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This world is teeming with monsters.
This is something that Edogawa Ranpo learnt very young, at a ripe budding age before he even reached his teens.
They don’t look like it, oh no, but he knows. He knows.
He knows that behind their pearly whites are fangs that drip dark rid, and he knows that behind blinged-up ears are ones that point sharply upwards, and he knows that behind the two arms and legs are pairs of fours and sixes and eights. They can doll themselves up in pretty-penny jewels and speak in silver tongues, but a monster is still a monster.
They play their part with perfect poise while Ranpo fumbles without a script. He is the clown in this pantomime of beasts, the Fool in this Comedy, and everyone – the actors, the audience, the understudies and the directors – all with jagged fingers laugh at him and point.
—
When he hands the bag of candy to the cashier, he waits for her reaction and prepares, inevitably, for the questions.
“These gummies are a mixed variety in our stock.” Her eyebrows shoot up in surprise while she weighs the bag and taps away at the register, “yet you seem to have picked out only the red ones.”
“They’re the best flavour.” Ranpo replies with a grin. Too wide, too fang-less. She’s laughing at him, he’s sure of it.
She hums and hands him his candy. Then she leans forward and props her chin up with her hand, “you’re quite the young one. I’m surprised you’ve reached iridescence this early. That’s lucky.”
“Oh, I haven’t.” He fishes out the coins from his pocket and drops them onto the counter.
“Then how did you know they were red?”
Is she testing him? Because he’s a kid? Because she thinks he’s stupid?
He shrugs, “the label said all the gummies in total were yellow, green and red. Yellow tends to take on a paler grey compared to the grey belonging to greens and reds, which is darker. Plus, it’s February and there’s loads of Valentine's displays everywhere. With that, I guessed that the light above that porcelain cherub paperweight–” he points while stuffing his mouth, his voice muffled through the gummies between his teeth, “– was red. Then, all I had left to do was lift up each green and red gummy towards the light. Light travels easier through a medium of matching color. So, the gummies that allowed more light to pass through I concluded were the red ones.”
The lady stares, with her mouth hanging open before she has the sense to close it. Then she smiles, and it doesn’t look monstrous exactly, but Ranpo bristles anyway, “that’s some innovation. You’re sharp, kid. Can you tell most colors this way?”
Why is she acting so surprised? Like it isn’t obvious? Under her awestruck gaze he feels like a toddler praised for saying a whole sentence, or a puppy for rolling over, or a show pony for trotting a full circle.
He shrugs again, “most of the time.”
Her smile almost looks genuine from this angle. “I can only hope you reach iridescence soon. You won’t have to go through all this trouble every time you visit a candy shop.”
“I’m used to it.” He replies, a little sharply, “and I won’t reach iridescence.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
Because I can’t have a monster as my soulmate, and this world is full of them.
“Because I don’t want a soulmate.” He replies instead, and tops it off with a small pout and a humph. Endearingly petulant.
It works. The woman bursts out laughing. “Aw, I used to say that too at your age, and now look at me! You don’t know, kid, just how bright and beautiful this world is around you. I met my husband when I was eighteen, and it was when I realized I loved him that the iridescence took form. You’ve never seen a true sunset, and you don’t know how blue the sky really is, and you certainly haven’t seen a rainbow.” Her voice is dreamy. Most ‘enlightened’ people’s are, having ascended to the pearly iridescent gates while those like Ranpo are left to watch their glee behind a glass barrier.
“I don’t care for beauty.” Ranpo huffs again, and this time he doesn’t have to try to sound like a child, “I can get by just fine in this monochrome world.”
She laughs again, louder. Her head thrown back, her shoulders shaking.
Ranpo watches and wonders, briefly, what her hair color must be like. What shade her eyes are. And her skin and her teeth. But then stops himself, because he already knows the answer.
Her skin will be green, and her teeth will be yellow, and her eyes will surely be red, because she is a monster just like everyone else.
