Archive of Our Own

Heizou was good about separating the big things from the little things. It’s what made him a good detective and what helped him close cases. They didn’t call it the “big picture” for nothing. He was especially good at it when he knew he was closing in on the truth, when it was so close that even his intuition could smell it, if the truth had a smell. He could feel the truth in his grasp and could almost reach out and touch its familiar shape as if it were hovering over his desk at the police station; his desk that was currently covered in papers and loose bits of red thread and looked quite like a crime scene itself. But the mess was a little thing, as Heizou liked to call it. Just a little thing. The same sort of little thing like the laws of physics or biology or being human were little things. Little things could always be left for later. 

Heizou yawned and spun around in his chair, lifting his arms high above his head. He hated to admit the movement made him feel more dizzy than it probably should have but maybe it was because he was trying to ignore the way the glint of the sun streaming through the window reflected off the multiple different teacups and the new coffee mug that had come to join them scattered about his desk. Some were half full and untouched. Clouds of steam danced above his coffee mug. Those were all little things too. Heizou stopped his spinning with his foot and let his cheek fall into the palm of his hand with as much grace as he could muster. Across the way another doushin looked up from his desk to watch him, which Heizou scrunched his nose at. But maybe it wasn’t him that they’d been looking at. Heizou heard the sound of approaching geta as quickly as he felt a hand land on his shoulder.

“You’re still here?” 

Kujou Sara’s touch was far more gentle than her voice would have made it sound.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Heizou replied. It was an honest question.      

The hand on his shoulder moved so that Sara could cross her arms. “Because you hate it here and on an average day would rather be anywhere else, “mystery solving”? And considering the fact you’ve been here since last night…” 

“I do not hate it here.”

Sara scoffed, though if she was going to do anything more about pointing out his little white lie she didn’t. Maybe it was because it was a little thing. “Go home,” she said. 

“Mm-mm-mm, no can do. I’ve got things to finish up.”

“It’s not anything that can’t wait until you’ve actually… eaten something…” Sara’s eyes surveyed the mess on his desk, stopping over each teacup and looking sternly disappointed when she didn’t spot a plate or the remaining crumbs of police station food. Even the smell of it had put Heizou off of eating so he’d avoided the meager cafeteria all together. Food was a little thing anyway in the face of cracking a case. 

“I’ve had tea,” Heizou said. 

“I can see that. Caffeine isn’t food.”

“Not with that attitude it isn’t.” 

“Heizou…”

“Yes?” 

“Go. Home.” 

“Hmm? What was that?”

Heizou had started messing with the collection of teacups on his desk, moving them around for no particular reason other than to be noisy. He blinked blankly up at the tengu but then refocused his gaze back down at his desk. Looking up for that long was starting to hurt his head and his eyes and the back of his neck, even if the growing look of annoyance on Sara’s face had been worth it. He hardly liked being told how to do his job and when to do it.

“I said … wait… don’t. What do you think you’re doing ?”   

“Huh?” Heizou said, stopping for a moment as he let his still warm mug of coffee hover over one of the half full teacups. He looked back up at Sara. 

“Shikanoin.” 

“Yeah?” he replied, his gaze still fixed on the woman above him before he began to pour some of the contents of the coffee mug into the teacup. He made sure to work his face into a polite pout before he found a forgotten pen to begin stirring the contents of the teacup together. Sara balked at him and looked as if she wanted to throw her hands up when he brought it to his lips and started to drink it. 

“I’d rather deal with the oni than with you. Try not to make it anyone else’s problem when this,” she motioned at his desk and then at Heizou, still drinking his coffee tea abomination, “inevitably comes back to bite you.”   

Heizou saw her off with a salute and winked with a self-satisfied chuckle at the doushin who was still staring at him. Then he got back to work. 

