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The shot is loud, sharp, and clear.
Reigen immediately feels cold cascade through his body, from his head down. He stumbles, and reaches a hand up to his chest, and clutches the front of the suit.
The man standing in front of him, with a gun that has crude runes scratched all up and down its dark sides clutched in his shaking hands, breathes out a shaky, manic laugh, “I did it.”
Reigen feels his breath become heavier, and he presses his hand closer to his bones through his shirt.
The man isn’t looking at him though. The man is looking behind Reigen. Reigen peels his hand away from his front and sees no blood on his fingers.
He turns around and sees blood on Mob’s.
Mob has folded inwards, and his hands are covered in red where they’re clutched to the front of his small chest. His black gakuran shows none of that color, but the hole that Reigen can see sometimes through shaking stained fingers is deep, dark, and gushing.
“I did it.” The man breathes again. Reigen wants to punch him, or kick him, or toss salt in his eyes and shoot him with his own damn gun but Mob, Mob is there and his knees are giving out and Reigen is at his side and catching him before Mob can hit the concrete. Red blood immediately gets all over his shirt and hands as he presses his own fingers to Mob’s and tries to help stop the blood but he doesn’t care about his suit. For once he doesn’t care.
“M-Mob why didn’t you- a barrier- ?” Reigen gasps, desperately trying to move Mob so the boy is resting with his back in Reigen’s arms rather than his face pressed into Reigen’s tie.
Mob chokes, and blood seeps up between his teeth. Reigen doesn’t know what that means but he knows it isn’t good and he presses down more tightly on Mob’s hands until he sees a wince of pain on Mob’s face. “T-tried.” Mob gasps, with more panic and agony in his wide dark eyes than Reigen has ever seen on his usually inexpressive face. “ Tried.”
The man is laughing behind them but Reigen can’t really hear it over each rattling breath Mob is sucking in and letting out. His hands are pale and red and shaking under Reigen’s own but Reigen is sure, absolutely sure, that he is the one who is cold and that Mob’s hands are not cold at all. Mob’s hands are unbearably hot and wet and God Reigen wants to kill the man who is still laughing.
He tries to turn to yell at the man but one of Mob’s hands slips out from underneath his own and grasps Reigen’s wrist tightly. Reigen puts all his attention back on his student immediately.
Mob’s wide eyes stare up into his own. Reigen notices that they’re not actually dark brown, but instead an extremely deep and dark red, almost like the hole in Mob’s chest.
“S-shishou,” Mob whispers, his grip growing weak, “..... run .”
Then, his eyes flutter shut and his hands grow slack, despite how much Reigen yells for him. Reigen even tries shouting Mob’s real name. His voice cracks on the i of “Shigeo” and tapers off into rough breaths at the end of the o.
The man still laughs. The man is still laughing but now he’s wheezing and choking and Reigen feels sick with guilt because he’s left Mob on the ground but the man who shot his student needs to pay. There are no theatrics. This is no special technique. This is just Reigen, a completely ordinary man with no extraordinary powers, using his sticky red hands to choke a man who had lured him and Mob out into a bad part of the city for a job and then had shot Mob with a rune covered gun and then had laughed.
Reigen stares into the man’s bulging eyes, “ Why?! ” He screams, even though he knows the man can’t answer when Reigen’s hands are gripping his throat.
Then, there's a sort of lightning strike behind him. Reigen isn’t sure what it is, because he doesn’t see it directly. But when he turns around, hands still not loosening from around the man’s throat, all he sees is darkness. It claws at the air, reaching upwards, dragging Mobs body up like a broken puppet. A broken puppet silhouetted in inky black and with two glitchy glowing white gaping circles for eyes.
Reigen lets go of the man. The man crumbles and coughs and then tries to scramble backwards in terror on weak arms and crumbling concrete. Reigen can only stand there.
“Mob?”
With a wave of its hand, the darkness and its glowing eyes tears apart the earth. Reigen finds himself floating, feet kicking concrete that drifts upwards beside him with the weight of soap bubbles. He stares, air sucked out of him from shock, at the little dark figure, and watches as with a twitch of the same hand, the man who had shot Mob crashes back down to the earth. Reigen and the concrete and plants are all still in the air, hovering, but the man is being buried in the dirt, crushed under psychic power. His skin is melting and sagging with gravity as he blubbers and shrieks and then is gone .
