Akumu Ch. 7-1
Akumu Ch. 1 to 6
After the Kannon heist, things go quiet.
On the third day, a petite, short-haired woman in distracting rose pinks checks the moustached assassin out of the Kaga hospital's violent ward. She crushes the decoy spy camera while waiting for the paperwork to go through, steel-reinforced heel smashing up under her chair in the waiting room, all with a blandly cheerful smile on the sliver that can be seen of her face.
"Possible affectation for pink," Campari muses, curled up in a chair with hands prayerfully steepled before his face. "Handlebar moustache and a costume straight out of film noir. Explosives. Contract work, statement work, a sort of... of homicidal handyman, just skilled enough to make a layman think they're as good as actual professional contractors."
"No wonder we haven't heard of them," Amari says airily.
Campari frowns more deeply. "We created a power vaccuum, I think." The smile falls right off Amari's face. "Who's stepping into it, I wonder."
"Who isn't?" Amari counters. "It's gonna be a gang war soon enough. Let 'em pick each other off. We're through."
"I suppose so." Campari unfolds himself, and Amari plops into his lap like a very lanky and bipedal cat. "Heh. Let's keep an eye on the police reports though, hm? I'd not like to find a gang war by stepping into a hail of bullets."
"Knives," Heiji can't help but mutter.
Campari just raises an eyebrow and smirks.
The continued surveillance on the police station, over the next few weeks, turns up no signs of a gang war... or, at least, not enough of a pattern for the twins or Heiji to notice if one's starting, though it turns out that Beika has the highest murder rate in the nation, far closer to American levels than anywhere else in Japan. A quick records check proves that's been the case for at least three years, though.
"Something in the water," Campari grumbles, making Amari snicker.
"There was that one mission--"
"No," Campari snaps, and Amari drops the subject.
What the police surveillance -- which Amari will not stop calling the Hot Twink Fills Intellectual Gap channel -- does show is the slow trickle of evidence coming in from the COCOON party. Specifically, the tech department's ongoing work to try to compile something useable from the static that was left of the convention center's security tapes.
Turns out that deleting a sentient AI overclocked the systems and zapped everything, sort of like slicing a large weight off one end of a rubber band and making it go 'sproing!' All the electricity necessary had been dumped into the rest of the system for a split second when it suddenly wasn't needed to power Noah's Ark. No way Hiroki had known that would happen.
"Lucky us," Amari says.
"We're relying on coincidence now, are we." Campari looks like he's eaten a lemon.
Amari's eyes fly wide, and he puts a palm to his cheek in mock horror. "You mean you didn't avoid the cameras?" he gasps.
It devolves into a wrestling match that upends the sofa and gets Heiji firmly wedged between broad pectorals, and it takes a week to find everybody's shirts.
And then, one day in late December, Amari puts his fussy mother disguise back on and takes Heiji out to Ekoda, whereupon he hands Heiji a bright blue kiddie camera, folding Heiji's small fingers around it and tying the security strap firmly around his wrist. "Have fun, Hei-kun," he says sweetly, giving Heiji a little shove towards Ekoda High, which is in session this one half-day longer than Beika Elementary, hand smacking against his thick coat's back just a little too hard. "Be back by lunch, and don't let Hakuba see you."
Fat chance of that, Heiji thinks grumpily. Campari's tucked a little beeper into his pocket, some unholy meld of GPS and the Hot Twink Fills Intellectual Gap bugs at the high school, and it'll go off whenever he and Saguru have a line-of-sight on each other.
Why the twins aren't just taking screencaps off the HTFIG feed, he does not know.
... Strike that, he can deduce at least two reasons they're sending him a-spying. Three if you count 'teehee living dangerously is fun'. So three, then: the other two are 'keep people from realizing they've bugged the school/station' and 'corrupt Heiji into a life of crime', the latter of which is fucking working.
He plasters on a vapid grin, widening his eyes and hoping it comes across as playful and excited, and wanders into the flow of pedestrian traffic. Back and forth across the sidewalk, snapping pictures of anything remotely bright or shiny -- mostly holiday window displays -- Heiji slowly circles the school grounds. Every half-block or so, he gets a shot of the building, with a bit of the sidewalk's stuff, like road signs and electric boxes and guard rails, in the way so that it's clearly not from Google street view.
The beeper chirps, and Heiji ducks behind a parked car. This side of the school has only one level of classrooms, a line of curtained windows above what looks to be a rainy-day gymnasium, on the far side of the school's surrounding wall.
Only one of the classrooms has open curtains, and from here Heiji can just barely see the upper corner of a blackboard at one end. From where he was standing at the beep... the only way someone could see him through the window would be if they had a seat in the opposite windowside corner, one of maybe four seats in the back of the class.
Heiji climbs up onto the retaining wall of the house behind him, winter-bare rhodendron branches jabbing into his spine, and zooms in to get a shot of that back window. A smudge near the bottom of the grainy display might be someone's hair, but not Saguru's. Not that that'll make it any less terrifying whenever Kid gets around to using the pictures.
He jumps back to the ground, quickly takes a shot of a cat in the next driveway, and hurries on to reach a public rooftop with a view before gym class starts.
-0-0-0
Saguru cannot concentrate on the teacher's droning review, even with the promise of a mere two hours to go.
Something had derailed the Kid's plans at the last heist. The chances of that something being anything the police had done were laughable, at best... so what could it have been?
He can't stop picturing that odd silent movement of Kid's mouth and throat, right when the thief dropped the Nakamori disguise. It had looked like someone just learning how to use a subvocal recognition system, in that irritating stage where they'd made themselves impossible to lipread but had yet to master disusing their mouth. But who'd he been speaking to? Hattori?
And then there was the reaction. That miniscule flinch, the crack in Kid's armor and attention, the scarcest flicker of an opening that had allowed Saguru to tackle and actually get hold of him... the crack in Kid's control that had nearly gotten Saguru's throat cut on pure instinct.
What could possibly have gotten to Kid, in that split second, so that his attention and control would slip and he'd be left scuttling his plans?
... Is Hattori okay?
-0-0-0
"Your skeevy creeper pictures, oh lord and master," Heiji intones, tossing the kiddie camera clattering onto Campari's desk. Before he can get back out of range, Campari tugs him onto his lap and pins him in place.
"Good boy. Come hunt with me."
Heiji squirms away, because he does not want to know if it's a weird fold in the zipper of Campari's jeans or if he just gets off on whatever the hell he's looking at on the computer. Obituaries, it looks like. "Do I want to know?"
"Looking for a ten-years-dead Toichi," Campari replies. "Apparently that's Amari's muse." He clicks into another tab, a lurid headline and photograph of a charred stage. "This one's the best fit so far--"
Kuroba Toichi, world-famous magician, died in a freak accident during a show. Height, weight, and build are all unnervingly close to the twins', and his face... "Um." He could be Kudou Yuusaku's brother, and the twins have more resemblence to that pair than Heiji does to his own father.
"A fiery explosion in front of an audience of hundreds," Campari scoffs, "when it would've been so much simpler to arrange for a carbon monoxide accident one night at home."