♬

The sky over Inazuma could only ever be two things- cloudy and about to storm or spectacularly bright and cloudless. Heizou was sure the weather would have turned by now, chasing away the bright sun rays streaming through the police station window but it hadn’t. His hunch had been off and he was frustrated. The clues of his case were also off. It shouldn’t have been that hard to find the answer by now over something as simple as missing money turned into an embezzlement scandal. But the puzzle pieces wouldn’t come together no matter how hard he tried to rearrange them to make them fit. Whenever he looked at his notes the words swam. They seemed to fall off the page or swirl themselves into a mess of letters until they made him sickeningly dizzy. When he blinked he saw flashes of brilliant light that made his stomach turn and dots of it danced at the edges of his vision. And… his head hurt. Far worse than when Sara had come to visit in the morning. The sky outside may have been clear but inside his head there was a storm, the thunder of it relentless. 

Heizou sighed, rubbing his fingers against his temple and tying his hair into a knot at the back of his head. He looked at his half-full teacups again. Even his coffee tea concoction had been left abandoned even though more doushin had come by his desk, telling him to go home. Probably at the behest of Kujou Sara if Heizou had to guess.     

He needed some air. He needed some air especially before another officer came up to convince him where he should and shouldn’t be. Heizou didn’t think he could handle listening to anyone’s voice at the moment. The air would do him good. 

He tried to push his chair away from his desk as quietly as he could but the noise of the chair legs against the floor still drove a spike through his head and he grunted softly. A couple desks away a doushin raised their head to look at him, a poorly hidden grin fluttering across their face. 

“Giving up for the day, Shikanoin? Going home? You probably should. You don’t look so good.”

“As if,” Heizou scoffed. “I’m going out. I’ll be back.”    

“Sure you will.” 

Heizou rolled his eyes but it made him wince as he shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to make his way to the police station’s back door being as inconspicuous about using the wall for support as he could. 

The outside afternoon air stung his skin, lighting painful pinpricks up his arms. It was crisp and carried the smell of the nearby restaurants down the street and the aroma of fried oil would have made him hungry if it had been a normal day. The doushin had been right though, as much as Heizou hated to admit it. He did not feel good. Breathing deep breaths through his nose did nothing to help the pain in his head that had started spreading to his limbs and before he knew it Heizou was searching out a secluded handful of sakura trees near the back fence of the police station he knew to curl up under, undisturbed. He drew his knees to his chest and leaned his forehead on them, closing his eyes. It was still so sunny behind his eyelids and the bright flashes of light hadn’t gone away. His head felt rattled from moving around so much and even sitting still he felt like he hadn’t stopped. His stomach turned. 

“Hey.” 

Heizou hoped that it wasn't a doushin. He wouldn’t hear the end of it from any of the officers if they found him like this. Reluctantly he peeked up from his knees, forcing his eyes open. 

The blue sky had turned orange around him. How long had he been out here for? It must have been hours at least. Imahara would definitely have words for him when he got back to the station. If he got back to the station. 

Heizou swallowed as he looked up into Kaedehara Kazuha’s face. The remaining sunshine behind him made a halo of his hair, his soft features softer in the light but the sun in Heizou’s eyes threw hot needles into his head so he looked away. Kazuha tilted his head at him. 

“What are you doing here?” Heizou mumbled. 

When he managed to look at him again he watched Kazuha look around him, as if it weren’t a totally odd occurrence for him to suddenly appear behind the Inazuma police station of all places. 

“Oh… I was around and the wind thought it may have heard you and told me to visit. I happened to be in agreement… are you okay?”

Kazuha had crouched down in front of him so they could be on eye level together. Heizou blinked. Kazuha had explained his relationship to their element once before but he’d be lying if he said he’d fully understood it when he had. But Kazuha was… odd. He was unlike any criminal and unlike any person Heizou had met. 

“Let me rephrase… you don’t look okay. So what are you doing outside?” 

Kazuha reached out to him when all Heizou could manage was a tired silence, cupping his cheeks in his hands. He frowned to himself and without warning drew Heizou’s face nearer to place a kiss on his forehead, lingering as if he were looking for something and frowning more when he found it. Heizou started a little, his back hitting the police station fence. 

“What are you doing ?” he asked. 

Kazuha drew back, his frown forming into a gentle pout. “Checking if you have a fever. You seemed flushed. Captain Beidou does it all the time to me, it’s hardly strange. You have a fever, by the way.”  

Heizou groaned, dropping his head back to his knees. “Give me a few minutes, I’ll get over it.” 

“I don’t think that’s how it works.” 

