Chapter Text
It's not Kid Homage.
It's not Kid Homage.
Saguru gets a hand around the pipe and pulls himself up, one arm curling around the unconscious child as he sits up and takes stock. Interpol files flick through his mind -- he knows this man, he's seen his file, he remembers --
'Really, a handlebar moustache and a penchant for dark trenchcoats and fedoras? This one is a walking cliche!'
'Says the boy in the deerstalker and Inverness.'
'I'm thirteen. They're not going to take me seriously as it is, so I may as well enjoy myself instead of going around in a stupid prissy suit.'
-- Snake. A gun-for-hire with a list of crimes ranging from petty bribery to murder, Snake has no loyalties and a wide range of contacts, but not enough information on any organization to be of any particular priority to Interpol. He's little more than a jumped-up thug who crosses international borders.
"I suppose you have reason for bothering to show yourself," Saguru rasps.
Snake grins like a wolf, feral and toothy and not a patch on Kid's cutting mercurial insanity, and tosses a rolled-up newspaper onto Saguru's lap. When Saguru slowly, warily unrolls it, he discovers it's a single page of classified ads, and there's a large box in the upper corner.
Two boxes chocolate; one milk, one dark. Available upon receipt of the bluebird's peaches, the birthday plum, the lamplights, and the philosopher's stone.
One day offer only.
Well. This is... Someone -- not Snake, Snake doesn't do a thing unless he's getting paid in cash, and he's not at all creative enough to come up with this -- someone is using Saguru as bait for Kid Homage? To trade for the recent thefts? And he thinks it's going to work?
"It's on the internet too. Let's see what that bastard Toichi thinks of it."
So Kid Homage's name is Toichi? Good to know, but that's of no consequence at the moment. Something much more pertinent is the fact that, "I note there's no mention of where this exchange is to take place."
"He has his ways," Snake says, with all the gravity of a B-movie villain. "Toichi's a cunning bastard like that. I wouldn't be surprised if he had you bugged." He kicks at the child's backpack, left sitting in the corner just out of Saguru's peripheral vision. "This time, I'm gonna shoot him in the face. See if he comes back from that!"
Snake shot Kid Homage? When? Who paid him to...?
The man eyes the unconscious little boy (Saguru tugs him closer, cradling his small head, and damn the man for involving a child!), then sneers and storms off.
Saguru's left alone to take stock of his situation. He's in an industrial building of some sort, most likely a disused warehouse, with only one operational light source directly above. The light is too weak to show the dimensions of the warehouse clearly, although -- Saguru rattles the handcuff chain testingly, 'accidentally' clanging the pipe loudly enough to both tell that it's solid steel and that there's a faint echo somewhere in the shadows beyond his pool of light -- it's large enough that it's either quite far from Tokyo proper and/or it's being rented at a premium price. (For someone able to afford large gems like Kid's stolen, it could very easily be either or both.)
Just at the edge of the light, Saguru can see the telltale pinpoint lights and reflecting lenses of several video cameras, spaced evenly apart in an arc around the two of them. So they're being monitored (and constantly, too: between Snake and the night nurse, and the 'one day offer' threat, there's not likely to be any time in which they aren't being watched before everything goes to pot). This is not at all surprising, considering Snake's left them to their own devices in the first place.
Other than that, Saguru has his hospital wrap and socks, and the child (what was his name again...?) is fully-dressed, save for missing shoes and coat, and the backpack sitting frustratingly out of reach.
The air catches in Saguru's lungs, and he buries a coughing fit into his short sleeve.
Ah yes. And that. The cold floor is not going to help with that, though at least Saguru can hold onto the child to help keep them both warm.
The child who is stirring in his arms. "Nn...?"
"Pardon the intrusion," Saguru murmurs, and he feels the small body tense. "My name's Hakuba Saguru. Are you feeling okay?"
"... fuzzy..." the boy mumbles in Kansai-ben.
Drugs, then, rather than a head injury.
"It will wear off soon." I hope. "Just sit tight, we'll be okay."
The boy buries a nod into Saguru's chest, small hand fisting in the lapel of Saguru's gown. "... Yer sick," he says.