"You're not discounting murder yet," Heiji points out.
"There are a lot of idiots doing my job."
-0-0-0
When Saguru finally reaches work -- snow flurrying in the beams from streetlamps, low clouds making the mid-afternoon seem like dusk -- there's a pile of inter-office mail waiting in the box to be taken upstairs. He takes it and shuffles through it on the elevator.
Memo, memo, accounting (probably another pithy demand to justify the addition of the Task Force to the budget), risk management (almost certainly a complaint about the cost of liability for Saguru), manila envelope... Saguru drops that one on Nakamori's desk, setting the rest of the pile in the man's in-box.
"What's this, then?" the man asks gruffly, rhetorically, picking it up and slicing the flap open. Another file slides out, this one clipped shut with a letter on top.
Saguru sees the distinctive caricature first.
Two colors dear to Saturn
in the land of maiden's birth.
One maiden blue,
crowned third of the world.
Three men of wisdom
born brightest celestia.
Four frozen dawns
look south, and south again.
On that fifth starlit house,
the high moon takes the queen.
Growling, Nakamori pulls off the paperclip, opens the folder, and blanches dead white.
Aoko on a crowded train platform, in her school uniform. Aoko at school. Aoko in gym class, breath fogging in icy air as she does calisthenics in her shapeless winter tracksuit. The front gates of Ekoda High. The classroom window, specifically the back window near where Saguru and Aoko both sit, with a student just visible inside. A tiny single-family home. A close-up of the home's nameplate, Nakamori, and the address. A Google map printout with the same address visible on the page and pushpin helpfully colored bright red. A second letter.
p.s. - Let's not block Hakuba Saguru from our little dates again, hm?
The desk trembles under Saguru's fingertips, edges of his vision going red. "I'll call and check that she's home, shall I," he hears himself say as if from very far away.
"I'll call." Nakamori slaps the folder shut, mostly hiding the disheveled stack of pictures once more, and shoves the cover notice into Saguru's hands so roughly it slices open paper cuts on the pads of Saguru's palms. "You nail this fucker."
Right. Focus. He can do this. (Now there's no choice--) and the world narrows down to the notice, nothing but pure thought.
Set aside the allusion to Nakamori Aoko, set third after work and the Kid in her father's life.
It's four days til Christmas, and the note is clearly seasonal from the Three Wise Men line, which also presumably would allude to Kid, Heiji, and Saguru himself: three geniuses, two rising stars in crime-solving and of course Kid Homage's own increasing infamy.
Christmas was, as a date, most likely chosen in ancient, pagan Europe as the first day that the sun visibly rose earlier and more southernly after its solstice (sun-stop) pause to reverse direction. Four frozen dawns puts the date of the heist as certainly Christmas, then, the fourth morning after solstice.
Gemstones, two colors, dear to Saturn... sapphire, shani-priya in Sanskrit, is one of three named distinctions in corundum, the third-hardest mineral in the world, but of those three only two count as precious gems, sapphire and ruby. Pink padparascha is inexplicably only semi-precious.
A sapphire, from India where the name had its origin. Presumably a very large one, third largest in the world most likely.
Saguru pulls up Wikipedia and checks the list of the world's largest gems. Number 3 is, indeed, the Blue Birthday, which is the largest sapphire owned by India. It's currently on display in a museum house in Yamate, the historic foreign quarter of Yokohama, the second city south (south and south again) of Tokyo. That must be it, the note has the word 'birth' for a reason, so...
Date. Location. Target. Exact time... fifth starlit house. Nighttime, sunset is currently at about 16:30, on Christmas it'll be at 16:34 pm. A house, zodiacally speaking, is two hours long; does he truly mean to appear at 2:34, or within the span from 2:34 to 4:34? Or does he perhaps mean to measure from one of the twilight times (17:02, 17:34, 18:05 for civil, nautical, and astronomical respectively), which would give a ten-hour count of... 3:02, 3:34, and 4:05 respectively.
Perhaps he means to count hours, not zodiac houses. The hour has its roots in Egyptian timekeeping, sundials dividing a sunlit day -- or half a terrestrial rotational period -- into ten units plus two twilight units, plus twelve full-dark decan periods for the night based on rising stars. (And there is that third couplet once more.) The same twelve-unit system was common in Sumer and India, as well... so perhaps Kid means to count simple hours.
Five hours from sunset, 21:34.
Saguru hisses quietly through his teeth. Got you, you utter shite.
The world buzzes back into existence, angry officers swarming Nakamori's little office and forensics dusting the envelope at Saguru's elbow.
"Otousan!" he hears dimly over the din, somewhere outside the office. "What has that--" Nakamori Aoko goes off into a spate of furious, blue-tinged language a girl her age really shouldn't be using.
Saguru swallows hard, because...
Heiji is a fait accompli, and Saguru can sort of distance himself with the fact that he and Heiji both had known exactly what they were pitting themselves against, turning to detective work. Even if they'd been expecting desperate murderers, not Kaitou Kid. Nakamori Aoko has no such choice. She's nice enough, though she tends to blow hot and cold towards Saguru depending on some incomprehensible psychological rubric relating to how much overtime the Task Force has required recently, but she shouldn't have caught the Kid's attention on her own merits.
Kid has to be counting on them noticing that.
How far would I go to shield her?
How far has Heiji already had to?
-0-0-0
Christmas morning. T minus 12 hours.
After presents -- the crowning star a replacement for the e-reader Kid had stolen, upgraded to the best available model and loaded with Saguru's missing ebooks and the latest Night Baron release -- and breakfast, Saguru and his father settle in with coffee, How The Grinch Stole Christmas playing quietly on the tv.
They rarely have any time to themselves as it is. Even Christmas isn't exempt from the demands of the law. But, for as long as Saguru could remember, he and his father have made a point of taking this single half-hour to watch The Grinch together... even if it's on either end of a phone line, six thousand miles apart.
"And the Grinch... the Grinch himself... carved the roast beast," Boris Karloff finishes warmly, and the music swells to the Whos' Christmas song, credits rolling.
Saguru's father takes the drained coffee mug from Saguru's hands, setting it and his own on the table, then leans back against the couch and turns a serious look on Saguru.
I am not going to like this.
Three whirlwind hours later, Saguru's packed tightly among the early New Years' travelers on the monorail to Haneda Airport, instead of enjoying Baaya's Christmas recipes or preparing for the Kid Homage heist. He has precisely ninety-three minutes to make his way through ticketing and security, but at least he need not check any luggage. (He spares a minute to give grudging thanks for the improvements in technology, that he may carry his full library and a computer in a messenger bag, and thus while away long flights without the necessity of sleep aids.)
The airport is stark and echoing with the crowds, all new glass and steel construction without any sign yet of wear. Saguru lets himself loathe it for just a moment, for not being his warm house or the familiar environs of the station, then squares his shoulders and heads off to the queue for his airline.
The queue's fairly long, however it's moving quickly, and Saguru steps up to the counter soon enough. He opens his passport and gives his name, and the smiling attendant types it into the computer. And pauses. Checks the passport and types again.
"Er, okyaku-sama..." Her smile falters. "Are you sure your reservation is for today?"
