Chapter Text
“Loyalty… Honor… And Power… There’s something about a badass samurai, a quest of vengeance for justice and the sound of a sharp katana slicing through the air that leaves you dangling on the edge of your seat, unable to sleep. Tonight we honor a master of the art of storytelling, and celebrate the launch of Ware no Bushido – Saigo no Shobu, the stunning conclusion to the best selling light novel series about Samurais. Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for the Great King – Oikawa Tooru!”
Oikawa Tooru walks up the stage with a dazzling smile brighter than the camera flashes capturing him, as the crowd gets on their feet to give him a thunderous applause.
Detective Iwaizumi Hajime sighs, walking into the murder scene. It had been a slow week and he had been thinking of taking off early in the afternoon so that he could finally get a well-deserved break. Take a nice hot bath, get 8 hrs of sleep and maybe make a trip to the manga store.
He hears footsteps behind him and turns to see Detective Matsukawa Issei snapping on his gloves, followed by Detective Hanamaki Takahiro.
“Ahh Iwaizumi, you came after all. Dude, you should just take it easy and let me win a bet once in a while", Matsukawa said with a frown. "Weren’t you going somewhere? Not to mention you were really excited. We figured you finally decided to accept a date from that hot girl who asked you out yesterday”
“Well, I did tell you I was gonna win this one, easy. Now pay up”, said Hanamaki grinning and holding out his hand at Matsukawa.
“Tch. If only murderers would wait for a convenient day to stick a knife into someone, huh. Iwaizumi could have gone on his date and I would have made some money too.”
Iwaizumi shot them a glare. “It's the murderer's fault, so you can have your payback when we catch them. Stop bickering and start briefing me on the details of our victim’s death. You got an ID?”
“Ishimoto Haruhi, 25, grad student at Tokyo University, majoring in social work”
Iwaizumi was surprised. “She afford this apartment with all her karma? This is a three-bedroom apartment smack dab in the middle of Bunkyō!”
“Papa’s rich.”
“So, delivery guy comes with pizza and finds the door unlocked, decides to go in and finds the princess in a bed of cherry blossoms on the floor in the hall.”
“I feel like all this looks kinda familiar. Any signs of struggle?”
“None”
“Then she knew the assailant. Kunimi, what about the cause of death?”
“Two gunshots to her chest. Small caliber”, said Kunimi Akira nodding his head in greeting to Iwaizumi. He was the Medical Examiner at the Shinjuku precinct and wore the same mildly bored look on his face that he always did, but it did well to mask his exceptional intelligence.
Hanamaki gave the flowers an exasperated glare. “What kind of freak has the time to commit murder and go through the pain of covering up the body in cherry blossoms? And they are not even in Season! Shoot the person, and run. It used to be simpler back in our days as uniforms.”
Iwaizumi would take freaky murders every day over wearing stuffy police uniforms. “But the freaky ones reveal more. Look at the way he’s left her covered modestly. It shows that despite all of this, you’ll find no evidence of sexual abuse.”
“You get all that from just this?”
“That and I’ve seen this before."
"You've seen this before? Where?!"
"Sakura no ame? Kokoro e no ya?”
Hanamaki and Matsukawa give Iwaizumi a blank look.
“Don’t you guys read?!”
Oikawa Tooru smiled at the applause and walked off the stage only to find that he was stuck on the last step of the staircase as another swarm of his fans cut off his escape route. “Oikawa-sannn!! You are so cool!!!!”, “Oikawa-san can you please sign my t-shirt?”, “Oikawa-san!! Can you please give us an autograph??”, “Please accept these alien cookies I baked for you” God he loved all this attention.
“How about you all make a line so that Oikawa-san can meet everyone?”, said a honey-sweet voice, very much like his own, from beside him. Oikawa Ayane picked up a glass of champagne from one of the waiters passing by and glanced towards her brother. “You’ll do well to attend to your loving fans, Tooru”.
“Yes, yes, thank you so much, guys! I love you all! Kaito-sama and I are counting on your support this time too~!”, he said while posing with a peace sign for a selfie with someone.
He blew some kisses towards the fan crowds, signed a few more autographs and tee-shirts and mugs. There was also a Kaito katana from the special edition merchandise that was cool.
“Thank you so much for coming in today you guys! See you again next time!”, he says, waving at everyone.
Finally done, he walks along to where his sister who was also his publisher sat, sipping champagne.
“Aya-nechan setting me up for a trap like that, so mean! My legs are hurting. Besides the last fan meet and greet was only three days ago and I’m still recovering from that. Ahhhh the perils of being so famous and loved~”
“Well, we’ll see how much your fans continue loving you now that you killed their beloved Kaito-sama". Ayane gave Oikawa a sour look. "Seriously. I can't believe you killed the golden goose. You could have cut off his leg and written a brand new badass mechanical prosthetic leg or something and we could have gotten at least three more books with the recovery and new training arc, like we did with his arm. But nooooo, you had to cut off his head.”
“Don’t worry your pretty head too much, ne-chan. Spinning the tale is what I’M here for, so let me do the worrying. Besides, Kaito-sama isn’t the golden goose, I am. I wrote other best sellers before him and the next series will be so good, my fans will be swept off their feet”, Oikawa said, sighing in relief at finally resting his feet, and relaxing on the bar stool.
“And how do you plan on doing that when you didn’t submit the manuscript for the new book that was due three weeks ago?”
“You can’t rush genius”
“Genius? Your girlfriend is the genius for dumping you”, said a voice from behind him.
Tooru scowled. “Shut up, Takeru! Also, she didn’t dump me, I dumped her. Ne-chan, what kind of son are you raising? He has no respect for his elders - ”
“I’ll treat you like an elder when you start acting like one. Also mom, Tooru’s having a writer’s block.”
“Is that so?”, Ayane cocked her eyebrows at Tooru.
“N-Not at all! Don’t listen to this little upstart here. Someone is asking for their allowance to be cut down”, said Tooru, glaring daggers at his nephew Takeru, who was still only in high school.
“Alright then, since you are asking for it, you can return back the advance paid to you for your next novel –”
“Ne-chan!”
“-unless I can have the manuscript of your new novel on my table within the next three weeks. I want to see at least one illustration too.”
Tooru sighed and gestured for the bartender to give him a glass of champagne. “You know why I killed off Kaito-sama? He became predictable. I knew what he was going happen every moment of every scene. There was no thrill. No surprise.” He took a sip. “Just like these parties. Same old fans giving Oikawa-san the same old love. Same old mother and son bullying me together. Everything’s boring and there’s nothing new.”
“Oikawa Tooru?”, said a deep and pleasent voice from behind him. It was exactly what Kaito-sama sounded like in his head.
Oikawa picked up his pen to sign his autograph. Sheesh, his fans could be really persistent. But they probably couldn’t help it with how much they loved him. Still, it was pretty impressive that they managed to make it past security to the bar area. “Where would you like it?” he swiveled around his barstool with a smile, only to gaze into beautiful steely grey-green eyes that made him breathless.
A tan, sinfully rugged and handsome man in a suit that was bursting with muscles stood in front of him wearing a mildly amused expression. He held out and displayed a badge. “Detective Iwaizumi Hajime from the Tokyo Central Police Headquarters. We need to ask you a few questions about a murder that took place earlier tonight.”
“Well that’s new”, said Takeru grinning at his uncle who sat dumbfounded in silence, gaping at the detective.