“Fine. Do you mind… not talking. For a few minutes. Please.” Kazuha’s gentle voice was nicer to listen to than most of the doushin Heizou was usually forced to work with on assignment but even that was making the inside of Heizou’s head scream at him.  

It was a few minutes. It felt shorter than that. “While I do enjoy marveling at the beauty of nature at its finest hour, I don’t think you can stay here. Or should stay here. You’d know better than I do,” Kazuha said. 

The prospect of moving or standing up though was a terrifying thought. Heizou was sure he’d be sick if he did and he was coming to terms with having the shady spot behind the police station under the sakura trees becoming his new permanent spot of residence. “Legally this isn’t loitering.” 

“Okay,” Kazuha said. He shuffled a little and when Heizou still refused to move he started rearranging his limbs until eventually Kazuha had managed to pick him up off the ground with the detective settled securely on his back. Then Kazuha looked around a little bit, checking if the coast was clear and set off. 

Heizou was too tired and if he tried to kick out and struggle out of the samurai’s grasp he was sure he’d feel something worse than a bruise from falling. He sighed heavily and let his head loll into the crook of the boy’s neck. “I’d appreciate it if you told me when you were about to do… things.” 

“I could. But what are you going to do about it? Arrest me?” Kazuha’s voice was still soft but Heizou could tell it was only out of consideration for how he was feeling. He could still hear the teasing tone floating underneath the words. He raised his hand to yank at the hair pulled behind Kazuha’s head out of protest but his arm felt heavy once it was lifted and he only managed to graze the hairs at the back of his neck. He felt more than heard Kazuha shushing him when the samurai pulled his hand away to let it drop over his shoulder. 

Heizou also felt more than heard where they were going, away from the police station. The tired little bits of his intuition raised their head when Kazuha’s gait changed, when they were no longer moving across well trodden cobblestone and instead were traveling over grass and the uneven dirt pathways of sidestreets. But he had to be grateful he guessed. He could also feel the careful consideration Kazuha took to make sure they weren’t seen by anyone, a skill after years of trying to go undetected throughout the city. He came to a gentle stop every few minutes before picking up the pace again. 

“I don’t want to go home,” Heizou mumbled. “I almost had it, you know.”

“Had what?”

“My case… I almost-” 

He was cut off by the involuntary pained hiss he made which turned into a nauseous groan. Too much talking. “I almost had… the answer.” He felt Kazuha raise his head to the sky, the loose bits of his hair brushing over the top of his ear. Heizou shivered. He also felt Kazuha frowning, regarding the disappearing sun without kindness. 

“Do you really think the answer would have come to you, with the way you are now? Brute force isn’t your way. I thought you hated it.” 

“I do,” Heizou mumbled.

“Then… you should treat yourself the same way. Be kind.” 

Heizou tried to lift his head and blink his eyes open. He was shushed again and that was the last time he or Kazuha spoke. 

The next thing he knew he was indoors, where the last dredges of sunlight were gone and it was cool and dark. It smelt familiar, as much as scents agitated Heizou’s head. Being outside had only managed to pull an increasingly tight rubber band over the inside of his skull. Heizou turned his cheek, trying to get away from it with a huff. He felt soft, used fabric underneath his head and he knew it was the very deflated pillow he kept on the couch of his apartment. He shifted a little, trying to sit up before he heard footsteps draw near to him. They were like thunder in his ears and Heizou whimpered. 

“Sorry,” Kazuha murmured. “I’m still working on some medicine. I can’t say you’ve kept things easy to find. Here.” Heizou felt a hand pressing down on his chest before his cheek was turned and a cold, water soaked towel was draped over his closed eyes.

“How did you… how did you get in here?” Heizou raised his fingers to the towel, moving it so he could crack one eye open. Kazuha, seated on the un-messy part of the coffee table, tilted his head, wearing a gentle smile that was trying not to look as mischievous as it was. “I… broke in.” 

“You… broke in. You could have just… used a key, you know?”  

Kazuha shrugged. “Ah, but who am I to disrupt the criminal to pirate pipeline by doing something so… logical. You’ll probably want to change the locks again later, though.”

