New Girl
He could already tell she was going to be a pain in the ass.
Adachi found himself at the Dojima household kotatsu table yet again. It should have been an uneventful evening. Usually, Dojima would invite Adachi to his home and provide some dinner in recompense for his daily abuses. His young daughter would sit, staring at him with those big eyes as if he were a space alien. They'd talk a bit. Dojima would pass him a beer; they'd drink. And Adachi could comfortably slip out within an hour or two. However, this time was different.
This time, Adachi found his regular seat—the one that had the best view of the television—was occupied by someone. She was the newest addition to the household: Dojima's niece. He'd seen her once or twice; they'd met briefly at the station. She had been arrested for possessing a weapon, go figure. Apparently, she was very popular—or at least, Adachi's understanding of popular—she made three friends in a week. Dojima talked about her at work constantly: what she was doing, what clubs she was in, and how she was just "so smart" in all of her classes. Having met the real thing, he just didn't see it.
Her silver hair was shoulder-length, and her bangs stopped right above her eyes, hiding her eyebrows. Her clothes were plain: he saw her in her school uniform most of the time, and outside of school, she wore simple blouses and skirts. She seemed very traditional, despite coming from the city. She didn't wear any notable makeup, and she sat very obediently and ladylike, almost like a statue. Her eyes looked like they were carved from stone; once they picked a target, they didn't move and examined it in silence. Tonight, unfortunately, she decided that the target would be Adachi.
He found the way she looked at him to be a bit unsettling; it carried an unnatural weight like he had her undivided attention at that moment. He decided to ignore it for the sake of his sanity and tried to remember her name; it would be rude if he forgot it. Dojima had just reintroduced them a minute ago. Yuno? Yukki? Yukari? Something like that… No Yua! That was it. A small smile crossed his face as he remembered the name.
She cocked her head to the side; he'd realized he had been staring at her while thinking about the name. He spread an innocent grin before taking a gulp from his beer can. He thought she would have lost interest, but she still kept that gaze on him. Damn brat didn't know enough manners not to stare. He thought she was supposed to leave a week ago, but Dojima informed him that this was a year-long thing. He did not look forward to it.
Dojima got up to get Nanako some more water, leaving a tenuous moment between Adachi and the two silent parties at the table. He thought about saying something to Nanako, but she looked to Yua. Adachi did the same, only to be met with that stare again.
"Hearing you guys talk so much, being a detective must be exciting," Yua finally spoke; it was the first time he'd heard her talk in a while.
Adachi almost rolled his eyes. Inaba was probably the dullest place on the festering Earth to work. "Exciting" never entered his vocabulary. He couldn't let her know that and slipped on his stupid smile.
"It can be, but the amount of paperwork can be a drag sometimes. Although things are really picking up now with the murders and that Tatsumi guy going missing."
He noticed Yua flinch, probably at the idea of murder, but she quickly interjected, "I've heard around town that there wasn't much for the police to follow up on. That must be difficult. Do you think you can catch whoever's doing this?"
Adachi had to suppress a smile. Oh, yeah, he had killed someone, two people, in fact. The thought crossed his mind occasionally, less frequently now outside of some of his viewings of the Midnight Channel. He thought it was a good thing; he didn't need to be thinking about his crime when he was plodding around the police department. But, when someone brought it up like this, he just felt the need to say something, not out of a sense of remorse, rather, in the same way someone would gush about the genius of a work of art. Of course, there was no evidence; he was just too slick. He pushed those thoughts aside, trying to keep his "professional demeanor." It was a bit difficult these days with everything being so sensational. He thought about being quiet.
Ah—screw it, as if he was going to miss an opportunity to brag about "the murderer." He was the talk of the town, and he wanted everyone to know it. Even seeing the bit of worry in the girl's eyes was enough to convince him to loosen his tongue this time about the investigation.
"Yeah, the murderer's one slippery guy," He made a face like he was baffled; he was overplaying it a little, but she looked stupid enough to buy it. "He seems to keep getting away with things. We're not even sure how he was able to climb up there to put the bodies on the wire. I hope we catch him soon, but…."
"Adachi," Dojima snapped suddenly as he came back to the table and sat down. Adachi should have expected it. Nanako was sitting at the table; her eyes flashed with worry. "Not now."
"Right, sorry, boss," Adachi looked over to the girl, "Sorry, Nanako-chan."
Dojima glanced back to his frowning daughter. Adachi didn't need to be a fortune teller to see what would happen next. Dojima's knuckles smacked the top of his head just hard enough to make a point. Adachi rubbed the sore part of his head. He bit back a fit of seething anger, substituting it for a pained whine.