—
In his thirty five years of living in black and gray, Fukuzawa Yukichi has learnt to distinguish the shades that make up the oil painting of his life. The shade of human blood is one he knows most intrinsically, like the shackle of an old friend. Its repulsive shade of gray, mucky and almost black, twists his stomach even now. A shade that speaks of nothing but liquified pain and the loss of a life.
Living as a middle aged man without having reached iridescence isn’t exactly difficult, but it sure is inconvenient. More often than not, he doesn’t mention it. He isn’t one to feel self-conscious, per se, but the disclosure results in raised eyebrows, low whispers, infuriatingly sympathetic looks. Like it’s a thing to be pitied.
“You’re growing old, Fukuzawa-dono.” Ougai Mori had once told him, “there are programs, you know, set up for people like you. They offer travel packages to visit the world and meet new people, to try and speed up the process. Perhaps you should consider one.”
Fukuzawa refuses to even entertain the notion. This world remains the same whether in black and white or in color. The poor grow thinner as the rich get fatter. The world is a carriage carved in money and its wheels are oiled with the blood of innocents. Suddenly being able to see the yellow leaves and pink sakuras will not change this fact.
Besides, to be the fated individual soul-bound to Fukuzawa is a transgression in and of itself. His hands are greased dark with this blood, far too thick for any hand to hold. The concept of a bond written by the sun and stars, of human love in its purest genesis, of two splintered halves made perfectly whole — it’s laughable. It’s a far cry from the life he has cultivated for himself.
He has cut down countless lives and became the supplier to the devil. His humanity has been wrung threadbare-thin with every lick of soul his katana has snuffed out. He’s emerged from the flames a monster.
And monsters simply can’t have soulmates.
—
His long line of work has taken Fukuzawa across the vastest continents and oceans. He has ventured into the deepest crevices of tarnished societies, where politicians slink like cockroaches in the shadows. As such, he thought that nothing would surprise him much anymore. The memory of what he had for breakfast this morning drifts in the back of his mind alongside that of a man whose innards had been disembowelled and made into a garland before his very eyes. It all weathers down, in the end. It's all the same.
It was horror upon realising this indifference that made him sheath his blade and vow to never use it again.
Edogawa Ranpo, he soon finds out, surprises him nonetheless.
This boy is intelligent, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Intelligent by nature. There’s something about the matter-of-fact way he so readily exposed the secretary as a murderer. Like a child pointing out that the sun is round.
He finds himself at an impasse between begrudging admiration and prickling discomfort at how well the boy is able to read him. Under the weight of those sharp eyes Fukuzawa can feel himself being picked apart, from flesh to blood to skeleton, flipped over and examined and flipped over again. He can almost see the information being processed and filed away in Ranpo’s mind.
He wonders what color the boy’s eyes are. And then is startled by the thought, because he has never once cared about the color of anything in his life. But Fukuzawa simply wonders, simply wants to know. His insides are being examined and stored away behind sharp eyes, and he wants to know what color they are.
“I’ve been told they’re green.” Ranpo says through a mouth full of food. Fukuzawa hadn’t needed to ask. Of course he hadn’t. Ranpo had simply known. ”Which is a pretty color, apparently.”
“… Are you full now?” Fukuzawa says instead, eyeing the nineteenth bowl Ranpo has emptied up in two swallows.
His wallet aches.
“Yes.” Ranpo leans back and belches loudly.
“Good.” Fukuzawa moves to pick up the bill, “good work today–”
Ranpo’s small hand, sliding over his own, stops him. “That’s it?”
His eyes flicker over to the boy, who’s leaning forward in his seat imploringly.
“You’re talking to a fourteen-year-old boy who’s lost his parents, his job and his future. That’s all you’ve got?”
Somehow, Fukuzawa is not surprised Ranpo has mastered the role of a puppeteer of heartstrings. Unfortunately for Fukuzawa, it works all too well on his bleeding heart.
He pulls out a card from the folds of his yukata, “my contact information is here. Security police. I’m basically a bodyguard. Contact me if you’re ever in trouble and the first time I help you will be free of charge.”
