“What are you drinking, Beefking?” she asked over her shoulder as she dried a clear glass tumbler with a small rag. A clink rang out as she placed it on the rack above her head. A mass of wavy black hair fell down her well-muscled shoulders and back, ending just above her hips. She stood a good six and a half feet tall, as she’d decided to wear heels to work today. A new job in a new city, just something to pay the bills and put food on the table.
When she turned and actually caught a good look at him, Sorcha did a noticable double take, staring at the bleeding crown o his head. The red aura around him rather unnerve her, making her raise her brows. Just what in the world was going on here?
Serizawa & co. meet up with an old friend to engage in some hacking and uncover some truths. Shou and Teru commit acts of thievery and deceit.
Summary:
How many espers does it take to rescue one abducted conman?
Months after the events of the World Domination arc, Reigen disappears sometime between leaving the office and after-work plans. Serizawa finds himself the unwilling leader of a bunch of former Claw members and a couple of stubborn teenagers, determined to get Reigen back.
On AO3: <http://archiveofourown.org/works/11091201/chapters/30306522>
Serizawa rocked stiffly with the motion of the rattling train, clenching and unclenching sweaty palms in the folds of his suit. He was probably wrinkling the material of one of the few suits he owned, but couldn’t bring himself to care; it was all he had to focus on. Walking had been much better, had given him purpose, made him feel like they were getting somewhere. Now, in the too-bright artificial lights of the mostly-empty night train, the blaze of his anger had dulled, allowing the sickly buzz of panic to unfurl from its tiny corner in his mind. Serizawa felt the weight of every second that passed with Reigen still missing, heavy as the train rumbling along its tracks.
It was well past ten pm by the time the group of espers-turned-PIs arrived in the wealthier area of Spice City that Hatori called home. Hatori’s psychic specialty had translated well to the real world; he’d been hired by a technical support company around the same time Serizawa had started at Spirits & Such. Judging by the look of the tall, brightly-lit apartment building sitting just in sight of the coastline, it seemed Hatori had been rather successful at his new career.
Serizawa shouldn’t have been surprised to find a doorman keeping watch at the building’s entrance, but it didn’t help his discomfort at the affluent surroundings. He was far out of his league, and the anxiety was just more fuel for the staticky panic that had begun to crackle in his ears, muffling his hearing.
The doorman eyed their group with a healthy amount of skepticism as they filed in. Serizawa put on his work face, trying to emanate confidence and trustworthiness. Any reassuring effect from his efforts was immediately ruined when Koyama presented the doorman with a wide, teeth-baring grin, lip piercings flashing and biceps flexing.
Serizawa sighed, and reached out a hand to pull him gently along. Sometimes his friends forgot being intimidating was no longer part of their job description.
Soft lighting illuminated a tastefully-decorated lobby. Steel and glass furniture lent a modern feel that was probably supposed to be elegant, but to Serizawa just felt sterile; he brushed self-consciously at his wrinkled and sweat-stained clothing. The lush white carpet swallowed the sound of their footsteps as they beelined for the elevators.
Tsuchiya pushed the button for the 18th floor, and the elevator doors closed with a soft clank. Awkward silence fell over the crowded group, interrupted only by the low hum of the engaging lifting mechanism. Numbers appeared above the door and slowly cycled by.
3
4
5
The tension fought with Serizawa’s exhaustion; he was simultaneously about to drop dead and yet miles from sleep. He glanced at his phone: ten forty-eight. Reigen had been missing for over 24 hours. Serizawa clenched his jaw in frustration and looked back up at the numbers, willing the elevator to move faster.
7…
8…
9…
They should have just taken the stairs; the movement would at least make him feel like he was doing something. Or hell, he could have just floated himself up to Hatori’s window from the outside, and damn the consequences if anyone saw-
Deep breath. Stay calm, stay in control. Serizawa berated himself, pushing again at the panic that had less give every time he had to force it down. If he was being honest with himself, arguing with his own anxiety just wasn’t effective when it got this bad. It was time to try something else.