Reigen is terrified. He’s terrified . He’s never been so terrified in his life. The black figure looks up at him and their eyes meet.
Then Reigen looks down, at the figure’s chest, and sees that the hand the figure hadn’t used for murder is pressed against his chest. Light is seeping through the cracks in the dark black fingers.
The figure notices him staring, and closes their fingers more tightly together. The circular white eyes do not blink, do not betray any emotion, and Reigen wonders if it closed its fingers because it was bothered by Reigen’s stare, or if it was to keep the wound better shut.
He gets no more time to wonder, as in the next moment, the figure is moving their free hand again. The cement around Reigen slams back down into the earth over top of where the man had been buried. The grey slabs slip and slide together like puzzle pieces, all slotting in and beside and on top of each other until the sidewalk and street are neatly rebuilt. The only evidence that anything supernatural has happened are the dramatic cracks that splinter and spider-web all throughout the ground.
Reigen feels like he’s going to be slammed into the ground too. He braces himself for the impact, for the crushing of his bones against harsh and unforgiving concrete, for the white eyes of what was once Mob to watch it happen. He braces, and then it never happens.
Instead, the black figure drags Reigen through the air towards it. It reaches a hand out and grabs one of Reigen’s own.
The flesh is icy cold to the touch. It leaks ink and something electric down Reigen’s veins and God did he mention he was terrified ?
Still hovering, Reigen is dragged ever closer. His hand is pulled and pressed to the figure’s chest, right over top of the glowing bullet hole.
Then, Reigen drops. Mob drops too, the darkness receding from him like water going down a drain.
Everything falls away in an instant, just like how it had arrived. Mob is on his back on the ground, legs folded awkwardly beneath him, and he’s gasping and shuddering. Reigen is bent awkwardly over top of his student, his hand still on Mob’s wound. Mob’s chest is warm, Reigen knows it is. He’s the one that’s cold again, but Mob is warm .
But there’s still blood. There’s still blood coming from the wound. In a sudden jolt of panic through the shock induced numbness, Reigen fumbles for his phone. His fingers are heavy with cold and shock and blood, but he manages to call for an ambulance. He manages to call for the police.
Reigen feels like he should tell the police about the man beneath the dirt, but he’s so cold, and every thought besides Save Mob feels too far away. He wonders if the black figure brainwashed him. He wonders what they did when they grabbed his hand and held it to Mob’s bleeding heart, or why they even did it. He wonders what they even were . He keeps pressing his hands down on Mob’s chest and wonders.
Reigen glances around for the gun covered in runes right before the ambulance arrives. It’s there, sitting on the concrete where the man had dropped it, as if nothing had ever happened.
+++
When they get to the hospital, Mob is whisked away. There’s shouting and noise and Reigen feels himself swaying in place without the pressure of Mob’s chest holding him up through his hand.
“We need you for questioning.” A policeman says, gripping Reigen’s shoulder, helping to stabilize him. “We know you and that boy have been through a lot, but we still need to know what happened.”
They let Reigen get cleaned up first. They let him wash Mob’s blood off of his hands and wrists. Some of the dark red still sticks to his fingernails and the creases of his knuckles when he’s done. Then a doctor sweeps in and gives Reigen a quick once over. The man determines that Reigen is fine, except for the shock. There’s a scrape on his cheek where a piece of concrete had whizzed by too closely that Reigen hadn’t even felt, and the doctor slaps a thick bandage on it, free of charge. Reigen’s blood-soaked grey suit jacket is bagged up and taken as evidence, and one of the policemen - a nice policewoman actually - gives Reigen a jacket that he doesn’t bother asking for the history of so that he can cover up the other blood stains on his white button up shirt.
After all that, the police sit him down and question him in a small and empty private waiting room off the side of the main room.
Their questions pass in a blur, and Reigen answers the best he can. He lies when asked about the shooter though, he tells them the shooter dropped his gun and ran off after shooting Mob. When they’re done, the police let him stay in the main waiting room. They let him wait for news on Mob. Most of them leave, but one policeman stays with him.
“It’s always hard, when stuff like this happens to your kid.” The policeman says, as if he knows how it feels. He hadn’t been in on the questioning, and hadn’t heard when Reigen had told the other policemen that he was Mob’s boss, and not his father.