Heizou mumbled a non-committal noise before letting the towel fall over his eyes again. As it stood, the locks on his apartment were a little thing that could be left for Future Heizou, and he was starting to feel like he might not want to anyway. 

Heizou didn’t spend much time at home. He liked being at home as much as he liked being at the police station. It wasn’t poorly maintained by any means, and the only mess he had left was on the coffee table and the cork board he’d gotten as a thank you for helping the owner of Kiminami restaurant with a case when she’d insisted on giving him something. But that’s all the place was to him. Mostly barren, devoid of anything but the essentials, a few random knick knacks and the cork board he used to work on cases while he was at home. It was somewhere to sleep and then head off anywhere, for as long as he could. It wasn’t home. So it was nice, as much pain as he was in, to not have a silent apartment for once. It got lonely, living alone. 

There was one time he’d offered to give Kazuha a place to stay the night, after he’d disregarded his instinct that it was better judgment to leave the so-called criminal to his own devices and the sky had opened up to rain down a brilliant lightning storm. He wished the wanderer had stayed longer than he had, but all Kazuha had taken was the night before he was on his way again, not willing to take more than that as a thank you for having helped Heizou solve an earlier case. Heizou had said he could come by again if he had nowhere else to go. Kazuha had yet to take him up on it, until tonight. 

“You should try to get some sleep,” Kazuha said softly. He pressed the back of his unbandaged hand to Heizou’s cheek, frowning again. “I don’t think that fever’s getting better. I need to go. I need a few things.” 

“But you’re sticking around?” Heizou mumbled. Even his voice was starting to protest against him and the words were unclear. “You’re s-” 

“Yes. I’m coming back. I’ll stay. There’s a glass of water next to you, if you need it.” 

Heizou didn’t need it. He’d tried to need it when sleep hadn’t come to him, had waited until the towel over his eyes had begun to dry at the edges before he sat up to drink something, feeling like his head might try to snap itself down the middle. But in the end he found himself on the floor of his unlit bathroom, head hanging weakly over the toilet bowl and grateful that the only thing he’d had in his body over the last 24 hours had been nothing but tea and the coffee he had mixed with it. His ears rang as if someone had smacked him. His head throbbed without rhythm as he wiped his mouth and ungracefully let himself tumble the rest of the way to the cold floor. He curled his arms around his stomach and brought his knees to his chest, letting his head sink onto them again. Then he leaned the rest of the way to his side until he knocked into the bathtub. Every part of him down to his toes felt cold. He shivered harshly.

“There you are. I’m sorry I was gone so long.” 

Heizou heard something drop to the floor by the bathroom doorway, probably a basket of some sort, but the noise still made him jump as it sent a thunderbolt of pain richocetting across his brain. Kazuha’s fingers slid up Heizou’s face to his cheeks before one of his hands started to tenderly push away the matted hair that had stuck to his forehead. His hands were warm. “Did you sleep?” 

“N-no, couldn’t-” was all Heizou got out before he wrenched away from Kazuha’s grasp, turning back to the toilet bowl as his stomach forced him to dry heave. His shoulders shook and his throat burned for what was only minutes but felt like hours. In the midst of trying to catch his breath he felt Kazuha fix his hair, pulling back the strands. There was something settled over his shoulders when it finally stopped- a blanket. Heizou didn’t own an extra blanket. 

He was too tired to even feel embarrassed as he was half pulled and half fell back against the small samurai. 

“Think that’s over for now?” he asked.

“Please.” Heizou’s own voice sounded so far away to his ears. “By the archons, please. That sucked.” 

“Of all of life’s wild array of experiences, I think… I wish not to add a migraine to the list.” 

“A what?”   

“A migraine. You’re having a migraine, Heizou.” 

“… No that can’t be it. What? How do you know?” 

“Just… a feeling. Your head hurts, doesn’t it?” 

Heizou didn’t have an answer for that. Hurt didn’t feel like it accurately described anything anymore and he didn’t have the energy or the power for thought enough to go searching for a better word. That was more Kazuha’s thing anyway. 

“I’ll… I’ll get over it.” 

“You will.” Kazuha shifted a little, bringing his hand back to test the temperature radiating off Heizou’s forehead. “But for now, you need to be kind. To yourself. How about we get off the bathroom floor, for starters. Do you think you can stand?”

