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Ranpo is getting bored of him.
His friends and other members of the Agency would surely say that he wasn't, that he was being exaggerated and that the detective was always that way.
But Edgar knew better.
The things that previously interested Edogawa about him now only made him sleepy. He didn't have time to read the novels that the writer painstakingly prepared or, when he did, he dispatched them as a boring mission.
He hardly ever touched the sweets that Poe makes for him, or the lunches that he brought him to work. He stopped doing them for 3 weeks and the younger man did not complain or say a word. It was as if he didn't care.
Because he didn't care.
Another person could tell that it was that the other man was preoccupied with other matters, that it was temporary, that it was not about him.
But Ranpo was not like other people. And neither does Poe.
For a long time, Edgar had been him alone. His parents passed away when he was still a helpless child, and the Allans, well ... they weren't the best family he could have.
He had been a prodigy, a misunderstood genius of society and Poe loved it. He was fine, people just should admire him from afar, so far that they could never harm him.
Then he came.
Edogawa Ranpo.
And he destroyed his world into thousands of pieces that he didn't know how to repair.
In his 22 years of life, Poe had never felt so defeated, so incapable of solving a mystery. The mystery who was this shorter man.
But Edgar knew the taste of humiliation. And he would make him pay for it. For years his sole purpose was to defeat that man, to show him that he was up to the task.
And, in that moment, he lost again.
Defeated, in a well of deep shame and loneliness, the man who had crushed him put him back on his feet.
It was very funny, how the man who had made him suffer the most was now healing him.
It was in that instant that Poe realized. He didn't want to crush the man. He wanted the detective to see him, to treat him as an equal. He wanted that human who was as intelligent as he to appreciate him.
For once in countless years, Edgar realized that he was very lonely. He didn't want to be anymore.
He believed Ranpo could understand him. But it was the other way around.
It was the detective who knew everything, the one who did not need anyone, the most perfect being in unbeatable not only Japan but the whole world.
Ranpo didn't need him, in fact, Poe was just someone else for him, someone who had entertained him for a while as a kind of curious and unique mind game that had lost its value. It was no longer funny.
But Edgar needed him more than anything. He opened his eyes to a cruel and lonely world where no one but the agent understood him, and he could not go back to that state of blissful ignorance.
It was now 3 in the morning and Poe had gone to the bathroom to cry because when he opened his eyes after a horrible nightmare the bed was empty.
It was almost funny, as in his dream Ranpo was turning his back on him, moving further and further until he was a point in the distance and the reality was not so different from that nightmare.
Now the detective was moving out of reach of him and nothing Poe did could stop him.
Because Edgar isn't stupid, there are only so many reasons why his partner wasn't in bed at three in the morning. And Ranpo knew that Poe is not stupid.
He didn't even bother to hide his infidelity from him. He surely thought it was not worth it.
In the end, Edgar was just a mental entertainment, a decoration doll for all to watch until he gets old and ugly, old-fashioned, to put in a drawer where no one would remember his existence.
Poe knew it. Ranpo surely knew that the American knew.
And the worst thing is that even knowing, even with that knowledge, Edgar wouldn't leave. He would not leave the one person who had elevated him not just as a writer or a detective, but as a human. Like a loved one.
And now he alone would cry, with Karl clawing at the door to comfort his master, but tomorrow his hair would cover his puffy eyes and dark circles under his eyes.
Tomorrow he would pretend that nothing happened and Ranpo would do the same, because there was no way that the best detective in the world would not realize what happened, and everything would be fine.
Everything had to be fine.
Poe has no reason to not be happy, does he?
This is all he ever wanted.
He is happy.
He is happy.
He's...
Insufficient.
Disposable.
A mere entertainment.
Happy.
He is very, very happy.