Chapter Text
Ch.1: Mysta Dies
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
The metered clicking of the wall clock and the buzzing of the fluorescent lights seemed to be competing; neck-and-neck in a race to drive him crazy. Mysta was furiously aware of these two noises, as well as the cacophony of other, smaller noises that grated past his ears and settled into his mind in the form of spiritual thumbtacks. The shuffling of paper, the squeaking of a century-old chair, the scraping of furniture on the floor above them, all stabbed directly into his head and paper-thin patience, ripping it even further.
That incessant clock read 6:57, and that was close enough to 7 for the detective, who practically shoveled papers and files into the cramped, metal drawers of his desk and booked it for the door. He’d been doing nothing for hours, anyways. His time had been blandly occupied with busy work like refiling cabinets, dating old cases, and dusting the shelves. All of these things had already been done by the teenage intern (who’s name was something along the lines of Alvin, but Mysta was sure that it couldn’t be that, because he kept remembering it as ‘the name that sounds like Alvin, but isn’t), which meant they had to be re-done by someone who actually knew what they were doing. The kid was too short to reach the top shelves, anyways, so those files were both dusty and unsorted.
A couple of his co-workers called various farewells to him as he passed, and he returned them, a bit less than half-heartedly. They were all well accustomed to his cold-shoulder by now, and he might’ve appreciated their purposefully short good-byes if he’d cared enough to think about it at all.
The heavy exit slammed behind him, not startling him after all the years he’d passed through it. He didn’t look back as he walked away. Honestly, he hoped that maybe, as long as he didn’t glance to confirm it was still standing in the same, worn-down spot it always was, it would sink into the ground and disappear. His life would be better for it, he thought.
Though, when he reasoned with it further, maybe it wouldn’t.
Sure, the office job was hell, and his hopes and dreams from when he was a sly and ambitious tyke were dead and buried under paperwork and lawsuits, but it made money. Barely enough to survive, his small, damp apartment could tell you that, but it was still surviving.
He took a deep breath, and regretted it when the air tasted like smog and street-water.
The dark road was empty, despite it being barely sunset, and the flickering of the distant street lamps made him wonder if the world had ended while he was stuck pushing papers for an agency that couldn’t care less about it.
Keepers of the law, yeah right. He scoffed.
A long time ago, he had believed it. Even through school, working hard shifts to pay for ridiculous tuition costs, and being fed nothing but information and stale rice, he’d kept on with the belief that all the hard work would pay off, and he’d be able to help people someday.
His first case out of school, after months of arduous training and chores that had nothing to do with detective work (ones that he now shoveled onto the intern, with a mixture of humored malice, contempt, and bitter regret), he was assigned a missing-persons case. She was 11 at the time of her disappearance, but would’ve been 14 that year. Every other lead had gone cold, which is exactly why he’d been assigned. Half his superiors told him it was because they needed fresh eyes and a hopeful disposition, the other half knew the real purpose was to squash his hopes and weed out the weaklings before they could prosper.
The case was impossible. There were exactly two single-sided sheets of evidence, no active leads, and no witnesses. There hadn’t even been record activity on the file in over 6 months. Not a single phone call, anonymous tip, hell, not even the parents called for updates anymore.
When he’d tried to reach out to them to start the case back up, he’d nearly been beaten off their property. They were sick and tired of good-for-nothing cops, in their own words, and wouldn’t have another second of anyone prying around in their personal life and exposing their pain and grief to the entire world. Mysta hadn’t corrected them, when they called him a cop. Even if he was naive, he wasn’t stupid, and trying to correct an angry, sorrowful father with a broom in hand was probably the stupidest thing he could do.
He’d done the best he could, and spent a good majority of his non-working hours digging through old notes and mulling over statements for some kind of hint. Nothing came up, of course. He was new at his job, and however innately talented he’d assumed he was, was seeming more and more like a fallacy with each dead end.
That had been years ago, and not that it would change anything or find the lost girl, but he still glanced through the dusty file from time to time. Maybe as a reminder of who he’d once been, or maybe because he was a stubborn son-of-a-bitch who couldn’t let the past die.