He felt like a clown.
The pathetic performance was a success. The act of violence put a smirk on Dojima's face, and his daughter looked a little more relieved. He glanced over to the newest member at the table to see her reaction to his daily routine.
Yua didn't laugh or even smile; she simply looked on with a wince and a frown.
Somehow, it was worse than the other two reactions. It made Adachi feel ill. Pity was something for the dead and stupid, and he was neither. His jaw tightened in frustration, but he never lost that pathetic look on his face. He needed to relieve the anger before he snapped at her.
Adachi decided to snipe at Dojima, "Anyway, this meal was great! It doesn't have that refrigerated, store-bought taste like it normally does."
"Well…" Dojima muttered a bit. "Yua was home early today and decided to cook for tonight."
"Really?" He took a second look at his food and paid attention to it. It was honestly a delicious meal. He'd half suspected it was from an out-of-town restaurant, but it turned out it was from this girl. He turned to smile at her; the meal was enough to pardon her previous action, "This is really good!"
He anticipated her to accept with that snotty, city bravado that all of the young girls seemed to have or blush shyly or turn the conversation away from her like a good, bashful, homely girl. She simply maintained that pleasant, blank expression—the kind that sucked in his thoughts about her and reduced them to nothing.
"Thank you, Adachi-san."
With that, Adachi let the evening slip from his mind.
The next time Adachi saw her, it was a few days later at the tables that sat outside of Junes. Adachi was avoiding the boring toils of work, per usual. He did this by claiming to go "follow on a lead" before disappearing into the shopping center and wandering around. Usually, his unscheduled break would lead to a time spent wandering the isles or scouring the magazine and book sections. This time, he decided to do a little early shopping and picked up his meal for the night. As he came out of the store, he caught a glimpse of the familiar silver hair.
Yua was hanging out with a familiar face. Adachi had seen the boy working at the supermarket a few times. He was a robot of a person on duty, putting on a face smile and helping people find things or check them out. The boy was the happiest doormat Adachi had ever seen. Off duty, the boy was completely different; Adachi could hear him griping about work as he passed. Classic mask, Adachi supposed. Everyone wore them when there was work to be done, no exception.
Adachi hoped to pass by Yua without notice—his arms were tired from carrying his groceries—but her grey eyes locked onto his instantly. She beckoned him over with a hand; her friend looked over and waved with a bit of confusion. Too late to run away. Adachi walked over and waved a greeting.
"Hey Narukami," He ignored the other kid: didn't know his name; didn't care to know his name. It was already a bother that he had to keep her full name in his mind. He would have referred to her by her given name because it was short, but Dojima would have his head going around referring to his niece so casually. Honestly, Dojima would probably require him to call her Narukami-sama or other titles of nobility if he could.
Her friend looked back at her with a question on his lips, and Yua reintroduced them, "Yosuke, Adachi-san is my uncle's partner. We've met him before."
"Oh right," It was obvious the friend didn't remember, even though it wasn't that long ago that they'd talked to each other in this food court. It also helped Adachi remember something too.
"Not carrying any weapons on you, are you?" Adachi smirked.
Junes kid jumped, "Uh, no sir. Learned my lesson. We're not carrying weapons anymore. We totally learned our lesson. No—No weapons. Right Yua?"
"Speak for yourself," her flat response deflated the kid.
Their dynamic was as clear as day. The classic he-likes-her, but she's too dense to notice or doesn't give a crap. Adachi decided to push their buttons a bit.
He put on his most oblivious face.
"Well, I wouldn't want to take up too much of your time; I'll leave you and your boyfriend to your date," Inside, he was cackling.
"Boyfriend?" Junes kid looked like a shock went through him.
Yua's expression didn't change. Odd, the clear insinuation glanced over her head. It hung in the air so long that it became awkward. The Junes boy glanced back because he wasn't going to deny it if she wasn't.
It finally seemed to sink in, and she waved it off, "Oh, Yosuke's not my boyfriend."
The Junes kid gave a pitiful laugh, "Yeah, no, got shot down immediately. It's been Yosuke open season recently."
Yua made a finger gun and shot it at him, "BAM."
So strange.
The boy let out another laugh; it was pretty easy to see he was trying to recover some level of crushed dignity, "But, if you're looking for labels, Adachi-san, she is my partner." They bumped fists.
"Partner?" Adachi pretended to care. "Like for a school project?"
"Oh well, yeah," The Junes boy rubbed the back of his neck. "Something like that, at least."
"It's a massive project," Yua nodded, spreading her arms out like a dishonest fisherman.
