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Touya hasn’t seen Keigo all winter. It’s not a bad thing—it’s not like Touya searches through the crowd of melting faces for something blonde and vaguely furry. It’s not like Keigo is the human depiction of sunlight and Touya is the dark side of the moon. It’s not like he’s twenty-six and so close to being the top-ranked detective in the company, even if he doesn’t care, even if he never works hard, even if he’s just Touya.
There’s a murder in the alley behind the gay club. It’s one Touya used to frequent often until blonde, gold, sun turned up flashing shiny white teeth and a shirt that’s more expensive than Touya’s pathetic excuse for a car. The venue is different now—stained with more than just blood. The pink lights aren’t as warm and the music isn’t as friendly. There’s something that twinkles in the shadows, haunting Touya over his shoulder, irises yellow and pupils sharp slits.
Touya’s good at his job. He gets to the club within half an hour, he’s out after two. He’s faster than the fastest detective alive, and Aizawa doesn’t even have time to breathe a word. There’s no former child soldier deployed. There’s no arguments with Tenko or racing to the car against Toga. It’s just Touya, alone, truly a singular, lonely moon.
He flicks his lighter on. The alley behind the agency isn’t as red, but it stinks all the same. It’s ugly in a way no one can ever call home, and yet Touya is here every day.
“Those are bad for you, ya know.”
Touya’s jaw clenches. His cigarette snaps, and he rolls his eyes to the side, staring like death from under cheaply dyed bangs. “Come to arrest me, officer?”
Keigo snickers. He stands beside Touya like they’re friends, like they don’t steal cases out from under each other’s noses all the time. “Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day.”
Touya drops his smoke on the floor, crushing it under his heel and imagining the yellow sparks are Keigo’s face. He pulls out another from a box in his back pocket and tries not to think about how much money Keigo made him waste.
“Cool,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck. Go home to your lover and fuck their brains out or somethin’.” He stuffs the cigarette between his lips before he can shout leave me alone.
Keigo hovers like a parrot that doesn’t know what to do. “I’m single,” he finally reveals, and then leans against the wall. His jacket almost brushes Touya’s shoulder, and Touya almost doesn’t notice.
He moves away.
Keigo swallows. “I thought you knew that already. I mean, I’m here all the time. There’s no way I have a ‘lover’.”
He stares at Touya too intensely. Again, Touya has to move away, he has to look elsewhere, he has a take a long, exaggerated inhale, letting himself fade as smoke fills his lungs and his soul turns black.
He was thirteen when he fully fell into his emo stage. He still wears black jeans and loud, rattly, DIY-ed Doc Martin’s. He doesn’t know what Keigo looked like at thirteen, and he never wants to find out.
“Why are you here?” he asks instead of indulging any other question swimming around his brain.
“You stole my case,” Keigo replies fast.
“Why are you really here?” Touya replies faster.
There’s silence, long and comfortable. Out of the corner of his eye, Touya can see Keigo squirm. It makes the edges of his lips quirk up, just slightly, and then he remembers the huge red tattoo spanning Keigo’s back and the exact face Keigo made when he dared Touya to touch it.
He almost snaps his cigarette again.
“Rumi has a girlfriend,” Keigo finally mutters.
Touya laughs. “What? Fuckin’ lonely or some shit? Go pester Toga. She’s infatuated with you.”
Keigo turns like he has Touya right where he wants him, backed up in some dingy alley against a wall. His eyes sharpen like a predator, and Touya remembers his mother telling him not to look directly into the sun.
“Who are you infatuated with?” Keigo’s lips curl. He’s serious. He looks like he’s hunting down a serial killer.
Touya blows smoke in his face. “I don’t fall in love.”
He had his first girlfriend at age sixteen. It was weird and awkward. He held her hand because she wanted him to. He dumped her under her favourite cherry blossom tree and broke her heart.
Keigo snickers in caramel rings, each note more annoying than the last. “See you tomorrow, Todoroki.”
Touya doesn’t pay attention to his wave. He doesn’t pay attention to his tight jeans or the outline of his ass. He takes another inhale. He blows out. He counts the seconds for the blue sky to turn to sparkling stars and calls it quits because lazy workers don’t stay at the office until it’s late.