After the case was forced closed again, the only thing that kept him going was the thought that one day there would be one he did solve. One day, he would bring two angry, sorrowful parents the only thing that could make them happy again.
Except that didn’t happen. He solved cases, sure, there were plenty that he cracked with unmatched skill. He quickly rose to the top ranks of the district, earning his title as ‘The Fox Detective” through whispered rumors and gossip that he must have some kind of sixth sense, finding clues and leads where there were none. Or maybe, he just wasn’t shit at his job.
With each case he solved, and each lead gone cold, he felt himself slipping further and further off of that high horse. The victories were stained with the rueful taste of remorse. The vast majority had been dead when he’d found them. Only two of the dozens of cases the city had assigned him had been alive by the end, and only one of the two survived after that. He’d crumpled the hand-written letter telling of her suicide and stomped it into his kitchen trash-can. He didn’t attend the funeral, though he’d been invited, and had nearly drunk himself to death over it.
The cold cases weren’t any easier. No body (alive or dead) meant no closure. Each one left an open wound on his soul and ego, equally as harsh as the ones inflicted by the sobs and wails of the mournful families that had been pushed and dragged along through years of paperwork and media and radio-silence, only to come out of it with a dead child and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Truly, the only thing he’d gained from his job was alcoholism (and the underlying trauma causing it).
He didn’t know why he kept on with it. Whenever some reporter or intern asked what his motivation was, he’d always just replied with a “someone’s gotta do it”. When he still had enough energy to bullshit people, he would ramble about how sure, the job was hard, but people deserved to know the truth. In more recent years, he’d found that to be completely untrue. Maybe sometimes, the anxious ignorance, the sliver of dying hope, was better than the reality.
In an effort to pull himself out of the frightening spiral consisting of liver damage and emotional numbness, he’d turned to something unexpected.
He never considered himself a romantic. Naive, sure, maybe even an optimist (once upon a time), but never one to fancy the tender pull of true love, or soulmates. So it was odd, impossible , even, when his attention was grabbed by an iPhone game advertisement.
Luxiem~Deluxe!
It looked like a dating simulator of some kind. The ad didn’t reveal much other than silhouettes of tastefully dressed PNG characters overlaying a jazzy song. The seller for him was the barely legible cursive catchphrase. He’d only been able to decipher its meaning because it was also spoken by a deeply rich and melodious voice.
“I could be your hope in the dark.”
It had made him scoff.
Then he’d hovered over the tiny X on the corner of the screen. And found himself hesitating. His face was grim as the game downloaded.
It had sat unopened in his library for weeks. He’d honestly forgotten about it, until the bi-monthly app purge to free up storage for more cat-cafe themed games had him stumbling into it again. He couldn’t delete it, he just couldn't.
So he played it, and at first, he absolutely hated it. But the sheer audacity of the game, and the cringe induced by insolent flirts distracted him from his reality. It was an excellent distraction in fact, and despite the aversion he’d originally held for it, he began to really get into it.
The format was somewhat of an interactive visual novel, with almost too many options to choose when a character would ask a question. He was continuously impressed with the quality of the art and animation, and the depth of the story and characters.
He’d started with the most obvious route; it was heavily pushed by the game, and was probably the default if one were to choose only the neutral answers.
Vox Akuma. The voice from the advertisement, he discovered. Only select lines were spoken, the ones aimed to make your heart (and probably genitals) throb.
His voice really was beautiful, and his character was lovable. He understood quickly why the game pushed so heavily for this to be the first route. Vox basically threw himself at the player, deep voice muttering flirts and teasing jabs. It was fun , and thrilling, and got even better when the lore was revealed in the second chapter.
Mysta was amazed when, in addition to owning a massively successful upper-class bar, Vox was also a 400-something year old demon lord from ancient Japan. So he was hot, rich, and had a tragically-beautiful backstory. It was an easy sell, and Mysta bought it.
He was surprised again when the routes for the other 3 characters turned out to be challenging to access. All the cards had to be played right, and he found himself facing the bad endings for each character multiple times in a row.
