Chapter Text
His brother was having sex with Reigen.
It was obvious. Or at least it was obvious to Ritsu. Shigeo didn’t know how to lie—or at least he didn’t know how to lie to Ritsu—so when he said that he wasn’t coming back every weekend, he hadn’t been on the train, he wasn’t in the city, Ritsu had pressed and pressed until Shigeo admitted he was a lying liar that lied. He was here. He wasn’t staying at home. He hadn’t told Ritsu—but he was going to, he swore, he just didn’t know how to bring it up—because he was over at Reigen’s apartment. Spending the night. As a part of ‘an arrangement’.
Of all the people in the world, the one Ritsu hated most was Reigen. This was a foregone conclusion, because of all the people in the world, the one he loved most was Shigeo, but now Shigeo spent his weekends at Reigen’s apartment rather than home, and he either got this dopey smile or went very intense whenever someone mentioned that… that— stupid old blond.
Because Reigen was stupid, and he was old, and he certainly was blond. One time Ritsu saw a strand of blond hair on Shigeo’s coat and he felt like there was something in him, some living thing, convulsing against his ribcage.
What sort of person began having sex with a twenty-one year old? What sort of person began having sex with someone they’d mentored since fourteen? What sort of person began having sex with the golden goose of their business? What sort of person with a track record of fraud and manipulation would do that? Ritsu hated him in a way that transcended words and even rational thought. Ritsu wanted to bring it up to his brother but didn’t, because they simply did not talk about Reigen when it was understood they had different opinions, and what if Shigeo stood his ground? What he said, firmly, in that way of his: No, Ritsu. You’re wrong. Reigen is wonderful and thoughtful and perfect for me.
Ritsu would never breathe again. He would never live, never breathe, because even when Ritsu had hurt people, his brother had never told him he was wrong.
*
Unlike Shigeo, Ritsu stayed. The university in Seasoning City was quite good, and they’d offered him a full ride, and his parents liked having at least one of their children close by. Because his scholarship had come with a housing stipend, he’d moved into a small shoebox in downtown to avoid the commute time and spent most of the time in the airy library studying.
He was the reckless type; he was the wandering type. His head felt so full, all the time, and the only way to get it out was to pace the streets restlessly when it was completely dark. People weren’t meant to go out after 4AM, or 5AM, last call, but that was Ritsu’s favourite hour to be out—it was usually when he left campus and when he felt free to explore his burdens.
Ritsu was untouchable anyway, since he was an esper. It wasn’t as though he was going to get mugged.
He would pace and look at the dark windows and think, darkly, that that was how the windows were meant to be. It should be dark. He should be able to pretend that no one else existed, that everyone else had disappeared under the weight of Ritsu simply having to exist.
He’d watch the drunkards that were doing the same thing as he was, except he didn’t need to aid of any substance. He’d watch them try to drink their stupid troubles away with their stupid drinks, and think viciously that they were just the same as him, except they couldn’t be the same as him—their troubles had to be paler and more washed-out than his—because Ritsu had a brother. And his brother was Shigeo. And there was no existence in this galaxy that was so singular as Shigeo. No one else could understand having Shigeo as a brother, because he had only one, and that one was Ritsu.
Ritsu paced and prowled up and down the streets, looking at shadows, convinced that he’d see his reflection in them—and then looked at the shadows again because down that alleyway was a crumpled-up blond. That could be Reigen, Ritsu thought, and relished in that thought. And then he realised it was Reigen.
It was Reigen, bent backwards over a pile of trash, looking deflated. Ritsu froze. Reigen’s arms were flung behind him in the natural pose of something that’d been hurled like a rag doll. One of his shoes was loose, his tie stuffed into his mouth, his legs making awkward angles where they had been broken at the knees, and both layers of shirt were torn open, showing the ridges of his ribs and the ugly red blue-ringed blotches that coated them.
Ritsu had covered the distance before he was aware of what he was doing. Reigen was—
He dropped low. He looked at Reigen’s chest very intently, looking at the bruises and the way they were still mostly red because they were fresh—except he was meant to be focusing on if his chest was moving, and it was moving. There was a faint rise and fall, so Reigen was not dead.
Reigen was not dead.
Reigen was not dead, and as soon as Ritsu began thinking about what if Reigen was dead, or what if Reigen did die, he slammed into a mental wall the height and thickness of the Tokyo tower.
