Serizawa Katsuya had hoped to never, ever, EVER, see President Suzuki again.
But there he was.
It had been ten years since they'd last seen each other, since President Suzuki tried to take over the world, since he'd said all of those awful things to Serizawa. Since he'd told him that…that he had never thought of Serizawa as anything to him. Not a friend or a comrade or…or anything. Since he had been led away presumably to where they locked people up who tried to take over the world.
Treason was a serious crime.
Serizawa knew. He had almost been charged with it. Since there had been no real evidence that he'd been involved at all besides hearsay, he had Hatori to think for that, no charges had stuck. It had still been terrifying though. Serizawa had always been well aware of the fact that what he had been doing had been illegal. He had been well aware of the fact that, too, that sometimes world domination took risk and sacrifice. Only one of those things had been true…or maybe both of them. If not for Mob then President Suzuki would have taken over the world and right now he'd have been in the upper echelons of Claw and not picking up a slightly cheaper, but still overpriced, book for his game design class. He wouldn't have even been in school. He would have been at President Suzuki's side…
At Suzuki's side.
That was who he was now, Suzuki. President Suzuki…he wasn't the President of anything anymore, at least that was what Serizawa assumed. He certainly didn't look like President Suzuki anymore. He was sitting in one of the comfy reading chairs with a book balanced on his leg and a coffee or tea in his hand…it was probably tea. He only drank coffee when he had to stay awake. Jetlag was always a pain…Serizawa remembered. He remembered stepping onto a plain at six in the morning and then stepping off of a plain at seven in the morning…the next day. He hadn't been able to sleep and his body had still thought he'd been in…in the place that they had come from…and he had been too tired to do…the thing that they'd come there to do….
Here. Drink this.
President Suzuki had poured him a mug of coffee. It had just been the two of them, like normal. Serizawa had been yawning, he hadn't even had to say that he was tired, and then a cup of coffee had been put in front of him. He's drank it, it had been terrible but he'd drank it, and President Suzuki had sat right beside him…right in the next chair. Normally he sat across from Serizawa, or one chair away, but that time…that time they'd sat together and President Suzuki had talked to him…he couldn't remember what they'd talked about. All he could remember was the ringing in his ears, the pounding in his chest, and the way he screamed in his head 'don't mess this up' because…because he was so close….he had been so close and there could have been so many things that could have gone wrong…
But nothing had gone wrong.
He'd choked down his coffee while President Suzuki had talked about….he could sort of remember. A new asset, that was what he called the people he kidnapped, for Claw…why coffee had been better in Japan…why tea was better than coffee….things like that. Things that he never would have told the others. He hadn't liked the others, he had said, and he had preferred Serizawa's company to theirs. Hatori had been too annoying, he had said, too excitable. Shibata hadn't ever had anything intelligent to say, he'd said. Minegishi had lots of intelligent things to say but they were also incredibly, annoyingly, sarcastic…President Suzuki had never been good with sarcasm…which was maybe why he hadn't liked Shimazaki that much…but to be fair the only person who had ever liked Shimazaki had been Minegishi…
He wondered how their baby was doing.
He wondered if President Suzuki even knew they'd had a baby. He wondered if President Suzuki-if Suzuki, even cared, even would have cared. He had always been too busy, he had said, to concern himself with the lives of others. The President did not concern himself with the lives of his subordinates. He had more important things to do than remember their birthdays or favorite foods or if they preferred tea to coffee or if they just needed to wake up normally and get enough sleep because caffeine made them anxious…of course Suzuki wouldn't have cared about Shimazaki and Minegishi's baby…even though baby Himawari was the cutest baby he'd ever seen in his life….not that he'd seen that many babies…
There was a stroller beside Suzuki.
There was also a lady beside him, in the next armchair, and it had probably been her baby. Serizawa didn't know what he had been thinking. President Suzuki was too old to be having any more babies, his hair was white now, and he'd already been kind of old when he and Serizawa had met. He had said, before, that he had wanted more children. He had said that over breakfast, well diner but Touichirou's favorite food had been omelets with butter and ketchup every meal was kind of like breakfast…Suzuki liked breakfast foods. Serizawa didn't. He liked ramen, now, and…and President Suzuki didn't care about that. If they had been together then…then they would have been eating breakfast foods together now even though it was lunch time…
President Suzuki was eating a muffin.