Massive project? Adachi questioned what that could mean for half a second before banishing the thought. He didn't care. He was talking to them to keep up appearances. It was exhausting attempting to care about whatever this was. His fun was over; he couldn't really tease them anymore without seeming overtly nosey. He was about to dismiss himself when someone, a girl in a green jacket, came running up to the table.
"Ready to go, guys?" The girl slammed her hands onto the table. "I'm so ready to—" The teenage boy made a strained expression, and Yua indicated to Adachi with her finger, arms still held way out. The green girl suddenly realized Adachi's presence and stumbled over a few words, "Uh—go study?"
"Yeah! Study!" June kid's voice cracked. "We really need to pass that test."
"Huh?" Another girl came to the table, "But finals aren't for another—"
"Hey! Let's get going!"
Adachi felt his patience wane before turning to get a good look at the new arrival. Recognition flashed in his eyes as Yukiko Amagi glanced at him with momentary confusion, and he could only stare back. Why was she here? He searched back in his memory: oh, yeah, she was still alive and friends with Narukami. He'd seen them together at the table at least once, and they said that they were friends with Amagi when he had met them at the station.
Amagi glanced at everyone with concern, "But, I didn't bring my notebook. I thought we were—"
"Come on, Yukiko!" The green one started to drag her away.
"Is there a test I don't know about?" Amagi looked at everyone, still bewildered.
"Yeah," Junes kid jumped up from his seat and seemed relieved as he left. "Come on, Yua!"
Yua nodded towards Adachi before running after her friends, "Bye, Adachi-san."
With that, he watched the backs of a group of teenagers sprinting off towards the store. So dumb.
Wait, he thought. They were going to study: why were they going back into the store?
The thought spent very little time occupying his mind. Stupid brats. He shrugged and went back to "work."
It became more and more evident to Adachi that the happy-go-lucky nature of his chosen façade was wearing him down.
The moment he entered his apartment door, he kicked off his shoes, so they hit the wall. With a deep breath, he exhaled, and the mask he had been wearing all day slipped off. His expression dropped into a frown, and his eyes expunged any sign of artificial warmth. His apartment was the only place he could be honest and shed his idiotic veneer.
The space wasn't particularly nice or anything, but he lived there, so… Home? He'd never call it that. Not this place. "Home was where the heart is" or whatever the phrase was, and his heart wasn't in this place at all. The walls were bare, as were the counters, tables, and any other surface. It looked like a perfect showroom, with the exception being a small, cheap, worn, secondhand loveseat that he had crammed into the space between his kotatsu table and the TV. He just needed something that was half-comfortable, another option to sitting on a flat pillow on the unevenly thatched floor or his lumpy futon that wouldn't soften no matter how much he beat it. He just wanted to leave this town in the boonies far behind, and he wasn't going to get cozy calling it his home.
There was only one benefit to the space: he was totally and completely alone, separated from the idiots of the world.
He ran a hand through his hair and hung up his tie and suit so that it didn't get wrinkled. Dojima would rag on him if he came in with a single crease in his collar. God, Adachi needed a vacation. But he would be seen as "lazy" if he decided to take off so early in his career here and when they were so slammed with work. Once the murder investigation was over—
He paused for a moment as the thought hit him, and he had to remind himself yet again that he had indeed been the man behind everything. It seriously slipped his mind sometimes. After it had first happened, he thought the fact would have haunted him; he had gotten physically ill at the sight of a body—even if most of it was a show. Yet, just a few weeks later, the euphoria was gone, and the thought was standard, uneventful. Now, he was just bored. The thrill just slipped through his fingers. Like a TV show with a two-part premiere but a third episode scheduled a month away, he had grown to forget the plot and feel. Then again, he had been promised something, something that wasn't delivered.
He got out some frozen, premade food as he thought about his encounter earlier that day.
Yukiko Amagi. She should have been dead.
She should have appeared on the wire just like the other two, yet she was still alive. Even more mysterious, she had claimed to have absolutely no memory of the incident or where she had gone during her "disappearance." Her testimony had brought in some momentary doubt about the whole incident, but he knew she had to have ended up in the TV. He saw as much on the Midnight Channel. Wasn't that her? She looked the same despite the outlandish clothing. Adachi had found himself staring at the girl as she told her side of the story during their interrogation. Her airheaded demeanor played perfectly into whatever she was trying to pull over his eyes. He wished that Dojima would have pushed her harder, made her tell the truth she was so clearly hiding. But he didn't and sighted the whole disappearance as a stressed-out kid who decided to leave for a few days to recuperate. Dojima gave Amagi a stern lecture on keeping in touch with her family but seemed to be relieved that she was alive.
