note: if you are looking for the update, it is the last section before this chapter, and i apologize it's not terribly long. I had a note here before that said I was going to add a scene from Kudo's perspective to clear up some confusion, so now that is at the end of Arc 1: what is now chapter 10 or "T1B Arc (part 10)" just before this one. I'm not really used to adding scenes in post and having to rearrange, so sorry if this seemed like a false start to any returning readers.


Chapter 11

Shiho speculated that there were perhaps only two types of arguments. The sort that she might replay over and over in her head in anticipation, sometimes to never even be had at all. And the second sort, that blindsided her, and only replayed again and again after the fact. She supposed the first sort only existed in an attempt to eliminate the potential for the second, even if it never really could.

The real trouble started when while having the second sort of argument, all unplanned and emotionally charged, both parties began to draw from their pool of unused arguments of the first sort. All those festering arguments that were previously deemed better left unsaid.

Shiho was still reeling from one such argument, as she left the Kudo manner and sat back into the driver's seat of the rental she really ought to have returned that morning when they didn't get on their flight. She contemplated the sort of surcharges she must have incurred by not returning it on time, and tried to recall the terms of the contract even as the argument she had with Kudo and Akai echoed again in her head.

Akai's voice came, irritating and logical, "I'm sorry but I don't think it's a coincidence that Gin slid off our radar around the same time you started withdrawing and lying about where you'd been. If he made contact before this, it could help us find her please."

She forced herself not to grimace in memory of her response, her grip tightening on the steering wheel, "I haven't seen hide nor hair of Gin since you both lead me to believe he died. And no, Gin is not Elaine's father, and I don't owe either of you the truth of who is to prove that!"

"But you were acting off lately- and lying about why you're in Japan." Kudo probed, all matter of fact

"I was grieving, asshole." She slung back at him, "And it didn't have anything to do with you. I think after ten years I deserved some time to process everything. And, you're only telling me the truth now because you think I'm the one maintaining that sort of monumental secret. Did you two learn nothing from lying to Ran all that time? From lying to Akemi?"

"Shiho, this isn't about that."

"This is exactly about that. You think protecting the ones you love is the same thing as controlling their decisions." She barreled on, doubling down on arguments she had charted out years ago; words she had honed to a fine point but retired away because she knew they were too sharp. "Well, you can't keep other people from making decisions by withholding the truth from them, you're only leaving them to make uninformed ones instead. And while we're at it, if you two wouldn't mind making a note that someone dying isn't some sort of shorthand for emotional resolution with that person."

Shiho knew why they thought what they did. It was a logical possibility, even probability if they were going off their assumptions and statistics.

That understanding should have helped her forgive them, but it didn't. She was still too angry, it was still too much, with Elaine, and then Gin, and their accusations all in the same day.

It wasn't safe for her to drive; she very nearly ignored that bit of logic as well. But she didn't. Even if returning the car seemed productive, seemed like some bit of progress she could make, however hollow. She didn't.

Eventually, she grew weary of staring out the windshield of a stationary car repeating her own useless thoughts and considered following the advice she had been given no less than nine times in the past two hours: to get some sleep.

...

After a day of trying to track down Elaine's whereabouts post abduction from Suzuki tower, all the while circumventing the police's investigation into the same matter, and still coming up short, Gin decided he'd have better luck stealing his leads off of Vermouth.

He'd likely have to leave Tokyo to find her, but before he did there was a small matter of business still to attend to here.

Gin walked up to the rounded mostly glass behemoth of a house listed in Sherry's name, and quickly picked his way inside. The spacious interior was empty and gathering dust. Gin almost didn't set the white folded coat down here as it seemed unlikely she would ever come across it in such a place. However, he neglected to scoop it back up when he heard a rustling at the front door.

Gin slipped between a fully open bathroom door and the wall, a tenuous hiding place at best. But the fastest he could manage. He watched the dim room from the crack formed by the door's hinges as Sherry strode into the house.

She stepped out of shoes and into house slippers almost without pause. The contents of her pockets clattered onto a small table at the entry and her steps dragged with fatigue. She dropped the black bundle she'd been clutching to her chest onto a couch as she passed, still without breaking stride.

She hadn't noticed him, even with his poor excuse at concealment. Neither had she noticed the crisply folded coat he'd foolishly left in the room in his haste.

He heard rather than saw a door snap closed further down the hall.

He hadn't meant to hide from her when he saw her again. He had only slipped out of sight in case it was anyone else who might come in. That was what he told himself now.

She would notice her old coat in the morning, and returning it had been why he had come. His excuse perhaps, but still. With a task done, he moved to leave.

