Chapter Three
Carmine Red
Akane and Kaori met in the hub of Ikebukuro for lunch for their outing. At first, Akane felt a little stiff, but she could tell that Kaori felt the same, so they both fumbled their way through their, "Hi, how are you?"'s. Akane mused for a moment on finding some way of sneaking in alcohol somehow, even though there was no way she was going to get any here, but then she and Kaori managed to relax enough around each other that they could talk more like how they used to. But even if they were both careful to avoid the subject of Yuki for the present, Akane could feel the specter of their friend beside them, and she had a feeling that Kaori could too.
After that they went shopping in all of the stores they used to shop at back when they were in school along with Yuki, though Akane let Kaori lead the way for the most part. She noticed that her friend was being a little bubblier than usual, and the part of her mind that was still attached to her work kept a close eye on her friend. She wasn't setting off any street scanners, it was true, so it was doubtful that her hue was in any danger of clouding detrimentally, at least for now, but if Akane had learned anything from Kogami and old Masaoka, it wasn't to let a tool meant for human use do all the thinking.
Kaori bought a lot of cute new clothes though, with that same kind of abandon one might exhibit in binging on sweets to chase away blues, and that was enough for Akane to be solicitous. Of course, Kaori had always been a ravenous shopper, so this wasn't too far afield of her usual character either. And despite her concerns, Akane managed to enjoy herself too, if in a more muted way, and even bought a few cute things for herself. Her love of cute, happy, bright things hadn't been diminished by the darker things she had confronted lately, and she found herself feeling just a little proud of that fact.
At the end of it though, when the sun was low in the late afternoon sky, and the two of them were shopped out and starting to head back to the metro station in Ikebukuro, something gray settled over Kaori, and Akane picked up on it almost immediately.
"So…Akane," said Kaori, more subdued than she'd been all day. "Um…so, I hope you're not like…I mean…are you…okay?"
Akane didn't need to ask what she was getting at. "It's helped me to keep most of my focus on work. Not to say that today wasn't a nice breather," she added with a genuine smile.
"Oh." Kaori tried smiling too. "So then…your…hue's okay?"
"Been doing fine so far." Then Akane asked more seriously, "And you? What about your hue?"
"Come on, Akane. You can just check it, right?"
"I prefer asking like a normal person."
Kaori gave a weird chuckle. "Well, okay then." She cleared her throat and looked away, looked at the ground as she and Akane kept walking beside each other down the street, shopping bags in tow. "I've been…undergoing some therapy. I mean…you know…just the standard stuff that's mandatory for anyone who's undergone a trauma…and…well…it's been going okay…I guess…. Only…."
"Only what?" Akane pressed gently.
Kaori heaved a sigh and looked up at the sky instead. "I just catch myself worrying now and then that'll it'll get worse, rather than better. That I'll just end up…over the edge and in an iso facility. Cuz that happens, right? You go through something awful, because awful stuff still happens, people you care about still die…." Her voice caught, just for a moment. "And even though you get the therapy that's supposed to make it better because it's therapy…it doesn't always work for everyone and…." Her voice caught again, like a hiccup, but she couldn't seem to say anything more.
"You're going to be fine," Akane told her, and with conviction too.
Her friend though gave her a surprised glance. "I am?"
"Of course you are. You've got a good head on your shoulders. You've always been very practical and straightforward. And you work hard. When you set your mind to something, no matter how much things suck, you get what you need to done. You're always going on about how less-than-thrilled you are about your job, but from what I hear you're one of the of best people in your field of work. There's no way that therapy like this isn't going to help you get back on track."
"But…isn't it…a bad thing…that I want to get back on track? I mean…I don't know…your job involves dealing with sick people like the bastard that killed Yuki…so…of course your going back to that would be more than the right thing to do…but…me…? What am I doing with my life that means anything? If Yuki can't even be here anymore…she should be here…."
Kaori gasped and then stopped. Akane stopped one step ahead of her and turned to look at her, finding her friend crying, tears welling up in her eyes before they spilled, trickling down her cheeks, the tip of her nose, and drip-dropping in tiny clear beads.