“Yeah… yeah I-” Heizou stopped, looking down at his feet as if they might suddenly betray him like his mind had. 

“I’m just taking you to bed. It’s not far.”  

There was a joke in there that on a normal day Heizou would have swooped in to grab and tease Kazuha endlessly with. But he merely nodded and with the samurai’s help, Heizou stumbled himself into a stand on trembling knees and stumbled all the way to the bedroom. When he was safely laying down on his futon Kazuha made quick work of closing all the blinds in the room. It was deep into the night now, but even the brightness of the moon and starlight was enough to have Heizou’s empty stomach rebelling against him again and enough to continue the storm in his head. A nauseous bubble found its way up his throat, making itself into a hiccup. The rubber band around his skull was squeezing for all it was worth now. He drew his knees into himself and let his eyes fall shut as he heard Kazuha mess with a couple of porcelain or glass sounding things. He heard a match being struck. All magnified, so painfully loud. Kazuha blew the match out, careful to dissipate the smoke. In its wake it left a gentle scent. Something herbal, medicinal burning. A wave of fresh nausea washed over Heizou but that’s all it was. A wave, and then it settled into mere ripples. 

“Incense? Where… where did you get that?” he mumbled as he felt the futon dip, Kazuha’s fingers removing the tie in his hair. It did little to relieve the pressure in his head, but it was something.

“I told you I went out for some things. Though… it did take longer considering the time of night. My apologies. It was hard to see.” 

“See?” 

“Mm. As magnificent as the starlit sky is, I don’t suggest foraging by it between you and me.” 

Heizou struggled to open his eyes to look at him. Kazuha laid his fingertips over them and gently pressed them closed again before he readjusted the blanket over him into a somewhat reasonable, less tangled shape. “I’m guessing you’re not feeling up to taking any medicine yet, right?” 

Heizou turned his cheek into as much of a ‘no’ as he could. 

“Try to rest then. I’ll wake you in an hour. You should probably drink something too, to be safe…” 

“That sounds… like too much work.” 

Kazuha chuckled and the sound was as comforting as the scent filling Heizou’s nose. That didn’t hurt. “Perhaps. You’ll feel the better for it, though. I promise,” he said as he let his hand rest over Heizou’s forehead. It was cool and soothing, like the breezes that blew off the beaches of Watatsumi Island. In fact, he could feel a gentle wind brush against the shortened strands of hair near his ear. 

“Are you…” Heizou tried to open his eyes to look at Kazuha’s vision but he was promptly shushed. 

“You’re too warm.” 

♬      

It didn’t feel too long before Heizou felt himself drifting off into a dreamless dark sleep and even less when he knew Kazuha was trying to wake him up. 

“Five more minutes,” he groaned. 

“I’m sure if I give you five more minutes you’ll continue to ask for it when it’s over.” 

“Are you… calling me a liar?”

“Maybe.” 

Heizou was glad Kazuha was kind enough to not have forced him into fully sitting up, instead propping his head up against his legs. He was offered something in a low dish that had once been herbs and then mashed into a paste and finally a liquid which to Heizou’s addled brain looked suspiciously purple, like cough medicine did for children. It was just as pleasant as cough medicine for children was going down his throat and he quickly downed half the glass of water Kazuha had brought for him earlier without any regard for his nagging nausea. The night passed in a blur after that.  

He slept a little, but not well, the pain in his head easing into little electric shocks rather than an all encompassing storm for a while. He woke up sometimes to Kazuha idly perusing one of the very many books he’d left in a pile near his bed, his fingers still cool while they stroked over Heizou’s hair. Sometimes he woke up to Kazuha shifting through some papers Heizou couldn’t read, looking thoughtful. Sometimes he woke up to the cold, damp towel that had been placed over his eyes again and was hushed when he started harshly at the darkness that greeted him when he opened them. Most times when he woke up Kazuha tried to get more water into him, easing little sips of what was left in the glass down his throat. At one point in the night the thing that woke Heizou was the pain in his head making a vicious last stand and his body deciding it no longer wanted the medicine it had been given. It didn’t quite like the idea of water either. 