There, in his lap, he had picked up a muffin and pulled part of it off before eating it. He always did that, it looked better, he had said. Biting directly into things was uncouth and made it look like you had been raised by wild animals. His own parents had told him that, he had said, when he had been a child. But then when he had used his telekinesis instead of chopsticks his mother made him kneel on his chopsticks for four hours, two for each chopstick, and that was why he had those weird scars on his knees. Some were from kneeling on rice, too. He had a lot of scars…the one on his arm had been from when he'd been playing in the kitchen as a kid and knocked over a tempura pot. The scraw went up his arm to his shoulder and down his chest.
All he could see was President Suzuki's arm now.
He leaned forward and peeked, more, over the bookshelf. He had never seen President Suzuki out in just a short sleeved t-shirt before. He always wore his suit, it was important to look the part, he had said. He always wore that same suit but he changed his tie every day. He'd had a whole suitcase just for ties…he'd even tried to show Serizawa how to tie one once. It was an important skill, he had said, one that Serizawa was going to have to pass down to his son one day…even though Serizawa had only worn pajamas at that point in his life….and even though the thought of him having a baby had made him break out into laughter. Him, a baby? He didn't even know any girls let alone known one well enough that he fell in love with her and had a baby. President Suzuki had just told him that his time would come, that he hadn't even though about having kids until his thirties, and how even then Sho had been a complete surprise. Both of his kids had been. He'd kept the wrong one, he'd said. He had only kept Sho because his ex-wife had wanted him and he'd kept Sho away to teach her a lesson…and he'd given his daughter away because he didn't want to be with her mother…he hadn't had the time to go down that road again…
He wondered if President Suzuki would have cared that Mukai was in high school now.
She went to Salt Middle School now. She was in her last year. She was on summer break. She and Sho were spending their summer break in the woods drawing the animals they saw. She liked to draw. She sold her drawings at the same art market that Sho had started off at. He wondered if he knew that Sho had his own gallery now. He wondered if he'd heard about Sho and Ritsu's marriage. He wondered if he cared that Ritsu had graduated university and Sho had used it as an excuse to bake a ring into a cake. He wondered if he cared that Sho had accidentally wound up chipping a tooth on that same ring. He wondered if he knew how hard it had been to get Sho to go to the dentist. He wondered if he knew how much Sho hated to be touched by anyone other than Ritsu or his little sister. He wondered if President Suzuki knew or cared about the time Sho had accidentally given Ritsu a black eye in his sleep. How he showed up at Serizawa and Taka's place at one or two in the morning sometimes because sometimes it got so bad that-
-that his aura was showing.
Serizawa pulled his aura inwards. He didn't want Suzuki to notice him….or maybe he did. Maybe he wanted to walk right up to Suzuki and tell him…tell him everything that he'd missed. Tell him about how, yes, he had been right, and Serizawa had met someone. Just not a girl. How Serizawa had married Taka, how Taka was Serizawa Arataka now, but people still called him Reigen…Mob and the kids still called him Reigen…they weren't kids anymore. The kids had grown up these past ten years and…and he wondered if Suzuki cared. He wondered if Suzuki cared that his son was thinking of having a baby…he wondered if Suzuki even knew that Sho…if he ever even thought about Sho or any other. He wondered…he wanted to tell him…
He wanted to tell him that the lady next to him was stealing his muffin.
There was a lady next to him, an older lady but not as old as he was. Her hair had some grey in it but it was still mostly black. She had some lines around her eyes but not as badly as President Suzuki did. She looked kind of like Mom had, the last time he'd seen her alive. Older but still young enough that she wasn't old….not old like President Suzuki had gotten. His hair was silver, even his eyebrows. That had been what Serizawa had noticed, right after the aura, the eyebrows. He still let them grow like that…Sho had said, once, that the one good thing he had ever gotten from his mom had been her eyebrows. That he would have gone crazy and tried to take over the world, too, if he'd been cursed with eyebrows like his dad's. Mukai hadn't been so lucky. She hadn't gotten Tsuchiya's eyebrows, she'd gotten PResid-Toui-she'd gotten Suzuki's eyebrows, that was why she kept them in that sideways teardrop shape…or maybe they were commas…he wasn't entirely sure…
Now did not seem like the time to ask her.
What would he have even said? Called her up and told her that he'd spent so much time staring at her Dad's eyebrows that he'd gotten to thinking about hers? That would have been weird. Also she would have sent he dolls after him for bothering her during her sketching trip. Sho would have come after him for mentioning President Suzuki….had Sho even known that he'd gotten out of prison? Would he have even cared that at this moment his dad was reading about….something, Serizawa wasn't close enough to see, while some lady tore pieces off of his muffin and ate them like-like that was just a thing that people did in life? Would he have…no, of course not. He hated his dad more than anything else in the world. That was why he was Kageyama Sho, now, instead of Suzuki Sho.
