"Hello Mother,"
Natsuko Takaishi looked at the man at her door and had to admit she was a little confused. Hadn't she told him not to come back?
"What are you doing here?"
"I just want to check on my stuff, I'm assuming you haven't thrown it out yet,"
"No, I haven't touched your room, but we got broken into a few months ago, and I don't know what they took,"
"I know that, mother. Well, can I come in?" She didn't look like she was going to move any time soon.
"I have company,"
"So what? I'll be quick, and it's not like I'm going to know who it is," The way she looked away from him told Takeru everything he needed to know, "Oh you're not doing that again," he said and pushed past.
"Takeru!"
He dashed through the hall. Did they really think that going through this all again was a good idea? Don't they remember how well it went last time they tried?
"Hello father, can't talk, I'm in a bit of a hurry,"
He cracked open the door to his room and saw the dust had been disturbed around his wardrobe. All this stuff with his parents would have to wait. He prayed that what he'd left in there still was.
He opened it.
It wasn't.
Shit.
He walked out of his room and found his mother and father sitting on the couch next to each other looking at him awkwardly.
"Right, I know you're adults and you can make your own decisions, but I just want you to remember what happened last time,"
"Hey," It was his father, "I'm sorry about your friend,"
"Thanks, I'm sorry your station is losing viewers to my show," and with that he was out the door and into his car.
The last thing he had wanted was to go back to that apartment, especially since it was just to check one thing, but asking his mother to do him a favour would have been harder than getting Hikari to have a rational conversation with him; and that was still years of growing indifference away.
Takeru loved his car. Not only was it practical, it was quiet, and it was helping to save the Earth. It was an uncomplicated formula, unlike everything else in his life. A little bit of fossil fuel saved here, an organic food market attended there, a light turned off, a television not left on standby, and he was doing something that he'd been trying to do all through his childhood, only with less violence and against what, until very recently, he considered an even greater threat.
He was saving the planet and it felt good.
He couldn't believe his parents were even thinking about getting back together again after the divorce; especially after everything that had happened last time they had tried to make it work.
Takeru thought that he'd probably been a bit too harsh on his father, but Hikari's snide comments had rubbed him the wrong way and then rubbed off on him. He didn't like that he'd had to lie to her to get her to talk to him, but that was the price he had to pay for his mistakes.
It wasn't even his fault. Satomi was the one who'd shown the story to her father, and it all snowballed from there.
Hikari really did hate him though.
Despite everything, he didn't quite understand what her problem was. But that was probably just because he didn't understand women in general. It was largely why Satomi had broken up with him, he realised, because he just didn't understand her. Two and a half years and he still had no clue as to what was going around in that pretty little head of hers. What had she said? I'm not one of your female characters, you can't just pretend you know what I'm thinking. That was probably a good thing, considering the fact that he tried to write his female characters as if they were male, so that they didn't end up being 'The Innocent' or 'The Love Interest' or 'The Bitch'. They still somehow ended up that way though. It was ironic, he thought, that Satomi was so against being defined as just one of his female characters, when she'd progressed through each of those stereotypes since he had first met her.
It was weird that he could think about her so objectively at a time when he was making such subjective decisions. All of this extra fuel, as minimal as his car's usage was, being used up on a wild hunch.
He parked his car a block away from his destination. The sun was well beneath the horizon and he put on the gloves he'd brought to keep his hands warm.
He barely remembered living in Hikarigaoka, except for a few of the times he'd had with his brother and especially that infamous night out on the balcony. It wasn't long after that that they'd been separated.
He climbed the stairs and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. It wasn't easy with his impossibly blonde hair. He cursed himself for not bringing a hooded jacket or some sort of woollen hat but he couldn't do anything about it now.
He walked toward the door with trepidation. There was no crime scene tape like there always was on television, but maybe they'd already finished up and taken it down. He pulled out his pre-prepared pick cut out from a soft drink container. He might not remember much from back then, but he did remember that all the apartments on both sides of the street had pretty unsophisticated locks on their doors. It was one of the reasons that they had moved away after the split, but the house his mother had moved into was just as easy to get into without a key. The locks on the apartments in this area were easy to push open, if you could get something through the crack in the door and bend it just the right way.
It took him just under a minute, and no one came past. Satomi was a good teacher.
Once inside, Takeru searched. It was a long shot but maybe, just maybe, finding it would answer a few questions.
What questions finding what he was looking for would bring up was another matter that he really didn't want to think about right now.
He took a cursory look around the kitchen-living-dining area, carefully opening the only cupboard that was big enough to hide it. Nothing.
He checked the first bedroom. He saw the music system and realised that this must be where Hikari had found him. Strange that, he thought, how she could walk right up to him, lying there with a knife in his back and not notice it.
A quick glance into the wardrobe proved fruitful. There it was, dusty as all hell and thankfully not connected to anything.
He took it out and examined it. It was the same one alright.
He studied it. What was Daisuke trying to achieve? Didn't he know it was hopeless?
He stopped himself; Daisuke had only ever given up on one thing in his life and that was only after over nine years of indifference on Hikari's part. Nothing was hopeless in Daisuke's mind. Besides Takeru knew all too well that Daisuke didn't know. But he was not going to think about that if he could help it.
There was a couple of scratch marks on the side and after a little bit of effort, Takeru managed to take off the affected panel.
There was something inside that he certainly hadn't put there. It was an xD card, a memory stick for a camera.
He pocketed it and put the panel back on. He thought for a second before replacing what he had been searching for back in the wardrobe. If the police didn't even think it was worth searching, then hopefully no one else would. It was safer here.
Besides, if he walked out the door with it, it would look very suspicious indeed.
He didn't know what was on the xD card, but he did know that there was only one person who could've known what Daisuke was doing with the object he had stolen from Takeru's house. He just didn't like the conclusion he got when he added the fact to Daisuke's murder.
Takeru's thoughts went off on this tangent as he began closing the door to the bedroom. The likely identity of the killer chilled him to his core. Seconds later when the vase came down on his head, and the figure who had just hit him with it stepped over him and into the bedroom, he stopped being scared at who he thought had done it, and became scared that he was about to do it again.
He couldn't move and his head was aching something fierce. He tried to think about something positive, if this were to be his last moment on the Earth, but all he could come up with was that it was ironic that he would die in the same apartment as Daisuke.
It would have annoyed him to no end that that was an incorrect use of irony, had he not just had a vase cracked over his head.
When the figure returned with part of the item Takeru had been searching for firmly grasped in two hands, and a heavily laden backpack which likely contained the rest, and stepped over him once more, it all but confirmed his initial fears.
But when the figure didn't stop to finish the job, Takeru was so surprised that he passed out.