Wordlessly, Ranpo plucks the card from his hand.
He stands up and walks away.
Fukuzawa blinks at the child’s retreating, hunched form before realizing he’s left alone with all eighteen bowls and a bill to pay.
“Boy–” he calls out sharply, but a trill, familiar ringing cuts him off midway. He pulls out his phone from his sleeves and presses it to his ear, “yes?”
“Please help me, Mister Bodyguard–”
Perhaps taking this boy had been a bad idea after all.
—
There are a number of things Ranpo finds out about Fukuzawa Yukichi within a few hours of their initial meeting; that he is middle aged, has a couple of skeletons buried in his closet and has never seen the color of blood despite having hands irreversibly stained by it. Not that Ranpo should care. Iridescence takes its own pace with people. Some, he’s heard, don’t experience it until their skin have sagged and backs have hunched and their vision has long faded into curtained blurry tunnels.
The man doesn’t tell him any of this outright, of course, but it’s obvious. The way he sniffs his food before eating it to check that it’s still good; the way his gaze flicks to his watch too often for a man who should be able to tell the general passing of their time as it draws closer and closer to sunset; and the way he doesn’t immediately gape like most ‘enlightened’ people do when Ranpo opens his eyes which, he is told, are startlingly green.
But above all, the man is kind. And for once, Ranpo concludes this not by logic, but by a guttural instinct. When he looks into the man’s gray face, observes the creases around his eyes, the long strands of hair curling at his neck, and the stern yet curious way he watches Ranpo… he doesn’t see a beast. He sees a soft old man whose bloodied steel drips crimson from his own bleeding heart, who likes fig tea and cats and helping out orphans who are lost and untethered in this world like Ranpo.
He does not like that he doesn’t see a monster. It’s almost laughable. Of all the monsters he’s met in his life, it’s the one who’s actually sunk his claws into people that has Ranpo feeling like a safe little lamb. How absurd.
Still, he follows the man along when he says he’ll help Ranpo find work, even if he knows from the second he steps into that theatre that that red-haired woman has no plans of hiring him.
He stays by his side through it all. They visit the dressing room, they question the actors, and then soon they’re sitting side by side in the audience waiting for the production to start.
The play bothers Ranpo in a way that itches his very bones. It’s not the message, or the acting, or the plot, or the ambiance or whatever else is supposed to draw people to these kinds of things… but because with every minute that ticks by—
He grows more and more confused.
This is a familiar feeling, to be a fish in deep waters with no shoal to accept him.
The plot isn’t complex. Not at all. If anything, it’s almost too simple. It’s so obvious. It’s so painfully obvious, so why does everyone around him look so… surprised? Why do they gasp at every plot twist and stare in unwavering rapture up at the scene, when the ending is so, so, so obvious?
Ranpo doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand what everyone else sees that he doesn’t.
If iridescence is one form of enlightenment, there must be another one that Ranpo is missing, because everyone around him seems to have cupped in their hands some golden ratio, some perfect equation that keeps their world spinning and their ones above their twos, while Ranpo is left with empty palms as every enlightened monster sees a play – sees a world – so very different from his own.
He just doesn’t understand.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
Fukuzawa Yukichi’s eyes flicker towards him.
“People here are paying to watch this, right?” His voice comes out far more stable than he feels, “Then why doesn’t anyone get upset at being forced to sit through a show with such an obvious ending?”
Fukuzawa frowns down at him. Him as well. He also knows. Everyone except Ranpo.
Ranpo stands up and points up at the stage, “he’s the murderer, isn’t he? You can tell in the first five minutes.” It’s obvious. It’s so obvious. Why does no one care?!
Fukuzawa grabs his arm and yanks him back down, “knock it off!”
“Why?” His voice breaks. Blood makes its rounds up to his head and into his ears, again and again and again. The space around him becomes an echo chamber. He can hear the actors' voices, but their grandiloquence becomes hideously loud. They’re growling. They’re roaring. Their words morph into a language Ranpo cannot understand.
He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand.