"Hey…" Akane called softly, and she went over and wrapped her free arm that wasn't carrying any shopping bags around her friend's trembling shoulders. Kaori hid in the crook of her neck, relaxing from her rigid demeanor of trying to keep it together, and cried a little more openly. A few passersby gave them uncertain, even uncomfortable glances before hurrying away, but Akane didn't care. She just held her friend tighter.
And after a few gulps of air, Kaori managed to get herself under control, and with a few sniffs looked up from the crook of Akane's neck and met her eyes.
"It's okay for you to get back on track," Akane told her, smiling her kind and gentle smile. "Yuki would scold you for wallowing just for her. So if you think about it, it'd be wrong not to get back on track. We both owe it to Yuki to be happy…if nothing else, then to do it at least for her sake. You know how doom and gloom stuff annoyed her to no end."
A genuine smile broke through as Kaori gave a watery little laugh and finally found it in herself to pull away. "Yeah, you're right. I'll keep that in mind."
She started continuing down the walk towards the metro station, and Akane watched the new, relaxed set of her friend's shoulders, the upright conviction of her retreating back, before she followed and caught up.
A piece of information she had absorbed into her memory floated up to the surface of her mind then. Back in school, she'd read something about the benefits of crying, that it in fact served a purpose to release toxins from the body. Moreover, it had been one of the best ways to relieve stress in a kind of purge, as it were.
One just had to be careful that they didn't get stuck in the crying part, because that meant their emotions were spiraling out of control, rather than being unburdened from their hearts.
Though Kaori seemed a little better even now after having that good little cry, Akane was resolved to keep a close eye on her friend. Not a hovering eye—that was Sibyl's job, anyway—just an attentive one.
She had failed one friend. She wasn't about to fail another.
Work was a bitch the next day though.
Akane was still short-handed, Ginoza was still in the hospital recovering, and so far, they hadn't gotten any new blood to fill in the gaps left behind by him, Masaoka, Kagari, and…Kogami.
Anymore, thinking about him elicited a heavy sigh from her.
She hated this whole being-a-support-division thing, and her frustration burst into full bloom when she confronted Chief Kasei about it. Honestly, it was easy enough to do, strangely enough because she knew Kasei's secret. One would think that it wouldn't be because of what she knew, but Akane was odd that way.
"This is beyond ridiculous," she told the Chief bluntly, arms folded, as she stood before her desk in her office. "So if you aren't going to put any effort into giving Division One new limbs, I'll handle it myself. I'm no HR expert, but then again, HR just answers to Sibyl anyway, right?"
Kasei regarded her with her usual impassivity, fiddling idly with that Rubik's cube of hers as she sat back in her chair, but a muscle jumped in her jaw, and that was enough to satisfy Akane that she was still managing to get under her skin in a way that made this puppet body of Sibyl acquiesce somewhat to her and her objectives.
Which was why, after a short yet stony silence, Kasei finally said, "Fine. Handle it yourself then. I have every confidence in you."
And she did, it was true.
Which, coming from Kasei, still sounded kind of like a threat.
Though Akane, as usual, was too fed up to care.
Akane stayed late that night, scrolling through profile after profile for every inmate in the iso facility. She went through the database herself, starting with running them through Sybil to narrow things down to the specific qualities she was looking for in an Enforcer. Even so, she herself was going completely on instinct here as she went through the narrowed results that Sybil spit out for her.
By midnight, she had it narrowed down to three, all them showing Psycho-Pass readings that made them ideal matches for Enforcer work. But of the three, there was one that stuck out the most, perhaps because of the unassuming air Akane picked up from his headshot.
Daikichi Akabayashi.
From what she read, he sounded like the kind of guy who could solve Rubik's cubes by the basketful in his sleep.
His past history demonstrated a high-functioning mind, but the kind that could fall prey to depression in thinking too much about how things life can go wrong. Akane decided to run his values through the Sibyl System, and the results pegged him for a good potential fit for Enforcer work.
She found she was pleased to see this, and made it a point to make a stopover at the isolation facility to have a chat with him first thing in the morning.
