#but he loves all sides of Shigeo

[ygodmyy20]

Your beauty never, ever, scared me.

I came across this AMV and it never got out of my head. I fell in love with the song and I just kept listening and listening and I knew I had to draw it at some point. I just kept thinking about it. Singing it. It never left me.

Would love to tag whoever made it but can't find them on Tumblr. Here is the Terumob edit:

Not gonna post the timelapse as it is like....4 mins long. Because it took me for fucking ever to paint Teru's face. I kept running into a lot of blockers.

[doctorsiren]

Consider: I repackage another ace attorney au (split phoenix au) into mp100 for the sillies

[erikoe-draws]

Have some tome redraws  ✨

(ft. mob and dimple)

Refs under read more.

[not-equippedforthis]

i binged 2 seasons of mob psycho in as many days and from the glimpses ive seen im not emotionally prepared for season 3. ive known these stupid little guys for 48 whole hours and if anything happens to them im buying a grenade launcher even if its with tears in my eyes. itching to watch s3 but being utterly incapable because i dont want it to end. i need to see reigen drive that fucking car. i need to see mob laugh. i need to see the surprise birthday celebration. i need to see tome's episode. people need other people and society is built on the foundation of kindness. can anyone hear me

[kanene-yaaay]

Thinking about Shigeo talking about his lack of control on s3 to his parents and being all anxious and still having the lingering "I am a monster" thoughts but both of his parents are just very happy that their son cried without exploding in powers like he did as a kid like !!!! "You've grown so much, Shig!" And they are being totally truthful and proud because that bean used to float and throw around everything around him when he was a baby and now he confessed, received a no from his childhood crush, got sad, let himself be sad, cried and not sent his powers all around the place? You did great, kiddo!

[russenoire]

on first watch as an anime-only, i remember feeling like ritsu kageyama's descent into evil in episode seven needed a little more air, more space to breathe. i... no longer do. if that slide down the slippery slope feels a bit sudden, there is a reason; and if you know what to look for, it's not actually all that sudden. bear with me here.

from the first episode, the anime sets ritsu up as shigeo's kind, solicitous younger brother. we don't see much of him for the first three episodes, but when we do, he's making bids for shigeo’s attention: helpfully straightening his spoon when it bends and deposits a bite of his dinner on the dining table; noting that he seems out of it and offering himself up as a confidant at least twice; checking in on him in the morning so they can both leave on time. (i actually love the anime for doing this. ritsu doesn't even show up as a character until maybe the middle of the manga's second volume?) except for the spoon, shigeo gently turns him down every time.

and yet. the interview ichi mezato snags with ritsu in episode four confirms a distance between the kageyama boys. you are not seeing things here. he initially refuses her desire for detailed information about shigeo’s powers, only indulging her to find out what shigeo’s been up to. ritsu holds those powers in such awe that he uses a rather hyperbolic phrase to describe shigeo for her: '世界の基本', or sekai no kihon, literally the standard for [his] world.

after he coldly walks out on her, she reviews what little she’s gleaned from their chilly meeting: he's hawt, at the top of his class, athletic, very popular... all things his older brother decidedly is not. the story establishes a duality here between ritsu’s image—indirectly revealed through mezato’s notes—and the reality of ritsu, sat hunched across from her, sullen, barely tolerating her until she coughed up the information she promised him. later on that evening, we see just how deep ritsu's awe goes... or rather, how snared up it is in resentment and envy as he attempts in vain to bend a spoon, just like shigeo did when they were younger. all the trophies of others’ esteem already gathering dust on his shelves don’t mean shit if he can’t have this.

ritsu intercepts shigeo as he leaves for class the next morning: no student council meeting, so an opportunity to actually talk to him. this is rare, his brother notes. and of course dimple is haunting shigeo. when the specter comments on their apparent closeness, the boy side-eyes him hard. this can easily be read two ways: ‘why the hell are you talking to me when no one else can see you?’ and ‘man, fuck you for sticking the knife in deeper.’ ritsu doesn’t ask about the cult meeting here or ever in the entire series. was he really all that interested in mezato’s news? no, he only wants to know why his brother doesn’t use his powers anymore. and this is the first time they’ve talked about this.

it’s such a neat little mystery, these breadcrumbs the story leaves for us until ritsu’s formal introduction in episode six. even though they share the same home and appear to be on friendly terms, the kageyama brothers may as well live on opposite sides of the planet. we don’t even get a sense of why this state of affairs exists until episode five, where teru chokes the breath out of shigeo and his pissed-off soul levels teru’s school before catapulting him into the stratosphere to reflect on his sins: several years prior, shigeo nearly killed ritsu (and possibly ended three much older boys) in an accident neither boy understands; fragments of memory flash before his eyes as his consciousness shorts out.

‘brother, you’re home late, sopping wet. here’s a towel. are you hungry? you seem down; is everything OK? if you need to talk, i’m here for you.’

instead of turning down this bid for connection like all the rest and turning inward again, shigeo actually opens up. he apologizes for the accident—for the first time—then asks for some clarity, since his memories of it are broken. and ritsu clenches the knob to his brother’s bedroom door tighter. he lies to his face, tells him to ‘get over it already.’ this after asking shigeo to confide in him again, no less: too terrified to be honest with him, too used to being shot down. this boy is soaking in fear he has no context for, and he heads downstairs to soak in it alone. shigeo at least has reigen to process his own fears with, though he never trusts the man enough to take full advantage.

ritsu has no one.

he’s already keeping up appearances at home and has been for years; over the course of the spring cleaning big cleanup arc, we learn the extent to which he’s been doing so at school.

(all those expectations of him weighing him down for so long… he can’t hold out forever.)

student council vice president tokugawa calls him out on trying to melt into the scenery like his brother; his considerable gifts make that impossible. said gifts, however, are so ego-dystonic for him that they’re yet another part of Ritsu Kageyama’s Big Lie. the academically-gifted, popular sprinter so many of his fellow students swoon over isn’t real: why does everyone praise him for things anyone could do? he doesn’t actually have friends, just associates. who cares about charisma? why does everyone think he’s perfect when the only thing he truly wants will never be his? and why does his locker leak chocolate every valentine’s day?

gentle reader. are you still wondering why he snaps when he finally gets his wish? and why it looks the way it does?

[sneezeta]

Quick little rant.

Something I love about the Mob Psycho 100 final is that we can see the concealed sides of both Reigen and Mob.

It's quite obvious that Mob bottles up his emotions throughout the series. Mob is far from an emotionless kid, even though sometimes the fandom (me included) forget he's not passive all the time.

Just like how Reigen is not a level headed all the time.

Reigen can be crude and has used mob for years. Every character in the show has done bad things. Some worse than others, but no character is perfect.

Mob is the person that hurt Ritsu

Mob is the one who rampaged through Seasoning City

It's not some separate identity, not some separate being. This is as much of Shigeo Kageyama as the one who gets flustered talking to Tsubomi. Mob is so much more than a kind vessel of kindness and forgiveness, he's a person and a person with a full range of emotions.

Just like how Reigen has been lying to Mob every day for years, he's the same man who would rather die trying to help Mob than not.

Only in the final episode both of them are able to release themselves of that gilt of doing wrong.

With the realization that expressing your true self without gilt

And the realization that you need to rely on others even if it makes you feel weak

Even after years of trying to hide and minimize that part of themselves, it never went away. It was as much of them as the selves as any other part of themselves is.

At the end of the day, they're just people, not heros or villains.

And you're not a monster for messing up once.

(Sorry if this doesn't make sense! I just wanted to get this out there cause I just love analyzing this show)

[deadboyswalking]

Emotional about MP100 again. Shigeo thought his psychic powers made him terrifying, a monster who could only hurt people if he truly let them into his heart (though he desperately longed for connection) and let them see him, all of him including the ugly parts.

But they love him. SO MANY people love him and his ultimately kind nature had a profoundly positive impact on their lives. So many people saw his dark side at the end of the show and... they still love him. He's their brother, their friend, their mentee, their classmate, their savior.

He thought of himself as a monster. A cult thought of him as a god. But to the people who love him, he's Mob. He's Shigeo. He is a flawed human being trying his best to live a good life and they all care about him so much.

[astronomical-bagel]

yo mutual i love ur tags fr because like u took the words right of my mouth i was so baffled how ppl would side with one more than the other because the autism pvp felt so real to me that i related to Both of them rlly a lot like. So much so it has cemented itself as rlly one of my fave scenes ever because it was a Step up for growth like that fight made them both better people . and it makes me mad ppl belittle toshiros experiences and like ignore his autism for the sake of pitting two bad bitches against each other Good Lord. The Nuance. There is Nuance. and ppl who ignore it just feels so personal to me as an autistic asian person who's been told that there's no way they're not "normal" like ive not been masking and not even like That well either.

