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For a few years, now, Shuichi Saihara had hunted one particular thief across the world. Any other decent detective could have told you as much the second you slipped them his card – oh, oh yeah. Him. If he was out of town, there’d be just one reason why.
One reason, and his picture was plastered all over Detective Saihara’s office, maybe wearing coquettish, knowing smiles in a dozen flavors from sweet to terrifying, or maybe caught balanced on the edge of a rooftop and waving like he didn’t have a care in the world. Sometimes he wore a plastic clown mask; sometimes he lifted that mask right off when he saw that Shuichi thought he had him cornered. He cackled, then, maybe, or else shrugged dramatically and told Shuichi he knew he’d done his best chasing him, but he’d be the one getting to say “no dice” that time.
His name was Kokichi Oma. It had taken Shuichi ages to gather that name together, like prying up some messy, screaming floorboards to find whatever secrets were waiting underneath. It had felt so vindicating, so intimate, finally putting a name to his face. Shuichi had held a hand over his mouth and stared down, stomach twisting, at the pasted-together old hospital records that finally handed that name over to him. Kokichi Oma. The leader of D.I.C.E., a clown gang that had never once killed anybody – but had nearly given at least one police chief a dozen separate accidental heart attacks. His gang had stolen from the robotic tyrant Monokuma, even, and worked to scrub his Killing Game Lounge off Tokyo’s map.
D.I.C.E.’s leader was a human, in the end. With a name, and a birthday, and a favorite drink to get out of vending machines. Shuichi knew that, too – he’d seen the soda bottles left behind in hideouts D.I.C.E. had given up for lost. He’d found Yu-Gi-Oh cards around there, too – a complete deck, stacked up neatly, one time – and boxes of different teas. Comedy films still in their shiny DVD boxes. White boards scrubbed clean, or with little winking faces drawn on them to hint at what used to be written there. Honestly, Shuichi thought maybe Kokichi had left all those things behind for him, like messages. Like a “Hi there, Mr. Detective. It looks like some sort of thief gang was just camping out around here! Suspicious, right?”
He wondered if maybe he should leave something of his own behind, too, sometimes, but that was a strange thought for a detective to have about someone he was supposed to be bringing in to face the law.
That night, Shuichi found himself in a glaring neon city, full of mirrored buildings and fog that drifted in syrupy-slow and colder than the blood of the dead. It was halfway across the world from where he was born. Flickering motel signs and strip club ads reflected off all the oily puddles in the street, light catching in the fog like a magic trick. He was walking quickly, a takeout bag clenched up in his fist and getting colder and less appetizing with every step.
Shuichi didn’t think Kokichi was in this city, anymore. He had come through and stolen from a couple stuck-up dignitaries. Played a couple pointed pranks, too – a mayor who everybody knew funneled money away from the parks got a dead tree dropped mysteriously inside his office, for instance, with a gaudy bow tied around the pot. The ribbon was that same icy-sweet purple as Kokichi kept his hair. Oh yes, and the guy’s private safe had been completely emptied, with a note saying “Got you!” left inside. That was why Shuichi had turned up, but now? Now, things had been dead silent for three days.
Maybe D.I.C.E. had moved on. Kokichi did that, when he got bored. When he said what he’d wanted to say, and stirred the pot a little.
Shuichi had rented a small, leaky hotel room in that city. He’d chosen it because it was close to a couple casinos, and Kokichi liked gambling almost as much as he liked telling Shuichi wild, impossible stories just before he somehow escaped police custody again. The key card stuck in the door the first couple times he tried it, that night, and he found himself looking at a construction project going on across the street. Tasting fog on his face; shifting in that new, dark coat he’d picked up at the airport. They were rebuilding a half-crumbled church. Well. Not just then, but you know. During the day. The place looked hunched and stubborn next to all the tall, flashing buildings around it. There were metal poles sticking up next to its spires like brand-new bones.
