A/N: I've only watched the first ten episodes of the anime, and here I am. Forgive me.

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The house was silent.

No ticking clock, nor hum of air conditioner, nor settling of the earth made a sound. Everything remained quiet—and waiting.

The man moved like a shadow. Soundlessly, he surmounted the dark stairs, the black peace of the hallway disturbed ever so slightly as he crossed to the distant bedroom. The door was obtusely agape, and inside lied a couple nestled in their futon.

He stopped outside the door. He took a moment to note how they were placed: the woman, the mother, with her dark hair twined together like seafaring rope, and the father with his arms perched atop the blanket. A square of light from the uncurtained window almost cascaded across their unassuming faces.

He lifted his arms. Silently, and for no longer than a moment, green and black trendels unleashed from his fingers, finding their way around the heads of the mother and father. They wove into the couple's noses, darting out with what looked like ghost orbs in the colors of aquamarine and purple and pink. Satisfied, the trendels returned, and the man quashed the vibrate orbs between his palms. The fragile things gave away with a little death of stardust.

The man startled when an utterly pitiful noise came from beside the futon. There, lying unseen in the dark, was a baby, so newborn its face glowed like the moon. It fretted within the loneliness of its own futon.

He darted to quell the baby at once. More dark wisps unraveled from his hands as he covered the child's mouth, all the pain in its face melting into a sudden sleep. Any disruption in tranquilly was returned, and the parents slept on, unaware of the man in their bedroom or what he came to do.

It really had nothing to do with them. The man left them as they were, traveling instead to the room across the hall.

The room was as he expected it: unguarded, unremarkable, with anything suggesting it was a child's room tucked away or nonexistent. Only a single futon with a single person implied the place was anything at all.

The man walked astride the futon. The child within was mostly still, and looked like he had not misplaced a centimeter since his mother had tucked him in many hours ago. His breathing pitched his little chest at a steady rate.

The man watched for a moment. Then, he picked the child out of the futon and carried him out of the house without a single word.

.

"Yeah, I've got him."

The child awoke with cool, nighttime air brushing his skin, and he noted the strange, hurried motion of whoever had their arms around him. He watched curiously as the man snapped his cellphone closed and hid it away, his other arm returning to holding the child close to his chest. He also saw how the man had an evil mark across his face, although he couldn't have possibly known the twisted skin to be a scar.

In his haste, the man did not notice the child awaken. He was concentrated on escaping, and that perhaps was his downfall.

The child reached towards the man's face. And, with a single flash of light, the child was on the ground and the man was sent flying into a pile of trashcans.

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Arataka Reigen was cursed to be mediocre.

He went to work, and he came home. He didn't expect to win the lottery (although he desperately hoped to), and didn't expect a woman to want to marry him anytime soon. He didn't eat nutritively, he wore plain clothes, and he went to bed too late every night. He wasn't special, and that was that.

Possibly the only interesting thing about him was that his family owned a graveyard. Reigen lived in the house his family also kept beside the graveyard, from back when they hired single groundskeepers instead of an outside company. Now, the only responsibility of the house's occupant was to open the graveyard gates before they went to work, and to lock them shut when they came home. Reigen fulfilled his duty with no exhaustion of grumbling.

On this particular, soon-to-be-eventful night, Reigen had found the inspiration within himself to read his collection of ghost stories for the umpteenth time. The twaddle of a late night show gave the room some needed noise, and the atmosphere of relaxation and unconcern was complete.

The turning of a page and sound of televised laughter combined briefly to make the oddest noise. The upset startled Reigen only momentarily, before he reasoned it to be nothing but an imaginative happening, or something of the sort. In any case, it did not bother him enough to disrupt his reading or make him move, so he remained firmly planted in the couch and tried to continue with his careless evening.

But he heard it again.

Giggling.

The events of about ten horror movies rolled through Reigen's mind. His limbs jerked against his conscious choice, and with a shout he went tumbling to the floor, the contents of his side table following suit. The pretty ceramics bowl he used to steam ramen hit him in a very unfortunate spot, and he had to spend agonizing moments fussing and holding the tender area in pain. When Reigen pulled his wits together enough to stand, he willed himself to the window, switching on the porch light and peeking out warily.

Nothing greeted him in his immediate yard. He almost had the time to be relieved, but another laugh from outside created a new wave of panic. It sounded like it was coming from the edge of the fence that separated his yard from the graveyard.

