Work Text:
Poe considered himself a clever man.
Not out of arrogance, and certainly not as a boast—just a simple fact. He had the credentials to prove it: multiple award-winning novels, certification as an architect, a reputation as a world-class detective. Give him a skill, and he could master it in days if he cared to try.
And yet, whenever he stood beside Ranpo, he felt… small.
Not half as intelligent. Not even a quarter. Not an eighth.
A sixteenth.
It was absurd, really. Illogical. There was no measurable way to quantify intelligence like that, no equation that reduced a person to fractions. And yet the feeling persisted, stubborn and unshakable, settling somewhere deep in his chest where logic could not quite reach.
Worse still, Poe was not nearly as confident as he pretended to be. If anything, he was a coward.
Because no matter how many times the thought crossed his mind—no matter how many times he entertained it, examined it, turned it over like a puzzle begging to be solved—he knew, deep down, he could never bring himself to kill Ranpo.
And that was the problem.
Because that man—that man—had become an obsession.
Ranpo had consumed every waking thought, every idle moment, every quiet second Poe had to himself. He lingered at the edges of every idea, every plan, every half-finished sentence. Even when Poe tried to focus on something else, even when he forced his attention elsewhere, it always circled back.
It always came back to him.
And what would happen if he actually did kill him?
The question surfaced more often than Poe liked to admit.
Would he simply move on? Find a new obsession? Replace Ranpo with someone else equally brilliant, equally infuriating?
No.
That wasn’t how it worked.
Obsession was not interchangeable. It was not something that could be neatly redirected or replaced at will. It was all-consuming. Irrational. Compulsive. It was a need, a craving—something dangerously close to addiction.
Poe hadn’t entirely dismissed that theory, even if the idea of being addicted to a living person was… unconventional.
His therapist certainly thought something was wrong.
They disagreed on what, exactly. Poe insisted it was simply the result of unresolved emotions—professional frustration, perhaps, or wounded pride. His therapist suggested something far less comfortable. Something closer to a psychotic break, brought on by years of pressure and the quiet, persistent failure to prove his worth in the one arena he believed himself superior in.
That had been years ago.
Poe was better now. Healthier.
And he was definitely not having a psychotic break anymore.
Because, really—would someone in the middle of a breakdown be capable of writing over five hundred manuscripts in under two years?
…Actually, that might not be the most convincing argument.
If anything, it raised more questions than it answered.
Still.
The point stood.
Somewhere along the way—over the course of six years, countless drafts, revisions, rewrites, and complete overhauls—something had changed.
It had started, if he was being honest, as a self-indulgent little thing. A bitter, petty story about a great detective scorned by a self-righteous, insufferable prodigy. It was revenge dressed up as fiction—a way to prove, to himself if no one else, that he was the better mind.
A coping mechanism.
That was all it had been, at first.
And it stayed that way for years—
until it didn’t.
Because Poe was not a fool. Of course he had a plan. You didn’t spend that much time on something—didn’t pour years of thought and effort into a story—without intent. The idea had always been there, buried beneath the surface from the very beginning: trapping the world’s greatest detective inside a book of his own creation.
It had been a quiet sort of satisfaction, at first. The knowledge that, within the confines of his own narrative, he could control every variable. Every clue. Every misdirection. He could construct a world so precise, so airtight, that even Ranpo would have no choice but to play along.
But somewhere along the way, the story… split.
Even now, he struggled to explain it. Looking back on it made his head ache, like trying to recall a dream that refused to stay still. It felt like two different narratives fighting for control of the same pages, neither willing to yield, neither willing to disappear.
So, at the time, he did the only thing he could think to do.
He separated them.
The first was deliberate. Structured. Controlled. A “mansion of tragedy”—a locked-room murder mystery designed to challenge, to corner, to dismantle everything Ranpo believed to be true. Every detail was intentional. Every outcome accounted for. It was sharp, calculated… and, admittedly, a little sadistic.
But that hardly mattered.
Poe hadn’t exactly been in the best state of mind when he wrote it.
The second story, however…
The second one was strange.
It had no clear direction, no proper structure. It resisted him at every turn, slipping through his fingers whenever he tried to pin it down into something coherent. It didn’t make sense—not fully. It lacked the precision he prided himself on, the careful logic that defined his work.
And yet…
He couldn’t bring himself to discard it.
No matter how many times he tried, the idea lingered. It circled back, persistent and patient, as if it knew it could outlast him. It appeared in fragments—half-formed scenes, unfinished sentences, emotions he could not quite name.
So he set it aside.
For later.
He told himself he would return to it eventually, once the first story was complete. Once everything was perfect. Once he had proven what he needed to prove.
He just hadn’t expected it to return to him first.
Poe wasn’t sure when the shift happened—when the second story began to take priority over the first. If he had to guess, it was sometime after he and Ranpo became… “friends.”
The word felt strange, even now.
Uncertain.
Fragile.
And he certainly didn’t know how it happened.
He only knew that, somewhere along the line, the numbers had stopped mattering. Five hundred drafts, a hundred sent to editors, dozens more rewritten in sleepless frenzies—it all blurred together into something indistinct.
Irrelevant.
Because by then, it was no longer just a story he was trying to perfect.
It was something else entirely.
What had once been sharp with resentment, dripping with bitterness, had softened into something unrecognizable. The edges dulled. The anger faded. In its place, something quieter began to take root.
Something far more dangerous.
It had gone from I will kill him with my own hands
to if I ever lost him, I would burn the world to ashes with them.
Ridiculous.
Dramatic.
Romantic.
Poe might have laughed at the absurdity of it, if it hadn’t felt so undeniably true.
It wasn’t just obsession anymore.
It was hope.
A fragile, foolish, impossible sort of hope—the kind that settled into the spaces between thoughts and refused to leave. The kind that made him hesitate, made him reconsider, made him rewrite entire sections of his own story just to accommodate the possibility of something more.
He knew he wasn’t the cleverest man—not when he stood beside Ranpo. Next to him, Poe was a fumbling mess, a pale imitation of something far greater.
And yet…
He couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Couldn’t imagine turning away, even if it meant constantly falling short.
So maybe—just maybe—if the coward he was could gather enough courage… the world’s greatest detective might take pity on him. Might look past the awkwardness, the stammering, the obvious inferiority—and see what Poe had laid bare across every page.
Every sentence.
Every word.
Every letter.
Because the truth was painfully, embarrassingly simple.
The entire book was a love letter.
Not a perfect one. Not a clean one. It was messy, inconsistent, fractured in places where it should have been whole. But it was honest in a way Poe had never quite managed to be aloud.
Even his editor—someone Poe rarely listened to—had admitted it would be a success. Another triumph. Another addition to his already impressive legacy.
But part of Poe wondered if it should remain theirs alone.
Something private.
Something understood without ever needing to be spoken.
Then again…
Ranpo did love proving he was the best.
And what better way to do that than by unraveling every secret Poe had hidden within the pages—
following every clue, every contradiction, every carefully placed inconsistency—
and realizing, at last, that every single one of them led back to him?