Honestly, Shuichi was just biding his time, at that point. If another clue didn’t crop up soon, he was fully prepared to head back to Tokyo. He had the tickets already pulled up on his phone, ready to buy. People had probably shoved requests under his office door while he was gone, sometimes scrawled on the back of receipts, sometimes in perfumed envelopes stuffed full of bribe money he’d make sure to return. He would work his normal job until Kokichi slipped up again and made himself known – or until he practically called out, “I’m here, if you wanna make things interesting for me!” by doing something like shoving a tree into a mayor’s office, again. Or, you know. Stealing an ancient chess set from a museum about some country’s royal family. Or maybe lifting a ridiculously enormous gem and then posting a picture of it online – now halfway painted up like a really misshapen dice.
Shuichi hadn’t yet admitted to himself that he was disappointed he didn’t actually get to talk to Kokichi this time around, but it was a familiar taste in the back of his throat. That guy was baffling, always trying to talk circles around him, always rattling off chipper, innocent-faced lies. He wasn’t like anyone else Shuichi had ever met. It took everything he had to keep up with him, sometimes, but still he chose to go out and chase him again and again and again.
Kokichi was probably holed up somewhere secret with his gang, right then – maybe that huge guy, maybe the girl with bouncing dyed-blonde pigtails – plotting up something new. Or getting someone to play rock-paper-scissors with him for an absurd amount of time, if Shuichi could go off his past experiences. He liked imagining quiet domestic things for Kokichi, when he wasn’t off stealing from ancient mummy exhibits or spray-painting pictures of clowns on government buildings. Sure, he said some playful, too-reckless things to get under the cops’ skin, sometimes, and plenty of the people he’d robbed wanted to see him locked away. But they both knew Shuichi didn’t want to send him away to jail forever. At least, he thought they both knew that.
There were things he wanted to understand. Questions begging for answers. Fancy bejeweled chess sets that really should be returned back to their rightful owners.
There were reasons to chase Kokichi down, even if the idea of him behind bars and finally, impossibly trapped made Shuichi sad in a way he didn’t completely understand.
Shuichi spread the food he’d brought back on a rickety motel table and clicked the TV on. It was mostly news he’d already heard – Shuichi spoke a little of the language they used around that city, enough to get by. He knew about drama happening overseas, mostly, and he knew enough about the state of that country’s economy. He listened, anyway. Listened, chewed slowly, and let his mind wander back through his day.
After a while he blinked hard, shook his head, and turned the TV on mute so he could search around on his phone a little. It was a detail he’d heard earlier that set him off, heard and only half-understood back then. Someone had leaned in close to the girl next to her and laughed about “the championship” happening in a town a couple hours away. Apparently her boyfriend hadn’t been keen on her competing in it, because the contestants got really nasty. At the time, Shuichi had been translating the word that girl used as something like an athletic competition, but… No. No, that wasn’t it at all.
There was going to be a game show filmed a few towns over, and it was going to be styled in morbid honor of what Junko Enoshima had given Japan not too, too long ago. It was going to be a faux killing game, and Shuichi knew just where Kokichi Oma – the leader of D.I.C.E., the giggling phantom thief that he was pretty sure had given him a full deck of Yu-Gi-Oh cards a while back in hopes he’d learn to play – would be striking next.
Kokichi liked to say that sometimes the best way to win a game was just not to play it. If he wasn’t planning to steal all the prizes for this make-believe championship, this thing meant to honor the Killing Game Lounge – and probably something else, besides, something it would really hurt that town to lose – Shuichi would eat his favorite hat. Sometimes Kokichi targeted people randomly, for the chase, but other times he revealed a lot more of his empathetic, furious core than Shuichi thought he realized.
He paid for the hotel room and gathered up every one of his notebooks before heading out to the train.
