panoply (n.): a collection in display; complete protection for spiritual warfare.
Teruki is mulling over pamphlets of the universities his parents are nudging him into aiming for. Years ago, he'd outlined the trajectory of his life into pleasing them, into gaining everyone's favor. He'd planned on cheating into the country's top university, getting the highest honors. Now he wants to keep doing things his own way, not beholden to his powers.
A sudden tremor rocks his building, almost flopping him off his bed, and he thinks with nonsensical alarm of little earthquakes, slumbering tsunamis. A comet streaks over his window, ripping apart the night, except it's not a comet. It's Mob, adorned in a writhing aura so dark, so huge it douses the stars. Teruki leaps out his door and up the stairs to the roof of his apartment.
Mob is suspended in the heavens, ready to drop and lay waste to civilization. Teruki's pulse rattles in his veins, the courage that drove him into action a minute ago now all used up. But then Mob's mouth opens, blazing white light erupting from it, same as his eyes, and sobs, "help."
Teruki can't think of why Mob would come here to him, and not to Tsubomi, or Reigen. Of course Reigen, his anchor, his haven, his calm in the storm. Teruki can't think of why, unless something's gone wrong, unless…
"Kageyama-kun, where's Reigen?" he gasps before he can stop himself. Worst-case scenarios flood his mind, of Reigen sick, or hurt, or oh gods—
Mob's face contorts into sorrow beyond description. He throws his head back and screams.
Teruki is knocked flat on his ass at the shockwave. Mob is broadcasting his pain, unfounded tears in Teruki's eyes at the anguishdespairshame. Teruki tries to stand but it's too much, he's yelling alongside Mob now too, how long has Mob lived feeling like this, how long has he been suffering? He almost misses the figure that's come up the stairs to join them on the roof, and he has to furiously blink his eyes clear.
Tsubomi is crying too, just as affected by Mob, but she's silent and steady as she walks right into Mob's inferno. She stretches her arm out.
Teruki's seen Tsubomi's aura at work before: a gentle green, tropical ocean shallows still reachable from shore. But now it's bursting, billowing, and the girl's voice rings like a church bell: "Calm down." It's not a plea, or a request. For what seems like eternity, nothing happens. Tsubomi's arm trembles, bullets of sweat mixing with her tears. Dreadful trails of blood begin to drip from her nose. But slowly, so slowly, Mob's cries quiet down. Teruki stops weeping tears not his own, and he drags in lungfuls of brisk air, shaking from the force of it.
Mob's still glowing, still floating, but he's more broken boy than weapon of mass destruction now, the lights from his orifices eking in slow streams. Tsubomi wipes at her face. "Mob-kun, what happened?" she asks, like she hasn't just subverted a small apocalypse, like her friend is more important than her injuries. Teruki is both concerned and impressed by how much stronger she's become.
"Look into his mind," he suggests, clambering to his feet. "He's in no state to talk right now, and Reigen could be in trouble."
Mob flinches, his aura flaring up again, and he weeps, "no i don't want you to see—"
"Then tell us," Tsubomi implores him. "Please."
After the truth is dragged out, after Mob's collapsed on Teruki's spare futon, after Teruki's cellphone gets the text from Reigen (im ok. dnt look 4 me. just need 2 b alone. pls.), after all and everything, Teruki finds himself here. He's sat with Tsubomi on his building's fire escape, listening to Tome on speaker halfheartedly curse out Mob's rashness, more shaken than irate.
"Besides," she snaps, cutting off her own tirade, "aren't you and Mob having feelings for each other again, Tsubomi-chan?"
"What? No! Before tonight, Mob-kun and I even thought that Reigen-kun was already dating Hanazawa-kun—"
"What?" Teruki's stunned, then amazed, laughing from the inanity, "Holy shit, all we could've done was compare notes about these two idiots and we'd have avoided this whole mess."
"But we didn't," Tsubomi sighs. "And it's all ended badly. So badly."
Teruki tries to reassure her, erase that heavy guilt from her face. "Let's just give them some time, they'll come around."
"'Come around?'" Tome's raised her voice again, this time with untampered rage. "Reigen just got assaulted and you think he'll just come around?"
"But he likes Kageyama-kun…!"