“How long have you been in touch with Hatori?” Serizawa asked Minegishi the first thing that came to mind, simply as something to distract from the empty silence his brain was all too happy to fill.
Minegishi crossed his arms, tapping his fingers soundlessly on one arm. “I reached out to him pretty soon after we ran into each other, that time you first visited the plant shop.”
Serizawa blinked; now that, he hadn’t expected. Of the Super Five members, Serizawa had thought Minegishi the least likely to initiate reaching out to anyone.
Back at Claw, Minegishi had been standoffish to the point of dismissive of the rest of the Super Five, though Serizawa had thought, at the time, that the rest of them had been friends. He, Shibata, Shimazaki, and Hatori had spent a lot of time together; sometimes, it had even been fun. He’d enjoyed being able to talk openly about his powers with others, others like him, for the first time in his life.
Hindsight had shown him how little he’d understood.
His memories of the others were now shadowed with doubt and hurt and the realization that they had not been his friends, not really. Real friendship – the way he was friends with Shigeo, the way he was friends with Reigen – meant a two-way street. There was investment on both sides, investment in each others’ feelings and each others’ happiness.
There had been none of that in Claw. Everything was about the society, and its plans… and its leader. The other members of the Super Five had been too self-absorbed and too occupied with their own enjoyment and the sparkling future painted for them by their boss’s lying tongue, to be real friends.
After Claw – after the President – Serizawa had decided it would be best for him not to see any of the others again. A clean break healed easier than a messy, lingering injury. That plan was ruined when he ran into Minegishi at the plant shop a couple of weeks after starting at Spirits & Such.
Even to his novice’s eye, Serizawa had thought the orchids in the window looked stunning. He’d gone into the shop hoping to look at them more closely. Of course, if he was honest with himself his real interest in the flowers came from searching for conversation points with his new boss. He’d been surprised to find the least-friendly of his former coworkers employed at the unassuming little shop.
Caring for the plants at the shop had been good for Minegishi. Since Claw’s ostentatious demise he’d lost some of his callousness, replacing it with a stoic optimism and compassion. Thinking this through, Serizawa realized Minegishi’s unexpected desire for a support system wasn’t so out of character as he’d first thought.
Minegishi had been the one to stay in touch with Serizawa after their reunion. The two bonded over stories of living among non-esper neighbors: the time Serizawa retrieved his mail with an absentminded wave of his hand, only to watch it fly straight into an unsuspecting passing neighbor’s face; the times Minegishi forgot that while it was common for people to talk to plants, it was veryunusual for the plants to communicate back.
“Oh,” Serizawa said awkwardly, the reminder that he’d been having a conversation suddenly filtering back through his fatigue. “Um, how’s he been?”
Serizawa tried to say it casually; he had mixed feelings on seeing Hatori again. Unlike Minegishi, who had seemed essentially unfazed, Hatori had been hurt by the President’s betrayal of their ‘select’ group. He’d still been in shock the last time Serizawa had seen him, and Serizawa had no idea how Hatori might feel about him now.
Minegishi shrugged. “He’s fine. He gets a little anxious sometimes, having to spend so much time with non-espers for his job. Just like us.”
Serizawa gave him a small smile. “You get nervous about non-espers?”
“Hmm…” Minegishi quirked a corner of his mouth. “I guess ‘frustrated’ might be the more accurate term.”
“Oh,” Sakurai said, under his breath, “-do I ever feel you on that.” Koyama laughed softly, patting Sakurai comfortingly on one shoulder.
Minegishi’s smile grew. “I have my outlets, as does Hatori. From what I understand, his mostly involves yelling at people on the internet. I don’t really get it, but he gets great enjoyment out of it.”
A soft ding announced their arrival at the 18th floor, cutting short the conversation.
Hatori answered the door at the first knock, his eyes going wide as he took in the large group waiting on his doorstep. He met Serizawa’s gaze and immediately ducked his head away, searching faces. It wasn’t until he saw Minegishi that he relaxed, some of the tension easing from his shoulders. Then his eyes, behind the same old square-framed glasses, found Serizawa’s face again. He smiled uncertainly.
