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The adrenaline lasts until Serizawa reaches them.
Dimple’s been watching as Reigen’s arm around Shigeo’s shoulder becomes less of a comfort and more of a crutch, as his extravagant hand gestures start to take more and more of his body with them until he’s swaying like a drunkard with each step he takes. But he stays upright. Keeps up the patter. It’s an impressive performance, Dimple has to admit.
When Serizawa comes running towards them, Reigen smiles broadly and reaches out an arm and half-leans, half-crashes into him, assuring him that everything’s fine, there’s nothing to worry about. Is Serizawa okay? No, no, it’s just a scratch . . .
“He should go to the hospital,” says Shigeo, and Reigen waves his hand dismissively but Serizawa nods.
“I—” says Shigeo, “I should—” And there are still fat, messy tears running down his face, and Dimple thinks he’s coping pretty well with having leveled a city and getting his heart broken, but there’s only so much a kid can deal with—
“Mob,” says Reigen, suddenly serious again. He takes a stumbling pace forwards and plants both his hands on Shigeo’s shoulders. For a moment it looks like he’s going to fall, or like he meant to kneel there on the shattered ground, but he steadies himself.
“Mob, you’d better get home. Your family will be worried about you.” He grins with the ease of a practiced liar. “I’ll be fine.”
And it’s only after Shigeo has nodded and turned and begun to jog away, gasping messily through his tears, that Reigen’s legs give out and he sinks gently down into the rubble until Serizawa’s aura reaches out to stop his fall.
*
Dimple doesn’t even have adrenaline to help him. He grits his teeth when Shigeo isn’t looking as he tries with all his might to stay solid and alive and here . There’s that spark inside him, the ember of Shigeo’s faith that kept him tethered to this world, and he holds it at the center of himself like an oyster trying to build a pearl, but it’s not enough to steady him. Any energy he can pull in from the residue of the storm around him is expended in the same moment with the sheer effort of continuing to exist.
Still, he sticks close to Shigeo as they make their way through the ruins, chattering away about whatever comes into his head, and if the boy notices how pale he is or the way the edges of his form fade out like a candleflame in sunlight, he doesn’t mention it.
Ritsu finds them first, and Dimple hangs back as the brothers cry and cling to each other. They deserve their moment, and he needs to rest.
Not that there’s much of a respite when you come back from the dead, no matter how little you do. This world doesn’t think he belongs in it, and it tries to push back, to shove his flickering soul back to the void. He’s not sure he’d be strong enough to fight against it on his own.
But Shigeo wants him here, and he can’t disappoint the kid.
He stays as the Kageyamas trek through the ruins to where the Body Improvement Club are waking up and talking about what a good workout helping to clear away rubble will be. He stays as Ritsu leads them back to the roof where he left Teru sleeping, and the Captain of the Body Improvement Club picks him up and carries him until the streets are clear enough for the ambulance they’ve called to get through.
“Do you need to go to the hospital too, Shige?” Ritsu asks. Shigeo seems to consider before shaking his head. Dimple is skeptical, and so are the others. But when they wash the blood away from his scalp, the wound is already scarred over, and his pupils contract to pinpricks when Ritsu shines a light in his eyes.
Shigeo keeps sniffling, on and off.
“Does anyone else need help?” Musashi asks, and Shigeo shakes his head again.
“Master Reigen should be at the hospital already,” he says. “H-he—”
“He’s gonna be fine,” says Dimple when even Ritsu looks worried.
But as they’re walking back to the Kageyama house, Shigeo says, “Dimple . . .”
“What is it, kid?”
“Can you go check on Master Reigen?”
“Sure thing,” says Dimple.
Shigeo’s starting to sway now, he and Ritsu leaning into each other as they walk.
“You’ll come back?” he says.
Dimple floats down to eye level. “I promise. I’ll see you tomorrow, eh partner?”
It earns him a tiny, fleeting smile.
*
There are echoes of Shigeo’s power throughout the city, but otherwise it’s empty. Soon the swath of destruction will be teeming with low-level spirits desperate to consume the scattered remnants of the psychic storm, but none have dared to approach yet, so Dimple’s journey to the hospital is mercifully lacking in other ghosts.
When he gets there he trawls the wards in search of Reigen. They’re not as full as he would have expected them to be. The doctors and nurses he overhears are full of the nervous relief of people who’ve been preparing to be overrun by a catastrophe that has somehow failed to materialize.
Dimple’s glad of that. He hadn’t been able to tell what sort of casualties to expect.