Toshiro to me is like a similar vibe of Autism to Mob aka Shigeo Kageyama MP100 where he represses so much of his true feelings and opinions and emotions that he will just blow up one day (validly!!!) !!! like. let him be autistic in peace. not everything has to be a moral failure and not everything has to revolve around Laios just because hes the main character of Dunmeshi. Like they were both so relatable it hurts me...

not me spelling empathized as emphasized lmao

but yeah anyways I really interpret the shuro and laios conflict as just two autistic people who just don’t mesh naturally? At the very least, it’s a complication between two people with very different cultures.

Both laios and toshiro are people who don’t exactly fit in. On shuro’s side, the source of his ‘otherness’ is a little redirected (is that the word?) because his status and nationality already set him apart on the island, but even back home he was reserved and didn’t socialize well. He struggles to connect with others and has a hard time being sincere!!! the argument between him and laios isn’t an evil neurotypical vs blorbo autistic, it’s conflict-avoidant autistic vs social cue blind autistic!

There isn’t really a right or wrong side here, Shuro tried communicating in the way he knew how, but he and laios just simply don’t understand each other’s languages. Their fight is a reset for the both of them; now they each know a vital fact about each other! Laios knows that Shuro has a hard time verbalizing discomfort, and shuro now knows that Laios needs to be told things to understand them. Now they can both find a middle ground and properly compromise between their two opposites.

and it’s important to note that if laios did know he was making shuro uncomfortable, he would stop as best as he knew how, all the way. This guy takes boundaries seriously, as long as there are clear lines to what those boundaries are. And he’s attentive to other’s needs! (See: him and chilchucks friendship. They understand each other very well, I could write a whole meta on it)

Now that he and shuro are seeing eye to eye, their friendship can now progress in a healthier fashion! This fight isn’t the end of the world. (Honestly having a fist fight is like third base to me but we won’t speak of that) Toshiro isn’t evil, he’s just a really cool foil to Laios, and their disagreement serves to establish important parts of their characters and to progress both their character arcs 👍

[ampheenix]

I need (a human’s touch)

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

SUMMARY:

Set during the last episode of Mob Pyscho 100, in which Shigeo has taken over Mob completely.

But Teru is desperate. He hasn’t given up yet.

And he can only think of one thing that might shock Mob enough to break him out of… whatever this was.

TAGS:

terumob, angst and fluff, love confessions, 1.8k

He was hot.

Dangerously hot.

And well, Teru was always dangerously hot of course, but this was actually a huge problem. Teru was sweaty, all over, and could feel his breath coming faster and faster.

The searing pain of several stitches echoed from his core, cuts and bruises were littered all over his skin, his limbs were so tired he could fall asleep right then and there…

Teru hadn’t felt this degree of exhaustion since the last time Mob had lost control, when he had blown his school to bits.

But this degree of destruction triumphed over that event, easily.

Teru gritted his teeth, staring hard at his friend.

Piercing white eyes stared right through him, unblinking, unflinching, in the worst way.

Usually, those eyes could appear as apathetic to someone who didn’t know Mob well, his expression seeming perpetually bored and aloof.

But after knowing Mob for so long, Teru could always spot a slight gentle tinge to his gaze, a small crinkle of humour to the side of his lips, a shine in coal-black eyes. Just because Mob wasn’t very skilled at expressing emotion didn’t mean there was nothing there.

But this… this was different.

These eyes were nothing. Empty. Single-minded destruction.

It was jarring. Teru wasn’t sure he could even call the entity “Mob” anymore. Even so, he had to keep trying.

“MOB, COME ON!” He yelled hoarsely, breath coming hard and fast as he darted out of the way of another attack. Teru desperately tried to force his voice through the psychic energy swirling all around them. “YOU NEED TO WAKE UP! LOOK AROUND YOU!”

He grimaced, as deep down, he knew there was no point to it. These words hadn’t worked before, in the forest, when he’d tried to gently de-escalate the situation. He doubted they’d work now.

Teru’s brow furrowed. Nothing he was doing was even getting through to Mob. And his psychic barrier was chipped and full of cracks – he didn’t know how much longer he would last.

He had to do something. Now. Before it was too late.

And even whilst his mind was racing, trying to come up with sort of half-baked strategy, rattling through letters of the alphabet to devise a plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D, he was having to dodge rubble, save civilians, save MOB.

And keep his hair this time, if he could. It had been a pain growing it back out last time.

Teru clenched his jaw and fists, feeling his energy slowly come back to him. He had to do this. He owed it to Mob, for getting him out of that toxic mindset that had carried him through the first fourteen years of his life.

He owed so much to him.

Maybe… maybe what Mob needed was a huge shock. That was what Teru had needed back then, something BIG that had turned his world upside down – and at the time, Mob had certainly delivered.

(floating naked and bald in mid-air whilst sapped of all power did that to a guy. Yeesh.)

Could something like that bring Mob back? He’d been fighting against whatever had been consuming him, clearly he was still in there… somewhere… right??

Maybe…

Teru shook the idea off immediately. That would be- be awful of him, it’d be taking advantage, it’d practically be assault and wrong in so many books of moral code. There had to be another way.

That idea probably just came to mind because of Teru’s own biases, there was no way it would ever… It would ever…

Despite himself, Teru paused for a brief moment, feeling his cheeks warm. He… could he really-

A searing pain on his arm brought him back to his senses. He let out a yelp, darting away and instantly regretting getting distracted as he glanced down to see a fresh cut on his arm.

It went deeper than the others.

Teru paled, looking up. “Mob” had become distracted too, seeing as Teru hadn’t been directly attacking him for a while, and had just been frantically thinking up a plan (which he still didn’t have!!) but it seemed the entity had its head back in the game.

This was bad.

Teru had already been tired before, but he was feeling more and more sluggish with every minute that passed. He needed to nip this in the bud.

And as Teru watched the dark, swirling mass that was Mob slowly move forward, sending huge cracks skittering through the ground wherever he stepped…

It was still Mob, at the end of the day. Right?

Steeling himself, and wishing that his heart would slow down, Teru hoped in vain that his best friend wouldn’t hate him too much for this.

(He also wished retroactively that he’d remembered to put on chapstick this morning because his lips were very dry, and that didn’t tend to be the vibe when it came to finally kissing the guy you’ve had a crush on for a frankly humiliating amount of time.)

Teru walked forward, his expression soft. Mob’s eyes (?) narrowed, and honestly at this point, Teru hoped he’d be able to get within a metre of him without being blasted away.

His walk slowly became a jog. Then a run. Then a flat-out sprint, as a he used the last dregs of his energy to dodge and zip through all the attacks being sent his way, breath rattling through his lungs.

Within a blink of an eye, Teru was in front of him.

And he knew he had to make this quick.

Teru’s eyebrows furrowed in determination, pulse pounding in his ears and bruised ribs screaming in protest.

“Mob, I like you.” Teru’s voice cracked, and he hated himself. He continued, eyes shining. “I really, really like you, and I hope you’ll forgive me for this.”

And without further delay, he leaned in and pressed his lips to Mob’s, as hard as he could and with all the feelings brimming in his chest.

Teru had never actually kissed anyone, despite the amount of girls he’d gone out with. The most he’d done was a hold a few hands, and posture and flirt a bit. A dazzling smile was enough to make most of them fall to their knees, anyway.

He hoped, hopelessly, that blind devotion would make up for lack of skill.

(Deep inside swirling black, Mob was absolutely losing it.

“Let me out!! Please!! you have to- Teru just KISSED me!!” He exclaimed, hand on his chest, red as a tomato.

Shigeo Kageyama looked at him with disdain. “We literally are on our way to confess to Tsubomi right now.”

Mob narrowed his eyes, fists clenched. “No, YOU are. We just had that discussion. I want you to let me out so we can stop destroying everything and I can tell Teru I like him too.”

Shigeo’s voice was even flatter now. “Since when do you like Teru. That has never been a thing.”

Mob somehow, impossibly, grew redder. “I… I don’t think I really realized until now.” He shook himself, determination now defined. “You need to let me out. Y… You can still confess to Tsubomi, but I need to see Teru, right now.”

“Please.” Mob’s voice is resolute. It’s not a question, and Shigeo lets out a sigh, glancing outside to where Teru’s mouth was pressed against his.

“You’re serious? After all of this? And his lips are chapped, you know.”

“Wh- why would I care about that?! Ours are as well!” Mob gave him a look of despair, trying to claw his way out of the space. “Let me out, right now! Before he pulls away – before you kill him!”

It wasn’t like Mob hadn’t been trying before, too, but his desperation was renewed now. He had been lulled into a sense of defeat, watching himself tear everything he loved apart, but now he knew.

“I’ll hold you to it.”

Shigeo’s voice is quiet. Decided.

“Hold you to what?!” Mob exclaims with furrowed brows, completely and utterly frustrated.

“You’ll still confess to Tsubomi. You have to.” Shigeo’s eyes are deadly serious. “You will. Or else.”

“I… okay. I’ll do it, but only if you let me out right n-”)

With a jolt, Mob realized he was in the middle of his first kiss.

His eyes flew wide open, darting all around, but just as he tried to commit everything to memory, Teru’s lips left his.