Well, yes, the gown may be of far better quality than the backless kind Saguru's used to, but it's still distinctively crunchy and plasticized to the touch. "I had a bad cough," he replies. "There was some worry about the medicine, so I was in hospital so doctors could keep an eye on me. It's nothing you need worry about. Though I apologize in advance if I cough grossly near you."
He feels the frown against his pectoral. Then the boy levers himself upright, swaying a little bit, and -- with a glare at his wrist when the handcuff gets in the way -- fishes in his pockets. "Here," he says. "I got a new handkerchief outta the laundry this morning." The square of wrinkled linen he offers up has an adorable border of smiling hand shapes and sudsy soaps in pastel colors. "I ain't used it yet."
The mere idea of coughing is enough to trigger the rough tickle in Saguru's lungs. "Thank you," he says hastily, taking the handkerchief and turning quickly away from the boy to hack into it. "Ow. Ugh. I hate that."
"I bet," the boy replies, turning a sharp green gaze on him. "You sure you're okay? You really sound awful."
"I'm as well as can be expected." Which isn't particularly well at all, given the chilly environs. The child seems to know that, too, giving the cold concrete a pointed glance before returning that look onto Saguru. "I apologize, I didn't catch your name," Saguru continues, hoping to distract the boy.
It works, somewhat. The child's gaze goes old and shuttered, downright suspicious. "... Hei," he eventually mutters.
"Pleased to meet you, Hei." Hei? The boy's name is Hei? "Again," Saguru adds.
"... Again?"
Saguru smiles, even though his mind is racing. "We stayed at the same hotel a couple of months ago, in Kaga. The town with the giant gold statue? You said my hair was the same color as you." In the baths, where Hei (a dark-skinned, green-eyed Japanese boy, only the second that Saguru's ever seen) had been bathing with his twin... cousins? Brothers? Two identical boys of college age.
"Oh. Yeah. You said you were with the police."
Uncountable trains of thought are colliding behind Saguru's friendly, approving smile.
If Hattori Heiji had been missing for seven years, Saguru would think... but he's only been gone seven months. And he's too young to be this child's father; he would've been only nine or ten when the boy was conceived, too young to even have had operational spermatogonium much less actual sperm cells.
What if Hattori Heizo had had his sperm stolen, though?
... What if Heiji'd had somatic cells stolen? The famous Dolly the sheep had been cloned in 1996, which allows for nearly a decade of refinement in the field for some unscrupulous organization to begin production from selected unwitting donors. Heiji would've been just settling into his adult personality, would've long since displayed appealing factors of IQ, athletic skill, deductive skill...
Could this boy be why Hattori Heiji was kidnapped in the first place? But why...? Was the child not turning out quite the way Kid Homage's horrific relatives wished? Was the child turning out too much the way Kid Homage did not wish?
Somehow, though... somehow, somehow, Hei is related to Heiji. (And Hattori Heizo doesn't know he exists.)
Hei's been kidnapped to lure Kid in, as surely as Saguru has. Hei is a child known to Kid, wanted by Kid, used by Kid. He must be the child Kid has access to, the child Kid used to get Heiji into the COCOON event. (They still haven't figured out the logistics of that.)
When Saguru first met him, the boy had been in the care of college-age twins, twins who were in the bath and therefore couldn't have been hiding Heiji's skin color behind body paint, twins who are Kid Homage's age and were at Kid Homage's heist and who have Kid Homage's decoy child.
Kid Homage is twins.
(Who is Toichi, then?)
It was never Heiji at the heists. It was both twins who molested Saguru and menaced him with a knife on the nanny's bed. It was one twin keeping his distance at the museum, prior to being shot at. It was one twin in Kumano and the other in Saguru's bedroom the night before last. It was his twin Kid Homage was waiting for -- speaking to, subvocally -- in Kaga, who Kid had planned to co-molest Saguru with. Not Heiji. Never Heiji.
... Except in the game. Although it was one of the twins who Saguru failed to capture upon being released from the COCOON capsule. Where, then, had Heiji been?
"You falling asleep, Sa-- Hakuba-nii?" The boy pokes at Saguru's shoulder with one sharp little finger. "Don't sleep, you'll get sicker."
Honestly, he's going to get sicker either way. But he definitely does not want to risk being unconscious when Kid Homage arrives.
Or, he thinks as he spots movement in the shadows, when Snake comes back.
