Notes: So... Originally I planned to get this chapter done and posted before the end of January. Now March is almost over and this isn't even all of what I had planned for chapter 2 (it got too long). Ahahaha.

I didn't mention this in the last chapter's notes (because I ramble too much and it was already getting too long), but if you didn't already guess, this is a non-Hope's Peak (and thus non-Despair) AU. I've nerfed the skills/legacies of most characters to something more commonplace (eg. the Kuzuryu Clan is much smaller and less influential; Kirigiri does come from a family of detectives, but it's not some secret cabal of ultra detectives like in canon; etc.).

Also, this particular chapter is unbetaed for now, so any and all errors are my own! I'll make any needed changes at later date when my beta isn't busy. (And if there are any weird formatting errors it's because I'm uploading from my iPad while out of town... I just want to get this chapter done and out of my hair if you couldn't tell, haha.

Finally, please enjoy!

Waiting for Rainbows
Chapter 2: Life is ordinary, but even ordinary is difficult

By the time the ordeal was over with and Hinata came back to his senses, he realized that he had missed the last train of the night. He groaned as he stared at the time on his phone; even if he tried to take a cab back, it would still be past curfew, and the dormitory doors would be locked until morning.

He leaned against the doorframe to Kagayaki's entrance as he swept a finger across the phone screen, navigating to his contacts list and scrolling through it. Maybe he could stay with a friend for the night... Naegi would be working the graveyard shift at the convenience store and probably wouldn't be home until Hinata had to leave for work, so that wasn't an option. Hanamura would be closing up for the night soon, but if Hinata wanted to get any sleep before work then crashing with him wouldn't be a good idea. Not that Hanamura would do anything inappropriate to him—he knew full well that he wouldn't—but he would try to make him watch... certain videos all night long. So that was out.

Hinata sighed and scrolled back up to the Ks. If he was going to stay with someone, his only option was Kirigiri—there was no police dormitory for female officers within commutable distance, so she had her own apartment in Kibougaoka. But staying at her place overnight... He tapped his phone against his forehead, thinking.

No, he couldn't do that to her. Staying with Kirigiri could cause too many problems.

He shoved his phone back into his pocket and paced in front of the pub as he thought. Was there a cheap hotel or manga cafe nearby that he could stay at? Probably not. Maybe he could spend the night at the koban?

He stopped in his tracks. The koban. That was probably his best bet. It wouldn't be very comfortable, but there was a break room in the back, which should be good enough for one night. He'd just need to ask for the key.

Taking out his phone again, he dialed Kirigiri's number.

"No, you can't stay at the koban."

Hinata's shoulders slumped as he tried in vain to hide his exasperation. "I can't— But you told me to come all the way here to pick up the key!"

Kirigiri blinked up at him expressionlessly from her doorway, arms crossed. Despite the stern look, she looked a bit younger than usual, dressed in casual clothes and with her hair draped over her shoulders, free from the loose bun she kept it in at work. "I told you to come here, but I never said I'd give you the key." She stepped back and held the door open. "Like I said, you can't stay at the koban. Now come inside."

"Sempai."

Kirigiri met his gaze again, slight annoyance tinging her features as Hinata gave her a meaningful look. There had always been an unspoken agreement between them not to talk about her situation, and though Kirigiri seemed to prefer to ignore it outright, Hinata wasn't just going to potentially make things worse for her.

Kirigiri gave a short sigh and turned on her heel, long hair whipping behind her. "Just stop worrying about ridiculous things and come inside."

Reluctantly, Hinata followed her into the one-room apartment. There was no arguing with his sempai once she had decided on something, and he knew that full well.

"You can borrow the spare futon," Kirigiri instructed as she pulled the bedding out of the closet and handed it to Hinata. "Lay it out on the floor over there. The public bath is closed by now, so you'll have to make do without for tonight."

"Thanks," Hinata muttered as he spread the futon as instructed. "Sorry about this."

"I said it's fine."

They fell into silence, but Hinata could feel her gaze boring into his back. Finally unable to take it any longer, her looked over his shoulder at her. "What?"

She continued staring with her arms crossed, a gloved finger tapping her arm thoughtfully. "So what happened?"

"Wh- nothing happened, really." Hinata turned away again, becoming flustered by her expressionless gaze. "I drank too much and missed the last train, that's all."

"I'm sure you can think of a better lie than that," Kirigiri immediately responded, shooting down the falsehood easily. "I can tell you barely even had one drink."