★
Toga is cackling into his ear.
“Oooh,” she sings, her voice breaking out halfway into giggles. “Someone’s got a secret admirer.” She lunges, nails scraping Touya’s chin in her futile attempt to grab the white letter. Touya holds it up high, glad he’s a piece of fucking shit who wears too tall boots to be appropriate for detective work.
He tries to smirk but it doesn’t come. All he can do is stare at the letter. The handwriting is neat and pretty, something gorgeous and girly and weirdly familiar in a way he cannot place. He’s disturbed and he doesn’t know why. He puts one hand to Toga’s face and easily holds her at arms length, eyes moving fast even though he takes three times as long as everyone else to do simple paperwork.
“Touya-a-a-a,” Toga whines. “You’re being mean! It’s not fair! What does it say?”
She’s seventeen so Touya gives her annoyingness a pass. But then she bites his palm and Touya knows he’s bleeding. Her canines are as sharp as a leopard’s, for some reason, and sometimes Touya stays up at night, thinking of weird secret government labs and hidden experiments and how Toga might not actually be human at all.
“None of your fucking business.” He crumples the letter between his fingers, destroying each pretty word dotted with pink love hearts and decorated with cringe pining. There’s something satisfying about the action, but Touya’s heart hurts. He feels a pang, and then he feels something churn, and then Toga’s shoving him aside and snatching the letter from his grasp.
She gasps, eyes wide and sparkly. She looks like every stereotypical teenage girl, and suddenly Touya is five. He’s battling her in the hallway of their workplace, trying to grab a love confession like it matters, and Toga’s winning. She’s strong. Her teeth are sharp. Touya has bite marks everywhere.
Keigo is nowhere to be found. Touya hasn’t checked in with Tenko. He’s probably lost his case for the day, and now all he can do is sit around and wait for someone to be murdered. He hopes it’s him. He hopes Toga whips out one of the many knives she keeps hidden on her person and stabs him through the jugular. He hopes someone materialises from the floorboards and snatches the letter from Touya’s hands and explains how it wasn’t actually meant for him.
It says Dear Touya at the top though. Not even Todoroki. Touya.
He’s going to die. He’s going to bury himself as his cheeks burn his body to ashes, and he’s going to finally, finally die.
Toga sighs wistfully. “You’re so lucky, onii-chan—”
“Not ‘onii-chan’.”
“You’re so lucky, onii-san—”
Touya gives up. He lies on the floor. “I’m going to kill you.”
Toga giggles. “I think you’re in love. I can smell it.”
He’s so sure she isn’t human. She’s part-cat, or part-dog, or maybe even part-raccoon. “You need to get your nose checked.”
She giggles again, louder, sharper, the snarls of a wolf trying to hunt a rabbit down. “You should write a letter back. Tell him how much you love him. Do you think Keigo will write me a love letter one day?”
Touya doesn’t understand Toga. He’s known her since she was seventeen and now she’s almost twenty, but he still doesn’t understand a word she says. It’s a blessing and a curse. He looks at the note again, at the pretty words once more. It’s nothing like Keigo’s chicken scratch. Touya doesn’t even know why he’s making the comparison.
“How do you know it’s a guy?” he asks, tongue dripping with scepticism, instead of confronting any of the demons in his brain.
Toga does the thing Touya hates; her smile is knowing, mischievous, and full of obscured truth. “Women’s intuition, onii-chan.”
“Not ‘onii-chan’,” Touya says again.
His buzzer beeps. A murderer has come to save the day. He stuffs the letter into his pocket, ruining love with harsh creases and stains. Tenko is as pissy as usual and the world is as broken as ever, but this is the life of a detective. Even someone like Keigo has no time for romance.
★
The library is quiet—they’re amongst the old archives, a desk overrun with yellowed paper and news from decades gone. Keigo’s foot is on the chair next to Touya, and his shoes are shiny. They’re brand new. Touya doesn’t take notice of what Keigo wears often.
“How’d your Valentine’s go?” Keigo asks, not looking away from the research cluttering his brain.