Teru was looking at him, eyes equally wide. Teru was there, golden hair matted with sweat and covered in blood and bruises.

Teru was alive.

With tears prickling in his eyes, and with equal ineptitude both in kissing and in words, Mob went for the next best option.

Within a blink of an eye, his arms were wrapped around Teru’s torso, tight and snug, head tucked into the other’s neck as he blindly hoped that this would make up for all the thoughts he didn’t know how to convey.

There was a beat of silence. Mob tensed up, ready to immediately draw back the second he sensed he’d made Teru uncomfortable.

And then, he felt the other melt into the embrace, arms winding around him and pulling him closer. A shaky hand cradled Mob’s inky-black head, stroking his hair and trembling like a leaf, as if still in disbelief that it was there.

Then, came Teru’s frantic words.

“I’m- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” He drew further away, hands on his shoulders and Mob instantly wanted to tug him back, to where he had been stroking his hair. “I hope- I hope it was okay, I just wanted to shock you enough to break you out of- whatever that was- I just-”

As Mob watched the stammering, insecure words fight their way out of Teru’s mouth, it felt… wrong. Those words didn’t belong there. That shaky, unsure expression didn’t belong on Teru’s face.

And before even Mob had figured out what he was doing, he was pulling at Teru’s shirt, tugging him closer and shutting him up with another kiss.

It was… really nice. Especially since he got to experience all of it this time. Teru’s lips weren’t very dry at all, they were soft, and Mob liked how the other relaxed into him.

Teru’s hands came forward, cupping his face, and Mob liked that too.

After another moment of savouring the feeling, he slowly pulled back. Teru was looking at him like he’d hung the stars in the sky, cradling his face, his mouth positively agape. “You… you actually…”

Just as Mob was wondering if he needed to kiss him again, to really prove his point (and it’s not like he would mind) Teru smiled, a genuinely happy smile, soaking it in.

Because this was it. This was requited.

“I’m here. I’m sorry I wasn’t before.” Mob said, as he took both Teru’s hands in his. He bit his lip, not knowing where to start. “I… I have a lot to explain.”

Teru gave his hands a reassuring squeeze, sending him  the softest smile he’d ever seen.

“We’ve got nothing but time.”

[ygodmyy20]

Happy Birthday @sodasexual!!!!

Teru and Shigeo dads with lil baby Saitama from her MP100 X OPM crossover AU (you can read An Egg Hatches here)

THEY ARE A FAMILY!!!

I already said this but worth saying again: Thanks for gushing about terumob with me, and being my friend, and betaing my stuff, and helping me come up with so many great [SPOILERS] for Black Sweatshirt that I am so so sooo excited to write.

[quirkle2]

[zombie au] the written version of this post but like.way more harrowing (3.5k words)

It’s been a long time since Ritsu has seen the stars.

When he and his brother were little, stars were very important to them. An obsession from one brother meant it was an obsession by association for the other—Shigeo would listen to Ritsu ramble about types of stars and facts about comets for hours. He’d always be so patient about it, even if Ritsu stumbled over the big words.

Ritsu has always loved space, and the imagery that comes with it—his favorite planet has always been Neptune ever since he learned of the existence of its rings. He finds supernovas fascinating, nebulae even more so; the cycle of life for bodies so beyond his understanding had never failed to capture his attention and hold it until its last breath.

At six years old, his father had taken him and Shigeo on a camping trip. His brother had gotten carsick on the way there, their father’s card had been declined when trying to pay for gas, and Ritsu had nearly caused a crash the way he suddenly screamed about a spider in the seat with him. Looking back, he’s sure the journey had been about eighty percent stress for his father.

For Ritsu, it had rewired him.

It’d been the first time he’d ever seen so many stars in the sky. It’d been the first time he’d ever been outside the city to begin with, the first time he could look out over the horizon and not see the treeline replaced with geometric, manmade light. He’d been so enamored by it his neck hurt the next morning from straining to drink everything in.

His brother gave it all that subtle smile, that surface-level spark of appreciation, and then he’d gone to bother their father about s’mores—he’d left him there in front of their tent to gawk at the expanse, at the majesty. Their voices had been far away, and the stars had felt so close.

That same majesty had blanketed him when they’d escaped the city, after the start of the apocalypse, but despite his lifelong love for all things space, he hadn’t found it in himself to enjoy it. Before, it’d been light pollution to fog his obsession.

Now, it’s… well, it’s a lot of things.

The air is crisp in his lungs, and dry against his cold fingers. The plastic of the truck bed against his back creaks and wobbles when Tome shifts in her spot. The crickets are loud in the absence of conversation, but Ritsu appreciates the songs they play—he taps his collarbone with two fingers to the beat of their melody, never having been much of a music lover in the past, but slowly learning its importance.

He senses Tome lean and angles his head down to watch her loom over his brother, squished against his side. She observes him for a moment, studying, and then her eyes flick to Ritsu’s and she’s mouthing something to him in the quiet.

He catches something like sleep and it’s all he really needs to get the gist. Ritsu lifts his head from the bed of the truck, double-chinned, to peek at his brother’s face.

Cheek smooshed up to his hip, limply hugging his thigh, and probably drooling on his t-shirt. He eyes the edges of his silhouette in the dark, watches the rise and fall of his chest and notes how it’s slower, and steady.

For the past few days, everything about him has been… droopy. The lids, the nonsensical speech, the sloppy movements, the slurred cracks of saliva in his throat when Ritsu takes something out of his mouth. Before they’d found this truck, abandoned on a dirt backroad they’d been walking along for hours, Ritsu had seen the pure, glassy exhaustion in Shigeo’s eyes and prayed for a decent place to settle down.

The bed of a truck that has a bloodied backseat and bullet holes in the rear windshield isn’t necessarily a decent place, but it’s passable.

Shigeo’s eyes are closed, and when Ritsu shifts his leg, his brother does not rise. He breathes out a sigh that feels heavy on his soul, but the sound is made of relief and Tome sags too.

The tension pressing down on the truck bed releases, and Ritsu assumes it’s his imagination when they seem to lift an inch from the weight taken off the flat wheels. They’re left in a silence that, for once, feels empty in a calming way. There is little substance to it, little to complain about in the moment, and Ritsu can tell he’s not the only one basking in that shallowness.

“Thank God,” Tome mumbles into the dark. Neither of them are particularly afraid of waking him up—once he’s out, he’s out for a while and dead to the world during it. “It was starting to make me tired just looking at him.”

Ritsu cannot help but agree, but somewhere in his own long-lived exhaustion he forgets he’s supposed to respond and instead just stares while Tome adjusts. She wraps her knees with her arms and stilts them up to make an X, stares out over the truck siding and traces the edges of the cornfield around them.

The crickets fill his lack of reply with croaks and chirps, and Tome seems used to his odd stints of silence. It’s a bit of a lullaby, and Ritsu finds himself drooping too, yet he’s unable to close his eyes and give into it.

Instead, he stares with a fuzzy gaze at the stars directly in his line of sight, and realizes they’ve been there the whole time. Of course they have, he thinks, and it’s one of those obvious things that hits him much too late to even stifle it, and he’s left with a thrum in his mind that’s of a vaguely embarrassed timbre.

He sees the stars every night. It’s just been quite a long time since he’s seen them.

There is something about the quiet, modest glint to them that funnels all that nostalgia to the forefront. The smell of s’mores and campfire smoke, the dust on old library books and the ache in his muscles that came with carrying too many nonfiction copies in his little arms. The cold, factual tone of documentary narrators over the coolest computer animations Ritsu’s ever seen, no matter how low quality the textures were.

His mother leaning over his shoulder, kissing his scalp and humming out a laugh when he pointed at all the comets crudely drawn into his looseleaf. His father bringing home science books that’d get more and more complicated as Ritsu grew older, but he soaked them up and memorized each paragraph like it was his duty to recite them perfectly.

Shigeo, eyes seemingly sparkling whenever Ritsu even opened his mouth and so, so incredibly patient, nodding in those little excited bursts when he’d explained how stars were born. Giggling when Ritsu threw his arms out under their little blanket fort in his bedroom, reenacting those supernovas he loves so much and spilling the blankets on their heads.

Ritsu realizes that maybe it isn’t nostalgia, because it feels quite bitter on the tongue. It’s something close, but it’s too… aggrieved to be nostalgia.

“So what’s your take?” Tome speaks over the crickets, over the crisp air that makes her shiver as she scoots down the truck bed to lie on her back. One of her arms is pinned under Shigeo. She doesn’t bother to yank it out from under him.

“On…?” he mumbles lazily, exhaustion peeling at his patience. He fights the urge to close his eyes because if he does he knows he’ll pass out on her instantly and he needs her on his good side.

Tome’s hair pillows under her head in a spiraled, jumbled mess while she loosely copies his position. He just knows she’s going to complain about the knots in it for the sixtieth time tomorrow morning, and he starts mentally preparing for that.

