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He's still just a boy when the future comes crashing into his life with all of the grace of a fish on land, and when expectant eyes stare down on him, each one demanding answers he's ashamed to admit he cannot give, he can't help but liken himself to the poor, suffocating creature himself. No one enjoys thinking about the uncertainties of what lies ahead of them in life, and it's not his youth alone that's kept him from doing so. This is a time to focus on studies, to refine talents, to rebel, to immerse oneself in hobbies, to sample bittersweet love, to enjoy the ephemeral joys of boyhood – not waste his time wondering where the him of twenty years from now will be sitting, will be eating, will be doing. He's at the cusp of adulthood, his parents, his teachers, even strangers try to tell him, but he hasn't fallen in entirely. Is it too much to ask for these last years to be spent enjoying himself instead of job hunting? The paper the instructor slaps down on his desk, the one that has him worrying at his lip and sweat building up hot at his collar and looks at him with a false gaze even sharper than its edges, very definitively tells him “yes”. More definitely does it tell him what he has to do for his latest assignment: Decide what, exactly, it is that he wants to be once the youth he's been grasping so hard for finally slips out of his fingers.[break][break]

It shouldn't be a hard thing to answer by any means. It's not as though it's binding in any way, and even the classmates that are so dull he wouldn't be surprised to find were brain dead all along have aspirations to their name. Baby steps toward a goal, the foundation of a future they could enjoy. Things, most importantly, that have always failed to really cross his mind. And he could, he likes to imagine, “be” just about whatever he can possibly desire. Perhaps he's not to most physically fit child to ever walk these middle school grounds, but he's plenty of time to fix that between now and when the school system spits him out a grown man should the desire ever arise. His grades and the minimal effort it takes to get them certainly don't lie – neither does the way his tongue lashes out sharper than the upperclassmen, and, dare he say it, some of the faculty themselves. (After all, you don't have to actually be particularly good at something in order to be it. You just have to convince people that you are.) General talent sits prettily at his side and whispers softly of all the things that he could possibly hope to be. So softly – too softly, impossible to hear. There's so much potential in his brain, in his bones, but there's no desire to put it anywhere. No idea of where even to start.[break][break]

Still, he wants the grade, and even though he's been scoffing at this whole thing since it bared its poison-tipped fangs at him, he's no choice but to submit and whip up an answer that will satisfy. Maybe he wants to know what sort of answer he can come up with, genuinely come up with himself. This isn't something, after all, that he's ever put much thought into. Space and its endless ocean of stars seems like a start... but there's a fine line between being humble and being discarded in favor of the vastness of the universe, too large for even the brightest minds to wrap their minds around. Astronaut, he'll assume, is out. In the reverse, there are occupations that would put him up on a pedestal, but he has always scorned the over glorification that the stars on Earth find themselves showering in, and if there's one thing he doesn't want to be, it's a hypocrite. So he'll think more, and he'll think and think and think until his food's gone cold at the table and his father is snapping, “Arataka, stop staring into space like that,” and then he'll keep thinking still. His ceiling at night is as blank as his mind, the tick of the clock's first hand as slow as the gears struggling to turn in his brain, and realization hits him like a train on a track. He can't do this. Not they way they want him to, anyway. (He looks at it from a different perspective – and it all falls into place.)[break][break]

Come the end of the day, he's still a child, and the affairs of his older self should be left to his older self. Instead, he'll resort to the usual tactics (ones that, despite not knowing it now, will continue to be his usual tactics for decades to come) and bullshit his way out of another pointless assignment.[break][break]

What does Arataka Reigen want to be?[break][break]

I want to be someone.[break][break]

