"So," Teru starts suddenly.

Mob flinches and makes sure to listen carefully ‒ it's the same tone a teacher uses on him when they're trying to explain the same thing to him for the third time and are very much running out of patience.

"I am done making this about me. Your hands itch, you say. Is that all the time or just in certain situations?"

Teru's eyes are once again focused directly on him, with a piercing intent this time that would be sort of scary if they hadn't just established their friendship. But even so, it's like all the weight that Mob felt had just been lifted from him immediately crushes back down.

Too bad Mob can't just answer "I don't know" and wait for the teacher to ask someone else. "Um, all the time, I think?" He is too aware of the heat in the room again. "But. It gets worse. In certain situations."

"What kind of situations?"

Mob can just about mumble a shaky "Um" before Teru sighs loudly, scratches that one persistent fluff of hair by his temple and then holds up a hand in a calming gesture.

"Sorry, I don't mean to sound so harsh," he says in a kinder voice again. "It's just, I would really like to sort this out and I feel that I've been continuously interrupting this conversation with my own issues, when it's actually you who is asking for help here. So." He sets the cup down on the floor and turns his full attention on Mob. "Even if you don't want to talk about what happened, you can at least tell me the details of that problem I'm supposed to help you solve, right?"

"You shouldn't put the cup there," Mob says. "Cups don't go on the floor."

"You are entirely correct, of course." Teru picks the offending piece of ceramic back up and leans over to put it next to Mob's on the bedside table. "Now." The quick motion brought him a lot closer again, though he is still careful not to touch Mob. "In what kind of situations does this get worse?"

Mob swallows harshly and looks away, heat persistently crawling up his neck. Which actually gives him an idea of what to say. "Heat. And touching things. Skin is the worst. Or, just ‒ when things are bad."

"Like they were back then?" Teru points to the door to the bathroom again. Mob makes sure not to look in that direction at all and just nods once. "And that's why you wash your hands so much? To make them feel colder?"

"Hm." Mob only washed his hands twice while he was here. Apparently he was weird enough about that to make Teru immediately realize it's a whole thing now. "Less sticky too."

Teru nods, slowly at first, then faster a few more times as he stands up. He takes just two or three steps back and forth, not quite enough to count as pacing, before he stops again and faces Mob. One hand is on his hip, the other switches between gesturing vaguely and lightly tugging at his own hair as he talks. "Alright. What little insight I have on this topic, I can of course share with you, though I'd like to clarify that I am by no means an expert. Despite my previous experience with choking people."

Mob scoots forward to the edge of the bed, listening intently and nodding along. Any advice is preferable to none at this point.

Even though the usual confidence has returned to Teru's voice, there is still a short moment in which he seems undecided. Mob almost misses how he chews on his lower lip for a second, but he does unmistakably catch the way he practically studies him like a puzzle to be solved.

"I would like to try something," he says, softly and carefully, as if his voice alone could scare Mob right out of his body again. It seems very deliberate how he doesn't move from his spot at all now, just stands there with his arms crossed over his chest as if he requires Mob's permission to keep going from here. "If you're up for it. But it might become very upsetting long before it becomes helpful. If it does at all."

"Okay," Mob agrees.

Teru cocks his head to the other side and smiles, exasperated and lopsided. "You didn't even let me explain yet."

"Oh, sorry. You can still explain if you want, I don't mind."

With a chuckle, Teru just drops his head and rubs his eyes with two fingers, then smiles back up at him. "Just wait here, please." And he leaves for the kitchen once again.

Mob looks after him even though he is long gone from his field of view. He thinks he can hear the fridge opening and closing again, then the sound of crinkling plastic. The thought of Teru's idea not helping and just being upsetting should maybe make him a bit nervous, he thinks, but in a way he is just glad that he has an idea at all. Even if it doesn't work in the end, at least they can try to do something.

It turns out that the plastic he heard must have been from a bag of ice cubes, because Teru carries a small bowl filled with said cubes back into the living room not a minute later. He sets it aside on the table, grabs one ice cube and folds both his hands around it. With his foot, he pulls up one of the chairs and pushes it over to the bed so that when he sits down, the two of them are sat directly across from each other.