One thing Touya hates about him is his nonchalance. He doesn’t need glasses, so he can keep his head down as long as possible. Touya, on the other hand, is stuck like a loser shoving his glasses up every few seconds. He should get them tightened, but time is money, and murderers make a killing as the seconds pass.
“Fine,” Touya answers curtly. He shuffled the newspapers once, and then he does it once more. And then Keigo still isn’t paying him any mind and Touya can’t stop shuffling the papers for the third time in a row.
It’s useless. The note still sits in his pocket. There was no meeting place, no time, nothing. It was just a love confession. How middle school.
Touya’s face heats up, and he swallows his childishness down.
“How was yours?”
“Boring,” Keigo replies. He laughs, airy and horrifying. His hair flickers gold-white-gold as he starts on a new pile of old notes. “Stayed in, did some work, tried to convince Tokoyami to buy me yakitori, but then he said he had a date. Can you believe that? My intern has found love before me.”
Touya can’t stop his wry smile. “You’re only twenty-six, where’s the rush?”
“Ha. Ha.” Keigo rolls his eyes. “Very funny. You’re not getting any younger, too, ya know? Found a Mx Right?”
Touya doesn’t mix professional with personal, aside from when it comes to Toga breaking into his house, and then Jin tumbling through his window, and then Iguchi desperately knocking on his front door at midnight because he really needs to pee.
But there’s still the note in his back pocket, and Touya might hate Keigo, but he’s one of the best detectives in the department. Only someone who works here could have slipped the note into Touya’s locker. It’s simple, it’s easy—Tenko would be proud Touya’s no longer being a lonely ass. Finally, he can work together as a partner.
He pulls out the letter. It lands slap-bang in the middle of the desk, right between all the important files and stacks of bullshit, almost like it’s being framed, almost like the table has been waiting for it all along.
“I got this yesterday. Do you recognise the handwriting?”
Keigo’s more social than Touya, and yet he somehow always ends up in the back alleys, alone like an eagle. Sometimes Touya has to find another place to smoke. Other times it’s quiet. It’s just them. It’s just two people who are lazy but somehow the lease lazy of them all.
Keigo’s eyes squint as he peers closer. He swallows. He looks up, fingers outstretched and hovering, and Touya almost cackles.
“You can touch it. It’s not gonna bite.” He wishes it would.
“Cool, cool. Just checkin’.”
Keigo takes the note gingerly, delicate fingers handling the most important thing in the world. But it’s not important, and Touya sits on it, he crushes it, he shoves it away like he doesn’t care.
The notes turns over, going back and forth as Keigo examines it. Touya has never actually watched him work before, and even though he’s fast, Touya understands why everyone loves Keigo more. He’s thorough and calm, and his eyes don’t miss a single detail.
The letter stops. There’s a beat. Touya doesn’t know how to think, how to feel, how to even breathe anymore.
Keigo meets his eyes. The letter falls back to the table. “Sorry, man, I don’t know who wrote this. Where did you find it?”
Touya’s cheeks burn red. He hates how he has his mother’s complexion; it’s make him too easy to read for a murder detective. He should be hard and stoic, like his father, like Keigo himself.
“Nowhere.” He grabs the letter, crumpling it between his fingers as it finds its home back in his pocket, and the moment is over. They go back to researching. Touya puts all his energy into scanning each word he’s reading, but nothing is going through his brain.
Twenty minutes later, Keigo holds up an old journal article like it’s a trophy. He shouts a battle cry of victory and gets scolded by the librarian, and Touya has lost again. He’s second place. He needs to find a new murderer to catch before Keigo gets ahead.
★
Jin and Toga are laughing over their bubble tea, black tapioca pearls spitting onto the floor in diseased globs as milky liquid comes out their noses.
“Someone really admires you, onii-chan.” Toga slurps her tea obnoxiously, and then spits it back out again when Touya glares.
This letter is pink. There are love hearts on it. It smells like roses.
Jin finally puts his cup away. “Dude, this is kinda cute. Are you in love now?”
Touya ignores the second sentence. He ignores everything actually, tearing the letter open to read its contents.
Dearest Touya, it starts.
He closes it. He folds it. He crushes it into a ball and throws it onto the floor, only to rush back and push Toga away before she can get her grubby paws all over what’s his.
