The estate was silent.

She hated when the estate was silent.

Keeping busy did enough to occupy her mind, but she wasn't going to be able to busywork for the entire time her grandfather and Yakushiji-san were gone. For one, there was no indication of how long they would be gone for. For two...

No. We are not considering that option.

So cleaning and dusting and rearranging her room it was. And then making sure that all of the food in the refrigerator was still edible. And in the pantry. Then rearranging the pantry because didn't Yakushiji-san have any idea of basic organization, honestly the spices were all over the cabinets and if this was the kind of mess he was going to leave then she was going to insist that Grampa hire a cook and—

She froze, hand clenched around the neck of a soy sauce bottle. This is nothing. Simply a fluke. Everything will be fine. It's simply a fall. But the detective couldn't fool herself. A fall at her grandfather's age was nothing resembling simple, especially with that cough he'd had...

Why wasn't I there? Why didn't I insist he go see someone sooner? Why didn't I see...? It was like watching Nanako in the hospital all over again. Again, the pieces of the puzzle were right in front of her and she was too focused on trivial things like schoolwork and court cases to be bothered by her own family's illness...

A sob managed to choke its way out of her chest before she corralled her feelings again. Get it together, Naoto! She could still hear Kanji from all that time ago. Yes, this is precisely like the incident surrounding Nanako's illness. What's done is done, and chastising yourself over incidents you cannot change will not help anything.

She glared out the window at the cloud-darkened sky, watching the rain course down the windowpane in rivulets. If it hadn't been raining, she could have gone for a walk, and that would have at least gotten her out of the estate for a while. She could have walked down to the riverbed, sat by the Samegawa, browsed the bookstore... She could have done anything but sit in an empty mansion and fret. She hated fretting. It was pointless and juvenile and bothersome.

And yet, it appeared to be an inescapable portion of her makeup.

Adding another entry to the list of Naoto particularly despised about her given sex (along with such items as difficulty sleeping on stomach, absurd expectations of fashion, and lunar cycles), she headed up the stairs back to her room, determined to find something else to occupy herself with.

And what will you do when you have run out of busywork? She tried to shove the unwanted thought from her mind. There is only so much you can do before you are left in a house alone with nothing to do. During the days would not be a problem. She still had school to attend, and she could likely convince one of the others from the group that had formed last year to allow her to tag along with whatever they were doing for the afternoon. Evenings she could make dinner—though her cooking was still rather unpracticed—and work on her coursework.

So what about nights? Even tonight, you're running out of options...

It was like her Shadow had crept into her brain and made a home there instead of the 'secret base' she had (gratefully) left behind in the television.

Unfortunately, as the Shadow often did, it did raise a point. With the skies this dark from the rain, the house was getting grim even with all the lamps in the house turned on. (All of them. She'd checked. It would be irritating to go through and turn them off again, but...perhaps she would simply leave them on for now. She could apologize for the electric bill later.) She took a breath and turned to face her bookshelf. "You. You can be reorganized."

No sooner had she reached for a book than the room lit up around her—then faded, with all the speed it had come with. She blinked—and then again—and her eyes widened when—

BOOM!

With a squeak most unbecoming of a detective of her caliber, she felt her knees give out from her as she crumpled to the floor, hands over her head.

No, no, no, why did it have to thunderstorm now, of all times...? It wasn't something she was particularly proud of, but since she was a child, she had harbored a severe phobia of thunderstorms. Each crash of thunder reminded her over and over again of hearing the officer at the door, informing her au pair that there had been an accident and did she know who the closest living person of kin was, and was that their daughter? Thunder was synonymous with death and abandonment and everything she thought she'd finally gotten over.

Under any other circumstances, she could talk about her parents' death without emotion at all. It was simply another facet of her life—an unfortunate and painful one, but one in the past and dealt with. Everything was under control...and most of the time it was.

Except when it stormed.

It had certainly made it easy for her to remember when to watch for the Midnight Channel. Rain was always vaguely ominous, with its potential to herald the storm.