"Gin?" He was halfway across the main room when a voice called him by name. She had returned with a quietness he might otherwise have attributed to lethal intent. "Gin." She repeated, less a question this time as their eyes locked.

"Not for many years," he admitted.

"Then who are you now?"

There was too much to that question. Too many demands for answers and cold accusations both. It could have been asking any of a thousand things, the name he went by likely not prominent among them.

"I haven't taken your child. I'm not her kidnapper, if that's what you meant to ask." It had seemed the most pressing concern to address, but the way she'd stiffened gave him pause. "It's what your pack of great detectives is thinking, isn't it?"

"They were, but only because they thought- well, because they made a false assumption."

"They're not the only ones to make it."

Surprise lit in her eyes, but she doused it quickly. "She's not- her father is- well..."

"I know Elaine isn't mine," he said, with a laugh that didn't ever make it out of his chest.

Finding the answer to that particular puzzle had been a project of some years back; one of the first priorities he'd address as he earned enough trust to merit a certain degree of leeway in what he did in his downtime.

He knew who the girl's father was, and consequently, why Sherry never let the information out very far from herself. Gin tossed around the idea of killing him every now and again, but perhaps he had handled the notion long enough now to render it empty. Perhaps.

"Elaine," Sherry repeated hollowly; maybe in an attempt to reclaim the name away from him. It would only be fair; he had never been given Elaine's name properly.

"She's named for her grandmother," Sherry continued, jarring Gin with just how fragile and tentative her voice had become. "Do you know how many people I've actually told that? -have dared to. How mundane a thing it sounds, and still I've been afraid to say it. But you must have known the moment you heard it."

"Elena," he said. Almost as if confirming something, though he wasn't entirely certain he knew what. It seemed to mean more to her.

She tucked one arm over her stomach, pulling into herself, still her other hovered over the folded white coat that rested on an end table. The room remained only dimly lit by the light of a few odd electronics and the muted glow of street lamps that found its way in through the windows. So it was no great mystery why Sherry only now seemed to notice her old white coat as it grazed her fingertips. "I've been right to be afraid, haven't I? This has all come from the shadow of who we were, hasn't it?"

He wanted to say she was wrong about that, that it was only the sort of bad fortune that could strike anyone, the sort that no one had a real chance of preventing; but he feared she was correct. Worse, he feared that he was the only one that had been offered a real chance at preventing it and had failed.

She said something then, as her fingers laced briefly through the frayed edges of a hole in the coat's collar, but the words were too soft and mostly lost to him. Perhaps she had said, "How could I have expected anything less than that to bring you back," but he couldn't be certain. Before he could wonder anymore on it she grabbed hold of the coat's shoulders and shook it from its folds.

"Funny, I was expecting a lot more dust," she commented to him, after snapping the unfurled coat about once or twice more than necessary. It smelled more of laundry soap than anything, he was sure, even if he wasn't close enough to catch the scent of it.

"On clothes of yours? It seemed like a sin."

"Hmm," she studied the old white coat with a critical eye. "You know this is dry clean only."

"Is it." He echoed her droll tone.

"It doesn't look too worse for wear," she conceded as she began the process of lining up the shoulders so she could fold it lengthwise. She paused just a moment as if to wonder whether it might still fit, but made no real move to try it on. Gin wasn't sure why he wished she had. He found himself contemplating the strangeness of the thought as he watched her, studied her. She looked fully an adult now, the years suited the cool certainty of her features better than the lingering youth he had once known. Paradoxically she looked somehow more herself for the change.

He had taken only a couple of cautious steps toward her since she had reentered the room, and he hovered on the verge of another.

"Sherry, I-" He began to address her, nearly finding the courage to say what he had told himself he would, were fate ever to grant him the chance to see her again. But she spoke at the same time, her voice proving the stronger of the two.

"Yours is on the couch there." She gestured to the black heap she had dropped when she first entered the house. He couldn't place her meaning until he picked it up. That old coarse weave greeted him, as stiff and heavy as he remembered it. It had spent some time in an attic from the smell of it, but she'd held onto it. Had brought it, here? now? He looked up with the question on his face.

"You were nearly too late for it," she said, dropping back onto the couch. "I had meant to give it up not two days ago, but I suppose it is fitting that it's made its way back to where you really are, in the end. Even if I had thought I would be giving it to you at the time."

He lowered himself onto the cushion next to her, holding her gaze. It was a stare somewhere between asking permission and challenging her to tell him to sit elsewhere.

"Thank you for holding onto it then, and for so long."

After just a beat too long she cleared her throat. "Yes," she managed, "Likewise."

