Usually on weekends the station was a bustling place, but with every detective who was even remotely associated with the place out for the time being, things were much quieter than normal. If it were under any other circumstances Maki wouldn't have minded the silence so much but seeing as she was trapped in the cell without any way out and with only having her coworkers to rely on, she almost wished that there were a million things happening there to distract her instead. Her one, reliable companion almost all the time was Himiko, who would run various errands for her to keep things going smoothly, and even though it was expressly prohibited she would bring a friend with her almost every time she came in.

Now, Maki couldn't say too many bad things about Himiko, especially not once she looked past the crippling laziness and bored expressions she always wore, but some of her friends were a lot to handle, even for someone who had to speak to them through a door. "I'm telling you, I could bust this door down in five seconds flat," Tenko said, upon being brought with Himiko the first time she possibly could. "It can't be that hard to break open, doors are meant to open after all."

"Oh yes, because we're going to put criminals on the other side of a door that they could easily smash the lock on to get open. Brilliant idea. That's why you're not one of us, because you think like that." Sounding irritated with the stupidity she was hearing, Maki gave Himiko an are you serious about bringing her? look that was immediately, slowly shrugged at. "Get her out of here, Himiko, before she breaks something and we can't manage to blame it on Kokichi because he's still not here."

"About that," Himiko started, looking at Tenko and how she seemed to be feigning being offended at what she'd just been told about herself. "I may have said to Kokichi that what he did was not okay and that he should stay home until he fixes the problem. He was only gonna make things worse if he kept coming around, you know. So I told him, stay home or fix everything! And he said…he's gonna stay home because he can't fix things."

"That sounds exactly like something you'd do, and exactly like his expected response. Can't anyone around here have any brain cells for five minutes?" It wasn't exactly fair for Maki to react like that, seeing as her initial reaction to being trapped inside the unbreakable cell had been to kick the door and injure her foot (which still throbbed whenever she put weight on it, and had been swollen to the point of her being unable to keep her shoe on). But it was ridiculous that Himiko had taken that sort of action without running it by her, even though it was amazing that Himiko had acted at all. "Now it's literally just you here to do things if someone calls in. Are you prepared to deal with that?"

Himiko froze, before shaking her head, but Tenko jumped in with words of encouragement for her companion. "Of course she's prepared to deal with it, she's a superstar when it comes to doing her job! Why else is she still employed here, if she's not good at what she does?"

"There's a lot of reasons why that would be. Almost as many as there are for why Kokichi's still here, even though he's a colossal piece of shit who can't be a decent human being for one weekend." The response felt scalding, and Tenko seemed to recoil at it, but Himiko didn't seem bothered to hear what was said to her by the person acting over her head at the moment. "Thankfully we haven't had any calls yet, but there's no telling how long I'm going to be in here, and so you might get unlucky and have to do some real work."

"I can do real work!" Himiko declared, stomping one foot into the ground. "I'm just as good as getting to the bottom of things as you are, you're just being mean to me!"

"Maybe that's all she's good for right now," Tenko said, trying to diffuse the situation she'd had a hand in making worse. "Besides, what kinds of things are you going to have to do in this kind of weather? No one's going to be committing crimes when the world's flooding."

Now it was Maki's turn to recoil at what was said, having not realized that there had been any sort of rain event going on in the world around her. "What do you mean, when the world's flooding? I thought there were going to be some storms outside of town, but that's all I ever heard anything about." The next several minutes were spent with Tenko, and occasionally Himiko, catching her up to speed on the weather situation outside the station's walls, a story that Maki realized quickly she didn't actually want to hear. If the weather was as bad as they were claiming, then the likelihood of either of the people she knew had keys to the cell door coming back on schedule was slim to none.

Which meant that she was going to have to hope like hell that Kokichi had been lying about taking Kaito's key from him, and that when he came back from his weekend off he'd be able to let her out with a goofy smile and probably some cheesy inspirational quote he'd seen on a poster one time. Admitting that she was going to need to believe in Kaito's ability to not believe a word that Kokichi said was never going to happen, because the second anyone knew that, regardless of if they knew Kaito or not, she was never going to hear the end of it. All she could do right then was put on a brave face and act like none of this that she'd just learned had changed a thing, and neither of the ladies she was speaking with seemed to catch on to the fact that she'd had such a realization.

