Work Text:
Ritsu works seven days a week. Ritsu also cooks and cleans, does their laundry, the grocery shopping. Never asks for anything. And whenever Mob offers in a small voice to set the table or clean the bathroom, Ritsu only smiles and leads him away and says, “I got it, nii-san. You should relax.”
After four months of living together, the shame of freeloading is almost more than Mob can bear. When he’d lived with their parents, it wasn’t so bad; he’d helped around the house as much as he could. Now, with Ritsu (who needs no help, who needs nothing at all, who shoos him away if he so much as glances at a dirty plate), Mob lies on his futon all day while the acid of his guilt eats away at the wall in his mind that for years has held back his emotions and his powers—on the condition that he stay safe, stay inside. Stay calm.
Mob wakes one night from some troubling dream to find his small lamp flickering a distorted Morse code into the darkness. The flickering quickens until the interspersed slices of dark and light are so thin it’s as if he’s viewing a fully lit room through rapidly blinking eyelids. The lamp floats into the air and hangs there about two meters from the floor. Slowly other objects rise to join it: his phone tethered to its charger, his laptop, a stack of manga.
Mob sits up and gently takes hold of the lamp’s cord, reels it in like a fluorescent fish until it’s close enough to grasp and place back on the ground next to his futon. The lightbulb trembles in its socket. His powers itch. He pushes them down. Breathes. Clicks the lamp’s switch a few times, and on the fourth try, the room settles back into unbroken darkness. Around him the other objects descend as tired shadows.
The last time his powers leaked this badly in the night was before Mob turned eighteen, before his parents stopped trying to coax him out of the house.
If he doesn’t take care of this, he might start breaking things again.
Tomorrow is Friday, and on Fridays, Ritsu works late. He’ll be tired when he gets home. If Mob can ease his burden even a little, maybe this guilt will subside. Maybe his powers will calm down.
Mob slips out of his room around four in the afternoon, half fugitive, half sleepwalker. The hallway is bright. He gets stuck staring at a cloud of dust motes swirling in a slant of light, then snaps himself out of it and manages to shower for the first time in days, though he gets stuck there, too, watching the water run through his fingers and over his upturned palm.
An hour and a half later he stands dripping and dizzy in the kitchen, phone in hand. The kitchen always makes him feel unwell, with its looming family of sharp steel appliances, the microwave, the fridge, the dishwasher, the oven with its five-eyed stovetop, all hives of electricity, all humming and hazardous. What would happen if his powers snapped and spilled into one of those buzzing metal caskets? Into all of them? A fire. An explosion. He could destroy Ritu’s beautiful apartment—the apartment that Ritsu rents by himself, furnishes by himself, that he cleans and cares for by himself, even as he cares for Mob. All while Mob hides like a parasite in the windowless dark of the second bedroom—which Ritsu says belongs to Mob, but which Mob knows is only the guest room that Ritsu lets him stay in.
He squeezes his phone in his damp hand, then puts it on the counter and scrolls through his messages until he finds the text with his mother’s recipe.
He turns on the stove.
Ritsu’s surprise at finding Mob in the kitchen is even more intense than Mob had anticipated. “Nii-san!” he says, voice going loud and high with concern. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes.” Mob’s voice is as calm and empty as ever, but he can’t stop his face from flushing unexpectedly with embarrassment. He keeps his eyes trained on the eggs he’s clumsily beating. “I just, I knew you’d be home late…and I thought you might be tired, so I thought…that maybe. I’d try to…”
He trails off as Ritsu walks slowly towards him, a sharp dark shape enlarging in his peripheral vision.
Something like fear makes it hard to keep speaking. Ritsu is standing just behind him now, at his shoulder, very close to him in his dark suit and very still, watching and listening in silence. Mob’s hands feel unsteady as he pours the egg mixture into the pan. Why? Does he think Ritsu might be angry with him? Why would he think that? Ritsu has never been angry with him, not since they were very young children.
“Ah,” Mob says. “Sorry. I.” But he doesn’t know what he wants to say, and so he makes himself look at his brother instead, searching for reassurance in his face.
Ritsu doesn’t return his gaze immediately. Instead he surveys the scattered ingredients, the splattered sauce, the chipped bowl, the bandage on Mob’s left index finger—every bit of the mess Mob has made—with an expression so devoid of emotion that it almost looks like Mob’s own face whenever he catches sight of himself in a mirror, only on Ritsu it looks cold, so cold, almost cruel. But it thaws in an instant when he finally meets Mob’s eyes and smiles.