Gin laid his old coat across his lap revealing the shredded state of the back as it fell out of its remaining folds.

At this, he said only, "I doubt it's fit for wearing now, but thanks all the same."

"It wasn't fit for wearing when you wore it either," she quipped and adopted a very small, very sly smile.

It was a mannerism he wouldn't think anyone could grow to miss, but he had. He had missed her quiet victory smiles, very much, even when it was because she had quite thoroughly insulted him. A moment out of time, that's how it seemed to him. To have his Sherry so close, he would sooner believe he was in a fevered dream than truly beside her making her laugh at his expense.

"How I've missed you," he breathed the thought and realized he'd said the words aloud only with her expression of shock, and then- something else, however brief.

"Missed having me to point out your many flaws, yes, I'm sure." Her heart wasn't in it, that he could hear. She hadn't even looked at him as she said it. "I doubt I managed to convince them you're not behind this, my pack of detectives, as you name them."

She stood with the change of topic, though hardly seemed to pause for breath. "They'll be relentless; the Organization, its straggling members, that's the enemy they know, they expect." She moved steadily to the door as if she were simply seeing out a guest. All the while her hands wound around and around the white bundle in her grasp until they'd become too tightly wrapped to continue. She stopped short of the door. "But it's not what I'm facing, is it?"

"It..." that had been a lot to process. She had figured out who had really taken her child, her Elaine, not just now, immediately after. And with that knowledge she had... tried to convince her friends he wasn't behind this.. she had defended him to them. He could hardly conceive of that. Just two days prior she hadn't even known he was still alive. How much worse must that have made everything? Finally, or perhaps only what felt like a finally in the utter shock of that sliver in time, Gin managed. "It's not. You're correct in that."

It wasn't ex organization members who'd taken Elaine. It was that old enemy of the Organization, the one it had been formed to combat.

He stood, and as he stood he heard her voice go hoarse, go weak.

"Then it's my fault." She looked back at him. Oh, how she had looked back at him then. Eyes wet, heart broken. "And I was foolish enough to believe I had walked away from it all, that I could." Her jaw quivered, and he saw how close to tears she had hovered not just in that moment, but in every moment since Elaine had been taken. He saw how much energy and will it took just for her to keep them at bay.

He walked to her, paused just behind her, so close but not- damn, damn it all. How long had it been since he'd seen her? And still, old impulses thrummed in their remembered pattern, in their old desires.

She would not welcome his touch. He doubted she even wanted him as near as he had come, but he was remiss to step away.

But he didn't pull her into his arms either, despite the pangs demanding he do so. He brushed her hair from her ear, and tried not to notice the subtle tension in her neck as he did.

"If you're thinking this is your punishment for all you've done wrong, it's not. This is only an old enemy resurfacing." He offered her. "We are not fighting fate here, only men."

Sherry breathed out, in a sob or a laugh he couldn't say. "You're very practical you know."

"Right is what I am."

She shook her head and dabbed at forming tears. "Perhaps," she said, and then, "hey Gin?"

"-yes?" he answered, hesitation ebbing into his voice despite the small jolt of pleasure he felt when she called him by that name.

"Would you, flip on the lights? It's quite dark in here."

He obliged, but wondered as he stepped the few paces away from her if that had really been what she first intended to ask, or if she had only grown scared of her own question and elected to ask him to move away instead.

Surely, even that much was foolhardy, she had invited him to leave once already, in not so many words. Asking again for distance would require no considerable leap in logic.

As the lights flicked on, they redefined the main room, casting its distant edges into stark relief. It made what had seemed a moment ago an intimate space, easily filled by the sound of their voices, merely a vast empty room, made no less empty by their presence.

Sherry rubbed any of the remaining upset from her face, and he did little more than stare openly at her; neither of them had words for the moment now passed.

There is a certain comfort in the silence shared between two people who know each other well, but this was not that silence. This was the strained silence found between strangers; where all parties felt obligated to fill it but none could find a suitable excuse to do so. And that, more than the additional years they wore on their faces, more than their warring desires to hoard and divulge fragments from their lives apart, more than anything else, felt wrong.

"That leaves the question of what to do now, I think."

"You've developed a habit of asking difficult to answer questions," Gin postulated, "That is twice now you've asked me something without really specifying what you're referring to. You're not going to convince me to leave, if you're back to that again. I won't hide away from your hounds out for blood. And, as for the problem of old enemies resurfacing..."

She silenced him with a faint smile, and a shake of the head, as if she were amused at how wrong he could be. "I only meant what to do with the night," she explained. "They told me I should sleep- that they were exhausting every resource, but what they needed from me now was to get some rest."