Reigen’s asleep when Dimple finds him. He looks . . . bad. He’s the sort of person who always takes up three times as much space as a man his size should, but now he lies small and still in the hospital bed, dwarfed by the machines around him. The massive bandage around his head has already bled through in spots, and an IV snakes from his skinny arm.
Dimple tries reading the chart at the foot of the bed, but the characters just blur together and he doesn’t have enough strength to flip the page. So he settles down on top of one of the machines and waits.
It’s cold. He huddles, pulling the wavering edges of his physical form in close to his core.
*
He’s not sure how long it’s been when Reigen finally stirs.
“Dimple?” His voice cracks. He’s staring, bleary, his eyes only half-open.
“Hey.” Dimple floats closer.
“Why—” Reigen breaks off, clears his throat. “Why’m I here?”
Dimple considers. “Does sprinting through a tornado of psychic power sound familiar?”
For a moment Reigen just stares at him and Dimple’s afraid that he actually won’t remember and he’ll have to explain everything, but then his eyes widen and he gasps, “Mob!”
“He’s okay!” says Dimple, as Reigen tries to sit up in the bed and fails. One of the machines beeps reproachfully.
Reigen sinks back down. Then his eyes focus, and he points an accusing finger at Dimple.
“Why are you here?”
“Because Shigeo asked me to check in on you, idiot!”
For a second, the bluster feels like old times. Even though Reigen is beat to hell, he shifts in the bed and suddenly his presence fills the whole room again. Even though Dimple is the spiritual equivalent of a faulty lighter, he puffs himself up and snaps back. It’s how they’re supposed to be.
And then, to his horror, Reigen starts crying. His face crumples and he hides behind his hands as he sobs, like a toddler playing peek-a-boo. Dimple wonders if he should leave. He settles for looking away.
There are words hidden in the sobs, not polished like Reigen’s usually are, just choked little fragments tumbling out of him. “He—he still . . .” Dimple hears, and “After everything?”
“Yeah,” Dimple says. “Yeah.”
Eventually the crying stops and Reigen wipes his face on the scratchy-looking hospital blanket.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. It’s the head injury. You know how it is.”
“Not really,” says Dimple. “I’m a spirit. We don’t have to worry about that sort of thing.”
“Yeah. You seem . . .” Reigen squints at him and flicks one limp hand towards Dimple in a half-hearted approximation of his usual expansive gestures. “. . . Wobbly.”
Of course. Leave it to Reigen to shift the focus to anything but himself. Not even a concussion could keep him from being annoyingly perceptive.
“This form isn’t . . . stable yet,” Dimple admits, because he’s too tired for lying. “I just came back. It takes a while.”
“Didn’t you, you know . . .” (and here Reigen makes an awful slurping noise, like someone trying to suck up wet concrete through a straw) “. . . With all that power around?”
“Ehhhhhh,” says Dimple. “I mean, I skimmed a little, but then I had to burn through it all to get his attention.” He sprouts arms so that he can shrug.
It’s a mistake. His form undulates, parts of him trying to dissolve and other parts trying to phase back into the in-between place where he’d been trapped for—months? Had it really been months? It had felt like no time at all. It had felt like eternity.
He re-absorbs the arms.
A hospital wasn’t exactly an ideal place for a spirit barely clinging to existence. With all the grief and fear that built up in them, they were usually prime haunting ground for the sort of low-level spirits that in his prime, Dimple would have considered too weak to bother with. Right now any one of them could take him out, if they even noticed his presence. The place felt less busy than he would have expected; other spirits were still taking their time to return to Seasoning City. And, most likely, some of the things that might otherwise find themselves haunting this particular hospital had been turned off by the dense flare of electric-yellow power the next wing over. It was making Dimple a little nervous too, especially since he remembered what had happened the first time he’d gone up against that aura.
And the last time. He wasn’t going anywhere near it until he had Shigeo to intervene on his behalf.
“So how do you get stable?” Reigen asks, still squinting at Dimple’s washed-out form.
“Just takes time. If you’ve got a location to anchor to or a body to hide in it’s easier, but . . .”
He wobbles his body in the closest approximation of a shrug he can manage without wasting energy on arms again.
Reigen goes quiet for a bit, and Dimple finds himself wondering if he’s fallen asleep again. None of the machines strapped to him start screaming, so he probably isn’t dying or anything. Dimple hovers next to the IV pole.