"That's not the point!" Tome's words crack, somehow on the verge of tears, "Reigen's had to live with Mob longer than all of us. Has it even occurred to you what that's like for him, for us, no powers to protect us from the scars we could get? Scars Reigen already has? For Mob to force himself on him like that— Fuck."
Teruki's cowed into silent contemplation, but Tsubomi stumbles to say, "Mob-kun's been so much better since then, this is just a lapse, he'll be better—!"
"Are you seriously taking Mob's side right now, Tsubomi?"
"N-no, of course not, I… I just…"
Tome lets out an empty chuckle. "I know what you're thinking. Reigen is Mob's off-switch. The one to calm him down when he loses control, so they need to stay together. Except Reigen's just a human being, no matter how much he bullshits us otherwise. He's already been through way too much, and it's not fair to ask any more of him just because Mob's a fuhh—" She snarls and exhales, scraping static. "I'm shutting up now before I say shit I'm gonna regret."
Tsubomi flinches like she's been slapped. "I'm sorry, Tome-san. I really am. You're right of course, you're right."
For a few seconds there is tense, heavy silence. Teruki sighs and steps in. "Look, they're both hurting over this. It's gonna be bad for Reigen-kun, and it's gonna make Kageyama-kun's problem even worse, so. Let's have them breathe and sort themselves out, however long it takes. And we need to look out for them."
Tome utters an agreeable hum. "Heh. You're turning into quite the diplomat, Teruki-kun."
"Yes, I— oh dear." Tsubomi's nose has started bleeding again. Teruki offers the box of tissues they have on standby.
"S' going on there?" Tome asks, tinny bewilderment through the phone.
Teruki speaks for the other girl as she's got her head tipped back and her nose full of tissue paper. "A nosebleed. She reached into Mob-kun's mind to get him to calm down."
Tome gasps, starstruck, "Wow, really?"
Tsubomi wipes her face clean and says, still a little congested, "He's the one who calmed himself down, really. All I did was let him know his friends were around him for support. I don't have mind control or whatever."
"Still," Teru insists, "you got past his mental barriers even at his maximum strength. The fact that you were able to contact him at all is really impressive."
Tsubomi beams, shy but pleased, proud.
By the time their call ends, the fabric of the night is as black as tar and soft as lake water. Teruki sighs and thunks his head on the metal of the fire escape. "Jeez, I'm famished. There's a corner eatery where they sell killer gyudon, want some takeout?"
Tsubomi flashes an apologetic smile. "Tempting, but I don't have any money with me. And to leave Mob-kun alone is…"
"Consider this payment for saving me and everybody in a ten-block radius. You can stay here, I'll be fast." Teruki winks at her, his aura coiling around him with a flash, and her smile grows more genuine. He may have vowed not to abuse his powers anymore, but that doesn't mean he should rob himself of convenience.
Later, as they sit on the hallway floor beside his apartment, with Tsubomi's delight at the extra egg in her gyudon, Teruki comes to the sheepish realization that his penchant for showing off to pretty girls may have factored in there too.
"I wonder, Hanazawa-kun," Tsubomi says after a short, companionable quiet of concentrating on their meals, "did you bleaching your hair ever have anything to do with the color of your aura?"
Teruki mulls this over, and chuckles through his mouthful of beef. "Honestly? I don't know. I just wanted yet another reason to stand out in a crowd. Now that you've pointed it out… Yeah. Maybe." He sidles a teasing smirk at her. "Wanna dye your hair green, Takane-chan?"
To his pleasant surprise, Tsubomi grows both serious and excited, and she admits, "I've always wanted to color my hair. In highlights, at least."
"I can help with that, if you want. I bleach my own hair, it's not too hard to do."
Before their conversation can carry further, the door to Teruki's apartment swings open. Mob peers down at them, from a greater height since his feet haven't met the ground yet. His hair is still standing on end, but at least his aura is a muted mirage rather than a lighthouse now. An otherworldly sight, like a bolt from the blue that's been preserved in amber, something humans are not meant to behold for longer than necessary.
Tsubomi raises a hesitant hand bearing gyudon in a takeout container. "Mob-kun, please eat something."
Mob's eyes stir, voids filling with grim determination, and he speaks, still hoarse from crying: "Tsubomi-chan. Hanazawa-kun. Please help me. Please help me control the other me."
