Chapter 2 - Not So Bad… Maybe
Monday, October 29th
Before she could say anything that might keep Kondou from leaving her alone, he was gone. She fidgeted and glanced nervously around the room, not meeting any of their eyes. The silence was almost like a physical weight pressing down on her shoulders, making it hard to breath. Finally she couldn't take it anymore.
She cleared her throat quietly and gave a small bow. "Um, I'm Yukimura Chizuru. It's an honor to meet you and hope I will be able to aid you in your investigations."
Heisuke grinned at her. "Glad to meet you Chizuru. You can just call me Heisuke, everyone else does and I think we're about the same age anyway."
She gave him a slightly hesitant smile and nodded. "Ok, Heisuke then."
Harada leaned back in his chair, his eyes and smile warm as he jerked his thumb at Nagakura. "Hope you'll forgive this idiot over here. He never did learn when to keep his mouth shut. I have to admit, it will be nice to have a woman's touch around here."
Nagakura shot a hurt look at Harada. "Hey, how was I supposed to know she was the consultant? Hijikata's been telling Kondou to get a secretary for years!"
Hijikata sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "That's enough. Shinpachi, go get the cases we set aside."
Nagakura grumbled slightly, but got up and left the room. Hijikata gestured to the only free desk in the room. "While you're here, that will be your desk. Ask anyone if you need something, but distractions will not be tolerated and do not go beyond the scope of the cases we provide to you. Understood?"
"Yes sir." She gave him as firm a nod as she could.
Without another word, Hijikata turned away and re-entered his office. This seemed to be a signal to the others, because they all returned to what they had been doing before she and Kondou had interrupted. She looked with some trepidation at the desk she'd been assigned, before she moved to place her bags next to it. Of course the empty desk had to be next to the one person who seemed to instantly dislike her. She didn't know when it had happened, but at some point during the whole encounter, Okita's eyes had shifted from ambivalence with a hint of curiosity, to outright hostility. She had no idea what the cause had been, but she had no intention of asking right now. Thankfully Kondou chose that moment to return, a rather thick stack of papers in his hand. He held them out to her.
"Just give these to Toshi when you've finished and he'll make sure they get to Gen." His gaze softened slightly "I know they can be an unruly bunch, but they really are a good group."
She took the stack and nodded her understanding. As soon as he left the room, she sat down at the desk, shooting a quick glance at Okita. Thankfully he was studiously ignoring her. Hopefully it would stay that way. Chizuru dug a pen out of her purse and looked at the first sheet. This is going to take a while…
She'd been right, it had taken a while. It was now a couple hours past noon and she was only just signing the last sheet. Flexing her stiff fingers, she stood and made her way towards Hijikata's office with the papers in hand. The door was open and a quick peek inside showed Hijikata sitting at his desk, his back to her. Timidly she knocked on the doorframe.
At the sound, Hijikata glanced back at her, but almost immediately returned his attention to the papers on his desk.
He gestured to an already cluttered shelf to his left. "You can put them over there."
Stepping toward the shelf, she gingerly placed the papers on the least precarious stack she could find. Taking another look at the office, she realized that there were stacks of papers on nearly every surface. The stacks themselves were neat and orderly, but some were tall enough that she worried walking by them too fast would be enough to blow them over.
"Was there something else?"
His voice yanked her out of her thoughts and she whirled to face him. She could feel a small blush spreading across her cheeks at the fact that he'd caught her examining his office.
"Um no…" She was just about to turn away and dart back to her desk, when she suddenly remembered. "Wait! Yes there is."
He looked at her, eyes narrowing slightly. "Well, what is it? I don't have all day."
"Right," she chewed on her lip slightly. "Um, I'd like your permission to use my personal computer when I'm working on the cases. It's really more of a work computer, since that's all I use it for, but I have an application on there that helps me organize and view the case data."
He gave her an evaluating look as he leaned forward and steepled his fingers. "That's not really standard procedure… but I'm assuming it's what you used while you were at Rintaro's department?"