This time, the man's grin is more eager and sadistic, far closer to Kid's than before, when he swoops into the light with the trenchcoat flaring. "Awake, are we?" he asks, bending to peer into Hei's face. (To his credit -- or, more likely, Kid's credit -- the child takes the sudden invasion and terrible breath without flinching.) "Tell me." Snake's beady eyes gleam. "Is Toichi horribly disfigured now?"
Neither twin is, from what Saguru saw.
"A broken shell of a man?" Snake adds hopefully. "Does he give you nightmares?"
Hei twitches under Saguru's hands.
"He does!" Snake laughs. "I knew it! I knew I hit the shit!"
"Oh belt up," Saguru snaps, pulling the boy away as best he can. "He clearly doesn't know what you're blathering on about." More due to Kid being two people (and therefore not a singular Toichi) than from anything else, but regardless no child deserves to be terrorized. No child will be, not when Saguru's there and capable of deflecting such attentions onto himself.
Hei seems to agree, as he buries his face into the angle of Saguru's shoulder and clings, small arms clutching around Saguru's neck.
Snake glowers at the pair of them. "He knows damn well--" But uncertainty flickers across his face. "Never the same face twice?" he prompts Hei.
"... iunno..." Hei mutters into Saguru's neck.
Saguru twists away when Snake pokes at the boy, but there's nowhere to twist away to and Snake manages to get the boy's face visible once more by prodding at the ticklish spots under his chin, making Hei flinch as Snake's trying to get a grip on his jaw. The three of them glare at each other for a long moment, then...
"ROSE!" Snake yells, standing and shoving Hei and Saguru to thump against the wall. He storms back across the lit section of floor, yelling vaguely towards the rafters. "YOU STUPID-- DID YOU EVEN GET THE RIGHT BRAT? ROSE!"
"Oh, she got the right brat." Kid's voice creeps from every wall around them, soft as frost crackling across glass.
Snake's suddenly pointing a gun into the shadows far too close to where Saguru and Hei are locked up. "Get out here, Toichi."
"My. Such manners." The gun twitches a few centimeters to the left, and now it's pointing straight at Saguru. "Spoilsport." Kid melts out of the darkness to Snake's left, his own gun aimed at Snake's head. (With Snake now fixated on Kid, Saguru begins trying to ease Hei behind him, where if any shots get fired at least Saguru's body will block their trajectory. The boy clings like a limpet.) Kid continues, "Let's put that down, hm?"
Snake snorts, then, with a contemptuous look at Kid's gun, starts laughing. His gun remains trained upon Saguru, shaking a little with the force of his laughter but not enough to actually miss should he fire. "You think-- you think-- I'm going to believe that's not your old card-gun?" he howls. "You might have the police fooled, but I know better! You haven't hurt anyone worse than him," he clearly means Saguru, "through all your fake psycho Homage crap, and I'm supposed to believe that's real?" More braying laughter, and Snake wipes a tear from the corner of his eye with his free hand. "You've always been nothing more than a bleeding-heart who can bluff! Once a magician always a magician, eh, Toichi?"
But he's not Toichi, Saguru thinks. This Kid isn't who Snake thinks, and the gun is very, very much real.
Kid shrugs, the motion just barely visible in the ripple of his cape. "A tiger's stripes won't wash off," he says noncommittally.
"So they don't," Snake agrees. "Let's see them, then. Gems out, come on now, we don't have all day and my trigger finger's getting tired."
"The gems?" Kid's free hand fans up, color flashing between his fingers -- first both golden opals and the Blue Birthday, then a chunk of emerald the size of a child's fist -- before vanishing. "These gems?"
"And the jade ring."
"If I show you where that is, what's to stop you shooting me?" Kid asks reasonably.
"If you don't, what's to stop me from shooting them?" Snake snaps.
"I don't know." The shot and subsequent scream echo through the warehouse. "How about the lack of a weapon?"
"You shot me." Snake's clutching at his wrist, staring at the gaping gory hole through his palm. "You shot me!" A second shot sends the gun skittering out of his reach. "You--!"
Pssh.
Snake slumps to the stained concrete floor under a spray of pink gas.
Kid kicks him onto his back, then takes out a bit of rope. One makeshift tourniquet later, Snake's probably going to lose the hand but he won't bleed out in the next ten minutes. Then his gaze lifts to meet Saguru's.
