Work Text:
“Shishou, please. Don’t—talk like that.”
“Talk like what?”
“Don’t call me that—”
“What?” Gentle, interested. “What have I been calling you?”
Mob doesn’t respond right away. The bed creaks as Reigen climbs back on top of him, and a flimsy bar of moonlight falls across their bodies. On the wall, their slow shadows blur.
Mob answers, finally, as Reigen pushes in. Two syllables. Halfway through the word, his voice breaks and shrinks to a whisper, like it’s afraid of itself.
Reigen kisses him, a reward for saying it. Then, smirking against Mob’s lips, starting to move, he lets loose a sentence way worse than anything else he’s said so far tonight: “You’re telling me that my little boy,” he says, “doesn’t want me to call him baby?”
Mob looks ready to faint. Or die. “Please—no,” he chokes.
This happens every once in a while. A strange urge comes over Reigen, and he wants, suddenly and very badly, to say certain appalling things to Mob: humiliating phrases, indecent endearments. And then he does. Even though he knows that later when they’re damp and spent the memory of what he’s said will make him want to beat his head against the wall until his skull cracks, until a pulp of blood and gray matter coats the room, until he can’t form even a simple sentence, can’t utter even a single word, ever again.
In this moment, though, looking down at Mob’s shocked face, into his blown pupils, Reigen’s looming shame feels very far away, and very worth it. It always does.
Because Mob loves it.
“No?” says Reigen. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Please, I can’t—”
“You don’t like it?”
Mob shakes his head wildly, fringe flying. “I hate it, I hate it—”
He loves it so much. It’s obvious. Oh, Mob. So honest everywhere but in bed.
Reigen has to fight to keep the crazed smile off his face. He’s really hit on something this time. How lucky that it’s the one word he’s privately called Mob for months now in his head, the one that’s always welling up like juice in his mouth when they’re in bed together, that he’s had to bite down on and swallow time and time again, because although he’s said some pretty dicey things before in the grip of his desires, for some reason that one word, that particular pet name—that, Reigen had thought, would be too much, wouldn’t it? Mob wouldn’t like it. It would embarrass him.
He wasn’t wrong in that last regard. But now he knows just what embarrassment does to Mob.
“Sorry, Mob,” he says. Sympathetic. “But I don’t think I can stop. It would be wrong of me.”
Mob hides his face, anguished and red, in his hands. “No… Why…”
“Because it’s true. You are a baby. I’d be lying if I said you weren’t.” He’s getting too excited. Slower, slower now—his movements, and his mouth. His next words are low and unhurried. “You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?”
“Shishou, why, why?” The more flustered Mob gets, the more he whines and cries, and the more he really does sound like a baby. “Why are you—I’m not—”
“You are, though.” Reigen peels Mob’s hands from his face like rind from a wet fruit and presses them to the bed on either side of him. The left one he pins palm to palm, their fingers interwoven; the right one he anchors by the wrist. “Look at you. Barely out of high school, never driven a car, never tasted alcohol.” Since Reigen’s inside of him, it seems only sensible to punctuate each item in this list with a pointed roll of his hips. “Crying. Drooling. Just a little boy. A baby. Taken advantage of by a grown man.” He leans down to kiss his temple. “Poor thing.” Then, mouth pressed hot against his ear: “Poor baby.”
Mob makes a wild stunned sound, which cuts off abruptly when his wet lips sew shut, followed by his wet eyes. Face scrunched and agonized, he’s holding his breath now; he’s close already. Reigen clicks his tongue and tells him to breathe. Opening his mouth, gasping, Mob tries to obey, but his breaths are just sobs, and they get louder, faster, more erratic, more obscene as Reigen, feeling him tighten, rears back, reaches down, touches him, fucks him, bruises his hips with his fingers, watches his whole body shake and come undone on his cock and, finally, inflamed and euphoric, calls him his poor thing again, his poor baby, his poor little baby.
Sitting on the edge of the bed in his pajamas with his head in his hands, Reigen prays for death.
Mob lies on his side with a hand stretched out to him, petting the bare slice of skin just above the waistband of his sweatpants, where his ratty old shirt has ridden up slightly. It tickles.
“It’s okay, shishou,” he says.
Reigen groans. A cigarette might briefly curb his urge to kill himself out of shame, but he won’t smoke with Mob here.
“I liked it,” says Mob.
Reigen knows that already. Mob has a way of telling him when he really doesn’t like something, after all. No, this is just his own delayed mortification, which tends to hit him like a brief but brutal flu just after they’ve cuddled, the nausea, the headache, the longing for obliteration. Although it is a little worse tonight, so—yeah. There might be something else to it this time.
“You know I don’t really see you that way,” Reigen rasps. “Right?”
“I know,” says Mob.
“Because I don’t want you to think that I do.”
“I don’t. I won’t.”
“Because…” He can’t look at Mob without wincing when he gets like this, but Reigen forces himself to turn and face him anyway.
Mob’s nose and cheeks and eyes are flushed and blurred and rawly pink. He always cries during sex, as if some subtle and irregular engineer with an intimate knowledge of Reigen’s sexual predilections had slipped in among the channels and cables of Mob’s body and wired his tear ducts to whatever part of his brain is responsible for arousal. For his part, Reigen sometimes cries, too, but usually after. (An exception: not the first but the second time he ever fucked Mob, towards the very end. The hardest he’s ever cried in his life.)
Now, in the shining dark—the calm liquid black of Mob’s irises, the pale legs tucked thoughtfully up, the tranquil understanding in his face, affectionate, accepting, wise. Adult—in spite of the tear tracks. In two days he goes back to university. Reigen is so proud. Respects him so ferociously.
“Because,” says Reigen again, “you’ve grown up so much, and. And I look up to you. I learn from you, I love you, I see you—as a man, I…”
“I know, shishou. Thank you,” says Mob. He smiles. Then his pinkie inches over to Reigen’s hand on the mattress and strokes it cautiously, his fond acceptance turning to shyness. “But. You know. Even though it’s embarrassing, I really do like the way you talk when we… And next time, I wouldn’t mind if you—that is, you can...” Is he pouting? “You can call me…that. Again. If you want.” A weak finish, cryptic and self-conscious.
Reigen knows what Mob means to say, though—what he’s doing his best to admit out loud for Reigen’s sake, and his own—and as his cock stirs in response, most of his remaining shame recedes quite miraculously. He leans toward him, gets a knee back onto the bed. “Yeah?” he says. “You like being my little—?”
Mob shoots up and slaps a hand over Reigen’s mouth. “Not right now,” he says.
Grinning slowly beneath Mob’s palm, Reigen wraps his arms around him and uses his weight to pull him back down onto the pillows, where he holds him tight and still. Grasping Mob’s wrist, he pries his hand away from his mouth. “Baby,” he says into Mob’s ear. “Baby, baby, baby—”