YOU OPEN YOU'RE MOUTH, YOU'RE BOUND TO RUMBLE

Life becomes as cyclical as the laundry he listlessly watches tumble in his parents' washing machine. Chase the moon in the morning, rising before the sun; wash down the residual lethargy with a shower that will never be any hotter than lukewarm; put on the same crinkled black suit and black tie; try to bury the traces of disappointment in the periphery of his mind under the smoke of a cigarette (maybe two, if that's what it takes); catch the early commute, always ten minutes ahead of its own schedule; sit down at that same block as yesterday and the day before; paperwork – paperwork for hours; catch the late commute back to his little cube he's tried and failed to call home; (another smoke, or two, or three just for good measure); take out for dinner again; stare at the ceiling until nostalgia or sleep catches up to him – whichever comes first, really; lather; rinse; repeat. Some days, he'll stare in the mirror, and he swears he can't tell himself apart from the man who sits just on the other side of his cubical. The aching in his feet has long since subsided to dullness. He'd never been a picky eater before, but part of him can't help but wonder if the tastelessness of his lunch is from quality to be expected of something he purchases so cheaply, or something else he'd rather not put a name to. “Reigen” is a name that almost seems to be swallowed up by the void. He doesn't even realize he's turned twenty-three until his voice messaging system screeches out birthday wishes to him at least a week, perhaps two after the tenth day of the tenth month has already come to pass.[break][break]

His mind sometimes drags itself back to younger days, back to a time when he'd believed that he could have been just about anything under the sun so long as he'd the motivation to reach out and grab for this. This... This hadn't been what he'd wanted, had it? He remembers being indecisive, but he can't remember what, exactly, his younger self had wanted to be. Once he's realized the fact, though, it clings to the ends of his thoughts like a burr, tenacious in its efforts to keep holding on no matter how many times he tries to let it go. He could lose himself in the mechanical acts of his work before, but now he's being jerked out of lulls while some part of his brain demands that he try, just try to remember if the him of a decade ago really had this bad of a death wish. Days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months. Finally, on his way, it hits him.[break][break]

Someone.[break][break]

Not anyone, but someone. An individual, someone who can stand alone. He's – no, Reigen's looking out now into the crowd of people around him, each a nameless, faceless blur, and when he catches himself in the reflective surface of a nearby window, he's his disgusted to admit that he sees someone no different than the rest. “Home” is full of white walls and semi-functional furniture. A fridge full of nothing. His brain full of nothing. Where is the individuality in this, or that, or anything that his life has taken root in? Not a single name he could classify as a friend can come to mind, not a single person who would point him out of a mass of people and think 'that man is something special'. How long now, he can't help but wonder, has he been living out his life by everyone else's standards? Certainly, he's not main character material for any tales of dashing heroism and addictive action, but he's the main character of something, dammit. His own life, for one thing.[break][break]

He snaps the cycle with his own two hands, rising two hours earlier than usual, letting the water of his shower run icy cold over his back, and reaching not for the usual black, but instead for that ugly not-quite-pink and not-quite-purple tie he'd been given some handful of years back before setting off with a cigarette in his hands. He throws in the towel with energy he didn't think his body could even hold anymore, hums the whole work day away, and successfully makes something resembling a meal on his third try when the evening begins swallowing the afternoon whole. His mother and her all knowing ways (how did she find out he was out of work so quickly? no, no, he wasn't stupid enough to get himself fired, just how little faith does she have in him?) catches up to him no more than forty-eight hours later with more than a few choice words to say to him, but adrenaline (and maybe a bit of alcohol) has him running stronger than he thinks he's ever run, and even maternal disappointment over his supposedly “rash” decisions can't hold him back now. Even in the beginning, he's not always the most honest man, but in the end -[break][break]

Reigen always makes good on his word.[break][break]

BIG TALK IS CHEAP TALK UNLESS -

Spontaneity kicks him out of its car and into a ditch: jobless, alone, and out of ideas.[break][break]

The disgruntled messages of a disappointed mother pile up on his messaging machine faster than he can turn down a job interview, strings of her reprimanding him fresh salt to rub into freshly opened wounds. Had he the energy for it, Reigen likes to think that he could shut her up immediately with a a few words of his own – he's been playing people, the man and woman who raised him included, like a harp with nothing more than a few pretty words for almost as long as he can remember now – but another fruitless day only serves to suck all of his reserves as soon as he's swung open his apartment's door, and the messages are deleted without so much as a bat of the eye. The most frustrating thing about this all, most certainly, is that he's not failing in the usual sense. Any of these offers could have been his had he made the attempt to take them; decline has only been coming from his end. No, no, he's failing in the sense that he just can't let himself settle. He's gotten into this mess trying to flee from a life that would rob him of the very things that make him human (there's a difference, after all, between being on equal footing as everyone else in the world and indistinguishable from them), and he certainly isn't going to get out of it by putting himself in that very same position in just another office building. Or any of these buildings, for that matter. There's a boredom that's settled over his life that needs to be fended off, he comes to realize, and even just one of his overactive hands has more life than any of these openings could ever possibly give him.[break][break]