The baby's name was Shinji.
"…some muffin, Shinji?" asked the lady. That was all that Serizawa could hear…he moved closer. He moved from the computer books to the game manuals…oh, they had the manual for the new…he would pick it up later. He crouched down low and pretended to be looking through a lower shelf. He pushed the books out of the way and kept his aura in close…it wasn't easy to hide, not at his side, and…and what if he hadn't hid? What if he stood up and just said…said something? Anything. He could have said 'hi' or 'hello' or 'do you know that the woman next to you is stealing your muffin and feeding it to her baby?' or something like that…the last one would have made sense, the most sense. He had no reason to say 'hi' or 'hello' or anything like that to Suzuki.
He wouldn't have wanted to hear it.
Just so you know, I never considered any one of you to be my comrades. That had been the end of it all, he had figured it all out in therapy. He had thought about it, talked it over with Taka, the idea of him going all the way to esper prison to visit President Suzuki. Closure, that was what he'd been after…at least what he had thought he'd been after. He had just wanted to see him one more time and…and maybe tell him about….about how he had been wrong. About how Serizawa could survive on his his…about how mean he'd been and how it had made Serizawa feel…about how he couldn't just use people and throw them away like that. About how much pain he had been in just thinking….just thinking about never seeing him again….
About how Suzuki had never wanted to see him again.
Those last words spoken between them had been all the closure he needed. That was what Taka had said. Suzuki had made it clear that he had never intended to be anything to Serizawa. That he had never planned on doing any more than using him. They had never been friends. Serizawa had always been a tool to him, just a tool, like all the others had been. Everyone else had served their purpose and been thrown away and….and Serizawa….well they had all moved on and so had he. Hatori had moved on…sort of. He still did criminal stuff, mostly stealing data, and actually he and Shimazaki worked for the same yakuza boss…his friends had moved on to good things, too. Minegishi and Shimazaki' had a baby now with another on the way, which had raised questions about Minegishi that he knew never to ask unless he wanted to be plant food. Shibata lived a quiet life in the mountains now, Serizawa wondered if he'd ever found peace…it was hard to find if you were looking for it….
This was not the way to get peace.
Spying on President Suzuki would do nothing more than…than make him want to do something stupid. Stupid like get up and ask what he was doing there…obviously he was reading…but what was he reading? Was he reading that new Galaxy Express three nine light novel that had come out? He had always loved the Galaxy Express. One time, over the course of a week, he and Serizawa had binged the whole thing while they waited for some kind of yakuza war to cool down. They had been holed up together in a hotel room, it had been the way everyone had divided up. Shimazaki and Minegishi had always been together, they had been partners long before they'd been partners in Claw, and Hatori always shared with Shibata because Shibata was a heavy sleeper and Hatori stayed up half the night playing games and arguing with people on the internet. President Suzuki used to share with Sho but Sho, at that point, had started spending more and more time with Fukuda and the other two at Tokyo HQ….they'd had good jello there….so it made sense that he and President Suzuki had shared a room and it hadn't meant anything and Suzuki had…nothing mattered. Not about that week and not now.
Nothing mattered between them anymore.
It didn't matter how Serizawa knew the story behind every single scar on his body. The oil burn on his left arm and most of the left side of his chest and back. The thin red lines the crossed his back. The long, faded, line that went across his stomach…he'd had appendicitis when he'd been a kid…a lot of his scars were faded, like the ones on his knees…or they had been last time Serizawa had seen them. He wasn't ever going to see them again….he wasn't ever going to see any part of President Suzuki…of Suzuki…ever again.
He was getting up now.
"Honestly, Touichi." Said the lady as she brushed crumbs off of President Suzuki's shirt. He let her. He didn't even get mad…his aura got bigger. It passed right over Serizawa and…oh. No, he wasn't mad…but he was looking at Serizawa now. He was looking right in Serizawa's direction and-wait, no. There was this slapping sound…sandals. The little boy who was running had sandals on. He had come from the children's and young readers section. He had a book clutched to his chest…and bright red hair.
"Mom! Dad! Can I have this! I promise I'll read this one!" said the boy as he ran. People were looking…President Suzuki hated to be embarrassed. One time Sho had said a bad word in the middle of a meeting, he had both cursed and interrupted, and President Suzuki had-well he wasn't mad now. He wasn't happy, he knew what Touichirou looked like when he was happy, and he just looked….kind of bored….