“Hey.” Ritsu puts a hand on Mob’s tensed shoulder. “Nii-san. Thanks. I’ll set the table.”
His smile and his touch ease Mob’s anxieties at once. Flushing with tentative pride this time, Mob swallows and looks down and nods, eyes wide and fixed on the omelet that he’s trying and failing to fold the way their mother does.
Ritsu is so kind to him, even when he's tired and stressed from work. It makes Mob happy to help him, even if only in this small way.
“It smells great,” says Ritsu, sitting down.
“I,” says Mob. “I overcooked it. I’m sorry.”
“It looks perfect. Just like Mom’s.” Ritsu watches as Mob picks up both plates. “Need help?”
Mob maneuvers around the kitchen island. “I got it,” he says, right before he trips.
Immediately Ritsu pushes away from the table, chair screeching. He shoots to his feet, trying to reach Mob, to help him, but it’s too late. The plates fly forward out of Mob’s hands—and now the rice will scatter, the overcooked omelets will smear their sauce onto the floor, their grandmother’s old dinner plates will shatter into a thousand pieces. Because of Mob. Ritsu will step on a jagged ceramic shard and have to miss work because of Mob.
Arms outstretched and reaching for the soaring plates, Mob stumbles again and finally falls. And just as his face meets the polished tile with a crack, his powers burst from him like a flung net, filling the room with blinding violet light and catching the plates only centimeters from the floor. Like a pair of flying saucers, they float serenely to the table before settling themselves down among the silverware, not a grain of rice out of place. The violet light dissolves.
Sprawled out on his stomach, Mob cranes his neck to look up. He feels one nostril turn on like a faucet, and blood drips over his lips to his chin.
“Ritsu,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Ritsu stands over him, frozen, his own psychic barrier forming a dense, glowing shell around his body.
The appearance of his powers differs from that of Mob’s mostly in texture, as if someone had taken the uniform interlocking latticework of Mob’s aura and shattered it into mismatched confetti fragments, ground it up. Through the irregular indigo of that veil, Ritsu’s mouth twitches like he’s trying to smile, but he has that cold, cruel look in his eyes again, and this time Mob recognizes that it is, above all, a look of fear.
It’s been years since he’s seen Mob’s powers erupt like that.
“It’s okay,” says Ritsu in a strange tight voice. “Sorry. Of course it’s okay. Of course it’s…”
He backs away slowly, then bumps into the table. His powers spasm, and beside their plates steaming innocently with warm food, their spoons jerk and twist into twin helices.
“Actually,” says Ritsu. He finally manages to smile, though this only makes him look more frightened. “I think I forgot something at the office.” He turns away from Mob, the smoldering shield of his aura still lighting up the room. “I’m sorry.” Receding footsteps. “It won’t take long.” Putting on his shoes. “Sorry,” Ritsu says again. The door opens and closes quietly.
He leaves Mob alone in the apartment, alone with the stillness and the ticking clock counting up and up. The room looks dim and jaundiced in the absence of his brother’s powers. The long, pitchdark windows reflect everything, reveal nothing.
Mob stays on the floor. Something is building inside of him: pressure, an explosion. A young man with a bloody nose looks at him through a black mirror-window. The young man’s hair sways like he’s in space.
What is he feeling? What is trying to come out? He was told once that naming your emotions can make them more manageable, can diminish their power.
Guilt, mixed with sorrow. And love. An awful, hopeless sort of love, always malfunctioning, always miscarried, always wrong.
He thinks the words in his mind, but it doesn’t stop this feeling from growing in his chest and throat and skull. This perilous feeling. Maybe he didn’t name it right. He can never tell what he’s feeling, until it’s too late—and now it’s almost certainly too late, because whatever this is, it’s a supernova inside of him, and it’s going to come out of him now, out of his eyes, his fingers, his mouth. Out of every electrified follicle of hair on his scalp. Ritsu will return to a heap of rubble with Mob at the center.
No. Reverse it, collapse it. Instead of a supernova, a black hole.
He wraps his arms around himself and makes it happen. Now everything Mob feels is a black hole, and every new feeling feeds it, a fruit fattened with poison, and Mob swallows it down. Pushes it down, wrestles and plunges it down the internal tower of himself—and it descends, and sinks, and is buried in the most secret cellars of his viscera, in the deepest parts of him.
Some time later he half-wakes to someone picking him up off the floor, laying him down on the couch, wiping the dried blood from his face with a warm washcloth.
Fingers gently palpate the tender bridge of his nose.
“It isn’t broken,” Ritsu says softly.