The combination of Himiko and Tenko may not have noticed it, but when Himiko brought in someone different to keep her and Maki company there in the station, that someone else was quick to take a guess on where Maki's mind was at the moment. "Thinking about your lover boy, aren't you?" Miu asked, pushing her face up against the door and speaking oddly un-crudely for herself. That changed almost immediately when Maki's whole face scrunched up at the name that she'd used for Kaito, seemingly giving Miu the answer she was looking for. "Ha, you totally are! What a loser, locked in a cell and all you can fantasize about is getting raw-dogged by some guy who probably actually hates your guts!"

"I can tell you from personal experience that Kaito doesn't hate me, thanks, and even if—"

"She didn't say who she was talking about." Himiko put on a thoughtful look, her finger pressed against her chin as she seemed to have noticed a flaw in what Maki had said before anyone else did. "So maybe you have been thinking about him, haven't you?"

"—no, I really haven't. I'm just used to everyone and their grandmother accusing me of being in love with him, so it's kind of a natural reaction now." She was trying to save face as best as she could, but the truth as everyone knew it was that Maki really had been thinking about Kaito, and what he could've done for her in the situation in the case that Kokichi had been doing what he did best and lying. She'd had to put up with so much stuff because of her potential feelings for him that she worked hard to mask them, and it was in situations like that where her masking got her in more trouble that made her wonder if keeping up the charade was worth it. So what if he found out how she felt, because he was too dense to really do anything with the information.

Unfortunately for her, she'd made the mistake of keeping up that charade in the presence of one vulgar-mouthed Miu, who was slyly grinning from ear to ear at hearing the denial. "No way, I know when a bitch is lying when I hear it and you've got that stench all over you. You're so thirsty for him, which I don't get but whatever, you do you and do what makes your pussy happy."

"Please, can you shut up for two seconds and stop being nasty? I don't have any feelings towards him aside from…" Maki had to stop to think about the best way that she could word how she felt about Kaito that wouldn't lead to more questions. "Aside from putting up with him whenever I have to see his dumb face around here. That's it. Nothing else."

"I already told you, you've got that stench all over you, you're getting soggy between the legs just talking about him!" To illustrate her point, Miu inhaled deeply, coughing dramatically once she'd taken the breath in for a few seconds as she exhaled it with flourish. "Come on, just admit to it, then we can work to push the two of you together when we get the chance."

"Not interested, but thank you anyway."

Reminding them both that she was, in fact, paying attention to what was going on around her, Himiko said, "That's how she always reacts when someone says they'll help her get with him. I don't think she really means it. Or maybe she really doesn't want to be with him. I don't know, I've never been in that situation."

"It's totally the first option, she's so desperate for a piece of that man that she's basically drooling just having to talk about him!" Miu gave a harsh laugh, the sound of which initially reminded Maki of how Kokichi would laugh about anything similar, before she remembered that he was currently out of her hair and that she didn't need to worry about him. "You've got to step up as her wing-woman, Himiko! Get in there and hook them up!"

"But that doesn't sound like what Maki wants. I'm not the best at forcing people to do stuff, I just kinda…let them do what they want." Himiko looked at Maki, who was switching who she was glaring daggers at. "Yeah, I'm not gonna force her to do it. Sorry, Miu."

"Then if you're not going to do it, I will! Where's his phone number, I'm gonna call him right now and give him a piece of my mind and tell him to get over here!" Slamming her hands together, Miu met Maki's glare and responded to it with a wink. "I'm sure he's small enough that he can fit himself in through the food slot there on the door. You and him can have some private time, all thanks to this fabulous woman genius right here!"

There were several things wrong with what Miu said, and Maki didn't know where to even begin with any of them, but she did have one specific thing to say on the matter. "If you call that man and get him in here on his weekend off, I'm going to add you to the list of people to murder once I'm out of here, and that's a promise."

"Wh-whoa there, isn't that excessive?" Switching from her boastful self to a more subdued one, Miu finally flinched from her stare-down with Maki, beginning to cower next to Himiko even though nothing had been done to warrant the behavior. "I'm just trying to help a sister out, give her something to look forward to in life. You'd do the same for me if I had a guy I was into, wouldn't you?"

Rolling her eyes, Maki immediately replied, "Yeah, sure, except there's not a man I'm into, so you're just barking up the wrong tree here. Get lost, Miu, all you're doing is making a mess for yourself that you don't want to clean up." There was some sputtering of retorts but Miu quickly heeded the command to leave, Himiko going with her for whatever reason. Maki didn't exactly want to be alone there at the station yet again, but she preferred the silence to having to listen to Miu's nonsense, and so if she was given silence, she was going to take it.