After a while Reigen opens his eyes. He nods to himself, then turns to Dimple and says, “Well, come on then.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Come on.”
Dimple bobs closer. You were supposed to check if the pupils were uneven, right? He didn’t remember enough about how bodies worked or all the thousands of ways they could stop working. “Did you hallucinate something?” he asks.
Reigen looks at him like he’s being deliberately obtuse, which Dimple thinks is pretty rich coming from him.
“Nah. You said you’d be safer in a body, and Mob would be sad if something happened to you, so come on.”
“You’re serious?”
“Why not?” Reigen flaps a hand at the monitors around them. “It’s not like you could take it for a joy-ride. I’m not that stable myself.”
He’s . . . right. Still, Dimple hesitates. The possession earlier had been an act of necessity, of desperation. That’s how it works now. He takes over bodies when he has to, in the heat of the moment, to keep them from dying. Before, he took them over because he felt like it, because it was useful, because that was the sort of thing that evil spirits did .
No one has ever just . . . offered.
“You sure that head is okay?” he asks.
“Well, no.” Reigen sighs. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That a problem for you?”
“It might be a problem for you that you got a traumatic brain injury and then invited an evil spirit into your body,” says Dimple bluntly.
As far as he’s concerned, this should be the point where Reigen says, “Wow, you’re right! What a crazy and reckless idea! I take it all back!” That would be the sane response. That would be the response of any other human in the world. But instead he just gives Dimple a sallow, tired smile and says, “I don’t think you’re really that evil.”
And opens his arms.
Dimple blinks. He feels like badly-set jelly. There’s not a drop of power left in him, and he’s struggling to hold on to his physical form at all. He’s only been properly alive again for a few hours, and he’s already so, so tired.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
He floats closer, but he does it slowly in case Reigen wants to come to his senses and back out. He looks at least a little nervous about it, which is good because Dimple had been starting to wonder if his brain was really irreparably scrambled after everything that had happened.
“Oh!” Reigen props himself partway up on his elbows and waves an accusatory finger at Dimple. “Don’t be inappropriate with the nurses!”
“Why would I do that?”
Reigen fixes him with a Look. “I can hear how you talk about my massage clients.”
“I wouldn’t say any of that to them,” Dimple protests. “I just wanted to make you uncomfortable!”
Reigen stares at him for a minute. Then he lets out an ugly little snort of a laugh. “Of course you did,” he says.
Dimple hovers awkwardly in front of Reigen’s face. His eyes refuse to open fully, and he’s breathing heavily from the effort of raising his head.
“You’re sure about this?” Dimple asks.
“Yeah.” When Dimple looks at him askance, Reigen simply adds, “Like I said. Mob missed you.”
Dimple hesitates, like he’s about to jump into the deep end of a pool. Which is stupid. Possessing Reigen will be easy. He could do it in his sleep.
“Just, you know, be careful,” Reigen tells him. He smirks. “After all, my body is a temple.”
“A pretty busted-up temple,” says Dimple, glancing at all the tubes and bandages and the bruises spreading across Reigen’s skin. He sighs. “But I’m a forgotten god, so I guess we’re perfect for each other.”
*
He’s not used to sharing.
When Dimple first settles in to Reigen’s body he grabs for control instinctively, slotting himself into the driver’s seat. It doesn’t help that Reigen doesn’t even try to put up a fight, just relaxes and lets him in. There’s not even a gasp. He doesn’t normally get that from people who are conscious. Immediately, he feels the warmth and insulation of the body around him, his sad little form protected and hidden away amid the blood and muscle and bone.
If Shigeo’s body is like a high-powered sports car, Reigen’s is like a rickety ten-speed bicycle with a loose chain. Dimple hadn’t really had time to notice the first time he’d possessed it. There had been more pressing matters to hand. But now, without distractions, he settles in and practically winces. There’s the complete lack of psychic abilities, for one thing. The lungs tarred over from years of smoking and now choked with dust from the storm. The muscles in Reigen’s hands and arms have been toughened to a sort of wiry strength by all those fake exorcism massages, but the rest of them are weak and underdeveloped.
His first instinct when he enters a body is always to push it to its limits, to feel the delicious crackle of adrenaline and the joy of movement, to pull out all the stops and see what it can do. That’s what he’d done earlier, coaxing every bit of energy out of Reigen’s exhausted legs so they could make it to Shigeo in time.
But Reigen’s body has already been pushed as far as it will go. Dimple doesn’t usually stick around for the crash.
