June 5th, 2020:
I hate it when my clients cry, I've never been good at dealing with tears, not even with Shinji. It seems like every time I handle a divorce, my client ends up crying. Maybe it's the photos of their partner cheating on them, maybe it's the realization that their marriage is a sham, but whatever it is, it annoys the hell out of me.
Presently, I'm in a coffee shop at Sapporo International Airport where my client has begun bawling her eyes out after I show her photos of her husband and some purple-haired Chinese bimbo doing the horizontal mambo in a cheap motel. The photos are not my best work, I had to take them while dangling from a fire escape at midnight without the use of a flash. The pictures are grainy, but you can clearly make out the husband's pigtail in the photos. Overall, it's enough for any competent divorce lawyer to make a case for irreconcilable differences.
"I just can't believe him," my client sobs. "We've been married for twenty-five years and I only find out about this now?"
"These things are always hard," I hear myself say. It's become routine by now, I've said these words of comfort so often to so many different clients that they've lost any meaning for me. A lot of things have lost meaning for me.
"But still, HER??!!" My client has now left the denial stage and has entered the anger stage. "That bimbo? That Chinese hussy? I thought she and Ryoga were happy together, but now it turns out she's been screwing MY husband on the side!!" She glares at me. "How long has this been going on?"
Here comes the hard part. "By my estimation, and this is purely guesswork, at least twenty years."
She stares at me incredulously. "Twenty years?" The tears start to form again. "Oh god, no!" She's crying again and making quite a scene in the coffee shop. I try my best to calm her down by patting her on the back and offering the occasional 'there, there' but by this point I just want my money and I want to get out of there.
For the record my name is Misato Katsuragi, I'm thirty-three years old, divorced and hold the recallable rank of Major (retired) in the Japanese Self-Defense Force (on loan to the United Nations) where I served as Director of Operations for the now infamous NERV project. For the last four years I've eked out a living as a private investigator, operating out of Japan's northernmost city of Sapporo, Hokkaido prefecture. Being a private detective wasn't my first choice of jobs, but the way in which I left my post at NERV made my post-military career options limited at best. Basically, it was either this or go work in a lingerie pub, and I'm a tad too old to be doing that, despite my gorgeous body.
Sapporo is the largest city on the island of Hokkaido. Prior to Second Impact it had a population of about one million. After the South Pole melted, Sapporo was one of the few cities to be untouched by the massive flooding that devastated most of Japan's coastal cities and became one of the main refugee centers. Today there's about seven million people living in the city proper, and another million in the suburbs. I moved here because it was as far away from Tokyo-3 that I could get and still find people who spoke predominantly Japanese.
Right now I'm tired. I was up half the night taking these damned photos, then I had to spend the morning trying to get the damn things to download from my digital camera into my aging laptop and print them out. I probably got five hours sleep before meeting my client at the airport, where I then proceeded to play den mother to a woman who just found out her husband had been cheating on her for the better part of two decades. I'm tired, hungry and I need a drink.
My apartment is in the southeastern part of town, one of those converted warehouse lofts that artists are so fond of. It's bigger than my old place in Tokyo-3, but the rent is considerably cheaper considering that I now live in a high-crime zone.
I park my car on the street and head up in the elevator. I study my features in the elevator mirror. Aside from a few more lines around the eyes, I haven't aged much.
When I reach my doorway, however, I'm startled to find a young man waiting for me, a man I haven't seen in two years..
"Hey," Shinji says. He grins sheepishly and gives a half-hearted wave. He's wearing a loose fitting T-shirt and jeans, a suitcase sits next to him.
"Hey, yourself." I continue to stare at him, not entirely sure what to do.
"Is that all you're going to say?"
I shake my head. "No, of course not." We hug. "God, Shinji, how are you? What are you doing here?"
"What's the matter, can't a former Child visit his guardian every now and then?"
"Well, yes, but..." I stop as it hits me. "Shinji, what's happened between you and Maya?"