She nodded. "Yes. I've wiped it of the cases I worked there, and I'll wipe it again once I've finished the cases here. It's also completely secure. It requires a password and fingerprint to access it, and it wipes automatically after three failed attempts."
He frowned slightly. "And what if someone just takes the hard drive and reads it directly?"
She shook her head. "That wouldn't work. All the data is automatically encrypted before it's stored, so all they'd get is gibberish."
Hijikata thought for a moment before giving her a small nod. "Very well. But Heisuke will oversee the wiping of the computer when you've finished the cases."
"Thank you." She gave a slight bow before leaving his office and heading to her desk.
"There you are!" She hadn't even made it to her desk before Nagakura walked through the doorway, a large box in his hands.
He grinned at her. "Took me forever to find this. Some idiot had it sent back to storage."
From his desk, Heisuke snorted as he said, "Are you sure it wasn't you in the first place Shin?"
Nagakura dropped the box down on her desk and she was surprised by the loud thump it made. It hadn't looked that heavy when he was carrying it…
"Oi, care to repeat that shrimp?"
Leaving them to what she was quickly realizing was their normal banter, she opened the box. It was crammed with so many cases, she couldn't help but wonder how it wasn't bursting the seams. This was only a small portion of the cases they had? No wonder they needed help. Leaving the cases for a moment, Chizuru sat down and pulled out her laptop.
Once it's started up and she'd logged in, she clicked over to the available wifi. The building had both secured and guest wifi. She could use the guest, but if they had a central VM system, then she would need the secured…
Glancing up, she noticed that Heisuke and Nagakura were still trading insults, something about a night from a couple years ago from what she could gather. How did their argument end up there? Shaking off the thought, she noticed Harada was just sitting back, clearly enjoying watching their verbal tennis match. He seemed to be the best person to ask at the moment. Okita had been studiously ignoring for the past couple hours, and to be honest, Saito's stern demeanor intimidated her.
"Um, Harada?"
He glanced away from the two arguing next to him and gave her a warm smile. "Yeah? What's up?"
"Do you guys have a VM here?"
He gave her a confused look. "A what?"
"Um, you know, Virtual Machine? …A central system you can log into remotely? I just want to make sure I can access any forms I may need from my laptop..."
He still looked lost, but she wasn't sure how else to explain it. Thankfully Heisuke took that opportunity to turn toward her, his eyes and smile bright and almost puppyish.
"I can give you the username and password for that. You're also going to need the password for the secure wifi, right?"
"You know what she's talking about?"
Heisuke gave Harada a weird look. "You log on to one every day. How do you not know what a VM is?"
Apparently Nagakura realized he'd lost his opponent, because he took that moment to butt in. "What's a VM?"
Heisuke smacked his palm to his forehead as he sighed exasperatedly. "Geeze you guys are old. It's the thing you log on to on the computer. You know, the central system that gives us all access to the same set of applications and documents?"
"Hey now, Shinpachi may be old, but I'm not!" Harada's expression looked affronted, but she thought she could detect a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Nagakura immediately turned toward him, his eyebrows drawn together sharply. "Oi, Sano! I thought you were my friend!?"
Heisuke sighed and shook his head. "When it comes to technology, you're both dinosaurs." He quickly scribbled down the username and passwords she'd need on a post-it note and handed it to her. "Here you go. You can use my username and password for the VM until HR gets you one of your own."
She barely got her thanks out before Nagakura had Heisuke in a headlock.
"All right, all right! If you're done flirting with the new girl, let's get out of here. We should have had lunch hours ago and my stomach's cryin'!"
Heisuke struggled to escape Nagakura's grip, his face going red. "I wasn't flirting! It's called being nice, something you wouldn't know anything about."
Harada shook his head as he grinned at the pair of them. "Shin, let him go so we can get out of here already." He turned to look at her. "You wanna come? The place we're going isn't far."
She'd like to say it was tempting, but really it wasn't. If this was what they were like in the office, she didn't know if she could handle them out of it.