Taking a shuddering breath, she pulled herself up from the floor, cursing the utter loss of control, and reached for her books again. I will not let this storm cripple me. I will continue to act normally, as if nothing has changed, and I will...not...let the storm win.

Another flash of lightning, and her heart was in her throat, hand white-knuckled on her copy of A Study in Scarlet. A clap of thunder, and this time the lights flickered.

"Don't you dare," she warned the light in her room, pointing an accusing finger at the fixture. "I will not stand for your obstinance tonight." Placing the book with the rest of her Conan Doyle—how had they gotten separated?—she went to start on a new shelf when the house phone rang.

Her body chilled. It's probably a telemarketer. It's nothing. It's just something routine and typical. Stiffly, she made her way downstairs to the front room, where the nearest telephone was, and answered. "Good evening, Shirogane residence."

"Naoto? That you?"

The voice was utterly alien and yet incredibly familiar at the same time. Who...? Someone who knew her, calling the house phone...? The tone was too brusque to be anyone her grandfather worked with, and regardless, none of them would refer to her simply by her first name.

She must have taken too long thinking, because the male voice spoke again. "Naoto? You there? C'mon, answer me."

Finally the pieces clicked, giving her mind a vision of leather and peroxide blonde. "Kanji-kun? How...how did you get this number?"

"You ain't answering yer cell, so I asked around ta see if anyone knew yer house number. 'Course, no one did so I called the station, but they didn't want ta give that out so I ended up callin' Dojima-san an' I guess he knew, or he looked it up or sumthin."

Kanji was speaking too quickly, and Naoto's mind was desperately trying to keep up, but as the storm grew increasingly closer, it was becoming harder to focus. "My phone battery m-must have died. You...Dojima-san?"

"Are you okay?" The young man on the other end of the line sounded far too concerned. Does he know...? No, he couldn't possibly. I haven't told anyone, not even Yu-san...

"O-of course, why wouldn't—" Her voice hitched at the clap of thunder, louder than its predecessors, hit overhead. "I be?"

"Jus' saw the paper. Ma picked it up on her way home from the store, an' it's got sumthin' in it 'bout yer gramps, I think. I mean, can't be too many Shiroganes around, right?"

"Evening...paper...?" Of course, he'd collapsed in public, on his way home from some speaking engagement. He was something of a figure in the community, thus naturally there would have been some kind of mention of it in the news. "O-oh. Yes. Of course. I'm f-fine."

"Ya sure? I mean, you got kinda a big house up there, an' if you're all alone..." Kanji's sentence didn't quite have an ending, but Naoto could manage an extrapolation.

"Quite sure. I appreciate the consideration, but I am j—" This time, the thunder was a gunshot, and it was everywhere—everywhere, the storm was right on her head—and she was sure she'd made some kind of noise but had no idea what it was, and why was she sitting on the floor now, where did the phone receiver go...

"Naoto? Naoto!" the voice shouted from the dangling receiver. Thank God for corded phones.

She reached out, her hand shaking enough that she could just barely keep hold of it, and brought it back to her ear. "My a-apologies."

"You sure as hell don't sound all right, Naoto." Kanji's voice was rough, and if he'd been anyone else, she would have heard a warning in his tone, but this was Kanji and what would be possibly be warning her about...

"I... I assure you th-that there is n-nothing t-to be done, and I a-am fine. I'm...I'm just n-not..." Before her sentence finished, another crash of thunder startled the phone out of her hand—

—and the house went dark.

Maybe the phone still worked. "K-Kanji-kun?" Silence. "Kanji-kun?" Still nothing. Her voice shattered. "Kanji!?"

That was the final straw. Leaning over to press her forehead toward her knees, Naoto dissolved into tears, trying to choke back the sobs before they made it out. Why tonight? Why does Grampa have to be in the hospital for the first storm we've had in months now, why did the power have to go out, why did Mother and Father have to go out that night, why does it always have to storm and leave me alone...!?