"Yes." Now what's gone wrong?
She types into the computer for a few more minutes, then, "I'm not showing any records, and I'm afraid there isn't anything more I can do here," she tells him apologetically. "We have a customer service office in baggage claim, if that's all right...?"
It's hardly her fault. "I will manage," Saguru replies, trying to sound reasonable about it. He's not sure how well it works, but he bobs a quick bow and stalks off in search of escalators down.
A weaselly little man melts out of the crowd at his elbow. "Going somewhere?" he asks in Kid Homage's voice, and Saguru startles so badly he nearly knocks over an oncoming passenger.
"And without saying goodbye," Kid mock-sniffles, one hand under Saguru's elbow to haul him back into place. "I'm disappointed. My tantei, running away, leaving Hei-chan to face the brunt of my attentions all on his lonesome..."
It hits Saguru like the proverbial thunderbolt. "You deleted my ticket."
"Deleted is such a crude term," Kid replies, gesturing airily with his free hand. "Boring, too. It was much more amusing to get your passport." Saguru goes cold. "I wouldn't try to get through customs with that one, by the way. I might've forgotten an authentication detail or two, you never know."
Now that is considerably more serious a crime. The things Kid could do with an authentic ID for the son of Japan's national chief of police... Saguru needs to deflect that line of thought. "You won't let me leave the country. Not even to visit my mother." As if Kid would believe the visit was so innocuous or temporary.
Kid sighs happily. "So clever. And stoic," he adds, as he lets Saguru swerve them away from the escalators. "Most people would be throwing a fit right about now. Makes a little thief's heart go pitter-pat." He flutters his free hand vaguely over his heart. "And anyway, I never did see the point of parents. Father was a puppet with two masters... or three, I suppose, depending on how you count... and Grandfather was a bore."
A terrible curse, indeed.
"Well, so was Father, really," Kid muses aloud, tapping an index finger coquettishly against his cheek. "It was all about bang-dead with them. Bullets and efficiency," he scoffs. "What is so efficient about going through targets like tissues? No imagination."
If they do another circuit of the ticketing floor, security will take notice. The ersatz Edo-period mall upstairs, all of a dozen tiny box stores strong, will make it easier for Kid to escape... but will also minimize the need for him to get creative in said escape.
The escalator isn't empty, but it's rather less crowded than the ticketing floor. Kid lets Saguru slip free once they're firmly between the glass enclosures, and turns to lean on the moving railing. "Have you ever modified an airsoft to shoot plugfuls of needles?" Kid asks, peering up at Saguru. "The heavy-duty tapestry kind work best, especially if you sharpen them properly. Grandfather didn't appreciate it much, though he really didn't get a good look. It's best to aim for the face on the first shot, see."
Saguru blinks. He did not just imply... Kid's expression is perfectly level, perfectly knowing, and yes indeed he did just imply he'd murdered his own grandfather, and in a way that Saguru will be able to track all too easily.
"Happy Christmas, Saguru-kun," Kid purrs as they step off the escalator, and he slips an envelope into the inner pocket of Saguru's Inverness, warm fingers brushing firmly against the thin cotton of Saguru's shirt. "See you tonight."
A second later, Kid's vanished into the crowds.
-0-0-0
The envelope turns out to hold another picture of a house and accompanying map.
It's the safehouse Aoko's been staying at for the last three days.
No one tries to keep Saguru from the heist after that.
-0-0-0
The Blue Birthday is on display in a historic building in Yokohama, a Meiji-period home with distinct Indian influence. It was built by a British administrator fresh from the Raj, and its gleamingly restored white stucco, large windows designed to take advantage of cross-breezes, and quirky meandering floorplan will make lighting the place ideal for Kid Homage's purposes.
The ongoing snow flurries will not help, either.
Saguru pulls his coat tighter about himself and stifles a shiver. There's minimal heating in the house -- it was turned into a museum piece while cast-iron radiators were still the fashion, and for budgetary reasons the system is only allowed to run just enough to keep the pipes from freezing and cracking -- and the influx of police and spotlights is doing very little to improve conditions. The spotlights are outside, melting the snow in their environs rather than snaking trippable cords all over the antique floors and blocking traffic in the small rooms; as for the police, their combined body heat doesn't balance out the gusts of frigid air every time an officer enters or exits the house.
Of course, the temperature isn't the only reason Saguru has to shiver. The Blue Birthday is twinkling malevolently across the room, the showpiece of the lady's boudoir. It's the exact shade of Kid Homage's visible eye.
"How are you holding up?" Nakamori asks gruffly, stepping up sidelong to Saguru. One of the trio of officers arrayed around Saguru tugs at the inspector's face.
"Admirably, I suppose," Saguru answers. Nakamori yanks at the three officers in turn, eyeing them like a dog considering whether or not it needs to bite. "I've yet to run screaming into the night, at least." Which he suspects would be a decidedly foolish move, now that he's caught the Kid Homage's attentions.
Nakamori grumbles something unintelligible, then checks his watch.
Saguru doesn't really need to, but his eyes flick to the heavy-duty dial. 21:33 and 28 seconds... 30... 32...
And that's when the first shouts go up, somewhere downstairs. "It's smoke, it's just smoke!" crackles over Nakamori's radio.
"Gas masks at the ready!" Nakamori snaps, matching word to action. Saguru pulls his own from his pocket, just as more yells go up.
Two squads, just near the top of the stairs to the attic nursery and far in the back near the kitchen respectively, if Saguru's got the echoing right. Nakamori's radio hisses and pops with men coughing, plastic clattering as they pull the masks over their heads. Whatever they're saying goes unintelligible.
Saguru's fingers are shaking, white-knuckled on his mask. The filters are only meant to last about ten minutes, enough to get out of the danger zone, but that won't work if it's gaseous fentanyl. The molecule's too large and will plug up the filter, cutting off oxygen and effectively causing the same -- albeit a considerably safer -- loss of consciousness. Either way, it would result in being unconscious in Kid's presence.
He can see the smoke cascading in slow ripples down the stairs, out in the hall... for all of fourteen seconds, then something hisses under the radiator and suddenly white smoke engulfs their room.
It tastes only like ice, in the scarce two seconds it takes for Saguru to pull the mask over his head. Hands catch at his coat -- three points, three, it's the officers not the Kid -- and as quickly as the smoke goes up, it settles into a swirling frigid river of mist around their ankles.
The Birthday's still there. Nakamori stomps over, opens the case and peers in with a jeweler's loupe, hems and haws. "Still sapphire," he finally declares. He eyes the pooling mist. "Trapdoors, loose floorboards--" he grumbles something indelicate and stomps at the boards underfoot.
They're all looking at the floor, Saguru suddenly realizes, snapping his head up. The ceiling is in fact the underside of the thick floorboards above, and Saguru doesn't know if it's nails or mortis-and-tendon construction. The former would make it possible for Kid to remove floor joists and slither in from above.
But the ceiling's undisturbed.
Where will Kid be coming from, then?
The ruckus over the radio continues, slowly fading into confusion. It sounds like every room's been hit by the smoke bombs, but that's it.