Being alone for so long made for a perfect amount of preparation time for when the weekend was over and the man they'd talked and argued so much about came back to work. The first thing that Kaito did when he showed up every day was holler into the building that he was there, seeing if anyone else was around, and when Maki heard it she tried her best to stay completely silent. If she didn't have him knowing that she was locked in the cell, she could get around having to talk to him for as long as possible, which meant avoiding any of the awkwardness that conversations with him typically entailed. Hoping that she'd get lucky in that regard was dangerous, but she didn't have much of a choice because she really did not want to have to talk to him.

But Kaito had a way of ending up right where he needed to be there at the station, whether he was wanted or not, and he came up to the cell's door with bounding steps, shoving a package in through the slot. "Mail delivery, Maki Roll! Rise and shine, it's time for another day of work!" he greeted, in time with the package hitting the floor and her limping over to get it, grumbling about how she didn't care for that nickname, even if it was him addressing her with it. "Now if only I knew where my key was, then I'd get ya right out of there. But Kokichi said it'd be on my desk when I got back, and it's not there. I checked a couple times, didn't see it. Any ideas?"

"Yeah, you dumbass, he took it from you just to intentionally lock me in here. So…thanks for doing that, you made my weekend simply fantastic." She felt like she was spitting venom with those words, but her calling Kaito negative names was just as common as him calling her Maki Roll, and he was quite used to hearing it. "I've got no idea where he put the key, and he said he's not coming back until I'm let out of this, so that means we wait until Kyoko's back in town, or until Shuichi gets back, and who knows which one's sooner."

"You've been in here all weekend? Kokichi told me it was just for the night, that lying piece of—hey, wait a second! If you've been locked up all weekend, that means you don't know about the storm yet, huh?" While Kaito's realization of what kind of news Maki had missed over the weekend hit him, she was left staring at him with an almost confused expression on her face. She nodded, unsure of if that was the answer he wanted or not, and he put his hand over his face, shaking his head side to side a few times. "Oh no, that's not good then. Sorry that I've gotta be the one to break this to ya, but neither of them are gettin' back anytime soon, that we know of."

"And why, exactly, would that be?" she asked, still not connecting the dots he was trying to draw for her because of how obscenely idiotic they seemed.

"Because of the storm? I already asked ya if you'd heard about it!" His hand slid down his face until he'd unobscured it, staring her down with a serious, yet somewhat goofy, look that only confused her further, especially as he started to play with the hair that made up his little goatee on his chin. "They're kinda stuck wherever they are, which I don't even know where my ol' sidekick is because he hasn't bothered tellin' me anything, but if he made it out to the city he's not leavin' for at least a week, and Kyoko's just kinda not coming back for that long anyway because of whatever it is she's out there doin'."

That was an explanation that Maki hadn't wanted to hear, and she loudly groaned when she caught on to the fact that he was being completely serious despite his manner of delivery. "I can't believe this, Kokichi's a little rat who trapped me in here for shits and giggles and ended up locking me in a cell for at least a week?"

"Seems that way, if the people on the news haven't been getting over-the-top with how they're reporting on this." His hand slowly stopping its fidgeting, Kaito came closer to the door, blinking slowly as he looked around the cell that Maki was currently calling home despite doing nothing to deserve it. "I'm sure that Kokichi's got that key somewhere around here, though, there's no way he'd lose that and get me in trouble."

"Trust me, he's looking for trouble for someone, but that person in particular would be himself. He thinks he's getting away with this, he's got another thing coming." Maki was trying not to look too closely at Kaito, but she needed a distraction because she knew getting him to leave her alone wasn't going to be easy. The package he'd delivered made for a perfect thing to focus on instead, and she crouched down to pick it up, noticing that it was addressed to her at the station's address. "Wait, did you know I was in here from the moment you walked in, or was it a guess or something?"

"Saw your car outside, knew that you'd have told me to shut up if you were tryin' to work, made a pretty good guess as to where I could find ya. Just…I thought that you'd be in there cleaning it, not locked up, so that part was a big surprise." As for what was inside the package, he could only shrug, telling her that she needed to open it to see what it was, because he had no idea at all.

"You're such a bad liar," she told him as she opened the package, hearing the way his voice had slightly cracked when he'd mentioned not knowing what was inside what he'd given her. "I know that you're the one responsible for whatever this is, and I'd like you to tell me before I open it up."

He raised both hands defensively, spitting out, "I don't know a thing, Maki Roll! It was just sittin' out front when I got here, so I did ya a favor and brought it to you! Can't a man do nice things for a lady he works with without getting grilled for it?"