Ritsu hated Reigen. Reigen was not dead. Any other thought, or thoughts about how he felt about it, were— off-limits.
He bit himself in the fleshiest part of his arm to calm down and called up one of his routines to flush out the rest of his thoughts. It involved recalling the face of his brother. First he imagined Shigeo from the top of his hair, which was like silk (unlike Ritsu’s) and so fully transcendent of the elements that it defied description (like Ritsu’s); then he went slowly down, recreating Shigeo’s eyebrows, which were thinner than his own but more shapely; then he thought about Shigeo’s eyes, the slant of his nose, the perfect curve of his mouth, and all in relation to himself, because Shigeo a part of him and he was a part of Shigeo, and that was a fundamental fact of the universe.
Ritsu held out his hand, gathering power there. Shigeo had taught him this. When he’d taught him this, they’d held hands. Ritsu remembered that.
Shigeo’s powers were a wondrous uniform halo, like looking into just the fraction of an endless kaleidoscope. Ritsu’s powers had the same colours and fragments, but with the general feeling of someone picking up a kaleidoscope and shattering it over their knee and then throwing the shards into an open fire.
He pressed his knuckle to Reigen’s bruised chest, and did not think about the heat of his skin, or the fact that they had never touched skin-to-skin before, and felt inside him. His bones were broken, so he moved his knuckles over the injury site and then put them back together. When he sensed deeper, he realised that somehow Reigen’s left lung had been crushed into a single mass roughly the shape of a size 6 egg, so he slowly began to unfurl it, and re-inflate it, and hold it together because this was grounds for choking and dying.
This was someone else’s psychic energy, Ritsu realised, and suddenly it became a lot less appropriate to surreptitiously hope that Reigen would die. If there was an esper attacking Reigen, it was probably because they were after Shigeo, and if they were after Shigeo then he needed to keep Reigen alive so he could find the esper to desecrate their remains.
He put both hands on Reigen, knitting him together as well as he could, pretending it was not Reigen. When he was done, he had broken out into a sweat, and standing up too quickly made his head spin. He leant against one of the alley walls to steady himself and pressed one of his hands against his eyes just to give himself something grounding, chest heaving with breaths.
When he opened his eyes again, Reigen was still lying there, still bruised all over, still barely-breathing. When Ritsu popped the tie out of his mouth he jerked and coughed and vomited up a whole stream of thick blood so dark it seemed black. Ritsu hoisted him up—with his powers, because he didn’t want to touch Reigen anymore—so Reigen could vomit it onto the trash, which was appropriate, and then start groaning weakly as his body tried to restart.
Ritsu knew where Reigen lived, because Shigeo was always there. The familiar anger at that knowledge flared up and then faded, because it was hard to feel angry while Reigen drifted corpse-like beside him. No. He corrected himself. It wasn’t that it was hard to be angry at him. It was pathetic to be angry at him. Like how heroes in novels were only as good as their villains, Reigen right now was a piteous excuse of a villain. If Ritsu hated him blindingly right now, it was a poor show of character.
Right now Ritsu was virtuous. He was righteous. He was doing what lesser people could not; he was carrying Reigen back to his apartment because Reigen had been beaten within an inch of death, and later he would tell Shigeo that he had saved his boyfriend. Were they boyfriends? They had never referred to each other as such, but Ritsu knew they were fucking, which had to make them boyfriends.
He imagined telling his brother, and he imagined his brother’s expression when he learnt Reigen got hurt, and all of his insides twisted into a hot, tight, knot, and he decided that maybe he wouldn’t tell his brother after all.
That was, in fact, the virtuous and righteous thing to do. One couldn’t go around boasting about their good deeds.
To avoid using his powers in public like this, he could pretend he was carrying Reigen, except that would mean being in proximity to Reigen, and he hated Reigen, except he wasn’t meant to hate Reigen right then because he was being Good and Virtuous, so there had to be another reason why he wasn’t carrying Reigen. It was because his suit was bloodied, Ritsu decided. His suit was bloodied and it would be inconvenient if Ritsu also got his clothes and schoolbag bloodied too because he pretended to carry Reigen, so he wouldn’t.
Reigen made soft noises as he was levitated, which made Ritsu look at him: he was curled up on himself, surrounded by Ritsu’s powers, his hair drifting. He looked weirdly waifish, which wasn’t something Ritsu had let himself think about Reigen before, and he had crossed his legs, hugging them, and Ritsu could see his knobby ankles.