"You're awake," he says. "Poo."
... Poo?
"We agreed, Amari," and the second twin slips into the light, the night nurse limp over his shoulder. The second twin is in slacks and a turtleneck sweater, face completely bare and not a stitch of Kid costuming to be seen. He drops the nurse onto the ground like a sack of rice, with no particular care nor disdain for how she falls, then straightens.
Bare faced. Both twins. No farce of being Heiji. ... And I'm awake. I've seen Hei. I know he's Kid's, I know Kid is twins, I know.
They have no intention of letting him live.
Blind animal panic doesn't deafen him to the fruitless rattle and bite of the chains, as he kicks at the wall and yanks at them and the too-solid pipe. It darkens the edges of the world but doesn't numb him to Hei's grip, or deafen him to Hei's, "Campari-- no, please, no--"
"No bargains this time."
"Please."
The pipe's too strong, the chains too thick, he's bleeding against the handcuffs but can't really feel the bite of metal into his wrists--
"Pick one to interrogate," Campari says.
"The woman," Amari replies instantly. "She'll have a higher pain tolerance but society's done half the psych work for us."
A gunshot makes Saguru curl sharply into himself, around Hei, frozen for a split second before he realizes neither of them got shot. (Snake's head is at the apex of a gory fan across the concrete, brains and blood and the smoking barrel of Campari's gun--)
Campari pulls a water bottle out (poison, it must be) and opens it, takes a drink (not poison?), then stalks towards Saguru.
(I'm dead.)
Saguru shoves Hei against the wall, up against the pipe, (maximum chain length I need that--) and grabs for Campari. His punch to the balls only grazes a hip; he misses Campari's nose, misses the gun hand, gets fingers clenched in a sleeve-- then it's like a mule kicks him in the chest, and Saguru finds himself coughing, breathless and pinned to the ground. Campari's got one knee on his sternum, the other on his free hand, he's landed so that the chain is pulled taut and he can't lift his cuffed hand, and Campari's (gun is gone) pressing a pill into his mouth and pinching his nose (he can't breathe he has no air) and the water bottle's pressing against his lips--
BANG
Campari falls.
BANG
Saguru twists his head, spits out the pill, sees the woman slumping (dead) with the gun still pointed at them. She woke, she shot Campari, she--
Amari shot her.
Amari is frozen with the gun aimed at her.
Amari is still armed.
As some inhuman, broken keen rises up from Amari's throat -- the man still frozen, broken, shattering before Saguru's eyes and every instinct Saguru has is screaming at him to stay still and not catch the madman's attention -- Hei bursts into motion.
"Get up. Get up!" He shoves Campari's body off Saguru, strips off his sweatshirt and the tee-shirt underneath, wads them and bundles the tee high against the back of Campari's shoulder, against the entry wound. "We can't let him die--"
Campari's not dead yet? Saguru scrabbles out from under Campari's legs, grabs the sweatshirt and packs it into the gory crater of the exit wound just under Campari's clavicle.
"--he's the sane one!" Hei finishes.
Oh god Kid Homage has been under a restraining influence this whole time.
"Amari!" Hei yells. "AMARI! Call 119--" Kid whines, deep in his throat, one sightless eye turning to them. "HE'S NOT DEAD YET. AMBULANCE. NOW."
Kid crumples to his knees. But... yes, there's the phone, its screen lighting up and Kid thumbing in the number. A pause. "Raiken 8-9-2," Amari rasps. "Ambulance. Gunshot."
"TWO AMBULANCES," Hei calls out. "REMEMBER SAGURU."
"... And one guy kidnapped from a hospital."
As blood seeps sticky-wet into Saguru's palm, and Hei orders Kid... Amari... to give more and more information -- crime scene, dead bodies, still armed -- that a rational or dominant Kid wouldn't be obeying, all he can think of...
... all he can think of...
... is that something about this seems so familiar, yet so off.
Who is this child?
Why is he so capable in the face of all this? With so much blood, chaos and death, guns and Kid's sanity and their very lives on the line, surely no child no matter how horrifically raised would be able to cope instead of make things worse. Surely no child...
Surely no child.
Is he really a clone?
-0-0-0
"What's going to happen to them?"