For the first time since she'd noticed him here, she started making progress further into the house, talking and looking back at him all the while. A clear invitation to follow.

"I don't know why I thought I'd be able to sleep if I came here. I haven't stayed here since the professor retired. Oh, that's right, you've never met Agasa have you? A strange thought." They had entered a kitchen by that point, and Shery changed out the water in her hot water pot and set it to reheating. "For now, it's sufficient to say we spent some years taking care of each other; it was something like coming into an aging father I didn't know I needed back then. He took me in, shared his home, this mansion, but perhaps that's just one more thing I'd be silly to assume you don't already know, since you were here... waiting. Just like you were there at Suzuki Tower, just at the right time..."

And with that note, their conversation became swept up in comparing what they both knew of the situation. They spoke as if reporting to the other in some formal capacity, her moving about the kitchen, him leaning forward onto a countertop, his forearms resting on its cool surface. To an outsider, their manner would have seemed strangely detached. To an outsider, their words would have seemed so clinical, so unfeeling, so cold. But to them, it was like falling back into their first language, a language they shared.

Their comparison didn't turn up much in the way of useful information. Certainly, Gin had more accurate specs on the Yakuza family that had been contracted for the extraction. But they knew Elaine had already traded hands. And Sherry had a firm time table of where Elaine had been when, since arriving in Japan, but they both suspected she had been followed from the cemetery.

"You were there, in Japan, at the tower. You must know more if you could predict that they would come for her. You must know why, and what they need her for, where they'll go next, and if there is any hope for her now that they've taken her. You must." She didn't look up at him, focused on her task of setting out cups for the tea.

It was all the same questions that he'd wanted from Vermouth. The why of it. He didn't have any reassuring guesses.

When he didn't give any response, she carefully paused her task and stated, in the same matter of fact tone they had assumed throughout their reporting, "You can't protect me from it, just tell me. I deserve to know."

Gin's silence held as he contemplated a response, and eventually Sherry resumed preparing the tea.

"Here you are," She set one of the cups down in front of him, and he nodded his thanks.

"I don't have answers," he admitted at last. She didn't believe him, didn't want to believe him at the very least. Mistrust was an outright easier emotion than despair. "I'm sorry, I don't know why, only that it was going to happen. I tracked down the location from overhearing that Yakuza family's radio transmission. And I meant to stop it; I meant to keep them from taking Elaine. I couldn't; I failed."

His hands felt numb from where he clasped them, and his head fell. Like as not, she wouldn't believe that either. Why should she?

"I know. Forgive me. I'm just tired. It's the not knowing. Why do I never know, Gin; I never get to know."

"I-" he didn't know what to do with that. "Vermouth knows. That's likely of little comfort to you. But it's the beginning we have, and a lot more than nothing."

"Vermouth... how is she caught up in this?" Then she paused and seemed to come to some conclusion. "Oh. Oh, I see." She distanced herself from him, not in physical space but in manner. He'd overlooked how comfortable her posture had become, the easy grace of her shoulders, the slight lean toward him as he spoke, until she'd snapped back to hard lines, her shoulders going rigid, her expression falling to indifference. "So then, has she offered to help?"

"As much as she ever does; it might be more accurate to say she asked for my help," he explained. "I can't say where she stands now that we failed. She could even be another threat to Elaine because of it. For whatever reason, she didn't want Elaine to be taken by who has her now. At whatever cost."

"At, whatever, cost," Sherry echoed. "I'm starting to regret every good opportunity I had to poison her over the years."

"A common sentiment among those who've known her, in my experience." He smirked. She didn't reciprocate a smile. "But for now, she's the one with answers. Whether we can find her, or get her to reveal them are other matters. Still, she's the only lead we have a real chance of tracking down, even if it is a slim one."

"How do you usually find her?" Sherry asked, just before testing the temperature of the tea against her lips.

"I don't." Gin could not have hidden the distaste from his voice if he tried. "And I've never wanted to. Before she found me, I hadn't seen her in ten years."

"Oh," Sherry's brow creased just slightly, "Then why even involve you. We both know she's capable of- the task. And it would have been simpler for her."

"She thinks Elaine is mine, and I haven't really been able to convince her otherwise." He hadn't thought it relevant until now, not to Elaine's kidnapping anyways. "I doubt she relishes the thought of my retaliation." Gin continued.

"Your retaliation?" She asked in something almost a laugh, almost a sneer, and clasped her hand over his as he went to reach for the tea. Her grip turning painful as she said. "She should have properly considered mine."