…
Shuichi let Kokichi’s gang members smuggle all that Monokuma-tribute show’s prizes into a huge van with fuzzy dice hanging cockily in the window, watching from a parked car across the street. He’d been able to pick up a rental at the train station – everything was far away, out in the country, and it helped to hide almost-facelessly in a field of other parked cars. It was early, early morning, and the television studio wasn’t set to open for a while yet. The sun was still a blurry, bleeding smear of red at the edge of the horizon. Nearly all of Shuichi’s muscles ached, but that was a dull, distant thing when he was part of the chase.
Kokichi’s gang was wearing TV studio brand jumpsuits, and there weren’t any clown masks in sight. But Shuichi knew them, by that point. He smiled down into a cup of lukewarm coffee. He imagined he would follow the van a ways, and corner Kokichi for what had been stolen from the mayor’s safe. He’d let him take whatever he got from the imaginary killing game, though. It made his lip curl, too, thinking about how some people made light of what Junko Enoshima created.
It looked like the D.I.C.E. members were just about to lock the studio up behind them – a girl with a smart blonde bun curled in the nape of her neck waggled some keys in a tall man’s face, shifting playfully from one foot to the other, anyway – when Shuichi’s passenger-side door was pushed open. He almost couldn’t believe it when Kokichi slid into the seat next to him, wearing a stolen TV crew jumpsuit just like his gang members. He’d locked the door, of course, but the fact that Kokichi could get in wasn’t the strange part.
Normally, Shuichi had to chase him down before they could speak – had to pin him against a wall, had to trap him in an elevator, had to surround the building he was in with barking police dogs. Normally.
Kokichi didn’t take off his clown mask, at first. Maybe he didn’t want Shuichi to see his expression, yet.
“I was afraid you weren’t gonna make it this time, Mr. Detective,” Kokichi scolded. “We scouted this place out last night and the day before, but – nope. Nowhere.”
Shuichi smiled just a little. He imagined what it would be like if he reached over and lifted that clown mask off, himself.
“Didn’t mean to keep you waiting,” Shuichi said, instead, hands politely curled around the cup of coffee. Maybe he should have tried to cuff Kokichi to him, keep him pinned down there in the car. Maybe Kokichi was sort of daring him to. It’s what a police officer might have done, but Shuichi was something else. “How about we blame it on a translation issue?”
Kokichi laughed – he had a very particular laugh, sometimes. It was one of the first things Shuichi had remembered about him after seeing a video of D.I.C.E. on the news way back when. He tipped the mask forward into his hands and looked up with eyes so dusky and soft they caught Shuichi off guard. He’d asked Kokichi why he was willing to take his mask off around him, once, and Kokichi said he was very flattered Shuichi had made the effort to learn his name. And anyway, just because Shuichi had seen his face once or twice didn’t guarantee he could catch him in the kind of way that stuck. That was sort of what “phantom thief” meant, right?
“It’s okay this time,” Kokichi said. “Because I’ve been meaning to ask you to help me with a different game.” He paused. “Hey, are you doing alright, Shuichi? You look like you just got stampeded over by an army of horses. Your face is all weird. And I was afraid you weren’t coming.”
It was strange for Kokichi to use his “Mr. Detective’s” real name. Put Shuichi on edge every time – he always ended up wondering why. What this criminal-with-a-conscience could be playing at. Now, he offered a little honesty. Even though Kokichi didn’t use it very often, personally, he seemed to appreciate Shuichi’s truth. “I’m fine – couldn’t sleep much… A headache.”
"Aw, yeah, yeah.” Kokichi rubbed at his nose, shifting so he could prop his shoes up on the rental car seat. He folded his arms around his legs, and glanced at Shuichi out of the corner of his eye. “I figured you could help me settle a bet.”
Shuichi remembered one time, a while back, when Kokichi had asked to play Russian roulette with him – and another time when he’d begged him to test out how long he could crawl through some convenient supervillain lair-ish fire. “We’ll see,” he said. “How about you tell me what it is?”