Water drops from in between his folded hands. "You're dripping on the carpet," Mob helpfully informs him, even though Teru's eyes are focused intently on his own hands and he must have noticed too, so he suspects it's not actually all that helpful. "Do you need a towel?"

"No no, that's alright," Teru assures him with a short shake of his head, still without making eye contact. "A bit of water is not going to ruin the carpet." He moves the ice around between his fingers. It almost looks like fidgeting, but Mob is certain that there is actually a very good, very smart strategy behind all this.

"This is probably stupid and dangerous," Teru says. "But here is what I'm thinking. If you want to be able to use your hands normally again, you need to force yourself to get used to the things that set off that itching. Confront your fears, right?"

There is a little swirling feeling in his stomach at that. Mob suddenly, almost painfully realizes he's been watching Teru's face a little too intently, something that often makes people nervous. So he, too, quickly drops his gaze to his hands instead and fixates the tiny trails of clear, cold water running down over his knuckles.

"I read that that's actually a very common practice in therapy. Desensitizing yourself by controlled exposure to your triggers."

"That sounds good," Mob says, nodding. "There's many big words."

Teru glances up at him and then back down so quickly that Mob isn't entirely sure it really happened. "Please do not think I actually know what I'm doing. It's just something I read."

Mob's first instinct is to protest, to assure Teru that he believes in his smart sounding idea. But he closes his mouth around the words before they can leave, tries to remember instead if he has ever witnessed Teru being humble. He's pretty sure he hasn't.

"I was thinking ‒" Teru starts up again. But for some reason, he suddenly stumbles over his words in an uncharacteristic fashion. He lowers his head even more over his folded hands. Mob's entire field of view is blond, spiky hair now and he wonders why the tips of the ears poking out of it suddenly look a little more flushed than before. "Ah, well, I was thinking I could hold your hands, basically."

He finally opens his own hands again, wipes them dry on his jeans and holds them up between them. "I cooled them down so it's just one thing at first, just the feeling of skin without the heat. And after we hold them for a while, they'll slowly warm up again. I think that would make it easier to get used to it."

As if from far away, Mob notices the collar of his uniform clinging to his wet skin again, the hair at his temples getting stringy and soaked as well. A loud rushing sound in his ears drowns out many of the other tiny noises he should be hearing. The longer he stares at Teru's hands laid out before his eyes, the more everything else drops away and the more his eyes get hung up on every little detail.

He is painstakingly tracing one especially deep crease and all the smaller lines branching off of it with his eyes. "Wouldn't it make more sense for me to hold your neck, then?"

Teru actually flinches a bit at the question. "It probably would," he admits, hesitating just a little bit. "But, forgive me, I think it's best to start small. I don't know how you will react to this and if your powers end up getting involved ‒ well, we both already know that I wouldn't be able to do anything about that."

"Oh. Right." Even Mob notices that his tone of voice is more flat than usual, but he doesn't have the energy to do much about that. "That's a little risky." The thought of the task that Teru just put ahead of him is immobilizing. His own hands are just heavy, scratchy, lifeless lumps by his side. He flexes his fingers as a test and barely feels anything at all.

Teru leans forward, maybe he tries to make Mob look up at him, but Mob doesn't so he can't say for sure. "It's the only idea I have for now. I promise I'll let go the second you ask me to. And we don't have to do this at all, if you really don't want to."

"I don't want to injure you," Mob explains. "If I lose control of my powers ‒"

"You did that when we met, didn't you," Teru interrupts him. "Under much more stressful circumstances." Mob isn't too sure about that one. "And I still didn't get hurt. I'm not saying we should be careless ‒ I quite like my apartment, after all, and, uh... this sweater. But last time I was trying to kill you and you retaliated by simply humiliating me a bit. So I don't believe you would injure me now, when we're not even having a fight."

His hands lower by another inch, fingers curling inwards just a tiny bit.

"Look, I don't mean to pressure you." He sounds almost worried now. Mob doesn't want to look at his hands anymore either, it's no better than the face, so he quickly closes his eyes. His own hands are on his knees, still turned upwards, and just like the imprint of a bright light sticking to the inside of his closed eyelids, he can still see the contours of Hanazawa's hands hovering in the air not two inches from his own.

