Chapter Text
The Tokyo skyline sparkled and shimmered as it always did, making a thousand promises to a million souls at any given moment. Promises of wealth, of vice, of fame, of escape, all within view, and yet eternally out of reach. A landscape of desire, casting its spell on all who beheld it.
It meant very little to Naoto Shirogane, though. She kept her apartment curtains closed much of the time to block it all out.
It had all seemed so straightforward a year or two ago. Her time in Inaba had lent her a confidence in herself as well as in her investigative ability, and years of balancing consulting work with high school studies had given her both a hardiness and a determination. Some time after her twentieth birthday, she had decided it was time to bring those skills to bear in earnest. She would come to Tokyo, establish herself there, and take on the biggest jobs available, the kind that would help guide the nation’s future and help the people who needed helping. Expose corruption at the highest levels. Pull back the curtain on the evils that had come to rule society. And do it all from the shadows, more or less. The original Detective Prince didn’t need public adulation, after all.
To begin with, it hadn’t gone too badly. She had exposed a few minor public officials in various petty misdemeanours – resignation matters, if not ones resulting in actual jail time. She had kept away from the headlines as far as possible, but her exploits still filled a few column inches here and there. She had been stymied by her early realisation that the Tokyo police couldn’t, as an institution, be trusted, but then that was part of the whole deal, wasn’t it? She had come to the big city to root out corruption, so she could hardly be too demoralised to actually find it. Besides, it wasn’t as though the police had ever been much help to her in the past. Obstruction and deliberate negligence weren’t, ultimately, so far removed from patronising comments about how she should be out trying to detect herself a husband (a line of wit that had started up almost the moment she celebrated her eighteenth birthday, as if some kind of dial had turned instantaneously in every police officer’s head from “should be in school” to “should be in the kitchen”).
Her first few grateful clients, plus a small injection from the Shirogane family funds, had set her up in this place, which she thought of, at least to begin with, as the nerve centre of her grand operation. It wasn’t grand, but she didn’t need much space, and it was centrally located at the heart of Shibuya. Rise swooned over the view on every single one of her initially frequent visits, though she was less enamoured with the corkboard that took up an entire wall to itself. But then, as Naoto had pointed out, the corkboard was what paid for the view.
It was some time around June of last year that Naoto’s suspicions had first been aroused. Between jobs, she’d taken to digging into the mental shutdown cases. It was a combination of idle curiosity and professional interest; they were a little too like the cases of Apathy Syndrome from years ago for comfort. The Kirijo Group, she knew, was conducting its own investigation for similar reasons, so she shared information back and forth with them where necessary. And it was while gathering information to email to Fuuka Yamagishi that she’d noticed the patterns.
The cases were spread out enough that it wasn’t apparent until you gathered them together, but they weren’t random. Their knock-on effects were substantial – businesses shut down, careers ending, even a minister resigning. And there was a pattern, just about. It was like one of those irritating magic-eye pictures – if you stood in just the right spot, and looked at it from just the right angle, you could almost determine some short of shape, if not a particularly well-defined one.
After arranging relevant news clippings on her corkboard, she placed a single piece of text over it to frame it all:
Cui bono – who benefits?
Bit by bit, answering that question became an obsession. Pin after pin found its way onto the corkboard, until it was, to outside eyes, an incomprehensible mess. A visibly disturbed Kanji, on a rare trip to the big city, had said that the intertwined pieces of string reminded him of stitching. She found herself poring over surveillance of the April subway accident late into the night. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for – there was unlikely to be a cackling villain on the subway platform – but she was sure there was some secret to be found. She even took to curling up in front of her small TV at midnight whenever there was even the slightest hint of rain. Just in case.
Early in September, Kunikazu Okumura found his way onto her board. He didn’t fit the perpetrator’s profile, not entirely, but he certainly was benefitting from some of the shutdowns. According to Mitsuru Kirijo, he was also thoroughly unpleasant on an interpersonal level, which was probably irrelevant, but did help to fuel her investigation – she always had reserved a special ire for misogynists. By the middle of October, she was certain he at least knew who the mastermind was, and was contemplating leveraging her reputation to get an interview with him and see what he might spill.