“Why,” Ranpo whispers, “is everyone watching this play without complaining?”
If he had been looking up, he’d have seen the way Fukuzawa gaped. He’d have seen the shades of trepidation that sharpened his features. He’d have seen the unease and the worry and most of all the confusion at Ranpo’s statement.
But he keeps his head bent low. The monsters are loud, they’re so loud. “There’s something everyone else gets that I don’t. I don’t get it. I’m scared.”
Why not me? He wants to scream. Why everyone but me?
“I’m all alone,” Ranpo chokes out, “living in a world full of monsters. And I’m scared.”
The growling stops, then, very suddenly, and the lights in the theatre turn back on.
Intermission time.
“Come.” Fukuzawa stands up. “I’ll give you the answer you’re looking for.”
Once they’re out of the stifling atmosphere, sitting on a sofa on the second floor overlooking the foyer, he asks him:
“Have your parents said anything about your talents?”
“Talents?” Ranpo glances at him, “I wish I had talent. It wouldn’t be so hard to find work.”
“No.” Fukuzawa says firmly. “You have a special talent.”
Ranpo blinks.
“You were right about me.” The man continues, “I used to carry a sword at my waist. I was known as the Master of Swords, even within the government’s ranks.” His gaze glazes over, like a misted-over moon, as he stares ahead at what can only be a distant memory, “my sword would bring peace to the nation… or so I sincerely believed. That was why I killed. Assassination was far too easy.” A shuddering inhale. “I only became fearful when I noticed I began to eagerly await the next assassination. I could no longer tell whether I was murdering for my country or for the moment of the kill… And that’s when I decided never to wield a sword again.”
Ranpo gazes at him. It’s not like he didn’t know most of this. It was obvious, and the rest had been pure deduction. But the way Fukuzawa is speaking is like he is offering up a precious moonstone of secrecy that no one else should know. Except that doesn’t add up, because everyone does know. Because it’s obvious.
As though reading Ranpo’s mind, Fukuzawa says, “no one else has ever learnt of my past occupation. Only you. And you guessed the murderer very early on in the play. I suspect you are the only one who could have gleaned the answer so quickly.”
As if.
“Have you ever thought,” Fukuzawa turns his head a fraction, enough to gaze at Ranpo between his swaying strands of hair, “that the people around you are all fools? That they’re all clueless idiots?”
Ranpo doesn’t reply.
“Listen and remember this: you are special, and the rest of us are all fools. Including me.”
He’s a liar. A liar. Why do adults feel the need to abate him with lies like this? The same lies he’s heard from his parents, from teachers, from doctors behind cold clinic walls.
“The reason you are alone is because you have a special talent. An Ability.”
“An ability?”
“But Abilities need to be controlled. For you to pretend not to notice your talent is the same as my past self swinging a sword in pursuit of blood.”
His words are absurd. More than absurd, they’re downright lies.
But they ring with a halo of truth Ranpo cannot ignore. But even so, he fights it anyway.
“I’m the only one who’s special?” He scoffs, “how can that even happen? Look at all the people in this city.”
“It’s because you’re Gifted.” The man replies with an air of uncompromising certainty, standing up and looking out over the balcony with his back to Ranpo, “your Ability allows you to determine the truth at a single glance. And it is because of your special Ability,” he glances back at Ranpo who is still slumped in a daze on the sofa, “that the people around you look like monsters.”
Liar. Ranpo hears a voice scream. Liar liar liar. But it’s not his voice of reason. It doesn’t stem from the webs of logic in his mind. It’s guttural. It’s wretchedly raw. It’s the voice of a child, buried in the space between his organs and struggling to breathe, unwilling to let an adult lie to his face again.
Liar. The child screams, in frantic circles.
“You must control your Ability.” Fukuzawa says, “and I’ll teach you how. With my help, you’ll be able to produce your special Ability on command.” The man pulls out something from the folds of his clothes and holds them out. “Here.”
“… A pair of glasses?”