Reigen just breathes, “He’s not mine.” In response, rather than elaborating. But he clutches at his own fingers and twists them around each other to try and stop them from shaking.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Hospital probably has called his parents already. Probably won’t let me see him when he’s out of critical condition. Probably won’t-”
The policeman stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Reigen stiffens then goes quiet.
“I’m usually better with words than this.” He laughs weakly after a moment. But it’s not really a laugh, it’s more of a crack of his spirit that leaks desperation and sadness in the stilting tones of his voice.
The policeman leaves after a few hours, and Mob’s family arrives. Reigen doesn’t know they’ve arrived or been told what happened until Ritsu is standing in front of him like an omen of death. Dimple is hovering over Ritsu’s shoulder, and both of them look grave.
“You got my brother shot.” Ritsu says, sounding like the thirteen year old on the verge of tears that he is. He’s shaking. His fists are tight.
Reigen shakes his head, opens his mouth to say something, and that’s when Ritsu punches him.
“ You got my brother shot!” Ritsu screams as his father and a nurse grip his arms and pull him away from Reigen. He’s desperately swinging punches, and magazines from the waiting room coffee table are shaking and juttering in the air with his psychic power. Reigen sits, slumped in his chair, eyes wide as he stares at the sobbing, angry, powerful little boy in front of him.
Reigen’s cheek throbs, and he accepts the blame. He gets slowly out of his chair and bows on his knees and elbows to Mob’s family. “I’m sorry.” He says to Ritsu, to Dimple, to Mr. and Mrs. Kageyama.
“ I’m sorry.” He says, to Mob.
+++
Reigen goes back to his apartment instead of waiting around anymore to see if Mob’s family or the doctors will let him into Mob’s room after the boy gets out of critical condition.
“Will take hours.” The nurses had said. “Pierced a lung. Close to the heart. Too much blood-loss. Went all the way through though, which is good. But still. Poor boy. Poor boy.”
Reigen slams his door shut with more force than ever, and lets it echo loudly in his dark home, lets it wake up something inside of him.
He thinks, for the first time that night since it had happened, about the black figure with white void eyes that had taken Mob’s place when Mob had fallen unconscious. He decides he needs a drink before he thinks any further about it.
After one drink, with his alcohol tolerance as low as it is, Reigen is completely gone. He’s slumped on his couch, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out if the thing he had encountered that had grabbed his hand and poured darkness down into his soul had really been Mob or not.
“Creepy, creepy thing,” Reigen mumbles. His cheeks, with a bandage on one side and a thick bruise blooming on the other, are flushed, “Killed th’ damn, shooter. Threw me in the air. Stared at me. Creepy and black and creepy.”
He decides that it was not Mob, and instead that it was some kind of Not Mob. It was something strange and powerful and hidden inside Mob that Reigen didn’t ever want to see again.
If he ever saw Mob again.
He passes out without any more thoughts past that. Right there on the couch he gives in to the exhaustion and the pressure on his mind and he lets it drag him to unconsciousness.
Reigen is not so easily dragged back to consciousness though. It is hours later, maybe even an entire half a day. He doesn’t know. He hadn’t bothered to look at a clock before beginning to drink. But his phone is ringing loudly on the table beside an empty glass, and everything in his body aches. His head especially aches, and there is a dull thud that he feels just behind his eyes every few seconds. He smacks at the phone on the table at first, to try and quiet it, before realizing that he actually needs to open it up and answer it because someone is calling him and they could have news about Mob.
It’s Mob’s mother.
Her voice is not at all like her sons’ voices. Their voices are quiet, but forceful at times, and Mob’s especially has a light airy quality to it that makes it hard to hear sometimes, as if he is always whispering. Mob’s mother’s voice is high and overwhelmingly normal . “They took Shigeo’s phone as evidence, don’t know why.” She says, voice cracking. “But Ritsu had your number, and I thought you’d want to know,” God , Reigen thinks, God please don’t be bad news, “He’s out of surgery now. He’ll be okay.”
Reigen drops the phone.
He immediately picks it back up.
“I- Can I-” He doesn’t want to say the words.
“You’re… on the visitors list. On the list of people allowed to see him.” Mob’s mother says slowly, guessing what he wants to say but can’t bring himself to. “I didn’t think it would be right to keep you from seeing Shigeo, after you had to see him like -”
She swallows, breathes, composes herself. Reigen stares at the dark dried blood still in his fingernails.