“Ritsu,” croaks Mob. “I’m sorry.”
Mob’s eyes blink open, and he’s surprised to find that the apartment is still intact, only the lights have been dimmed, and the food that had been left to cool and congeal on the dining table has been cleared away. He doesn’t know what time it is. Late.
Ritsu’s hands withdraw from Mob’s face to retrieve something from the coffee table. Sitting up, Mob accepts the cup of milk his brother offers him. His fingers are cold but the chilled glass is colder, and the milk feels good on his slow, hot tongue.
“No,” says Ritsu, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left.”
He sits beside Mob on the couch, and despite his clear contrition, his posture is actually a little looser than usual, which comes as both a surprise and a relief. Ritsu brings something to his lips and takes a small, measured sip. Whiskey. That explains it. Neat like their mom used to drink when she was stressed, only she would sip it from an old mug in her pink robe, whereas Ritsu looks almost unbearably cool with his crystal tumbler and dark suit, collar and jacket undone, no tie.
Ritsu rarely drinks. It’s always a strange sight. His little brother.
There’s a lump in Mob’s throat. “It’s my fault,” he says. “I shouldn’t have…”
Ritsu shakes his head. “I’m glad you did. It made me happy. To come home to…”
“But I messed it up. I…”
“No. It was nothing, nii-san. It was literally nothing. I have no idea why it…why I…”
Long pauses stretch between their words as they both think carefully before speaking. Breathing. Sipping their drinks. Starting and stopping. They’re not used to this. Mob loves Ritsu more than anything, but their exchanges are normally somewhat limited. Week after week, the same basic pattern: Mob asking about Ritsu’s day, then Ritsu describing his day while suppressing the instinct to ask about Mob’s in return because all of Mob’s days are the same and he doesn’t want to make him feel bad about that, then a cordial parting followed by Ritsu wandering back into Mob’s room about an hour later to ask cryptically how Mob is doing and if he's okay or if he’d like to talk and Mob saying he’s fine and no and then asking Ritsu if he’s okay and Ritsu saying yes he’s fine too before asking what Mob would like for dinner, and Mob responding that anything is fine with him and does Ritsu need any help? No, Ritsu doesn’t.
“I thought things were better,” Mob says finally. “But my powers… I don’t know what it is, but recently they’ve been…” His fingers tighten around the glass in his hand. “Maybe I should go back to Mom and Dad’s.”
“No,” snaps Ritsu at once, voice raising suddenly. “No,” he repeats more quietly. Sighs. “They don’t understand. I know they try, but they ask too much of you. They aren’t good for you.”
“But I’m not good for you. Not when you don’t need my help with anything. Not when you’re still—afraid of me.” Ritsu makes a dissenting sound, but Mob gently cuts him off. “You are,” he says softly.
Ritsu hunches over to rest his arms on his knees.
“I am,” he concedes after a long silence. “Yeah. I am. You’ve gotten so good at controlling your powers, nii-san, but I’ll always know they’re there. I can feel how strong they are. How much stronger than mine they are. And as long as I’m weaker than you, I think I’ll always be afraid.” Now that the lights are dim in the apartment, the dark mirrors on the wall have turned back into windows, and they can see the moon through them now, an empty black circle with a white crescent rim. Ritsu continues, “I wanted you to come live with me so badly. I wanted to make life easy for you. It wasn’t just for your sake. I’d hoped it would quiet your powers even more, fix my—fear. But I’m starting to see the flaws in my approach. I’m starting to see that I’ve worried you in a different way. Even though I only wanted to help.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mob. He can control his expression but he can’t control the tear that finally escapes his eye and slides down his cheek as he speaks, or the one that dives out after it. “It’s just…I want to help you, too, Ritsu. I’m your big brother. You should be able to rely on me. You shouldn’t have to be afraid of me.”
He wouldn’t mind if the whole world were afraid of him, if only Ritsu were spared.
“What should I do?” he asks as more tears come. “I’ll do anything. I wish I could give up these powers, I wish I could give them to you.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Then I wish I could help you get stronger.”
Another silence. The longest yet.
Ritsu flicks a finger, and the motorized curtains begin to draw themselves over the windowed west wall with a whirring mechanical sound so soft it’s almost inaudible. Swaths of white fabric swallow the lights of the city, the moon and the stars.
“Actually,” says Ritsu. “Maybe there’s something we could try.”
“Really?”
Mob’s tears slow and stop as he waits for an explanation.
“Ritsu?” he says after a minute or two.
