One of the officers jogs up to him as he's heading back to his office. "Ah, Morofushi-keibu!"
He slows down. "What is it?"
"A man came looking for you while you were out, but he didn't have an appointment, and wouldn't stop shouting, so – "
He puts man, yelling together with barging in without an appointment and comes up with an impending headache.
Morofushi barely manages not to sigh. The local precinct is only a few steps up from a koban, and what passes for a meeting room is currently a makeshift office for the newer recruits, which leaves only one place.
"You directed him to the interrogation room, I assume?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.
"Um. Yes, sir." The officer pauses, uncertain. "Should I not have? I wasn't sure if you'd want him to wait in your office. I didn't tell him that it was the interrogation room, though."
"If he isn't already aware of that, I'll be well disappointed." He spares one moment to imagine Kansuke's reaction. (It's amusing. Almost.) "Either way, I'll handle it from here, please inform everyone that I'm unavailable for the next hour at least."
"Understood, sir!" comes the answer with a salute, and Morofushi nods before making a detour to the pantry for coffee.
One hour was an overly optimistic estimate. It's going to be a long afternoon.
.
The restless rhythm of pacing coming from the interrogation room is familiar. The footsteps are not.
That much, Morofushi expects.
He had reported back to duty and been reassigned here before Kansuke had even shown any signs of regaining consciousness, although his contacts in headquarters had updated him of the situation. (Including the part where Kansuke had resumed partial duties at his own insistence, against all medical advice and good sense. Naturally.)
But for all that knowledge, for all that he's aware that his – friend – is now missing an eye and most of his mobility in one leg...
Morofushi stands outside the door, careful not to cast any noticeable shadow as he listens to the uneven thunk-thunk-kathunk coming from behind the door, and realises that all of this has felt unreal, on some level – until now.
How ludicrous of him, he thinks as he opens the door, to say something like that when he had been there for the most pivotal moment of it.
"What now?" barks the loud reality of Yamato Kansuke, asserting itself almost instantly, and Morofushi almost walks back out. "If you tell me to wait one m–"
Morofushi coughs once, deliberate.
Kansuke whirls around to glare at him, angry and scarred. "Oh, if it isn't Koumei. Just the person I wanted to see."
"I'm afraid that is a sentiment I cannot return." He steps forward, and the door locks behind him with a soft click. "What did you want to see me about, Kansuke-kun?"
The corners of Kansuke's mouth are twisted in a way he's rarely seen, even after all these years. "I go back to HQ after two months, and the first thing I find out is that Uehara quit! What do you THINK this is about?"
"I wasn't the one who approved her resignation, since I wasn't her direct superior." Morofushi watches him pace, the cane an ungainly addition to his stride. "But I did speak to her about it, yes. The chief asked me to."
"So she said that she wanted to quit, and you – YOU JUST LET HER DO IT?"
"That is–"
Kansuke doesn't even let him get the words out – if hadn't already been yelling before, he certainly is, now. "TO GO LIVE UNDER THE SAME ROOF AS A MURDERER? WHAT THE HELL, KOUMEI, I THOUGHT YOU WERE SMARTER THAN THI– "
"Sit down, Kansuke."
His voice comes out much sharper than he'd intended – he barely even recognises it.
Morofushi doesn't apologise, barely even breathes for a long minute.
"Ordering me around now, are you?" Kansuke snarls, vicious, and stops moving so abruptly that Morofushi's fairly sure he almost trips over his cane. "I might not have been fully reinstated yet but last I checked you don't outrank m–"
"Either we discuss this like rational people," says Morofushi levelly, hands clenching around the ice of freezing snow and hospital sheets, "or you leave my precinct right now and never approach me again."
Kansuke glares, yanking one chair out with a pointed screech – to little effect, since they're both well-practiced in the art of interrogation room theatrics – and sits. "Fine. You want to talk? Then talk."
"Gladly," Morofushi snaps back, the words acidic. "First of all, I didn't let Yui-san do anything. She made the decision herself, and you disrespect her by even daring to imply otherwise."
"Don't you go nitpicking my words, Koumei. We both know damned well that you could've convinced her to stay if you'd actually tried."
The last thread of his temper stretches thin and breaks. "And why should I have done so? We both thought that you were dead as a result of your idiotic stunt, Yamato Kansuke! What did you think we were going to do?"
Kansuke opens his mouth to retort –
– then stops, cold.
Morofushi regards him dispassionately. Kansuke is not a suspect; he does not fall elaborately apart into confessions and pleas of motive, but it is the same slow collapse, nonetheless.
"I'll tell you the answer," Morofushi says, eventually, when it stops feeling like he's breathing water instead of air. "You weren't thinking."
Kansuke stares back up at him, expression blank.
"You didn't think," he repeats, quiet and tired, in the empty vacuum that fury has left behind, "you never have, but this time – this time, Kansuke-kun, it cost us all."
END
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