“Hey, Serizawa – long time no see?” His voice went up in tone at the end, making the statement a question. “You, uh. You look good.”
“Uh… thanks.”
They stood in awkward silence for a minute, until Minegishi gave a quiet sigh.
“Nozomu – I think we’re a little limited on time here.”
“Oh… yes! Right! Let’s get to it.” Hatori seemed relieved, hand going up to ruffle hair that already looked as though he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket. He waved them in, hurrying through a sparsely-furnished living room to the enormous computer set-up occupying most of one wall.
Four large monitors formed one huge screen that stretched almost floor to ceiling. Serizawa stared in awe at the screens, one filled with scrolling text boxes, another with the plain text and code of an open terminal.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry about the clutter.” Hatori looked up at Serizawa and then quickly away again, hurriedly closing windows and tabs. “Toshiki said, uh, you needed my help with something? Finding your boss?”
Serizawa breathed easier, focusing. “Yes, please. We know where he was taken from, so we were hoping, maybe you could see if there were any cameras there, and if you’d be able to get the footage…?”
He trailed off awkwardly; the idea sounded impossible, putting it out like that. But Hatori was nodding, fingers flying over the keyboard as he pulled up a map.
“I’m really better with radio signals – you’re lucky that I’ve been honing the use of my powers on computer tech lately. At work I keep fixing problems no one else can fix, for some reason.” Hatori grinned, just a little mischievously. “The problem comes when the other guys ask me to show them how I did it – I’ve had to get creative.”
Minegishi snorted. Hatori flicked a grin his way before returning to the map in front of him.
“Okay. There might be a police cam on that corner, but not all of those are connected to the internet, so it might be difficult to find where the footage is actually kept… but if one of the stores along the street has a camera, I might be able to tap into the security feed…”
Hatori’s words trailed off and his eyes grew distant, no longer looking at the screen but instead somewhere else, a virtual world only he could see. Windows began popping up on the screen all on their own, showing still images of random bits of city street. They each only remained for a moment before closing again, to make way for another in quick succession, all without Hatori ever touching a keyboard.
“Holy shit,” Tsuchiya whispered from behind Serizawa. “‘Better with radio signals’ my ass.” Serizawa could only nod.
Finally a window stayed open, showing only an empty, darkened street. Hatori blinked rapidly, as though clearing his vision, and looked up at Serizawa.
“Point me the exact location again?”
Serizawa gestured silently to the spot on the map where they’d found Reigen’s belongings. Hatori nodded in satisfaction.
“We got lucky – there’s a convenience store across the street that has a cam. I think that spot should appear on screen.
Serizawa’s buzzing panic began to clash with a sprouting seed of hope as a new browser window opened and a download bar began counting down. By the time the download was complete, Serizawa’s skin was beginning to itch with the tension. Hatori pulled up the footage file from the entire day before, and the whole group leaned in a little closer.
Serizawa’s heart was pounding. “Start from six o’clock in the afternoon, the last time I saw him. That way we know we won’t miss him.”
Hatori shrugged, but scrolled the viewing bar to the requested time and started the footage, sped up. The video quality wasn’t great; a little pixelated, and the camera lens hadn’t been cleaned in a while, blurring the view. Yet it was still obvious when a person flashed by on the screen.
At each stranger’s appearance, their movements made abrupt and jerky from the speed, Serizawa’s heart leapt and then plummeted in disappointment. Minutes ticked by in the corner of the window, then an hour; the scene before them grew dimmer as it darkened with the setting sun, Serizawa’s hopes dimming with it.
Please, he thought, despite the sick twisting of his stomach that told him this was hopeless. Please please please…
He recognized Reigen the instant he appeared on the screen.
“Stop!”
Hatori hit pause, rewound to the first instant Reigen appeared, and then hit play in real time. Serizawa drank in the lanky form of his boss striding confidently down the sidewalk. He’d walked almost too far, almost out of sight of the camera’s lens, when a car pulled up next to him.