Within 3 months of having the game downloaded, he’d successfully unlocked the neutral ending for all 4 characters, the bad ending for 3 (he couldn’t bring himself to reject Vox, and had abandoned the route), and the romantic ending for 2. Shu and Luca were almost impossible to get a solid good ending on. Luca, an outwardly terrifying mafia boss with a heart of pure gold, would default to a neutral ‘friend-zone’ ending if even one answer wasn’t satisfactory for his route.
Mysta had gone through every possible variation of both his bad and neutral ending to try and track down the answer he was missing, and suffered the emotional damage for it. He’d finally found it, after an additional month of back and forth between save files, and had cried genuine tears upon hearing the last spoken voiceline of the route.
“I do.”
It was the only romance ending to involve marriage, and was the sweetest victory he’d experienced since graduating college. It almost made the repeated bad endings worth it, but he purposefully avoided Luca’s route from then on, if only to never have to see him getting betrayed and shot by the player again.
Shu’s good ending wasn’t necessarily hard to complete, in terms of difficulty, but the steps to get there made no sense to Mysta, so he hadn’t seen the solution right away. Shu was arguably Mysta’s least favorite of the bunch. He didn’t understand him, the things he said were cryptic and unusual, and even having reached the end, he felt there was still so much to the character that was never explored. Like, why did he vanish after admitting his love? Why couldn’t he just be straightforward about his origins? Why did he dress like that? Why did none of the other characters seem concerned about the fire floating behind him?
Regardless, Mysta had been satisfied upon completing all 4 good endings. He’d gone to close the app and actually do his job, when he noticed a new icon on the flashy homescreen.
True Love Ending- Unlocked.
The branching track of bubbles, which indicated his progress in each storyline and individually represented an Event in the relationship, had formed a circle around a large, grayed-out heart with a lock on it. Despite claiming it was unlocked, the level couldn’t be accessed through the homepage, and he assumed it would need to be discovered through gameplay.
He had really tried, and had spent more time at work re-running different routes than doing his actual job. Eventually though, a fresh case came in, and they needed all hands on deck. He was called to the front lines, first on the scene, and the real life mystery became more important than the fictional men in his phone, and the fake mystery that they hid behind a pixelated lock.
It was an emergency case, one of the ones the police district shoveled onto them as soon as they could. Thankfully, it came with stacks of evidence and witnesses. Though the majority of the statements were disregarded for lack of proof, there were a couple solid leads that basically dragged Mysta to a conclusion.
It was one of the most thrilling cases he’d experienced to date, never topping the Noir Novelist ( that one could probably spawn a dozen novels spanning the length of the case, and would keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time), but coming to a close second.
Unlike the Noir Novelist, there hadn’t been any dead victims found at the time the case was assigned to him (he was grateful for it, the novelist had been a particularly gruesome killer). There were 6 disappearances (kidnappings) over the course of three weeks and all in a span of about 7 or 8 miles. The victims were all young-ish men, with not much other than that connecting them. They ranged variably in skin tone, height, hair color, hobbies; pretty much anything they might use to put a profile on the kidnapper.
But they had a lot , compared to previous cases. So much, in fact, that Mysta wasn’t even sure why he’d been called to look over it in the first place. With this much evidence (there was literally footage of the guy kidnapping one of the missing people, they had his appearance, down to the red tattoo over his left eye) he figured any cheap investigator with internet access would be able to solve it.
He figured wrong, apparently. Despite the piles of neon signs pointing to the answer, no one had been able to track this guy down. He’d gotten various explanations on why exactly that was, but most of them were shamefully muttered or littered with so many excuses that he couldn’t decipher anything other than the underlying truth of “I suck at my job”.
Annoyed, he’d climbed into the car of a man he vaguely knew, and was taken out to the last kidnapping scene. The guy was a chief commander, or whatever they called the head honcho of the police district, and was pretty notorious for shooting first and asking questions later. Mysta didn’t necessarily like the guy, at all really. He was polite and, from the small amount of time he’d spent with him while getting taxied around to various crime scenes, figured that he had a decent sense of humor, but his hair was an ungodly shade of blond, and his car smelled too much like those cheap air-fresheners. He also had a curious (creepy) relationship with the intern at the office, and Mysta recalled, in vague horror, watching Alvin (or whatever it was) bend over seductively to pick up a pen that had very intentionally been dropped.
