Saguru wandered down the road, nose buried in a book- the Hound Of The Baskervilles. He was only halfway through and his mind was already tallying everything up and drawing conclusions. He was suspicious of that marsh. The butterfly collector was the only one who knew it well enough to use it…
He glanced up quickly as he approached the crosswalk, and the second he saw the green man still glowing, returned his attention to his book. What he didn't notice was that a couple of seconds after he looked away, the man changed to red…
The car was speeding a little as it came around the corner. The driver was arguing with the person in the passenger side, paying no attention to the road, only glancing at the lights to check that they were green for a split second, as Saguru had. Neither the driver nor Saguru noticed that they were on a collision course.
"Look out! Little boy! Move!"
Someone on the pavement had noticed, and Saguru glanced up, to see the car bearing down on him-
Suddenly he was yanked aside, back to the pavement, someone lifting him right off the ground with abnormal strength and speed- Saguru was tall for nine, too tall to life easily any more- and he felt the car whizz past his toes as he fell backwards, onto the pavement, somebody still gripping him tightly. From the soft feeling of the chest he was being held against and the long hair tickling the back of his neck, it must be a woman, some still-logical part of his mind concluded while the rest of it was gibbering a little and staring at the shredded remnants of his book in the road, where he had dropped it while being pulled away from the car.
"Pay attention, silly boy," a woman's voice- definitely a woman's- hissed in his ear. "That could have been you." Then they let him go.
He struggled to stand up, looking around for his saviour, but he had already been surrounded by a ring of concerned adults and a group of middle-school girls, fussing over him and asking if he was alright. He could not determine which, if any of them, had saved his life.
Nine years later, he hadn't changed much. The only difference was that it was a real-life murder that he was absorbed in.
"His son certainly has a powerful motive, but he was talking to me at the time… It was his brother next to him, but no prints on the knife, and the man didn't have gloves… Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. What if there was an accomplice?"
Normally, he was very strict about road safety, as he was about just about everything, but he was too absorbed in thoughts of justice to pay too much attention now. He stepped out into the road after a flash of green, striding across after a crowd of grade-schoolers, not bothering to look at the cars, because what cars run a red light with little kids in the road?
One containing somebody who's already killed once.
Some sense of danger made him look up, to see the 4x4 bearing down on him. He ran forwards to yell at the kids to move, and they ran, just far enough out of the car's path to get away easily, but Saguru had no time to run himself, it was too close, and he looked into the driver's eyes…
…so it was the brother…
Then hands, small but strong, wrapped around his arms, pulling him out of the way with surprising strength and speed, making him seem to fly across the road, landing heavily on the pavement. Once more, paper fluttered into the air as his notebook was shredded…
"You never learn, do you?"
The hands let go of his arm, but some old sense of déjà vu made him reach out, grabbing her hands before he'd even heard her speak, stopping her from vanishing this time. He turned to a pair of familiar red eyes…
"Koizumi-san," he muttered in surprise. "Long time no see."
"And yet you haven't changed," she huffed, plucking a piece of paper from the air.
"Look who's talking," he said. Hadn't she been an adult back then, too….?
"Well, I suppose I ought to thank you for saving my life," he said pleasantly. "Twice."
"If you really want to thank me," she half-yawned. "You'll pay. I suppose I'm not the only one dozy enough to need coffee right now…"
"It's the least I can do," he said, standing and pulling her to her feet as well as people milled around, muttering and staring at the road down which the car had vanished. Saguru knew who the murderer was; but for once, he felt no desire to chase him straight away.
For some reason, something seemed more attractive than chasing a murderer. Who would have thought it would be coffee with Koizumi-san?
This is the first of a series of four fluffy little oneshots, all dedicated to people's birthdays. This first one is, in fact, for Hakuba Saguru himself. It's August 29th- Happy Birthday, Sa-chan! ^_-