Despite its futility, Serizawa felt the urge to scream a warning to Reigen. When the two people appeared behind him, dressed all in formless dark clothing, he wanted yell at him to run, to run now. But of course, that would be useless. All he could do was stare at the screen, fists clenched, as one of them extended something compact and dark.
Reigen fell.
Reigen did not get up again.
Watching his prone, twitching body, Serizawa found he could not breathe deeply enough, a choking mass of horror suffusing his chest. He wanted to close his eyes, to look away. He could not tear his gaze from the screen.
One of the anonymous enemy leaned over Reigen; Serizawa stiffened when he saw a gleam of light reflect off something small.
A gun? A knife?
A third person appeared from the gloom, a woman with a medium skin tone and short dark hair. She stood with a confident, commanding bearing that told Serizawa instantly that she was in charge. The woman made a signal with her hands, directing one of the others to open the back of the sedan and climb in. She then motioned at Reigen’s limp body, which levitated, following the person into the car. It took Serizawa a second to remember that wasn’t normal, and provided a new piece of the puzzle.
Reigen had been kidnapped by espers.
The car drove away, leaving the scene once again an empty stretch of cracked sidewalk and blank building wall. If he squinted, Serizawa could see the shape of Reigen’s wallet left on the ground.
The silence held, six people watching the seconds continue to tick by.
Serizawa realized he was trembling.
And that the room around them, too, was shaking, just a little, as if in echo of his rage and terror. But Serizawa could no longer see the room, too obscured by the writhing mass of his own aura.
They’d just… taken him. Right off the street. There was nothing he could have done to prepare, to prevent it. And he still had no idea who these people were, or why they’d taken Reigen. Or if Reigen was even alive.
All the hope he’d allowed to build up, despite his best efforts to crush it back down, collapsed into a crumpled heap.
For all he knew, he’d just watched Reigen’s death occur right in front of him.
The room shuddered again, stronger this time as his power boiled and leapt. It pushed, shoving at the boundaries of control he’d worked so hard to build and fortify.
He had so much power.
He was so powerless.
Serizawa was drowning, and there was nothing for him to hold onto.
The red-haired man, backlit hand outstretched.
“Let me teach you to use your power correctly.”
But he hadn’t. Serizawa had been as trapped as he ever was.
“As long as I’m with you, you’ll be fine.”
He’d been lied to by everyone around him, including, most damningly, himself.
“You cannot survive on your own.”
But… no, wait... that wasn’t right.
The President had been wrong .
“Serizawa, he was only using you for your power. You told me this, you know this; you just have to keep reminding yourself of it.”
A brief loss of control over his powers had resulted in a shattered mug, easily contained by a wave of Shigeo’s hand. A small mistake, but representing all of Serizawa’s deepest doubts and fears – he’d sunk to the floor, shaking hands pressed to his face. Reigen’s voice, softly encouraging, was all it took; Serizawa had spilled his demons into Reigen’s confident, ever-moving hands.
“That kind of ‘help’ was nothing more than another trap. He kept you dependent on him, so that he could use you.”
Reigen pointed at him.
“Your powers are a tool, a tool only you can decide to do good or ill with. They are a part of you, but they do not control you. You need to convince yourself of that, so that you depend wholly on yourself. And that might not be an easy thing; you’ve had a lifetime to convince yourself otherwise. It’s going to take some time, and mistakes will happen. In fact, mistakes are part of the process.”
He smiled, crossing his arms.
“Just remember that Mob is here for you, and so am I, for when you need support. Until you reach the point where you can stand on your own two feet, even in the most dire of circumstances and most tumultuous of emotions. I have no doubt you will succeed; you’re under my tutelage, after all!”
Serizawa’s powers wanted to rage, to throw themselves upon everything and everyone around him, to rip and smash and destroy.
But they belonged to him.
One last frisson of energy rolled through the room, less an uncontrolled outburst than a prickle of cold, determined outrage, shifting unsettlingly across walls and floors and skin.