Because he wore threadbare suits, Ritsu reminded himself. He could see his ankles because Reigen wore ill-fitting, thrift-store suits, because he was a cheapskate that had underpaid his brother for years and made a living through scamming.
After that, he stopped looking at Reigen as they walked.
Instead he thought about Reigen, even though he didn’t want to. He would’ve much rather thought about the way the street looked, or the way night settled quietly over everything, or that he should’ve been more concerned if someone saw him floating Reigen down the street.
Instead, he felt like he was in a high school darkroom, staring down at the tray with developer in it, and the photo in black and white—except the white looked red, because it was a darkroom—the photo was getting darker, the image sinking forth, and it was Reigen, Reigen splayed out against the bags of trash, his cheap suit ill-fitting, his shirts torn open, his bones all broken. Even when Ritsu closed his eyes it was imprinted onto the back of his eyelids and he didn’t understand why.
Reigen, head back. Throat like a pale column. The flat divot at his sternum that Ritsu had rested his knuckles against.
Ritsu bit his forearm again. He thought again about his brother. Shigeo had narrower eyes than Ritsu did, and some people said that meant Ritsu’s eyes were prettier, but they just didn’t understand. They had never witnessed Shigeo’s gaze slant into serious, the change so seamless and fast that it was like a flash of quicksilver under the surface of a frozen pond.
For a few blistering minutes he just held onto that image, that image of his brother’s face, and let his heart feel so full with it that there could be nothing else, then let it fade.
Thinking about Shigeo, focusing purely on Shigeo, meant that Ritsu could be calm. He could think just on the logistics of this current problem and nothing else. He was going to take Reigen home and presumably Reigen would be too cagey to tell Shigeo about it, and Ritsu wasn’t going to tell Shigeo about it, and Reigen could ask Serizawa or someone else to handle his business. All would be well.
He reached Reigen’s drab apartment, flicked open the lock with his power, and pulled the door open.
It was dark inside. He saw the shapes of furniture and things but didn’t linger.
He considered dumping Reigen on the floor. He’d survive that, wouldn’t he, now that Ritsu’d repaired the life-threatening portion of the damage? He drew Reigen closer to analyse him, and realised that Reigen’s eyes were open. He was halfway out the door by the time it dawned that they were unfocused: his eyes were open but glassy, and his face was flushed with something that looked like the onset of fever. There was no way Reigen recognised that it was Ritsu here.
Ritsu could still dump him on his bed and be done with it. He could come back when Reigen was better to question him about the esper. None of this was Ritsu’s obligation, because right now Ritsu was being righteous and virtuous and one never had to be either of those two things.
He stared intently at Reigen, whose face looked very soft and breakable.
But if he did, it was possible he could use that virtue for something else. Namely: stop seeing my brother! Stop being near him, stop looking at him, stop thinking about him, stop having anything to do with him.
Reigen wasn’t a person of honour, though, and Reigen wasn’t a person of guilt, so leveraging virtue against him like that didn’t work. The only functional alternative that Ritsu could think of was to phrase it like a threat, but then that still rendered the ‘taking-care-of-him’ portion unnecessary.
Ritsu was not a good person. The moment he’d realised that in his life had been a foundational one. He was not a good person, meaning he could leave Reigen in his bed instead of dressing him down into pyjamas and washing him or doing whatever it was that caretakers did. He was not a good person, so he could shake this off and return later.
He moved slowly through the apartment, pushing into the bedroom, which even in the state of darkness he could tell was surprisingly free of clutter, and focused on nothing but setting Reigen down. Reigen coughed, shuddering, when Ritsu sat him on the edge of his bed, and in the darkness Ritsu saw, with all the horror and inevitability of an oncoming vehicle collision, Reigen reaching out.
Reigen’s hand came over Ritsu’s shoulder, and his hand was very warm—which was disorienting, because Ritsu had never considered the thermal properties of Reigen before—then the other one came around his back, which meant Reigen held him—Reigen was holding him—pressed like a brand against Ritsu’s front, except maybe he was just burning up and it was a fever. Then Reigen whimpered: a small, pained noise, “Shige.”