He studies the floor. "She threw me out this morning."
"Oh god...."
"Said it wasn't working out between us. She said that I wasn't 'emotionally healthy' for her, whatever that means."
"So you came here?"
"I didn't have anywhere else to go," he explains. "I was hoping that maybe you'd let me crash on the couch for a few days."
"Or course." I hug him. "God Shinji, stay as long as you want. I'm just glad to see you again after all this time."
He returns the hug. I unlock the door and let ourselves in. He smiles as I turn on the lights to reveal a virtual wasteland. "I can see you took those cleaning tips I gave you to heart," he says bemusedly. The living room is cluttered with take-out containers and empty beer bottles. The kitchen is no better.
"I don't spend much time here," I explain. "I'm either at the office or on a case most of the time. Really, this is just a place to crash and store my food."
Dinner consists of warm beers and slightly stale pizza, neither of us cares, it's mostly a chance to catch up on old times. "...I thought things were going great between me and Maya, age difference aside," Shinji says. "But we started arguing after I flunked the entrance exams for the second time, and then she started going out a lot more often." He takes a sip of his beer and shakes his head. "I don't know, I guess we just grew apart in the end."
"Well, I'm glad you came here. I've missed having you around." I reach over and ruffle his hair, drawing a faint blush from my former charge. Shinji has grown a lot in the two years since I've last seen him. He's slightly taller than me now, and although still skinny, he's more muscular than when I first met him almost five years ago. Five years ago...? Then it hits me.
"Shinji, tomorrow is your birthday, isn't it?"
He smiles tiredly. "Yep. Maya dumped me the day before my birthday. I was going to call you tonight and see if you wanted to do anything tomorrow, but then Maya asked me to leave this morning and I figured, why wait?"
"Shinji," I say, "that's just..."
"I don't blame her," he interrupts. "She was right. Maya and I were moving in different directions and it just...." he trails off again, and for the second time today I find myself dealing with someone who's crying. This time, however, I don't mind. I hug him close to me as he sobs into my shoulder.
"It's going to be alright, Shinji. Really. It's all going to be alright."
His crying subsides after awhile and he looks at me with tear-stained eyes. "Thank you," he says.
"It's alright," I say. "Tomorrow, how about you and I go out and celebrate. We can go to the mall or maybe see a movie. How about that?"
He smiles. "Okay."
He helps me clean the living room and I get the spare sheets out for him. "Shinji," I say, "stay as long as you want. It gets kinda lonely in this big place and I wouldn't mind sharing it."
He blushes again. "I'll think about it, Misato." I tuck him in and lean over to kiss him on the forehead. I stop at the last minute, and for reasons that elude me, kiss him on the lips. It's a brief kiss, lasting no longer than a second, but it's enough to make him gasp and stare at me in shock. "Misato??!!?"
I smile seductively and wink. "Get some sleep, Shinji. Tomorrow's your birthday and we'll have lots of fun together." What type of fun, I'm not exactly sure, but I do know that things just got a lot more interesting around here.
**********
Author's Notes: I am constantly fascinated by the creative process. Most of my works over the last three years have been short spam pieces that were written in the course of a few hours. The genesis for this piece began some two years ago, however, when I toyed with the idea of casting Nabiki Tendo into a murder mystery in an homage to my favorite writer, Sue Grafton. Those ideas never panned out, and my output of new work slowed to a crawl as I contented myself to posting my old works on FanFiction.net. But then a few weeks ago I saw the Jeff Bridges movie "Eight Million Ways To Die" on cable and then I read up on Lawrence Block's character of Matt Scudder, an unrepentant alcoholic detective. I'd also been reading Brian Bendis' wonderful comic book "Alias," another piece about an alcoholic detective, though this one taking place in the world of superheroes. The idea of an anime murder mystery fanfiction returned to me, this time with Misato Katsuragi in the lead. C&C welcome, flames will result in even bigger flames.
W*ING Higley
Florida, 2002