Heiji almost doesn't realize he's spoken until the words are hanging in the air between him and Saguru. He winces -- he knows the answer, it's prison as soon as Campari's out of surgery -- and his little fingers go white-knuckled around the edge of the plastic visitor's chair he's perched in.
Saguru doesn't answer for a long moment. He coughs roughly into fresh tissues, tosses them meticulously away while taking a few hissing breaths from the thrumming oxygen machine between them, then sighs.
On the other side of a thick wall of bulletproof glass, in the next room over, Amari -- wearing nothing but a paper gown (far cheaper and flimsier than Saguru's, it's from the suicide watch kits in the mental ward so it can't be used as a garotte) and bed restraints -- is staring, empty-eyed and catatonic, through the locked door to the corridor beyond. To the surgery suite where Campari is.
He looks painfully small and young.
"Prison, I would think," Saguru replies. "Or a psychiatric hospital."
Why are hospitals always so damn freezing. Excellent A/C system, though; Heiji didn't even hear the gust of frigid air that landed on him when Saguru spoke. "That won't hold them," Heiji bites out. His eyes are prickling with heat. He can see three, four, five, six walking dead from here, how many hundreds can a hospital hold? "They're too good. And," the kidnappers can't have tracked down Heiji themselves without knowing about the twins, but that one bastard was so sure about some singular Toichi, "they're going to want to hunt down whoever targeted them."
"Mm." Another few breaths. "And retrieve Heiji?"
What?
"Assuming they've left him someplace where he cannot obtain food or water on his own," Saguru prompts.
Saguru doesn't know. He doesn't... how in the hell--? "The fuck you think I am?" Heiji blurts. "All of that, and you think-- you--" Heiji rubs the thick of his palm over his eyes. Okay. Okay, what would he think seeing a kid obviously related to Saguru if he didn't know about the apotoxin? (Little brother, duh, unknown little brother, so the mom couldn't know and it'd be a half-brother--)
"Clone," Saguru replies.
-- or that. That's. Actually kind of a good guess, just whacked enough to be plausible without needing Hattori Heizo to be cheating, and it'd fit having Shi-neechan for a doctor instead of, y'know, a real doctor. "Afraid you're gonna meet your weird shit quota for the year," Heiji mutters. (They're all dead anyway, it doesn't matter whether he keeps quiet or not.) "'Cause I ain't a clone." Heiji glances sidelong through his fingers at Saguru and tries to smirk. It comes out a little sickly and lopsided, but it's close enough. "Hi. Hattori Heiji." He shrugs out a little 'ta-dah!' gesture. "Guess why the twins got interested enough to keep me instead of finish the job."
Saguru gapes for a long second, visibly rattling through theories and possibilities. "... There was no 51st COCOON," he mutters. Then he goes a ghastly shade of gray. "You-- but you-- he-- they--" Somehow, Saguru manages to go a shade whiter. "They didn't. Please, they didn't--?"
"Didn't what?" The hell's Saguru freaking out about? "Okay, yeah, they tried to kill me, it hurt like a bitch, and be damn thankful you spit the thing out because chances are you'd be nothing but a lot of goo and clothes on the warehouse floor--" That's not helping. What else...?
Oh. Right.
"... You. Um. Kinda saw the worst that they actually ever did." Heiji rubs the nape of his neck. "I kinda eventually figured they're pretty sex-averse. Dunno why."
Saguru swallows. "... I do."
"I mean, not that there weren't threats a coupla times. Early on. But I bit the hell outta Amari's arm, so." Saguru does need to know he's not entirely wrong, and they're dangerous. "The murder-everybody-else stuff worked a lot better. After they killed a guy when I got loose."
"Killed--?!"
"Which is why you gotta let us all go." Heiji twists, nose-to-nose with Saguru, and his hand lands on a loop of the oxygen tubing. (He quickly resettles that hand to free it and pinches the flattened tube round again.) "Before they recover enough to break loose and shoot their way out."
Saguru, the idiot, completely ignores that. "Who did they kill? Heiji?"
"I think you're missing the important part here. Public facility? Helpless people?"
"Hours of surgery left," Saguru counters.
A knock on the door snaps Heiji's mouth shut, and what he was about to fire back flees his mind as Saguru's doctor comes in. "Well, how are we feeling?" she asks, shooing Heiji off the bed and out of the way without actually touching him.