And then the unthinkable happened, live on TV.
She had been rather taken with the idea of the Phantom Thieves up to that point, albeit in an abstract, romanticised way. Against all the evidence of her adult life, she wanted to believe that heroes of justice could truly exist. She had managed to acquire a copy of the calling card addressed to Junya Kaneshiro, and had hung it above her bed, almost the sole piece of decoration in her otherwise spartan bedroom. There was something about the rhetoric, with its firm denunciation of evil, that she found rather appealing.
It didn’t hurt, admittedly, that Goro Akechi was so publicly against them. While she had wished Akechi well in a rare public profile at the beginning of the year, in truth the very sight of him irritated her, on an irrational level of which she was more than a little ashamed and of which she had told no-one. He was somehow too polished for her liking. And it wasn’t that she was particularly married to the “Detective Prince” moniker – she’d never liked it, and it was self-evidently inappropriate for her now – but somehow having someone else assume it felt like allowing them to take a small portion of the Shirogane inheritance. It was foolish to think that way about what was clearly a media-confected nonsense, but she’d come to accept, in a cartoonish research lab long ago, that irrationality was as much a part of her as clinical detachment and observation.
But Okumura’s death changed her perception of the Phantom Thieves as much as it did the rest of the country’s. She knew an assassination when she saw one. And she knew that the identity of the assassin was far less important than that of the one who’d ordered it.
It was at that point that Masayoshi Shido began to attract her attention, also much as he was doing for the country at large, albeit for different reasons. She had started paying a lot more attention to political discourse since arriving in Tokyo, and his increased prominence struck her as odd. Yes, opportunism among politicians was hardly unusual, but to this extent? Shido, an apparently loyal member of the Liberal Co-Prosperity Party for many years, all of a sudden seemed to have the apparatus of a new party, a whole new political movement, behind him in a matter of weeks.
Almost as if he’d been planning it for quite some time.
It all clicked into place very quickly once she began thinking along those lines. The government had been severely weakened by the mental shutdown cases, and the Phantom Thieves’ activities. Their record on law and order was in tatters, and their polling had dropped by several dozen percentage points since the beginning of the year, an almost unprecedented fall in such a short period of time. They had been criticised roundly and increasingly by figures like the squeaky-clean and hugely popular incoming governor of Tokyo, an early and vocal Shido supporter. Naoto couldn’t even begin to explain all of it, but at the very least it smacked of some manner of orchestration.
Then there was the infamous yakuza chairman, head of what was thought to be the largest such organisation in the country, who had been abruptly freed from prison towards the end of the year, along with his lieutenants. She had never established a conclusive link to Shido in that particular occurrence, but she thought it likely that Shido found himself lacking in underworld connections, or muscle, after the loss of Kaneshiro, or perhaps had even wanted to trade up. Kaneshiro’s operation was nothing compared to what the Tojo Clan could muster, after all. Besides, that had been around the time of the election, so perhaps there was some element of electoral fraud to it all, though she had found no evidence of that yet.
By the beginning of November, Shido’s smug face had been sitting securely right underneath the Cui Bono heading, attached by a dizzying array of string to everything else on the board like some kind of multi-limbed puppetmaster. At this point, she stopped taking cases at all. Given Shido’s impending election victory, she was on a timeline. This had to stick.
It proved to be slow going. Suspicions and broad linkages were one thing, but mental shutdowns and psychotic breakdowns, by their very nature, had a way of erasing associated evidence. Many of those she contacted – Madarame’s former pupils, students at Shujin academy – clearly knew nothing, beyond wild speculation, and those who might – board members of Okumura foods, yakuza patriarchs – were next to impossible for her to contact, and were unlikely to speak to her anyway.