“After you saved him.” Mob’s mother finishes. “So, come whenever you like. Just. If you bother Shigeo at all. I’ll have you taken off the list.”
Reigen promises to not bother Mob. He promises to be on his best behavior. He thanks her, and then when she hangs up, he goes to take the shower he should’ve taken when he’d gotten home the day before.
After that, it’s immediately back to the hospital he goes. He’s not in a suit, just in a shirt and jeans that he’d managed to pull on quickly. He tells the reception he’s there to see Shigeo Kageyama and God does Mob’s true name feel heavy and odd and important in his mouth, especially after he’d choked it out when Mob had been bleeding in his arms. The nurse at the desk gives him a visitor sticker, tells him the room number, and points him down a hallway. She tells him that Mob’s condition is still fragile. She tells him that Mob’s brother is still there in the room, but his parents went home to get some of Shigeo’s things and to rest for a bit. She tells Reigen to be careful.
Reigen meets Dimple in a hallway on the way.
“What happened?” Dimple asks, as if he doesn’t care, but Reigen can see the tightness in the little green spirit’s expression.
Reigen shrugs, and keeps his eyes on the room numbers as they pass him by. “Some man called us out for a job. Said there was an evil spirit haunting the street by his shop and he needed it gone for business. We got to the street, and he turned around and shot Mob.” He says this much more calmly than the memories feel, bubbling and gurgling with guilt and horror inside his mind.
“I went to the police station, to check out the evidence.” Dimple says, “After the doctors said he’d been shot. No normal bullet could pierce Shigeo’s barrier. The gun was covered in runes to cancel psychic power. It was just enough to get it through Shigeo’s barrier. That man had deliberately targeted Shigeo.”
Reigen stops, in the middle of the hallway. There’s no one there to see him do so, so it doesn’t matter. “Deliberately…?”
He thinks of the black figure with the white eyes. He thinks of how much power he had felt coming from it. He thinks of Mob, as he normally is, with the same power suppressed inside of him.
Someone had known that Mob was an esper. Someone had known that Mob was powerful. Someone had tried to kill his student. Someone had seen Mob as a threat.
“You gonna throw up?” Dimple asks, unkindly. Reigen realizes he’s been pressing a hand to his mouth, and his other hand to his chest. He shakes his head.
“We’ll worry about people coming after Mob later.” He says, and Dimple’s face twists. The spirit looks like he wants to protest, wants to go out right then and there and stop the threat at its source. Reigen can’t do that right now though. Reigen just wants to see Mob.
He finds the room after another 5 minutes of walking down the endless hospital hallway. Ritsu is in there, just like the nurse said. The boy is more tired looking than angry looking now, slumped in one of the three open chairs at his brother’s bedside.
And Mob,
Mob looks terrible. There are machines and tubes and things all around him and Reigen doesn’t know anything about any of them. He looks so small, with his body surrounded by those machines. His arms are above the hospital bed blanket, and are bare, showing an I.V. nestled in the crook of his left elbow. Mob’s eyes are closed above a plastic mask feeding him air.
Reigen stumbles and falls into the chair beside Ritsu, feeling weak in the knees as he stares at his student. Mob, with all his power and kindness, has been reduced to this by a man afraid of psychics.
“I’m sorry.” Ritsu says, dragging Reigen’s attention away from Mob for only a moment. Ritsu points at his own cheek, then gestures at Reigen’s face, and repeats “I’m sorry for punching you.”
Reigen knows Ritsu doesn’t mean it. He shrugs, “It’s not the first time I’ve been punched. Don’t sweat it.”
Then they both go back to staring at Mob in silence. Well, not complete silence. There’s the cold beep, beep, beep, beep , of a heart monitor, and Reigen watches the little green line leap around in time with his student’s life.
“Dimple told me,” Ritsu says, once again being the one to say something first, “About how the man was probably targeting Brother specifically. And it wasn’t entirely your fault.” Dimple himself nods where he floats above them both.
Reigen shrugs. He can hear a “but” coming along.
“But,” ah, there it is, “I still blame you for using my brother, and parading him around to exorcise ghosts for pay. You put him in the spotlight. You brought the attention to him.”
Reigen doesn’t look at Ritsu, “And what do you want me to do about it? I can’t change anything now.” He can’t take back the three years of working with Mob. He doesn’t want to. He wouldn’t change those years for the world.