★
“I got a second letter.”
They’re in the library again, in the same seats as last time, going over the same but different papers. Maybe something is happening between the streets, maybe the world is ramping up, maybe things are clashing together once and for all. Maybe Touya should be connecting the dots, filling in the spaces, doing anything to get his mind out the gutter.
Keigo doesn’t look away from the archived papers but his lips quirk up all the same. “Yeah? Have you figured out who it is yet?”
Touya grits his teeth. “No. No one has their handwriting, or people are just fucking with me.”
Keigo chuckles. “You sure are fun to fuck with.” He shuffles his papers. He shuffles them again. Touya glares as he shuffles them a third time before finally letting the stack go.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Keigo sighs and stops. The smile still stains his lips. Touya wants to kiss or punch him—he isn’t quite sure. “I’m just sayin’...maybe whoever you’re searching for is closer than you think.”
“What, like Toga or something?”
Keigo coughs to cover a laugh, but Touya still hears it. He still sees the shine in Keigo’s teeth and gold of the rings covering his lips. “Toga’s not subtle like this.”
Touya raises an eyebrow. He slaps the egregious letter onto the table, letting its pink bleed everywhere. “You think this is subtle?”
Keigo shrugs, and he goes back to work quietly. This time, Touya catches the culprit first and rubs it in his smug golden face.
★
There’s a third letter, and then a fourth, and then the fifth is huge, barely fitting into his locker. It’s bright red, like fire, like the original colour of Touya’s hair, like the wings on the back of Keigo’s back. Toga has started bringing ice cream to work, and Jin wears 3D glasses as if that makes sense. Either way the audience has grown as Touya pulls out his love confession of the day, probably including a sonnet that describes his eyes in sixteen different ways.
He sighs, pulling it open just so he can move on.
And gets a huge explosion of red and pink sparkles in his face.
There’s silence, a second for Touya to process what the fuck just occurred.
Toga falls over in her chair, spilling popcorn everywhere and dragging Jin down with her, Moe snickers somewhere in the background, and Tenko judges Touya for eternity.
There is pink in his hair, on his suit, in the crevices of fabric trickling down his body. He can taste it in his mouth. There’s a red lipstick stain on the letter, and Touya’s not a romantic. He whirls around, blood boiling, and bares his teeth at every co-worker in his vicinity.
“Who the fuck did this!?”
Everyone is silent. Iguchi, on his way to the copy room, lets out a low whistle. “This is why I asked my boyfriend out on Minecraft.”
Keigo walks in. He’s pristine and handsome, and his grin is the worst thing in the world. “Lookin’ hot, Todoroki.”
Touya flings the letter at his face. Glitter goes everywhere. They turn up to the crime scene in matching love heart suits.
★
Three more dead, an arrow through their hearts. Touya’s out for a smoke, but the archived journals run through his brain, each of them stained with pretty handwriting that doesn’t belong to anyone he knows.
The cigarette glows when it touches his lips, matching the sun setting behind him. The sky is rose-gold. Keigo hasn’t been in the alley for the past few days.
He’s missing something. He doesn’t know what. He slumps down onto the ground and lets the cigarette disintegrate. It blinks into ash in a second, and Touya throws the butt away.
He and Keigo have been working together lately, kind of. Well, working together as well as they, the biggest loners in the building, can. It’s been nice. It’s been weird. Touya’s been smoking more.
There’s still glitter on his skin, making him sparkle. Keigo can’t seem to look away, a damn magpie drawn to the glitz and glimmer like there’s nothing else worth looking at. It’s weird. It’s so, so weird. He tells himself it isn’t nice too.
Touya buries his face between his hands, letting them plonk into his bony knees. No matter who he thinks of, his brain always comes back to Keigo. Moe is a lesbian. Rumi has a girlfriend. Toga is like an annoying little sister and Jin is in his mid-thirties, so far removed from romance and occupied with everything else going on. Aizawa feels like Touya’s secondary dad, Kaina is so obsessed with the armless criminal they just caught the other day, Tenko and Iguchi are dating even if they think no one knows—and that just leaves Keigo. Stupid fucking Keigo.