Reigen saw a white figure hunched near the edge of the fence. The sight of the ghostly color was all it took for him to zip away from the window. His breathing hitched, and he clutched at the wall he was pressed against.

That couldn't be a ghost…

…

Could it?

Reigen wasn't so distasteful or dismissive of the supernatural as many. In fact, if he wanted to admit it, the stuff interested him greatly, and that reminder soothed his fluttering heart.

He unpeeled from the wall. Puffing up with bravery that probably wasn't sincere, Reigen marched out the front door and across his yard, towards the thing huddled by the fence.

The figure wore all white. A dark head rested close to the knees pulled up to its chest, and hands covered the entirety of its face. It giggled, once, and opened the hands from its face, almost like it were playing a game with something unseen on the other side of the fence.

Reigen realized it wasn't a ghost at all: it was a little boy.

He froze out of sheer disbelief. The boy, who couldn't have been more than two, was barefoot with white pajamas grass-stained on his rump. His black hair was cut in a round shape that had made Reigen think his head was something sinister. The little boy giggled again and covered his face.

Reigen finally found his voice, "What are you doing?"

The boy paused his game. Reigen was not entirely sure the boy was not some evil spirit until he turned his face and Reigen saw only a bored, or unimpressed, expression—which was rather interesting on one so young.

"Playing."

He replied in an equally vapid tone. Clearly seeing Reigen as no interest and no threat, he returned to whatever was across the fence, the smile again gracing his face.

Reigen honestly had no idea what to say. Eventually, and clumsily, he decided to be more direct, and his clipped manner showed that.

"What are you doing here all by yourself?"

The boy again determined Reigen worth humoring. He looked back, a more thoughtful twinkle to his eyes.

"I don't know."

He expounded no more—and, really, what could be expected of a toddler? Reigen, fully exasperated, decided to scrape together some adult respectability. He had to take charge of the situation.

"Let's take you to the police station," Reigen offered in his best fatherly voice. "We can find your parents that way."

The boy appeared to mull over the prospect. Finding it satisfactory, he nodded.

"Okay."

Reigen had an awkward fumble of not knowing if he should hold the boy's hand. Whatever distance of contact was chosen for him as the boy made grabby hands to be picked up. A little unwilling, but also eager to move the process along, Reigen lifted the strange child who he at first thought was a ghost and who talked to nothingness into his arms.

"What's your name?" Reigen figured it beneficial to ask.

The boy had to think.

"Mob."

That's what everyone called him. That was his name, wasn't it?

As Reigen was going to ask a bewildered follow up about if that really was his name, a person pulled forth from the shadows of the street. His previous quietness was lost with the injured foot he dragged behind him, and Reigen was off-put by the deep shadow from his hoodie cloaking his appearance. He stopped just before the property line. If Reigen could do one thing, it was read people, and intuition told him at once that the man was not good news.

"You." The man wasted no time. "You caught me off-guard. Nice job, kid."

A husky bark from the man set a weird, conflicting mood. Mob cocked his head like a sparrow, not replying but also not understanding.

"You're pretty decent for a toddler."

The man stepped up into the yard. Reigen took that as his cue to work them both out of the situation he could feel was escalating, and he took a step back towards the safety of his house.

"Who-?"

Reigen never got to finish his sentence. In the place of any words, Mob raised his hand, a glowing aura twirling from his fingertips. The man, without even the notion of challenge, was shot across the street, landing headlong into the adjacent building with an explosion of bricks and mortar. Mob watched the scene lacking even so little as contentment. It was like he was batting away an insect.

Reigen's jaw hung ajar. He looked to the little boy in his arms, then to the unmoving man, and did so many times that his brain threatened to be bruised. Mob was patient enough to wait for Reigen to compose himself, and he wasn't fazed when he practically yelled.

"You have psychic powers?" Reigen cried in excitement (and maybe a little bit of fear).

Mob blinked in question. "What?"

Oh… of course he would be too young to know what that meant. Nevertheless, Reigen was practically feverish, sprouting all sorts of incomprehensible nonsense.

"I've always—like, all my life I've— "

Mob had enough of the babble. He firmly put his hand over Reigen's mouth, shushing him.

"Hush."

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A/N: If this gets any notion of being ~popular~, I might continue it, but don't expect much from my poor weary soul.