A/N: This chapter's more dialogue heavy, as promised. It's still largely setup, but expect action from Chapter 3 forwards. Feedback lets me know if I'm doing this correctly and portraying the characters in a new, fascinating way, while keeping them true to their skins. Please R&R!
Adachi smirks underneath his smile, feeling the adrenaline that he hasn't gotten since the fucking kid let him have his own way with Inaba's climate, literally and figuratively. The detective is pleased that Doujima's nephew, like him, gracefully cuts the shit. Adachi himself had stopped killing, not that he'd confess to anyone about being the culprit. Killing was simply the journey, not the destination. He gives the teenager a sideways glance, and assumes that the latter is not yet aware that the Fog Murders are over. Adachi shrugs. The murders are minutely relevant to him, and the Inaba Police Department reflects this. Doujima had been instructed by his superiors to close the case. The Fog Murders had been filed away two weeks ago as unsolved. It would undergo station procedures like its arcane predecessors, and Adachi was instructed to focus on other tasks and to act less like a rookie.
The gun in his holster weighs like air now.
His passenger breaks his train of thought.
"I brought you some stuff," Souji adds, gesturing to the cabbage.
"Noticed. Thanks," Adachi mumbles.
"You're welcome. But I got you some books, too."
"Don't have time to read. I work overtime for your uncle, remember?"
"You don't have to read them. I'll read them to you."
"Are you trying to be funny? You're the kid," Adachi scoffs, and makes a left turn when he remembers to. "And you're not my kid. You don't read to me."
Souji frowns and feigns a rare look of hurt.
"Well, I can cook, and I'm on winter vacation." he says with a nonchalant nuance; Souji is smiling, Adachi can hear it in his voice. "And you're working overtime for my uncle. Gutters for you."
Adachi is silent again, and Souji's voice resonates warmly with the chilly, outside air. The boy lowers his passenger window and Adachi raises it back up with an irritated press of his thumb. The car stops in front of a leaky apartment, and Souji wonders which of the brown doors belong to the detective, and if the interior of his room looks any better than the exterior of his apartment complex. The man had always implied his living situation subtly, it didn't take Naoto to make the assumption that Adachi Tohru did not live as well off as he had thought he would. Frankly, Souji was certain that Naoto knew more of peoples' surfaces than their marrow, so this did not surprise him. What surprised him was how wrong she often was. Quiet is all that permeates when errors occur, only sound disrupting the silence is Adachi's fingers' rhythmic drumming on the steering wheel.
When Adachi finally speaks, he sounds curious
"How long?" he inquires, staring ahead still.
"Two weeks," Souji replies cheerfully. "I won't be a bother."
Adachi grunts.
"Two weeks my ass. Does Dojima know you're here?" the latter mutters, thinking it strange that his partner's nephew would choose to be secretive about his own arrival. His eyes are overcast again, static, like the midnight channel. It didn't make sense no matter how Adachi looked at it. Was Souji truly more clandestine than he thought him to be? The detective didn't think so, and didn't want to think so, because the idea was not only infuriating but also mundane. He prefers thinking of the brat as, well, a little shit. Yet, due to previous encounters, Adachi's conscious that the boy cannot, by any means, be an idiot. Souji suffices in his answer.
"Nobody knows I'm here." Souji says, and echoes himself a bit.
Adachi shifts in his seat and unplugs his car key.
"I could kill you here, y'know."
"You can't. You won't. I know."
The detective snorts and heaves his weight on the car door, allowing it to swing open with more ease.
"Come on. We have to climb a few stairs. Give me those bags," he gestures, and Souji obliges. He hands Adachi the books and cabbages, keeping only a small duffel bag to himself.