Hinata grimaced. With such keen observation skills, it was entirely unfair for her to be stuck manning some middle-of-nowhere koban.

"Well?"

"Some weird new guy showed up, all right?" Hinata stood, having finished setting up the futon, and turned to face Kirigiri directly. "He got wasted so I helped him find a ride home, and it took longer than expected."

Kirigiri raised an eyebrow. Hinata knew she could tell that he wasn't divulging all the details, but she relaxed her stance, apparently letting it slide. "All right, then. Let's leave that there and turn in for the night. I'm not going to let you sleep in."

"Wouldn't expect you to." Hinata shrugged off his overshirt and gratefully crawled into the futon, ready to put the entire night behind him. "Good night then, Sempai."

"Good night."

The lights flicked off, and Hinata stared into the unfamiliar darkness. His body felt heavy with exhaustion, but now that he had his thoughts to himself again, his mind was swirling with even more questions than before.

Why hadn't he given Kirigiri more details about the man from the pub? Wouldn't it make sense to tell her his suspicions about yakuza activity in the area? The best explanation he could think of was that he didn't want to make any accusations before he was entirely sure of the situation himself, but wasn't that a naïve—and frankly, dangerous—way of thinking?

It was stupid to try and hide anything from her, anyway. She obviously knew there was more to his story, and had he been anyone else, Kirigiri wouldn't have let up on him so easily. His stomach churned with guilt at the thought. Kirigiri wasn't one to freely give others her trust, and it was thanks to the two years they had worked together that such a bond had been built between them. Hinata was taking advantage of that trust for some reason that he couldn't even pin down.

In the sleepy recesses of his mind, he considered that perhaps it was something he didn't even want to admit to himself. But that didn't make sense. Truth mattered to Hinata more than anything else; why would he run from the truth when he lived to expose it? It was why he had wanted—

Sleep tugged incessantly at the corners of his mind, and Hinata abandoned that train of thought in favor of much-needed rest. Even if he decided to confide in Kirigiri, it was too late to be starting that conversation, so he finally relinquished himself to the realms of unconsciousness.

Hinata awoke slowly the next morning, feeling almost worse than he had the night before. His trousers had wrinkled uncomfortably as he tossed and turned overnight, and his mouth tasted like sleep and stale beer. He groaned and huddled under the covers, feeling completely unwilling to greet the morning chill wearing a sleeveless undershirt. He knew he had to get up eventually, though, so he stuck his hand out from under the sheets, feeling around for wherever he had tossed his button-up the night before.

He yelped in surprise when something wrapped in crisp plastic packaging was dropped on top of his hand, and he pulled down the covers just enough to glare up at Kirigiri. "What was that?!"

"If you stopped being a baby and actually got out of bed, you'd see that it's a toothbrush."

Hinata frowned and reluctantly sat up, shivering as goosebumps prickled his bare arms. He quickly located his shirt on the floor and slipped it on before picking up the brand-new toothbrush lying by the futon. "Did you go out and buy this?" He blinked blearily at his sempai; now that he looked at her properly, she was already dressed to go outside.

"I can't have you coming into work in such a mess." Kirigiri didn't look at him as she rummaged through her refrigerator, pulling out an energy drink and considering it before packing it in her shoulder bag. "The least you could do is brush your teeth before we head out."

With how disgusting his mouth felt, Hinata was more than happy to oblige. "Thanks," he muttered, standing up and walking to the sink. "I'll pay you back."

"Don't bother." She shot him an unimpressed look before handing him a tube of toothpaste. "Just hurry up and get ready. We're already running later than I'd like."

"Later than Kirigiri would like," Hinata noted as they walked out of the apartment and he checked his phone, was a full forty-five minutes before their posted service time. He didn't complain, however, and they walked the few blocks to the koban in silence.

The sun had barely risen above the horizon by the time they arrived. Once Kirigiri had unlocked the front door, Hinata gratefully followed her inside, ready to finally change out of his clothes from the night before... but he paused halfway to the changing room, glancing down at Kirigiri next to him.

She quickly noticed his gaze and returned it with a tired expression. "What is it?" she asked, though Hinata could hear the unspoken "Don't bring this up" behind her words.

"Nothing," he sighed, and he entered the changing room, Kirigiri following after.

