A/N: This first piece is mostly projection. And my personal vendetta against smoking acting up again. It actually came very close to my writing style in Vietnamese, and I am adequately happy about that.


"You seem stressed," Kano said.

"It's the stress," Ritsu replied, without much emotion to the words he used.

He knew how it would go next. Kano was not good with people until he found something he had in common with them. He mostly tried to deal with that front by persuade people into sharing a trait with him.

"Fancy a smoke?" Kano asked.

And there it went.

Ritsu hadn't swayed until then. It seemed to be common for people with parents who smoke to despise the habit; he and his brother two prime examples of that. Their dad joked about it all the time. He never really stopped. He did make a conscious effort to not smoke when together with his family, and Ritsu respected and valued that a lot. It didn't make his coughing less torturous to the ear and mind of a kid with overthinking tendency.

And maybe there lie all of his problem: he thought too much. He and his brother both had the same problem, even though it played out differently for either of them. While his brother had always been too easy to be pulled into other people's life, he had countless time overloaded himself trying to reason out of that. Reasoning, judgement, excuses.

Their dad was a happy man, even though he coughed his lungs out every night on the sofa where he sat watching late night TV.

It wasn't that Ritsu was an unhappy kid. He just thought too much. He just caught himself replaying every single thing he said during the roadtrip with his family after they'd come home and bid each others goodnight, worrying about dad's grimace,

(was it because of his grades? or him and his brother's tendency not to go straight home after school?)

He just caught himself up at three in the morning, staring into his phone's screen, ministry-issued guide book open in his lap, worn with pencil lines and the pressure of his eraser, too busy thinking about the spirit bust the day after,

(better keep everything he knew about those spirits in mind because they couldn't beat his brother but they could hurt, him, Ritsu, the con man, people nearby, they were vicious with their power but even more cunning and sinister with their words)

and the school he would be applying to,

(he knew his brother wasn't an academic person, but people had to have spoken about their family at their parents' work, they didn't mind, they never did, but he did, he did his share of minding, he did even their parents', that was all he could do, that and doing well at school and ensuring this commonplace, less-rumored-about future)

He caught himself worrying about his brother, his parents, about their life, about their feelings at the end of the day, about their happiness,

(they were happy)

about people in their life, about people in his life, about their happiness, about all of it. Nothing never really let up.

He just thought too much, and never enough about himself. Ritsu had caught himself, in his senior year, wide awake at night, realising that no direction for his future really enticed him. He liked writing, had always liked writing, but it was too unstable a job and writing school costed more than that was worth. He could get a job after high school, he was of age anyway, but that wouldn't help the talk around his parents much, wouldn't it? He could maybe do something with his power, but– no, his brother didn't allow himself to become his power, how dare he, how dare Ritsu think of that, how dare he invalidate his brother's efforts like that…

He thought and thought and thought, and it never really let up. He went to a good enough college. It never let up. He thought and thought and thought.

Dad coughed out his lungs every night on the sofa while he watched TV, but he was happy. Dad never really cared about the consequences of smoking. He cared enough to keep his family away from its direct hit, but he indulged himself.

He was happy.

Ritsu sighed. He could never be his dad.

"No, thank you," he said to Kano, ignored the way the guy's face fell. "Maybe some other time…"