Inside Adachi's apartment, Souji revels in dripping rainwater everywhere. Adachi hadn't noticed how drenched he was during the car ride, but after he'd had the lights switched on, the man had cried out in alarm and returned with a towel, looking as disarrayed and slightly peeved. He didn't bother cleaning his abode in preparation for his guest, mainly because unruliness had become an ugly habit. Messiness, among all Adachi's other vices, was something that he didn't figure needed fixing. Who would commend him for doing so? Nobody would, and he knew that he certainly could care less about himself, he, an ex-Hokkaido U honor student. Eventually, he became less keen to his own deprecation. Among others, Adachi also doesn't seem aware of Souji's newfound fascination with the apartment's furnishing and decor, rather, lack of. A worn sofa rests peacefully in the corner of the one-room apartment, and Souji figures that it was probably donated from a tenant who decided to retire it. All of Adachi's furniture emitted the same aesthetic vibe; none of them matched each other or the thematic, cracked, grey look of the room, and on the surface, they were far from novelty. Yet, they don't embarass Adachi, and Souji doesn't find them disturbing. He moves the books and cabbages onto a sloppy kotatsu, and sits himself down beside it. There's a small TV on the far side of the room, and it had been turned on without Souji noticing.
"Ah! Sangoku san! You have pulled the RABBIT CARD! That means that you get to hop into the foggy, boiling hell!"
"Does everyone want Sangoku san to jump into the pit?"
A game show is playing and its sound muffles when Adachi lowers the television's volume.
Adachi chooses to throw himself on the sofa, appearances being the least of his concerns. He leans back further against the cushion, and has his arms crossed over his chest. He'd sit beside the little shit when a snowball found its way into hell, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to interrogate him any further; he is, after all, an Inaba detective. It'd almost be hilariously irresponsible.
Souji returns his glare with his own, sheepish stare.
"Hey. There are ground rules." Adachi states, his glare emphasized by his inhospitable tone. "First rule. If you're going to live here, you can't be doing that. That's fucking with me."
Souji cocks his head, brows raised.
"I meant that. Stop doing that. That creepy staring thing you do; stop it."
The boy gives a slow nod and fixes his gaze on something else, and Adachi relaxes.
"Good. Second rule. You buy your own food. I'm not your dumbass caretaker."
"Sure. I can cook," Souji shrugs, and Adachi grits his teeth and ignores the retort.
"Third rule. You transport yourself. I'm not your dumbass driver."
Souji smiled.
"I have legs," the teenager fondly answers.
Adachi chooses to ignore that also.
"Fourth rule. No bringing your stupid friends in here."
"You sound like an older sister, Adachi-san. They don't know I'm here."
"Whatever. Fifth rule." A stark pause, and the detective frowns. "-If I come up with one, there will be a fifth rule. That's all there is for now."
Adachi exhales, and Souji mimics the action. The latter grins and props his cheek against a fist.
"I'm surprised that you didn't kick me out," laughs the boyish Fool, and Adachi laughs darkly himself. He sounds hollow and suspicious when he does, but he's almost comforted by the fact that he doesn't need to explain this to Souji Seta. Contrary to what the brat would know, Adachi, too, feels curiously inviting. He convinces himself that it's nothing short of curiosity, and the desire for truth, to understand, is normal to the two of them.
"Yeah well, don't get used to it." the detective says with a regal air, and Souji scratches his head.
"Nah. I think it's quite opposite. I did offer to cook for you before," the younger Persona user says, bemused.
"Same answer. I'd prefer it if a girl came over."
Souji laughs again, and picks up the bag of cabbages in preparation for dinner, and Adachi, finding nothing "rich" to do with himself, fumbles through the books that Souji had brought over, and gets lost again. He thumbs through the pages faster than he'd ever done with police documents, and feels his hands going numb. It had to be coincidence, there was no way that the brat could have known that the texts were identical to the ones that he'd enjoyed as a student from Hokkaido. He'd sold them for train tickets and living expenses, like he had with the rest of his bulk when he'd moved to Inaba for his new job. Yet, they were here again, in different editions, but they were here nonetheless. He didn't understand why the little shit had purchased these, but it's not important. Machiavelli, Franz Kafka, Shakespeare-they're all here, in their translated glory. Books that he himself, as a student, had found enlightening, frightening, and wonderful. His fingers tightened around The Prince's spine. He didn't know if he'd let go this time.