The last time she had come here, Kogami had been with her. They had needed the advice of someone with a mind as artistically twisted as the culprit behind the killings at that all-girls academy. When Kogami had rather off-handedly said that one day, he would end up here as well, once he'd outlived his use to society as an Enforcer, Akane had felt a twinge of sadness. She felt that twinge again just remembering it, and then hopeful, that after all that time accepting a dismal fate like that, he'd managed to escape the system. So even if he ended up dying out there, at least he'd die free.
Though she preferred to think of him as still alive rather than dead.
After getting her identity confirmed and given Inspector's access into the facility, she communicated her need to speak with the inmate named Daikichi Akabayashi. The staff in charge of this acquiesced accordingly and one of them led her to a room split by a glass window. On either side of the glass was a set of chairs and table space. Akane sat in one of the chairs on her side, and through the glass she could see the door on the other side open, and another of the facility's staff leading the young man named Daikichi Akabayashi through it. The staff member had him sit in one of the chairs on his side, so now he and Akane faced each other.
The first thing she noticed was the bright red stripe of hair dye shot through his dark hair.
Thanks to an audio feedback system, Akane and Akabayashi would be able to hear each other clearly from each other's side. As uncertain as he seemed, there was also a cautious inquisitiveness to him. Akane found she wasn't surprised about this.
"It's good to meet you, Mr. Akabayashi," she said. "I'm Inspector Akane Tsunemori."
At this, Akabayashi's ears pricked up at this, and then a grin spread across his face and he leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head, turning rather devil-may-care. "You've come to ask me if I wanna become an Enforcer, haven't you?"
Akane couldn't help being amused. "I have, actually. Figured that out on your own, huh?"
"Well, it's more than obvious," said Akabayashi. "You're an Inspector, I'm a Latent Criminal. Latent Criminals can be recruited to the PSB as Enforcers."
"I could just be here to question you about a case I'm working on."
"Yeah, but you opened up our conversation with a pleasantry: 'it's good to meet you, Mr. Akabayashi'. You wanted to approach me favorably. Like you would with a sales pitch."
Akane raised her eyebrows at him, and Akabayashi raised his back at her.
Oh yes, she made a good choice with this one. She'd still need to get approval from Ginoza. And the Chief, of course.
Assuming he agreed to take the job.
And naturally, reading her correctly, he asked her, "There are risks to the job, right?"
"That's more than obvious," Akane told him, rather bluntly. "You don't need to an excellent deductor to figure that out."
"But with Sibyl in our lives, what risk can there really be?" Akabayashi challenged, and rather sarcastically at that.
Akane took a breath. "Sibyl…yes, well…." Her mind flickered back to that cold, sterile room full of amoral, compassionless brains deep in the bowels beneath Nona Tower that virtually no one knew about, except those permitted to know and live.
People like her.
Even so.
She looked up and gave Akabayashi her smile again, but this time, it was steely, and she could tell that Akabayashi could see that.
"Every system still needs its safety nets. And the Inspectors and Enforcers, the humans who operate the Dominators…they're that safety net." Then she added, "And Sibyl might make her judgements, but in my experience, she can't really do what she does without us."
Akabayashi knitted his brow thoughtfully. "Are you saying then…that Sibyl depends on us?"
"Well, without us, Sibyl would have no reason to exist," said Akane simply.
"Hm." Akabayashi considered this a moment, and then his grin came back. "You know, working for someone like you could be pretty fun. I think being a soldier for justice on the side would make that worth it."
Akane warmed to his enthusiasm. "It is worth it, Mr. Akabayashi. It's definitely worth it."
Akane was just finishing feeding Dime when she got an alert message that informed her that Ginoza had been moved from a room in the recovery ward to a room in the physical therapy ward. So she made a point to go and visit him the next day on the pretense of getting his opinion on her choice of Daikichi Akabayashi as a new Enforcer with Division One.
After she stuck a slot in her schedule for it, she looked down at Dime devouring his kibble at her feet. She considered the precious dog, with his beautiful coat and his big, adorable eyes that looked up at her when he seemed to sense her watching him while he ate. She smiled and knelt down beside him to give his ear a scratch.
Satisfied that that was all she was going to do, he turned his attention back to his food.
"I don't know what it is, Dime," she murmured, moving her hand to stroke the fur along his quivering back, "but I think it's quite sweet that Mr. Ginoza has a dog like you."