Tome can believe things that are true, things that aren't true, and things that no one knows if they're true or not. Her sister Chisato raised her on Star Trek and X-Files and quite possibly every piece of extraterrestrial pop fiction there is. The vastness of space causes others to shudder in fear and tread closer to the ground, but she could never stop looking up.
At sixteen and standing on a mountain peak with all her friends, she was ready to abscond with the knowledge that espers existed, that telepathy was real. It was a foot in the door of the transcendental, more than she'd ever dreamt of.
Except the spaceship descending to greet them kicked that door open completely, and the transcendental became the divine.
Tome was quiet, as they drove back home in the graveyard hours of the morning. She'd just shaken hands with an alien, hugged an alien. She and everyone got to sit in their spaceship and talk with them, Tsubomi as mediator. Reality was somehow dimmed and yet also brighter than it had ever been.
A passing streetlight illuminated her friends in the rearview mirror, dogpiled and fast asleep. Beside her, Nee-san had an odd smile on her face, the one that meant she was finding a way to say something, and so Tome waited for it.
"You know, I never really believed in aliens."
It was too late in the evening, and too early in the day, for Tome to process this. She just let her eyebrows disappear into her hairline and her mouth fall open, and Nee-san huffed a muted laugh.
"Everything we watched, they were just something for us to bond over. But you latched onto the idea so fiercely. You have more faith in it than most people do in their entire lives about any one thing. You see the potential in everything, in everyone. And look." Nee-san glanced back at Tome's friends. "You got them into following you, because they believed in your belief. And it paid off. Beings from another world came, because of you." She laughed again, except the laugh morphed into a sniffle. "You're such an amazing little shit."
Tome was struck dumb for a minute. Then she winched out of her seatbelt to smush into Nee-san, validation and victory and vaguely hysterical joy and everything else crowded inside her.
Here and now at nineteen years old, she still believes. And she believes in Reigen.
She doesn't believe Reigen, per se; every other breath he takes is to lie about how much sleep he got, when he last ate a decent meal, whose cigarettes are in his dorm room. She believes in him as a person, as someone who's going through a lot but will come through alright.
They're at an internet café typing up an assignment for the GE class that they're both in when Reigen asks her, in an offhanded way like he's commenting on the rainy afternoon outside, "Have you heard from Mob?"
Tome delivers her most deadpan face, though it falters due to the bags under Reigen's eyes, the pallor of his cheeks. "He's doing okay," she answers in a careful tone. "He talks about the recipes he has to practice for school on Friendster."
Reigen tilts a brow, genuinely amused for a moment. "He has a Friendster?"
"I think Teru-kun forced him into making it."
Reigen laughs along, and then his smile drops like it's been shoved out of a plane, punching through clouds. He straightens and turns back to his computer screen, and says, "I should contact him."
Something in Tome's chest clenches, aches. "Why are you using the word 'should' and not 'want?'"
For once, Reigen has no clever reply to barrel-roll out of this. Tome presses on. "Reigen… Mob isn't your responsibility. He's keeping himself in check now, okay? You still need time."
It's the wrong thing to say, because Reigen shrugs and glances to the side with a pasted-on half-smile. "Looking back on it now I was just overreacting, and it didn't go as worse as it could've. I have to—"
Tome slams her fingers into his shoulders and yanks him around in his chair to face her. "Reigen Arataka," she hisses with contempt, "will you please stop doing this to yourself."
Reigen grimaces, shoves her hands off as though they scald him. "Doing what."
"Treating yourself like your feelings don't matter, like you don't matter. Putting everyone but yourself first and giving them your all until there's nothing left for you." Tome angles her face until he finally meets her gaze, and says, "What you went through can't be compared to how it could've been 'worse.' You deal with it at your own pace. You aren't overreacting. And I swear if you fight me on this I will spam you with chain mail until we die, you sanctimonious asshole."
Reigen's subsequent laughing fit sounds more like sobs.
Over the year, the two of them get shoehorned as an annoying couple, because of the time Tome had to cuss out a girl who tried to take a very drunk Reigen home from a house party. Then they're accused of being a faggot and a dyke. Neither of them couldn't give less of a shit what anyone else thinks.
Because Reigen translates Tome's comments into English on her alien theory messaging boards. Reigen fusses over every bruise on her shin or scratch on her arm from her being an uncoordinated mess who bumps into everything. Reigen buys her snacks on the worst days of her period. Reigen is her family. And Tome is Reigen's family too. She reminds him to slow down, to breathe, to take care of himself as much as he does for others.