Kokichi glanced away, eyes slippery as just-melting ice. He chewed on his lip, a little. Shuichi could never tell if that was an actual nervous tic of his or just something he’d practiced to look thoughtfully nonchalant. Then, like the sun coming out, like a television clicking on, he jolted upright and announced, “I was lying about your face being weird.”
“What?”
“Oh, you knew I was lying. The truth is – and you can believe this part – I made a bet with a bunch of my friends about you.”
“Okay, and –?” Shuichi started, but he couldn’t quite make it to the end of that sentence. Kokichi unfolded his legs way too suddenly and leaned forward, grabbing him by the front of his airport jacket. He dragged Shuichi in close enough to smell the grape soda on his breath – even that early in the morning! – and kissed him.
Kokichi didn’t let go of his coat for a long minute – he held on as if trying not to fall off something, as if trying to reassure himself that the fabric was real. His eyes were closed, and he was vulnerable enough that Shuichi might have been able to pull out his phone and text the local police station hotline without him even noticing. His lips were about as soft as Shuichi realized he would have expected, except that he hadn’t known he’d expected anything at all. Kokichi’s skin was still so cold from the brisk morning air. Outside the car, the world was still and watery – it all felt very far away. This guy’s arrest warrants, the newspaper headlines, Shuichi’s jobs waiting back in Tokyo. All of it.
Shuichi kissed him back, letting his own eyes flicker closed against his better judgment. He leaned in just that little bit closer, shivering. Coffee spilled on the rental car chair a little, and on his leg, but he didn’t even notice until it was over and Kokichi was gone.
And Kokichi was gone very soon after that. He pulled away, waited a second, looking puzzled, and then announced, “Thanks for kissing back, Mr. Detective. I just won a ‘No Chores for a Week’ pass. Pretty nice, right?”
“Congratulations,” Shuichi offered.
“And to think some of my teammates actually voted against me. Hah!”
Maybe Shuichi shouldn’t have encouraged Kokichi, here, but instead he scooted nearer like he was hoping to get kissed again. “Was this ‘bet’ another one of your lies, Kokichi?”
Kokichi cackled, just the way Shuichi had hoped he would. He said, “Well, you never really know. I am a liar. Maybe I’m trying to tell you I’m in love with you.”
“Are you?”
“Do you want me to be?”
Shuichi thought, feeling his heart shuddering inside him, all restlessness and want, but he didn’t answer fast enough. That broke the spell. Kokichi tossed his head back – always so theatrical, when he made up his mind to do something. His voice might have shaken just a little when he said, “Well, you can tell me your answer next time. I’ll look forward to it!”
“Wait - “
“I have something fun planned, so try to be on time, ‘kay Shuichi?”
And then Kokichi Oma, the only face that stayed pinned on Shuichi’s office wall all the time, the only name that appeared in every single one of his notebooks, drew away and climbed out of the car without looking back. Shuichi made as if to follow him, calling his name in a voice he didn't honestly recognize from himself, but his legs were shaking. They'd gone a fuzzy sort of weak at the knee. Oh, and also Kokichi had somehow stapled his jacket to the rental car seat. Maybe that was why he’d been holding on so tightly.
There was a foil pack of Aspirin stapled in with the jacket fabric, too. For Shuichi’s headache, probably. What a smug bastard - it was kind of sweet, yeah, but didn’t he realize Shuichi was going to have to pay for this rental car damage?
By the time Shuichi looked over to where D.I.C.E.’s van had just been, the road was empty and the sun was truly, truly coming up. It smothered all the hollow space in a clear, cold light. A couple wintry trees rattled together as if they were clapping their hands.
The chase wasn’t over, at least. And hey, maybe Kokichi would honestly hold a poll now, getting gang members to bet on what Shuichi would say next. Stranger things had happened – even just that morning. Stranger things were happening inside Shuichi's head.
If Kokichi cast his vote the way Shuichi thought he would, maybe he'd even win something as honest and human as a week without having to do any of the gang’s chores. Maybe something about their game together was about to shift for all time.