She went home that night with a rather happier feeling than she had in what felt like a while, and brought that disposition in with her when she went to check in on Ginoza the next day.
She found Ginoza in the middle of a physical therapy session with an AI physical therapy program.
He turned to her upon her entrance into the room, and his expression seemed to light up a bit.
"Tsunemori," he greeted, giving his new mechanical arm another good flex per the AI's instructions.
"Hey there," said Akane, appreciative of her superior's rare show of physical strength in the way he moved his new arm. "Getting a good feel for the mechanics?" she asked.
"More or less," said Ginoza.
Then something flickered in his eyes that for a split-second reminded Akane of that look she'd seen in Kogami's eyes when he'd faced down that rogue drone with his teeth bared like a wolf's. Like there was something about his new arm and the mechanical strength that it implied that pleased a shadow of something surfacing in Ginoza's personality.
Then it disappeared as he quit flexing his fingers and he looked at Akane again. Not just looked at her, but smiled at her.
"I think it'll do well enough," he assessed. Then he considered the arm again, and added, "You know what some kid doctor said? She said it reminded her of some character's mechanical arm in some old manga."
"What manga was that?"
"Fullmetal…Something. I dunno. I'd never heard of it before. She was pretty excited about it though. One of those 'old-takus', you know."
"Well, that's something," said Akane with a hopeful grin.
"I suppose so." Ginoza performed another exercise with it per the AI, twisting the joints around as far as they would go. "If anything, it makes me feel a bit more like a superhero."
"Oh? That's rather charming."
Ginoza paused and glanced up at her, and perhaps it was just her imagination, but it looked for a moment like his cheeks flushed. Just for a moment.
"You think so?" he asked, sounding strangely earnest about it.
"Mm, yeah," Akane told him honestly.
The corner of Ginoza's mouth quirked, and then he went back to the exercises the AI was giving him at the its prodding.
"Mr. Ginoza…."
"Right, right, sorry." Ginoza asked the machine to repeat its instructions and then followed through with them with the arm with flawless precision.
Akane laughed quietly under her breath and then pulled out her tablet, opened it up to Daikichi Akabayashi's profile, and held it out to Ginoza. "When you get a minute," she said.
Ginoza glanced over his shoulder and, understanding what she was probably getting at, reached over and paused the physical therapy program, muttering, "Eh, that's enough for today." He took the tablet from Akane as he stepped off the platform in front of the AI and scrolled down the screen.
Akane watched him as he put on his calculation face, a little more like the old Ginoza, which was strangely a comfort in some ways. Then he glanced up at her.
"This is one you're thinking of recruiting as an Enforcer?"
Akane internally braced herself against the skepticism in his tone. "Yes."
"I see." Ginoza turned back to the tablet and scanned the screen again. Then he gave Akane a thankfully approving smile as he finally handed it back to her. "Good choice. I like him. He…reminds me of Kagari…a little. If Kagari was a little more arrogant. I like your comment here about him being the sort of person who could probably solve Rubik's cubes in his sleep by the basketful."
"Oh. Well, thank you." Akane took the tabet from him and tucked it back in her bag. "Though I think 'a little more arrogant' is putting it mildly in Akabayashi's case," she added with another laugh.
When she turned back to her superior though she was taken aback at the sight of him staring at his mechanical hand…with inexplicable tears rolling down the sides of his face. Ginoza himself appeared shocked to see them there.
"What the…? I don't…." Ginoza raised his glistening eyes to meet Akane's, and the falling tears rolled like raindrops down a windowpane.
"Mr….Ginoza…" Akane breathed.
Ginoza blinked and then shook himself, turning away. "Shit. What the hell?" he growled. He buried his face in the palm of his hand that was still flesh and blood.
Unbidden, Akane's heart caught in her throat, mouth going dry. Reflexively, she reached out a hand, but stopped short of touching Ginoza's shoulder. Yet she couldn't find anything to say. She found herself back in the hyper oats facility, stumbling across Ginoza broken and bleeding on the ground as he collapsed atop Masaoka's body.