Touya groans, thumping the back of his head against the brick wall as he pulls another cigarette from his packet. He closes his eyes. He tries to focus on more important mysteries that don’t have dead ends—but they all do, and he’s lost and confused, and every time Touya blinks, he feels like the world is falling apart even more. He’s going to be twenty-seven. Fuyumi just got a girlfriend who Touya isn’t allowed to meet yet, and Touya still isn’t the top-ranked detective in the company—not for sure, not for definite, not until he and Keigo stop this little game of you get one, then i get one, then you get one, and then i get one.
He feels stupid. He feels agitated. He feels like he’s infatuated and Toga keeps telling him he smells like he’s in love.
There are footsteps, lax and unhurried, but they strive with purpose. They’re obvious. Touya always knows what shoes Keigo wears and how they sound.
“Those are bad for you, ya know?” he says, stopping so he’s looking at Touya in his sad little pity corner.
Touya tries not to snap his cigarette. “You’ve already told me that.” He fails.
Keigo laughs, settling down next to him. He smells like roses. His lips are pretty. Touya wants to yank him close by his pathetic attempt at a goatee and do one more things co-workers aren’t supposed to do.
Keigo holds up coffee. “Here.”
It’s only 6 pm. Work is over but Touya’s going to be here for at least a few hours more.
“Take it.” Keigo tries to push the cup into his hands. “It’s too sweet for me.”
Touya scoffs but takes it anyway. “I thought you liked sweet things.”
Keigo hums, leaning back so his head it also touching the brick wall. “Nah. I like things with a bit more bite, ya know?”
And it’s them, in the alley they always find themselves alone in. The coffee is just right, as if it was made for Touya first and foremost. He doesn’t know how Keigo knew. He doesn’t know how Keigo knows anything. Half the time, Touya just follows his gut.
So that’s what he’s going to do.
He sets the coffee down, turning around so things are serious and Keigo can’t run away.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
Keigo blinks, playing stupid. “What’s me?”
He pulls the latest letter—number seven, bright blue, dark red writing, something gorgeous and ugly at the same time—out of his pocket, slapping it between them, right where it belongs. “It’s you. I know it’s you. Who did you get to write it for you? I know that’s not your fucking chicken scratch; it’s actually legible.”
Keigo blinks again. He pauses. He looks at the letter like it holds his entire life, like it holds his entire everything.
And then he looks up. “How do you know it’s me?”
“Detective’s intuition,” Touya replies in a heartbeat.
“I’m infatuated with you,” Keigo says just as fast.
There’s a beat, something slow and irrational. Time stretches, wrapping Touya in a bubble he can’t escape, but he can feel it. It’s weird. Everything about his life is weird.
Keigo runs his tongue over his lips. There are little bite marks in them. Touya wants to add more. “I’m actually quite jealous of you,” he says through a laugh. “You just…know, ya know?”
No, Touya doesn’t know.
“I spend hours researching and thinking and doing all this crazy shit, and then you see the case file and know instantly where to go. You know who to ask.” Keigo stops. “You knew the letters were from me, even if I got Rumi’s girlfriend to write them.”
The bubble expands, blowing bigger and bigger until Touya can see the grand picture. He can see every time Keigo watched him a little too intently and they just so happened to be in the same place at the same time. Or maybe it was all Touya’s doing. Maybe he’s been infatuated with the top-ranking detective more than he ever realised.
Keigo keeps going: “And at first it was silly. Just one letter. I thought you would throw it out straight away, but then you kept it, and then you showed me, and then it was fun seeing how much I could push and prod and—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Touya cuts him off. He grabs the collar of Keigo’s shirt, crinkling the white fabric so it’s imperfect. He tugs, and Keigo’s eyes flutter.
He lets out a breath. “Are you going to kiss me, Todoroki?”
“I said shut the fuck up.”
And he does. It’s rushed and clumsy, too many things happening at once. Keigo bites Touya’s lip and Touya tugs his hair, and their suits are wrinkled—but they’re detectives. They’re used to a little mess. The world is broken and it’s about to get even worse.
Good thing two top detectives are on the case, ready to rip the world’s secrets apart.