"Sure, but he should also own up to the truth about those nice things he's doing." It was moments like this where Maki fully understood why people were so certain that the two of them had something for each other, because there she was, in the middle of one of the worst situations of her life, opening a package that contained nothing but a small stuffed bear with her name stitched into the sweater it was wearing, which happened to also have a red heart on the front. Her first reaction was to grimace at the overwhelming cuteness, then it was to groan inwardly about how that gift in particular was not going to help everyone's opinion about them at all, and finally she looked at him with a glare in her eyes to attempt to thank him for the gift. "Did it really need to be a heart?"

"It was either that or a flower, and I figured you'd like the red more than the pink that would've been. So now you've got yourself a little buddy for whenever you're driving alone at night, and it's all thanks to some dashing stranger." He playfully winked at her, making her narrow her glare a bit more in an attempt to point out that he'd already admitted that he was the one who'd gotten her the gift. "Just say you like it and let's move on, Maki Roll, there's so much I've gotta ask you about what happened to put you in there."

She tossed aside the packaging the bear had been in, deciding that she'd let the little thing stick around for a while, and she hobbled towards the bed to lay it next to the paper-thin pillow she'd been forced to use to sleep. "I guess I like it enough to not throw it away, so there's that as a review," she replied, turning on her good foot to see Kaito looking at her with an unsure look in his eyes, as if her response wasn't what he wanted. "Oh, do you want me to say I love it? Because I don't."

"No, it's just…what happened to your other foot? You're limping really badly, did the bed fall over on ya or something while you were in there? I know it does that sometimes." He sounded truly concerned about what had happened, and Maki knew that trying to let that go unnoticed would not work in her favor, so she heaved a sigh and broke into the explanation of how she'd gotten locked in the cell in the first place, and how in her anger over that she'd managed to injure her foot or ankle to some extent. The whole time she spoke he was nodding along, even though she was certain none of her words were actually sticking with him, and when she finished he put on a pensive look, tapping his fingertips together as he processed all the information that he could. "That sounds like you should get that looked at as soon as you're outta there. And that sounds like I've really gotta find that key so that we can get the door open for you."

"Finding the key is something that's going to happen between you and Kokichi, because I can't do anything in here and he's not going to listen to anyone anyway so I'm not even going to bother suggesting asking Himiko for help. You're the dipshit who decided to believe he was going to use the key for good while you were gone, you're the one who can clean up that mess." It felt nice for Maki to be able to command the source of her problems around a bit, but Kaito seemed surprised at how bossy she was getting about things—even though he had literally just said that he needed to find the key. The problem seemed to come in the fact that he was fine with knowing that if he told himself to do it, but if she told him then he wasn't quite as interested.

But there was no time to worry about his feelings on the matter, because what was most important was unlocking that door and giving her the freedom she rightfully deserved; it was a long-shot that anything was going to happen but she had to believe that if anyone could make a miracle occur, it would be the always-positive one who boasted about how he made the impossible happen every day. By the end of the long day, which was spent with her lounging around in the cell and him scouring every possible corner of the station, he'd not found any traces of the key and was convinced it was gone, and with that in mind he had one solution to act on. "I've gotta make a call real quick," he told her, when they were back on their respective sides of the cell door, him looking somewhat apologetic and her looking completely unamused. "It's the only way I think we're gonna get to the bottom of this."

"Have fun asking Kokichi where he hid the key," she replied, not caring to watch his reaction and therefore not noticing that he attempted to refute that statement, giving up when he saw that she was heading back to the bed to lay down and forget about things for a while. She was beyond done with the entire situation for the moment, and was pushing it into the hands of the person with the second-most amount of responsibility for things happening as they did.

When he did go back to his desk to make the call he'd mentioned, Kaito didn't bother trying to track down whatever phone number Kokichi might've been using that week, nor did he simply sit in his chair and forget about what he'd said. He picked up the receiver, pushing in numbers that he was familiar with on a personal level and hit to dial the call, and when the person on the other end answered he merely started with, "Uh, hey there sidekick, I've got a bit of a problem you've gotta hear me out on."

There was a typical hierarchy to the phone system at the station, in terms of who it was that was using the phone to make outgoing calls. The most likely to be calling someone was Shuichi himself, but those calls came from his personal office phone and were in response to investigations already in progress. Next came whichever other senior detective was there at the station that particular day, whether it was Kyoko or Shuichi's uncle, and those too came from the private phone. After them came Maki, Kokichi, and Himiko in that order, because they would occasionally call wherever it was that they were expected to go to try and scout things out a bit. And then last, and least, was Kaito, who despite being the station's acting secretary of sorts, never really had a reason to be calling anyone.