Souji's "Itadakimasu" startles Adachi, and the latter drops the volume he's holding and gapes. Chopsticks are raised between the boy's fingers, and he has a bowl of cabbage soup in his non-dominant hand. Adachi supposes that cabbage soup didn't take long to prepare, and hopes that the little shit doesn't eat more than Adachi would like him to.
"Are you familiar with them?" Souji asks between chews and swallows, and Adachi says nothing.
"I read them untranslated in Tokyo. I didn't know if you're familiar with English, so I bought the translated versions instead. Machiavelli seems like someone you would like."
Adachi glares down into his cabbage soup. He hates how good it smells. Fuck.
"You should eat," Souji gestures, and Adachi does. He didn't need some snotty city kid to tell him when to succumb to his appetite.
"I don't need you to read these to me," Adachi mutters. "I can do it myself."
"Sure."
"You bought these for me?"
"Yeah. I was curious about how alike we are."
"Don't compare me to you."
"You compared me to yourself first back then," Souji said pointedly, jabbing a chopstick in Adachi's direction. "I just analyzed that thought a bit more. You said that I'm the plague."
"And I don't feel any different about that now. Freeloading plague."
"I said I can cook."
"You also said you have legs. Tell me something I don't know, dumbass."
"I just did. I'm a monster too. Let's eat."
"You say the dumbest shit."
"Only the truth."
The two finish their meals in silence. Souji, to Adachi's chagrin, begins breaking rule number one again, but after awhile, the detective had learned to ignore it, and Souji had learned that Adachi didn't mind it anymore. He thinks about the times that the boy had been malignant towards him, and he cannot think of one. Yet, the bowl-cut plague here, and eating at his kotatsu in all his youth glory, his expression thoughtful. Simply the thought of the kid thinking himself similar to Adachi at all infuriates him. Still, there was a part of him that questioned how true that was; and while he did not yet know that Izanagi was a resident of both of their souls, there was something that made a connection function. Could it be possible...?
No, the boy had friends. Family. A future. A girlfriend probably.
"It's fun getting to know people," says Souji after downing his cabbage soup.
Adachi jumps. Shit, is the kid psychic now, too?
"But it's just fun to be relied on. It's fun to feel cared for, and that's really all there is to it," the younger persona user summarizes, and gestures between himself and Adachi with cabbage-free chopsticks. "So, in the end, I'm not much different than Adachi-san."
"You shut people out because you're afraid that they're actually monsters."
Adachi feels his jaw tighten.
"Adachi-san. I think it's important that you know that I'm a monster because I let people in," Souji says a little louder this time, and lowers his voice when he remembers what he was going to say earlier.
"Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are," the boy recites. "Machiavelli. You remember."
"For, in truth, there is no sure way of holding other than by destroying," the detective replies. "Machiavelli. I do remember."
Souji's lips turn upwards, and his smile is as radiant as an unkind sun.
"Don't." Adachi cuts. "I know you're going to say something. Shut up."
The detective buries his face in his hands, having finished his own meal.
"How much does someone need to destroy to find truth?" he mutters.
He's almost begging Souji to answer, because it's opportune.
But the boy doesn't, and Adachi grins darkly.
After both had decided that the silence had, by then, permeated enough, Souji gathers and washes the plates on his own, leaving Adachi sitting alone at the kotatsu. Adachi is drumming his fingers again, his own sleeves a stained contrast to Souji's rolled up, clean ones. The boy pauses after finishing with the bowls before moving onto the chopsticks and spoons.
"Just enough," Souji finally says.
Adachi looks up.
"One needs to destroy just enough to find truth."
Souji drops a plate to prove his point.