There's no sign of Kid.
Saguru's pounding heart slows, and he feels the cops arrayed around him settle, tension narrowing, focusing...
There's only one person who's gotten anywhere near the Birthday. They only have his word it's still the Birthday. And Kid's impersonated him once before already. Nakamori-keibu.
As Nakamori-Kid's brows beetle, the man starting to frown uncomprehendingly under the men's stares, Saguru drags his gas mask back off. "Step away from the Birthday, please."
"Hakuba-kun?"
"Now."
The tinest hiss, and this time the smoke that belches out of every corner of the room is dove gray. Saguru yanks the mask back on, tasting something sickeningly sweet as everything goes dim.
Someone catches him under his elbow as he staggers, pulling him stumbling towards -- that way was the door, right? -- away from Nakamori-Kid (???) into the gray where the floor pitches and yaws underfoot back and forth and swooping uuuuuup over his head like one of those classic cartoons with the anthropomorphic sailor in high seas and his head stays exactly in the middle of the screen while the deck goes spinny splashy swoop in great arcs around and around and his floppy feet are always on the planks and his body's perfectly straight pointing at his head and his neck somehow slides right around his cranium
oh bloody fuck the sweet taste is inside the mask
he lifts a Mickey-Mouse hand to shove at the mask, slapping air, then air again, then -- ow his ear and the cartoon shipdeck bites sharp corners at his ankles, ow ow ow ow fuck ow--
stairs
the world finally tips his head out of the center of the universe, something soft thumping his side from knee to mask, then spins again with the soft rolling under his legs and back and then sitting him up, thick warmth pressing against his spine and thinner tendrils curling heavily over his spread thighs and around his chest and his head falls forward and the mask falls away
That first clean breath blows the cobwebs out of Saguru's head. The second clears his vision, blurry shapes resolving into the sloping ceiling and white-painted balcony doors of the attic nanny's room. Streetlights cast a yellowed glow over the colorless walls, gleaming streakily in the hazy limp sheers over the doors' glass inserts. He's sitting propped up upon the nanny's bed, legs akimbo over the crocheted coverlet.
The limbs holding his legs open are clad in dove-gray, with gray suede shoes tapping a syncopated idle rhythm with their toetips.
"Kid," Saguru rasps. Something hair-thin twitches away from Saguru's throat, just enough for metal to flash in the very lowest periphery of Saguru's vision before settling back in, and Saguru goes very, very still.
That. Is a very long knife.
"I take it you've obtained the Birthday," he says carefully. What does Kid want? Why's he still here? (Saguru's legs are open and he doesn't dare move and Kid has a free hand. It's currently wrapped around his chest, propping him up against Kid plastered against his back, but Kid has a free hand and Saguru's legs are open.)
That free hand slides upwards, goosebumps trailing in its wake under the fine fabric of Saguru's dress shirt, then gloved knuckles tip his chin back so Saguru's head rests on Kid's shoulder. It bares his throat entirely to the blade, but also redistributes Saguru's weight so that he won't fall forward onto the knife should Kid. Perhaps. Take liberties.
He doesn't feel any telltale hardnesses at the apex of Kid's legs, there pressed lightly up against the sloped flesh over Saguru's sacrum, but that doesn't particularly reassure him. There are theories that Jack the Ripper was impotent and used his blade as a sexual proxy, theories that come from how often that's been the case with others in the subsequent century.
Kid's hand slips low once again, arm sliding around Saguru's chest in that horrid parody of a comforting hug, and he goes still.
Silent.
The sinister monocle is a second sharp blade -- so much thicker, so much safer -- in the curve of Saguru's cheek. The charm, which Saguru has yet to see the emblem upon, is lost somewhere in the folds between collar and nape, but with every breath shared unevenly between them, its chain plucks pinprick downy fuzz from the sensitive flesh angling back from his ear, just on the bared skin below his hairline.
A spotlight sweeps across the balcony doors, room going bright white for a split second, and the sheers go opaque, a drifting curtain of dove-gray. Kid Homage stands freely, all razor grin and shining glass and gloved hands nonchalantly in his pockets. But if he's there... who's still holding Saguru open with a knife to his throat?
Kid's knee lands on the bed between the unknown's ankles, which remain low on Saguru's thighs. "A wire, Meitantei?" he purrs. A second blade flashes in his hand, hooked tip sliding lightly between Saguru's submaxillary triangles, from chin to Adam's apple (one good shove upwards and the blade would bifurcate Saguru's brain), then lower (hyoid, thyroid, cricoid, cloth). With scarcely any effort, the cruelly sharpened hook slices up right through the practical nylon of Saguru's tie, and the knotted fabric slithers free and puddles upon Saguru's crotch.
"Such a pity, Nakamori-keibu noticed almost immediately when I switched myself for you. And here I worked so hard to do justice--" Kid giggles "-- to you and match perfectly."
Flick, flick, flick, plastic buttons scattering into the depths of the antique bedding. Kid leaves Saguru's shirttails mostly tucked in, pulling the two halves of his ruined shirt apart just enough to -- upon flipping the blade backwards -- catch Saguru's undershirt with the tip of the knife and shred it to his trouser waist.
The wire is stark black on Saguru's skin, easily visible even in this little light. It's mostly taped near Saguru's waist, with one almost perfectly flat microphone taped over his nipple, and when Kid's gaze lands on that his grin cuts just the slightest bit wider.
"Why, Meitantei!" he gasps in mock-scandal. "For me? You shouldn't have!" he trills. Then, "And where did they put the battery pack, shall I check?" He pauses, eyes flicking over Saguru, pausing at the very few places where nothing's visible and the unknown captor isn't touching. He turns his head to look at Saguru's lower legs. "Was the technician clumsy about it?"
"Perfectly professional," Saguru replies quickly. Too quickly; Kid looks back at Saguru's upper, inner thighs.
Saguru squashes his panic and manages a put-upon sigh.
"I did tell them that was a stupid place to put the battery."
"Hm."
Saguru has every sympathy for women right now. 'Like a piece of meat' has never felt so apt, nor has a zipper fly ever felt so flimsy.
But, instead of going for the obvious button-and-zipper (and removal of trousers down to the unknown captor's ankles), Kid simply slices Saguru's upper inseam, precisely over the state-of-the-art battery pack. It's half the thickness of a hip flask, the already-undersized kind they were selling at tween girls' fashion shops in London some five years back, and shouldn't have been visible in the generous cut of Saguru's slacks at all.
Kid does break a great many 'shouldn't's'.
As Kid rips the battery pack free and pops the wire jack out, then begins to do the same with the leads taped to Saguru's torso, Saguru tries to distract himself from how the Kid's fingers are tickling his waist, and how they're going in a lowest-to-highest pattern that's clearly leaving the nipple mike for last.
The easiest way to distract himself, is to think of something entirely different. Or as different as he can manage in the situation. He casts about for that something, and gets, "If you're... you..." he asks, because he suddenly has a very bad feeling about the answer, "then who...?"
Kid flicks a chiding look over Saguru's shoulder. "Didn't you introduce yourself, love?"