Ritsu looks straight ahead. “I’ve never told you this before, nii-san. But a long time ago I figured out what makes my powers stronger.”
The edges of the curtains meet and close over the last dark sliver of night.
“It’s guilt,” he says.
Mob waits. Then, faintly, “I don’t understand.”
“It’s pretty simple. The guiltier I feel, the stronger I become. That’s why I started doing those awful things back in middle school, when my powers first awakened. That was after you started staying home, though, so it was easy to hide it from you. Anyway. I won’t go into detail, but I got a lot stronger during that time. And I never stopped. I’m a lot worse than you think I am, nii-san. I’m terrible.”
“You’re not terrible. Please don’t say that. I don’t really get it, but I know that you would never—”
“I’ve had to be more careful as an adult,” Ritsu goes on, cutting him off, “and I’ve developed a tolerance over time, like an addict. But I cultivate guilt wherever I can, and although I’m nowhere near your level as an esper, I’m still more powerful than I was ever meant to be. Surely you’ve noticed.”
“It’s because you’ve practiced. It’s because you work hard, Ritsu. That’s all. I’m positive.”
Ritsu stares into the amber of his drink with distant interest.
“Next week, one of my colleagues will be fired,” he says calmly. “She didn’t do anything wrong. She’s hardworking and kind, she deserves her position, and she needs the money for her father, who is dying. But I’ve been sabotaging her work for months, and now they’re going to fire her.” He looks up and smiles at Mob. “I do things like this all the time, nii-san. Guilt is what makes me stronger.”
Before Mob can respond, Ritsu gets to his feet. He walks to the windows and stands there with his back to Mob, holding his drink between long loose fingers. Mob often sees him like this at night, minus the whiskey, standing in that very spot, gazing through the glass at the city below, at the moon and the few stars sharp enough to pierce through the light pollution—only now the curtains are closed. Still, Ritsu stays put, staring straight ahead as if he can see through them.
“I’ve hurt more people than you can imagine,” he says. “But there’s one thing I haven’t tried yet. Something that would make me feel guiltier than anything. I wonder how strong I would be, if I did that.”
Dazed, Mob can’t keep up with the flood of information; the sponge of his brain feels small and oversaturated.
Still he tries to respond to the first thing he processes. “Your colleague…I’m so sorry. But—I’m sure it isn’t your fault, Ritsu.” Mob abandons his half-finished glass of milk and goes to join him at the windows. He feels unsteady on his feet, almost tripping on his too-long sweatpants, and when he speaks again, his voice is clumsy and stuttering: “So please, I. I don’t want you to feel that way.”
Ritsu won’t meet his eyes. And although the alcohol hides it well, Mob can see it now in the set of his handsome shoulders as he turns away from him—that there’s something really wrong with his brother.
Mob’s stomach drops. He keeps speaking to Ritsu’s back in its sleek jacket, throat going dry. “Please. You don't have to feel that way. I know you, Ritsu. You're not…I don’t believe…”
“You’re so sweet to me, nii-san. Really. But it’s okay. I’m used to it.”
Ritsu swallows the rest of his whiskey and walks back to the coffee table, placing his empty tumbler next to Mob’s milk.
“You see," he says, straightening up to face Mob with a smile, "guilt doesn’t make me feel bad anymore. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel powerful.”
He approaches Mob slowly. Comes much closer than Mob expects him to, and Mob has to crane his neck up to look at him, a fact that will never lose its strangeness. He thought they’d always be around the same height.
With effort, Mob refrains from taking a step backwards. He is aware of the curtained windowpane behind him, of the twenty-story vertical drop behind that.
Ritsu kisses him.
Mob has never kissed anyone before, unless you count the kisses he acquired and bestowed as a baby and a toddler. If that’s the case, then the last person he kissed before today was also Ritsu, more than two decades ago.
Ritsu slips one hand around Mob’s head to cradle his skull while the other presses into the small of Mob’s back, persuading it into an arch. Numbly, Mob receives and yields to these pressures as his brother’s lips slide against him. Mob isn’t sure what his own lips are doing in response, though at some point he opens his mouth because it feels like that’s what Ritsu wants him to do.
When Ritsu is done, he releases Mob’s mouth but not the rest of him. “Do you hate me?” he murmurs, their lips still very close.
“No,” says Mob. “No. I love you.”
“Really?” Ritsu’s voice is barely above a whisper. “How much?” He’s stroking Mob’s neck. “Would you let me keep kissing you? Touching you? Would you let me fuck you?”