So when Shuichi answered his phone with the long-awaited call from the station to hear Kaito's voice on the other end, he immediately knew that some sort of trouble had happened that he was now getting let in on. He glanced around the hotel room, which was empty for the moment as Kaede was in the lobby putting on another piano performance that he felt comfortable letting her be at by herself, before settling into the desk chair with his flip phone against his ear. "What kind of problem could you possibly have, the station's not taking any investigations while I'm out, remember? Did you try booking me to be somewhere that I can't even get to?"

"No, it's not that," Kaito said, scratching the back of his neck as he thought about how he was going to present the problem at hand. "It's not even something I did, 'cause I wasn't here this weekend either. So I might've given Kokichi my key to the cell in case they needed it while we were all out, and he closed the door to the cell and lost the key somewhere."

"That's a problem I can solve when I get back, whenever that is. You…know I'm stuck right now because of the flooding, don't you?" Of all the things that Shuichi expected to hear next, the words yeah, but Maki's stuck in there and I can't get her out were not anywhere close to the list, and just hearing them made Shuichi's stomach clench. "O-oh, yeah, that is a problem you've got there. You're sure he lost your key?"

He could hear the hesitant pause on the other side, followed with, "Nah, I haven't actually talked to him since he asked for the key in the first place. It was Maki Roll who said he lost it, since she's the one that's trapped and all. I'm allowed to call someone in to break her out if you can't do it, right?"

"No way! Kaito, I know that you want to help her, but we can't afford for that cell door to be broken, if it's broken all of you are out of a job and I'm going back to working at Kyoko's station. She's just going to have to survive, somehow. You guys are feeding her, correct?" The thought of losing his independence and returning to working at the station he'd broken away from when he was given the chance was worrying to Shuichi, but at the same time he was worried for one of the people that he employed to help him out. When Kaito told him that as far as he was aware they were feeding her, he felt a smidge better about things, but it was still worrisome to now have this on his shoulders as well as everything there at the hotel. "I just need you to keep her alive until I get back, or until Kyoko's back, or until you manage to get Kokichi to give back the key, since I doubt he really lost it. I know Maki's a strong woman and she can handle anything."

"You're right, but…I wanna get her out now. As my sidekick, I beg you to tell me how I can do that right now!" Kaito was sounding like he was getting desperate, even though he wasn't the one that was in any sort of trouble, and it pained Shuichi to know that he had to keep turning him and his pleas down.

Things were made easier when the hotel room door came open and Kaede came in, humming a tune loudly that Shuichi could hear almost immediately. He let out a yelp of surprise and hung up his call without acknowledging or responding to what Kaito had demanded, but he didn't want to have to explain why the pianist was still around when she should've been at her destination. "Those people down there are so polite when I say I'm done playing for the night," Kaede said with a smile, locking the room's door behind her before turning to see Shuichi tossing his phone aside, hearing it hit the floor. "Oh, what did I walk in to? Who was calling you?"

"None of your business," he immediately replied, hoping that Kaito didn't call him back now that Kaede was around. "It was work-related, which means it's nothing you need to know about. Top-secret stuff."

"I bet you were just talking to a friend, you're getting awfully defensive for whatever it was, especially if it was just 'work-related'." Kaede made her way over to the bed, sitting down on the edge of it and lifting one foot up to undo her shoe, which was squeezing her foot rather tightly. "Ugh, I didn't think that these things would shrink if they got wet, this is so stupid and I really liked them, too."

Shuichi was glad that she'd moved on in her life without lingering too long on his mystery phone call, but what she said only raised more concerns. "What do you mean, your shoes shrunk when they got wet? What were you doing getting your shoes wet in the first place?"

"I went outside with some of the people in the lobby to go look and see the damage that we could see from where we are. It wasn't much, and it wasn't a really smart idea, but we did it and…" She trailed off, rubbing her foot for a few seconds before switching to get the shoe off the other one. "I'm so ready to get to leave here, I'm kinda over being stuck in this place."

"You and I both." He could tell that something had rattled Kaede, based on how she was acting so strangely, but he wasn't going to pry when he knew that she wasn't the fondest of him. "Let's just hope that it isn't too much longer before they decide they can fly people out, because you need to get on with your life, and I need to get back to mine."