"Aw, hell. Damn it." Then Ginoza's shoulders shook. "Who am I trying to fool? It's my fault…isn't it…?" he croaked before he let out a gasping sob. "It's all my fault…."
Akane withdrew further into herself, her insides shaking to see her superior like this. She'd never seen him like this. This was the last thing she had expected to be privy to, even with everything that had happened.
"I let this happen…." Then Ginoza hiccupped. Actually hiccupped. Like a child who was crying would hiccup. "I couldn't…handle what was happening in my head…I couldn't get my shit together…and I started to fall apart…and you…." He raised his eyes and looked at Akane again, and this time the tears were thick and unmistakable. "I left you all alone…to deal with everything…because I couldn't…and because of that…Kagari…Kogami…Dad…."
Akane was drawing a blank. She didn't know what to do. She knew what she'd do if this were Kaori. Hell, she'd done such a thing for her just recently.
And then she thought of Yuki, and her own eyes pricked with tears before she could help herself. And she recalled again that bit about the relief that crying tears could bring.
So she let her own tears flow. But she grit her teeth and made sure Ginoza didn't miss it.
"Don't you dare," she told him, so fiercely that Ginoza could only stare at her, his own tears drip-dropping listlessly like dew off leaves. "Don't you dare blame yourself. Because if you do…then I…." She gulped, ignoring the voice in her head that tried to tell her she might be crossing a line here. "Then I won't forgive you."
There was a heavy drop of silence, and then Ginoza rasped, "But…Ak…an…e…."
Akane pressed onward, in spite of herself. "And you know Mr. Masaoka would never forgive you. And Kagari would laugh at you mercilessly, damn him. And Kogami would just call you pathetic." She had her hands balled so tightly into fists at her side that her fingernails were cutting her palms, but she didn't care. Her formerly stuttering heart was now pounding in her chest and in her ears. Unlike with Kaori, she had to be tougher on someone like Ginoza. Someone who needed the tough treatment. Who wouldn't take anything less from her, short of her actually smacking him, but even in her passionate state of mind she was aware that smacking him definitely would cross a line.
Only today Ginoza was being particularly stubborn.
He turned away from her again, and of all things, let himself sink slowly to his knees, burying his face in his hand once more.
"What does it matter?" he mumbled, letting out another, quieter sob. "I can't even forgive myself…."
Akane's own tears kept falling, but she was stumped for anything else she could say. Except for, "How can you…? Don't you realize…you're just hammering the nail in the coffin acting like this…?"
Ginoza sniffed and lifted his eyes, but his mouth was still hidden behind his hand. "Oh, I'm more than aware, Inspector."
"Then why?!" Akane snapped before she could stop herself. "You…fatalistic…idiot!"
In the past, Ginoza had certainly gotten on her nerves, even gotten on her bad side, and they had more than once butt their heads over how to do things as Inspectors, but this was the first time...that Akane was outright pissed with him. And it wasn't even remotely out of anything akin to animosity. If anything it was because she'd come to care about him, perhaps in the same way Ginoza and Kogami had come to care about each other as friends and colleagues themselves, as it vaguely dawned on her in the back of her mind then why it was that out of all of the Enforcers, it was with either Kogami or Masaoka that Ginoza would get the most angry.
Ginoza knitted his brows, his eyes hardening, though with the tears in them this only served to liken them to cold emeralds, an effect that was very affecting on Akane for just a moment amidst her roiling ire with him.
"All right then," he challenged her. "You wanna lecture me? Then lecture me. Save me with the power of your oh-so-optimistic words."
"Come on now, Mr. Ginoza…."
"Much good they did for hopeless cases like Ko…."
"For goodness's sake, Ginoza, don't make this harder than this has to be! You know, it didn't occur to me until just now, but you're actually more like Kogami than you probably ever realized!"
"In that case, then I think you've lost your own argument that I'm an idiot for being fatalistic about this."
He still had tears in his eyes, but he'd stopped actively crying. Now he was just giving her an utterly livid expression. Like he was trying so hard to suddenly become as unsalvageable as possible, so that he might believe it when she did manage to save him.
