Ritsu had really enjoyed having his own bedroom.
He had first gotten his own room when he had been six and Shigeo had been seven. Well, it was more like Shigeo had gotten his own room. It just made more sense, him being older, that the old guest room had become Shigeo's bedroom. After grandma died, dad's mom, nobody really came and stayed over anyway. It just hadn't been possible with the way that Shigeo's powers had been so out of control when they had been kids. Hardly a day had gone by without Shigeo accidentally trashing their room.
This was kind of nostalgic in a way.
"Brother, let me help." Said Shigeo as he turned away from the stranger on the bed. After that explosion it seemed like the best thing to do was keep him asleep, at least until they could figure out what the hell was even going on. The whole thing was like something out of one of those dramas mom and dad watched when they thought he and Shigeo were asleep. Apparently this guy was Sho's secret brother or something. How he had gotten here and why he was freaked out about the year, though, eluded him.
Maybe he had amnesia or something?
"No! Are you a moron or something? If he wakes up then he'll take the whole house down!" said Sho. Ritsu glared at Sho. Yes, fine, he knew that Sho had a bad habit when it came to insulting people but this wasn't Reigen or someone like that, this was Shigeo.
He had enough to deal with as it was.
"I'm going to have to agree with Sho on this one. It might be in everyone's best interests to keep him asleep until…." Said Teru as he folded Ritsu's clothes. He didn't need his clothes folded, he mostly just put them in the drawers any old way as mom put it, but Teru had a thing for clothes and Ritsu wasn't going to pass up the help.
It was good to have a clear goal, at least when it came to one of the many problems they had right now.
"Until what?" asked Shigeo. From anyone else it could have been seen as a challenge. If Ritsu had been the one asking he would have meant something along the lines of 'until what, I explode or he ends up dead from having too much of his energy drained…which I assume is a thing that can happen.' But of course he wasn't Shigeo and he never would be so he just went back to putting his notebooks back on their shelf before they got even more mixed up than they already were.
It was nice to have a clear end goal.
"Until…I don't know. I'm not the leader here. I don't want to be!" said Sho
"Sho! Come on, do you want my mom and dad to come in here again?" said Ritsu
"…no….but I think that you're all being way too calm about this! I mean we knew that he was an esper but we didn't know that he was going to go all explody on us! I mean he could have completely wrecked the house and I don't even know how to get ahold of Higashio again and I don't think that your parents are going to be ok with not having a place to live until I figure out where he went and then you guys are going to be homeless and then you'll starve or freeze or bake or get sick and die-" said Sho. Ritsu sighed and got up. He hated it when Sho got like this. He was like one of those little dogs that people pushed around in strollers, way too excitable, but also really scared. He was pacing the floor now, back and forth, and waving his hands in the air. In another minute things were going to start flying and he was going to end up pacing the ceiling and then…well and then it would be a lot harder to pull him back down to earth.
It already wasn't going to be easy but this was what Ritsu was here for.
He didn't say anything as he walked up to Sho and took his hand. Shigeo did that thing where he didn't know where to look. He didn't have a problem with Ritsu being the way he was, he had told Ritsu so about a million times before, he just didn't know how to feel about his little brother being in love. Ritsu had no idea if he was in love with Sho, he was the first guy to ever like him back, but he did know that he really liked Sho a lot. He liked him enough to bring him back down to earth when he got like this, after all.
He held his hand tight. Sho stopped moving.
"It's going to be alright." Said Ritsu
"How do you-" said Sho
"It's going to be alright." Repeated Ritsu
"But he could-" said Sho
"It's going to be alright." Said Ritsu. He took Sho's other hand in his and pulled him close. Sho rested his forehead against Ritsu's. Ritsu leaned up and kissed him. He knew that Shigeo was looking away and he knew that Teru was staring. He didn't care. At least he couldn't show that he cared. It wasn't like he and Sho had never kissed each other before, that had pretty much been all that they did after he confessed, but just because they had done this before that didn't mean that Ritsu liked having an audience.
But whatever. How he felt didn't matter. He was never going to put his own feelings above doing what was right ever again.
"We're going to be alright." Said Ritsu as they came apart. Sho nodded, his hair brushing up against Ritsu's.
"I trust you." said Sho. Ritsu wanted to kiss him again, to pull him close and kiss him and never let him go, but he settled on squeezing his hand. There were people around, including a complete stranger, and his own brother. He didn't know which was worse. For now he would have to settle on holding Sho's hand extra tight.
Now was not the time to come apart.
"Excuse me for interrupting but I would just like to know, for sure, how exactly everything is going to be ok here? Because from where I'm standing-" said Teru
"Sitting." Said Ritsu, partially to lighten the mood and partially because pissing off Teru could be kind of fun sometimes.