Tsubomi also becomes a closer friend, and the three of them work around their different time schedules due to being in different colleges at their university. They haunt convenience stores, libraries, cafés together.
Teru drops by a lot too, coming every few weeks to pick up Tsubomi, and they take a day to meet with Mob.
Nobody talks about that in front of Reigen.
Inch by painstaking inch, Reigen builds himself anew. He gains back some weight, cuts down from smoking a whole pack of cigs a day. He walks and talks like his skin finally fits him, transmogrifying his self-destruction into self-determination. Tome's forever torn between irascible annoyance at his antics, and secret relief and pride at his confidence.
Sometimes Reigen will spin an exaggerated yarn about adventures in middle school and he'll go "and this was at Mob's house," or "so Mob had to lift my bike out" without thinking, and then clam up, friendly charisma evaporating. Sometimes he'll recover quick and carry on regaling who he's talking to with the tale in question.
Sometimes Tome sees that Reigen's fired a message to Mob on Friendster and that Mob's replied, all their exchanges awkward and stilted and very brief. Both Reigen and Mob seem to have realized how deep their codependency metastasized, for years. Carving it out of themselves until they're no better than acquaintances who never really knew each other.
Nobody talks about that, either.
They're holed up in Reigen's mother's apartment the weekend before the new academic year starts, marathoning old Batman movies, when Teru asks, "Are we friends?"
Tome would react to that, and quite loudly, except Reigen is issuing soft snores with his head on her shoulder. Tsubomi's the one who asks, in the dulcet tones everybody gets at two in the morning, "Can you elaborate, Hanazawa-kun?"
"We talk to each other about updates on Kageyama-kun and Reigen-kun. We're really more their mutual friends than we are each other's. But." Teru pauses, and Tome watches the technicolor lights of the TV bounce off his face, can pinpoint the exact moment he becomes flustered. "I like when we get to spend time together like this, and talk about things we've read, watched, and what happened in our classes. So…" He sighs. "I don't know where I was going with this, sorry."
Tome murmurs, drowning out Catwoman's monologue, "For someone so smart, you're so dumb. Of course we're friends. We're friends for each other, not just for being Mob and Reigen's friends. Our lives don't revolve around those two, y'know." As if sensing that he's being mocked, Reigen mutters in his sleep and shifts his head off, freeing Tome's shoulder.
Teru blinks and tilts his head to the side just as the TV goes white from an explosion scene. It's a perfect moment, his young-wolf face in profile; a lightning flash, photograph, still life. Then the moment ends and he grins, a rumpled bleached-blonde boy again, and says, "Heh. You're right. You're pretty smart too, Tome-sam."
Tome flaps a hand at him and tries to concentrate on Batman's horrible acting to drown out the odd feeling in her stomach. Beside her, Tsubomi utters a small, thoughtful noise. To Tome's astonishment, the other girl asks, in a tentative voice, "I… I hope you feel the same way about our friendship too, Tome-san?"
"What? Dude, of course!" She slings an arm around Tsubomi's shoulders. "I'm forever indebted to you for helping us meet aliens. You're the coolest to me, even more than Mob, that dummy. The coolest."
Tsubomi always blushes a little when Tome gets affectionate with her, and Tome's chalked it up to the other girl's easily embarrassed nature. But now Tsubomi's face is a glowing coal, so hot Tome can almost imagine steam rising from it like in anime. She's staring very hard at her fists clenched in her lap, and Tome becomes hyperaware of the fact that they're both in thin sleepwear. And the side of her chest is squished to Tsubomi's, which is larger. And softer. And she smells so nice. And oh gods she's in the same room as a mind reader—
Tome cleaves herself from the other girl so fast and hard she jostles Reigen, who kicks his leg up in a fuzzed yelp. Trying to look everywhere but at Tsubomi, Tome's eyes land on Teru, who has the biggest shit-eating grin on his face as he looks right back, a soft flush of his own filling his cheeks. "See?" he says. "Told ya she likes us."
Tsubomi has never found Mob's powers as incomprehensible, as something to fear. Not even since the very first day they met, when they didn't yet know each other's names. She could never understand why that was until now, after cleaning out her room as distraction from the thoughts of the city crashing itself against her like tumultuous ebbs and flows of the tide.
