Mob was the master of cryptic texts.
'I love you please forgive me.'
'Are you mad at me?'
'I did something wrong.'
'I didn't do anything wrong.'
'You're my best friend and I'm going to miss you.'
And that was just in the past hour. Minegishi didn't like to be chained to their phone, especially not when they were trying to relax, but now they had no choice. The odds that Suzuki would need them for anything were low. The odds that Mob would need them for something….well they were significantly higher.
Significantly.
"Damn it, Mob." Muttered Minegishi as they asked her, once again, what was wrong. Mob was just going to tell her that nothing was wrong, she was fine, and then that she was very sorry for whatever it was that she had done. Knowing Mob it could have been literally anything. She could have borrowed one of their books without asking, forgotten to water their plants, or she should have burn the building down on accident and now Minegishi's lifetime spare sock collection was dust in the wind. There was no way to know, not without going back to Hong Kong….
But Minegishi didn't really feel like going back to Hongkong.
"Damn it! God damn it! God damn it all to hell!" shouted Mukai as she stuck stickers to their leg. It was their fault for wearing shorts and Matsuo's fault for letting her have stickers, and also his fault for offering to babysit her. Minegishi tried to shake her off but she just laughed and went back to damning everything.
Wonderful.
"Well that's new." Said Matsuo as he handed Mukai another sheet of stickers. Why he did that they would never know. She was just sticking them to everything and everyone. At least she wasn't eating them, that would have caused even more problems. Maybe she'd be a little less annoying when she got to be Mob's age…no, scratch that, the age Mob had been when they'd met her. Eight year old Mob had been kind of annoying and more than a little clingy, the princess phase had gone on for a little too long, but Minegishi would gladly have watched frozen and played princesses and made friendship bracelets or whatever with eight year old Mob for the rest of their life if it meant that they didn't have to worry about whatever it was that thirteen year old Mob had gotten up to in their absence….
Lots of horny teenage boys in Hongkong….
"Not to me." Said Minegishi as Mukai stuck a sticker to the top of their foot. They tried to shake her off but she just laughed. Another Suzuki to cause them grief. Another Suzuki to ignore every single thing they said. Mukai was only three…in ten years they'd have another Mob on their hands…and the last thing that anyone needed was another teenager with the strength and power of a grown adult, or ten, deciding that the best thing to do with her life was to become a teenage mother…that had better not have been what Mob had been apologizing about…they should have taken her with. She didn't want to come with, she didn't want to be anywhere near that stupid kid she'd slept with, but Minegishi shouldn't have been dumb enough to listen. They should have dragged her onto the plane by her hair if it had come to that.
If Mob would have stood for that. Since the day they'd met she'd always been stronger than Minegishi could have ever hoped to be.
"She does this a lot with you?" asked Matsuo. Mukai was damning him, no, and kicking his leg.
"The stickers, no. The screaming and violence that make up the backdrop of my life? All the goddamned time. I have no idea if she knows what she's saying or she just wants attention or what. I know it's driving me crazy, though." said Minegishi. They didn't have a lot of experience with three year olds but they figured that this was normal…and Mob wanted another one of these. What was it with the Suzuki family and this…this baby fever…or whatever? Suzuki was, apparently, trying to get his girlfriend pregnant, Mob wanted to have a baby, and even Sho refused to separate his male and female hamsters because he though the babies were cute or whatever. That family….the last thing that the world needed was more Suzuki's.
The world was not prepared, they figured, since they certainly weren't.
"She's driving you crazy? Really? Her?" asked Matsuo. He picked Mukai up and sat her between them on the couch. Minegishi rolled their eyes. Yes. She was driving them crazy. She had been driving them crazy since the day they'd met…or maybe things had been easier when she had been a baby. Sure the crying and vomiting had been nonstop but at least she hadn't been able to go anywhere or do anything. She had just been this sort of loud potato person. Now she was a small, loud, person who got on their nerves. Matsuo somehow liked looking after this tiny, loud, person….
He had better not have been thinking of having any tiny, loud, people of his own. Minegishi got enough of that from Ryou.