Everything feels heavy and frail. He knows, even without trying, that the muscles don’t have enough power in them to respond to his commands. There was usually some sort of startle response when he took over as the body instinctively sent out panic signals at the loss of control, but there’s nothing except the eyes widening for half a second and then drifting shut as Dimple decides it isn’t worth the exponential energy drain of keeping them open.
Spirits, even when they were possessing a human body, didn’t properly feel pain. They were aware of it, though, the equivalent of an annoyingly flashing red warning light on some piece of industrial equipment.
Right now, there’s hardly a nerve in Reigen’s body that isn’t sending out pain signals. Whatever they’ve got hooked up to the IV must be doing a decent job of muting them, but Dimple knows he can do better. It’s a matter of pride; no self-respecting evil spirit lets harm come to their host. He settles in, playing with the inner workings of Reigen’s nervous system like an engineer at the controls of a mech. He dulls the pain, relaxes the muscles that need to be relaxed. It only takes a few seconds. It would have taken less, if he’d had anything approaching his usual power.
Well. Time to show off his handiwork.
It’s a struggle, but Dimple pulls back until he’s given up control of Reigen’s senses. It feels crowded, both of them being awake at once. Not . . . bad, exactly. But different.
The shared body breathes in as deeply as it can given their cracked ribs, then lets the air escape slowly and uncertainly.
“That you?”
Dimple waits for a second before taking control.
“What do you think, idiot?” he asks with Reigen’s mouth. He feels the pull of the muscles in their face as he speaks, the weight of their tongue, the click of their teeth. “Do you even want this thing? That was like possessing a corpse.” Then he lets go, waiting as Reigen clears their throat, thrums air through their vocal chords. It’s not like earlier when they were running together, so intent on reaching Shigeo that it had almost felt like they were one person. This is harder, this dance of handing control back and forth so they can talk to each other. It almost makes Dimple want to retreat to the back of Reigen’s mind where he could communicate telepathically. But . . . not quite. Sometimes he misses being in a body, even when it’s as run-down as this one.
“You said you were weak!” Reigen protests. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Like you could.”
Dimple chuckles. It’s strange to notice the physics of it: the rumble in their chest, the percussive burst of air through their mouth and their sinuses. Everything about having a body is so mechanical.
Before, he’d always been moving, and he’d always been by himself, so he hadn’t paid attention to the little things. Things like how, when he’s the one speaking, the sound concentrates in their throat and the bridge of their nose, but when Reigen opens their mouth the nasal hum drops away and the resonance comes from their chest. The way that when the body is at rest Reigen carries his tension in their neck and Dimple carries it in their jaw.
“Hey,” says Reigen. His voice is breathy with exhaustion. “I’m being very nice to you right now! You’d better behave.”
“I am behaving!” Dimple shoots back. “It’s not just the drugs taking all your aches and pains away, you know!”
“That’s you?” Reigen mumbles in surprise. He sighs, shifts their body in the bed. “Feels good . . .”
“I bet you say that to all the evil spirits.” Dimple’s usual smirk feels strange on Reigen’s face.
Reigen stretches the corners of their mouth out further. “Believe it or not, you’re my first,” he says.
Dimple blanches. “Really?! You’ve never been possessed before?” He speaks too loud and it sends their body into a fit of coughing, rattling their throbbing head and sending stabs of pain through their ribcage that even Dimple can’t dull completely.
“Far as I know,” says Reigen once the coughing has stopped. There’s a soft smile on their lips, a spike of fondness in their battered brain. “Mob always looked out for me.”
“Lucky bastard,” Dimple mutters.
“Oh,” says Reigen, “I know.”
And then there’s a sudden heaviness to their chest and their lower lip starts to tremble, and the fragile equilibrium Dimple has established gets thrown off as he fights not to get subsumed by the wave of Reigen’s emotions. Evil spirits didn’t cry, thank you very much.
“Oi,” he says, wresting control of their voice back even though it cracks and wobbles. “Stop it. You’ll wear yourself out more.”
Reigen doesn’t seem to hear him. “That kid . . .” he chokes. “I don’t deserve him.”
And yeah, Dimple gets that. He remembers waking up in the storm, remembers the realization that Shigeo had brought him there. Had wanted him back, despite everything.
He sighs and shakes their head. “Reigen,” he says. “What the hell makes you think that any of this is about deserving?”
“I don’t—”
Dimple pulls control, clicks their mouth shut.
“I died for him, you know?”
That seems to shock Reigen out of his wallowing, at least a little. “What?!” he sputters. “What happened?”