Usually their arrival and departure times were slightly staggered, enough that they didn't normally have to deal with the dilemma of there being just a single changing room to share. On the occasion that they did have to occupy the room simultaneously, Hinata couldn't help the feeling of helplessness, the dull anger towards the system bubbling in his gut. Kirigiri, however, never said a word about the situation, silently disappearing behind the makeshift curtain they had hung across the room.

Hinata sighed again as the curtain was swiftly pulled closed, then quickly got to work at changing into his uniform and making himself look as presentable as possible. Kirigiri never emerged from her side of the room before Hinata had finished changing, and he was fairly certain that wasn't a coincidence.

And as he fell into his normal daily routine, preoccupied with his concerns over the precinct's myopic ways, Hinata nearly forgot all about the stranger from the night before.

Hours later, when Kirigiri was out on patrol, Hinata sat alone in the koban, adjusting his hat awkwardly. He didn't usually wear it indoors, but he hadn't been able to get his hair to sit quite right that morning—not that it was ever completely tamed in the first place—so he had decided to just hide it under the regulation cap. After several hours with it on, though, the hat's inner band was beginning to irritate his scalp, so he ducked into the restroom to try to fix his hair once again.

Placing the hat on the edge of the sink, Hinata leaned forward to study his reflection in the mirror. His hair looked even worse now, between the unfamiliar sleeping conditions, a night without a bath, and hat hair on top of all that. He groaned and wet his hands under the faucet before running his fingers through his hair, trying to make it look somewhat presentable.

He caught a glimpse of his own eyes reflected back at him and instinctively averted his gaze, but suddenly, words from the night before echoed in his mind.

"You've got nice eyes."

Hinata paused, fingers stilling in his hair. That's what that stranger had said to him, right? Granted, they had been the meaningless ramblings of a drunkard, but...

His arms lowered to grab the sink as he leaned slightly closer to the mirror, daring to meet his own gaze. He had been unnerved by his own eyes for the past several years, ever since those strange stress lines had appeared partway through college. The pale rings around his pupils, bizarre lines slashing diagonally through his olive-colored irises—those weren't the same eyes that had met him in the mirror for the first twenty years of his life. They had become the eyes of a stranger, foreign and unwelcome, a constant reminder of his own failures.

That was, of course, his own subjective view of them; he was well aware that most of his distaste towards his eyes was colored by his own personal feelings. But he had, more than once, seen a stranger on the train recoil upon making eye-contact, noticed a child staring with innocent but unrestrained confusion, so he knew he wasn't alone in finding them strange.

He had never been complimented for them before.

Hinata frowned at his reflection before finally stepping back and placing his hat back on his head, deeming his hair to be a lost cause until he got home. What was with that guy from the night before, anyway? His immediate impression was that he was involved with the criminal underground, but was that a hasty judgment to make? Kirigiri often said that approaching a problem with preconceptions about what the solution must be was a dangerous route to take...

At a loss of how else to proceed, Hinata tried to reorganize his thoughts.

Fact: Hinata had never seen the man before. He had been a stranger to Hanamura as well, or at the very least, Hanamura had never served him alcohol before. Hinata was fairly certain it was the former.

Fact: The man had been wearing a pin-striped designer suit. It was the type of attire often seen in mafia films, but drawing that parallel would be mere conjecture at that point, so Hinata left that train of thought where it was.

Fact: The man had been upset. That was a fair assessment to make; more specifically identifying him as being "angry" or "frustrated" was too speculative for Hinata's liking, but "upset" was vague enough to work with.

Fact: The man complimented others when sufficiently drunk.

...Hinata wasn't sure how that was relevant to the issue.

Fact: The man had been referred to as "young master," and had been picked up in an expensive-looking foreign car. Hinata wasn't exactly sure of the make of the car, and was wishing that he had gotten a photo of it to send to Souda to identify, or... damn, he could have even snapped a picture of the license plate as it left! Hinata was mentally kicking himself for his inaction the night before.

Hinata quickly reviewed his thoughts, and decided that he had probably exhausted all the hard facts he could glean from the encounter, but for good measure, he added one last item to his mental list.

Opinion: The whole situation just seemed shady.

He had nothing concrete to back up that assessment, but he just couldn't bring himself to disregard it, no matter how much he might want to.

As for theories to be drawn from that list... the one that made the most sense to Hinata was that the man had been a young yakuza, probably of high rank in the organization, who had messed up some sort of deal and stopped by Kagayaki to drown his frustrations with alcohol.