"Pretty sure he already knows," Hattori Heiji replies.
After the Kannon heist, things go quiet.
On the third day, a petite, short-haired woman in distracting rose pinks checks the moustached assassin out of the Kaga hospital's violent ward. She crushes the decoy spy camera while waiting for the paperwork to go through, steel-reinforced heel smashing up under her chair in the waiting room, all with a blandly cheerful smile on the sliver that can be seen of her face.
"Possible affectation for pink," Campari muses, curled up in a chair with hands prayerfully steepled before his face. "Handlebar moustache and a costume straight out of film noir. Explosives. Contract work, statement work, a sort of... of homicidal handyman, just skilled enough to make a layman think they're as good as actual professional contractors."
"No wonder we haven't heard of them," Amari says airily.
Campari frowns more deeply. "We created a power vaccuum, I think." The smile falls right off Amari's face. "Who's stepping into it, I wonder."
"Who isn't?" Amari counters. "It's gonna be a gang war soon enough. Let 'em pick each other off. We're through."
"I suppose so." Campari unfolds himself, and Amari plops into his lap like a very lanky and bipedal cat. "Heh. Let's keep an eye on the police reports though, hm? I'd not like to find a gang war by stepping into a hail of bullets."
"Knives," Heiji can't help but mutter.
Campari just raises an eyebrow and smirks.
The continued surveillance on the police station, over the next few weeks, turns up no signs of a gang war... or, at least, not enough of a pattern for the twins or Heiji to notice if one's starting, though it turns out that Beika has the highest murder rate in the nation, far closer to American levels than anywhere else in Japan. A quick records check proves that's been the case for at least three years, though.
"Something in the water," Campari grumbles, making Amari snicker.
"There was that one mission--"
"No," Campari snaps, and Amari drops the subject.
What the police surveillance -- which Amari will not stop calling the Hot Twink Fills Intellectual Gap channel -- does show is the slow trickle of evidence coming in from the COCOON party. Specifically, the tech department's ongoing work to try to compile something useable from the static that was left of the convention center's security tapes.
Turns out that deleting a sentient AI overclocked the systems and zapped everything, sort of like slicing a large weight off one end of a rubber band and making it go 'sproing!' All the electricity necessary had been dumped into the rest of the system for a split second when it suddenly wasn't needed to power Noah's Ark. No way Hiroki had known that would happen.
"Lucky us," Amari says.
"We're relying on coincidence now, are we." Campari looks like he's eaten a lemon.
Amari's eyes fly wide, and he puts a palm to his cheek in mock horror. "You mean you didn't avoid the cameras?" he gasps.
It devolves into a wrestling match that upends the sofa and gets Heiji firmly wedged between broad pectorals, and it takes a week to find everybody's shirts.
And then, one day in late December, Amari puts his fussy mother disguise back on and takes Heiji out to Ekoda, whereupon he hands Heiji a bright blue kiddie camera, folding Heiji's small fingers around it and tying the security strap firmly around his wrist. "Have fun, Hei-kun," he says sweetly, giving Heiji a little shove towards Ekoda High, which is in session this one half-day longer than Beika Elementary, hand smacking against his thick coat's back just a little too hard. "Be back by lunch, and don't let Hakuba see you."
Fat chance of that, Heiji thinks grumpily. Campari's tucked a little beeper into his pocket, some unholy meld of GPS and the Hot Twink Fills Intellectual Gap bugs at the high school, and it'll go off whenever he and Saguru have a line-of-sight on each other.
Why the twins aren't just taking screencaps off the HTFIG feed, he does not know.
... Strike that, he can deduce at least two reasons they're sending him a-spying. Three if you count 'teehee living dangerously is fun'. So three, then: the other two are 'keep people from realizing they've bugged the school/station' and 'corrupt Heiji into a life of crime', the latter of which is fucking working.
He plasters on a vapid grin, widening his eyes and hoping it comes across as playful and excited, and wanders into the flow of pedestrian traffic. Back and forth across the sidewalk, snapping pictures of anything remotely bright or shiny -- mostly holiday window displays -- Heiji slowly circles the school grounds. Every half-block or so, he gets a shot of the building, with a bit of the sidewalk's stuff, like road signs and electric boxes and guard rails, in the way so that it's clearly not from Google street view.
The beeper chirps, and Heiji ducks behind a parked car. This side of the school has only one level of classrooms, a line of curtained windows above what looks to be a rainy-day gymnasium, on the far side of the school's surrounding wall.
Only one of the classrooms has open curtains, and from here Heiji can just barely see the upper corner of a blackboard at one end. From where he was standing at the beep... the only way someone could see him through the window would be if they had a seat in the opposite windowside corner, one of maybe four seats in the back of the class.
Heiji climbs up onto the retaining wall of the house behind him, winter-bare rhodendron branches jabbing into his spine, and zooms in to get a shot of that back window. A smudge near the bottom of the grainy display might be someone's hair, but not Saguru's. Not that that'll make it any less terrifying whenever Kid gets around to using the pictures.
He jumps back to the ground, quickly takes a shot of a cat in the next driveway, and hurries on to reach a public rooftop with a view before gym class starts.
-0-0-0
Saguru cannot concentrate on the teacher's droning review, even with the promise of a mere two hours to go.
Something had derailed the Kid's plans at the last heist. The chances of that something being anything the police had done were laughable, at best... so what could it have been?
He can't stop picturing that odd silent movement of Kid's mouth and throat, right when the thief dropped the Nakamori disguise. It had looked like someone just learning how to use a subvocal recognition system, in that irritating stage where they'd made themselves impossible to lipread but had yet to master disusing their mouth. But who'd he been speaking to? Hattori?
And then there was the reaction. That miniscule flinch, the crack in Kid's armor and attention, the scarcest flicker of an opening that had allowed Saguru to tackle and actually get hold of him... the crack in Kid's control that had nearly gotten Saguru's throat cut on pure instinct.
What could possibly have gotten to Kid, in that split second, so that his attention and control would slip and he'd be left scuttling his plans?
... Is Hattori okay?
-0-0-0
"Your skeevy creeper pictures, oh lord and master," Heiji intones, tossing the kiddie camera clattering onto Campari's desk. Before he can get back out of range, Campari tugs him onto his lap and pins him in place.
"Good boy. Come hunt with me."
Heiji squirms away, because he does not want to know if it's a weird fold in the zipper of Campari's jeans or if he just gets off on whatever the hell he's looking at on the computer. Obituaries, it looks like. "Do I want to know?"
"Looking for a ten-years-dead Toichi," Campari replies. "Apparently that's Amari's muse." He clicks into another tab, a lurid headline and photograph of a charred stage. "This one's the best fit so far--"
Kuroba Toichi, world-famous magician, died in a freak accident during a show. Height, weight, and build are all unnervingly close to the twins', and his face... "Um." He could be Kudou Yuusaku's brother, and the twins have more resemblence to that pair than Heiji does to his own father.
"A fiery explosion in front of an audience of hundreds," Campari scoffs, "when it would've been so much simpler to arrange for a carbon monoxide accident one night at home."
"You're not discounting murder yet," Heiji points out.