She shook her head, giving him an apologetic smile. "Thank you, but I'm fine. I brought lunch and I want to get a look at some of these cases.
Harada shrugged. "Suit yourself. The offer always stands."
She smiled and gave them a small wave as they left.
With the noise of their banter gone, Chizuru realized she was completely alone in the room. Apparently at some point Okita and Saito had disappeared, and Hijikata had shut the door to his office. She let out a sigh and stared at the box of files on her desk. This was nothing like what she had expected, but she had to at least give it some time before she decided whether she liked it or not. They were a crazy and eclectic group, that was for sure, but on the whole they seemed like good people.
She traced a finger down one of the folders and mumbled to herself, "Well, most of them anyway…"
Shaking herself out of her thoughts, she glanced at a few of the cases in the box. Whoever had put them in there obviously hadn't bothered with any kind of order. They weren't grouped by type, date, name, or any other system she could possibly think of. Unfortunately that left her with only one option. She was going to have to do it herself.
Going to her bag, she dug around for a few seconds before her fingers found the pack of multicolored page markers she'd thrown in earlier that morning. Almost as an after thought, she snagged a bag of carrots from her lunch. There was no way her desk would have the space she needed, but a quick glance around the room found her the perfect spot. One of the back corners had plenty of free floor space under the whiteboards and would hopefully keep her out of the team's way.
It wasn't that she was OCD or anything, her bottomless pit of a purse was proof of that, but she liked things to be in their proper place. It made them easier to find later and she much preferred doing little bits here and there to one giant cleanup when things got unbearable.
She wrapped her arms around the box and made to lift it. No sooner had its full weight settled into her arms, then she had to take several stumbling steps to remain upright. Just how many cases were in here? Those muscles Nagakura had bragged about must amount to something, because he'd made carrying it look easy. To be honest, she wouldn't have been surprised to find several bars of lead at the bottom.
Somehow she managed to make it over to the corner and set the box down without dropping it. She sat down next to the box and idly munched on a carrot as she reached in and grabbed the first five or so files that came to hand. They definitely weren't in any specific order. In this batch alone she had a burglary from two weeks ago, the disappearance of a woman a year previously, and a scattering of other crimes in between. Well, she had to start somewhere.
An hour into it and Chizuru had half a dozen piles of different heights surrounding her and the box was half empty. She chewed on her lip thoughtfully. Which pile did this case belong in? Technically it was both a burglary and an assault…
"What, exactly, are you doing?"
Her eyes flew up from the file in her hands and found herself trapped by a cold green gaze. She felt herself freeze and her mouth open and close a few times as she tried to figure out how to get her voice to work.
Okita raised an eyebrow. "Well?"
Somehow, though she had no idea how, she managed to get her body to cooperate enough to speak. "O-Oh, um sorry… The cases were all out of order and I tend to think better when I can lay things out. I hope that's okay…"
He snorted slightly as he turned away, waving a hand dismissively. "Whatever. Just make sure you stay out of my way."
"O-Okay…" she wasn't sure he even heard her, because without another glance her way, he sat down at his desk and began typing.
Trying to push Okita to the back of her mind, she focused back on the case in her hand. Assault or burglary? Assault was the more serious crime, so she set it on the stack of other assault cases.
It didn't take her long to forget Okita was even in the room as she continued to work her way through the cases. At some point, her butt and back hadn't been able to take sitting on the hard floor any longer, and she'd succumbed to to the temptation to steal a pillow from the couch and the rest of her lunch from her desk. She'd just started to apply colored page markers to each of the files and sort the stacks by date, when a group of loud voices caught her attention.
Harada, Nagakura, and Heisuke walked into the room, laughing uproariously at some story Harada was telling. Had they been at lunch this whole time?
Heisuke glanced around the room and his eyes lit up when he saw her. "Hey Chizuru! …What are you doing over there on the floor?"
She couldn't help but smile back at him. "Oh, hi Heisuke. I'm just organizing the files since they were all out of order."
