Chapter 3
"Uncle Kudo, hey Uncle Kudo," Elaine called out. Though she wasn't particularly focused on searching for him. Her eye was on the ball at her feet. Every couch and table was an enemy she must avoid in order to keep the ball from falling into their clutches. After a close encounter with a lamp, which had wobbled just a bit when it's base had reached out to steal the ball, she spotted her goalkeeper. "There you are! Think fast!"
She kicked the ball straight for the slightly open door behind him, figuring it was as good an endline as any. Kudo caught the soccer ball under a foot and let the door fall the rest of the way closed behind him. Then in one easy motion, he kicked the ball up into the air before him, bounced it once, twice, and then tucked it under an arm. Elaine had tried to imitate that before and found it much harder than Uncle Kudo made it look.
"Alright little striker, we should probably keep soccer an outside sport, don't you think?"
Elaine thought of responding that she obviously didn't. Instead, she said, "lots of soccer matches are played on indoor fields."
"That's true, but most living rooms aren't one of those."
"Neither are most backyards," she grumbled.
"I know of a public soccer field that's not too far," he said as he adjusted a lampshade that was crooked, and flattened a turned up corner of a rug. "If we hurry we might be able to get in some practice before it gets too dark."
"Well actually," Elaine drew out, gaining a near manic look to her eyes. "I was hoping you might take me somewhere else."
She leapt onto a couch in pursuit of him as he retraced her earlier path of disruption. Then further she climbed onto the armrest, her words firing off almost faster than comprehension as she went.
"You know all the tallest buildings in Tokyo, don't you? Mom said you would, but I thought you might not, because it isn't interesting enough to know off the top of your head."
"Elaine, maybe you shouldn't-"
"I mean, I think it's interesting cause I like looking at things from places that are really high up. But, it's alright if you don't."
It was then that her mom entered the room, deep in conversation with Auntie Ran, but not so deep that Elaine thought she wouldn't notice the precarious way she was perched on the armrest of the couch. She slipped her feet out so she was only sitting on it, in a likely not-quick-enough save.
"I see you're already recruiting Uncle Kudo into your schemes," she said, not without the guilt-inducing look Elaine had expected. "Don't forget you have an early flight tomorrow."
"Does that mean no?" Elaine pouted. "It's my only chance; We're not going to be here tomorrow night."
"That's up to Kudo." Her mom answered without looking at her. She was preoccupied adjusting and readjusting a pillow behind Ran's back, to Ran's polite protests and her mother's insistence.
"He has to be on that flight as well." She added.
She noticed it wasn't technically a no. More like a no her mom had delegated to someone else to tell her. It was permission enough for Elaine.
"Please, please would you take me!" she leaned forward on the armrest trying to catch Uncle Kudo's attention, and gave him her cheesiest smile.
"I'm not sure what I'm agreeing to here," Kudo said, looking to her mother. Elaine thought it was rather like he was passing the job of telling her no back to her mom. Maybe she could still intercept.
"To see the city lights!" She had leaned far enough off her perch that she slid off and dropped the few remaining inches to her feet. She darted a look at each of the adults in the room, but didn't think anyone had noticed her fumble.
"Elaine has a couple of online accounts where she likes to post pictures of places she's been."
" -But only a really specific kind." Elaine cut in.
"That's right," her mom smiled. "Did you want to take over, Sundrop?"
She shook her head vehemently; she'd only gotten excited.
As her mother continued to explain Elaine listened intently to make sure nothing vital was left out, nodding along. She did a decent job of covering all the most important bits of what it was, even if Elaine thought she might not have conveyed how impressive it was to have the sort of following that her online identity had.
Mid explanation, Elaine thought of her book and ran to get it from her backpack. She held it up to Kudo, figuring if anyone was going to appreciate a book it was him.
He read the title aloud, "Sam and Lacy's Practical Guide for Getting on the Roof - The Essentials of Urban Exploration." The book itself was overflowing with illustrations of the sort of places people went exploring and enough information on the hobby that Elaine hadn't even gotten to all of it yet.
"Yeah, I thought the title was probably just a joke or a trick, like how 'To Kill a Mocking Bird' doesn't say how you would really kill one. But there's a chapter called "rooftopping". That's chapter..." she flipped through several glossy book pages, "eight. See!"
"Ah and there's the culprit," her mom teased with obvious affection. "The book that started the obsession."