Regardless, he didn’t like the guy very much, and had been pretty pissed at the circumstances leading to his involvement in the case.
When he’d actually gotten there, though, he began to get a little excited. It was not as cut-and-dry as he’d originally thought, and the branching leads sounded like a lot of fun to sort out.
The highlighter-esc cop led him to the back to review security footage. The quality had been awful (not like the gas station in the middle of the outskirts of the city had money to blow on Ultra 4k cameras), but it clearly showed not one, but two men exit a sleek, black car and approach the latest victim. One of them was obviously the same guy from the other sighting. His hair was chin length and very light, though the quality of the recording didn’t display color well, he figured it was either incredibly blond, or gray. The newest player in this sick, twisted game was a bit shorter than the guy with the eye tattoo (Mysta had made a vague comment about it looking like a heart monitor). His hair was shorter, and wilder, and the flickering, staticky colors had portrayed it as an ugly violet color.
There hadn’t been a lot of suspicious activity in the recording, no outright violence or luring. They appeared to have just approached the kid (a tall, lanky, dark skinned boy with the tightest leather pants Mysta had ever seen) and led him back to the car. The strange, stiff movements the boy walked with baffled him for a moment. He walked like some kind of zombie, aimlessly following the two men back to the vehicle.
Mysta had been watching the boy in the tape so closely that he physically jumped when his eyes flicked over to the other man, who was staring directly into the camera. The bottom half of his face was covered with a surgical mask, but the ferocity of his glower translated clearly through the screen. He had then turned to the eye-tattoo guy and gotten in the passenger seat with a visible laugh.
“What the hell?” Mysta had muttered, and the tape cut off.
They had been drugging the victims, he deduced after an additional week of investigating. Every scene they’d been involved in had traces of an aerated powder substance, known to induce a trance-like state.
The issue then was that these guys were about as elusive as they came. It was like they could see the future, or something, with the way they avoided every stake-out and every planned police raid. They dodged every baited hook Mysta placed, and he’d been both frustrated and excited when the kidnappings sped up. They were getting erratic, panicked, and this had been exactly what Mysta wanted.
Their plans, admittedly genius for avoiding the law, started to self-destruct once they got desperate, and ended with a large-scale hostage situation.
It had been at an old wearhouse, Mysta tracked them on foot after a particularly helpful lead, and had quietly called for backup from the safety of the expanse of storage containers and dumpsters surrounding the place.
He remembered peaking in the large windows. Despite being something of an evil lair, the view inside wasn’t obstructed at all, and he could see a comfy living room and kitchen set up. It was pristine, like rooms in a furniture store. Nothing was out of place, no movement, no scattered papers, no activity at all. It was domestic , and it freaked Mysta the fuck out.
He sat behind a dumpster long enough for his legs to cramp, before movement startled him out of his dissociation.
Both of them were completely recognizable, just more colorfully saturated than they had been on the footage. The taller of the two was wearing a large grin, his red-lined tattoo crinkled at the corner of his eye and Mysta thought (not without his own shame) that he was handsome. He had a sort of weary cleanliness to him, and, without the context of his current situation, probably would’ve caught his interest.
The shorter did, in fact, have violet hair. It wasn’t quite that ugly, grayish color from the film, but it was just as wild. His eyes were wide, in a way that sent shivers all up and down Mysta’s body. He appeared like he was looking past the other man, or maybe into him, seeing something no one else could. He had a softer smile, a gentle, peculiar thing, like he was trying not to show as much as he felt.
Mysta watched as they led each other through the staged house, laughing and smiling as they went. They were holding hands, he’d noted. They stopped in the kitchen, and just stood holding each other. There was nothing other than furniture. Even from the outside, Mysta could see the empty cabinets, but they held each other like an old married couple in their well-worn kitchen.