"Well you certainly look more comfortable now." Harada gave her a grin she couldn't quite decipher.
Comfortable? Chizuru glanced down and suddenly realized how she must look sitting on one of their pillows, sandwich in one hand, post-its in the other, surrounded by cases, and to her horror, her hair tugged up in a messy bun she couldn't remember doing.
She felt a blush creep across her cheeks, but before she could say anything, Harada raised his hands in a placating gesture and quickly continued. "Just sayin' it's nice to see you settling in. You were so jumpy earlier I thought we might've scared you off."
She felt her blush deepen and had to fight the urge to bury her face in her hands. Had she really looked ready to bolt earlier? She was definitely going to have a talk with Sen on her definition of fun. In no way did anything that had happened to her today qualify as fun.
Realizing she hadn't actually answered him yet, she managed what she hoped was a sincere smile. "Oh… um, thank you?"
Heisuke snorted. "Can you really blame her? Hijikata's scary as hell even when he's not in his oni mood."
Nagakura grinned and looked pointedly behind Heisuke. "Hey Hijikata."
It took a second for Heisuke to process that comment, but Chizuru could tell exactly when it clicked. Almost in slow motion, she saw his eyes widen and his face pale as he whirled around… to find nobody behind him.
Nagakura burst into laughter as Heisuke turned back, his fists clenched and eyes narrowed in a glare. "Bastard! That wasn't funny!"
Heisuke looked ready to lunge at the still laughing Nagakura and Chizuru couldn't suppress a laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole situation. Almost instantly, all eyes in the room focused on her and she clapped her hands over her mouth.
Harada gave her a wink. "That's what I've been waiting for. You're definitely cuter when you laugh."
Heisuke's expression immediately shifted from surprise back to glare as he frowned at Harada. "Seriously dude? Can't you go two seconds without flirting?"
"It's not flirting if it's the truth." Harada said as he leaned casually against the wall, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants.
"How about you all shut up before I decide to kill someone?"
Chizuru jumped slightly. She had forgotten Okita was even in the room until he'd spoken.
Nagakura frowned and looked slightly confused at a glowering Okita. "Hey man, what's got your tail in a knot?"
"You mean besides a loud trio of idiots and a waste of space?"
Waste of…? Oh…
Heisuke let out a surprised exclamation of "Souji!" and Harada's expression darkened as he said "That was uncalled for."
Okita only smirked slightly as he pushed away from his desk and stood. "Whatever. I'm out for the day anyway." Without another word, he brushed passed the group and was gone.
Nagakura sighed and rubbed the back of his head as he turned back to her. "Sorry about that Chizuru. He's normally not this bad."
Heisuke gave her a slightly strained smile. "Yeah, just ignore him."
"It's all right." She gave what she hoped was a convincing smile as she shrugged.
As soon as their attention shifted to their work, she let the smile drop and stared at the case in her hand without really seeing it. His words echoed in her head. Was that really what she was to him? A waste of space? A waste of time? She fought to push down the hurt as she gently ran her thumb over the smooth paper of the folder in her hands. Was he always like this? Maybe something else was bothering him… With a rough shake of her head, she succeeded in pushing down her hurt and took a deep breath. It didn't matter what he thought of her. In fact, it didn't matter what any of them thought of her. She had agreed to take on this job and she would see it through to the end.
Thankfully another hour's work was all it took to get the cases organized and back in the box. She glanced at the clock and realized that at this rate Sen would beat her home. Hopefully she could get there before she did too much…
She had packed up her bag and was just about to leave the room when she heard someone call out from behind her.
"You leaving for the day, Chizuru?"
She turned back to find Heisuke and the other two looking at her. She nodded. "Yeah, I need to get back before my roommate ruins dinner."
Heisuke laughed and smiled brightly at her. "Alright, see you tomorrow!"
She couldn't resist a smile as she gave them a small wave. Maybe, overall, this wouldn't be so bad.