"This is all up to you. If you would rather just, just talk, or sit and watch a movie, or ‒"

Mob grabs Teru's hands.

His eyes remain closed, the rushing sounds in his ears swell and they either tune out Teru's voice, or the other has stopped talking entirely. Mob cannot tell.

The icy hands in his own barely even feel like hands at first, it's just like cold water. For a few breathless, calm seconds, it's cold and clean and nothing else.

But it's not nothing, it changes too quickly. Teru moves, so little that it should have been unnoticeable. Except the way he adjusts his grip and slowly closes his hands all around Mob's is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

The back of Mob's throat feels hot and scratchy, he's not entirely sure if he's still breathing properly. There is Teru's voice, he realizes absently, growing clearer for a second and then shrinking back to a dull droning noise that he could maybe manage to pick words out of if he bothered to listen.

The ridges of Teru's freezing fingertips are sharp edges that chafe along Mob's skin. The thumb that's now tracing calmly along his knuckles, the same motion again and again in a desperate attempt to be soothing, makes his stomach revolt with every circle it draws.

Mob leans forward, his body acting on its own accord, and bits and pieces of Teru's hushed mumbled nonsense are managing to make themselves heard over the blood rushing through his ears.

"You're alright," he whispers near his ear, and "Just breathe, it's fine, I'm here," he hums with the voice that sounds like a smile, only Mob can hear it waver now and the hands that gently hold onto his are trembling ever so slightly.

His head feels light, as if he's spinning in place, but the rest of him is heavy. The crushing weight in his stomach pulls him down and Mob thinks he might be moving, somehow, but he can't tell where and how, which direction is up or down. His fingers are trying to clench into fists, stiff and shaking, but locked in place by two cold hands circling around them like a prison.

Mob feels the muscles in his forearms twitch and cramp, the persistent tremble travels all the way up to his shoulder with a soft pain.

"Do you want me to let go?" Teru asks, but his fingers close tighter around their prey at the same time, making it clear they don't actually want to. "You need to tell me if it's too much."

There might be a flaw in that plan, Mob thinks, breathing heavily, lips wide open and his dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, his voice lost someplace he can't reach. He thinks of chopsticks and pencils and dumbbells bending under his palms, thinks how easily he could break Teru's fingers, bend them away and stop all this.

He almost hears the echoing sound of snapping bone when he thinks of how Mogami broke Midori's fingers.

With one more harsh twitch of the muscles in his arms, he forces his hands to go slack. The soft feeling of his powers leaking out of them is like pins and needles and he holds it back, tries to pull it in again as best he can and concentrates instead on the dry, cracked, itching feeling of his own skin against another's.

He cannot use his powers against Hanazawa, not again, not this time. He has changed now, he must have.

And he can't use his own two hands to hurt him either, can't change himself in the wrong way like that again. Teru's fingers wander over his, adjust their grip once more and end up pressed into Mob's now open palms. They're getting warmer, too. Mob chokes on air and wants to scream.

"Hey, did I ever tell you about our chemistry teacher?" Teru says all of a sudden.

Mob is pretty sure by now that his forehead is leaning on Teru's shoulder, but he can't bring himself to concentrate on his own body enough in order to make sure.

"She is sort of a legend at my school because of her crazy experiments."

Everything is getting warmer, body heat piling up in the small space between them and making Mob's eyes burn. He tries to forget about his hands, tries to go back to when they were lifeless, numb weights by his side, but he can feel Hanazawa's fingers pressing into his skin like vises.

Can almost feel his own fingers pressing down too, but on a fluttering, erratic pulse that grows weaker and weaker.

Teru leans further into him, rests his chin on Mob's shoulder, right at the curve where it connects to his neck. "One time," he continues, impossibly softly, his fingers once again drawing circles into Mob's flesh, "she wanted to prove to us that real gold can't be dissolved by most acids. But the school obviously doesn't provide a supply of actual gold to do experiments with."