“How the apocalypse started.” She tilts her head toward him while she talks, but her eyes stay glued to the stars. “Got any good theories?” 

Ritsu slowly slogs through the question, wishing he were asleep instead. Maybe he should just pass out. “Mh… I dunno,” he shrugs noncommittally. His legs ache, and he shuffles them around to press his calves against the rough plastic of the bed. “I don’t really think about that stuff.”

A partial lie; he occasionally feels ungodly amounts of hatred toward whoever started it—if a human being even started it at all—and occasionally wanders if it would be morally incorrect to shoot the fucker between the eyes if he ever meets them.

“Oh c’moooon,” Tome drawls, tilting her head as far back as it’ll go against the rivets underneath them and finally looking his way. There’s an odd weight to her gaze, like she’s looking for something in his face a little too closely, and he suddenly, inexplicably feels vulnerable.

Her free hand comes up to gesture just above her stomach, flippant. “You’ve gotta have something!”

He considers fabricating some ridiculous answer, but he finds he doesn’t have the energy to. That knowing glint in her eyes has him backstepping a little bit, and he scratches at his neck habitually and shrugs out a reply. “Not really.”

Ritsu moves the hand on his collarbone and flops it above his head, the zippers of his backpack sliding along his knuckles. He searches for the dangling pull to fidget with, and he senses Tome look away from him and back to the sky.

She then says, quietly in the air, “Well I think it’s aliens.”

Ritsu blinks slowly at the stars, lagging a little, and then the words catch up to him and he can’t stop himself from side-eyeing her hard.

“Aliens?” he echoes, a disbelieving lilt to his voice that borders on hilarity.

Tome nods matter-of-factly, comically genuine about it, and for a moment he doesn’t know whether he should openly be a dick and brick her dreams, let her down softly, or allow her to float.

There are a lot of things he could say to this, and he decides to settle for somewhere in the middle of all three. “You need to be medicated.”

It’s poured out over a tired grin and lazy, wandering eyes that trail the sky, soft and a little prudent. Tome grins back, like she was expecting that answer. It’s sharper than his fuzzy, weary edges.

“You need way more medication than me,” Tome teases, “I’m serious about it and it’s true.”

“Nevermind,” Ritsu breathes, lifting his head to pillow it under a hand, “I actually don’t think medicine can fix you.”

“Aliens are real.”

“Okay,” is calmly fed back, unperturbed but not convinced.

“Nobody ever takes me seriously after I say that,” Tome rolls onto her side, facing him, hair draping over the hand that’s propped against her head. Shigeo is jostled, but stays still and silent.

“Wonder why,” Ritsu deadpans.

“They’re scared of the truth!”

“Mmmmh. Sure.”

“They don’t wanna admit it.”

“They don’t.”

“And neither do you.”

“And neither do I.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Doing that—stop just agreeing with me.”

“Okay. You’re wrong.”

Tome tsks in a funny gauh sound, gesturing to the sky and shaking her head as if it’ll help her, and then, “Shigeo would believe me.”

Ritsu can feel her freeze up, even if they’re not touching. He can feel the way the air gets a degree colder and that weight comes back down to press against the truck bed and their chests. He breathes through it—he doesn’t think Tome even tries to.

She waits, breath baited, balancing on those eggshells she usually stomps on. She’s never been one to shy away from kicking him while he’s down, at least in the past. Those little pokes and jabs are something he simply had to get used to, if he wanted that much-needed help.

He thinks about the look she gave him earlier, the one that left him feeling centered in her claws while he stared at the stars and reminisced. He wonders what changed her demeanor. He wonders if his increasingly exhausted eyes lately have anything to do with it.

She’s waiting to see if she’s toeing a line, studying his face with sharp basil and calculating exactly how many eggshells she’s stepping on, listening to the crackles. Ritsu counts with her and finds it odd that he doesn’t already know the answer.

“No he wouldn’t,” he hears himself say, just to have something in the air between them that isn’t tension. He’s unsure if it’s true—it’s so silly he doesn’t even bother fact checking it. He’s too focused on the fact that Tome seems more attuned to what he’s feeling than he does. “You know nothing about him, you’re walking right into failure here.”

Something like relief flashes there in her irises, and the substance to the air dissipates a fraction. A brief moment of mischief and a close cousin of anger follows it, and then she swallows back the righteousness and smoothes out that sharp edge to her smile. “Okay, Mr. Genius. Maybe it’s time I ask The Question, then.”

Ritsu’s grin disappears, quickly at first, and then it floats down into a numb line and they’re suddenly in a much different kind of quiet. It’s still, almost suffocatingly so, but the crickets carry that old, childhood sense of safety with their song. The world loses that presently sharp, shiny finish and everything in existence suddenly feels matte against his atoms, flat and smooth and dry. Distant, and unreal.

She says it with a capital T and a capital Q, and despite how bold the statement is in the world of their little war between each other, she looks at him with an invitation to back down. It’s offered up like a challenge at first, but as she leaves the implications of it to marinate he can feel her confidence slipping. Her gaze is open and curious, but it’s poised for disappointment and acceptance of the fact.

If he searches, he can almost see the apologetic look hidden beneath it all, like she’s sorry she even asked him of such a thing.

The Question has gone unspoken, until now, but Tome continues once she feels she’s given him ample time to cut the cord on it all, and then she lets it out. “What was he like?” Quiet words, with such deafening reminders.

Ritsu stares, and he tries to think about how to summarize somebody he loves so much.

To Tome, he has been nothing but a kid who was bitten a long while ago. To her, he’s a husk, of a stranger, of a boy who’d often been a stranger even to people close to him. To this girl, Shigeo is one zombie in a crowd of billions, and the little sparks of personality in that dying flame of his core probably seem quite feeble and unimpressive.

To Ritsu, that all means everything.

“He was,” he stutters out, stilted and slow, as his racing mind jams every messy thought to the forefront, “quiet. He was really quiet, in everything he did, to most people. Sometimes you’d have to strain to hear him.”

He keeps his eyes on the edge of the truck bed, because if he doesn’t, he’d have to meet Tome’s gaze and he doesn’t think he’s capable of that anymore. “Really soft-spoken. Really gentle, but he could get intense when he wanted.”

In the silence, he’s very aware of his breathing, and the slow, steady bobbing of his own hand resting on his diaphragm. He works to keep it that way. “People ignored him a lot—said they barely registered his presence,” he says, with just a touch of sourness to his tone, “A lotta people would say most of him felt… ‘muted.’

“But I never understood that, cuz…” Because it was so wrong. “Cuz everything he did, he did it with all he had. And that was loud to me.

“He’d stay up all night in calls with our friend Teru, when he was upset. He’d bring home cookies for me if he knew I had a long day.” The twinge of a smile on his face is despairingly bittersweet. His breaths are steady. “All of the kids at school thought it was cool to hate your parents, but Shige looked sad when they said stuff like that and he came home and hugged them longer than usual.

“He’d cry if he accidentally stepped on a ladybug. He’d wave to frogs he saw on the sidewalk like they were his best friends,” he chuckles, and it brings a delicate little grin from Tome. It all feels very brittle. “He was the gentlest guy you could ever meet, and he loved everything.”

Ritsu swivels his head to look at the stars, and wonders why they’re staring at him so innocently. Wonders why it makes him want to cry. “Everything, even the stuff nobody else did,” he mumbles, voice small, “He picked bruised fruits from the store baskets cuz ‘nobody else will want them.’ He forgave his bullies instantly, even if they didn’t deserve it, even if Shige was still mad at them. He was too nice, sometimes. He let people walk all over him.”

He lets his teeth show a little, bares them in a shaky display. He remembers a day in class where Shigeo defended a kid from a couple brats, and then they all turned on him instead, including the kid he was defending. The next week Shigeo had helped that same boy pick up his books, and he’d been shoved to the tiled floor instead of thanked. Ritsu couldn’t decide whether to be mad about the cruelty, or mad about Shigeo’s selfless, stubborn character who didn’t seem to learn any lessons.

His throat feels sore. There is something sweltering and lumpy forming in the back of his mouth and he swallows it down. “He was really shy and talking to people was hard for him, but he stood up to people when others were being made fun of, even if his voice shook.”

A little Shigeo’s tiny words, trembling just like his hands. Feeling everything on Earth when they all said he couldn’t. Quietly, silently bearing it when the world kicked him down, and all he ever did back was be kind to it.

Ritsu learned from Shigeo’s mistakes, and he never defended any bullied kids, never tried to be kind for the simple act of being kind. Shigeo didn’t view them as mistakes at all. Maybe he’d been right about that.

“He was the only kid I’d ever known to be genuine about stuff. Compared to Shige, everybody else’s achievements seemed… shallow,” Ritsu bares his teeth again, at the world, at the stars, and they stare flatly back, “People told him to ‘get a clue,’ ‘get a personality,’ and I never understood why they did that, because Shige seemed like the smartest one there, to me. The richest in personality.

“Maybe not in an academic sense, but he already knew how to love things.” The hand on his chest bobs unsteadily. “He knew how to love life before he was taught how to walk. And above that, ya’know… what else matters?”