He was better than he’d been in Claw. And he would stay that way. It was the only way he’d be able to get Reigen back. No more explosions; he couldn’t afford it right now. He’d let himself go later, when he knew whether Reigen was alive, when he had him back, and safe.
The room, at last, was still. Serizawa looked up, and blinked at the five pairs of eyes fixed on him.
“Um… s-sorry,” Serizawa said, panting a little. He swallowed. “Won’t – won’t happen again.”
Tsuchiya slowly placed a picture frame back onto the desk it had fallen off of.
Serizawa looked around in surprise: the frame was the only item that had fallen in the entire room. He breathed a bit easier; he’d failed to keep his powers trapped beneath his skin but contained their actual impact, so while the other espers in the room had been able to see the battle he’d waged, it had made almost no effect on the physical world. Almost.
He glanced at Tsuchiya. “Ah, thanks for catching that.”
She shrugged well-muscled shoulders, not entirely hiding her unease. “Hell, what are friends for?”
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, only now convinced the danger had passed. Hatori gave Serizawa a shaky smile.
“Wow, look at that. We always thought you’d never be able to survive outside of Claw.”
Serizawa sighed, closing his eyes in weariness. “You and me both, at the time.”
When he opened them again, Hatori had rewound the video to the moment something had flashed in one of the kidnapper’s hands.
Koyama frowned. “I thought that was a knife, but is that… a syringe?”
“Yes, yes I think so,” Sakurai said, nodding a little more earnestly than he might have usually. “It’s got to be a drug to knock him unconscious.”
Serizawa peered at the image, fearing they might be lying to him. But yes, yes that made sense. Just knocking him out. Just unconscious. Not dead.
Minegishi studied the screen, arms crossed. “Well, not much luck on the why, but at least we’ve got some visuals on the who. At least one esper.” He softly touched the image of the woman on-screen, then turned to face the others.
“I think it might be best for us to take a break at this point. It will give Hatori a chance to look through everything more closely and see if we’ve missed anything. Right Hatori?”
“Oh, uh of course! I can try; anything is possible.” Hatori had already excised the section of footage featuring the kidnapping, and was now running it through a software that broke it down frame by frame. He dragged his eyes from the screen to pull a flash drive from the computer, and press it into Serizawa’s palm.
“A copy of the clip, just in case,” he said absently, before turning back to his monitors. Serizawa slid the drive into his pocket. He never wanted to see that video again, if he could help it.
“A break will also give some of us,” Minegishi continued, looking pointedly at Serizawa, “the chance to get some sleep. We can start again in the morning, fresh.”
Serizawa clenched his fists in frustration. “We wasted all this time to get that video hoping it would lead us to him, and it’s basically useless. How can I possibly sleep now, when we have to figure out why the hell espers wanted Reigen and-”
Minegishi was unruffled. “You’re exhausted. You’re going to run yourself into the ground like this. How, exactly, does that help Reigen?”
“And it wasn’t useless,” Tsuchiya said, a hand going to his shoulder. “It looks like they took him alive. He’s alive, Serizawa. You’ve got to remember that. And the way they took him, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t keep him alive.”
Serizawa closed his eyes, breathing deeply. He felt the fatigue settling deeper into his bones, dragging at his limbs and enveloping his mind. As much as he hated to stop moving forward, Reigen deserved him at his best.
Alive . For now, it was all he could hold onto.
***
The dream took a different path, this time.
The President raised his hand for a killing blow, Reigen and Shou staring up with wide, fearful eyes. Serizawa had to get in front of them, protect them, save them. That’s what had happened, back then, he told the dream stubbornly. The dream disagreed.
Serizawa started to run to them, but his limbs wouldn’t respond to his brain. They moved sluggishly, as though dragged down by thick, clinging mud. It did not matter that he knew he was supposed to be moving faster, that he was capable of so much more speed. In his head, a voice was screaming. The voice was his own.
He didn’t make it in time.
The President’s power flashed in an eruption of smoke, in a boom of subsonic sound Serizawa didn’t hear so much as feel, like a spasm in his chest.
And Reigen fell.