Tucked in a hidden shoebox, along with other treasures from early childhood, is an unkempt photograph. She's three or four years old in it, perched on her great-grandmother's lap, the both of them giggling as stuffed toy animals dance on air over their heads.
The sparse memories that flood into her are very faint. Pinching the soft pruny lines on Baba's skin. Getting floated around in the clothes basket. The smoker-rough but fond voice threatening to steal Tsubomi from her parents so she can be doted on forever.
She can't remember how she felt or reacted when she learned that Baba died. The grief arrives seventeen years too late.
Teru's come to pick her up in his new car, a sensible Mazda. Even with her earplugs in to narrow her focus, Tsubomi catches flashes of his pride at having acquired his driver's license in less than a year. It's a lovely morning all around, over-starched blue flooded with sun, and she's happy for him, she really is, trying to show it best she can. But they've known each other for six years, and grown closer in the last two, and Teru coaxes her into talking about what happened.
Tsubomi lets the sensation of wind streaming through the open windows buoy her as she talks. When she's done, Teru muses, "Y'know, maybe being an esper might be hereditary. Like a recessive gene that can skip generations." He turns his head a bit towards her and says, softer, "I'm sure she'd be proud of who you've grown up to be."
"Thank you, Teru-kun," Tsubomi says, leaning into the comfort. She hides a smile when the tips of Teru's ears go pink at the use of his first name. It's been a month now since the night in Reigen's apartment when their soap-opera situation had unraveled. Tsubomi has liked Tome for a long time now, but developed feelings for Teru as well, over the course of them helping Mob together. Tsubomi had wasted whole nights waiting for the freaked-out shine to wear from it, and become weird or disgusting, as it's supposed to be, but it never did.
The likelihood of Tome and Teru both being in the exact same boat as her was slimmer than snowfall in June, and yet here they are. She's giddy with it, and still kind of freaked out, a perpetual overlay of freaked out like newspaper around flimsy valuables.
Reigen's been thinking up increasingly elaborate nicknames for their relationship. T-cubed. Triple T's. Terrible Trio of Trouble. He's been nothing but supportive, which has been wonderful. So is Mob, since she messaged him about what transpired. She knows all too well what society thinks about people like them, but to be blessed with intimacy and support, even just from a handful of people, means the world to her.
Mob's already on the sidewalk when they pull up by the Kageyamas' house. "What a nice car, Hanazawa-kun," he says as he accordions himself into the backseat, smiling at both of them. "Couldn't wait to show it off to Tsubomi-chan?"
Teru splutters and Tsubomi can't stop laughing even if she tried. They They banter all through the drive to their practice grounds; as usual, sidestepping any mention of Reigen, like a seat at the dinner table that you know should be filled, but finding no one there.
They've always tried to find open areas to do this. Here on the outskirts of their city, they favor the condemned buildings, the abandoned car park pockmarked with potholes between them.
It doesn't take long for Mob to explode; he's been this way for years, constantly a few degrees away from his tipping point. A stone dropped into the still lake of his being, and he disappears into furious rippling black-blue, his eyes molten-white chips of steel. The transition still jars Tsubomi, no matter how much she witnesses it.
Teru braces beside her, and she does too. Sometimes Mob will attack them in blind fury, and sometimes he'll try to shave the whole city block off the earth. Those scenarios she can take. But not the ones where Mob tries to hurt himself, punish himself.
For the first time, Mob does none of those things. Instead, he turns to them with the widest grin Tsubomi has ever seen him make, his everbright eyes almost disappearing from the force of it. "I'm happy for you, Tsubomi, Hanazawa. And for Tome too, of course. I hope we can all hang out together soon."
Teru's jaw has dropped wide enough to start catching flies. Tsubomi isn't any better, though she rushes to say, infected by Mob's joy, "Of course, Mob-kun! Thank you so much, I'm so glad. We all are."
Mob nods, appeased, his floating hair moving with him. "And I'll make Arataka happy too."
The miracle evaporates, and Tsubomi flinches. "Oh, Mob-kun…" She shouldn't cushion this blow and so she doesn't. "Reigen-kun is still coping with what's happened, it's… not a good time."