Adachi stared at the label for the food and the corny cartoon princess mascot for far too long.
Adachi thought he had figured out some of the ways things worked. Push them in; they come out after the next heavy rain and fog. Simple, beyond simple! Still, he wouldn't put it past his "partner in crime" to absolutely screw it up. Namatame sounded out of his mind when he was on the phone. He professed to know something about the TVs and the murders. Namatame didn't suspect Adachi, surely. The ex-secretary never seemed that smart, but he was getting them in there somehow. Adachi was sure that Yukiko's disappearance wasn't a coincidence, and now some other kid had vanished off of the face of the earth. This should have set the stage for another body soon, but Adachi had doubts about his new entertainment.
The delivery man wasn't delivering. Adachi smirked at the stupid joke.
He finally had a meal: he really wasn't paying attention to what it was. It was pretty bland anyway. He sat down on the couch and turned on the TV. It distracted him for a while, but he found an old tick come back. Namatame's impotence really irked him, and his eye flickered to the closet in the corner of the room. He needed his fix.
Adachi set the bowl down and stumbled his way to the closet. He had to pull out his futon to get to the box in the bottom corner. He opened it and fished through the box of photos and news clippings to pull his prize out.
Adachi wrapped the lock of hair around his finger. He had memorized the texture weeks ago, but it still brought a bit of a smile to his face when he ran it through his fingers.
Saki Konishi once had such beautiful hair.
Was it stupid to have it? Yes. Was it a pain in the ass to secretly clip off in the Inaba morgue? Yes. But that was outweighed by the overwhelming benefits to the artifact: making that moment real again.
Yamano had been too well protected and carted off too quickly to the grave; his interaction with her before her demise had also been just as disappointingly quick. The only thing left of her was photos, which he still collected to fill the void. Yet, this single piece from Konishi outweighed the album in a second. Anyone could have a picture; he had something much more special. While the corpse rotted in the grave, he held onto the final perfect piece of her. He remembered the first time he had seen her: a cute, mature girl stocking the shelves in Junes with the pitifullest expression—worn down by her stupid little life in this rotten town. Then when he saw that same girl, with that wavy bleached hair, walking through the police station to testify for witnessing the results of his crime, he knew she had been gifted to him.
The strands of hair from that miserable girl solidified that moment for him, the fear in her eyes, the way he'd held her in precisely the way he'd been fantasizing about with nameless girls for over a decade. It was all so thrilling, so powerful. And now, that power was gone, only to be found in the memento. If only he could reclaim that power somehow, make a new moment, add something to his collection…
His mind drifted back to Namatame.
He was sure that Namatame wasn't that incompetent. He had managed to shove two people in. If the victims were going in as he suspected, they were definitely getting out. How? Damned if he knew. He doubted that Yamano or Konishi would have sat around to die if someone could just climb out. He tried to think about it in terms of what he knew, which was admittedly very little. Just push someone in to get them inside… so in order to get them out … was someone pulling them out?
As he pondered the idea in front of the TV, his phone buzzed. He groaned, realizing that it probably meant that he would go in for some late-night hours. He shuffled over to where he was charging it. Predictable: Dojima's number appeared.
He took a moment to get back into character before picking up the phone, "What's up, Dojima-san?"
"Adachi, I need you at the station," Dojima's voice was as welcome to his ears as a cat's claws on a chalkboard. "The punk kid who went missing, he's here now. I need you here to file some things and help me close the case."
"Alright, on my way," He hung up, and his stupid expression darkened to a frown.
Now, Kanji Tatsumi had come back as well. He'd seen the punk kid on the Midnight Channel for sure doing. . . whatever the hell that was. People turned into freaks on that thing. But this was a concerning pattern. He doubted that those two escaped on their own terms.
Something happened; someone interfered. It only seemed natural. If someone could push a person into a TV, why couldn't someone pull them out? The question now was who was pulling them out. The only other person he knew had this power was Namatame. He needed more evidence. He knew so little about this town and his powers.
Adachi sighed. It was just his luck that someone was trying to ruin the game. Some self-righteous asshat was getting in the way of the only thing that kept him sane in this town. However, wasn't this the next logical step? If the police were woefully unable to stop his abilities, the universe dictated that some opposing force must be out there to match him; otherwise, things would get boring. He decided to look on the bright side for once. Player two had entered the game. He now had an opponent. The idea brought a smile with it. He wrapped the hair around his fingers for the final time that night.
This could be fun.