No, NO! This wasn’t right! Wait, Shou, where… where was Shou…
And in the way of dreams, Reigen’s body was suddenly smaller, with bright red hair. So small, and so very still.
They were both gone, because he had failed.
Serizawa bolted upright.
“S-Shou?”
He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, breathing heavily, chest heaving, sweat dripping down his back. Eyes cleared, he looked around his dark bedroom, almost certain he’d see someone there, someone with a familiar, bright, sparkling aura…
There was no one else there.
Serizawa eased out of bed, all his senses on alert, psychic and otherwise. Yet, nothing seemed out of place. His lights were off and he could hear the familiar dripping of the leaky faucet in his bathroom. His shed clothes lay in a heap where he’d left them, just below the window. The window which was, he noticed with a start, wide open. And he was pretty sure it had only been cracked when he’d finally fallen into fitful sleep…
He moved to the window, scanning the view of the empty lot outside for anything out of place. Still, nothing. He must have just left the window all the way open and forgotten about it.
A breeze blew in, unusually cool for this time of year. It fluttered along his sweat-slicked skin and he shivered.
Maybe the wind had been responsible for the odd feeling that someone… someone had just been here. Or, you know, maybe he was just going out of his mind with worry and paranoia, and needed to stop imagining things that weren’t there.
Serizawa rubbed a hand down his face and slid the window shut. He returned to bed, bundled himself back into his sheets, and waited for sleep that refused to return.
***
“Ok, so that was a little close for comfort.” Shou slid into the seat across from Teru, slapping a flash drive down on the café table triumphantly. “I might have banged a foot on the windowsill on my way out. But here, I was right – Hatori always backs up everything. Typical nerd.”
Teru tried to pretend he hadn’t jumped at Shou’s abrupt entrance and casually put his phone face down on the table, taking up the flash drive instead. He plugged the drive into his laptop, selecting the only file on it. As the video software began to load, he shot Shou a look of disgust.
“Please, speak up a little more. I think only half the café heard the details of your act of breaking and entering.”
“What, all these people?” Shou flung his hands out, gesturing at the almost empty coffee shop. “Calm the fuck down, nobody cares.”
The middle-aged waitress who’d been eyeing Teru for the last half-hour began approaching their table, frowning. Teru sighed, and minimized the video player so that his screen displayed only the series of math problems he’d been using as a cover.
The waitress stopped at their table, suspicious eyes settling on Shou.
“Everything alright with you boys? It seems a bit late for you two to be out; do you need me to call anyone for you?”
Teru met Shou’s gaze, warning him to keep his mouth shut, then brushed gleaming hair out of his face and gazed sorrowfully up at the waitress.
“Oh, no, ma’am, we’re fine. I’m so sorry if my friend got a little too loud. He’s just upset about a geometry problem he hasn’t quite grasped, and was expressing his distress.”
The waitress focused on Teru, her frown softening, seeming to forget that Shou was there. Teru, accustomed to this response, immediately took advantage.
“I’m so sorry for the late hour; ‘all-night café’ doesn’t give anyone the excuse to get rowdy, does it?” Teru shook his head, as if asking how anyone could be so rude as to disturb the peace in the middle of the night.
“I’ve been trying to find time to tutor my friend here, but my poor mother’s failing health means I don’t want to stay up late at home, keeping her up. And Shou’s house… Shou’s house is not really the best working environment.” He sighed sadly, his voice suffused with mournful insinuation. The waitress nodded in understanding.
“Getting into a good high school is just so important, and I’d be absolutely devastated if my young friend Shou doesn’t make it into the same school I got into.” Teru lowered his eyes modestly. “Moutarde de Dijon Preparatory High, perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“Oh, my!” The waitress’s eyes rounded at the name of what certainly must be one of the highest-ranked high schools in the prefecture. Teru sighed again and shook his head woefully, lowering his voice, inviting her to join him in pitying his poor, geometrically-inept friend.
“He really needs the extra help; I do hope you don’t mind? I’d simply hate to be a bother.”