Kazuha had been quick to kick a trash bin under Heizou’s head. When he’d had the time to move it from the other room Heizou couldn’t be sure. He’d thought Kazuha had stayed with him all night, which was a thought that made the heat in his cheeks explode into a new, aggressive shade of red. His stomach had been left wringing around nothing for a while and when he was done heaving for the second time that night Heizou collapsed into Kazuha without much care, curling his arms around the samurai’s stomach and burying his face into the side of his leg, holding on with all the hope that that was the last of things getting worse before they got better. 

“I hope at least some of the medicine was able to run its course…” Kazuha murmured. He didn’t make a move to get the detective’s hands off of him so Heizou squeezed a little tighter in answer. 

When Heizou finally felt well enough to peer up into Kazuha’s face he could tell the sun was starting to rise as its rays tried to find a way to weave through the blinds of his bedroom. The room was aglow in a soft orange. 

“Are you okay?” Kazuha asked. 

Heizou stared for a moment longer, then his brows pitched together and he sighed. He ignored the question for a while. He sighed again before he spoke. “Why did you have to be a pirate?” 

“I’m… sorry?” 

“No you’re not.” 

“No… you’re right, I’m not. Why did you have to become a detective?”

Heizou blinked and turned his face away, muffling a groan. “‘Dunno. That’s a difficult question.”

“Does your head still hurt?” 

“Yeah… not as bad, though.”

“I’ll let you think it over, then. There’s no rush. But there has to be a reason why you asked me that, isn’t there?”     

There was but Heizou was reluctant to admit it. No one liked being ill, but Heizou might have just learned to hate it a little more than the average person. He hadn’t meant to say anything at all and wished he could have taken it back. How was he going to explain that it was lonely, living alone and more than anything, he wished things were different? 

“I just… couldn’t think of anything else I could do,” Heizou said after a while, ignoring the question yet again. “Detective work felt right.”

“There aren’t many things in the world that align themselves just so, so that they feel right. That’s what pirating is for me… or rather… I think it provided me with the avenue I needed to do something that felt right. Wandering is… my right.” 

Heizou wrinkled his nose. “That all just seems too simple,” he complained and Kazuha chuckled again. 

“All the things worth pursuing are, are they not?”

“You ask too many questions.”

♬

Heizou wasn’t sure when he drifted off again, but the orange glow of sunrise had been dispelled and Kazuha was no longer next to him when he woke up. He did feel markedly better though, but as he sat up he was also sure he didn’t feel quite like himself either. The ghost of the pain in his head still lingered like a shroud and he felt tired even though he had just woken up. 

He slowly untangled himself from his blankets just as long as it took for him to sit up. Looking over himself he decided to see if he could manage a shower, if not just a change of clothes. 

He was drying his hair when he emerged from his bedroom, carefully rubbing a towel over it so as to not aggravate his headache. He rubbed his fingers over his forehead a few times before he opened his eyes again, spotting Kazuha sitting on his coffee table. 

“You’re awake!” he said, smiling softly in greeting as he turned his head over his shoulder. “How are you feeling?” 

Heizou pushed aside some of the papers still covering the table before taking a seat on it next to the samurai. “Better… better.” 

“That’s good,” Kazuha said before pressing his hand to the side of Heizou’s face. “I think your fever’s started breaking too. I wouldn’t push your luck, though, try to rest today.” 

All Heizou could do was frown, unable to find the words to reply. 

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you… you should look into Ms. Suda’s security detail again, when you’re well.” 

Heizou blinked. He’d almost forgotten all about his case, how close he was to solving it. He hadn’t known Kazuha was even looking at it at all last night, or this morning. “I thought it was a dead end. Their alibis checked out for the most part. Ms. Suda vouched for them.” They said they’d never left their charge’s side while they’d been in Ritou the day the money had gone missing, and Ms. Suda had agreed.

Kazuha shrugged, but it was Kazuha. He always knew better, even if he never lorded it over anyone’s head. “Just one of them. It’s in the picture.” He nodded over to the corkboard set against the wall. Some of the papers had been rearranged, with the pictures tacked to the top. “It’s in the leaves.”