Ritsu went hot, and then cold, as it struck with exquisite violent that Reigen and his brother really were in a relationship, which he thought about all the time but never faced so head-on, never realising that there always was the premise of plausible doubt until that plausible doubt shattered—right then and right there—because it was possible that Shigeo was just there to drink or go on cases, and it was possible that they were simply being friendly, but here Reigen was: battered, in the dark, on his bed, whispering his brother’s name—his nickname—his name that only his family called him—and it was like Ritsu was standing in front of a train and looking directly into its headlights while it thundered towards him.
He felt nauseated. He wanted to die.
The entire apartment seemed to waver and then took on the eerie quality of being haunted. He saw with vivid clarity the imprint of his brother. His brother had been in here. His brother had sat in these chairs. His brother had laid in this bed. His brother had been pressed to Reigen like this.
Reigen was still holding him, rasping, S-Shige.
And Ritsu hated Reigen so much in that moment that it overwhelmed all the hate he had ever felt in the past. He hated Reigen for getting to hold onto his brother and he hated Reigen for getting hurt and making Ritsu endure this, so he stood there, arrested completely by the force of his emotions, letting it fill him like someone had made an incision at the tenderest part of his head and was pouring all that loathing into him, sloshing and overflowing.
Reigen’s mouth was very warm. His breath against his skin made Ritsu start to shake, in part with the catastrophe of his feelings and the sense that he was being stabbed all over. Reigen had done this to his brother. Reigen had held his brother, in the past, in this very room, and Ritsu was now witnessing it, except his brother wasn’t here, and it was Ritsu instead, and Reigen had placed a leg around his waist and was murmuring against his neck.
Reigen Arataka was resting his mouth against Ritsu’s neck.
It was the last straw in the series of straws. Ritsu’s mind vacated his head in an apocalyptic rush and he closed his eyes, to stop thinking, until all he felt keenly was the warmth that was pressed against him: Reigen was pressed against him, Reigen was pressing against him.
Ritsu did not move. It was impossible to. The intimacy of it was indelible. That was why Ritsu didn’t move—because it was intimate, and it was intimacy that was given to his brother, and it was intimacy that was given by Reigen, and experiencing it was like having a caltrop stuffed directly into his chest, and he deserved that caltrop sensation because he was Ritsu.
It felt like an eternity before Reigen’s head sagged to his shoulder, breathing wetly. Ritsu remained rooted there, hot tears spilling over his cheeks. He didn’t wipe them away because in some way that would mean acknowledging them.
Ritsu had never even kissed anybody. He gone on dates and held hands but never been interested enough to go further because he was busy, and now he was here, and it was like that chasm that had existed between him and his brother had opened all over again, except where before they’d been psychic powers and psychic powers were possible to obtain, this wasn’t.
Reigen was just slumped there as though he hadn’t been responsible for Ritsu’s meltdown, all his clothes still bloody and filthy because he’d been in the trash not an hour before. He was still wearing them because Ritsu hadn’t changed him into proper sleepwear because he had decided it was within his rights as a bad person. Ritsu, the bad person, had done that out of spite.
He was rifling through Reigen’s closet before he’d made a conscious decision to, his crying dissolving into little hiccuping. Reigen was the type of person to have matching pyjamas, so Ritsu fished them out, then levitated Reigen again, and—in as much of a detached way he could manage—began stripping Reigen down.
He attempted to make it meditative. First he undid the the tie, then he removed Reigen’s shoes, then he took off Reigen’s socks—which had holes in them—and then he took off Reigen’s suit jacket and removed the torn dress shirt and torn undershirt, and then he took off Reigen’s trousers. For a moment it was just Ritsu, all of Reigen’s clothing folded neatly on the dresser, Reigen’s sleepwear hovering, and Reigen, who was mostly naked except for his briefs, which hugged his body tightly, particularly over the divots of where his skin met hips. Ritsu’s head started to pound.
It was disturbing how clothing made the un-clothed parts so visible—which obviously was the point—but it exposed the soft swell of Reigen’s thighs, the little flex of his bones in his wrist, and—beneath the huge patch of bruising across his chest—the swoop of his navel. Ritsu could not think about any of that.
Hurriedly, Ritsu re-dressed him. He picked up all of his thoughts and put them in a little bottle and pushed the lid on very tightly. Ritsu was thinking too much. This entire situation was more simple than he was putting on. Reigen was injured and so Ritsu, the Good and Virtuous person, had taken him home and made sure he was not dead.