"Sounds like you're trying to get rid of me," she laughed, setting both feet flat on the floor and scrunching her toes a couple times to stretch them. While he could have told her that she was quite right with that assumption, he kept his mouth closed and merely smiled at her, but both of their expressions changed in a split-second when there was knocking at the door. She jumped up, heading towards the door but veering into the bathroom at the last moment, meaning that if anyone was going to see who was there, it was going to be Shuichi.

He got out of the chair and walked over, peering through the view-hole to see someone he didn't recognize as a hotel worker standing on the other side. Making sure that the door was still locked and that it wouldn't be able to be opened any further than he allowed it, he went against his better judgment and opened the door to tell the person on the other side to go away. "Can I help you?" he asked, taking a second look at the green-haired man on the other side who was standing with a bit of a fidget, playing with the sleeves of his long, striped shirt. "I'm afraid I don't know who you are and what you want, and we didn't try ordering anything, so…"

"Wasn't expecting there to be a man answering the door," he replied, looking straight at Shuichi with half-lidded eyes that showed he was quite tired. "I thought I saw miss Akamatsu come up to this room, and I wanted to—"

"If you're here to harass her because she's famous, you can leave." Shuichi was going to close the door on the man and put an end to it, but the man stuck out an arm, putting his fingers in the gap the door had while open. "Excuse me? I said, if you're here to harass her, leave."

"—I think there's some kind of mistake. Which is fine, didn't expect Kaede to really talk much about me." The man withdrew his hand, but when Shuichi went to close the door again he put it right back. "Just let me talk to her, for two minutes. It's nothing bad."

"If she wanted to talk to you, I think she wouldn't have decided to hide herself away rather than just go ahead and talk." Shuichi considered going through closing the door anyway, but the legal issues that would arise from that sort of behavior were nothing he was interested in getting wrapped up in, and so he looked towards the closed bathroom door and cursed mentally at the woman inside of it. Of course she would leave him to deal with some rabid fan of hers, rather than even give him a hint as to what was going on.

That, or she was planning something else, as evidenced by how she came out of the bathroom moments later, a fresh coat of makeup on her face and her hair brushed neatly behind her shoulders. "Okay, I'm ready to talk to him now, thanks for being a distraction," she said to Shuichi, motioning for him to get out of the way so she could take his place at the door. "Hey there, Rantaro. Long time no see, am I right?"

"Certainly. May I come in? There's a lot we've missed out on since the last time we spoke, like whoever the guy you're in there with is." Almost immediately the demeanor of the man on the other side of the door lightened up, and Kaede didn't seem to be unfamiliar with him at all. In fact, when she unlocked the door to let him come inside, the first thing they did when they were able to was share a quick hug, Kaede apologizing for the mess and the stranger that was in the room with them while they chatted. "It's no problem, you know I'm used to talking to people in weird places. Better here in front of him than at the place I've been stuck staying in all of this."

"Where's that?" Kaede asked, tilting her head and ignoring the blank look that Shuichi was giving her for her behavior. "I wasn't even aware you were anywhere near here, I totally would've invited you up here sooner if I'd known!"

The man—Rantaro, that was what she'd called him—shrugged as he sat down on the floor, letting his legs sit straight in front of himself. "Just a house right outside of the flooding. Today's the first day that we've left the house, all of us who were staying there. Figured I'd come up to the hotel to see what was happening, wasn't expecting to see your face here. What's a performer like you doing in a place like this?"

"Getting stopped while trying to get to my next concert, that's what. Shuichi was driving me, since he was headed that way as well, but the bridge being out and the roads collapsing kind of ruined our plans entirely." She blinked, shuddering in surprise when she abruptly looked towards Shuichi, who had turned his attention towards the muted news on the television. "Say, Shuichi, why don't you join our conversation? I promise you that Rantaro's a good guy, he's a longtime friend of mine who travels around the world!"

"Not really interested," he quickly replied, not wanting to leave any opening for doubt to take in his mind. He certainly would listen to their conversation, but he wanted no part of it for himself, and Kaede would have to understand that. "You two can catch up or whatever you plan on doing, but I'm fine being left out."

She groaned for a second before shaking off his rejection, looking back at Rantaro with a smile. "Don't worry, it's nothing to do with you. He's always like this, has been since we first met and hasn't changed at all."