Mob wonders absently why he can feel Teru's aura, reaching out in small, swirling tendrils all around them and pulling at things, a sense like a stable anchor clinging to his powers where they usually feel more like wily but strong gusts of wind.

"What she did have handy, however, was her wedding ring. So, with a big speech about absolute trust in science and one's own mind, she took it off and dropped it into the beaker of acid."

This must be an important story, if Teru is telling it right now. Mob is shaking, shoulders trembling, he thinks he keeps tilting forward more and more, but he tries very hard to keep listening.

"And the ring dissolved."

Their clasped hands are now trapped between both of their bodies, fingers intertwined and wrists bent at uncomfortable angles.

"It was incredible, you could practically feel every single student in that classroom holding their breath in either horror, pity, or the strained attempt not to laugh out loud."

Mob can feel knuckles pressed firmly into his chest, but he can't tell if they're Teru's or his own. He can follow every one of Teru's breaths, feels his ribcage expand and shrink back with each one. Without even any conscious thought on his part, Mob's own breathing tries to adapt, to fit itself into the small space between them, breathing in when Teru breathes out.

The spinning, swirling feeling in his head grows a little less distracting.

"And our teacher, she just stared at the beaker for a moment and then said, completely deadpan: 'Well, I guess my husband took the piss out of me there.'" Teru's little giggle at the memory vibrates through both of them, tickles Mob's neck as the gush of air moves strands of his hair around. "Then she left for the hallway and we could hear her yelling at her husband over the phone for buying wedding rings made out of fake gold for the next fifteen minutes."

Mob feels lighter.

He's not sure if that's a good thing at first, or if it's a sign that he's leaving his body again. But then he just spends a few moments breathing, concentrates on the warmth surrounding him that is suddenly not so bad anymore. There is a faint, steady heartbeat pulsing through his body from where his chest is pressed against Teru's, and he can't tell whose heartbeat it is at all. He just knows it grows calmer, slower, with every breath either of them takes.

He slowly opens his eyes. For a moment, everything is blurred and patterned with bright little stars because he had them shut so tightly. As soon as his vision clears again, he is greeted by the warm yellow of Teru's sweater. There is a tiny pink stitching of a strawberry right underneath Mob's nose, and with every second he studies it, he becomes strangely more and more relaxed.

His mouth is still too dry, he has to swallow a few times before even attempting to find his voice again. "Did your teacher make up with her husband?" he asks, the sound barely more than a deep breath.

Teru chuckles and nods against Mob's neck. "Hm-hm, he got her a new ring. She used it for the acid presentation again ‒ and it melted, again. Now she gets a new fake wedding ring every school year and melts it in front of her new class. It's a tradition."

They stay like this in silence for a while. Mob can't tell how much time passes until Teru leans back, only a little, and lets a thin layer of air separate them again. "Are you alright?" Mob can feel him crane his neck to try and look at him, but he's too comfortable with his face nestled into Teru's shoulder and staring at his strawberry sweater to try and meet his eyes. "Do you want to go back down, or ‒?"

"Down?" Mob asks confused. The way Teru just hums in agreement instead of explaining what he means forces him to lift his head and look around after all.

At first, he wonders why the ceiling appears so much lower than he remembers. It's only when a book, presumably lifted from Teru's shelf, lazily floats past his line of sight that he notices his own blue aura enveloping both him and Teru, making them hover in the air above the bed ‒ along with a dozen small objects from Teru's room. Mob watches their pink and blue cups gently spin around themselves, sees his own bag and phone bounce off the walls and keep tumbling through the air in a different direction, followed a whole bunch of school supplies that were spread out on Teru's desk ‒ as well as the desk itself and all the chairs.

When he looks up, he also realizes that a subtle shield of Teru's powers is keeping the two of them from rising further up and bumping into the ceiling, and that quite a few yellow specks are scattered around the room to nudge the blue encased objects away from them.

Mob's face grows hot with embarrassment. "Ah! Sorry!" He quickly has everything float back to its rightful place again, only with Teru and himself he opts to setting them both down on their feet in the middle of the room. That's faster than making them sit back in their previous positions on the bed and chair, and he really shouldn't continue rudely forcing his host to float in the air for much longer than absolutely necessary.

