#if people care enough ill prolly reblog this w new shit when i finish a new part so <3 yippee

[quirkle2]

hi who wants excerpts from my wip fic recondite. don't answer that ur getting them anyway

Tome tuts, juts her lip out a bit into a pout as she stares at the rusted ceiling, arms crossed over her chest. Shigeo watches her watch the leaves sway there, hanging onto vines with skinny stems that the breeze pecks at. “Of course I’m a genius, I know this. It’s just… frustrating. It’s like I don’t even know what I don’t know.” Shigeo feels something in him pause, and he finds himself understanding those words in a visceral, molecular way, but he feels he’s linking them to unrelated things. Things that have nothing to do with math.

-

The energy in the room coils and bursts out like a water balloon, hard-hitting and sharp. Reigen yelps from behind him over the ear-splitting whine. Shigeo can feel an odd prickling of static along his skin in little dots, like acid spraying out from the fissures in the spirit’s bloated soulskin. Somehow he tastes every splatter even when none of it reaches his tongue—it’s a motley of sparkling water and freon, cold against his skin until the aftertaste gets uncomfortably warm and sweltering in his joints. His palms feel like dry ice. He hears Reigen make an odd noise, something between a whine and a gasp, as the rustling of clothing spells out one of his strange, quick squirms. “Holy hell, Mob—you didn’t have to go that hard!” One of the cardboard boxes in front of him sizzle and crack at the edges, some unknown chemical interaction between corrugate and psychic mana. A flap along the top falls off and hits the ground pathetically, smoking from pure heat and making a low crumble sound in his ears that sounds quite alien. He didn’t. And judging by the ever-so-slight tremor of the building, he’d say he shouldn’t have. He hadn’t even meant to, is the concerning thing.

-

“I just mean my powers… I didn’t mean for that to… ya’know,” Shigeo explains, and Teruki’s goofy persona softens into something more genuine, “They’ve been kinda weird today. I don’t know why.” His partner hums, sitting in the quiet music for a while. His fingers drum against Shigeo’s knee to the beat. “You have seemed… preoccupied, lately.” Shigeo cannot help but notice that he says it carefully. Like he’s afraid of using the wrong word. He can’t think of a synonym for preoccupied that could possibly offend him—he’s heard it all before, anyway, from other people. From people who didn’t care nearly as much as Teruki. No, Teruki isn’t like that. Teruki doesn’t think he’s oblivious. Something ugly pierces his gut there, at the thought, at the idea that Shigeo could think so lowly of his partner like that. Not everyone is out to get you.

-

“Are you doin’ alright?” Ritsu utters slowly, softly, and Shigeo thinks back to a few weeks ago, on Teruki’s (Reigen’s) couch, and how the answer he’d given to a very similar question had apparently been the wrong one. Ritsu asks this question a lot, though. And Shigeo never answers with anything but affirmatives. “Yeah,” he gives, because it feels impossible to say anything else. This feels like a ritual to him—Ritsu asks, Shigeo lies, they part ways. He doesn’t have it in him today to disturb the peace. “I’m fine.” He lets the answer hang in the air between them for a moment, lets it settle atop their shoulders like it always does, because the answer is light and made of helium and Shigeo wants it to retain that nothingness. It’s a nothing answer. It’s a nothing answer to a question about a nothing problem. Simple, really. He counts the seconds it takes Ritsu to say it. He makes it to seven and a half before his brother opens his mouth. “If you’re sure… but I’m always h—” —ere if you need me, Shigeo finishes in his head, recites it by heart. He knows. He knows Ritsu is here if he needs him. He appreciates it, he really does. But it’s a nothing problem, and it therefore needs a nothing solution.