“These were handed down by a nobleman from Kyoto. When you wear them, your ability will be activated and the truth will come to you instantly.” He pauses, before also adding, rather like a chef adding a pinch of salt to his dish, “and, when you aren’t wearing them, you will be no longer bothered by the foolishness of others.”
Ranpo takes the glasses. Examines them. Flips them over. The lenses catch the light, rectangular and thick. They look ordinary. And they are ordinary.
The world looks the same even through the lenses. “I don’t see a difference.”
“Ha!” Fukuzawa lurches forward, stomping on the ground, startling Ranpo enough to knock him back onto the sofa.
“Now, use your glasses to control your special ability!”
The child’s voice is still screaming, somewhere in the back of his muddied mind, but it’s growing quieter and quieter.
He’s still lying. Ranpo is certain.
… He’s certain. Absolutely. Undeniably.
…But…
But what if Fukuzawa isn’t lying?
Ranpo slumps forward, “control my special ability?”
“Correct. Cut open the truth with your special ability and banish evil from the darkness in which it lurks, Gifted Detective!”
Gifted Detective.
“From today on,” Fukuzawa Yukichi declares, “you are the world’s best detective.”
“The world’s… best… detective…”
“Isn’t everything clear now?“ Not once does he look away. Not once does he look at Ranpo with anything other than stern, terrifying sincerity. “The world isn’t terrifying at all. No one is a monster. They’re simply far more foolish than you are.”
No…
“No one bears any ill will towards you. They’re just fools. Mere children who don’t know how to see the world.”
“…Children?”
“Yes.”
“…Everyone is just a fool?”
“Yes.”
“…They actually don’t know anything?”
“That’s right.”
The world is a soaring carousel circling around him, their crowd of spectators the gleaming glowing horses. He can’t seem to find his bearings. His head spins.
And the man’s words… the man’s words…
“But…”
“Edogawa Ranpo!”
It thunders down on his drifting misty mind. Ranpo startles, jolting upright.
“The glasses have already accepted you.” Fukuzawa intones, with deceptively gentle harshness. “All that’s left is for you to open your mind.”
All that is left is to open his mind.
This creepy world… overridden with monsters that crawl in the cracks between the alleys and speak to him in his dreams. The beasts he brushes shoulders with in the streets and who speak to him behind counters. Their gazes that press like cold steel joints as he passes. The niggling feeling that eats at his skin, because they all know something that he doesn’t.
Ranpo has spent his whole life living as a white pawn on the black side of this chess board, and now Fukuzawa is telling him he is a diamond queen instead?
“All that suffering.” His voice is a distant echo that rebounds in senseless circles through a tunnel that has no end in sight. “It wasn’t because there was something wrong with me, but because there’s something wrong with the people around me?” He looks up. At the only bright light at the end of this dark abyss. “Is that what that means?”
Fukuzawa nods.
Ranpo‘s throat constricts. His cheekbones become heavy, he can feel the tears threatening to burst. But he doesn’t want to cry. He doesn’t want the figure of Fukuzawa to ripple away behind tearful blurriness. He doesn’t want the man to ever stop looking at him.
The only monster who Ranpo hasn’t wanted to run away from.
The only monster who cared enough to not kick him to the curb at any opportunity.
The only monster with blood on his hands who doesn’t want to kill again.
“They are all clueless children.” Fukuzawa’s voice smoothens into a soothing murmur, “would a baby who can’t even hold its head up ever despise its mother?”
He’s right. It’s logical. It makes perfect sense.
He’s right.
No one…
No one has ever despised him. No one has ever despised him.
And then—
Something happens.
No, not something. It happens.
The world becomes a kaleidoscope. The fabric of space around him splinters into a billion trillion dazzling shards.
The fabric of reality is unwoven before his very eyes, like the rotting of a bamboo forest or, no, like the ascension of something higher, something celestial.
The edges of his vision begin to change first, as shades of black and white bleed away into unfamiliar brilliance.
There’s so much. There’s so much of it all. His eyes can’t seem to drink it all up.