"No worries," Teru says. Now that Mob is not invading his personal space quite that drastically anymore, he can see that even Teru has a bit of sweat clinging to his forehead now. Just a little bit.

He's smiling his nice smile though.

It wavers only a tiny bit as his eyes quickly glance down between them and then back up. "Are you alright?" he asks again. "Is it ‒ better now?"

He actually pauses to wait for an answer now, looking at him with nervous expectation.

Mob looks down as well and startles. Their hands are still wrapped tightly around each other. He didn't even notice anymore.

"I think so," he mumbles, disbelief evident even in his monotone; even to himself. He lifts their hands slightly, squinting his eyes curiously at the way their fingers are all intertwined now and genuinely wonders how and when that happened.

Their hands are very warm now.

It only bothers him because they're starting to get a bit sweaty.

"Um," he starts. "How long do we have to keep holding them like this?"

Teru jumps a little. "Oh. Well, I suppose this is enough, actually." His grip loosens, they both pull away and let their hands drop back to their sides respectively. Teru takes a small step back as well, which makes Mob realize that they were actually still standing unusually close to each other.

Mob looks at his own hands. Wiggles the fingers a little, flexes them a bit. It's not that he can see anything different about them. It's just all rather normal again, just a pair of hands. That in itself is fascinating enough for him to stare at them in wonder for a few seconds.

Teru stuffs his own hands into his pockets and leans back into a relaxed stance. "So, that went a lot better than I thought it would," he says. "The walls are still standing, at least!" He winks at Mob, then chuckles quietly into the silence that follows. "Ah, sorry, just a joke."

"Yes, I got that," Mob quickly assures him, trying to lift some of the awkwardness.

It doesn't work, of course, and he honestly doesn't even know what he was thinking with that.

"Thank you," he decides to say then. "I think that helped."

"Hm," Teru makes. He watches him with his head cocked to the side, biting his lower lip again for a second. "Maybe. Honestly, I don't believe that was a permanent solution, exactly? I don't ‒ I mean, I have no right to tell you how to handle this, of course. But maybe... maybe you should consider talking to someone about this, at some point. At least a little bit."

"I already talked to you a little bit," Mob reminds him, and Teru sighs his amused sigh.

"Yes, well, maybe just a little bit more than that."

"Ah." Mob nods knowingly as he realizes. "Details."

With a snap of his fingers Teru points straight at him, repeating "Details" with a proud smile. An expression which immediately melts away from his face when he lowers his hand again. His eyes seem very tired once more, but Mob thinks it's not quite as bad as it was before. Maybe.

Mob looks down and fidgets with the hem of his uniform jacket. "I can try," he says. He glances around the room for a moment, eyes flitting over the furniture and all the small objects that were flying around them through the air not five minutes ago. "Since I already told you a bit," he starts again reluctantly, "might I come talk to you again sometime?"

"Of course." Teru's answer is so fast, it almost sounds like he stumbles over his words. "You can come by any time, and not just for talking about this either. Here," he grabs Mob's phone from the bedside table and flips it open, "let me give you my number."

He has to awkwardly turn the phone back around for Mob to type in his PIN, but then they quickly exchange numbers. Mob saves it under "Hanazawa," but when he leaves the apartment to finally go home, he nervously mumbles "Goodbye, Teruki" over his shoulder.

Teru's smile grows wide and happy, his eyes so soft that Mob has to hastily look away. "See you later, Shigeo," he says, as the door closes behind Mob.

They talk on the phone two days later.

Mob doesn't tell him any new details.

He doesn't tell him that the tips of his fingers are tingling again sometimes, that the image of wrapping his hands around another's throat are even clearer in his head now sometimes, but that he can make them less scary by thinking about the feeling of Teru's cold hands in his.

But they do decide to go to the movies together.

(It's a weekend, and weekends are the hardest. Nobody yells for him to wake up. Mob sits and waits and the silence stretches along. He stares at the wall, but that doesn't help him find a single reason for getting up and getting dressed and doing things.

He does in the end, because his phone is ringing and his friend gets worried if he doesn't answer.)