She doesn't touch Saguru any more than necessary through the ensuing exam, either, and most of that touch is from the stethoscope. It's painfully obvious that she's been debriefed about Kid's harrassment of Saguru and is extending that to Heiji.
The exam is short, and concludes with her briskly untaping Saguru's nasal cannula and turning off the oxygen machine. "Keep this up, and you'll be home by morning," she tells Saguru. "Maybe even tonight. We'll see in a few more hours."
Then she turns to Heiji, professional smile gentling into something truer. She looks like she wants to ruffle his hair, though thankfully she refrains. "Bet you'll be glad to go home too, hm?"
Whatever else she says gets lost in the surge of white noise. Home. "... Yeah..." Home.
They think he'll be going home.
They will be sending him home. To Osaka. To his parents. To... to...
He can't. He can't, the twins will kill them, he-- he--
He doesn't realize he's bolted until the door handle thunks under his hands, until he's flung it open and himself through and crashed right into someone face-first. Long hands catch him by the shoulders. "Hey, hey kid, whoa there--" Some lady with a thick American accent has him and he can't break her grip. "Where are you going?"
He can't stay, he has to go, he has to get out and find... find... he knows where one of their stashes is, the storage locker with the sweet sweet motorcycle, the code VTY1412, he can go there, they can find him there, they won't hurt his parents--
The woman scoops him up over a shoulder, pinning his kicking feet and hauling him back into the room. A quick jerk of her head, which Heiji feels in the press of muscles against his hip, sends the doctor off with an apologetic glance.
"Jodie-san," Saguru says from behind him. "What are you doing here?"
"Stopping an escape attempt, it looks like," she replies bemusedly. She plops Heiji back onto the bed near Saguru's knees, but doesn't let go. "What set him off?"
"Home," Saguru replies. "But truthfully, Jodie-san, why are you here? This is none of your business-- you won't be allowed to put any of it in your documentary, what--?"
She grins, sheepish. "Right." Out comes a thin black wallet, and she flips it open to reveal an unmistakable shield and ID. "Jodie Starling. FBI."
Heiji gapes, a months-old phone call racing through his mind. We don't want them on our asses... governments always need people who can do the dirty work... any agency's bad enough... they can't block us from finding the leak. "You have to go." He grabs at the woman's shirt sleeve. "Now, quick, before they wake up."
She blinks, then glances at Saguru.
"He's been like this since we got here."
Goddammit, they have got to stop treating him like a fucking ignorable kid! "THEY WILL KILL YOU BEFORE THEY WORK FOR YOU," Heiji howls. "THEY'LL KILL EVERYBODY. JUST LET US GO AND GET THE FUCK OUT."
"Language, Heiji-kun."
Heiji freezes, one tiny fist just centimeters from Starling-san's face. That voice. He can't. He... He can't stop himself from peering over Starling's shoulder.
His mother's standing in the doorway. At first glance, she looks... her kimono is perfect, a plum-violet robe and black obi set in strict clean lines, her hair in a matronly bun. But her face is drawn and red-eyed, one ashen hand clutching her shawl around her shoulders: she looks like she hasn't slept well in months (she hasn't, she obviously hasn't). "... Okan."
She nearly stumbles when she steps forward. The room's not large; she's hovering over him, taking Jodie's place, before Heiji can think of anything else to say. "... They said you'd changed," she murmurs, some stricken soft voice that Heiji's never heard out of her before.
Her eyes are shining and she's blinking too fast. Heiji swallows a lump in his throat.
"This..." Her fingertips are light on his jaw, burning through every scrap of thought left. "... This is so much more believeable than you running around committing crimes."
Heiji winces and looks away. "... I helped plant gas capsules on the kids at COCOON," he admits. It always turns out worse to hide things from his mother. Always. And this time... this time he doesn't know how it could get worse. "I stalked Hakuba Saguru and Nakamori Aoko so Kid would have pictures to threaten the police with. I broke into a hotel room and stole criminal data, and passed it to someone I think might've been yakuza. I--"
His mother's hand closes his mouth. "Lived. You lived, Heiji. No mother could ask for more." Heiji stares, heart breaking, because that can't be true, it just can't, and Shizuka glances at Saguru. "Excuse me," she says, before hitching up her skirts to sit on the bed and pulling Heiji into her lap. "Indulge an old woman," she adds, before Heiji can even pretend to struggle.