Fukuzawa still speaks to him, his lips are moving, but all Ranpo does is gaze in wonder at the strange color of the scarf around his neck and the darker, more mellow shade of the clothes hanging on his back. The pale color of his skin. The icy color of his eyes.
Ranpo doesn’t have a name for all of these different hues and shades. But when he catches his gleaming reflection in the gilded silver knob of the sofa, he sees that his eyes are the same color as Fukuzawa's clothing. Green, he’s been told. Therefore Fukuzawa is wearing green. And really, it suits him.
Ranpo doesn’t know what above all is the most exciting. That he has reached iridescence and found his soulmate, or that he has just realized that the world isn’t full of monsters at all.
Ranpo is just better – better! – than everyone!
Tragedy has been woven between the tapestry of Ranpo’s life ever since he can remember. But now he feels everything has been flipped over. The world around him seems to breathe, the colors speak to him in smiles and congratulations. He feels his soul tug — perhaps, because he has just reached iridescence — towards the man who has just pulled him from the darkness.
The man who is looking at him curiously. Frowning. Not like one whose world is being deconstructed and reconstructed around him.
So he hasn’t yet reached iridescence yet, Ranpo concludes. That is also normal. People reach it at different times. It is only a matter of time before something triggers it for him as well.
Which means Ranpo will help! Because he is his soulmate! Because Fukuzawa will only be able to see this beautiful world because of Ranpo, so he won’t ever leave him! He’ll help with this special Ability of his!
He’ll make him proud.
Ranpo begins to laugh. Low, quiet chuckles, before bursting out louder. Hysterical. He is cackling, “aha! Ahaha! Ahahahahaha!”
He rushes past Fukuzawa with a running leap, soaring until he reaches the top of the stairs in the foyer, facing the sea of ignorants. Beasts? How could he have possibly thought that? They’re not beasts. They’re babies. They’re just babies!
“I see!” Ranpo declares, hands on hips, “the world isn’t creepy at all! You’re all just stupid idiots!”
They stare at him quite like shocked pufferfish. It’s really quite adorable. Why had he found this all scary, again?
“I have to protect all of these silly children!”
“Ranpo.” Fukuzawa lands behind him, “stop–”
“You should go back to your seat.” Ranpo tells him.
“What?”
“The enemy’s goals, their plans. I can see everything.” He steps closer with a wide grin. Fukuzawa looks quite concerned now, but Ranpo can’t help it. His stuffing has been replaced with clouds. He could float up through the ceiling and to the sun and stars.
Looking at Fukuzawa, this strange new saturated world glows even brighter.
Yes. Yes. He’ll solve this murder. He’ll make him proud.
—
The first time Fukuzawa had experienced True Fear, that cold flame of visceral dread licking his skin and filling his bones with ice water, was the first time he had killed a man. What color is blood? He cannot tell you. But what he can tell you is the stench – putrid, like the fetid breath of a rotting beast. He can tell you its texture – slippy, sticky, warm and dry. He can tell you its taste – metallic, sour, leaving a dry and bitter aftertaste.
Experience dulls the senses, as they say. The sight and stench of murder still sickens him, but less for the sin and more for the sinner he had become.
But here, as he walks through silent stone walls passing cells on all sides, with a hammering heart and Gen’ichiro at his heels, the cold flames of True Fear close in on him again.
Finally, he stops in front of the cell he had been looking for.
“How do you like your cell?”
The young boy doesn’t turn around. “Not bad. I told them I was bored so they gave me this.” He holds up a book. The holy scripture. “I guess they’re telling me to repent.”
“I’m here with a question.” Fukuzawa speaks slowly, “have you accepted any requests to capture a Gifted lately?”
“I can’t talk about my clients.”
“It doesn’t have to be about a client. Have you heard anything recently about capturing a Gifted alive?”
No answer.
“The requests may have come from someone who calls themselves V.”
He does not miss the barely repressed shudder that shakes the boy’s frame. “I don’t want to talk about them. Do you know what their objective is?”
“No.”
“It’s justice.”