It was a fallacy, it was fake , and Mysta knew that somewhere hidden from sight were a dozen innocent people being held against their will. Despite this knowledge, and despite knowing these men were probably (definitely) insane, and dangerous, he couldn’t help but look away. It felt wrong to be intruding on this moment, to be looking in from the outside. He had glanced back, feeling just as wrong about taking his eyes off of such elusive targets, and felt his heart stop.
Those eyes. Bright, terrifyingly purple eyes (or was one pink?) stared directly at him. Even from a distance, Mysta had felt the weight of that gaze. It was from over the other man’s shoulder, they were still hugging. It was protective, insanely so, and weary.
Mysta’s stomach had dropped when the purple one muttered something into the other’s neck. It was probably a warning, he was probably going to die very shortly, he’d been caught, but the tattooed man just laughed. They pulled away so they could laugh together, clutching onto each other as if it was the funniest joke in the world.
“What the hell…?” The purple one wasn’t looking at him anymore, he had to wonder if maybe it wasn’t just his imagination.
Backup had arrived, the whole SWAT brigade had surrounded the building, lasers and all. They put up a fight, Mysta gave them that. The taller of the two had tried to shoot from the roof of the warehouse, taking aim directly for that blond cop that Mysta disliked, and ended up with 3-dozen bullet holes. The purple one had screamed and wailed and held the dying man, shouting about fate and the universe, and Mysta might have laughed, if he wasn’t already crying.
Everyone aside from the kidnappers had come out alive. They didn’t remember much, and all just muttered vaguely about ‘mama’ and their ‘destiny’ until the effects of the drug fully wore off.
It had been a massive success, one that put Mysta even higher up on the pedestal. It haunted him the same as any other case. He wouldn’t ever know the story of those two men, what they thought they were doing, who they thought they were helping. All he had were fragments, broken shards of a larger picture he’d never see.
And that was his job, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t responsible for the before, or the after, the backstory, or the punishment. He was paid to put together obvious pieces of information for the larger, idiotic public to witness. And still, he was the ‘hero’. Fox Detective Mysta Rias, another victory to shove under his belt.
He was grateful, in a way, that both of those men had died. At least they went out dramatically. People would write about their tragic romance for decades, and he’d be the villain in those stories. He felt that that would be more accurate.
In the past, he’d never put much thought to how he would die. When asked, he’d always brushed it off with a joke about dying in the field, in some crazy, James Bond type way.
A garbage can rattled across the street. He stared at it for a moment, his eyes narrowing to combat the shadow of the city. On a particularly strong sway, the can tipped over and spilled sodden trash across the sidewalk. A cat clawed their way out of the pile, fur matted with grease and whatever else was oozing out from the trash. It was a tiny, bony thing, and even from across the road, Mysta could tell it was probably pretty young.
The creature blinked at him owlishly, and he raised a hand as if to wave at it. It cocked its head, and turned to walk farther down the alleyway.
“Oh hey, wait!” he called, stepping off of the sidewalk and into the street to catch up. The cat glanced over its shoulder, and Mysta could’ve sworn he saw it wink. Then, it took off running, and as he took another step to chase after, it vanished from his sight.
Mysta had never given much thought to how he would die. When asked, he definitely wouldn’t have said “Oh, I think I’ll get hit by a truck after I step out into the road to chase after a stray cat covered in garbage”.
Except, that’s what happened. The cat disappeared, and he took another step anyway, because maybe it would circle back around and he’d be able to catch it. Truthfully, he was already imagining how nice it would be to have some other living thing around the apartment. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so alone anymore.
And then a deafening honk blared from behind him.
The sound of the rain seemed much louder than it had been previously. He hadn’t really even noticed it was raining before, but now, it drowned out all other noise. He hadn’t felt much, and some part of him was grateful for that. Dying suddenly in an unexpected way was probably much better than getting kidnapped and tortured to death by some serial killer.
Mostly, though, he was disappointed. He was disappointed at how lame of a tombstone he’d get from dying this way. Moreso, he was disappointed that the only true happiness he’d felt in over a decade came from a dating simulator. One that, now, he wouldn’t get to finish.
Yes, the worst part of the-whole-dying-thing, to Mysta Rias, was that he wouldn’t get to finish his dating simulator.