And then his mouth curled into a humorless smile that was, of all things, cruel. The sight of it turned Akane's stomach. Moreover, she was all the more bewildered at where all of this was coming from. Not a few moments ago he was perfectly amiable, and now here he was, swinging from pathetic to hostile on the turn of a dime.
"Go on. Call me an idiot again," he goaded.
"You…."
"Just look at me, for crying out! Don't pretend you can really save…this—" He shook out his prosthetic "—with that…sweet goddamn naivety of yours! You can't save everyone Tsunemori! Haven't you figured that out by now?!"
This was different than his usual cynicism. This was just mean. Moreover, it was pain that he was inflicting on himself as much as he was on her.
Because all of it…came from a place of pure hurt.
She could see it now. His thoughts touching so briefly on Kagari a moment ago had triggered something he'd been trying to hold back inside of himself ever since his father died, and he'd learned that Kogami had gone MIA and he'd had to square with the fact that Kagari had gotten himself killed too, and it further occurred to her that this edge of cruelty was a result of how much he was already hating himself for acting out like this, for the aspects of his emotional state and how losing the handle he'd had on himself had indeed contributed to the crack that had formed in the Division One Akane had first met.
Guess I'm gonna have to cross that line after all, she thought sadly, and before Ginoza could properly react, except to widen his eyes at the idea that she would attempt this in the first place, she raised her hand and then brought it down, smacking him clean across his face.
She hit him so hard that it knocked him aside, knocking the breath out of him, out of her too for that matter. Numbly, in the aftermath, he reached up and touched the red mark she left on his cheek with his trembling fingers, and then he gaped up at her, all anger gone. And then he lowered his eyes in raw shame, and the tears came back. But this time, his cries were silent.
"Akane, I'm sorry," he muttered. "You should…you should just leave me here."
She knew he didn't mean just leave him there on the floor. Or if he did, that wasn't the only thing he meant.
"You damn idiot," she hissed at him under her breath, fresh tears spilling from her eyes. "Like I would do something like leave you." Then she was the one who hiccupped. "I'm not losing you too," she told him, her voice cracking.
"I said leave me," Ginoza reiterated, this time in a tone of dangerously quiet warning.
Akane little heeded this, even as a frightened part of herself deep inside was pleading with him to come to his senses. "I'll leave you just for now. But you get your act together. You say you should've had it together when you had the chance? Well now's your chance. Seriously, what the hell…."
She turned away, gathering up her bag and bristling, quivering with whimpering cries that still escaped her, furious as she was.
"Damn it!"
Behind her a loud bang nearly made her leap out of her skin and stopped her dead outside the door. And when she whirled around, she saw that Ginoza had taken it upon himself to lash out with his mechanical arm and run the fist of it into the floor, cracking into the linoleum to the concrete underneath. And then he let out a wounded, growling cry and curled further into himself, shaking again with violent sobs.
There it was. The kind of crying that spiraled out of control, that took someone over, possessed them like a demon, making it impossible for them to break themselves out of its vicious cycle.
And according to his stats on the nearby monitor, he was pushing 99 hard, almost like she could hear the number screaming as it shot up and threatened to break into 100.
Feeling helpless, Akane reached out to the alert button on the wall by the door and rang for the closest mental health aide. There was nothing else she could do. Nothing she said or did was doing anything for him anymore like it was before, and she could only watch as the aide swooped in and stuck Ginoza in the arm with a sedative and then caught him as he collapsed with a pained gasp.
"I'm sorry, Ginoza," she whispered, wiping away the rest of her tears with the heel of her free hand, finding herself achingly wishing in fact that she was the one who could catch him as he fell. "I'm so sorry…I shouldn't have started to walk away like that…I'm sorry…please forgive me…."
Akane dropped into the seat at her desk after hanging up her bag on the back of her chair. For a moment she took a deep breath and massaged her temples, trying to calm herself.
Dealing with Ginoza like that had drained her more than she'd thought possible. And while comforting Kaori had left her feeling fulfilled the way a good friend who's helped another good friend would feel, with Ginoza she felt nothing but nearly hopeless for his fate. A fate he seemed unwilling at this point to avoid, as though all his former drive to do so had evaporated in those few moments where he had just…cracked. Out of the blue.
And she'd struck him.