"Yes, really, her. I don't like kids, you know that." Said Minegishi
"You don't like kids?" asked Mukai. Whether she was genuinely asking them or just parroting back the last thing she heard was up for debate. Minegishi had no idea how much awareness she had over, well, anything. She was looking up at them with her little blue eyes…
"Nope." Said Minegishi
"Come on, don't lie. You like-" said Matsuo
"I like Mob." Said Minegishi
"Shigeko? Where Shigeko?" asked Mukai
"Go look for her." said Minegishi
"I'm looking! I'm looking right now!" said Mukai before she ran away. She took a sheet of stickers with her as she left. Good, maybe she would decorate something else. Minegishi reached down and started pulling stickers off of their legs. They were stuck on there good…well then maybe this would just be their life now. Compared to the rest of their problems this was an improvement. At least there was an immediate solution, though an unpleasant one, to this problem. Not like with Mob…they still didn't know what in the hell they were supposed to do with her…
"You can get those off with soap and water, it's really not strong glue." Said Matsuo
"Should I tell Mukai, then, that you got her the cheap stuff?" asked Minegishi
"And have her lose respect for her Uncle Matsuo?" asked Matsuo
"Better now then when she's thirteen…" said Minegishi as they yanked a particularly obstinate sticker off of their leg.
"Vice President Suzuki again?" asked Matsuo
"You can just call her Mob, everyone else does. She prefers it, actually." Said Minegishi
"I don't know her that well." Said Matsuo
"Consider yourself lucky…" muttered Minegishi. They felt themselves being watched, and more so than usual. There was always a sense of being watched when they came to visit Matsuo. He swore that the spirits he kept had no perception of the world outside of their containers but Minegishi didn't believe that. They knew when they were being watched. The feeling was the same, Ryou had said, being in a room with their plants. They poured a bit of themselves into every single one of them. The nature of their powers….the nature of his….human nature…
It was human nature, after all, to stare…even if it was annoying.
"What?" asked Minegishi
"You don't mean that." Said Matsuo
"I do….and I don't. Sorry. Mob is just…she's been really driving me crazy lately." Said Minegishi
"She's not still trying to have a baby is she? I mean I know she's not exactly destitute but she's-" said Matsuo
"Thirteen. I know. And no, it's not about the baby thing…at least it had better not be. She's been sending me these cryptic texts for a while." Said Minegishi
"Cryptic?" asked Matsuo
"Here, see for yourself." Said Minegishi as they handed him their phone. They watched him scroll, his eyebrows raising with each touch of the screen. Eventually his eyebrows started to furl and hen a look of confusion completely dominated his face. He handed their phone back to them but the look didn't face for one second. If anything it got worse. Well how did he think that they felt? They were the one who was going to have to come home to…whatever that was.
They had a nightmare vision of Mob holding a screaming, smaller, version of herself.
"See?" asked Minegishi
"What….is she even apologizing for?" asked Matsuo. Minegishi rolled their eyes. Well now that was the million dollar question now wasn't it? Well they hoped that he wasn't planning on getting an actual answer. He would have been better off asking Mukai at that point, better of tearing her away from whatever she was jumping on and asking her what, exactly, her supposedly older sister was going on about this time…
Calm down, Toshiki.
They knew what they were doing. They were stressed so they were pushing him away even though he had nothing to do with it. This was just what they did. They knew what they did, they knew why they did it, but they had no idea how to stop doing it. This, being a bastard was just in their nature as a human being. Honestly it was a miracle that he put up with them. They didn't know how anyone could have stood to be around them for more than five seconds...
But they were grateful for the people they had.
"I have no idea, but it had better be pretty damn bad." Said Minegishi
"Why don't you just ask her?" asked Matsuo
"Because I'm not even sure if I want to know, alright? My life…sometimes it feels like my life is putting out fire after fire after fire-" said Minegishi
"What do you think that my life is like? This Division is nothing but fires." Said Matsuo
"It's not the same. Here, at the end of the day, you come home to your own apartment and just….you get to be off the clock. I don't get that luxury." Said Minegishi
"I live on site, there is no 'off the clock' for me. Even when I'm not here I can't just say 'sorry, no, I'm busy'. If someone tells me to do something then I have to do it. I'm still just a Scar, the lowest in the entire upper echelon." Said Matsuo
"You don't have to take care of a kid! You…sorry, sorry. It's just that…you don't have to take care of an entire human being…and watching Mukai was Tsuchiya teaches Awakened not to bite one another isn't the same. You're going to give her back to Tsuchiya and then you can get on with your day. I can't do that. There's no one to give Mob back to. Her father? He's insane. Her mother ran away…she only has me and she's getting to the point where there's no way that I can save her from herself. For all I know she went off, found some cute boy, and now I have two kids to take care of. So, yes, the last thing that I want to do is ask her what all of this is about." Said Minegishi. You were supposed to feel lighter when you got things off your chest, but Minegishi just felt heavier, they felt like they weighed a thousand pounds like they had suddenly just gained ten more of themselves. That they had just stacked people on to people on to people and now they had to carry this weight on their back.
They had never been very strong.