It's during this aggravating lull that he finds the bar. And not just any bar – the bar, the one that sells its booze for lower prices in exchange for an atmosphere reeking of desperation (and maybe a little vomit if you're sitting in the right corner) and a crowd that can do nothing better than cry over their losses, self imposed or otherwise. In the beginning, he goes there to remind himself of exactly why he doesn't drink. The taste is all wrong, and it's not even twenty minutes before the room is spinning or three drinks in before he's the one contributing to the smell of throw-up behind the booths. Come the time where the bartender has switched from calling him, true to cliché, “stranger” to “Arataka-chan”, the ginger's made somewhat of a name for himself with the regulars, and even with the unfamiliar faces that swing by now and then on a whim or poke their head in to match a face to a rumor. Tongue slurred by the influence of alcohol or no, talking has always come so easy to him, and even if he didn't know how to say exactly what these people need to hear, their sorrows (their drunken states) would eventually bring them to lap up his words like water in the middle of a desert. This man lost his wife because of infidelity, and that woman is just never good enough for the people around her, but they walk in those doors to forget at the start of the week and walk out, empowered, by the end. They depend on him for their emotional support because he always knows just what to say. Even though he doesn't like to admit it, too, he comes to depend on the time he spends here. (It's the only place that makes him feel like a real, tangible person again.)[break][break]

Just once does someone turn the tables on him, and a question he is completely unprepared to answer comes sucker punching him in the stomach. What is he, the one who supposedly has everything all figured out, doing here in a place dedicated to the miserable?[break][break]

That night, dark eyes latch onto an advertisement for crystal balls on the back of a magazine. Spontaneity swings its door open once more with hesitant apology, and Reigen realizes that he won't have to struggle to think up an answer to that question for much longer.[break][break]

- UNLESS YOU'RE BACKING IT UP

There's a lease in his hand, and in a single night, a nameless little office is reborn as the Spirits and Such Consultation Office – and its owner reheralds himself as the greatest psychic of the twenty-first century.[break][break]

(Someone.)[break][break]

BIG TALK IS, CHEAP TALK IS -

Reigen is twenty-five when he considers that another change of occupation may be in order.[break][break]

He's run this business for what must tally up to a year's worth of conning now: the weak of mind come knocking at his door with stories, true or otherwise, of spirits inferring with their lives, and he rids them of their problems with a flourish that is certain to have them coming back for any of their other psychic-orientated needs. In truth, there's nothing remotely paranormal about his methods. He can't even claim to really believe that psychic exist, much less that they have any ability to actually exorcise evil spirits (the likes of which he's still a bit iffy on whether or not he chooses to believe in, as well). All he's managed to do here is rack up just enough income to maintain the place and his less-than-humble home and perfect his skills as a masseur – not exactly a goal he has ever planned, nor wanted to set for himself before testing his feet in the business. The skeptics spit verbal acid in his face, the rare appearance of something that may actually be something from the Great Beyond, and the fact that these people keep dragging him into places just crawling with cockroaches are all working together to put a bit of a sour taste in his mouth, and between that and the mediocrity of his job alone... Well, thoughts of another line of work have always held their temptations, but never as strongly as they do when he sees his latest client out the door (content and spared from the con men who would take her money and fail to solve her problems as she may be). The idea of changing this place into an office more befitting of a private detective strikes him as especially promising – Detective Reigen, on the case – but is immediately dampened by the realization that his luck would only send him men and women begging him to stalk their lovers for any signs of infidelity. Boring.[break][break]

