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One sleeve falls down over his wrist. He pushes it back above his elbow.
Mob has fixed his sleeve eight times that day.
It's never annoying enough to consider rolling them up. Eventually Ritsu stops by the sink where Shigeo struggles to keep his sleeves dry, and volunteers to fold them up and out of the way. Shigeo does Ritsu's share of dishes in return. He really doesn't mind. The water is intensely warm and every second his hands are submerged, it feels like rehabilitation.
~~~
Humiliation wasn't the tinder for it, possibly shame, the feeling of hot coals searing his brain from an hour earlier, when he was seated at the dinner table. Ritsu was looking rather uncomfortable, unusually quiet as their parents praised and chided both of them, but their voices were a distant knocking in the walls of Shigeo's mind, bending and breaking waves of static dripping out of his ears.
The existence of other espers...Mob's fight with Hanazawa, his memories of hurting Ritsu, or lack thereof. There was also something off about Ritsu lately that Shigeo couldn't identify.
His own existence, his own power. It was suffocating him, this gift. It felt a lot like Hanazawa's hands around his windpipe, or maybe it was just the ache of finger-striped bruises under the scarf he'd been wearing recently.
He felt like he'd been baptized in formaldehyde, the experience soaked into his skin because of its crucial position in his life. It marked another slip of all the stillness and balance a normal mind possess through its accustomed conception of familiarity and their reality. If such a balance existed, Mob thought, it would definitely be zero.
"-oing to eat, Shige?" His mother's voice sliced through his soft insecurities.
He blinked. Oh.
"Yep." He obliged, and immediately as the food touched his tongue, his saliva turned to acid and his guts soured.
The meat his mother cooked throughly was raw between his teeth, and despite being overwhelmed with nausea, Shigeo bowed his head and quickly excused himself from the table.
Reflexive tears evaporated off his eyelashes and bled down the crease of his cheek. Shigeo readjusted his scarf and apologised to his parents.
~~~
He does the dishes to make it up to them. Ritsu just stares on in silence, palm resting on the brand new textbook laid before him, cellophane adhesing to his hand.
"No studying at the table," His mother reminds him.
He hears the hinges of the front door groan. The cellophane crinkles.
There is a monolith tree beside the grave with four matching dates. No doubt the tree survives on its own tenacity, it’s easy to see from the limbs missing and the trunk charred black from strike after strike of lightning over the decades. And yet, it lives as the largest in the Cemetery.
Maybe the tree is possessed.
Roots claw out of the ground, vehement and angry, one robust root in particular has menacingly wedged under the grave marker, slowly shifting the weight of the stone until a fissure split into its face.
It is a grave that’s a bit further away from the other clusters of white grave markers, knit closely like lace and geometric abstraction. There’s a reason for it, Mob supposes as he perches atop the gravestone.
Shigeo stays put until the stone cannot steal any more heat from him and his body reaches a homeostasis. He will probably still catch a cold from the effort.
Not much later and the temperature has dropped with the sun, painting everything in a rapturous and eerie glow. Transforming glossy stone faces into slivers of orange peels and burning matchwood. Long shadows scorch the ground in cubist formations.
The monolith tree's limbs cast into the sky and give under the force of the wind, like a saint reaching towards the face of God. Shigeo adjusts his scarf.
This world is just a frightful gateway into forbidden dreams and complex spans of time, separateness, and dislocation. Mob drew notice to this at a very young age, clinging to the horrors of aeon-long deaths and the spirits that wandered this bleak world with hopes of becoming whole.
It makes the graveyard feel safe and familiar in all of its vacancy and his body curls around his knees to stay warm.
Shigeo is not dead, but neither is he alive- in the sense that he exists on the hem of everyone's consciousness, like a mirage on asphalt. By his own efforts, he begins to feel visible to his peers. Shigeo found it rewarding to struggle towards a goal by his own composition, sweat and blood sticky on his legs, forgetting briefly the significance his power played in his life.
The power to laugh in the face of God.
It is an enabler and a disabler.
He wants to act by his own accord, he wants to be told what to do.
The wind dies down, and in the sudden and vast noiselessness, grass is brittle underfoot.
He can distinguish a form weaving through the graves, Shigeo knows it’s not a spirit, so it has to be Ritsu, for only his brother could find him here.
Mob is so predictable.
"Hey..." He says, stopping at the foot of the grave, unsure if he should walk on it. Ritsu sports a thick coat and a strange noncommittal tone.
"Brother, why'd you come out here?" Shigeo gently inquires, the fabric of his scarf muffling his voice.