Dimple finds himself smiling. “Turns out he wouldn’t let me,” he says.
It takes a while for the shock to fade from their face, but eventually Reigen gives their head a tiny, wondering shake and says, “Sounds about right.”
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” Dimple cautions. “It’s different with evil spirits.”
“I know,” says Reigen. Their toes prod at the bandages that swathe their cut-up feet. “Don’t worry.”
*
Reigen sleeps, on and off. Dimple lets him; the body needs it. At first he’d been afraid that he would feel like he had in the void between worlds before the storm brought him down to earth again, practically spitting him into Reigen’s face.
But even asleep, the body is warm, which the void had never been. Dimple retreats to Reigen’s hindbrain and lets him rest. He can feel the beat of their heart, the rush of blood through veins and arteries and out to the broken capillaries below their skin.
He can hear the rumble of their stomach (empty, to keep the possibility of surgery open in case Reigen’s condition worsened), the steady rush of breath through their nose. To his disappointment, Reigen doesn’t snore. He would have loved to give him a hard time about it.
He lies back and rests, drifting on the swell of their breath like a boat at sea.
*
“Did you mean it?” Reigen says as he waits for a nurse to bring him more medication in the middle of the night, his voice quiet and foggy with sleep.
“Mean what?”
“That we could be friends down here?”
It takes Dimple a minute to remember. His memories are there now, reformed out of the haze with the rest of him, but they’re slow to sort through, like pulling cards from a shuffled deck. But he gets there eventually.
“Why are you thinking about that?”
Reigen would be looking at him skeptically if there was a separate him to look at, Dimple’s sure. He feels their forehead wrinkle, their hand point to the machines and bandages, their eyes roll up towards the fracture in their skull.
“Gee, I wonder,” says Reigen, and Dimple snorts.
The nurse comes back, and they go quiet. Dimple doesn’t want her to think that Reigen’s having some kind of psychotic break on top of everything else.
But the problem with sharing a body is that it’s very hard to hide what you’re thinking. In his spiritual form, Dimple doesn’t consider himself particularly good at reading body language. But reading the language of a body when you’re inside it is a different story. He’s aware, probably more than Reigen, who’s lived in this thing for nearly thirty years without thinking about it, of the way that their heartbeat speeds up, of the tightness gathering in their temples, of the hollowness in their stomach.
Once the nurse is gone and they’ve settled back down, Reigen twisting the sheets around his thumbs in the dark, Dimple says, “Of course I meant it.”
Their heartrate jumps, then slows. The tension in their temples fades away.
Reigen smiles, and then he sleeps.
*
Morning comes, and the hospital starts to come alive. Reigen keeps drifting in and out of consciousness. While he’s asleep, Dimple hides. It doesn’t feel right, somehow, to take over in the way that he’s used to. It would make it harder to find the balance again once Reigen wakes up.
Between the nurses fussing over him and Serizawa arriving and the message that his mother was on her way, it’s hard for Dimple to get a moment with just the two of them. Finally there’s a break in the vistors and Reigen is awake and propped up in bed, eating a pudding.
“I’d better go see how Shigeo’s doing,” Dimple mumbles around the spoon in their mouth. He could talk more clearly if he ended the possession, but he can’t remember the last time he had the opportunity to taste something that wasn’t blood, so he’s sticking around.
Reigen nods. “Tell him he’d better be resting.”
“He’s gonna tell you the same thing.”
“Well, I am!” Reigen waves a hand and almost flips the spoon off the little tray table. “I’m in the hospital; I can’t really do anything except rest.”
Dimple pulls himself out of Reigen’s body. As always, there’s a sensation of tension and then something invisible snaps and he’s back in the air, nothing but energy. And maybe it’s just that his spiritual form reminds him too much of the void after spending so much time in a body, but he almost misses it.
“How do you feel?” asks Reigen. He sounds different now that Dimple can’t feel the resonance of his vocal chords, his voice thinner and higher.
Dimple considers. He’s still practically powerless. He can feel his form being pulled this way and that by the subtle background energies of the world. He wouldn’t bet on himself in a fight with anything bigger than a mouse spirit. But . . .
“Stable,” he says. He feels solid, not like liquid trying to maintain itself in liquid. It’s not much. But it’ll get him through the day.
Reigen smiles widely enough that Dimple has to blame it on the drugs. He must be pretty loopy if he’s looking at Dimple like that.
“Good,” he says. “Me too.”