Part of them, the selfish part of them, the dominant part of them wanted to tell Matsuo that they did not want to talk about this. They wanted to tell him that he was supposed to be the easy one, this was supposed to be their easy relationship, that if they wanted to have long stressful conversations they would have asked Ryou about his feelings, God knew we had enough of them. They didn't want to think about all the ways that they had failed Mob, didn't want to think about all the ways that they were going to continue to fail her, and they didn't want to think about all the dangers that she was in right now without them to protect her from herself. There were a lot of things that they didn't want to think about...
But, obviously, they didn't have a choice.
"Sorry….for being such a bastard back there." said Minegishi. They weren't going to tell him off, not now. They had gotten close but that would have ruined everything. They were their own worst enemy…no wonder they couldn't save Mob from herself. Look at what they had done with their own life. They had joined this shitshow voluntarily. That was their first clue that they were in no way competent enough to run Mob's life for her.
No wonder she'd turned out the way that she had.
"I'm used to it." Said Matsuo
"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Minegishi, their eyes narrowed. They knew that they could be difficult but they had been making a real effort for him. He put his hands up like he was surrendering. Like he had a reason to surrender. Minegishi wasn't going to let themselves feel bad about this. They knew exactly who they were, they knew what their limitations were, and they had never once misrepresented themselves to him. If he didn't like what he had then he could just go and find someone else.
Minegishi Toshiki was many things, many horrible things, but they were not a liar.
"Nothing, nothing, I was just…nothing. Anyway maybe it's nothing. I mean she seems really sweet-" said Matsuo
"That doesn't mean she's immune from her own stupidity." Said Minegishi
"-and maybe if you just asked her what she was so sorry about…maybe if you got come clarification then you'd feel better. It's probably nothing. I don't think that she's pregnant, you said she was shy when it came to boys-" said Matsuo
"I said she likes to sit and stare at them, obviously she's not that shy if she's giving serious thought to having a kid." Said Minegishi
"She's still only thirteen. Teenagers say that they're going to do a lot of dumb things all the time. When I was thirteen I was going to run way to Tokyo and make it big. I was going to be the next Mogami." Said Matsuo
"You were planning on hanging yourself?" asked Minegishi. They, for once, wish that they could take back what they had said. The look in his eyes, his hand on his spirit belt, the way his aura flickered... Obviously they hit a nerve. They had never had a problem hitting nerves before, but this was not before. This was now and... and they'd fucked up another good thing.
Simply. Wonderful.
"At that point in my life -" said Matsuo. Minegishi didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to have to sit there and listen to another piece of the puzzle that was his life. They knew him. They'd put the pieces together on their own a while ago. They much rather preferred to get to the part where he told them off for running their mouth. There were some lines that you just didn't cross with people….and they had to get used to being with someone who had those lines. Ryou was a very simple man when it came to these things. Don't mess with his food, don't touch him when he wasn't expecting it, and don't ask about his childhood unless you wanted to hear a very depressing story about a lonely little boy locked away in his room.
"You can tell me off. I deserve it." Said Minegishi
"No, it's fine. You didn't mean it like that. But, aside from whatever made him do what he did, I did want to be him. He was like me. I used to stay up until one in the morning on school nights to catch his show. He just…made me feel less alone. I was going to run away to Tokyo to be him. I was going to cut my hair and wear bright green suits and catch spirits like Pokémon, which I mean come on of course he would have if it had been a thing when he'd been alive, but I only made it to the train station. I realized that I was thirteen, I knew nobody in Tokyo, and I only had about twelve hundred yen to my name. So I went home and didn't try that again until I was an actual adult. Teenagers are stupid, Toshiki, but they're not morons." Said Matsuo
"That's the difference between you and me. I never went back." Said Minegishi
"You were running from something much worse than what I was running from." Said Matsuo
"We were in very similar boats." Said Minegishi
"My parents never understood me, wouldn't let me wear pants or cut my hair, and wouldn't call me by my actual name. Your parents starved you, beat you, and made you live outside." Said Matsuo
"Osaka's not that bad in the fall." Said Minegishi
"You still had it worse." Said Matsuo
"This isn't a contest that I think either of us want to win." Said Minegishi
"Alright, alright, I get your point…but you've been on edge all day. Just text her back. It can't be that bad. I'm sure she just burned the house down, pulled up your plants, salted the earth so nothing could ever grow again, stole your boyfriend-" said Matsuo
"Don't even joke about that." Said Minegishi as they picked up their phone. A thought…a terrible thought. Ryou…well he did have feelings for her but Mob was smarter than that. She had better taste in men than they did. They'd seen that blonde kid she'd been into. She apparently liked cute blonde eurotrash. She didn't need needy, emotionally damaged, men in their thirties. Mob was smarter than they were. Even at thirteen she knew better….Ryou didn't. He had it in his head that he had a crush on her…he wasn't smart enough to realize that sleeping with his boss's thirteen year old daughter hadn't been a good idea when he had been in the yakuza and it wasn't a good idea now….