Ritsu whispers, “I don’t know. I don’t know how to fix this.”
Small hands, but hands bigger than Mob’s, clench into fists on the tops of Ritsu’s knees. He shakes and trembles, “I don’t want these people to come after Brother again. I don’t want them to come after me either. I-” Ritsu scrubs a hand roughly across his eyes. He breathes, he collects himself. Reigen watches him lock his emotions away.
These Kageyamas and their emotional issues. Reigen wants to let Ritsu know that it’s alright to admit to being scared, but he knows that Ritsu would not appreciate the advice as Mob would.
Ritsu looks very serious all of a sudden. “Mr. Reigen. I have to ask.” He waits until Reigen looks at him, finally dragging his gaze away from Mob’s small body on the hospital bed. “I have to ask. When Brother was - when he got-” Ritsu clenches his teeth, “When he got shot , did anything… did anything come out?”
The Not Mob. Ritsu knows about Not Mob. Reigen is two parts horrified thinking about what might have happened to Mob and Ritsu for Ritsu to have met the dark figure, and one part desperate for answers. “Yes.”
That’s all he needs to say for Ritsu’s eyes to flood with panic. “You met it?” He gasps, and suddenly they have a bond. Ritsu may dislike him, but Reigen knows now that they’ve seen and encountered something terribly dark that no one else has.
Reigen nods, and wonders how much of the truth he should tell Ritsu. He decides to not say anything.
Ritsu leans forward in his chair, obviously not going to let Reigen’s silence slide. “What did it do?”
Dimple, above them both, hovers down closer, “Oi oi, what are you both talking about?”
Ritsu throws Dimple a glare at waves his hand at the spirit like he’s trying to shoo away a fly. “Nothing you need to know about, parasite.”
“That’s harsh, Ritsu.” Dimple pouts, then turns to Reigen. “What is it?”
Reigen frowns at the spirit, and meets eyes with Ritsu. No, this is something Dimple doesn’t need to know about yet. Ritsu and he will have to talk about Not Mob some other time. “Nothing,” Then he leans back in the chair and stretches out his legs dramatically until his heels are on the edge of Mob’s bed. He waves a hand dismissively, wiping away the previous conversation from the air, “It doesn’t matter right now. Both of you should go home and get food and sleep, I already went home, so I’ll stay here and keep watch over Mob now.”
Ritsu and Dimple stare at him, “You still look like a mess though.” Dimple says.
Reigen pulls self consciously on his shirt and frowns at Dimple, “Thanks. Go on, get out of here you two.”
Ritsu stays sitting firmly in his chair and is glaring again, “I’m not leaving my brother.”
“Mob would be more upset if you neglected your health for him.” Reigen answers smoothly, and gestures at the door again. “Don’t make him worry.”
With a snarl, Ritsu stands and looms. All solidarity is gone, the bond is thin, and Reigen wonders if the boy is going to punch him again. But Ritsu must have realized the truth of his statement, because he doesn’t punch Reigen. Instead he just bares his teeth one last time before grabbing the end of Dimple’s soul and stomping out of the room.
Reigen blinks as the door shuts. Oh. He hadn’t expected it to be that easy.
He’s left alone in the room with Mob and the heart monitor very suddenly. So Reigen fills the room with his voice until he can’t hear the beeping anymore, and can pretend it’s just another day in the office with him rambling about everything and anything to a Mob who is at his desk reading manga quietly.
But it’s not one of those days. It’s not. Mob has a hole in his chest and almost died and a man really is dead and there could be more of them out there hunting down Mob and Reigen thinks he saw a God in the body of his small little student and
He doesn’t know what to do about it. He doesn’t know what to do about any of it.
Carefully, Reigen pulls his feet down from the edge of Mob’s bed. Then, he braces his elbows on his knees and puts his face in his hands. He breathes, deeply, for a few minutes, just trying to pull himself together again.
He can’t be like this when Mob wakes up. Reigen knows Mob won’t wake up for a while - probably for days - but still. He needs to be the strong, stable pillar of a Master that Mob knows. Mob will need support, care, and help while he recovers. Mob doesn’t need panic or fear or questions. Mob just needs protection.
Maybe, Reigen dares to think, protecting Mob was Not Mob’s goal too.