Rain streaks the windows, landing heavy outside. The plants need it, it's been too hot. If he strains, Mob can just barely imagine the sound of water sizzling into steam, leaving behind the clean-fresh-washed smell of the city being reborn. Seasoning City has been holding its breath for all of a dry month now. Summer storms come hot and fast.

At his desk, Reigen taps his pen in an unsteady counter to the downpour. It's dark even without the clouds, rendering the space in shadows that gather closer than usual in the crooks where the dust lingers, an unsettling contrast to sharp fluorescents.

The office holds its breath in the split second before a monsoon, and then it exhales with all the force of a deflating balloon. Reigen and the sharp angles of his side profile put down his pen, perpendicular to his edge of the desk.

“Say, Mob, how about takoyaki?”

There's a new tomato plant on the desk. When they leave, closing the door with its soft click and the sliding-home lock, it's the only thing that says they were there at all. The walls cannot listen. They don't repeat what they see. With the lights off, Mob wonders if it all ceases to exist.

A roach scuttles from wall to wall, frantic and mindless. Mob crushes it with the boot of a psychic heel before Reigen can see it.

Reigen pitches the umbrella four steps from the door and holds it over them both. Street lamps cast an irregular halo onto soaked pavement, and cars offer bleeding white light without warmth, transient bars across concrete. The city is sustained by its neon veins and pumping asphalt heart. There are still cracks in the pavement from the Divine Tree, branching in the stamped shape of some arcing fractal. In Maths, he had watched the patterns branch out and out from a finite center, half-awake. He’s not half-awake now, though it's later than he thought it was.

“Close the door, Mob,” Reigen. “Where has your mind gotten off to? This isn't what I pay you for.”

Light, teasing. Reigen is the only person who teases him.

“Sorry, Shishou” the door, shut firmly so that it doesn't swing open on its hinges in the wind. They’re spit out the same place they always are, not a bad part of town, but not the nicest, either. He presses it into its frame with hard-earned muscles that refuse to show themselves.

“C'mon. I'm not waiting for you.” Reigen waits for him to hurry under the umbrella.

Thunder shakes the ground, but it does nothing to halt the throbbing pulse of an incessant heart. An object in motion will stay in motion. Reigen twirls the umbrella between two fingers, idle. They walk to the bus station, strides staggered, it's still hard to match his steps to Reigen's, even though he’s grown a bit. His heels go damp outside of the umbrella, he casts a field of protection without thinking. He wore Ritsu’s shoes again by mistake.

“Shishou.”

He's fast, but he's also clumsy. It would be so easy to slip and fall into a puddle, especially in his brother's shoes.

“Right. We're not in a hurry.”

Yielding.

Reigen walks like a man set on fire, frantic down to bone. Street lights make his hair into a beacon, something to follow to the end of the earth. A flame. He's bright and inevitable. He shakes his umbrella out under the bus stop awning, disregarding the rain. Mob thinks that he could dry himself in a storm through force of will alone. He brushes Mob down just as the bus pulls in with a hiss. A hand on his shoulder pulls him forward. Mob isn't sure if Reigen is aware of the fuzzy solidity of his own form, more powerful than any curse. A hand on his shoulder, second nature. They settle hip to hip, touch lingering, reestablished.

“It's coming down hard, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Rhetorical, Mob.”

Reigen says his name a lot. It sounds nice in his mouth, familiar. Mob presses them closer, thigh to thigh. Daring. Reigen shifts away. The curve of his neck seems endless when he turns to watch the rain.

“It's coming down hard, huh?”

Reigen is quick to dart out of reach when Mob starts things. In the back of his mind, he's begun to compile a list of what's okay and when.

When he's stressed.

When they're alone.

When he's in danger. When he's in arm's reach.

When Reigen needs to reach across him.

When they're chest to chest. When Serizawa is out. When Reigen tastes like cigarettes, tobacco-slick tongue. In nasty old motels.

When it's an accident, carefully staged jostles and jolts when the bus pushes them together. Careful, Mob.

Mob, Mob, Mob.

Storm clouds are gathering in Mob's belly.

“Are we traveling out of town any time soon?”

He’s been teaching Mob how to read between the lines. He sets his jaw, nods once, doesn't look away from the window.

Reigen eats fast, making nervous, flighty conversation the entire time. It starts with the weather, and then he carries on a monologue about why he hasn't raised Mob's pay in the last few years. He drinks. His throat bobs. He reeks of the sticky-black curse that bloats under his skin. Mob has tried to exorcize it before, when Reigen’s back is turned, when he thinks he’s alone. He can’t. It’s not a spirit.