Mob almost can’t understand the words, encased as they are in the calm, impossible tenor of his brother’s voice. And now he has that feeling he gets sometimes, like when he sees himself in the mirror and can’t recognize his face, only it coats the entire world and it’s one hundred times stronger. This fancy apartment is a stranger’s fancy apartment. Ritsu’s body holding his is a stranger’s body; his body being held is a stranger’s body. “I’d do anything for you, Ritsu,” Mob says shakily, truthfully.
Abruptly, Ritsu tenses. He grips Mob’s shoulders almost painfully and takes a step away from him, holding him at arm’s length to better stare at him in wonder. Something comes over him then as his wide eyes flit all over Mob’s face; his respiration quickens until he is breathless and vibrating with some new compound of emotions—shock, affection, gratitude. He cradles Mob’s face, then folds him into a tight hug. His back heaves and shakes like he’s about to cry. It all happens very suddenly.
“I’m so happy.” Yes, he is crying. “Thank you, nii-san. I never thought you’d say yes. That you’d let me…I never…”
He trails off and pauses.
“Although,” he says finally, considering, “I would’ve felt a lot guiltier if you hadn’t.” Another pause before he exhales a hoarse laugh. “It’s okay, though.” Nuzzling a damp smile into Mob’s neck. “Because now I feel even worse about what I put into your milk.”
Mob’s comprehension has been in decline for a while now, but this last sentence manages to stall it completely.
“Mm?” he says. “My…?”
Ritsu’s upturned lips are moving, he’s saying something in reply, but Mob can’t understand it because a hot wave of vertigo is crashing through his body, taking his thoughts, his speech, his ability to stand with it. He tries to extract himself from Ritsu’s arms to get to the couch before he falls, but he’s melting like a wax doll, and his legs can’t carry him.
Ritsu catches him when they give out completely.
What is happening?
His mouth is wet and open and invaded.
Kissing. Kissing is happening.
This kiss is better than that first kiss. Mob was a little too numb and surprised to even really feel that first one, but now it's like the nerves of his mouth and lips are impossibly sensitive, supercharged, hyperreceptive. Ritsu’s tongue is in his mouth and his hands are on his body, gliding over his neck, his chest, the soft dip of his flank.
“Nn,” says Mob, but the sound is swallowed.
The way Ritsu’s touching him makes him feel weird.
His body wants to move away but the most it can do is squirm weakly. Hands all over. His little brother’s hands. When did they get so big? Every skim and squeeze of them drowns him.
The way Ritsu’s touching him feels so fucking good.
Fingers trail further down his torso, past his bare navel.
Mob isn’t wearing any clothes.
“Wait,” he says. Or does he just think it?
He pulls weakly at Ritsu’s heedless wrist, at his scrupulous long-fingered hand.
Laughing. “I thought you said you’d let me, nii-san. I thought you said you’d do anything for me.”
“Oh,” says Mob. “That’s right...” He can’t tell if his words are coming out in the right order, or in the right language, or at all. “Yes...I’m sorry.” He releases Ritsu’s wrist.
Ritsu kisses his forehead and slides his hand between his legs. And he touches him there, and Mob has never been this wet. There must be something wrong with him, for him to be this wet. Ritsu must think he’s disgusting.
“I’m sorry,” he says again faintly.
“Why are you sorry?” Brushing it off with a smile, like he does all of Mob’s apologies. “This isn’t your fault.”
He coaxes Mob’s useless legs further apart.
Mob touches himself every once in a while because his powers will act up if he doesn’t. Unfortunately they’ll also act up if he enjoys himself too much, and so it’s always had to be a rather clinical, rather cursory operation with him, hand over his underwear, mind empty and impassive, climax flimsy and fleeting.
This is nothing like that. Ritsu touches him directly, and Mob has never really felt it this way before, the slick swollen slide of it, fingers slipping between his lips to glide wetly against his folds, and he can’t make sense of Ritsu’s motions and rhythms, they’re so fluid and fluctuant, so filthy, so different from his own stiff, almost mechanical routine. Ritsu varies his pace and pressure agonizingly and sometimes even stops entirely, simply pausing and holding Mob there, his palm hot and still, Mob pulsing almost painfully beneath it. Leaking. Making a mess. He can’t move. Yes, there’s something wrong with him; yes, he might be getting sick. And this sickness won’t let him come like he normally does, quick and clean and weak; this sickness is taking him somewhere else. Ritsu is taking him somewhere else. And Mob’s entire torso is electrified, drenched in sparking nerve endings, each sensation shocking in its rawness, like he’s missing a layer of skin, and it’s too much.