"Sounds like a tough nut to crack. How did you end up sharing a room with this guy?" Rantaro's curious question invited Kaede to explain the whole story from beginning to end, in as much detail as she could manage, all while Shuichi had to hold in his judgments and not interject to correct her misgivings. She was fairly reliable at recounting their tale of woe, but there were parts that she embellished to make him seem worse than he was (particularly when it came to them finding the bridge that had been swept away, as she made it sound like they discovered it by driving off of it), and Rantaro was doing nothing but eating the whole thing up. His nods and murmurs showed that he was following the entire thing, and when she got to the end with a dramatic arm-flail, he sat a bit straighter up on the floor. "That's a lot you've had going on there, Kaede. Surprised I haven't heard more about this sooner."

"I don't know why you would have wanted to hear about any of this, it's not exactly the most exciting stuff, not when so many other people are going through the same things." At least Kaede was able to recognize that what she was going through was not exclusive to her, or even to the people in the room with her, but that was a small victory in the grand scheme of the world. "I just want to get out of here and get back to my real life, but I guess I'm not the only one who wants to do that. Isn't that right, Shuichi?"

Hearing his name be brought out again struck him by surprise, and Shuichi had to figure out what it was that he was expected to say before he put his foot in his mouth and said something dumb. "I mean, that would be correct, but what your 'real life' means and what mine means are two very different things."

While she nodded and agreed with that statement, Rantaro wasn't quite sure how to take it, and expressed that concern almost immediately. "Is that a dig at how she makes a living on being a pianist? Would you come after me the same way if you knew I traveled the world on my family's dime?"

"Uh, no, not at all!" Shuichi quickly replied, cursing himself for still managing to put his foot in his mouth anyway. "What I meant was that I was going somewhere important—ugh, no, Kaede's concert was important to her too—I mean that I'm a detective and there was a crime and…you know what? Just forget it."

"And so the pianist ended up sharing a room with a detective, despite knowing that she shouldn't. How interesting." There was an amused tone to Rantaro's voice, but Shuichi was so flustered and shamed about how badly he'd seemed to have messed up that he didn't dare say anything about it. Instead, he chose to leave the room, making sure he had a key on him before stepping out with nothing more than a statement that he'd be back eventually to the pair still in there.

While he paced the halls of the hotel, all Shuichi could think about was how strange of a position he'd ended up in, and how badly it was going to reflect on him when everyone inevitably found out about things. He didn't know this Rantaro guy at all, and he barely knew Kaede, and as far as he was aware the two of them were going to run his name through the mud as an awkward and incompetent detective once they were all out of the town. He was never going to be able to get a job on any cases outside of Kibou again, he was certain, and it would all be because of this one little incident where he hadn't had any control over anything except his own mouth. Adding in the fact that it seemed to be common enough knowledge that Kaede didn't even like detectives and it was just a recipe for disaster where Shuichi himself was the key ingredient, and he hadn't wished more to go home and call everything over than right then.

By the time he made it back to the room, over an hour had passed and he was feeling more miserable than he had when he'd initially left. That only made him stand staring at the door for a while, debating whether or not it was even worth it to go back inside, before biting the bullet and unlocking the door anyway, going in to a room that had all of the belongings it had before, but none of the people. "Where'd she go off to this time?" he asked himself, closing the door and checking to see if her clothes were all still there. They were, which meant that she at least intended on coming back and not wandering off with her friend, even though he halfheartedly wished that she would at that point. Only halfheartedly, though, because he still knew that she was his responsibility until she made it to her destination, and if she got wrapped up in other things and something bad happened, the blame would fall squarely on his shoulders.

The longer he sat around waiting for her to get back, the stronger the wish that she wouldn't return grew, despite him knowing all-too-well how he couldn't dwell on that kind of thought in their particular situation. She needed to return to the room and all of her belongings, or else he'd have another problem on his hands, that being that he'd have her things but not her to show for it. That was definitely not anything he needed in his life, even though he was fine with her not being around, and so he had to sit there and wait patiently for her return.

Her opening the door came after he'd given up on waiting and had laid down in bed, tucking himself under the blankets as they'd previously arranged, and he heard her enter but made no effort to make sure that it really was her. She tried her best to sneak around the room to not disturb him, but every step she took resulted in her bumping into something or other, and by the time she'd changed into her pajamas and was getting into bed, Shuichi was back to being completely awake and aware of what was happening in the room. "I can feel how cold you are through the sheet, where were you?" he asked her, not actually interested in the answer but curious as to know how she'd managed to make herself feel like an ice cube. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want, but I would like to know."

"I was just outside talking to Rantaro for a while, before he walked back to where he's staying, and it got a lot colder than I was expecting it to while we were out there. You should've seen the sky, there were so many stars than I usually get to see!" Even though she was speaking in a whisper, there was excitement in Kaede's voice that had her volume ticking up slightly, before she brought it back down with, "But I know that you and Rantaro really didn't get to know each other, so maybe it's for the best that you weren't out there with us, stars or no stars."