At this point, the sequence of events was a little hard to piece together in retrospect. Her state of mind had not been the most robust - lots of late nights, searching for the silver bullet that would put Shido away, had undermined her wellbeing. She’d largely stopped leaving the apartment if she could help it, communicating with professional contacts mostly through phone and video calls. She suspected it was Yamagishi-san, who’d seemed noticeably perturbed by the state of her background, who’d persuaded Rise to turn up unannounced one day and clean the place up in a furious tempest. She’d never really been on the receiving end of Rise’s acid tongue before, and she had to admit that it had been a sobering experience. And that the sushi Rise had taken her out for afterwards was a lot nicer and probably more nourishing than the instant meals she’d been living on for several weeks.
In her near-fugue state, the reports of the arrest and subsequent death of the Phantom Thieves’ leader hardly penetrated, beyond a vague twinge of sadness. She had half-suspected this – the Phantom Thieves were either implicated directly, or an obvious thorn in Shido’s side, and either way their long-term survival prospects were not strong. She was a little surprised at the news that he was a high school student. She couldn’t help but picture Yu in his place, an idea that was as chilling as it was oddly fitting, for some reason she couldn’t quite place. Whatever the case, Shido’s operation almost certainly had information about them on lockdown, so it was unlikely that she’d find anything by looking into them. They were no longer part of the story.
And then, one night in the middle of December, she’d been hunched over in front of the news, only half paying attention to it as she pored over the briefing notes from the minister’s resignation in April. But she wasn’t so out of it that she wouldn’t notice when the broadcast was taken over.
It had been a heartening surprise, actually. She could remember smiling as the realisation hit her that the Phantom Thieves were still active. She had even begun to form the idea of trying to get in contact with them – perhaps her information would be useful to them. Perhaps they could even collaborate.
But then they had done it. They had announced to all and sundry who their new target was, and in doing so, laid bare his crimes.
It was as if the shutters had been drawn down around Shido. Suddenly, even low-ranking campaign officials wouldn’t give her the time of day. Detectives who had previously been willing to humour her requests wouldn’t even return her calls. Web-pages she’d been using to track Shido’s movements and comments over the last year or so abruptly went down, and even archived copies proved somehow to be garbled and incomplete.
And then, just after the election, Shido had called a press conference, and she knew what was coming.
Weeks of work, untold hours of sleep lost, who knew what kind of damage done to her mental and physical health, all in search of the definitive evidence that would stick. And then the target of her investigation had just… gone right out and confessed to everyone in the country at once.
It was hardly surprising that she didn’t remember the next few weeks very well. Her next really clear memory was of a long-scheduled but somehow still surprising visit from her grandfather in the middle of February. He had arranged for some new cases to come her way, for which she was grateful, but unfortunately those cases had been trivialities: a cheating husband who met his lover at the same time and place every week, a serial thief who wrote taunting letters to his victims in easily-identified handwriting. She could have solved such cases as a child, and they did nothing to take her mind off the overwhelming sense of failure that plagued her.
It was now the end of May, and she still had yet to take down the Shido material from her corkboard. She had become vaguely superstitious, as if taking it down might somehow bring everything back, even though Shido’s prosecution was, as she understood it, going forward with no issues. For a few weeks, she had felt vaguely resentful that she wasn’t being called as an expert witness, before she remembered that nobody in authority actually knew about the case she’d been putting together. And if Shido had confessed, there wasn’t much she could add that the prosecutors wouldn’t put together themselves. Which just made her feel all the more useless.
She had just picked up a new case, at least, and the client had come directly to her, which tended to make for more interesting investigations. It tended to suggest that the client had heard of her, considered her personally suitable, and, significantly, wasn’t going to make any assumptions regarding her age and gender. Admittedly, a missing person case could very much go either way, but perhaps it was time to start getting optimistic again. Besides, from the brief précis her client had given her, the missing person in question had led a rather colourful life, so there might well be an interesting investigation ahead of her.
She opened up the folder labelled Kazuma Kiryu, and began to read.