She scowled at this, but it wasn't the well-intentioned teasing that had soured her face. That wasn't really true, and her mom had to know that. Her dad had given her the book only after she had gotten into it. When she'd started posting pictures to her account shoelace_charms it had really only been a way to brag to her friends back home.
Her dad always took her to really cool places, just the two of them; big empty soccer stadiums, ice rinks all to themselves, and bumper cars and go-carts where they were the only ones on the track. She'd made up the name Shoelace Charms because both her mom and her dad didn't want her to post pictures of faces, but she needed something to prove it was her to her friends. So she tied a few of the charms she got traveling to different places into her shoelaces, and now that was her signature.
"This is an intense hobby for a girl your size." Kudo had paused on a full-page spread of a man suspended from a bar at the top of a cell tower with only one hand, the ground below him a distant blur.
"Isn't it cool!"
"Hmm maybe," he didn't sound convinced. "But, don't you think those heights are awfully scary?"
"It's okay if you're scared of heights; I can hold your hand if you need me to." She patted the top of his hand as if to reassure him.
"You know there are safer ways to get pictures of heights."
She heaved a sigh, he just didn't get it.
"And how many adventures have you avoided because there was a safer option, Mr. Detective?" Her mother stated. She would have sounded disinterested, were it not for the slightest of smirks on her lips.
"So you just want to visit the roof of a skyscraper, huh?" Kudo said.
Elaine, who had given up convincing him, perked up. "Really, you'll take me?"
"Why not, Ran and I have an old friend who just might be able to help us out."
Elaine squealed like the girl of only nine that she was, but conveniently forgot when it didn't suit her plans.
...
"I take it you didn't know she'd returned to Japan," Vermouth said. He knew exactly what her face would look like as she said it. It was why he stared so adamantly out the low-set airplane window. They weren't designed for someone of his height, but perhaps that was true for the plane as a whole. "She's been back what, only twice- no, th- four? Really, it's the fourth time she's been back? Interesting."
"Your other assets must be failing you if you're relying this much on cold reads." He sat up just a bit to relieve the pressure on his knees from the seat in front of him. "Ask me straight. I'll answer anything relevant to the job."
Ironically, the open invitation to ask questions silenced her. Gin enjoyed a moment of peace as the first island coasts stretched beneath them. The dying light of the day fled from the peaks of trees and skyscrapers alike. He hadn't been home since the Organization fell. An uncomfortable realization to be left alone with. Made even more so by how ill-fitting that word felt: home. What was he returning to then- a place too removed to still be called home to him- a place where he had left home behind...
Even Vermouth would be less unpleasant than such thoughts. He glanced her way. She was still deliberating, arms crossed, eyes fallen to an unfocused spot of the aisle. He gave up on her. He would fill the silence if she wouldn't.
"Sherry's visits to Japan, are they important somehow? I don't know why she's here now. So I can't answer that for you."
She may have been annoyed at him for interrupting her as she reordered her thoughts. Or maybe she only considered whether or not to divulge some information, because after a moment she pulled in breath to say:
"She visited your grave."
"My- what?"
"Your family's grave. She took Elaine to meet you there." She wasn't smirking; she wasn't waiting for his reaction. This wasn't an estimation. It wasn't digging. Why did that unsettle him so much more?
"I should've expected her to be so sentimental and so so very stupid."
"I don't understand," Gin said.
"She practically announced Elaine's parentage, taking her child to your family's gravestone. It's why they know, I'm sure."
"Why should that matter? The alleged child of a dead man, what could that possibly profit them? Except revenge, and you said that they didn't intend to kill her."
"They don't." She didn't elaborate, he hadn't expected her to. "This is all beside the point. Honoring your death is merely how Sherry brought Elaine to their attention. That's why it's relevant. They've been following her since then, and I'm led to believe they don't have the resources to identify Sherry and her child outside of who she was rather than who she is now."
She was led to believe? She didn't even trust her own information. "You really are slipping, aren't you?"
She didn't acknowledge his interruption, but he broke her resolve just a bit. He could hear it in her voice.
"We break their line of sight, we sever their only lead."
"That's awfully simplistic." He hated this, working with a partner who wasn't even trying to hide how much information she was hiding from him. That was only symptomatic of the true problem. She was off her game, it was all her intel, all her plan, and she was fraying at the edges.
Maybe if he could get his own intel, reassess, rework her plan. "How long do we have?"
"What?"
"Before they're likely to strike," He clarified. "How long do we have?"
"That's... hard to say." She tapped her fingers against an arm. "At this point, they may only be waiting for an opening."
...