Fukuzawa’s breath hitches.
“Killing for money, killing out of spite. Those things make sense to me.” The boy’s words rebound around the cell in a sinister, sibilant symphony, “but to them, the killing is a form of justice. It doesn’t matter who you kill. I don’t want to get involved in those types.”
“I’m not ordering you to fight them.” He tells the boy. But the room has darkened around the edges, and a sudden familiar stench of decay lingers in the air. His empty hands bear a ghost of the weight of a bloodied sabre. Still, his voice remains steady. “An acquaintance of mine has been abducted by them. Do you know where they might be holding him?”
“I have no reason to tell you.”
“You’re absolutely right.” The next words that come out of his mouth surprise them all, “but if you do tell me… I’ll testify that you fired in self-defence and killed that man by accident.”
He doesn’t miss the way Fukuchi, who had until now been leaning in silence against the far wall, snaps his head up sharply to look in his direction.
Then he turns and, without another word, walks away.
“I’m surprised.” The young boy says, “you don’t seem to be the type of person to sell out on justice like that.”
Fukuzawa didn’t think he was either.
He finally turns to look at him fully, “I’ve always worked as a killer on my own. I’ve never wanted any coworkers or superiors. But if a skilled martial artist like yourself is willing to go against all your principles just to save your subordinate… then he’s lucky to have you. I envy him a little.”
Going against all of his principles, for the sake of a fiery young boy he had met less than twenty four hours ago? Every instinct in him denies it. Because Fukuzawa had vowed to work alone.
… But he remembers the way Ranpo had curled up in the theatre, paralysed with confusion, fear, everything. Afraid of monsters. Afraid of himself.
He’s just a boy.
“I’ve heard about several buildings they use for their dealings.”
“Do we have a deal then?” Fukuzawa blinks.
A noncommittal shrug. “I could escape at any point if I wanted to. The reward you’re promising really isn’t worth it. But,” the boy pauses, letting the word hang for a few seconds, absorbed in the humid air, the food here is terrible. If you happen to have some sway here, would you mind talking to them?”
A breath he wasn’t aware he was holding onto releases all too suddenly from his chest. “Any preferences?”
A thoughtful pause.
Then: ”Curry.”
—
You’d think a large – dare he say, even sophisticated — organisation like this would rent out a classier backdrop for their beatings and blackmails, but the motel Ranpo is dragged to is derelict and abandoned. Tacky to the core. Glossed windows crawling with cracks surround the outer walls, while the carpet under his feet is brittle and mouldy and gives off a stench so putrid he doesn’t want to guess how it became that way.
Time ticks by in slow, agonising crawls. And the man in front of him just keeps talking, and talking, and talking. He just won’t shut up.
“Listen up, great detective.” The way he says it is already irritating. Half a lip curled upwards, a sardonic eyebrow raised. Mockingly indulgent, rather than reverent. Hmph. “Our organisation is formidable and flawless. I think it would be far more rewarding to team up with us than that bodyguard.”
Boring. So boring.
“Moo.”
The man frowns.
“I can’t pay attention to things I have no interest in.” Ranpo muses. And, to prove a point, fixes his gaze on the liquid moonlight spilling through the uncurtained windows rather than the man’s face. “It just sounds like cattle mooing to me. Moo!”
He sees the way the man forcefully keeps his composure, like a tight fisted hand closing around grains of patience. “You’re extremely fortunate I am the one you are negotiating with. Anyone else might have started sawing you apart from your nails upward by now.”
“He’s mooing again.” Ranpo rolls his eyes. “Moo! Moo!”
Click.
There’s a gun, attached to a hand, attached to the man on the precipice of losing his cool, pointed straight at Ranpo’s head.
“Looks like we need to use this to move the conversation forward.”
Finally. Something interesting.
“You can use your Gift to see the truth. So what? You’re too feeble to stop a single bullet.” The man snarls, “I only gave you my time for the sake of our grand objective. We’ll wipe out all of the Gifted rotting this country’s foundations.”