“Are you sure you want to spend your summer like this?” He asks for the thousandth time.

“Yes,” Mob says simply, though Reigen never listens.

At ten sharp, Mob herded out of the cramped restaurant by Reigen, who fumbles with the umbrella. There's a man beginning to mop the floor in the corner, he's wearing earbuds and his hair keeps falling over his face. Reigen is too close, and he smells of lemon sours. Mob remembers when he lingered. Mob remembers a time before he knew that Reigen drank.

“Shit,” one of the metal spokes is twisted. Reigen’s face is twisted too, in that way he gets when he wants something that he can't articulate. Leaning in. Pulling away. We can't, we shouldn't. Morning rain makes the world look like a watercolor painting, but night rain is all acrylic smear. Mob straightens the spoke out without looking. “You're a lifesaver,” Reigen says, flickering like the burnt out bulb near the shop. “Are you sure your parents don't mind you being out this late?” A thousand times.

“Yes,” it's Ritsu who worries. Does it count as a lie of omission?

He's wearing his brother’s shoes. He skirts the edges of puddles to keep them dry. Reigen swings the umbrella, careless as he walks, edges ground down by the hour and the drinks. The downpour has slowed to a hazy drizzle. Reigen is just loose enough to let Mob steal a kiss at the intersection, but he pulls away too soon. Sends his glance out over the empty street. Mob could destroy it all with one hand. They could be the only ones left.

“Goodnight, Shishou,” he says instead. Reigen under the spotlight is all heavy shadow and flaxen hair and waxy skin. It doesn't look like he's been sleeping. Mob imagines kissing the bags beneath his eyes.

There's really no reason to go home.

The sheets are thin and scratchy. The bed is western style. The headboard jars the wall. Mob's hair is a crown around his head. Sweat and pain are inevitable, but it loosens the cramped flash-flood in his stomach and makes it easier to breathe.

“Shishou,” there’s a tremor in his voice and a crease between his teacher’s eyebrows. Reigen feathers kisses along his jaw. Mob never lasts long like this – it’s not the sensation so much as Reigen’s face – he’s an oil spill, always changing, always moving, iridescent colors. There’s thunder and lightning in his gut, he’s spat out into the eye of the storm, and he comes across his stomach all at once, the third time in a night. The lamp clatters onto the side table as all the drawers puff open. He’s surprised that he has anything left to give.

“Just a bit more,” Reigen grits out. It sounds like pleading. He’s leaving bruises in Mob’s hips and his breath tastes like smoke, a bad habit.

“I stopped smoking when you started working for me,” Reigen says, nonchalant.

“You smoked?”

When he shrugs, it’s one shoulder up and one shoulder down.

“Sometimes.”

“That’s bad for you.”

“Mob –”

“Exactly.” Reigen gives him a thumbs up. Mob bumps their knuckles so that their thumbs press into one another. His heart skips a beat. “That’s why I don’t want you to ever smoke. Listen, Mob, your friends may try to pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do –”

It’s gone, swept away by summer rain and over-drawn pleasure. Mob thinks that he might be addicted to the secondhand smoke, to thunder and lightning, to the ninety-nine percent rush. The long planes of Reigen twist and contort as he finishes. Their skin sticks together in patches when he collapses, boneless. Reigen’s shoulder presses into Mob’s throat.

“Can’t – breathe,” Mob says, so Reigen sits up and ties off the condom.

There’s an ache where Reigen was, it’s everywhere when they’re not touching. His face is drowned in shadow where he faces away from the light, and for once he’s so perfectly blank. Mob aches and aches.

Mob wakes with the sun. Reigen is staring at the popcorn ceiling, and everything is peach pinks and baby blues and duckling yellows. He’s dressed in his pajamas, the ones with the stripes, and it makes him imagine Reigen trying to wrestle his boneless body into clothes.

Their day clothes are folded on the desk, a gakuran with shiny gold buttons and an oversized suit. Pink tie. White shirt. Pale, watercolor light.

“Shishou?” He says, voice rough with sleep. Reigen’s answer is the suggestion of a hum the color of his hair, warm and familiar. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

In an hour or so, Reigen will dust off the salesman persona, dressing up in his day-old suit that bags at the shoulders and his disarming personality. Right now, in the morning calm, he’s a man of few words, and Mob has him to himself.

“Did you sleep well?”

The shadows are still there under his eyes. It’s so much easier to span the gap between them when it’s dark and they’re not wearing clothes.

“Yes,” Reigen lies. There’s no fanfare. There aren’t any bells or whistles. There’s no point to it at all.