"Fine, from where I'm sitting this situation is the complete and total opposite of ok. We don't know this guy, he's clearly unstable, and oh yeah…he tried to kill us!" said Teru. Ritsu picked a book up with his powers and threw it at the back of Teru's head. Teru's aura glowed but he didn't do anything. He wouldn't, not with Shigeo being right there…Shigeo. What had Ritsu been thinking!? Shigeo didn't need this kinds of distractions right now! Not with what he had to do.
The stranger on his bed stirred.
"Ritsu, Teru, stop fighting." Said Shigeo as his aura showed and the stranger on the bed stopped moving.
"I'm sorry brother, you don't need distractions like that." Said Ritsu
"No, it's not that. I just don't think that you should fight. Friends shouldn't fight." Said Shigeo
"I know. I'm sorry." Said Ritsu
"Alright, I'm sorry too. We're all sorry. Now I think that maybe we should come up with some kind of plan. I mean, we can't keep him in here forever. Your parents are definitely going to notice if you try and hide a whole person in your room!" said Teru
"What am I supposed to do, then?" asked Ritsu
"Yeah, come on. You're sitting there telling us that we need to come up with a plan but you're not even trying to come up with anything. If you want to be the leader then you have to actually lead. Leading is more than just giving orders and telling other people that they had to figure shit out. You have to actually do shit or you're not a leader, you're a dictator, and dictators get their heads chopped off." said Sho
"That's awful." Said Shigeo
"Yeah, no shit, so how about he comes up with a plan instead of just telling us to? I mean it's like he said, we can't just leave him here. Not unless we keep him drugged and tied up under the bed or in the wardrobe or…maybe if you dug a hole in the backyard and put an air tube in-" said Sho
"Mom and Dad don't like it when we dig up the yard and I don't even know where we'd get drugs-" said Shigeo
"Shimazaki knows where to get drugs." Said Sho. Ritsu decided not to think too hard about how Sho knew that.
"Also, and here's the big thing, this is my room and I can't just have someone tied up in here drugged or not. Also brother's right, mom and dad really hate it when we dig up the yard." Said Ritsu
"Well then I'm all out of ideas. Do you guys have any better ones?" asked Sho, crossing his arms. Ritsu put his hand on Sho's shoulder but Sho shrugged him off.
"Why don't we just put him back where we found him?" asked Teru after a moment. Sho threw his hands up in the air.
"Why didn't I think of that? Oh yeah, because it's murder!" said Sho
"I never said to kill him!" said Teru
"Sho, Teru, stop yelling. You're both right. Sho, Teru never meant to kill anyone. Teru, Sho's right. We found him by the side of the road and if we put him back there then he'll die of cold or thirst or hunger or maybe a murderer will get him. Also, his stuff is going to get stolen and that's bad too." Said Shigeo. Teru ran a hand through his hair a few times. Ritsu couldn't tell if he was trying to fix it or mess it up even worse.
"Someone will probably drive past him, see him, and then call the 110 and then he'll go to the hospital and nobody will know that we had anything to do with this. I mean think about it, is anyone going to believe that we didn't have anything to do with whatever happened to him? I mean maybe if we had taken him to the hospital then nobody would have suspected us but this…this looks really bad, alright? This looks bad and I'm worried." Said Teru
"We're all worried." Said Ritsu
"Yes, fine, we're all worried so maybe the best thing to do is to let the people who's job it is to handle this handle it. They'll probably find his family and then bring him back and then they'll all live happily ever after." Said Teru
"Not with dad he won't." muttered Sho. Ritsu didn't blame him. That kid looked just like Sho's dad. They could have been brothers, twins even. Ritsu wasn't going to pretend that he knew what Sho was going through but he didn't have to know what it was like to be there for him. This was bad, there was getting around that fact, but he and Sho…they'd find a way out of this. Even if it was as simple as Teru said it would be…
He must have had a mom, right?
And his mom must have had an address? Obviously waking this guy up and asking him what his address was wasn't going to work. He had freaked out when he heard what year it was. Whatever happened to him might have given him amnesia, or maybe that just happened in books and on TV. He probably knew his address, Ritsu had known his since he had been old enough to write. Getting it out of him was just the hard part.
Old enough to write….