Around her, the storm raged on, uncaring of one little girl's pain, shaking the walls with claps of thunder she was sure would bring the house down around her and flashes of lightning brighter than any bulb in the house. Naoto couldn't move. She stayed seated on the floor next to the again-dangling phone receiver, its silence haunting. She wrapped her arms over her head, trying to hide herself from the storm, trying to make herself small enough that she could just vanish and the storm would be gone and her parents would be there and everything would be fine and she hated herself for feeling like this.

She couldn't fight off this weakness. This was more than her Shadow, more than a sexist police department, more than the leers and jeers of the students around her, more than Ameno-sagiri and Izanami, more than being drawn into certain death as her compatriots—her friends—all died around her as well. This was more than she could fight.

She didn't know how long she sat there, tears streaming down her face, coughing out sobs until her throat was raw—and still, the storm showed no mercy. Wind shook the walls, rain pounded against the glass in the windows, thunder boomed in her ears—

And when it sounded like the thunder had come directly down and crashed into her front door, she shrieked. Wide-eyed and knocked back to rest with her hands propping her up on the floor behind her, she stared at the door. That was thunder. That was...thunder. ...Right?

Until it happened again. Bangbangbangbang. Possibly a voice? The wind and rain swept any other sound away.

Desperately rubbing at her face with the cuffs of her sleeves, she forced herself to her feet and made her way to the door, legs shaking enough that she wasn't positive she was going to make it. A tug on the door opened it, and the wind snatched it out of her hand and pushed it open as wide as it went, bashing against the wall behind it and eliciting another squeak from the detective. And then her eyes went to who was at the door.

Standing there, out of breath and soaking wet, was Kanji Tatsumi. His blonde hair plastered to his head, half in his face, gray button-down shirt stuck to his torso, eyes wide and panicked. She could only imagine what she looked like herself: white button-down with tear-stained sleeves, hair disheveled, eyes wet and likely bright red, threadbare slate grey drawstring pants showing their age. No hat, no binder, just a shattered little girl in a pitch-black house all alone. Not remotely the image of Naoto Shirogane he'd ever seen before.

It didn't seem to matter. "Shit, Naoto." He pushed his hair back from his eyes, reaching for the door and wrenching it forward, forcing it shut against the persistence of the wind.

"K-Kanji-kun. Y-you're...b-but...w-why..." Naoto's voice was still coming out in hiccups, the tears not quite startled out of her. "Y-you're all w-wet."

With the door finally shut and latched, Kanji turned back to look at her, eyebrows knitted together, utterly blank for a moment. "Yeah. It's rainin'." He went to take a step forward, then thought better of it, watching the water run off of him. "What the hell is wrong? Thought ya said you were fine."

"I-I'm fine." She waved a hand indistinctly, then flinched as another thunderclap struck. "I-It's j-just a st-st-storm. P-Power w-went out."

"I ain't never seen you this worked up about anything." Kanji's eyes never left her. Odd, a tiny portion of her mind managed to note, that this is the first time in recent memory he's had any composure around me at all. I wonder what the difference is. She'd never quite figured out him out. A mystery, but not one easily solved. "C'mon, you c'n talk to me. What's up?"

"I-I..." She choked on a sob. "J-Just d-don't like st-storms, a-and..." Another flinch, and she wrapped her arms as tight as she could across her chest. "A-and n-now the p-power's o-off, and G-G-Grampa..."

Her knees threatened to buckle again, and this time Kanji didn't care about the floors of the house. In an instant he was next to her, one hand on either arm, keeping her from collapsing to the floor again. "Hey, whoa, it's okay. C'mon." He cautiously walked her over to a chair near the door and eased her down, letting her curl in on herself there, knees tucked up to her chest. "This ain't just the storm." It wasn't a question, so Naoto didn't offer an answer. "Naoto."

"I-I'll be f-fine," she managed to mumble against her knees.

That got a huff of air from the taller of the two. "Dammit, Naoto, stop tryin' ta be so damn perfect an' only relyin' on yourself all the time!" She flinched into a tighter ball, and Kanji made an indistinct noise. "Dammit, sorry. Didn't mean t' shout. But..." She could just see in her peripheral vision the young man shift so that he was crouching down closer to her eye level. "You don't gotta hide everything."