"I was honestly going to ask you the same thing." Though Ritsu doesn’t sound particularly curious. "This place isn't exactly conveniently near-by."
Mob hums his reply. True. It’s a little out of the way, but quiet and hospitable.
"Why didn't you finish dinner?"
".....I've not been hungry."
Ritsu's gaze could turn marble into soapstone. He reconsiders his answer.
"I haven't been feeling well. Dinner tasted weird, I couldn't stomach it." Mob exhales and Ritsu takes a deep breath.
"Is it your power?" Ritsu says, or rather whispers and it’s not necessarily a question.
'Yes.' Shigeo wants to say, but he's doubtful and it's his self-preservation, his impermeable barrier and the calcium in his skeleton. ‘No’, and Ritsu will surely call his bluff again.
"I guess." Shrugging, Shigeo lets his legs drop and his heels bounce off the cold stone.
Ritsu sighs, combing the hair out of his face. He glances at the grave.
"You'll be cursed."
"It’s a murderer's grave." Shigeo says, sparing the details since Ritsu is eyeing the correlating dates and names. "So maybe."
It is a family, three murdered and one suicide. Ritsu kicks at the monolith's root arching out of the dirt.
The silence that follows isn't terrible, but empty and depersonalizing. The sun sets behind unchanging mountains, so solid and valid, amazingly unlike human beings.
Winding bloodless hands up in the ends of his scarf, Shigeo knew the difference between what is, and is not imperative for Ritsu to concern himself with. He’d rather sever all of the neurons in his brain than oppress his little brother with his troubles. Ritsu already has enough to maintain, grades, a seat in the Student Council, and even their parent’s pride rests on his shoulders.
Everything Shigeo has failed in representing.
Mob adjusts his scarf. He will not be a distraction.
“Maybe I’m already cursed.” Shigeo’s says without thinking.
“What?”
“Maybe I’ve been cursed,” He reiterates, slipping off the gravestone. “This whole time.”
Ritsu’s nonplussed expression rapidly degrades into something callous and insecure. He turns away.
"Let’s go back." Ritsu redirects swiftly.
Ritsu walks ahead, dragging the millstone fastened to his neck. Begging to know anything but forgiveness, begging Mob to cleave open his own skull and let his thoughts boil out, because communication is his prerogative, and the sharpest weapon in his arsenal. And that's what a brother should do.
Mob won't though, weighing the effort against the effect. Shigeo knows nothing but pressure in his head, and even if he wanted to bite, his jaws are wired shut by his own pulse. Even if he seeks forgiveness like an addict, the understanding he desires is thwarted by the burden of his power, and it is savage to the point of shaking the marrow in his bones.
If only his countenance could be deciphered. If Mob could be salient for one person, for once in his life.
For the most important person in his life.
For the little brother who’s everything Shigeo isn’t.
He follows Ritsu, briskly driven by the whips of chilled air upon his back. Once in the city limits, they find a sidewalk and streetlights soon illuminate their path.
He wants to know.
Shigeo's guts twist and his diaphragm forces the air out of his lungs, but he wants to know.
Is he another chore?
It’s always more painful to ask Ritsu things, because he can tell when he lies, probably just like how it hurts Ritsu that Shigeo evades his questions.
Or so he thinks.
He thinks in endless, taxing cycles.
"Did...did mother send you to get me?" Mob asks, his voice stretched like the membrane of a drumhead. It is flat and disjointed. He would despise it, if he could be any other way.
Ritsu's shoes scuff on the sidewalk as he halts, swiveling around to face Shigeo. He studies his brother, hunched from the unforeseen cold, frail shoulders draped with his scarf, sleeves still hiked up around his elbows.
Ritsu entertains the sheer difference between Shigeo's physical and psychological states. The gulf that yawns between them, just like their own minds, only constructed around the same base.
Shigeo succumbs to a violent shiver. His round face gleams in the streetlight, almost looking artificial or waxy like adipocere. His expression is continuously placid.
"...No." Ritsu's breath smokes like incense in the glacial air. "I was looking for you."
Stepping forward, he tugs on the folds of Shigeo's forgotten sleeves, pulling them down over his thin, frigid arms until only Mob's finger tips are visible.
In the lapse of a second, Ritsu’s back is moving steadily away from him and Shigeo is left as an autopsy on stainless steel. Insignificant, viscous emotion in his veins.
A wave of saline sweeps over Mob's pallet. His sinuses burn equal parts familiar and foreign, an unpleasantly honest sensation attempting to pull his heart apart like saturated paper.
He readjusts his scarf.