Heizou squinted a little, wincing a second later at the sprout of pain that had formed behind his eyes. He hadn’t gotten to look for long, but it was enough to find the photo of the mousy Ms. Suda chatting with two of her security guards. One man in the photo had his official armor dotted little leaves that were a deep, rich purple. They almost blended in with the color of the metal and unless Kazuha had pointed it out he might have missed them entirely. They also had managed to migrate to Ms. Suda’s kimono around the shoulders and under the collar. “Those leaves… that tree… it doesn’t grow around Ritou, does it?”

Kazuha shook his head. 

Heizou sighed. The missing piece, staring at him blankly in the face. He really must have been off his game and unwell for longer than he realized. Ms. Suda had lied to him. Perhaps her detail had never left her side, but she had left Ritou. She was in on the scandal too. 

“Are you hungry?” Kazuha asked. “You should probably eat something.” 

♬

Kazuha was gone by the time Heizou woke up next. He’d made sure the detective had put more water in his body and filled his empty stomach with a simple crust of bread and a jam he had made after finding Heizou’s cupboards empty, then ushered him back to the couch. The tiredness had caught up with him quickly after that. 

Outside his apartment windows he could hear merchant stalls closing up for the day and the barks of restaurateurs becoming ever louder and more insistent. Heizou sat up briefly, staring out into the emptiness of the room and then to the adjoining kitchen, where he saw the basket Kazuha had brought sitting on the kitchen table. From where he was Heizou could tell there were quite a few more things still left in it; fruits and the remainder of the loaf of bread, a small bag of rice, stalks of herbs as well as a little glass jar of the purple, children’s cough medicine tasting thing. Then he laid back down on the couch, resolving to take tomorrow off work. And perhaps the day after that.  

♬

Heizou had dreaded returning to work. He usually explained his absences with a few choice words and an attitude of “don’t care, I’m not listening,” but that only worked when the absence was because he’d chosen to take a vacation or go on site to do his work. Not when the last time he’d been seen the General had been hounding him to go home for being ill and had roped the rest of the doushin into the charade. He sighed as he reached the front door of the police station, hoping that the on duty guards wouldn’t pay him any mind as they often did.

“Shikanoin, you’re back already?” 

Heizou had only gotten the door halfway open before he grimaced. “Yeah, that is what it looks like.” 

“Your boy… friend… or whoever dropped by, said you’d be longer.” 

“Boyfriend? I don’t have a-”

“Whatever, not my problem, I was only supposed to take a message.” 

Then the guard pointedly turned his head back in front of him towards the street, pretending to actually be doing his job. Heizou shook his head with a sigh and headed inside.

There was a pile of files sitting on his desk when Heizou finally sat down, along with the mess of the ones he’d been trying to make sense of for his embezzlement case. Someone had taken the time to remove the teacups and coffee mug from the desk though, although Heizou couldn’t be sure who. He couldn’t imagine any of his fellow doushin would have taken the time. 

He’d sent a message down to the doushin stationed at Ritou to bring Ms. Suda and her security detail back in for questioning, though he knew the whole ordeal was mostly said and done. He’d fielded nosy questions from the doushin who dropped by to tease him about his absence, throwing tact out the window and he’d put away another couple of minute cases before he decided that he was in need of a strong tea, or better yet, a coffee. 

Heizou had made his way over to his locker where he kept his stash and entered the combination for the lock before reaching blindly with his hand to the top shelf where he kept it. His brows furrowed before he searched again, not finding the familiar burlap satchel that housed the tea leaves and coffee beans underneath his fingertips. His fingers did manage to scrape across a piece of… what was that… was that… paper? 

He grasped it, crinkling it a little in the process before he opened his hand to see it was indeed a small paper note, folded at the top. He closed the door of his locker, spreading the note out against the door to fix it before flipping it over a few times. The outside of it was blank. Heizou sighed. Typical. 

On the inside of the note there were a few lines, written in a delicate, curling calligraphy. 

This contraband has been confiscated by order of the Crux Fleet and their wandering pirate. 

It was signed with the letter K and a rather nice drawing of a maple leaf. Underneath that there were more words. 

Remember- be kind.

Heizou stared at the note for a few more seconds, his face heating up. Then he closed his hand around the note, pressing his lips against the irritated sigh that threatened to slip out. 

“Kazuha.”