"Wh-what w-was I supposed to d-do?" Her voice was climbing in pitch dramatically, and she couldn't keep the hysterics from spilling over. "It's a-already r-raining out there a-and I can't g-go anywhere in th-this much r-rain s-so what what anyone g-going to do about it!?"

If Kanji was bothered by the shrillness of her voice, he didn't show it. "I'll figure somethin' out." He looked around. "I was gonna offer to stay here with you, but if th' power's out, that ain't exactly the best idea I guess."

"B-but... H-how..." Her sentences all fall short of completion. She turned her head to look at Kanji, who was still peering around the house, frowning at the darkness. "K-Kanji-kun."

His eyes came back to her. "Yeah?"

"W-what c-can we do? W-we c-can't go back out th-there in this..." Her eyes flickered to the window.

Kanji scoffed. "Like hell we can't. You sure as hell ain't staying in this dark-ass house by yourself."

Naoto's throat choked. "I c-can't!" Her voice broke on the last word, barely eked out before her voice gave out into a truly embarrassing whine.

Kanji looked pained as he looked back at her. "Naoto, yer grandpa's in the hospital, yer freaked out by the storm, an' the power's out at yer house. I'm not leaving you here." He moved so that she'd catch his eye, and there was a resolve in his grey eyes she didn't think she'd ever seen outside of the TV world. "You got a raincoat?"

If her eyes got any wider, she was sure they'd fall out of her head. "K-Kanji-kun..."

"Do. You. Have. A. Raincoat."

That tone held no room for argument, and Naoto's resolve had vanished with the storm. She nodded weakly, indicating a coat closet on the other side of the room. "Th-the blue o-one."

"Prob'ly coulda guessed. Don' move, okay?" He stood, waiting a moment seemingly to ensure that Naoto wasn't going to bolt, and then made for the closet. For her part, the detective couldn't have bolted if she wanted to. She sat, shivering and flinching at every crack of thunder, face buried between her knees.

A moment or two later, she heard footsteps come back toward her, and a shift which felt like Kanji had crouched down again. "Hey." It was as soft as she'd ever heard the so-called punk, and it was too much. The tears came back, and she coughed out a sob. "Shit, I'm... dammit, I don' even know what I did, but I'm sorry anyway." A wet sound, probably as he shifted his weight. "C'mon. I found your coat."

Tear-damn eyes lifted a fraction, and she could see the blurry outline of her navy poncho. "...c-can't...go o-out th-th-there. C-can't...w-walk."

Kanji made a strange strangled sound that Naoto couldn't place, then coughed. "Don't need to. C'mon. Can ya stand?"

She hesitated, then cautiously uncurled, setting her feet on the floor and bracing herself against the arms of the chair. After a slow breath—and another flinch from the storm that nearly destroyed any progress she'd made—she pushed herself to her feet. Wavering, she started to fall toward the chair again, but this time Kanji reacted fast enough, one arm around her shoulders, steadying her. "Hey, whoa, it's okay. C'mon." He held out the coat.

"M-my phone..." She looked up the darkened stairs to her room, pointing a shivering finger.

"We'll figure 'at out later. C'mon." Seeing the lack of initiative, Kanji flipped the poncho over Naoto's shoulders. Muscle memory got her arms in the sleeves while the blonde fastened it around her.

"Wh-where...what..."

With the coat closed up, he flipped the hood over her hair and caught her eyes again, that determination still there. "You trust me?"

Naoto was stunned. "Wh-what...?"

"Do you trust me?"

One blink. Two. A jerky nod. "Y-yes, o-of course..."

"Then hang on, tight as you need." In a flash, Kanji had bent just enough to get an arm behind her knees, and swept her off her feet. She let out a yelp, locking up in his arms for a second. "You gotta try an' relax, Naoto. Now hold on." He made for the door, managed to get it both open and closed again without dropping her, and then bolted off the front step and out into the storm.

Relaxing wasn't an option, but his last command was. All dignity lost, she buried her face in his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his neck, trying desperately not to collapse into hysterics again as she feels the rain pound against the fabric of her coat.