He’s too afraid to glance at Tome, because she is eerily silent and he doesn’t have the bravery to tear his gaze away from the sky. It hurts to look at that too, but he doesn’t know what else to stare at.

His breaths are steady. His breaths are steady, and the bottom of his vision is clear. He smiles again, bittersweet. The bottom of his vision is clear.

“You know what his favorite planet was?” he asks with a little voice, stifles a sniffle.

Tome takes a few beats to respond. “Mh… he seems like a Jupiter kinda guy.”

Ritsu shakes his head, and the smile he gives is not happy. “Planet Earth,” he croaks.

It sits for a beat, and in the air he can feel it, the common hesitance. “Yeah. When people first hear that, they usually go… ‘really? Earth?’” he chuckles wetly, moving his hands to copy their gestures, “Like… of all the cool, alien planets in our solar system, you chose Earth? The one we already know so much of, the one we’ve already studied inside and out? The one that feels so… mundane, to us?”

Ritsu’s favorite planet is Neptune, for its rings and its blue coat of paint. Shigeo’s was Earth, for its everything.

“But he loved the mundane. He showed love to the things people took for granted, to the uglier sides of them,” he breathes. It is not steady. His vision smears the stars into streaks. “He always did that.”

The crickets do nothing to cover his unsteady, long inhales, and the wetness of his cheeks and along his temples is cold against the air. Tome speaks after a few long, long beats, and her voice is quiet.

“... sounds like he’s got a heart of gold,” she whispers, and when Ritsu swivels his head to look at her, something like a supernova goes off in his own chest.

He cannot help but notice that she refers to Shigeo Kageyama in the present tense, and Ritsu does not.

[brown-little-robin]

Mrs. Kageyama Reaches ???%

People have different sides to them. Mrs. Kageyama is fine with that. She knew getting into motherhood that her kids would bring some things to their parents, and other things, they’d want to deal with on their own. That’s fine. That’s what people do!

She, for instance, worries over her kids out loud, in front of them, but only about the little things. Bumps and scrapes. Bent spoons, dropped dishes. Not the big things. She locks the big things away like an adult, only letting them out a little bit at a time so she doesn’t explode. She whispers to her husband in the dark when the kids won’t overhear them: are there any psychics in your family? Do you think your parents would know anything about how to help Shige?

As far as either Kageyama parent can tell, there aren’t any psychics in their extended families at all. Shigeo Kageyama was the first person out of the ordinary in both entire bloodlines, all the way back to the farmers (on Mrs. Kageyama’s side) and fishermen (on Mr. Kageyama’s side) who started keeping records of their family lines. And oh, it worries Mrs. Kageyama that she doesn’t know how to connect with that side of him.

There’s nothing she can do. Shigeo floats in the air as a baby, and Mr. Kageyama pulls him down like a balloon, but he floats right back up again, and there’s nothing Mrs. Kageyama can do but wait until her baby gets hungry and comes down to her again.

As a toddler, Shigeo talks to things Mrs. Kageyama couldn’t see. He repeats swear words she couldn’t hear the spirits teaching him. Actually, in that case, there is something she could do; one conversation later, Shigeo understands some social niceties he didn’t know about before.

But she can’t help with the root problem of the spirits who teach him words that he shouldn’t know. She wishes she was a psychic, too, not because it seems like fun—it certainly doesn’t, not to her—but because at least she would know what her son was dealing with.

But it isn’t that big of a deal, probably. Shige manages fine. He floats potato chips around to make Ritsu laugh and levitates all the small objects around him when he cries. It’s just another side of him. Shigeo is clearly bothered when other kids think he’s weird, but the Kageyamas let him deal with that by himself. All they can do, really, is keep loving him, feeding him, and making sure he gets to bed on time. The rest will sort itself out. Some things just wouldn’t be helped by parents getting involved.

Shigeo gets quieter as he got older. He still smiles and plays, but he doesn’t laugh out loud as much. He got self-conscious, Mrs. Kageyama thinks, because of those other little kids. Part of Mrs. Kageyama wishes she could talk to him about it, but that’s not how these things are done. Even if she tried to coax Shigeo’s hidden hurt feelings out into the open, all the parenting advice says that that would just stop him from developing the strength to deal with it on his own. And besides, real adults don’t make their children deal with their parents’ emotions.

So she hides that side of herself away. She whispers to her dear husband late at night, what if Shigeo is actually being bullied? What’s the point where we should step in?

He doesn’t know. He says, I think the boy is doing fine for now. Let’s let him socialize by himself for a while. She agrees. They let him socialize by himself. Sometimes he comes home from the park muted and weary, but he usually perks up once he’s eaten dinner, and Ritsu never fails to get a smile out of Shige.

Ritsu can connect with that side of Shigeo that Mrs. Kageyama can’t. His delight in his brother’s powers makes Shigeo smile where Mrs. Kageyama’s loving concern would just be smothering. So that’s all right. Different people can help with different needs.

Shige and Ritsu are good kids. They’re good kids, and they love each other, and they love their parents. But there are things they don’t come to their parents for. And that’s natural.

One New Year’s Day, Mrs. Kageyama got a call from a concerned neighbor and rushed to her sons. She found Shigeo standing stunned, blank-eyed, a few feet away from Ritsu, who was bleeding heavily from a head wound. Head wounds bleed a lot, she was informed by the doctors who stitched Ritsu’s precious little head up. That’s normal.

There was more blood on the ground than what could be explained by Ritsu’s head. Since she didn’t have to do anything about it, Mrs. Kageyama allowed herself to forget that fact. And then she forgot it again whenever she thought of it. Forcefully.

Ritsu didn’t explain what happened. He just went along with his mother and the doctors in a stunned, disbelieving kind of silence. He was a model patient, the doctors said.

Alarmingly, Shigeo didn’t explain what happened, either.

Mrs. Kageyama scrubbed the blood off his face in the hospital bathroom, and he didn’t resist at all. His hair didn’t rise up off his forehead in discomfort, and nothing floated, not even the water from the sink.

She squinted at him. Something was strange about him. Looking into his cast-down eyes, she could almost see something behind Shigeo’s blank expression. Something…

Something…

“Shige…?”

Shigeo made dull eye contact, and for a moment she saw with perfect clarity a boy behind his eyes, a boy with white eyes, screaming.

And then she un-saw it. Forcefully.

After all, there was nothing she could do; everyone has different sides to them, and that’s normal. Not everyone can deal with all the sides of everyone else.

After that, something is different in the Kageyama household. It feels almost like the boys had hit puberty early. Mrs. Kageyama heard from other mothers and parenting books about teenagers, how difficult they were, almost like they became different people overnight. It’s like that with Shigeo and Ritsu, only they’re still baby-faced little boys, not teenagers at all.

The tendency Shigeo always had to turn into a muted shadow of himself after a particularly hard day becomes the norm. He’s quiet. Too quiet. He’s calm. Too calm. He doesn’t laugh at all anymore. It becomes hard to remember that Shigeo was ever genuinely, visibly happy. His smiles at dinner are muted, his eyes always tired, even when he’s thanking Ritsu for unbending his spoons.

He doesn’t use his powers anymore. Not on purpose, anyway.

It hurts the side of Mrs. Kageyama that she has hidden away, the side that wants to stare deep into Shigeo’s eyes and talk to him honestly, to show him her overpowering concern for the part of himself that Shigeo doesn’t come to her for help with.

It’s not like he’s a teenage delinquent or anything, though. He’s perfectly polite. In some ways, he’s exactly the same as before. He still returns from school tired and distant but cheers up at the dinner table, even though his expressions are subtler, nowadays.

But unlike before, Ritsu can’t cheer Shigeo up.

It’s similar with Ritsu: it’s impossible to explain to other mothers how he’s changed. He’s still a model child. He’s still cheerful and helpful and nice. He just…

Sometimes Mrs. Kageyama hears him crying at night. Sometimes she catches sight of him staring at objects with such a fierce expression that she knows instantly what he’s trying to do.

The parenting advice doesn’t cover what you do when one of your children hurt the other one but both of them refuse to acknowledge that anything is wrong. The parenting advice says that if your children are angry at each other, you should give them some advice but mostly let them work it out on their own. But what if they don’t work it out? What if they never even try? There’s nothing to say.

Their family name, Kageyama, begins to seem like a cruel joke. Kage, shadow, figure, dark omen; yama, mountain, something huge and powerful. Mr. Kageyama is the one who points that out, late at night, whispering to his wife. He asks, do you think we’re cursed? Our family?

She lies, No, I think we’re fine. This is pretty normal, I think. People have different sides to them.

He thinks that over. I think you’re right. This is just… like puberty.

Now that the boys are middle schoolers, “puberty” becomes an excellent excuse to explain why the boys don’t share their other sides with their parents or each other. Everyone in the household embraces the excuse with relief.

Ritsu gets good grades. Excellent grades. He’s diligent. Too diligent. He’s a perfect son and brother. Too perfect. Everyone accepts it.