That... seemed plausible enough, Hinata decided, but it still didn't sit well with him for some reason he couldn't quite identify. There wasn't much known yakuza presence in the area; there were a few companies on back-alley streets that were suspected of being shell corporations or otherwise having ties with the yakuza, but nothing major. Was a clan starting to move in to claim the territory, then? Kirigiri would probably be able to make a better assessment of the situation, so perhaps he'd just bring it up with her...

Hinata tapped the edge of the sink thoughtfully, staring at those damnable eyes of his in the mirror, when suddenly he realized he had been standing there for far too long—probably close to ten minutes, and he was supposed to be on duty. Standing upright and adjusting his hat one last time, he headed to the front of the building and sat heavily at the desk, ready to put the whole thing out of his mind.

Until he abruptly realized that he had another investigative path available to him, literally right in front of his nose.

He could check the computer to see if he could find any relevant files.

Hinata stared for a moment at the old CRT monitor sitting on the desk. The information database available to a small koban like theirs wouldn't be very in-depth—he'd have to go to municipal headquarters before even hoping to do any intense digging. But if the man had been from any prominent yakuza family active in the general area, there should be something he could find.

The problem was that he didn't know the guy's name.

Hinata sighed, frustrated with himself for being unable to just put the matter to the side even temporarily. Even so, he jiggled the mouse and waited for the aging computer to slowly wake up.

Once the computer was fully awake, Hinata opened up a search query, then paused as he debated how to continue. He wouldn't be able to even begin searching without something to go on, so he thought back to the short glimpse he had gotten of the stranger's residence card. He had vaguely recognized the town crest stamped on the card, but the name of the town hadn't immediately come to him, and he couldn't recall the exact design of the crest. The only other detail he had noticed was the first character of the man's last name, "Ku"—the kanji for "nine." With nothing else to go on, he quickly typed the character and hit the search button.

...And of course he should have expected there to be far too many results to sift through.

Hinata groaned and buried his head in his hands. The hits included not only the countless people whose names contained the character, but also place names and any text mentioning anything in quantities of nine. Even with most dates and case numbers opting to use Arabic numerals instead of kanji, it was an overwhelming volume of results and Hinata gave up after skimming the third report involving someone from Kyushu. But maybe if he did just a general search for known yakuza clans in the area...

"What are you doing?"

Hinata jumped in his seat; he had been too engrossed in his research to notice Kirigiri returning from patrol. "Nothing!" he insisted, hurriedly closing out of the search results.

...and he immediately wondered why he was trying to cover it up. Hadn't he decided to ask Kirigiri for her input?

She stared down at him, raising a quizzical eyebrow. Obviously Kirigiri knew that he hadn't been doing "nothing."

Hinata grinned sheepishly in return. "Seriously, I wasn't doing anything important," he said, voice calm even as he internally berated himself for keeping Kirigiri in the dark. "It's nothing to worry about."

Kirigiri stared at him for a moment longer before shrugging and turning away. "Well, I know you wouldn't do anything inappropriate on there, so it doesn't really matter."

Hinata just laughed lightly as he watched Kirigiri disappear into the break room, though his mind was still in a state of confusion over his own actions. Apparently there was a part of him that didn't want Kirigiri to know about his suspicions, but why? He trusted her, and he knew that if he just shared the information it would make figuring out the mystery that much easier, but... he didn't want to.

That's all it came down to, if he were perfectly honest with himself. He didn't want Kirigiri to know that he'd met a potential yakuza. If she knew, then she'd—

She'd what?

Hinata looked up at his superior officer as she emerged from the break room, twisting open a bottle of water. Kirigiri took her job seriously—she couldn't afford not to—and for some reason that meant that Hinata didn't want her to know about the stranger.

Kirigiri shot Hinata another odd look. "You know you're going out to do the rounds in an hour, so whatever's going on with you, I hope you snap out of it soon."

Hinata hoped so too, but he somehow doubted it would happen.

Notes: I'm trying to stay away from making culture/translation notes for this fic, because I feel like they're sort of distracting as well as largely unnecessary, since most things I reference are obvious from context or at least easily googleable. That said, if you see anything you're genuinely stumped by, please don't hesitate to ask about it!

The next chapter should be out much quicker than this one was! Also, a little request from me to you guys: I'm looking for honest critique on my characterization for Hinata. He is coming faaaaar too easily to me when I write, to the point that I feel like I must not have it quite right since I'm not really thinking it through? So if you notice anything I could fix, please please do let me know! Thanks!