"There are a lot of idiots doing my job."
-0-0-0
When Saguru finally reaches work -- snow flurrying in the beams from streetlamps, low clouds making the mid-afternoon seem like dusk -- there's a pile of inter-office mail waiting in the box to be taken upstairs. He takes it and shuffles through it on the elevator.
Memo, memo, accounting (probably another pithy demand to justify the addition of the Task Force to the budget), risk management (almost certainly a complaint about the cost of liability for Saguru), manila envelope... Saguru drops that one on Nakamori's desk, setting the rest of the pile in the man's in-box.
"What's this, then?" the man asks gruffly, rhetorically, picking it up and slicing the flap open. Another file slides out, this one clipped shut with a letter on top.
Saguru sees the distinctive caricature first.
Two colors dear to Saturn
in the land of maiden's birth.
One maiden blue,
crowned third of the world.
Three men of wisdom
born brightest celestia.
Four frozen dawns
look south, and south again.
On that fifth starlit house,
the high moon takes the queen.
Growling, Nakamori pulls off the paperclip, opens the folder, and blanches dead white.
Aoko on a crowded train platform, in her school uniform. Aoko at school. Aoko in gym class, breath fogging in icy air as she does calisthenics in her shapeless winter tracksuit. The front gates of Ekoda High. The classroom window, specifically the back window near where Saguru and Aoko both sit, with a student just visible inside. A tiny single-family home. A close-up of the home's nameplate, Nakamori, and the address. A Google map printout with the same address visible on the page and pushpin helpfully colored bright red. A second letter.
p.s. - Let's not block Hakuba Saguru from our little dates again, hm?
The desk trembles under Saguru's fingertips, edges of his vision going red. "I'll call and check that she's home, shall I," he hears himself say as if from very far away.
"I'll call." Nakamori slaps the folder shut, mostly hiding the disheveled stack of pictures once more, and shoves the cover notice into Saguru's hands so roughly it slices open paper cuts on the pads of Saguru's palms. "You nail this fucker."
Right. Focus. He can do this. (Now there's no choice--) and the world narrows down to the notice, nothing but pure thought.
Set aside the allusion to Nakamori Aoko, set third after work and the Kid in her father's life.
It's four days til Christmas, and the note is clearly seasonal from the Three Wise Men line, which also presumably would allude to Kid, Heiji, and Saguru himself: three geniuses, two rising stars in crime-solving and of course Kid Homage's own increasing infamy.
Christmas was, as a date, most likely chosen in ancient, pagan Europe as the first day that the sun visibly rose earlier and more southernly after its solstice (sun-stop) pause to reverse direction. Four frozen dawns puts the date of the heist as certainly Christmas, then, the fourth morning after solstice.
Gemstones, two colors, dear to Saturn... sapphire, shani-priya in Sanskrit, is one of three named distinctions in corundum, the third-hardest mineral in the world, but of those three only two count as precious gems, sapphire and ruby. Pink padparascha is inexplicably only semi-precious.
A sapphire, from India where the name had its origin. Presumably a very large one, third largest in the world most likely.
Saguru pulls up Wikipedia and checks the list of the world's largest gems. Number 3 is, indeed, the Blue Birthday, which is the largest sapphire owned by India. It's currently on display in a museum house in Yamate, the historic foreign quarter of Yokohama, the second city south (south and south again) of Tokyo. That must be it, the note has the word 'birth' for a reason, so...
Date. Location. Target. Exact time... fifth starlit house. Nighttime, sunset is currently at about 16:30, on Christmas it'll be at 16:34 pm. A house, zodiacally speaking, is two hours long; does he truly mean to appear at 2:34, or within the span from 2:34 to 4:34? Or does he perhaps mean to measure from one of the twilight times (17:02, 17:34, 18:05 for civil, nautical, and astronomical respectively), which would give a ten-hour count of... 3:02, 3:34, and 4:05 respectively.
Perhaps he means to count hours, not zodiac houses. The hour has its roots in Egyptian timekeeping, sundials dividing a sunlit day -- or half a terrestrial rotational period -- into ten units plus two twilight units, plus twelve full-dark decan periods for the night based on rising stars. (And there is that third couplet once more.) The same twelve-unit system was common in Sumer and India, as well... so perhaps Kid means to count simple hours.
Five hours from sunset, 21:34.
Saguru hisses quietly through his teeth. Got you, you utter shite.
The world buzzes back into existence, angry officers swarming Nakamori's little office and forensics dusting the envelope at Saguru's elbow.
"Otousan!" he hears dimly over the din, somewhere outside the office. "What has that--" Nakamori Aoko goes off into a spate of furious, blue-tinged language a girl her age really shouldn't be using.
Saguru swallows hard, because...
Heiji is a fait accompli, and Saguru can sort of distance himself with the fact that he and Heiji both had known exactly what they were pitting themselves against, turning to detective work. Even if they'd been expecting desperate murderers, not Kaitou Kid. Nakamori Aoko has no such choice. She's nice enough, though she tends to blow hot and cold towards Saguru depending on some incomprehensible psychological rubric relating to how much overtime the Task Force has required recently, but she shouldn't have caught the Kid's attention on her own merits.
Kid has to be counting on them noticing that.
How far would I go to shield her?
How far has Heiji already had to?
-0-0-0
Christmas morning. T minus 12 hours.
After presents -- the crowning star a replacement for the e-reader Kid had stolen, upgraded to the best available model and loaded with Saguru's missing ebooks and the latest Night Baron release -- and breakfast, Saguru and his father settle in with coffee, How The Grinch Stole Christmas playing quietly on the tv.
They rarely have any time to themselves as it is. Even Christmas isn't exempt from the demands of the law. But, for as long as Saguru could remember, he and his father have made a point of taking this single half-hour to watch The Grinch together... even if it's on either end of a phone line, six thousand miles apart.
"And the Grinch... the Grinch himself... carved the roast beast," Boris Karloff finishes warmly, and the music swells to the Whos' Christmas song, credits rolling.
Saguru's father takes the drained coffee mug from Saguru's hands, setting it and his own on the table, then leans back against the couch and turns a serious look on Saguru.
I am not going to like this.
Three whirlwind hours later, Saguru's packed tightly among the early New Years' travelers on the monorail to Haneda Airport, instead of enjoying Baaya's Christmas recipes or preparing for the Kid Homage heist. He has precisely ninety-three minutes to make his way through ticketing and security, but at least he need not check any luggage. (He spares a minute to give grudging thanks for the improvements in technology, that he may carry his full library and a computer in a messenger bag, and thus while away long flights without the necessity of sleep aids.)
The airport is stark and echoing with the crowds, all new glass and steel construction without any sign yet of wear. Saguru lets himself loathe it for just a moment, for not being his warm house or the familiar environs of the station, then squares his shoulders and heads off to the queue for his airline.
The queue's fairly long, however it's moving quickly, and Saguru steps up to the counter soon enough. He opens his passport and gives his name, and the smiling attendant types it into the computer. And pauses. Checks the passport and types again.
"Er, okyaku-sama..." Her smile falters. "Are you sure your reservation is for today?"