It’s been years since the New Years incident, and Ritsu and Mob—Shigeo goes by Mob at school, Mrs. Kageyama learns from his homeroom teacher—still treat each other with polite respect and no genuineness.

And—Mob? Mob? It’s a name of no identity. Mrs. Kageyama finds that nickname more and more saddening as her son’s other side drifts further and further out of reach. She calls him Shige at the dinner table and he smiles. There’s a shadow self behind his eyes, just as there’s a shadow self behind Mrs. Kageyama’s eyes.

But, after all, people have different sides to them, and that’s only natural. It used to be Ritsu who could make Shigeo happy about his powers, who could touch that side of him that Mrs. Kageyama cannot. Now, there’s someone else in her son’s life who does that: one Reigen Arataka. Her son’s after-school part-time employer and master in the psychic arts.

Shigeo doesn’t show his psychic powers to his parents, not on purpose, anyway, but she’s so, so glad he has somewhere to go to use that part of him. He’s hard to read, but Mrs. Kageyama thinks he gets something really good out of those after-school consultation hours. He often comes home thoughtful, or happier, his shoulders a little lighter, the shadow self behind his eyes not so noticeably unhappy.

She’s happy Reigen Arataka is in her son’s life.

It’s a tremendous relief when Shigeo begins to blossom in middle school. He joins a club. A club! It’s amazing!

Of all things, he chose the Body Improvement Club, which baffles Mrs. Kageyama. Shige has never been… athletic. But she’s not complaining. She’s happy for him. She nearly gasps out loud, one night, when Shigeo tentatively refers to some girl associated with (but not part of?) the Body Improvement Club, Tome Kurata, as his friend.

She nearly gasps out loud, but not quite. She hides her true excitement in that other side of herself. Her shadow self and Shigeo’s shadow self are similar, she thinks—they’re too much for the dinner table. The dinner table is a place of relaxation. Never, never does any Kageyama disturb the sacred peace of the relaxed atmosphere of the dinner table.

Which is why it’s so strange when Ritsu starts acting up and declines to eat dinner with the family.

Something is going on with Ritsu. There’s another side to him, too, but it’s locked away where Mrs. Kageyama can barely even see it. Sometimes, she forgets it’s even there. She’s ashamed of that, but there it is: Shigeo’s troubles are so much more obvious and clear-cut than Ritsu’s that… well… anyway, it becomes obvious that something is going on with Ritsu.

His grins are sharp, his eyes deadly, mannerisms completely changed. It’s as if he doesn’t realize that Mr. and Mrs. Kageyama know him. It’s as if Ritsu doesn’t realize that his parents watch both their sons closely, knowing they’re going through things that they can’t help with because they’re just normal parents and you have to let your children work things out on their own.

Mrs. Kageyama begins to wonder if Ritsu is going to confront Shigeo, finally, with the way Ritsu looks at his brother, eyes venomous. She hopes nothing bad happens. So does her husband.

But then something good happens. Something involving Reigen Arataka and psychic powers, if Mrs. Kageyama had to bet. Shigeo and Ritsu miss dinner. They come home late at night, and in the darkness, straining her ears, tense all over so that she doesn’t make a sound and scare her sons off, she hears Ritsu and Shige stopping in the hall. She hears Ritsu say goodnight, Nii-san, and Shigeo answer, mm. goodnight, Ritsu. And then—amazingly—there’s a cloth-muffled thump that might have been someone clapping someone else on the shoulder, and a quiet, happy huff that can’t have been anyone but Ritsu.

Shige doesn’t touch Ritsu. He never touches Ritsu anymore.

And yet—!

Maybe kids do work things out on their own.

After the boys’ doors close, Mr. Kageyama shifts and hugs Mrs. Kageyama tight in sheer relief. She hugs him back, fiercely, silently, choked up. She’s close to tears.

The next day, Ritsu…. Ritsu has powers. He doesn’t show them off in front of his parents, but Shigeo accidentally bends a spoon at dinner, and while Mrs. Kageyama is scolding him and arguing with Mr. Kageyama in their well-worn, comfortable ritual, Ritsu takes the spoon and just looks at it, and it unbends with a happy little flourish.

Mrs. Kageyama is so happy she could cry, and probably will cry, later, actually, when the boys aren’t around to catch her. At the dinner table, she just lets those feelings slide into her other self and grumbles, “What’s with these kids?” to make them smile.

“Here, Nii-san,” Ritsu says.

“Thanks, Ritsu,” Shigeo says, accepting the spoon. And he smiles.

Shigeo continues to change. He comes out of his shell, little by little. Ritsu gets happier, seeming younger every day. Shigeo’s friends become a bigger part of his life. He starts leaving the house not only for Reigen Arataka but for his friends, not just for the club activities, either, but for karaoke, to go out for ramen, and just to hang out.

More psychic incidents happen. The Kageyama parents can’t help with that, but they can make dinner. They can tease Shige and Ritsu about their powers. They can watch, knowing something is wrong but not pressing Shigeo on it, when he comes home from a job one day with something deep and thoughtful in his eyes. Shigeo starts drinking water instead of milk for a few days. He flinches at the sound of crows and shies away when people move too fast. Mrs. Kageyama is torn in half with the desire to ask him about it, but she doesn’t. Shigeo deals with it on his own.

Shigeo temporarily quits working with Reigen Arataka, and the Kageyamas provide a no-questions-asked, relaxed atmosphere for Shigeo to come home to. It seems to help. They see Shigeo playing video games with Ritsu and they know that Shigeo and Ritsu are going to be fine. They’re taking care of each other, better than their parents can, in some ways. Kids are resilient. Their kids are resilient. They’re so proud of them. They don’t tell them how much they know.

They cheer for Shigeo at the school marathon with all their hearts, even though the sight of him with a skinned knee gives Mrs. Kageyama a jolt of pure terror. Well, he seems to have it under control now. He doesn’t even see them as he keeps running. He’s so big.

When Ritsu opens the door to a red-headed and clearly psychic “friend of his” they’ve never heard of before and looks at them with terror in his eyes, they pretend to believe him when he asks them to leave for a spur-of-the-moment onsen trip.

Maybe it’s selfish. Mrs. Kageyama asks her husband that as they eat dinner that night, pleasantly boiled-feeling from the hot water. “Do you think it’s selfish, leaving them to deal with their psychic problems on their own?”

“Oh, they’ll be okay,” Mr. Kageyama says. “We couldn’t do anything to help them anyway. I mean, look at that!”

He points at the television, where the news is going over the psychic terrorist attack in Seasoning City yet again, with not much more information than last time. There’s live footage of police cars floating in the air.

“After all—”

The TV frizzles and fills with static. Mr. Kageyama laughs a short, helpless little laugh.

“I get it,” Mrs. Kageyama sighs. “I just worry about those boys.”

The honest side of herself writhes in pain at the understatement, but she keeps it down.

“It’s all right as long as they’re together. Shigeo will have it handled,” Mr. Kageyama says. “He’d never let Ritsu get hurt.”

There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence. In each other’s eyes, Mr. and Mrs. Kageyama see Ritsu bleeding and Shigeo with blood spattered on his face.

“That’s true,” Mrs. Kageyama says, hoping it’s true. “They’re very capable kids now.”

When Mr. and Mrs. Kageyama return home, their house has been replaced with an almost identical house. They burst into muffled laughter together in their room, covering their mouths. The pattern of the floorboards in the hall is different. How—how?

They don’t tell Shigeo and Ritsu how much they know.

Everyone has different sides to them. The Kageyama parents are at peace with this. They are at peace with the fact that they are background characters in their sons’ lives. The four Kageyamas show each other a gentle, relaxed side of themselves. It’s a sorely needed safe haven for all of them.

They could keep this up forever. Mrs. and Mr. Kageyama giggle with each other sometimes at night about how Ritsu probably won’t know they knew he was having delusions of grandeur until they’re old and gray, and maybe not even then.

Everything is alright. Still, Mrs. Kageyama sometimes misses Shigeo as a carefree little boy. Still, her shadow self yearns to connect with his.

There’s a specific kind of loneliness she thinks she shares with her older son, something not quite shared by Ritsu or her husband, although they have their own versions. She sees Ritsu use his powers to open drawers and float his school bag over, and she sees Shigeo walk across the room to get his bag, and she thinks: Shige is still stuck in his head. But she doesn’t say anything.

It’s not because of the parenting advice anymore, and it’s not because she’s worried about stunting his personal development. Shigeo is a strong person. He’s been a strong person for a long time. It’s because it’s a habit, and every time Mrs. Kageyama thinks of cornering Shigeo and just… asking him, Shige, can we talk about your powers?, she remembers that she doesn’t have powers, and how can she dare to try to connect with that side of him now, when she hasn’t really tried to do that for Shigeo’s entire life?

It’s guilt. It’s shame. It’s a habit. It’s more comfortable to stagnate.

Kids work things out on their own, right?