He doesn't want to pretend. She feels nothing like the twins, smells nothing like them, doesn't have a single edge of playfulness or insanity about her... she's just... safe.
Huh. "... I forgot..." Heiji mumbles. What it was like to be held by someone who wasn't terrifying.
She buries her face in his hair and just breathes, shakily. And if Heiji's hair is growing damp, well, that's just what happens when people exhale. (And if his own eyes are wet and the room blurring, no one is saying a word.)
-0-0-0
Within an hour of Shizuka's arrival, Hattori Heizo and four seasoned cops -- all SWAT, though they're in regular uniforms instead of body armor, and all of whom Heiji's known since he was in diapers -- whisk them away in an armored van. The drive back to Osaka is long, though Heiji, exhausted, falls asleep against his mother shortly after sunset, and doesn't wake until she's tucking him into his futon.
He falls back asleep before he can do more than blearily notice he's in his old room, and doesn't wake until well into the morning.
His old room hasn't changed a bit. It's a little cleaner -- he was pretty sure he usually has his homework spread across the desk -- and the school uniform waiting to be worn is for winter though he'd been kidnapped in July, but otherwise... it hasn't changed at all.
It doesn't fit him anymore.
He wasn't... wasn't that guy anymore. Someone with nothing more in his head than kicking ass and hanging out with his best friend. Kendo and motorbikes and Ellery Queen. (Crime was so much simpler in the books, the movies... somehow he'd only tripped over that kind, the dramatic locked-room and isolated-resort sort of stuff until. Until Kid.
The bad guys are so much worse than he'd ever arrested before.
The good guys are so much more gray.)
Heiji presses a hand to his forehead. Kendo and motorbikes and Ellery Queen. That's not who he is now. He's... Kid's. And will be for a long time, deep inside.
A dove warbles on the veranda.
Heiji's head snaps up. Sitting there, on the other side of the glass sliding doors, a black rock dove is fluttering and cooing over a letter. Slowly, Heiji shoves the heavy comforter off, shivering a bit in the cool room. The worn tatami crunch lightly under his feet as he pads the few steps to the door, kneels, and opens it.
Something up in the lintel beeps and startles the bird away, leaving the letter behind. Heiji quickly snatches it up and stuffs it under himself, just as his father bursts through the door.
"Heiji?"
"... I'm fine." His father's eyes are sharp but alarmed, taking in the emptiness of the room warily. "I just wanted some air."
"... Right. Of course." Heizo takes a step back, and Heiji lets his shoulders relax just a little as his personal space (as his personal room) is all his once more. "Lunch will be ready in an hour." And, awkwardly, his father closes the door.
Heiji waits until he hears his father's slow, weary footsteps pad heavily away.
The letter is a single sheet of thin rice paper, colored to look like parchment and addressed in green ink, Harry Potter style. It's held shut with a sticker made to resemble a wax seal, if the Tokugawa mon had ever been done in wax seals, and reads:
Yamaguchi Hei
Hattori Heiji's bedroom
Osaka
Inside, the letter (also green) is in two different handwritings.
February 15th
Heiji-kun,
Two boxes of chocolate: both bitter, tempered hard. It takes only a seed and re-tempering to correct the latter. This is perhaps not the most seasonal of openings... but then again, yesterday had no significance when the rules were being set.
The simple fact that we were caught has made us re-evaluate our situation. I suspect that we were programmed to self-destruct within the year without handlers, not so much as a failsafe as a method of vengence should we take any lingering disloyaties into our own hands.
Grandfather was a bastard like that, after all.
It's a pity it took getting shot to make this assessment. With this in mind, though, we've taken a job offer with the FBI. Japan, I suspect, is just glad to be rid of us, at least since we're going to a country already so deeply entrenched in their defense. We aren't expected to return for quite a while, but we will be returning periodically until the situation no longer calls for us. Whether that'll be due to our deaths or some other change in circumstance, we'll just have to see.
So you can expect to see us again! They can't stop us taking visitation rights. ^_^
Should you ever require our services, legal or not, the contact information below will be viable in five days, or you may ask for James Black or Jodie Starling at the FBI.
Take care of yourself.
Yours,
the Bitters
END