“Ah, oh! That’s so nice of you to help your friend. No, no, that’s fine; I can tell you’re good, hard-working boys.”
Teru beamed at the waitress, who blinked, confronted with such a pure expression of radiant gratitude.
“Oh, thank you. He promises he’ll keep it down, right Shou?” They both turned to look across the table. Teru took the opportunity to shoot him a glare that promised violence and suffering if he didn’t agree. Shou rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue.
Teru snapped the smile back on his face as the waitress turned her attention inexorably back to him.
“You boys study hard now. Let me know if you need anything.” She walked back to the counter, seeming a bit dazed.
Shou, Teru was gratified to see, looked a little unnerved.
“That was creepy as hell. Don’t do that again.”
Teru propped a hand under his chin and turned his smile on Shou, upping the wattage to blinding levels of incandescence.
“Do what?”
“Shut up – you know what. That… that teacher’s pet thing. It’s weird, coming from you.”
Teru snickered, but dropped the act, turning his attention back to the screen and pulling the video window back up. Shou scooted a chair up closer to him, peering at the screen as Teru hit play.
All humor drained from Teru as he watched; he couldn’t keep himself from flinching when Reigen was hit.
Oh no, no, oh fuck, no you DON’T-
Shou startled him by reaching out a hand to pause the video. He stared, pale eyes narrowed, at the figure of the woman on the screen, one side of her face dimly illuminated as she gestured at Reigen’s body.
Shou spoke without looking away from the image.
“I know her.”
“You what?”
“I mean, I recognize her; I don’t know her personally.” An eye roll. “But I’ve seen her at the building they’re keeping my dad at.”
Teru was taken aback. “You know where they’re holding your dad?”
“Um, yeah, duh. I make it my business to know everything about my parents, including their whereabouts. It’s safer for me.”
Safer?
Chagrin flashed in Shou’s face, so fast that Teru almost missed it.
“I mean… it keeps me ahead of anything that concerns me, ya know?” He threw Teru a side-eyed look. “How irresponsible do you think I am?”
Teru shut his teeth tight on his automatic, scathing response.
“Ahem. I suppose… I thought you wouldn’t have bothered keeping track of him. Were you not trying to kill him before?”
“No, I was trying to stop him. I-” Shou bit his words off mid-sentence, eyes flashing bright with anger. “The point is, they might be keeping Reigen at the same place. And I know where that place is. So pack up your shit, and let’s go already.”
Teru continued to study the laptop screen, committing as much information to memory as he could about the people who had taken Reigen. He then pulled out his phone, ignoring Shou’s intense gaze and tapping leg.
“You’ve got to be kidding me-”
“Get off my ass, I just have to send a text.”
Teru stared again at the message he’d received three hours ago and, for once, not been excited to see its sender pop up on the screen.
🐱Shigeo😊
Saturday 10:06 pm
Hi Teru I’m confused about some of the math for the summer hmwk, and you said you had time to meet up this week? What about tmrw?
Teru hesitated only a moment more before typing the message he’d spent most of the past three hours considering.
🌟Teru🌟
Sunday 1:14 am
Of course, I’d love to help! 😄 Unfortunately I can’t tomorrow, something’s come up and I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll take to resolve. 😑 But I’ll let you know as soon as I’m free!
Teru turned off his phone and shoved it into his pocket before stuffing the laptop back in his bag.
“Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Oh, are you sure you’re done? I know how important it is that you text everyone and their dog about what hairstyle you’re wearing this week.”
“Please, that’s what Instagram is for. Far more efficient. Time is of the essence in kidnapping cases, you know.”
Shou flung his hands in the air in exasperation, keeping them raised as he marched out the café door, which opened before him all on its own. Teru followed as nonchalantly as possible, waving goodbye to the motherly waitress to distract her from the front door’s sudden and mysterious flair for the dramatics.
you’re the child of brief & neverlasting.
you’re the whore of mortality & ever the lover of finality.
you’re, most of all, the parent ignorance.
all that vanity, foolishness, & sheer blindness created the ordeal;