Smoke has only just started billowing from the freshly lit end of the cigarette between his lips, one he believes to be well deserved after his last “exorcism”, when there comes a quiet knocking sound on his door followed by words spoken through his door: “Excuse me. I came here because I saw your sign.” It's faint and maybe just a bit timid, but it's enough to pull him from his reverie of being a private eye and back into the world of the living. Because it's odd. The man isn't entirely unused to having walk-in clients who didn't know they were supposed to reserve a time slot ahead of time or were so desperate as to skip the process entirely, but it can't have been more than fifteen minutes ago that he was just seeing that clammy handed female out the door, and his office doesn't generate enough traffic for something like this to happen. It, admittedly, throws him off his groove for a second. Thankfully, he's skilled enough to jump right back on it.[break][break]

“Sure thing,” the con artist says as he stamps out his (regrettably) fresh cigarette into the ash tray by his desk. His pleasant air is only skin deep, but he wears it with all the familiarity of an old coat. “How may I help you? Er -” But then he's turned around and the door is open and his gaze has to turn downward because he's not looking at the tall frame of a worried adult, but rather the vaguely apprehensive (he says vaguely because he has to blink twice to make sure the boy's emoting at all) face of child who can't be older than ten, maybe eleven years of age. “Oh,” he says, deflating, and the disappointment seeps into his words without resistance. “It's just a kid.” Still, curiosity has some hold over him, and he blames it on that and that alone that he's standing and making his way toward the half-opened door, hands shoved deep into his pockets as he asks with bluntness he stores away when a potential buyer comes knocking: “What do you want, boy?”[break][break]

“Um, I'm an esper.”[break][break]

… What?[break][break]

“Huh?”[break][break]

If Reigen is being honest with himself, and he usually is, he doesn't exactly pay as much attention to the words tumbling out of the child's mouth as he probably should. They're muffled by his skepticism, the immediate thought of “this is a scam” poisoning every syllable and making it too much effort to really, truly comprehend. He's saying something about not being able to control his supposed “powers”, but the first words out of the elder of the two's mouth are anything but sympathetic. “Did someone tell you to come here and tell me that?” Much to his surprise, though, the response he gets is as genuine as they come. Children can't hide much from him. He already knows how to cut through the layers of dishonesty of adults with terrifying precision, but even a youth's best front is easily seen through by anyone with a lick of common sense. This is how he figures he can believe the sentence that follows.[break][break]

“No. I haven't been able to talk to anyone about this.” Reigen likens the nameless child to a turtle; he certainly shrinks into himself like one. “I thought you might be the same as me... If I try, I can see spirits, too.”[break][break]

And it's hard to say no to that. Espers and psychics aren't real, of course, but this poor kid has deluded himself – or, worse, was tricked – into thinking that they not only are, but he's one of the lucky and rare few to be one of them. It's obvious that this boy is deeply troubled, and while he can't bring himself to ask for any kind of payment for someone who's less than half his age, he also can't just sit by while someone's come to him for help. Not that he's particularly glad about it, though. “Well, come on in.”[break][break]

“... Okay.”[break][break]

In a matter of minutes, they're seated across from each other at his little table in the corner, steaming cups of tea too hot to touch set in front of them and expectant, small eyes watching the man in the suit intently. The tea had been a move to buy himself time to think of what to say (he doesn't mind lying to fellow adults, especially if it will do them better in the end, but it doesn't always sit right with him when it's a child), but even here, he can't think of where to possibly begin. Silence hangs over them just a bit too tense – or maybe it comes off as reflective and patient; is he the only one sweating here? – and he realizes that he'll just have to settle for the old tactics. Whatever comes to mind first is usually the safest way to go. “I was troubled a lot when I was a kid, too,” he says. It's not wrong, really. Off the top of his head, he can recall a time when he'd forgotten to tell his parents that it was sports day at school that day, and he was the only one left with nothing to eat. Still, though, the difference in what, exactly, their troubles are doesn't seem to matter in the least. The boy perks up immediately at the words, an intake of air so quick and strong that its audible really hammering the whole thing in, and – wow, this is one severe case. Good luck bullshitting his way out of this one. (He presses on, anyway, perhaps inspired by the hope he sees shining brighter in those eyes than in any that have come before them.) “Listen. Just because you have psychic powers doesn't make you any less human. It's the same as people who are fast, people who are book smart, and people with strong body odor. Psychic powers are just another characteristic.” And this boy, this poor, deluded boy, is nodding at him with enthusiasm, hanging off of every word with all of the attention of every client that's come before him combined. It fills Reigen with someone that feels nostalgic, almost. Something he hasn't felt since he must have been that young, himself. Thoughtless as the actions that have him rising up from his chair and resettling on the edge of the table, movements carried out without thought as he reaches to pat a shoulder than his hand looks to devour. (He keeps pressing on.) “You must embrace that as a part of yourself and continue to live positively. The truth behind one's charm is kindness.[break][break]