Ranpo takes slow, purposeful steps closer before stopping with the gun inches away from his head.
“I see.” He knew it was only a matter of time before the man would blab something of use. Tongues loosen best in ire. Hm. What he says is certainly strange. “So V is an organisation of Gifted brought together to drive out Gifted.”
The man’s grip on the gun tightens.
“Wait, wait, gimme a sec.” Ranpo raises his hands in surrender. “Hm. By my predictions… you have three seconds.”
The sound of distant gunfire.
The man’s startles, looking around frantically.
“Two.”
Distant cries of pain.
“One.”
The window beside them smashes into a hundred haphazard pieces.
A figure that could be called a human only in name soars inside, with deft movements like a tempered sabre turned sentient. He disarms the man and flips him over, swinging a fist that lands squarely onto his nose and breaking it.
“I took out one of the guards outside.” Fukuzawa turns to Ranpo, “how many more are there?”
There he is. He came.
Of course, he knew he would come! Ranpo knew, because he knows everything, but still.
He came.
“Four.”
On cue, the door behind him slides open and bullets are hurled like a swarm of locusts upon them. Fukuzawa grabs the nearest chair and uses it as a shield, and—
Well. To be honest, Ranpo doesn’t bother looking. He can hear the commotion, certainly, as the minutes are pierced by screams and grunts and sickening crunches. He can hear all of it. More than hear all of it, he can feel it, the vibrations pulsing under his feet.
Man, he knew Fukuzawa was strong, but that really holds no candle to witnessing it in real time!
As the drill of bullets slow down and the cries of pain simmer into terrified whimpers, Ranpo kneels beside the unconscious little cow and shackles him with the handcuffs hanging at his belt.
Then he waits.
It’s gotten silent. It must all be done, then.
Fukuzawa returns. “Are you alright?” There’s hardly a sweat broken across that forehead. Not single hair out of place. As expected!
“Yeah!” Ranpo jogs over with a splitting grin that is in comic disparity to the man’s serious expression, “wow, that went better than I expected! You arrived just in time, just as I calculated—”
Slap!
… His face hurts.
And oh, his glasses have been knocked off.
It hurts.
“Screw you!” Fukuzawa roars. It echoes in the empty warehouse. “To hell with your damn calculations! When I got here, I saw a gun pointed at your face!”
“That was only because I knew you would come!” Ranpo cries out. His cheek stings. But that’s nothing compared to the feeling of being at the receiving end of— of Fukuzawa’s current expression.
“Snowing off your abilities is fine.” He doesn’t shout this time, but the rage is still there, and somehow that’s worse. “But stop wagering your own life on your gambles.”
Ranpo’s swallows stiffly.
“You’re still a child.” His voice softens into something quieter. Tenderer.
That’s even worse.
The tears come unbidden. He can’t remember the last time he’s cried.
“I’m sorry.” Every octave of his voice breaks into another shattered fragment that pierces the air.
He walks forward with outstretched arms, even as the tears drip down his chin and onto the floor.
He wraps his arms around Fukuzawa.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
He can feel the man tense up under him, and then slowly relax.
He can feel his anger draining away and replaced with fatigue. The man’s will slipping away under Ranpo’s hiccups and tears.
Fukuzawa sighs, heavy and laden with resignation.
Then—
The man suddenly tenses up again. Ranpo hears his breath hitch, feels the way body locks up again like the clamping of a safe. The man stands frozen in place.
Ranpo pulls back with a frown, gazing up at the man through tearful eyes that make him look like a drifting jellyfish.
Fukuzawa looks—
Dazed. He looks a little bewildered, actually.
He looks—
Oh.
It lasts a couple of minutes. Then, once Fukuzawa’s finally blinked himself awake, he meets Ranpo’s gaze.
It’s strange, seeing each other, truly seeing each other, after everything.
And there’s a dawn of understanding on the man’s face. Followed by — of all things — a laugh.
Ranpo blinks up at him.
“You were right, boy.” Fukuzawa pulls Ranpo in for another hug, “green is a pretty color.”