Besides, Shigeo isn’t repressing his emotions so much anymore, just his powers. For instance, she heard him calling Mrs. Takane, the mother of one of Mob’s childhood friends. He’s going to talk to his childhood friend again! Mrs. Kageyama is curious what he might talk to Tsubomi-chan about. Is it possible that he might finally be processing the minor bullying that used to bother him so much? But that’s probably just overthinking on her part. Shigeo doesn’t talk about it around his parents, but she’s pretty sure he used to have a crush on Tsubomi-chan, and he might still have a crush on her. Adorable. He’s growing up so fast.

When the earthquakes hit, they hit her right in the guilty conscience.

It’s Shigeo. She knows it’s him. She never really had motherly instincts, but this isn’t a motherly instinct. This is her shadow self recognizing his shadow self, which is so much like hers. The boy with white eyes, screaming. She understands what he’s doing. He’s letting out all of the destructive guilt and shame and fear and rage at himself and everything else that Mrs. Kageyama has been seeing behind his eyes for years and years.

It’s Shigeo’s shadow self, and maybe if Mrs. Kageyama had managed to be brave for once in her life and talk to him about powers, secrets, and emotions, this wouldn’t be happening.

She stares at her phone, where a grainy photo of her oldest son blurs in her vision, and she feels the sob rise in her throat and the tear drip onto the phone, obscuring the bouquet in his hand, as if someone else was doing it.

She doesn’t go out to look for him. She doesn’t have powers. She’d get killed.

It’s Reigen Arataka who brings her son home—Reigen Arataka, who she’s only met once or twice before. He’s uncharacteristically disheveled and red-eyed with crying, and his head is bleeding. Shige did that to him—it’s obvious. Shige has clearly also been crying. He looks up at his mother and father, sniffs bravely, and starts crying again.

Mrs. Kageyama kneels and hugs Shige tight. Mr. Kageyama’s arms close around her and Shigeo, encircling them, and she starts crying again.

The government gets involved, in the form of a bored-looking bald man with a strange cigarette who shows up in a helicopter. He jumps down to ground level, interrupting the crying Kageyama family and the awkwardly standing by Reigen Arataka, and says to Shigeo, “Long time no see.”

Mrs. Kageyama does not like the implication that Shigeo has met this man before.

Shigeo pushes his parents’ arms away, gently but firmly, and steps up to meet the man. He says, “I’m sorry. I’d like to help.”

“Sure, sure,” the government man says dismissively. “Might take a while to rebuild the city, but I can pretty much guarantee no one’s going to mess with you. No one died, so…” he gestures lazily with his cigarette. “This kind of thing happens every once in a while with kid espers. Just thought you might like to know.”

The government man doesn’t spare even a glance for Shigeo’s parents. They don’t ask him anything. It’s like introducing themselves might shatter the illusion of good news and make the man shout, “Gotcha! Your son is going to esper jail right now!”

The government man returns to the helicopter and lifts off. And then it’s just Shigeo, standing awkwardly on the street and not quite making eye contact with his parents, and the voice of Reigen Arataka on the phone summoning other psychics, and a man with an umbrella, “Mob”’s coworker, apparently, arriving and nervously spiriting Shigeo away to meet up with some other psychics, including the one who apparently recreated the Kageyama’s house that one time.

So they don’t address the incident immediately. Shigeo comes home that night so exhausted that he falls asleep at the table. Ritsu looks more awake, but also so dreamily happy that his parents just… don’t ask him any questions. They don’t want to disturb that happiness.

The next day, they don’t address it again. Shigeo is a heavy sleeper. He wakes up slowly, brushes his teeth, and sets off for school, which didn’t get destroyed during his shadow self’s meltdown, probably for the same reason that their house went practically untouched, though shaken, among the earthquakes. Shige doesn’t come home until very late again, and when Mrs. Kageyama gives him a bento box to eat before bed, he just says thank you. To her tentative question—were you helping with the city today, Shige?—he gives an exhausted, affirming “mm.”

He’s tired. She lets him wobble off to bed.

It doesn’t actually take very long for the city to be healed. Shige stops being tired all the time right away after his bedtime gets back to normal. He’s livelier than Mrs. Kageyama has seen him in years—smiling, joking with Ritsu, arguing with him sometimes, sulking when he feels like it. He laughs again.

He’s so different. But he’s still Shigeo. And he still has something behind his eyes. At dinner, when their eyes meet, Mrs. Kageyama’s shadow self reaches out to her son’s shadow self, still.

Which is a strange sensation, because Shigeo isn’t repressing his emotions anymore, or his powers, either. But there’s still something there, something or someone existing in reserve behind his eyes. She second-guesses herself about it at first, particularly when Mob laughs or scowls or displays his powers and emotions like he’s never thought twice about it. He seems so… whole. It’s not a child made of shadows anymore. But in other moments—when he’s watching Ritsu or when he doesn’t have much to say, when he hesitates, when he has a forgetful spell—Mrs. Kageyama is sure she sees it. Another presence within her son.

Call it motherly instincts or call it Mrs. Kageyama’s shadow self resonating with her son’s shadow self—either way, she knows. Shigeo Kageyama is still hiding another side within himself, even though that other side is happier now.

So one day, a few months after the incident, once she’s sure Shigeo is really stable like this… Mrs. Kageyama catches Shigeo before school and asks him to come home and have a talk with her after school.

He looks surprised, then nervous, then pleased.

“Yes, mom,” he says. And that’s that.

Talking to a teenager is easier than they said! That’s Mrs. Kageyama’s first, indignant thought. And then right on the heels of that thought comes what am I getting myself into?!

After school, Shigeo comes right home. Mr. Kageyama will stay at work for a while, and Ritsu has student council today; it’s the perfect time. Mrs. Kageyama sits down with her son and finds herself at a loss, not knowing exactly what to say.

Shigeo waits, watching her seriously.

“Shige,” she says, and feels her shadow self rise up in her, telling her to just break down and cry. Her voice wobbles as she tries again. “Shige, I want to tell you something. I think you’re old enough…”

Mortified alarm flashes across Shigeo’s face. Oh no! She waves her hands, trying to erase what he’s thinking.

“About your psychic powers,” she says hastily.

He looks relieved for a split second, and then his eyes widen. His hair rises up off his forehead, and she hears a slosh as something happens to the water in the sink. He’s scared? Of all things, she had not expected Shigeo to be frightened of talking about his powers. She expected him to be irritated and dismissive, like the parenting advice says that teenagers always are. The parenting advice was wrong. Again.

Suddenly reaching her limit, Mrs. Kageyama throws out all the parenting advice she’s ever heard and just… tells the truth.

“Or, ah, not about psychic powers exactly. About… Shige, I think something runs in our family, and it’s not powers, but I think you and I share it.”

Shige’s eyes grow impossibly wider. He waits like his mother is about to reveal the secrets of the universe, and in a way, she supposes, she is.

“Tell me if I’m wrong,” she says carefully. “But you have more than one “self”, don’t you?”

He opens his mouth, and nothing comes out.

Nothing at all.

Mrs. Kageyama says, “You split yourself in half, back then… I saw it happen. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know how to help, because I… I didn’t know what to do about my shadow self, either.”

“Your shadow self, mom?”

His voice is quiet, so quiet. Mrs. Kageyama nods, feeling her shadow self sob and writhe in her head. It’s an unsightly thing. It’s so possessive, so emotional. She can’t let it do whatever it wants. That would hurt her children, and she loves her children, so, so much. She would never hurt them.

“I kept it quiet because I thought…” she takes a sharp breath. “It’s too much, and I wanted to keep you and Ritsu… comfortable. Parents can’t ask their children to carry their worries.”

“What do you mean?” Shigeo asks. He sounds so young, and so hurt.

“I never asked you what it was like to have powers,” she blurts out, and the wave of guilt that follows is tremendous, but so is the relief. “I’m so sorry. I let you deal with everything on your own. I didn’t realize…”

Shigeo’s lips are trembling. He says, “Mom, you have a shadow self too?”

“You’re just like me,” she says, and how, how did she never know that honesty could feel so right? “I knew you were just like me, and I didn’t tell you. I thought you could deal with it on your own. I’m so sorry, Shige.”

“Mom,” he says, and starts crying.

To hell with parenting advice. To hell with keeping her shadow self from shattering the relaxed facade of the Kageyama household. Shigeo deserves better.

Mrs. Kageyama stumbles out of her kneeling posture and grabs her son and holds him close.

“Shige,” she says into his hair. “Shige. Shige.”

“I thought it was just me,” Shigeo gasps. “I thought it was just me in the dark.”

And, with a start, she realizes why his shadow self is different now. They switched places, didn’t they? The Shigeo she’s talking to right now is the one her shadow self used to stare at longingly across the dinner table.

“So you’re that one,” she says, with all the shaky, weepy tenderness she's been repressing for years. “Hello. I’m so pleased to finally meet you again.”

Shige sobs. Everything in the room is floating. She could cry. She does.