“You don’t have to lie to me, Shishou,” Mob says, even though he’s old enough to know that Reigen Arataka will never stop lying. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

It’s an easy job, in and out. The girl is a ghost stuck to the bottom of the lake where her mother drowned her. She has six fingers and six toes, she sings lullabies, and she wants to go home. Mob gives her the next best thing.

“That was a pretty long trip for such an easy job, huh?” Reigen asks, hands in pockets with his head spilled up to the sky. The trees whisper and then yell, branches swaying as a cold current stirs the underbrush. “It feels like it’s going to rain again.”

Mob has goosebumps. He feels hollow whenever they’re not fucking.

“Let’s get lunch on the way home. My treat.”

Reigen always pays.

The last day of school comes on a Friday. Spring rain gives way to an underwhelming first bloom, and Reigen speculates that it’s because the plants are still suffering the aftereffects of the Divine Tree.

“It’s easier to confess and get the rejection over with,” Mezato had said, finger poised on her chin. Her backpack had been slung over one shoulder, careless.

“How can you be so sure he’ll reject me?” Mob had asked.

“You just turned fifteen,” incredulous, but not mean.

Now it’s almost five and Serizawa is at school. It’s just him, Reigen, and the tomato plant.

“I love you, Shishou,” Mob says, gripping his seat with white knuckles.

Reigen doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then he laughs, settling into composure. “I love you too, Mob.”

Frustration threatens to spill over in blue and purple. “Not like that,” he says. The whole time, he feels like he’s shoving himself down the throat of a snake, jaws pinned open, forcing his way towards inevitable digestion. When Reigen’s face goes carefully blank, he feels like the frog being boiled in a pot.

“Mob,” he says carefully. “It’s normal to have these feelings at your age, especially right after you’ve been rejected –”

“That’s not it,” he interrupts. “I love you. I want to be with you.”

“How about you head home early today,” Reigen says, firm and insistent. His hand spasms on the surface of the desk. The air is heavy and static-fuzzed. “If you want to be with a boy, you should spend some time with Hanazawa. He’s nice.”

“I don’t want to be with a boy,” Mob’s heart is hammering in his ribcage. Everything hurts at a fever pitch, an odd, pressing pain in his chest. “I want to be with you.”

“Go home.”

“Do you think that it hurt her?” Mob asks. The city flickers by in snapshots out the window.

“What hurt who?”

“The girl – Mutsumi. When her mother drowned her.”

Reigen is quiet, for a second. His free foot taps against the ground. He merges lanes.

“Yes. It probably hurt.”

Mob tries to imagine his mother drowning him and comes up blank.

Mob tries to imagine Reigen drowning him and feels strong hands around his neck, water, every place it shouldn’t be, and that face – the way Reigen looks blank after they have sex.

“Would you drown me, Shishou?”

Reigen’s grip on the wheel goes tight and he turns to stare. “Why would I do that?”

A man in a delivery van honks at their swerving rental car. Reigen corrects their course. “Don’t ask me questions like that when I’m driving,” he chastises.

Mob keeps imagining it.

Mob comes back to Spirits and Such the next day after lunch. Serizawa is at the counter worrying over boiling water, but the room is empty otherwise.

“Kageyama-senpai!” Serizawa greets. He taps the side of the kettle to gauge the temperature, and then hisses and jerks his hand away.

Reigen doesn’t greet him.

“Don’t you have school?” He asks instead.

“It’s summer break.”

“Didn’t you just have summer break?”

“That was spring break.”

There’s a new set to Reigen’s jaw, but he doesn’t tell Mob to leave this time, so Mob stays.

“What’s the schedule today?”

“I have a one-on-one exorcism,” Reigen gestures to the massage room with his thumb. “Nothing else. It seems kind of overkill to have both of you here, actually.”

“I’ll stay just in case,” Mob says, setting down his emptied-out backpack by his desk.

It seems quieter than usual, but it might just be his imagination, because at some point, Serizawa starts humming between the steady second-beats of the clock, and the client comes and goes with a steady stream of chatter. Reigen seems to take on her tension.

At quarter till, Serizawa leaves first for his class, and then it’s actually silent. Reigen slouches into his suit, giving his single-minded focus to a budget spreadsheet.

“Shishou,” Mob probes lightly. “Are we going to dinner tonight?”

Reigen sighs. “You’re going to buy me out of house and home.”

It’s not a no.

They eat soba for lunch at a sit-down place that’s a bit more expensive than their usual fare, and it feels like a date even though the floors are linoleum and the seat sticks to Mob’s thighs. It’s still early, so it’s not too busy. In the corner seat, a mother daubs her daughter’s mouth clean with a napkin. The daughter swings her legs so that her heels hit the chair’s crossbar.