"We can't leave him for someone else to find, not with what happened when he woke up. He could seriously hurt someone without even realizing it. I have to be the one to take care of him, keep him asleep, at least until we can figure out where he came from." Said Shigeo
"Maybe there's a missing person's report out on him already." Said Teru
"Has he been missing long enough to count as a missing person? I heard that you have to be gone for over twenty four hours to be considered a missing person." Said Shigeo
"No, they start looking for kids right away. That's why Dad mostly liked to find esper kids in orphanages, there was less hassle." Said Sho
"Not everyone was from an orphanage." Muttered Teru
"Yeah, I know, some people had family and some people Dad made himself. Whatever. It doesn't matter." Said Sho
"If they start looking for kids as soon as they go missing then maybe there is a missing person's report out on him already. I mean if I went missing I think that my parents would look for me." said Shigeo
"Yeah, alright, we'll just go to the store and start checking the backs of milk cartons until we see his face." Said Sho
"I don't think that they actually do that." Said Teru
"They do too, I've seen it in movies." Said Sho
"From what country?" asked Teru
"Is that even important?" asked Sho
"Yes it is because-" said Teru
"Check his stuff." Said Ritsu. It made sense, really. Ritsu had known his address as soon as he had been able to write. He had written it on all of his things. 'If found please return to the Kageyama House, 0099 Coriander Street Seasoning City.' Other kids had made fun of him but he hadn't cared. If he lost something important to him he, of course, wanted it back. Notebooks, his school bag, jackets, his DS, pretty much anything he could write on had his address.
"We shouldn't look through other people's things, Ritsu, it isn't polite." Said Shigeo
"Yeah and I don't even know which stuff is his and which is yours…and I think some of it might be mine, too." Said Sho motioning towards the mess around them.
"He might have written his address on something of his, we should at least look." Said Ritsu
"Alright, I guess it's ok just this once…but when he wakes up we should apologize to him for invading his privacy like that." Said Shigeo. Ritsu didn't think that this was really a big problem but he wasn't going to argue with Shigeo. The sooner he got this guy out of his room the better. Everyone but Shigeo got to work at looking through the disaster area that was Ritsu's room. Sho had been right, it was hard to tell where his stuff ended and the guy's stuff began.
Though Ritsu really couldn't picture himself ever doodling on the front of his notebook.
Yes, this wasn't his. He would never have drawn on the front of his notebooks, they were for important school things and his innermost thoughts. Not bad doodles of…he had no idea what show that robot was from or what was up with the train drawn along the border. He flipped it opened and…yes, there, in the front cover.
"I found something. Property of Suzuki, touch this and die…yeah, that's nice." Said Ritsu as he read the inside cover. That wasn't helpful at all…at least not to him. He could feel Sho's aura against his.
"See? I told you so." Said Sho. Ritsu had known him long enough, and well enough, to know that he wasn't happy about winning this particular argument…and it hadn't really been much of an argument. He looked just like Sho's dad, it was pretty obvious…but that didn't mean that Sho felt good about this.
"You know that there are a lot of Suzukis in the world, right?" asked Ritsu. Sho shrugged.
"Ritsu, come on. I know what you're trying to do and it's not working. Yeah, there are a lot of Suzuki's, but not a lot of redheaded guys named Suzuki living in Japan. This is my brother and…yeah. I have another brother. Whatever. I have another brother and he's kind of an asshole-" said Sho
"I think that he might have been scared. I mean I would have been scared if I had been in his place. We don't know what happened to him, either. I mean he is your brother and you did say that there were ex-Claw members out there with scores to settle." Said Shigeo
"Yeah, no shit. Obviously someone's after him. I mean you saw how much stuff he had with him? He was probably running away from home or something." said Sho. Ritsu knew that they were on dangerous ground now. Sho had said before, in that way where he tried to sound like he was kidding but Ritsu knew better, that maybe he would just run away one of these days. It wasn't like he hadn't done it before when he had been little, though it didn't really count since he had been with that Fukuda guy who used to take care of him. Ritsu knew why he wanted to run away, and he knew that Sho sometimes didn't think things through…
One thing at a time. He'd worry about one thing at a time.
"We don't know-" said Ritsu
"Uh…guys? I think you should see this." Said Teru as he held up a…Ritsu had no idea. A yellow rectangle…thing. Buttons on the side. Obviously not a phone. It looked more like an ipod, but a lot bigger. He wasn't sure, he'd had an ipod back when he'd been little but mom and dad had gotten him a real phone when he'd been ten. That wasn't a phone or an ipod but…but it looked familiar.
"Is that a Walkman?" asked Sho as he walked over and took whatever it was out of Teru's hands. A Walkman…right, ok, yeah. He remembered. He went over to see what it was. It couldn't have been real. Nobody had those anymore…aside from that one kid who was always listening to that weird electronic music and wouldn't shut up about how great the 80s were even though they were all first years.