"Yes." Now what's gone wrong?
She types into the computer for a few more minutes, then, "I'm not showing any records, and I'm afraid there isn't anything more I can do here," she tells him apologetically. "We have a customer service office in baggage claim, if that's all right...?"
It's hardly her fault. "I will manage," Saguru replies, trying to sound reasonable about it. He's not sure how well it works, but he bobs a quick bow and stalks off in search of escalators down.
A weaselly little man melts out of the crowd at his elbow. "Going somewhere?" he asks in Kid Homage's voice, and Saguru startles so badly he nearly knocks over an oncoming passenger.
"And without saying goodbye," Kid mock-sniffles, one hand under Saguru's elbow to haul him back into place. "I'm disappointed. My tantei, running away, leaving Hei-chan to face the brunt of my attentions all on his lonesome..."
It hits Saguru like the proverbial thunderbolt. "You deleted my ticket."
"Deleted is such a crude term," Kid replies, gesturing airily with his free hand. "Boring, too. It was much more amusing to get your passport." Saguru goes cold. "I wouldn't try to get through customs with that one, by the way. I might've forgotten an authentication detail or two, you never know."
Now that is considerably more serious a crime. The things Kid could do with an authentic ID for the son of Japan's national chief of police... Saguru needs to deflect that line of thought. "You won't let me leave the country. Not even to visit my mother." As if Kid would believe the visit was so innocuous or temporary.
Kid sighs happily. "So clever. And stoic," he adds, as he lets Saguru swerve them away from the escalators. "Most people would be throwing a fit right about now. Makes a little thief's heart go pitter-pat." He flutters his free hand vaguely over his heart. "And anyway, I never did see the point of parents. Father was a puppet with two masters... or three, I suppose, depending on how you count... and Grandfather was a bore."
A terrible curse, indeed.
"Well, so was Father, really," Kid muses aloud, tapping an index finger coquettishly against his cheek. "It was all about bang-dead with them. Bullets and efficiency," he scoffs. "What is so efficient about going through targets like tissues? No imagination."
If they do another circuit of the ticketing floor, security will take notice. The ersatz Edo-period mall upstairs, all of a dozen tiny box stores strong, will make it easier for Kid to escape... but will also minimize the need for him to get creative in said escape.
The escalator isn't empty, but it's rather less crowded than the ticketing floor. Kid lets Saguru slip free once they're firmly between the glass enclosures, and turns to lean on the moving railing. "Have you ever modified an airsoft to shoot plugfuls of needles?" Kid asks, peering up at Saguru. "The heavy-duty tapestry kind work best, especially if you sharpen them properly. Grandfather didn't appreciate it much, though he really didn't get a good look. It's best to aim for the face on the first shot, see."
Saguru blinks. He did not just imply... Kid's expression is perfectly level, perfectly knowing, and yes indeed he did just imply he'd murdered his own grandfather, and in a way that Saguru will be able to track all too easily.
"Happy Christmas, Saguru-kun," Kid purrs as they step off the escalator, and he slips an envelope into the inner pocket of Saguru's Inverness, warm fingers brushing firmly against the thin cotton of Saguru's shirt. "See you tonight."
A second later, Kid's vanished into the crowds.
-0-0-0
The envelope turns out to hold another picture of a house and accompanying map.
It's the safehouse Aoko's been staying at for the last three days.
No one tries to keep Saguru from the heist after that.
-0-0-0
The Blue Birthday is on display in a historic building in Yokohama, a Meiji-period home with distinct Indian influence. It was built by a British administrator fresh from the Raj, and its gleamingly restored white stucco, large windows designed to take advantage of cross-breezes, and quirky meandering floorplan will make lighting the place ideal for Kid Homage's purposes.
The ongoing snow flurries will not help, either.
Saguru pulls his coat tighter about himself and stifles a shiver. There's minimal heating in the house -- it was turned into a museum piece while cast-iron radiators were still the fashion, and for budgetary reasons the system is only allowed to run just enough to keep the pipes from freezing and cracking -- and the influx of police and spotlights is doing very little to improve conditions. The spotlights are outside, melting the snow in their environs rather than snaking trippable cords all over the antique floors and blocking traffic in the small rooms; as for the police, their combined body heat doesn't balance out the gusts of frigid air every time an officer enters or exits the house.
Of course, the temperature isn't the only reason Saguru has to shiver. The Blue Birthday is twinkling malevolently across the room, the showpiece of the lady's boudoir. It's the exact shade of Kid Homage's visible eye.
"How are you holding up?" Nakamori asks gruffly, stepping up sidelong to Saguru. One of the trio of officers arrayed around Saguru tugs at the inspector's face.
"Admirably, I suppose," Saguru answers. Nakamori yanks at the three officers in turn, eyeing them like a dog considering whether or not it needs to bite. "I've yet to run screaming into the night, at least." Which he suspects would be a decidedly foolish move, now that he's caught the Kid Homage's attentions.
Nakamori grumbles something unintelligible, then checks his watch.
Saguru doesn't really need to, but his eyes flick to the heavy-duty dial. 21:33 and 28 seconds... 30... 32...
And that's when the first shouts go up, somewhere downstairs. "It's smoke, it's just smoke!" crackles over Nakamori's radio.
"Gas masks at the ready!" Nakamori snaps, matching word to action. Saguru pulls his own from his pocket, just as more yells go up.
Two squads, just near the top of the stairs to the attic nursery and far in the back near the kitchen respectively, if Saguru's got the echoing right. Nakamori's radio hisses and pops with men coughing, plastic clattering as they pull the masks over their heads. Whatever they're saying goes unintelligible.
Saguru's fingers are shaking, white-knuckled on his mask. The filters are only meant to last about ten minutes, enough to get out of the danger zone, but that won't work if it's gaseous fentanyl. The molecule's too large and will plug up the filter, cutting off oxygen and effectively causing the same -- albeit a considerably safer -- loss of consciousness. Either way, it would result in being unconscious in Kid's presence.
He can see the smoke cascading in slow ripples down the stairs, out in the hall... for all of fourteen seconds, then something hisses under the radiator and suddenly white smoke engulfs their room.
It tastes only like ice, in the scarce two seconds it takes for Saguru to pull the mask over his head. Hands catch at his coat -- three points, three, it's the officers not the Kid -- and as quickly as the smoke goes up, it settles into a swirling frigid river of mist around their ankles.
The Birthday's still there. Nakamori stomps over, opens the case and peers in with a jeweler's loupe, hems and haws. "Still sapphire," he finally declares. He eyes the pooling mist. "Trapdoors, loose floorboards--" he grumbles something indelicate and stomps at the boards underfoot.
They're all looking at the floor, Saguru suddenly realizes, snapping his head up. The ceiling is in fact the underside of the thick floorboards above, and Saguru doesn't know if it's nails or mortis-and-tendon construction. The former would make it possible for Kid to remove floor joists and slither in from above.
But the ceiling's undisturbed.
Where will Kid be coming from, then?
The ruckus over the radio continues, slowly fading into confusion. It sounds like every room's been hit by the smoke bombs, but that's it.
There's no sign of Kid.