“Mutsumi really got to you,” Reigen says. It’s not a question, so Mob shrugs instead of giving an unnecessary answer, but Reigen seems to wait for one anyway.

Mob imagines the daughter drowning in her soup. The bowl is too big for her, and her tempura is getting soggy where it’s floating in broth. Her hair is tied back.

“I don’t know.”

Reigen changes his approach. “You know I wouldn’t drown you, right?”

“Yeah.”

The soba is cold like something long dead from the bottom of a lake. Mob drinks water instead – he drinks until he feels bloated and heavy and his teeth hurt from the ice, and by then the noodles are even less appetizing.

“Could we get this to go?” Reigen asks. “Thank you,” Reigen says. “Come on, Mob. Your parents will be wondering where you are.”

“I texted my mom.”

“I don't want to monopolize you.” Reigen is stubborn.

Mob kisses Reigen goodbye, once on the cheek under the overhang of a coffee shop that they pass most days. With his hand on Reigen’s shoulder, he’s just tall enough to bridge the gap if he stands on his toes. Reigen is soft stubble and skin. He doesn’t move, doesn’t react, doesn’t say anything at all.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Shishou,” Mob says to Reigen’s statue.

Mob doesn’t dream, but he falls asleep imagining Reigen’s hands around his neck, and he wakes up imagining his hands around Reigen’s neck. In the mirror, he checks himself for a haunting, wide eyes and soft chin. He doesn’t need the mirror to know that it’s nothing he can fix – that it’s nothing at all, really. He’s seen this type of nothing before, underneath Reigen’s skin.

He could try to scrub at it, but it wouldn’t wash clean. Ritsu tries to stop him on his way out. The office is locked when he gets there. Mob wanders through a maze of neon veins as the sky opens up again, and he thinks about the way Reigen says his name.

Feet bare, hands pressed against his. There are scratches on Reigen’s face and his forehead is bleeding. Mob is a peeling facade, a puzzle made up of a thousand disparate pieces, and Reigen is bleeding. Mob did this by being powerless to stop it.

“It was a lie,” Reigen says. “It was a lie from the beginning.”

Mob is the only person on the sidewalk without an umbrella. His hair is plastered to his face, obscuring his vision. He starts his walk to Reigen’s apartment, measured and straight. He says a silent apology to Ritsu for wearing his shoes again. There are cracks in the sidewalk, more than he remembers. The pavement is coming up. Mob thinks about roots that extend as far outward as a tree is tall. Mob thinks about fractals on top of fractals on top of fractals. Mob sucks the water out of his hair.

“Why are you still working for him? You know he’s a fraud, and he barely even pays you.” Ritsu is pacing. “It’s summer break!”

“He asked if I wanted to leave,” Mob is patient. “I said no.”

“Why did you go back? I thought he was overworking you.”

“We talked about it.”

Reigen has a tomato plant for his windowsill at home too. Mob sees it when he levers the window open with his elbows. He doesn’t come here very often – he feels out of place, tumbling into a heap on the floor of Reigen’s bedroom.

“One kiss, okay?” Reigen sounds like he’s trying to be stern. He twists the wand to close the blinds. Mob’s stomach erupts into a swarm of locusts that threaten to decimate everything in their path.

“Okay.”

Reigen’s hand on his shoulder is much more familiar than the press of their lips. He’s bigger – Mob knew that already – but when they kiss, he’s so much bigger, galactic, and Mob is hopelessly caught in his orbit, weightless and plummeting to Earth all at once. Reigen isn’t bending down anymore, and Mob’s feet aren’t touching the ground.

“Careful,” Reigen pulls away to say. “Don’t fly away.”

Mob buries his face in Reigen’s collar.

“I won’t.”

Something crashes to the ground behind them. There are flowers growing in the corners of the room.

Rain streaks the windows, landing heavy outside. The plants don’t need it, it's been too wet. When he’s outside, it feels like drowning in the detritus of a city that can’t let go. The summer might exhale forever, hot and wet as the belly of a beast.

“So, what did he say?” Mezato asks. Her interest is studious, almost impersonal. He imagines her writing his answer down in a column next to a photograph of his face.

“He said no,” Mob lies, just like Reigen does, just like Reigen told him to. It’s not really all that hard, but for all of a breathless moment, he imagines her knowing. There’s a bruise where his neck meets his shoulder that his shirt just barely hides.

“I’m sorry, Mob,” she says, sympathetic. “But it really is for the best.”

He nods. The second lie comes even more easily than the first.

She doesn’t even notice. “It’s really hot today. When was the last time it rained?”