"It is, see? Walkman." Said Shigeo, leaning over and pointing to the front. Ritsu leaned over. Sony Walkman. Huh. This guy didn't seem like one of those kids who liked this kind of stuff. He didn't dress like them, for one thing. His shirt was red with shite stripes and his jeans were this weird light blue color…there was something kind of weird about his clothes now that Ritsu really looked at him…
Teru was rubbing off on him.
"Look on the back, the back." Said Teru. Sho flipped it over. There was a label on the back, no address, but a name….
"Property of Suzuki Touichirou. Steal this and die…" read Sho. Ritsu took it out of his hands before he broke it. He hadn't seen that look on Sho's face before and he had never felt his aura like this, either. This was…he had no idea what this was. He looked over at the guy on his bad.
Still asleep. Barely.
"Junior?" asked Shigeo. Ritsu nodded. That was probably it. People named their kids after themselves all the time. That was…he had been really weird about the year, that was what had set him off….but that hadn't meant anything. It wasn't possible…
Ritsu was just going crazy, that was all.
"Either that or he's a time traveler." Said Sho with a shrug and a laugh. He was looking right at Ritsu. Ritsu hadn't noticed in tome to laugh, or maybe Sho was just really good at reading him. Either way he could feel Sho's eyes and aura focusing on him. First Sho and then everyone else. Even Shigeo had gotten distracted. The guy on the bed was starting to kick in his sleep and flail around a little, too…
His watch was weird.
"Guys, come on. I want him to be a time traveler as much as the rest of you but he's not. My Dad just fucked around with some lady, probably while we was married to my mom, and he named this kid after him. Hell, he's probably older than me, that's why dad gave him…that's why he's got dad's name, not me." said Sho, his voice getting shaky towards then end. Ritsu had no idea if it was because time travel might have been real or because his dad was an asshole.
Either way he was here for Sho.
"It would be cooler, I think, if he was a time traveler." Said Ritsu, taking Sho's hand again and trying his best not to look like he was freaking out. He hoped that…he had no idea what he hoped. On the one hand it would have been pretty terrifying if time travel was real and on the other hand it would have been pretty horrible for Sho if this turned out to be his dad's secret favorite son or something.
"That'd be terrifying." Said Shigeo. Ritsu just held Sho's hand tighter. He wasn't going to start anything, not now, and especially not with his brother. Right now they just had to get this all figured out. This kid probably wasn't a time traveler, he was just Sho's brother and as horrible as that was it was also-
"Either he's actually a time traveler or he just really wants to be one. This is a vintage Swatch Watch." Said Teru as he pointed to the eye burningly colorful watch on the guy's wrist. Red and black checkerboard pattern with a bright red face and some kind of red rubber band thing around it…but that didn't mean anything, some people wore watches.
Mostly dads…but still.
"The rest of his clothes are vintage too, probably." Said Teru as he turned the guy's head to the side and pulled the tag out of the back of his shirt.
"This is definitely an invasion of his privacy." Said Shigeo as Teru reached his hand down the back of the guy's shirt. Ritsu held out his hand, ready to put a barrier around them if the guy woke up. But he didn't, Shigeo was still keeping him asleep…draining his power. Not that he'd had a lot of it to begin with, and he had wasted some more exploding, but still. This couldn't have been easy on Shigeo.
"Look here, see? One hundred percent cotton, not made in China, and the label is wrong too. Not knockoff wrong, just old." Said Teru
"You and my brother are going to get along just fine." Muttered Sho
"His jeans are old too, you can tell by the color and cut, see? These are weird around the ankle. The color's too bright and the fabric is too thick. I can't see the tag though, do you think I could flip him over and-" said Sho
"Hanazawa, you're way too into this and it's kind of weird. Fine, he's really into vintage or he's a time traveler or whatever! I don't care, I just…I don't know. I don't know what in the hell that we're supposed to do here." said Sho
"Let's leave his pants alone, how about that?" asked Ritsu glaring at Teru.
"We need to figure out something, and fast. I don't know how long I can do this for. I'm taking a lot from him and it's a lot on me and…and I like having a house." Said Shigeo. Ritsu also liked having a house, and a room in his house, and also a big brother to share a house with even though they hadn't shared a room in years. This was…this had gone on for a while. Someone needed to make a decision and it had to be him.
He looked at Sho.
He looked at Shigeo.
This was bad. Sho was hurt but Shigeo was going to explode and…and it was going to be a lot easier to make Sho feel better than it was to fix the house if Shigeo exploded. And also his parents were here and Sho didn't know where that healer guy went to. Someone had to make the hard decision and it looked like it was going to have to be him…and he knew what he was going to have to say.
"I think that we should wake him up.