Reigen was injured.
Ritsu was helping him.
That was all.
At no moment had Ritsu shed any tears, and at no moment had Reigen touched him, and at no moment had Ritsu thought about his brother and Reigen, at all. He repeated this to himself, like a mantra, and failed to sum up his usual routine of imagining his brother from the head down because he wasn’t thinking about his brother.
As he laid Reigen back, Reigen made a noise, half-cry, like an animal did when in pain. Ritsu stopped.
It was possible this whole time that Reigen was still gravely injured. Very carefully, as though it would bite him, Ritsu took a seat on the bed and sent his power down his arms, to knuckles, and leaned in and lifted Reigen’s shirt. He focused on the bruises, and only the bruises, as he set his knuckles against Reigen’s chest like a defibrillator.
He shut his eyes.
Reigen’s heart beat was like a single finger tapping against a table. Reigen’s finger, specifically. One two three four—his heart rate was elevated, and Ritsu wondered if he had a fever or if everybody’s body was this hot. He leaned over Reigen and shifted his knuckles towards his lungs, trying to see if there was still any blood blockage there. Was that a rupture in the trachea? Ritsu focused. He thinned his power to a narrowed sliver and threaded it into the mucosa, and thought, grow.
Then, he started considering that there might’ve been other things he missed. It was almost certain that there was an infection starting but he wasn’t sure where. He moved upwards, using his sight without sight, except there was so much stuff in the way. He physically leaned in as though it would help him see better, even though he wasn’t seeing with his eyes, which he knew were blown wide and white because unlike Shigeo he couldn’t do this without using his powers completely. If one imagined there was a figurative valve on esper abilities, Ritsu always kicked it as high as it would go—that was just the way he did things. Whenever he had a task at hand, he would do it and only it with a tunnelling intensity that wiped away everything else.
He put the shirt back because it wasn’t appropriate that he had his hands under Reigen’s shirt, and shifted up, to the throat, which was easier: there was the thin layer of skin, then sternohyoid muscle, then omohyoid muscle, then the slant of a tendon, and if there were injuries they were too small for him to tell, then cartilage and—
Reigen’s hand was in his hair. Reigen’s hand had somehow found its way into Ritsu’s hair.
He was so shocked that he jolted, full-body, and nearly blew a hole in Reigen’s throat before he slammed the valve shut and locked up. He thought about accidentally exploding Reigen, blasting that cartilage open red like an alien mouth, and his brain slammed into the wall and stalled, completely.
Reigen had his hand in Ritsu’s hair, which naturally stood up, despite what anybody said. His face looked soft and dopey and even stupider up close. In that split-second Ritsu knew what was going to happen.
But he had locked up. Reigen, who thought he was his brother—Reigen, who was feverish and delirious, whose eyes had drifted closed, pulled him in and kissed him.
Ritsu could not imagine anybody else in the world had experienced a more debilitating first kiss; the ground simply dropped out from beneath him. It took him a moment to realise it was because he had levitated them suddenly in the bed, but he couldn’t stop it, because Reigen was moving his lips against his, and his lips were unbearably soft—Ritsu could not imagine anything softer, anything more tender, anything with such startling sensation that lanced straight through the cortex of his brain and made it spin like a top. This was what his brother felt, all the time, and now Ritsu felt it. This was a pair of lips his brother had kissed.
The bed hit the ground hard enough to knock his senses back into him. Ritsu flung himself away—Reigen was still looking moronic and unfocused and Ritsu couldn’t even bear the sight of him—so he launched himself from the room in a swirling frenzy, stumbling and racing through the entryway. He burst out the door, slamming it shut after him and running down the stairs and out onto the street and he kept running until his body heaved with the exertion of trying to outpace something that kept playing in his mind.
People were starting to get up. It was nearing 6AM. Ritsu faltered in the middle of the footpath as even the thought of returning to his apartment, being in a room with walls and no where to escape, became unbearable.
He wondered if his lips felt soft, if all lips felt that soft, and then punished himself for thinking about it by biting the flesh of his hand. But the damage was done: Ritsu had thought about it, which in effect had made the incident real, and now it was a real fact that Reigen had kissed him and Ritsu was churning with the inability to process it.
He sunk down into a small ball and covered his face with his hands.