“Became a good person. That's all.”[break][break]

He retracts his hand, confident that he's said all he needs to in order to put this poor little soul at ease – but then there's a smile being shot his way and a question following hot on his heels, and this is exactly what he hadn't been hoping for. “May I come to talk to you again?” That's bad. This isn't a place for charity cases, and it's not the place where he spills all of his best advice for all to hear because a lemon sour has loosened his tongue a bit (a lot). If people were to see this same boy coming back and back and back again, they'd get the wrong idea. There can only be so many free handouts, after all, before he starts losing business, and if his current state doesn't have his mother sending him enough job applications as is, that will have his e-mail overflowing beyond its limits.[break][break]

“Yeah, I don't know about that,” he says, peeling away from the table with his hot drink and cupping his chin with his free hand. Rejection has always been the hardest thing to master, but he's determined to make sure to let the “esper” down as easily as he can manage. “I'm pretty busy, you know?” Steam laps at his face as he begins to raise his tea to his lips, too distracted by his words to remember why that's a terrible idea. “Anyway, you should go home for tod-” And then he remembers. It'd be hard not to, what with the way his mouth explodes into fire. “Bwuh- Hot!” He's recoiling, arms flailing and tea flying into the air as he tosses the offending cup without a single second of forethought – but then he realizes who, exactly, he'd just tossed that boiling cup of liquid to. Oh no. “Hey, don't get bur-” For a second time, his words are clipped ungraciously short by the actions of a drink he's beginning to think he'll be taking a break from; whereas he'd been stopped before by the destruction of his tongue and inner cheeks, however, what has his body freezing in midair, all thoughts screeching to a halt with it, is all visual. The cup is... The cupping is twisting in midair, and the tea, it's – the tea is bubbling up and sucking itself back into the cup and – and this is it. This is exactly it. This is what Reigen has been telling people for more than three hundred sixty-five days that he had at his disposal. This is what one would call psychic power.[break][break]

This boy is everything that Reigen has claimed to be and is not.[break][break]

“Hey... You... said you could see ghosts, too, right?” he asks, and if he isn't what's shaking, then it's the room around them.[break][break]

A nod of the head.[break][break]

“Do you know how to exorcise them, too?”[break][break]

Another nod. Reigen feels light headed. (A thought strikes him, and he can't hold back a bark of a laugh.)[break][break]

“Alright. Come again tomorrow around the same time.”[break][break]

The sentence hasn't even reached its completion before that blank expression has burst into something livelier than a flame's end, and no more than a second after it has does the unnamed child ask in disbelief: “What? Really?”[break][break]

(He doesn't know it at the time, but this is the single most life changing decision Reigen will ever make in his life.)[break][break]

“I'll show you how to use your powers.”[break][break]

ONLY WORDS UNLESS YOU'RE BACKIN' IT UP

Three years ago, he was first dubbed Master Reigen by a interesting little boy named Kageyama Shigeo. It's funny to think that he'd considered closing up shop then, and even funnier that all it had taken was one child with a whole universe of stars shining in eyes that betrayed a blank face that managed to turn it all around. He's watched that same boy grow in more ways then one since: in height, in strength, in spirit. (If the he were to tell the him of ten years ago that his greatest inspiration would be a middle school boy, he likes to imagine he would have choked. Now, he can't imagine it any other way.)[break][break]

Mob gives him hope for something better from the very beginning. Better business, better company -[break][break]

A better Reigen Arataka.

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