Minegishi didn't know what they were worried about. Mob was dumb, all teenagers were, but she wasn't a moron.
'What did you do? Tell me without kowtowing.' There. Message sent. The three dots immediately appeared….and then vanished…and then appeared again. This was either going to be really silly…or Minegishi was going to have got get on a plane to Hongkong.
'I did something bad.' Said Mob. Minegishi wanted to reach through the phone and shake some sense into her. Yes, they could tell that she'd done something wrong. That was what all of this spam was about. The dots appeared again. They waited.
'I ate half of one of your Xanax. I did that. Please forgive me.' Said Mob. No emojis…she was serious... well of course she was serious! This was a serious situation! Mob knew how dangerous those were! Minegishi took back everything they said about her not being a moron. Mob was the biggest moron they had ever met! Mob was…well they had met Ryou….Mob wasn't making this easy on them. Matsuo watched in concern as they typed so hard their screen was in real danger of cracking. How could…they had to stay calm. Mob was sensitive and liable to explode or…or do something else that was self destructive….and anyway they weren't her parent, they were her friend. Her adult friend but still their friend.
'Don't touch those. You know better. Stay out of my stuff and my room.' There. Short, sweet, and to the point. They saw the dots again….and now they had a sticker of a crying cat. That was either good or bad….Mob wasn't torn up about this but…but still! She had seen what happened when you messed with those and…and she didn't even need…well she did but…but she was too young and…and she knew better than to go into their room without their permission!
She should have known better…Minegishi should have taught her better.
'I'm sorry for all the bad things I did and I don't want us to stop being friends,' suddenly appeared. Minegishi tried to force themselves to calm down. Right. Mob was sensitive. This had probably been tearing her up inside.
'I forgive you. Nothing is going to make us stop being friends. I told you that already. Said Minegishi. The dots appeared and disappeared again. What more could she have possibly had to apologize for.
'Would you stop being friends with me if I had sex?' Minegishi's heart stopped. They couldn't turn their back on her for five seconds! They did crack their screen that time…and they were not overreacting. Matsuo leaned over their shoulder and gasped. Either he had read Mob's message or he was concerned about the loud crashing sound coming from wherever Mukai had found herself. Minegishi had to turn their screen off before they hit the call button and asked her what in the hell was the matter with her head!? Why had she thought….in what universe….they were not going to be hypocrite. Sex in and of its self wasn't a bad thing….and the last thing that they needed to do was give Mob a complex…but she was thirteen and…and…
She had better have been safe.
'Were you safe?' asked Minegishi. One word. It came quickly, she hadn't had time to think up a lie. Good.
'Yes.' said Mob. Matsuo gasped again. Minegishi sighed. Well at this point there was nothing that they could do. She was being safe. What more could they ask for.
'I have no problem with that. Stay safe.' There were dots. Then no dots. Then dots again. What more did Mob have to say? They wouldn't have been surprised if, at this point, she told them that she had in fact burnt the house down. That would have been welcome at this point. There were fires everywhere just waiting to be put out….a real one would have been easier. Safer. Stress free. Throwing water onto Mob might have solved the problem…but that would lose effectiveness as time went on. They watched the dots appear and disappear twice more before they got one word back.
'Really?' asked Mob. What in the hell was Minegishi supposed to say? Yes, Mob, go out and have fun? It was her right. Minegishi didn't have the right to tell people what they could and could not do…even Mob…and she was at that age…and she wasn't doing anything that Minegishi hadn't been getting up to her age….but still! She was so young and…and she wasn't going to lose this argument. They weren't going to win this fight…but they could mitigate the damage.
'Really. I don't care what you do or who you do it with. Just be safe. Now let's never talk about your sex life again unless you need to go to a clinic.' Said Minegishi. Harsh but…but needed. They didn't like talking about this. They didn't like acknowledging that this was even a part of her life. They had never seen themselves as being squeamish but they learned new things every day.
'You're not mad?' asked Mob. Minegishi had no idea how they felt. Of course they were angry. She out there putting her life and her future at risk and there was nothing that they could do but pray that she had enough sense to be safe…but they didn't want to fight with her.
'I'm not mad.' Said Minegishi. They waited for the dots to appear again, the dots did not. Hopefully she was done with this conversation, because they knew that they were. They put their phone in their pocket where it belonged and vowed not to pay attention to it for the rest of the day...hour. they could do that. They had to do that, for their own sanity. Damn it... why did she have to be this way? Why did... There was no point in asking why. Minegishi she just had to live with it. She was a teenager now and this was just how teenagers were.
They were reckless, stupid, and occasionally cryptic.