Too much feeling. Too much mounting pressure. It should make him afraid, afraid of his powers and what they might do. But right now he’s more afraid of the feeling itself. And of dying.
He might die. He might really die; he can feel death in his body. His heart isn’t beating right. It’s too slow—except every few minutes it’s as if his body realizes this, and then his heart thumps rapidly with sudden panic at its own slowness, quickening to an incredible, uncountable degree before giving up or forgetting and finally returning to its wounded crawl. Like a drowning man breaking the water’s surface to shout and thrash wildly before succumbing to the waves. His lungs follow the same pattern, breaths sluggish, shallow, and occasional until a brief moment of awareness has him gasping for air.
He’s gasping now. He gasps, “I love you, Ritsu.”
Because he loves his little brother, who is the only one Mob can cling to. Who is the one dangling him over this precipice. Who is making him feel so good, so good he might die.
“Please,” he says. His face is wet. “I love you, I—”
The hand on him stills. Through the confused blur of his vision, Mob can make out Ritsu’s face and its expression of intense, fascinated focus—a surgeon concentrating on a cut. And then the hand comes alive again, and Ritsu’s fingers are on Mob’s slick clit, soft and slow at first and then firmer and faster, again and again skimming, circling, touching, massaging that screaming needy place, and Mob sparks and swells beneath his fingers as the tightness and pressure of his climax builds to an impossible point, and keeps building.
Mob sobs, “Wait, wait, wait—” He’s just realized. He’s going to come. Because of Ritsu.
He wants to close his legs but they won’t move. With a foot, Ritsu kicks them even wider apart.
“Wait—”
“Nii-san.”
“Please—”
“It’s alright.”
“Please, why?” Why is this happening? He can’t remember. “Why? I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” And then Mob can’t speak anymore.
Ritsu moans with him as he comes.
Cool sheets against his burning back, the creak of a bed frame. His head hanging upside down over the edge of a mattress. Ritsu’s mattress.
Ritsu’s cock in his mouth. Fucking his mouth like it’s a toy.
Mob’s throat is plugged. His gag reflex, usually quite strong, has been reduced to a feeble flutter, no real force behind it, like a flagging pulse. Eventually it gives up entirely, letting Ritsu slip into his loose throat again and again with no resistance. There’s panic in him but it finds no purchase in the smooth soup of his mind. His chest is tight. Ritsu’s hips don’t draw back quite far enough for him to breathe between his thrusts—and then when they finally do, the connection between Mob’s brain and his lungs is so severely frayed that his reaction lags, and he only manages a fraction of a sip of a breath before Ritsu plunges back in again.
Move, he tells his arms. Push him away. I can’t breathe.
His arms stay limp at his sides. Ritsu holds his head and neck in place, strokes his thumbs reverently over the bulging skin of his throat. Mob’s diaphragm heaves in an airless pantomime of breathing; his inverted head is hot and full of blood. It’s scary, and then it becomes sort of interesting. He’s floating. Ritsu’s fingers on his neck, his chest, his cunt. Inside of him. Pulsing inside of him. And he’s passed some limit now and almost doesn’t want to breathe anymore; he wants to see what happens, where this new swelling sensation is leading him. Tighter and tighter. Higher and higher. His orgasm is strangled out of him, like spilt wine from a rag, like juice from a mangled fruit.
A hand shaking his shoulder, patting his cheek. “Nii-san. Try not to sleep, okay?”
Mob’s head rests on a pillow now. He manages a hoarse groan in response and opens his eyes. His vision is a mist of slow-moving shadows.
The hand stills, then strokes his face. Just a gentle skim across one cheekbone with the back of its knuckles before withdrawing. “Good.”
Something slides against his folds, presses against his entrance.
“I think I’ll fuck you now,” says Ritsu.
Mob has never been so wet and open.
Still, it surprises him when it doesn’t hurt.
Above him his brother is the tensing shadowed hollow of a neck, shuddering breaths, lips against his temple. Lips and teeth. He pushes deeper.
Ah. No.
It does hurt.
And maybe it shows on his face or in the noises he’s making because Ritsu asks him, “Are you okay? Are you in pain?”
And it almost sounds like his normal voice, so polite and full of concern, only a constrained breathless thrill of excitement shivers through the word pain.
“Yes,” whispers Mob.
“Yes, you’re okay?” Ritsu’s breaths come shorter as he moves faster, deeper. “Or yes, you’re in pain?”
Mob tries but he can’t form words anymore, tongue limp in his mouth. He makes helpless wheezing sounds.