"I've gone stargazing enough to know what a full sky looks like," he replied, thinking about being home and going out at night to watch the stars with Kaito, who enjoyed doing that more than just about anything. "Glad you got to experience it for yourself, though. Must've been a real treat."

She vibrated for a moment while laying there, before rolling over and nearly pressing her face right into Shuichi's, him not expecting what she was doing until it was too late to miss her. "It was such a great time. That guy's one of my best friends, and the only one I've got outside of the music industry. Can you imagine what it's like to just end up running into him in this kind of place? What are the odds, right?"

"At least one of us had some sort of luck here."

"What are you saying? We both got lucky all sorts of times during this trip. I mean, what if there hadn't been any rooms left here? What if we'd been on the road when the landslides wiped out those areas? What about the bridge, we could've been on it when it fell!" Kaede's grin was visible even in the darkened room, thanks to how Shuichi's eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, and he couldn't help but feel motivated by her optimism to crack a smile himself. "Sure, some bad things happened and we weren't always lucky, but at the end of the day? Luck was totally on our side for all of this."

"I suppose you're right," he conceded, hoping she couldn't see how his smile had grown bigger. "I'm just thinking about all of the negatives that I never stop to look at what good things happened to us, and there were quite a few. I guess that the luckiest thing of all was that this happened with us together, because I'm not sure going through this alone would have been very easy." He was speaking out of kindness, having accepted that Kaede may not personally like him but she certainly made things easier to handle, but the way she giggled at his words made him think that she understood where he was coming from.

That all changed with her next sentence, which turned the warming air between them back to the same frigid breeze it had always been: "So I guess then you'll be fine when I get to leave tomorrow, huh?"

"You get to…what?" He hadn't heard a thing about anyone leaving beyond the rough initial timetable, so her saying that shook him to the core. "Since when was that happening? How are they managing it?"

"I don't know the details, but that's what I was told on my way back upstairs once Rantaro left. I guess they're gonna helicopter me and a couple others out? But I don't know when, or who else, or anything." She sighed, her happiness fading quickly. "I kinda wish you get to come with me, Shuichi, just for being such a nice guy during all of this."

"They'd have let me know by now if I was, I'm sure," he told her, his mind racing with all of the possibilities of what was about to transpire. If she was being airlifted out without him, that meant she wasn't his responsibility anymore, which meant he didn't have to think about her a second longer once she was strapped in. The thought was nice, but he wanted to finish what he'd started by driving her to the hotel in the first place, and this was denying him that opportunity; he couldn't dwell on that, though, not when she had things to get back to. "I'm happy for you, but at the same time I'm sad that I'll be here still for a while."

She gave a solemn laugh, much different from her earlier giggle. "I'm sure you'll be out of here soon, too, you just have to stay positive about things! And once you're able to go places on your own, you should totally come to one of my shows. I'll get you free tickets, you just say the word and I'll do it."

They fell asleep not long after that, those words being the last ones they exchanged that night, and when morning came Kaede's statement was proven to be true as the hotel workers had to come up to the room to wake her up, to tell her to pack her belongings and head outside. Shuichi tagged along to help her carry everything, and when she got on the small plane that could barely carry her, her things, and the other passengers who were also desperate to leave, he didn't have time to say goodbye or hear her thanks for his assistance. Their last moments together were spent rushing to get her out of the hotel and back on the road for her piano concerts, and all he could think about as he watched the plane take off from the makeshift runway was that he'd need to take her up on her offer sometime.

That was a decision made out of the same kindness as every other gesture he'd tried to show her, and one that just felt right given what they'd shared. They'd done nothing to get to know each other better, and in fact had seemed to only drift further apart than they'd started, but he could at least hold the olive branch and be there to support her in something that she enjoyed doing. His decision was only further solidified when he went back to the room and found one of her dresses laying across the bed, discarded without her realizing it, and he knew that if anything, he needed to get that back to her. It was a mission that would take time—and going to one of her concerts a week after he'd been able to get home from the whole ordeal and fix all of the problems waiting for him there had not been the appropriate time or place to try fixing it—but Shuichi was not going to let the dress become something that he had of hers that she still wanted. He was going to get it back to her, one way or another.

If only he'd known that the way it happened was unlike anything he could have ever imagined happening to him, in a world post-being trapped at a hotel due to flooding.