The door handle to the roof access was cold, even through the edges of the jacket sleeve Elaine had used to grab it. It made her worry for a moment that the night air was going to be cold too, but after Kudo's friend Sonoko had unlocked it with her special badge, the wind that whooshed into her wasn't any colder than inside. It was even a little warm. Elaine scampered under where Kudo's arm held the door open, and out onto the roof.
She stopped just short of the railing that lined the rooftop and took in the city lights beyond. The dotted lines of skyscraper windows were something like how she thought of computer code; it made Tokyo look the picture of the tech advanced city she had built up in her mind.
"Elaine," Kudo called to her, "be careful, you shouldn't run up here."
"Oh, let her have her fun," Sonoko chided him, from where the both of them still stood near the door. "isn't it too early for you to be hover parenting already?"
He said something back, and Elaine picked up from his general tone that he seemed to get annoyed, but they were pretty far away and she didn't hear too much of what they had started arguing about. Well, to be honest, she sort of stopped listening, but there was also a lot of wind noise in her ears too, so even if she had she wouldn't have understood too much anyway.
She turned her back to them once more and focused her attention ahead of her, leaving the bickering adults downwind.
The city was an expanse of hazy lights before her, and also, it seemed, beneath her. Elaine wasn't scared of heights; she absolutely wasn't. But maybe her chest didn't know that the same way her head did. And her chest was proving the more passionate of the two at the moment. She sat down still two or three steps short of the roof's edge and scooted her way to the end of the rough concrete.
Once there, she kicked her feet to either side of a railing spindle and freely into the open air over the city in triumph.
Looking over the edge wasn't going to summon a great hand to push her over it. It wasn't. Or, at least it never had before.
Once there the restless wind snuffed about every inch of her in the way of all places well and truly high up. Like some massive beast taking her measure with its great snout and powerful nose.
She leaned forward.
Her heart moved to her throat.
The wrought iron in her grasp was so cold; it seemed for a moment her only tether.
Then she was in the air.
Just as she had pressed her face to either side of two spindles, a pair of hands scooped underneath her shoulders and swung her backwards entirely off the ground, startling her. Her ears caught up to a hoarse voice that must have been shouting before.
"Do you have any idea how dangerous that was!" Her uncle Kudo turned her about to face him.
Her heart beat like a trapped rabbit and she nearly burst into tears from him scaring her so bad all of a sudden.
"I- I was fine." She insisted, her own voice now breathless. "The rail isn't even that close to the edge. See." She gestured to the railing, which truly was a good foot and a half back from the roof's edge.
"You don't go past the railing, Elaine. Not even a little bit, even if you think it's not that close to the edge, or for any other reason." He still gripped both of her shoulders in his hands. He was so close, and his voice had gotten so loud. She wasn't nearly so scared of heights as she was of him just then. "The railing is there for your protection, okay?"
She nodded, more from the freight of being startled than in agreement.
He let out a long breath, like he hadn't really breathed in the last minute or so, and seemed to check her over for scraps.
"I told you I'm fine." She said to her feet. "My balance is really good. I take gymnastics you know." The whole reason was so she didn't hurt herself when she took pictures like she wanted, her mom had told her so.
"You don't have any fear, do you munchkin?" Sonoko crouched down to her level and grinned like it all might have been a good joke.
Elaine mustered a smile and shrugged.
"Knock it off." Sonoko swatted away Kudo's examination of her, which had actually turned up a few scratches on the back of her calves from when he'd pulled her over the rough corner of the roof. "I have a real physician on call, and you're just scaring her."
Kudo grumbled something about "...the idle rich calling in a doctor when a first aid kit would do," but otherwise seemed to listen to her.
"Oh," Sonoko grew excited, seemingly out of nowhere, "did you know that in this very tower there is an ice cream bar where the Kaito KID once made an appearance!" Elaine didn't know what she was talking about really, but ice cream never sounded like a bad idea so she said:
"Really? At an ice cream bar here? Is it open?"
"It is for me," Sonoko led the way back into the building, chatting all the way, something about how this phantom thief KID person once 'allegedly' had a thing for her when she was in high school, though it was all ancient history now.
Elaine, still without any satisfactory pictures of her feet hanging over the view, gave a fleeting glance back at the roof as they filed away
Author's notes: to answer Velgamidragon, the entirely of The Shared Past is Canon with this story, but only as written. Anything you may have read between the lines is notably less canon. I think if you revisit that epilogue you'll find it does not claim Shiho has been married.
