Canon universe.

This is part one of two.

The start was always the hardest part. Even after a year at CID, a year with two disappearances, including the loss of a chain-smoking colleague, she still didn't know how to begin a report. The pointer blinked on the empty screen. It was a tiny metronome, doling out judgment for her inefficiency. She saw Gino coming from the left, the glass walls making everyone visible. The door wheezed as it opened and she pushed her chair backwards to distance herself from the desk.

He leaned on the work station before hers, crossing his arms. "Still working on it?"

She shook her head, glanced at the electronic blankness. "'Working' isn't the word I would use. I haven't started."

He looked around. "Are you alright?" His voice was low from the borders that he was crossing. Ginoza, who cursed only when he thought he was alone, who stayed clear of the broccoli in the steaming hot take-out containers, tried not to be personal at work.

When people talked about love, it was his face that she saw. "I'm alright."

He stared at a spot on the desk. "You were gone when I woke up." He tried to sound neutral about the fact. At four am, after a whole night of anxiously turning and sweating under the cover only to freeze after kicking it off, she'd gone back to her place and stumbled down onto her bed. "I'm sorry. I couldn't sleep."

Every time she went outside she saw couples, two people free to go wherever they wanted. They could meet up and they could be apart. They could leave. Ginoza had been spared. He'd been saved from a cruel fate of spending the rest of his life in a box that was three by five meters. He was saved, and yet he was condemned. To see him in her home, settled in amongst the sparse furniture, had become a dream so farfetched and unlikely that it made her stomach drop.

She shut the computer off. Neither of them were on call for the night. "Let's go to your place."

They quickly shook hands. Akane nodded towards the main entrance and started walking. The chief of production hurried after, pulling out a tissue from the front pocket of his severly tested suit jacket. He wiped the front of his balding head and shakily put the tissue back, struggling to keep up with his short and tubby legs. "This is unheard of. We've never encountered anything like it."

They passed three locked and reinforced steel doors and finally ended up at the scene of the crime.

"There aren't any cameras in this corridor," she said, watching as the man idly patted his sweating brow dry again. "For security purposes. We keep the military grade tests in these rooms." He pointed towards a gap in the row of big, silvery canisters. "The ones that were stolen were kept in this room." She approached them and the man muttered a "careful-..." They were less than a meter tall, but the metal cylinders must weigh quite a bit. They had release mechanisms on the top. She crouched down to read the labels.

"What kind of gas was it?" The name on the closest one, KSJ55-292, meant little.

"I'm afraid I can't say."

She got up, turned around, "Unless you tell me what we're dealing with, I can't do my job."

He clenched his jaw, took a break to breathe through his nose. "It's a question of state security."

Back at the office they tried to determine the when and the how. Two guards had been taken out, drugged by the sound of it, saying "I heard something outside and I went to check. When I woke up, I was on the ground."

"I'm not sure what happened in there," she said.

He scowled at her smoking expertise, at the readiness with which she held the cigarette lighter close to the tobacco stick. The cigarettes smelled like Kougami's room, of his countless folders and files. He'd been collecting it all, stage directions for a personal apocalypse. Akane exhaled as if she was trying to get a leaf to turn over in the air, a game of petite motions. The smoke stammered, evaporating. "The evidence point towards someone on the inside," she continued. He nodded but she missed it because she tapped off some ash with her thumb. Her arms were hanging over the railing, above the abyss of the city.

"We need to know what they developed it for," he said, stepping forward to see what she was seeing. A town, warm and lanky, its twisting streets cut off by corners. The buildings were high and the evening sun was being splintered in the glass facades. Plastic, glassware, metal, and her. She put out the cigarette, exchanging it for a chewing gum. If he kissed her in a couple of minutes, it would taste of sharp mint.

"I'm having a meeting with Kasei later. Hopefully she can put some pressure on him," she said. She started chewing faster, half-turning to the railing, seeking it out for a place to put her hands. A white bubble eloped from her lips, growing bigger and rounder until it popped.

She turned to him, smiling, "Did you see?"

He put a hand on her waist, placing a kiss on her cheek then retreating. "Very elegant."

She put her hand on her mouth, as if checking how he'd evaded it. Her eyebrows turned up in an apology. "Does it taste that bad?"

It was the same as the actual cigarettes, as late nights by the sofa in the shared living room, of ceaseless investigations.

Of Shinya.

"It reeks."

They were outside a bleak-looking building, three floors devoted to the National Protection Program, within CID known as the library. "There was a distress call at half past two. Nothing has been heard since then," Akane said.

They were at the office when they got the call, a short police recording with a woman's voice, "I think it's gas-", and then a clunk as the phone hit the floor.

"It might be the same gas that was stolen from the research facility. The biochemical team has cleared out the building but I'd prefer it if you wore these." She held up one of the clumsy green masks, old fashioned and peculiar.

It was quiet inside. The people who had been working when the building was hit were on their way to the hospital, all of them alive but unconscious. The perpetrator had spared them. Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing was taken. The few security cameras had been snapped at the base and quickly rendered useless. She looked closer at one of them. The plastic around the wires was thin and easy to cut or break. She viewed the empty office landscape, the potted plants and the cubicles so intent on keeping people in.

Division one met outside again, pulling off their masks and enjoying the air. Her bracelet vibrated from an incoming call. Shion. "Yes?"

"I cros-referenced the security footage against our database, there was someone I thought was familiar," Shion said against the everlasting clatter of her keyboard.

"And?" Akane asked, clicking on the file she received. A man in his late thirties, brown hair, a gently worn face. The other picture was from the security camera. The man had broad shoulders but he walked like he was small.

"He works at the research facility as testing manager."

They had flipped past his file, his hue had been turquoise, not indicating any crimes. She scrolled, read on. Six days ago he'd been questioned and subsequently cleared. Yayoi had done it, she was thorough. Akane frowned. He must have done something about his hue.

"Where does he live?" she asked, hurrying back to her car.

"I've already sent it to you," Shion purred. Akane started the car, smiled briefly, "You're the best."

When they arrived at the apartment complex she stumbled out in a hurry. They split, her and Gino going left, the three others going right. The large building was stubbornly placed next to an industrial area, that too abandoned.

They edged their way along the narrow hallway created by the chain link fence and the endless line of garage doors. Her bracelet made her stop.

Shion again. "I checked the computers in the library for any activity during the break in. One search was made."

The clicking of her typing sounded like rain coming down onto corrugated steel.

"It's a file from last summer. A woman died and it's sealed, but I managed to get her name."

Akane looked up to find Gino a meter away, listening intently but still on his guard. His Dominator pointed downwards, towards the asphalt covered in debris.

"It was his wife," Shion concluded.

"You did good," Akane said, "Keep looking."

They kept going, slowly skulking past dark edges and pieces of garbage. They made their way past a gutted container and the bottom half of a car, its wheels forming the square of a grave, marking its final resting place. There was a rusty door to the right and the trash had been cleared away from around it. Someone used it.

Wordlessly signaling they went into the darkness. The inspector blinked. In the faint, crummy light from their Dominators, she could barely make out the rusted bones of a bed. She saw a bench of some sort. Tools.

There was a cluck, a shear of metal on the concrete floor. A canister.

It was like the air itself exploded, but she couldn't hear the bang.