Ritsu cups the side of his face, swipes his thumb over his burning cheek. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It doesn’t really matter.”
Ritsu kisses him. How can he kiss him and move his hips like that at the same time? Mob can’t move even a single isolated muscle. Ritsu grasps his jaw and angles it up, mouths at his exposed neck, licking and sucking. And biting. And that feels, that feels—
The pain doesn’t stop but it does change, taking on the sweet stinging strain of arousal.
“I didn’t know you could sound like this, nii-san,” Ritsu pants. “You’re gonna, ah, you’re gonna make me come if I'm not careful.”
A confusing thing to say, when Mob isn’t doing anything at all, isn’t moving even a little. He barely recognizes the noises coming out of him as his; they hang like little red gashes in the air. But he’s glad that he can make Ritsu feel good, that he can make Ritsu—
A thought. A thought that wakes him up just a little bit, like a tiny alarm, clearing just enough fog from his mind for him to find one word, injecting just enough movement back into his tongue for him to speak.
“Condom…?” Mob says, bleary and slurring the syllables.
“What?” Ritsu breathes out a laugh, amused and vaguely shocked. “Oh. No. Sorry. I forgot. Actually, I’m surprised you even thought of it.” He straightens up slightly and grips Mob’s face with one hand, thumb and fingers squeezing his cheeks, deforming them, moving Mob’s head around, side to side, shaking it. “Do you need more milk, nii-san?”
He sounds just like Mob’s helpful little brother. Something appears in his free hand: the glint of a glass. It’s only half empty.
Mob still can’t move his limbs but with effort he can persuade his lips into approximate shapes. The voice that comes out of his squished mouth is small but intelligible.
“No, thank you,” he says, eyes fixed on the slow sloshing of the milk in its cup.
“Ah,” says Ritsu, “you’re so cute.”
The glass of milk floats away. Ritsu digs his fingers harder into Mob’s cheeks—it hurts—before releasing his face.
“I am sorry, though,” he adds. “I guess it would be pretty bad if you got pregnant.”
But it doesn’t sound like Ritsu thinks it would be bad at all. And in one forceful motion he slips his hands under Mob’s knees, pushes them up, and pins them to the mattress on either side of him. Mob is distantly surprised that his body allows this, and then he is painfully, urgently surprised when it also allows Ritsu to slide deeper, split him wider.
Ritsu murmurs, “Don’t you think that would be bad, nii-san?”
Mob can’t remember what he’s talking about, can’t remember anything. “Ah. Ritsu. Too hard, too deep—”
“Yeah?” Ritsu hurts him harder, deeper. “Am I gonna break you?”
“Yes…yes…”
“Then why don’t you open up more for me?”
He’s already so open, too open. “I don’t—ah, Ritsu, please…”
Ritsu grabs his throat. “Do it. Open up,” he says. “Let me fuck your womb, nii-san.”
The room spins.
Tears leak from Mob’s eyes. “That’s…not…”
“Possible?” Laughing. “Yes, it is.”
“No…it’s not, it’s…”
“Are you sure?” Ritsu fucks him slowly and with all his weight. “And where did you learn that?”
It isn’t possible.
Mob is so sure it isn’t possible.
But Ritsu’s right: what does Mob know? Ritsu is the one with a PhD. And so maybe it is possible. And maybe Mob can feel it—something giving way inside of him. Yeah. Maybe he can feel Ritsu breaching him that way. A pressure unlike anything he’s ever felt before, a deep unbearable insistence assaulting an impassable wall, and all at once Mob feels himself submit to it. And Ritsu squeezes into that incomprehensible place.
Pulls out. Then pushes, pops back in.
It can’t really be happening.
It isn’t really happening.
But Mob can really feel it.
Again, and again. Each time Ritsu snaps forward, Mob breaks open for him with greater ease and smoothness, until it’s as if Ristu’s simply gliding, over and over, into his cervix. Through the pain and the impossible excruciating pleasure, Mob feels something quiver inside of him.
Something old.
Something bad.
A mass of inconceivable feelings.
Oh.
It’s everything.
Everything Mob buried there deep inside himself—Ritsu is touching it.
Ritsu is inside of it. Ritsu is fucking that thing inside of him, that black hole he swallowed. And the black hole trembles and dilates at his touch. It grows and it glows.
It’s scary. It’s wrong. He’s going to be sick.
Ritsu has no idea. Ritsu flips him over, begins to fuck him from behind. It’s so hard to lift his head out of the pillow. Over the creaking of the bed Mob tries to warn him. “Ritsu. I don’t feel good.”