Saguru's pounding heart slows, and he feels the cops arrayed around him settle, tension narrowing, focusing...
There's only one person who's gotten anywhere near the Birthday. They only have his word it's still the Birthday. And Kid's impersonated him once before already. Nakamori-keibu.
As Nakamori-Kid's brows beetle, the man starting to frown uncomprehendingly under the men's stares, Saguru drags his gas mask back off. "Step away from the Birthday, please."
"Hakuba-kun?"
"Now."
The tinest hiss, and this time the smoke that belches out of every corner of the room is dove gray. Saguru yanks the mask back on, tasting something sickeningly sweet as everything goes dim.
Someone catches him under his elbow as he staggers, pulling him stumbling towards -- that way was the door, right? -- away from Nakamori-Kid (???) into the gray where the floor pitches and yaws underfoot back and forth and swooping uuuuuup over his head like one of those classic cartoons with the anthropomorphic sailor in high seas and his head stays exactly in the middle of the screen while the deck goes spinny splashy swoop in great arcs around and around and his floppy feet are always on the planks and his body's perfectly straight pointing at his head and his neck somehow slides right around his cranium
oh bloody fuck the sweet taste is inside the mask
he lifts a Mickey-Mouse hand to shove at the mask, slapping air, then air again, then -- ow his ear and the cartoon shipdeck bites sharp corners at his ankles, ow ow ow ow fuck ow--
stairs
the world finally tips his head out of the center of the universe, something soft thumping his side from knee to mask, then spins again with the soft rolling under his legs and back and then sitting him up, thick warmth pressing against his spine and thinner tendrils curling heavily over his spread thighs and around his chest and his head falls forward and the mask falls away
That first clean breath blows the cobwebs out of Saguru's head. The second clears his vision, blurry shapes resolving into the sloping ceiling and white-painted balcony doors of the attic nanny's room. Streetlights cast a yellowed glow over the colorless walls, gleaming streakily in the hazy limp sheers over the doors' glass inserts. He's sitting propped up upon the nanny's bed, legs akimbo over the crocheted coverlet.
The limbs holding his legs open are clad in dove-gray, with gray suede shoes tapping a syncopated idle rhythm with their toetips.
"Kid," Saguru rasps. Something hair-thin twitches away from Saguru's throat, just enough for metal to flash in the very lowest periphery of Saguru's vision before settling back in, and Saguru goes very, very still.
That. Is a very long knife.
"I take it you've obtained the Birthday," he says carefully. What does Kid want? Why's he still here? (Saguru's legs are open and he doesn't dare move and Kid has a free hand. It's currently wrapped around his chest, propping him up against Kid plastered against his back, but Kid has a free hand and Saguru's legs are open.)
That free hand slides upwards, goosebumps trailing in its wake under the fine fabric of Saguru's dress shirt, then gloved knuckles tip his chin back so Saguru's head rests on Kid's shoulder. It bares his throat entirely to the blade, but also redistributes Saguru's weight so that he won't fall forward onto the knife should Kid. Perhaps. Take liberties.
He doesn't feel any telltale hardnesses at the apex of Kid's legs, there pressed lightly up against the sloped flesh over Saguru's sacrum, but that doesn't particularly reassure him. There are theories that Jack the Ripper was impotent and used his blade as a sexual proxy, theories that come from how often that's been the case with others in the subsequent century.
Kid's hand slips low once again, arm sliding around Saguru's chest in that horrid parody of a comforting hug, and he goes still.
Silent.
The sinister monocle is a second sharp blade -- so much thicker, so much safer -- in the curve of Saguru's cheek. The charm, which Saguru has yet to see the emblem upon, is lost somewhere in the folds between collar and nape, but with every breath shared unevenly between them, its chain plucks pinprick downy fuzz from the sensitive flesh angling back from his ear, just on the bared skin below his hairline.
A spotlight sweeps across the balcony doors, room going bright white for a split second, and the sheers go opaque, a drifting curtain of dove-gray. Kid Homage stands freely, all razor grin and shining glass and gloved hands nonchalantly in his pockets. But if he's there... who's still holding Saguru open with a knife to his throat?
Kid's knee lands on the bed between the unknown's ankles, which remain low on Saguru's thighs. "A wire, Meitantei?" he purrs. A second blade flashes in his hand, hooked tip sliding lightly between Saguru's submaxillary triangles, from chin to Adam's apple (one good shove upwards and the blade would bifurcate Saguru's brain), then lower (hyoid, thyroid, cricoid, cloth). With scarcely any effort, the cruelly sharpened hook slices up right through the practical nylon of Saguru's tie, and the knotted fabric slithers free and puddles upon Saguru's crotch.
"Such a pity, Nakamori-keibu noticed almost immediately when I switched myself for you. And here I worked so hard to do justice--" Kid giggles "-- to you and match perfectly."
Flick, flick, flick, plastic buttons scattering into the depths of the antique bedding. Kid leaves Saguru's shirttails mostly tucked in, pulling the two halves of his ruined shirt apart just enough to -- upon flipping the blade backwards -- catch Saguru's undershirt with the tip of the knife and shred it to his trouser waist.
The wire is stark black on Saguru's skin, easily visible even in this little light. It's mostly taped near Saguru's waist, with one almost perfectly flat microphone taped over his nipple, and when Kid's gaze lands on that his grin cuts just the slightest bit wider.
"Why, Meitantei!" he gasps in mock-scandal. "For me? You shouldn't have!" he trills. Then, "And where did they put the battery pack, shall I check?" He pauses, eyes flicking over Saguru, pausing at the very few places where nothing's visible and the unknown captor isn't touching. He turns his head to look at Saguru's lower legs. "Was the technician clumsy about it?"
"Perfectly professional," Saguru replies quickly. Too quickly; Kid looks back at Saguru's upper, inner thighs.
Saguru squashes his panic and manages a put-upon sigh.
"I did tell them that was a stupid place to put the battery."
"Hm."
Saguru has every sympathy for women right now. 'Like a piece of meat' has never felt so apt, nor has a zipper fly ever felt so flimsy.
But, instead of going for the obvious button-and-zipper (and removal of trousers down to the unknown captor's ankles), Kid simply slices Saguru's upper inseam, precisely over the state-of-the-art battery pack. It's half the thickness of a hip flask, the already-undersized kind they were selling at tween girls' fashion shops in London some five years back, and shouldn't have been visible in the generous cut of Saguru's slacks at all.
Kid does break a great many 'shouldn't's'.
As Kid rips the battery pack free and pops the wire jack out, then begins to do the same with the leads taped to Saguru's torso, Saguru tries to distract himself from how the Kid's fingers are tickling his waist, and how they're going in a lowest-to-highest pattern that's clearly leaving the nipple mike for last.
The easiest way to distract himself, is to think of something entirely different. Or as different as he can manage in the situation. He casts about for that something, and gets, "If you're... you..." he asks, because he suddenly has a very bad feeling about the answer, "then who...?"
Kid flicks a chiding look over Saguru's shoulder. "Didn't you introduce yourself, love?"
"Pretty sure he already knows," Hattori Heiji replies.