Then Shigeo pushes himself out of the hug and looks at his mother, trembling but clearly happy and calm in a way she’s rarely ever seen him, even when he was young.

“You're wrong,” he says. “I am myself. I accepted both parts.”

“So you’re—” Mrs. Kageyama stops, thinking that over. Does it not matter anymore, to Shigeo? Which “self” is which?

Could it not matter to her, either, someday?

Tentatively, she lets more of herself out.

“I’m so sorry, Shige. I listened to the wrong advice. I should be the one helping you figure this out, not the other way around.”

Shigeo looks her in the eye. He says, “Adults can change too. It’s not too late.”

She looks back, and in his eyes she sees both of him, and she knows that now he sees both of her too. And she is not afraid to show him.

Not anymore.

[omgiamwish]

This prompt is vague haha but I just love your version of ???% Shigeo and would love to see more of him! Can be whomp, can be intense, can even just be…anything yeah haha. I just really like it (also loved your fic that you wrote with ???%!!)

Oh god. Teru is going to die.

He hadn’t expected an explosion, hadn’t put up a barrier. The heat and pain caught him off guard, so he hadn’t even been able to stop himself from being tossed away, or been able to cushion his fall. How embarrassing. How… stupid.

He hopes Kageyama-kun doesn’t see-

Wait. Kageyama-kun. Did he get caught in the explosion too? He’s- he’s better than Teru though, so he probably was able to put up a barrier in time… but he’s not better. No one is better than anyone else. Hasn’t Teru learned anything? But- but Kageyama-kun is stronger at least. That’s- that’s just objectively true.

Teru tries to push himself off the ground, to sit up. His arm gives out and he falls back with a choked cry. What hurts more? His arm? His chest? His leg?

A blast of power shakes the area.

Oh. Teru relaxes some. Whatever happens to him, Kageyama-kun is okay at least.

Teru really is for sure going to die though. Even if his current injuries aren’t enough to do him in, which they probably are with the way every breath is an increasingly painful struggle… Kageyama-kun’s footsteps are too loud.

Kageyama-kun doesn’t hurt people. But that doesn’t matter when he’s like this, does it? He hopes- he hopes Kageyama-kun doesn’t remember when he wakes up. He hopes-

Kageyama-kun steps into view and Teru stops thinking about anything other than breathing through his fear and pain. A tear rolls off the side of his face and into his ear.

“Kage… yama… kun,” he wheezes, and can say no more. Blank white eyes bore into his own and all he can think is, ‘are you going to kill me?’

But Kageyama-kun only turns away after a moment. He doesn’t leave. But he doesn’t attack Teru either, or do anything else.

The pain starts to lessen and Teru realizes that it doesn’t really matter if he’s dying anyway. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath-

Huh? Each breath comes easier. Nausea and lightheadedness dissipate. Teru lifts his arm to watch a nasty burn slowly fade to reveal perfectly healthy skin.

It’s not long before Teru risks sitting up and finds his body to be completely fine. His clothes are ruined, though. … Just like when that broccoli grew last year.

“Kageyama-kun…” he looks up at the figure standing so close. “Did you heal me?” There’s no other explanation, of course. Still, he asks. He doesn’t know what else to say.

Kageyama-kun hunches his shoulders. A moment later, his hair lays flat.

“Huh? What happe- Ah! Hanazawa-kun!” Kageyama-kun turns around, himself again, and looks Teru up and down. “Are you alright?”

Teru blinks. Then a smile tugs his face and he huffs a small, relieved laugh. “Thanks to you, Kageyama-kun.” He pulls himself to his feet and claps his friend on the shoulder. “You’re amazing as always.”

[isa-ah]

I love system mob and Shigeo for so many reasons and one of them is the comedy potential. Mob and Shigeo having full blown conversations in their head and they don't realize they've been silently staring at the wall for 12 minutes while the others make sure they don't walk into anything. Mob and Teru being Not Straight and the entire time Shigeo's just judging him. Mobs just trying to bat him away with a newspaper so he can have his damn date in peace. I think Shigeo being fucking Goofy as well as, y'know, literally terrifying is underrated.

literally the funniest thing I can think of is teru leaning in to kiss mob and shigeo grabbing his face one handed with That One Expression and simply saying. "No." 💀

I agree though! shigeos fear over acceptance and feeling like tsubomi was the only one who would understand him I think would mean his sexuality is Off Limits for A While. like warming up to the people in mobs life Takes A Minute. so doing any additional soul searching now on the other side of puberty? pump the fucking breaks for a second

and its doubly funny that teruki who's been on the other side of him twice also has a bad impression bc he did it babe! he saw you at your worst and he likes you anyway! he saw you do terrible things and he stood by you until the bitter end! but he also choked you out and tried to explode your bouquet so fuck that guy.

reigen spinning some tall tale and mobs like wow shishou :) you're so amazing :) and then he says smtn else and shigeo drops a flat one liner that suckerpunches him & contradicts everything he just said so blatantly he's left fumbling to catch up. (and worst of all: it was really fucking FUNNY.)

which brings me to my next slide: the first person in mobs life that shigeo falls in with is absolutely tome. imo. she's blunt with her feelings, she's up front, she's sardonic and silly and she's a girl. safe all the way down for someone getting their sea legs. also imo tome is gay so it eases his concerns right. vibes.

one last consideration: shigeo enjoys his powers. they're a part of him. he wants to flex his wings. so him sparring w ritsu (gently) and shou (less so) in a way mob would NEVER before. but it's good! it's healthy to blow off that steam! esp bc shous a firecracker and also desperately needs to blow off his extra power. do u see my vision

[russenoire]

7, 14 for the ask game :) 🌻

from this MP100 ask game! :}

7: what’s the most hilarious moment to you?

[note: i'm terrible at picking 'one favorite thing' as a general rule, and have too many Most Hilarious Moments to count (anime and manga). so i'm just gonna list random ones that kill me if more ppl ask me this question.]

and i called it! i will answer question 7 as many times as people ask; i simply adore this story's flavor of dry humor.

anime: in s1e8 during ritsu's attempt to pick a fight with shigeo, shigeo sincerely congratulates ritsu on finally obtaining ESP after his younger brother attacks him with it. he then launches into embarrassing parent mode and starts describing, for anyone within earshot, how ritsu used to bawl his eyes out when they were younger because he couldn't bend spoons. ritsu doesn't deny this; he just says, 'that hadn't changed up until recently.'

manga: the meat omake. OMFG. i can't decide what's funniest about it: shigeo's absolutely based refusal to clarify an awkward misunderstanding, or teru's emptying reigen's wallet and hanging it out to dry.

14: are there any MP100 fanfics you HAVE to rec?

my tastes lean towards deep character study and the whump side of angst, so take that as you will. most of these are ongoing/incomplete. in no particular order:

kegare (can be translated as 'spiritual defilement' in japanese) by zillasafe. an organization looking to solve the global energy crisis kidnaps shigeo after the confession arc for their aims. skilled scrambling of narrative chronology and use of an unreliable narrator, visceral depictions of the effects of long-term sensory deprivation. [mature, graphic violence, 95K words]

a breach of trust by phantomrose96. what if mogami'd sunk his claws into shigeo early... and he and teru never crossed paths? preternaturally naturalistic dialogue, willingness to challenge fanon interpretations of canon characters, thoughtful examinations of how trauma can warp the psyche into violence, OCs that give me life. it's a serious long-read. [teen+, graphic violence, 384.6K words]

the brassica heresy by scribefindegil. captures the unnerving atmosphere of the psycho helmet arc perfectly. what if psycho helmet got his wish? and why doesn't anyone remember shigeo? a mystery from tsubomi's perspective, and she's fascinating. [teen+, creator chose not to warn, 27.5K words]

a murder of crows and a kaleidoscope of butterflies by redberrysoda. slowly sketches out a seductive world of palace intrigue and burgeoning trust/love between the princes of two kingdoms. shoumob. i'm not much of a shipper, but i found myself wanting more of this pair in this world. [teen+, 23K words]

blackhole by dmyy20. river-of-consciousness internal monologue that ripped me apart in all the best of ways. what if dimple hadn't been there to talk shigeo down after he saw his family in the fire? [teen+, graphic violence, 2.1K words]

childlike wonder, in the palm of our hands by nanayon. high school slice-of-life in which shigeo stretches his wings tests the limits of his ESP, with ritsu's help. exploration of dissociative identity disorder/system dynamics, lovely sibling bonding, shigeo learning to enjoy his powers for once, dammit. [gen rated, 11.6K words]

can i recommend one of mine? i'm proudest of this one... a friend described it as melancholic fluff: kain no shirushi (the mark of cain). it's a slice-of-life story where thirty-something shigeo's quiet intensity and his powers end up intimidating others unintentionally... and then later on purpose. from my summary on AO3: 'Inspired by that scene in canon where high-school boys attempt to bully young Shigeo and he ends up saving them from his posse. There, he isn't yet sure how to defend himself without causing others physical harm. Here, he's managed to figure something out…' [teen+, 2.9k words]