He can’t breathe through his stinging nose. Blood drips onto the white pillowcase below his face, leaving wrinkled, very red circles that blur and spread at the edges. “Please. I think I might…”
Ritsu slows but doesn’t stop. He hums and leans down and fucks Mob thoughtfully and says, “Maybe you’re pregnant already, nii-san.”
And flicking his powers like a whip, he drags the small garbage can closer to the bed. Repositions Mob so that his head is hanging off the mattress, over the lip of the bin. Mob sees it but can’t seem to keep his face parallel to the opening, can’t seem to hold his own head up, especially not with his whole body rocking and jolting in time with Ritsu’s quickening thrusts. His head collapses against the side of the mattress.
Ritsu grabs his hair in a tight fist, holds him up, level and steady.
“Go ahead.” He says it kindly.
Mob’s entire face is leaking. Tears and drool and the blood from his nosebleed mix and drip and splatter into the bin’s dark interior.
The thing inside of him is trying to come out.
The bad thing.
The black hole.
They’re both going to die.
But then Ritsu pushes his fingers into his mouth and into his throat and at the same time fucks him with such sudden violence that Mob’s entire body quakes, unstable, the only anchored part of him his head, hair fisted, mouth impaled, hanging over the trash can. Mob’s gag reflex reawakens as the nausea surges; his diaphragm and esophagus contract and convulse along with the bright enraptured muscles of his cunt, which spread their brightness all the way up into his stomach, all the way down into his thighs. His stomach empties itself as his orgasm screams through him.
The shock of it floors him. He’s crying, hard, coughing, gasping, dripping, sobbing.
Sobbing in fear, in pain, in relief. Relief that what came out of him was not his powers.
Still, there’s a fracture in his mind now, like his thoughts will never align right again.
Ritsu turns him over. “You’re a mess, nii-san.” Milk splashes over Mob’s face before he even sees the glass tilt over his head. He would’ve gasped but he’s already gasping. Ritsu grips his jaw and forces it even wider. “Drink some, too. You’ll feel better. You’ll feel good again.” He pours the rest in Mob’s mouth. Mob splutters and chokes.
“Ritsu. Ritsu,” he sobs. “You’re scaring me.”
His brother gives an exhilarated laugh, as unfamiliar to Mob as the low, vulgar moan it turns into. “Say that again,” says Ritsu.
Mob does, his voice high and hoarse and broken.
“God. Nii-san.” Ritsu lifts Mob’s hips off the mattress and fucks him like he’s trying to kill him. “Nii-san.”
Mob wants to hide his ruined face in his hands but his hands won’t move. One of them lies next to his head, limp and palm-up, fingers curled loosely in the air like the legs of something dead. As he stares, colors swell around it, indigo-fuchsia, cyan-violet. His fingers, tangled in aura. He wouldn’t have thought that there was any room left in his mind for fresh terror at this point, but there it is, blooming quite easily along with the vivid pigments of his powers as they twine and surge around his hand. Please, he thinks, please, don't hurt him, please—
But then that hand is pinned over his head. Followed by the other.
Oh. It’s Ritsu.
Ritsu’s powers, not his. Ritsu’s powers, binding his hands. Mob wonders why he’s doing that when Mob’s hands are useless anyway, when he can’t move them even a little bit.
But the important thing is that the aura is Ritsu’s.
So it’s okay.
It’s okay.
The powers grip Mob’s legs next—he recognizes that shattered texture now, and he can feel it, too, the prickle of it—and spread them as wide as they’ll go, holding him open, pinning him like a butterfly. Then they drag his face out from its new hiding place against his arm, forcing him to look up. Above him Ritsu shines with psychic energy, fluorescence pouring from his skin, his hair swaying and lifting. For a moment his eyes are white. Rolled back, maybe, or briefly glazed with ecstatic light—Mob can’t tell.
He looks happy. He looks powerful.
Ah, Mob thinks. There’s something bad inside of Ritsu, too.
It’s the first time he’s really let himself see it. And whatever it is, maybe it’s as powerful as the bad thing inside of Mob. Maybe it’s more powerful.
The thought fills Mob with immense relief. And immense love.
“Thank you, nii-san.” Ritsu's spilling light like a star but his face is all dark at the center of it. His badness is a black hole, too. Or an eclipse at totality. “You’ve helped me so much.”
Whatever it is, Mob loves it, just like he loves Ritsu. And when he blacks out, he is not swallowed but only blanketed in soft shadow.