Seeing Green
Drabble 5: Treasure
Notes: My sister has this habit of calling me Kazuha. And I happen to like containers (Container Store mmmm) so I kind of ran with the idea.
---------
Kazuha was a girl who appreciated containers. Or, in Heiji's words, "She's completely obsessed!"
He picked up on her little quirk they were about 16 years old. Now, he knew that girls liked cute stuff, and Kazuha was no exception. She was always buying little boxes and tin cans and things with flowers and such. But one day they were walking through a department store and he noticed that she was stopping to look at the plastic containers.
The plain, plastic containers. The kinds one would use to store clothes and such. Yes, those kinds of containers.
Which didn't make any sense, considered Heiji'd been in Kazuha's room, and he distinctly remembered a walk-in closet that seemed to have endless space for her clothing collection.
One day he was bored and decided to go over to her house. Toyama-keijibuchou was the one who answered, and he directed the young detective to Kazuha's room.
When Heiji entered her room, he found her sitting in the middle of the floor, right in the middle of stacking up a 66-quart plastic bin with all the pretty little containers she had obtained over the years. He raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
She shot him a look. "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm putting all my boxes together."
Heiji sat down across from her with the plastic box serving as a barricade. "You know, you always make fun of me because I'm a detective, but you're weird in your own way. I mean, what the hell do you put in those containers anyway?"
Something flitted across her face, but it was gone before he could identify it. "Nothing really." She picked up a small black satin-covered box with embroidered cherry blossoms, lifted the lid just a tiny bit as if to see the contents were intact, and placed the box into the plastic bin.
He deadpanned. "What do you mean, 'nothing?' You spend a ton of money on those containers and there's nothing in them?"
Kazuha shook her head. "No, not exactly. If you have to know, I keep my memories in these things." With that, she placed a green box with a pink heart embroidered on the lid right in front of him, and chose at that moment to skip out of her room, humming a pleasant song.
Heiji curiously opened the lid to the box, and then he understood.
Nestled among an array of photos of himself and Kazuha were various trinkets and items. There were the hair ribbons she wore when she was a little girl in Kyoto. There was her first cell phone (and he remembered it well, for she had insisted that they share a plan after discovering that sometimes detective work was dangerous). And there was her omamori, the very link between the two of them, and as Heiji's mother had put it, "The substitute of the red thread of fate between my son and Kazuha-chan."
Suddenly his phone rang, jarring him out of his thoughts. It was Otaki-han, asking him to come and investigate a crime scene at the train station.
As he jumped on his bike and sped to the station, he made a mental note to pick up one of those plastic containers after the case was solved.
End.