Mob's fluorescent grin twitches, growing brittle. "But we're talking again. He wants me back. Of course we'll be happy."
"Kageyama-kun." Teru's voice is hard enough to crack diamond. "He's afraid for you. Afraid of you. And he hates himself for it, like it's his fault for being traumatized by all the times you nearly killed him."
That stops Mob dead in his tracks. "No. N-no. That wasn't me." His face curdles. "But it was you. It was us. It was me. No! I'm sorry!" The energy around him cracks, an inverse lightning storm, and he curls on himself, sobbing one minute and incoherent yelling the next. Teru throws up a barrier around himself and Tsubomi, and they can't do anything but wait.
By the time it's over, the crater that Mob's made around himself is deep enough to fit a ten-wheeler truck.
They help him back to the car and begin the drive home. Teru glances in the rearview mirror at Tsubomi, curled around Mob's limp body in a protective embrace. She hears him think, very deliberately, tell him. he has to know.
She sighs, and brushes against Mob's mind gently, letting her presence be known. Mob's thoughts are a maelstrom, and she breaks through it. mob-kun, you have to understand…all your actions are yours. though there's a ridiculously strong shield around your mind at the height of your powers, what little i can sense is still you. more uninhibited and arrogant and intense, but still you.
Unexpectedly, Mob gives a slow nod. i know. i've been denying it because i don't want it to be. i hurt arataka-kun. i assaulted him.
because you got carried away. the power flowing through you, combined with the emotions you keep suppressing—
i just don't want to feel anything anymore. Mob releases a shuddery breath. i keep hurting everyone.
mob. listen to me. Tsubomi shakes him a little until he meets her gaze. your emotions aren't what hurt people, your actions are. whenever my father treats my mother like trash i so badly want to hit him, but i don't act on it. i let go of my anger another way. you can't control your emotions. that's what you thought you could do but you can't, and you shouldn't. don't deny it. just learn how to live with it.
Mob's silent inside himself, contemplating. okay. thank you. thank you, tsubomi-chan.
She smiles and speaks low enough that only Mob can hear, because this needs to be said aloud. "For the record? I know your feelings for Reigen-kun aren't what hurt him. It's how you told him."
"What makes you say that?" Mob murmurs, puzzled.
"I don't need to be a telepath to know how much he feels about you, despite everything."
Mob doesn't reply to that. Even his mind is in murky, unreadable undercurrents.
It's already nightfall when they drop Mob off, low-hanging moon with a bite taken out of it. As they're driving over to Tome's house for a promised dinner, Teru reaches across the driver's seat to grasp her hand. She laces her fingers with his just as a scream rips her head open.
Teru's posing worried questions at her but she doesn't hear him, locking onto the young girl's futile cries for help, a hand over her mouth. She's an esper, her aura so new and unsettled pale. as she's dragged away by someone.
Another esper, with a malevolent red aura.
She yells at Teru, "Drive," projecting the jumble of images into his mind, and he guns down into the alleyway a few blocks over.
Tsubomi leaps out of the car, and she can see the girl, only ten, pigtails lashing about her as she weeps. The esper has seen them approach, and he starts running but Teru reaches out, freezes him in place. He curses and throws out projectiles of energy at them.
Tsubomi doesn't care, stampeding towards him. She has no telekinesis or other combative abilities, and even the barriers she can put up are weak and porous. What she does have is six years of tennis, coordination, and upper-body strength.
She ducks and swerves around the red projectiles, and by the time the man realizes his technique's not working she's close enough to sucker-punch him in the jaw. He yips, dropping his victim, and Tsubomi scoops her up just before Teru slams the man into a wall.
The girl won't stop crying, shaking with relief, and Tsubomi tucks the girl's face into her neck so she doesn't see the vengeful smile Tsubomi's wearing as Teru squeezes his powers around the man a little harsher than necessary. She idly notes that there's an old ragged scar bisecting his mouth.
who are you and what the fuck were you planning to do with her? Tsubomi relishes the way the scum freezes in his angry tirade upon hearing her in his mind. yes, we're espers like you. so talk quickly, and don't lie. i'll know.
"I-I wasn't gonna do molest her or anything!" He's manic with desperation now. "I work for a noble organization called Claw. We're going to put the world in its proper order!"
yes, tome, teru, and tsubomi are poly. hehe.