"Shinichi, ask your mother." Said President Suzuki as he picked up the book and stacked it on top of the one he'd been holding…now Serizawa was never going to know what he had been reading…
"Why do I always have to be the bad guy?" asked the lady
"Because you balance the household budget." Said President Suzuki. He was looking at her now, at the lady, like…like he was happy. Like she was the only other person in the world. Like he didn't even notice the way the little boy was pulling on his shirt or the baby was fussing or the bottle that had been thrown on the floor…Serizawa could have walked over and picked it up. He could have introduced himself to the lady and….and he could have asked President Suzuki….he had a lot of things he could have asked Suzuki. Like why that little boy had called him 'dad' or why that lady was looking at him like that and why he was looking at her the same way or…or what he was even doing here…or why he was wearing a t-shirt even though everyone could see his scars or…or since when did he eat blueberry muffins? He liked cinnamon raisin the best and…and he should have just let the lady have the muffin since she looked kind of…well now he was being mean…and her stomach and the way it looked like she had swallowed a bowling ball was none of his business and…and she picked up the bottle on her own…
Without touching it.
The more he focused the more he could see it. When he looked through the red he saw green…green for the lady and the baby…but red for the little boy and…and Serizawa wasn't stupid. He wasn't stupid and he was a bad liar, too, especially to himself. Touichirou had…he had….he had moved on. Joseph had made it sound like President Suzuki was going to either be executed or he was going to spend the rest of his life as a lab rat….and Sho….well he said that they were going to lock him up and throw away the key…but then Hatori had done some digging and it turned out that esper prison didn't use keys, it used retinal scans…and also they put bombs inside of you….so did that mean that President Suzuki had a bomb inside of him right now?
Serizawa didn't get the chance to ask.
"Touichirou…you're lucky I love you, but when we get home you're reading to him." said the lady
"You say that like it's a burden, Aia." Said President Suzuki. The lady, Aia, just rolled her eyes and started walking away. She pushed the stroller and the little boy followed her. President Suzuki…Suzuki…he waited. He waited and….and maybe it was because he didn't like walking through crowds. He didn't like being around normal people, people without auras made him nervous, he didn't belong with them he had said…he had said that one day espers wouldn't have to hide but…but he was the one who had been hiding and…well now Serizawa was the one hiding…
It hadn't been a very good hiding spot at all.
Serizawa jumped back…and hit the shelf behind him. He heard books hitting the floor and…and now a lot of people were looking at him. More people than President Suzuki…but the only person who mattered….no. Other people mattered and…and he didn't….he didn't know what he wanted. President Suzuki was staring at him and he just…he wanted to…to run up there and ask him why. Why was he here? Why had he been with those people? Why had he…why hadn't he….did Sho know? Did Mukai? That they had more…had he even bothered to….had he even thought about how he would make everyone….had ever once in his life thought about someone other than himself? Had he ever….ha he ever once thought about Serizawa.
Obviously not if he hadn't even bothered to tell Serizawa he had gotten out of prison.
It wasn't like Serizawa had been hiding….up to this point. It wasn't like Serizawa hadn't been in contact with people…but it wasn't like he had made an effort to keep in contact with Touichirou. He hadn't even visited him in prison. He must have been…he must have been scared. He didn't like small, closed in spaces…he didn't like being locked in places…he didn't like being told what to do. He must have been so lonely…he had said that he didn't need anyone but…but the thought of him locked in a prison cell all alone…Serizawa should have gone to visit him. He'd had so many opportunities to go and pay him a visit or…or even to write him a letter…or even now. He could have…he'd had so many chances to just say….
He had no idea what there had even been left to say.
Apparently, nothing. Suzuki looked at him and then turned and walked away….wait, no, he nodded but…but what did that mean!? Why hadn't he…he knew that Serizawa was there and…and he could have said…he could have said 'hi'. He could have told Serizawa that he was sorry, that he'd missed him, that he was sorry that Serizawa had slipped his mind while he was out having this whole other life…that he…that he hadn't meant it, that day…that it had all been too much and he'd just said something to hurt Serizawa because Serizawa had hurt him…he had hurt him, betrayed him, but…but he had been about to kill Taka and….
And it didn't matter anymore.
Suzuki was walking away now. Back to his new family, his new wife, his new li-he was walking away and…and Serizawa had to leave, too. He had to buy this book. He had to go home and do his homework. He had to put a load of laundry in. He had to get dinner going before Taka got home…he had….he had a lot to do and a life to live and….and there was more to it than…than somebody he used to know….someone he wanted to-to…to know….
Somebody he hoped to never, ever, EVER see again.