Work Text:
Tougane doesn’t initiate the offensive, doesn’t rush headlong to grapple the drone like a former hound once did before her eyes.
He waits.
Akane watches him sidestep the punch from the right, from the left, and her eyes linger just a second too long as he flips the drone to the floor and holds it down with the weight of his body.
The Enforcer’s eyes shift over from his opponent to her form, still rooted by the doorway, and a smile creeps over his face as he stands. Of late, he smiles at her like this quite often, and she supposes that he’s trying to present a congenial face to a professional superior, to signal his compatibility in working with her. The corners of his mouth lift in such a peculiar, mocking way though, and his expressions come off as distorted, making his smiles seem more cruel than kind.
Jarred by how analogous and yet dissonant this display of combative skills feels to her interred memories, Akane blinks and momentarily imagines another man in his place, a man whose attempts at establishing rapport had been awkward in their own way but whose infrequent smiles had never conveyed falsehood in their curve.
“Something on your mind, Inspector?” Tougane asks, voice imbued with the knowledge of one who already knows the answer.
“For a second there, you reminded me of someone,” she tells him, wanting very much to avoid further conversation, for that ‘second’ to be over.
Tougane tosses his head back though, a haughty slant to his admittedly admirable jawline, and she’s reminded of Kougami looking at her, amused at how she’d looked at him.
“Enforcer Kougami, am I right?” Tougane questions, and the self-assured glint of his irises makes his eyes look shiftier than before.
“You know, I was around back when the guy was still an Inspector himself,” he continues, and Akane wishes that she could just stop listening and force her feet towards a machine at the other end of the room. “Even then, he was always such a cold individual. So perpetually closed-off.”
His intonation drops to a soft purr, as if intended to be comforting. “I just want you to know, Inspector, I’m not going to leave your side like he did.”
Her voice feels too much at odds with her mind to speak. Her automatic inclination is to say something formal and glib in reply, thank you, Enforcer, for reassuring me of your loyalty, but his words throw her already agitated thoughts into turmoil. She wants to argue, wants to defend the principles of the hound who’d stood before her in this same place over a year ago, but more insidiously, her mind whispers, isn’t he right though? He’ll never fit his predecessor’s shoes, but that man promised he shared your goals, that he wanted to pursue those goals in the same way you did, and then he left.
Her shoulders twist to turn away, and Tougane voices another piece of verbal torment.
“I saw you looking, Akane. If you want to do more to ease your stress than just watch, I can help you with that too.”
She could laugh off these words as well of course, as just another offer of professionally-oriented development, but he takes a step towards her, his eyes now predatory in their intent, and she knows he meant to insinuate a less innocent sort of compatibility between them.
“Tsunemori.”
She feels Ginoza’s presence at her back even before her eyes confirm it, and he fixes a glance of open hostility at Tougane before informing her, “We just found something in an old case file that may be of help in the investigation. Would you mind coming back to the office to take a look?”
Murmuring a quick parting to Tougane, Akane turns fully to leave the gym, and both she and Ginoza are silent as they make their way down the otherwise empty corridors.
“There is no old case file, is there?” she asks him, just as they reach the office door.
His hand already placed on the handle, metal to metal, to open the door for her, Ginoza quirks one eyebrow at her and quietly answers, “Of course there is. I’m not just going to say things to mislead you.”
She steps into the room, and indeed, she spots the digital files pulled up on his computer, a new message from Shion flashing in the corner of the screen. As she pulls over a seat to sit beside his, Ginoza sets two cups of coffee, their steam briefly perspiring onto the monitor, in front of her. He doesn’t sit down at first.
“Akane,” he says, her given name rolling off his tongue to resound in the hush of the room. She’s accustomed to hearing him pronounce kanshikan and Tsunemori, word and tone deferential, but the way he says her name feels pleasantly natural and the lapse of formality relaxes the lingering tension in her form.
“You can trust me to not leave your side either.”
She looks up at him, no lens of glass or steel rim obscuring the devotion in his eyes, and her heart does not falter in believing the truth of his words.
“I know,” she tells him. Her smiles are rare these days, but she cedes one, genuine and fond in its unfurling, for him. “Thank you.”
And they sit down together, comforted in knowing that even if their work tonight arrives at no answers, then at least they were not alone in their searching.