And probably just made things worse. No it had definitely made things worse. She never thought she could be so horrible to someone, but there it was. For a moment she let herself indulge in self-loathing before she moved on from it.
Then, mustering up what energy she could as she managed to put it aside for now, she stretched and cracked her knuckles before buckling down to have another look-see at those other two potentials Enforcer candidates of the three, including Akabayashi, that the system had initially helped her narrow down in her initial weed-through.
Of the two, there was a Kaguya Fukui, which in name alone sounded like a winner. The only potentially grave issue was the young woman's proclivity to Attention Deficit Disorder, which had in all probability heavily influenced her Psycho-Pass. According to her file, she could've had an easier time of things if she'd just taken her medication, but apparently she'd come to a point in her rebellious youth where she'd started flushing those pills down the toilet, refusing to take what she referred to her as her "brainwashing meds".
Akane could see where she was coming from.
She was someone who could mentally tell the difference between a mind that was medicated into complacent focus and one that was given freer reign in its lack-of-focus. That said, unfortunately that lack of focus was in correlation with her rise in anxiety, and despite a last-ditch effort from her parents to intervene and get her back on medication, her Crime Coefficient had managed to rise and her hue had managed to cloud enough that the irreversible damage was done and she'd had to be confined to iso, where apparently she was content with smoking a hookah all day. Which was evidently more fashionable and more agreeable to a non-conformist mindset than ADD medication.
That said, she had something that made her think of Kogami, actually. If he were here, he'd probably intuit that she had guts, seeing how she managed to keep off her meds for so long, and not only that but keep the secret that she was keeping off her meds for as long as she did.
So…clever and gutsy.
Akane went about making some notes on her tablet. As she went about this, she reached over and snatched up her coffee cup, only to notice that it was empty save for a few drops. With a sigh she pushed away from her desk and, after a moment's thought, decided instead of hot coffee to go down to one of the communal breakrooms and get a can of milk coffee from the vending machine.
A bit lost in thought on her way down, what had passed between her and Ginoza earlier that day still weighing heavy on her mind, she didn't pay as much attention as she should have as she marched down the hall in her loafers, which caused her to collide right into someone else headed in the opposite direction.
"Oh!" Akane staggered back, stammering out an apology and bowing profusely once she regained her equilibrium. "I'm so sorry, please forgive me! I wasn't looking where I was going!"
"No, not at all," said the other person, a man, and judging by the build and bulk of him when she got a proper look at him, it was a wonder she didn't break upon impact with him.
Then she experienced a flicker of recognition and her cheeks colored.
"Oh, Enforcer Togane." Akane bowed again. "Please excuse me for bumping into you, I was simply lost in thought."
Enforcer Sakuya Togane shook his head and grinned at her, giving a casual flip of the long dark hair that fell over his eyes. "I wouldn't expect any less of the one and only Inspector Tsunemori," he told her quite genially.
This gave Akane pause and she blinked at him. "Huh? I don't follow. Do I…have a reputation as a…space cadet or something?"
Togane snorted a laugh. "Not at all, Inspector. But you do like to dance to the beat of your own drum, don't you? These things circulate around these offices, you know."
Akane rubbed the back of her head discomfitedly. "Yes, I'm aware of how office environments work, Enforcer Togane."
"Anyway," said Togane, cheerfully dismissive, lifting up a tablet in his hand, "I was just on my way to deliver something to Inspector Suzuki. Though I might've detoured a bit and nabbed something from the breakroom vending machine." With his other hand he lifted up a can of a fizzy sour fruit drink.
Akane managed a kind of awkward laugh. "What do you know? I was on my way there myself."
As she and Togane took their leave of each other, the Enforcer lifted his drink can to Akane in a strange kind of a salute as he continued on his way down the hall in the opposite direction of her.
Akane stared after him a moment, tilting her head to one side. She hadn't really spoken to Enforcer Togane straight up until just now, but as far as first impressions went, he struck her as perplexingly charming for someone who was a Latent Criminal.
Sure Kagari had had his own brand of flair and charm, but Togane…it like, when it came to being one of the many Enforcers imprisoned within Nona Tower, he seemed as though he were actually…happy about it.
