Magic Kaitou: Obligation (2/2)
Aug. 5th, 2010 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamTitle: Obligation (2/2)
Series: Magic Kaitou
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Notes: Follows Slip and Fall/ Pride Goeth Before, but stands alone
Summary: "Almost a year ago now, Inspector, you did me a favour. I've come to repay it. You need to leave the country now, you and your daughter." When the nets begin to close around the Black Org., Kid makes a visit.
The first thing Nakamori did, arriving at his wayward nephew’s creaking house in Thailand smelling of sweet wood and cigar smoke, was arrange for the delivery of the major Japanese newspapers. The second was to forbid Aoko from leaving the house on her own. The third was light a cigarette, and down a neat whisky.
For five days it felt like all he did was sit on the slowly rotting deck listening to the constant chucking of the birds in the trees and chain smoking while waiting for the next day’s paper. On the sixth day, ignoring Aoko’s ranting about having done nothing at all in their vacation, he booked a flight back to Japan, sheet of newsprint clutched tight in his hand.
The title page was splashed with bold font and several photographs of teenage boys. The main header read “‘Black Organisation’ toppled by teenage detectives” and went on to give a description of said organisation, currently thought to be behind dozens of murders, robberies and financial crimes as well as hundreds of other illegalities. There were several articles detailing the amazing work of one Kudou Shin’ichi from Beika, assisted primarily by an Osakan kid, Hattori Heiji. There were the beginnings of several international articles, continued in later pages, on the arrest of ‘Black Organization’ members across the globe. And, squeezed into one small corner, was a tiny picture of a white triangle in a black sky and the headline: Kaitou Kid sighted in Tokyo. The article that followed, only two paragraphs, explained that the Kid had been spotted by several citizens flying over the city, despite not having issued a theft notice, and indeed no jewel had as of yet been reported stolen. And finally that one witness had come forward claiming he saw the glider crash, although no evidence had been recovered to support the statement.
The lights, when Nakamori finally reached his office seven hours later, were turned out. As he had left them. He turned them on with a heavy hand, breath held tight in burning lungs. The chair behind his desk was swivelled around, back facing him. He had no memory of which way it had been facing when he hurried out a week ago to collect Aoko and book a flight from a public phone.
He shut the door behind him with a quiet click and locked it himself; the bolt slid home without complaint. “Hello?” His voice was gruff from a week of constant smoking.
Slowly, the chair swivelled around.
The first thing Nakamori noticed was that the Kid’s top hat was gone, and that there was a crack running through the frame of his monocle. His dark hair, standing rebelliously on edge, seemed to the Inspector to be slightly singed at the edges. His face was gray and lined. He was slumped back in the chair, in what was either extreme relaxation or a state approaching collapse. Only his eyes were near to their usual brightness, shining in the head of a person who in all other respects appeared completely exhausted and quite possibly injured. “Hello, Inspector. I see you heard the news.” His voice was nearly perfect, only a slight edge suggesting a throat tightened by overcompensation for tired vocal chords, or simple pain.
“Kid – are you – ” Nakamori took a step forward and paused as Kid’s eyes flashed. The thief didn’t move otherwise.
“I’m fine, Inspector. Perhaps just a few too many late nights.”
“Assisting in the capture of the, what are they calling it, that Black Organisation?”
“As good a guess as any.”
“The newspaper said you crashed your glider.”
“I believe it actually said one witness reported thinking I crashed my glider. I do read the papers, Inspector. Especially if there’s a chance of my being mentioned.” He gave a cheeky grin, which held a hint of a grimace.
“Did you?”
“Did I what? Read the papers? I just told you – ”
Refusing to rise to the bait, Nakamori ploughed through the words, “Crash your glider.”
“Of course not.” Under Nakamori’s hard stare, he loosened slightly. “However, I may have had a slightly bumpier landing than usual…”
“So you crashed it.”
“‘Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,’ Inspector.”
“You look like you crawled away from it. On three limbs. Through a mine field.”
“Uphill both ways? Really, that’s a little unkind. As a matter of fact, I did walk away from it. Actually, ran. If I hadn’t, I doubt I would be here in your delightful company now.”
Nakamori opened his mouth to make a cutting reply to the Kid’s teasing tone, and then stopped. Because although he was trying to turn them into a lie with his voice, his eyes said the words were true. That he had almost been killed, again. Goddamn reckless kid. Goddamn reckless Kid.
“And now?” Nakamori spat out, watching the thief shift in a lithe movement that was nevertheless stiffer than his usual.
“Now? Now what, do you mean? Or now, am I safe? I’m certainly safe, Inspector. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I’m not sure about that,” groused Nakamori, but Kid wasn’t really listening anyway. He was staring over Nakamori’s shoulder, eyes looking a long way into the distance. Or, possibly, the past.
“As for now what…” In the hush of the office, it seemed to Nakamori that Kid was waiting for the words as much as he was. After a moment, he found them. “Now Kaitou Kid performs his biggest trick ever. He makes himself disappear.” Any veils dropped from his voice, confidence and arrogance disappearing along with the simpler underlying changes Kid always made to project his voice to fill a room and to maintain the same constant amount of energy behind the words. He spoke in a near whisper, more to himself than Nakamori.
“And that’s it? No more Kaitou Kid, no more thefts, no more midnight chases? What will you do?” The clear unvoiced thought: What will I do?
Kid shrugged, attention still not entirely on the here and now. “I’ll go back to being … who I am when I’m not Kaitou Kid. Live my other life. There’s plenty of jobs where the Kid’s talents’ll come in handy. Kaitou Kid was never who I was. He was just my night time job. Like a part time job, but with better wages and worse hours.” Kid smiled, another new expression. Nostalgia.
A moment later it disappeared from his face, and his eyes snapped into focus, staring straight at Nakamori. “And you, Inspector? Now that the Kaitou Kid Task Force’s on the way out? What will you do?”
But Nakamori was staring, fists locked tight, shoulders tense, breath coming short and strong. “Only a night job? I’ve been chasing you for my entire career. I gave up my life, my family, my pride, my self-respect to chase the Kaitou Kid, and you’re telling me it was only a game to you? That you’ll just quit and it won’t matter? Easy as taking of your damn hat?” He shoved his hand under the back of his coat and drew out his handcuffs, held them tight enough to whiten his skin. “I should arrest you right the hell now, throw you in prison. Make those twenty years worth something for me, since you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass.”
Kid’s eyes widened in shock, and he sat up in the chair, faltering when it swiveled unexpectedly under him. “Hey, hey, now, Inspector, I-”
“You what? You were kidding? You were lying? You were-”
“I was doing a job.” Kid, surprise controlled, stared at the handcuffs with calm eyes. “I was doing a job. Like you. A job I had to do. Wearing a dead man’s face, a dead man’s clothes, to finish his work. Make the world a better place, maybe. Help a couple of people, probably. Stop some evil sons of bitches, certainly. Yeah, I had fun sometimes. I got shot sometimes, too, for a vendetta I inherited. This was never what I wanted to be. It was what I had to be, filling in a place until the work was done. Now it’s done. Now Kaitou Kid can rest in peace. And his ghost can leave this kid alone.”
“And the Inspector he’s been haunting all these years?”
“The Inspector can go back to doing what he’s supposed to be doing. Protecting the public. Chasing down guys who are meaner and sleazier and more violent than the Kid, and putting them where they belong. I’d like to think you can believe me when I say that if you’re trying to clean up the world there’s a lot of people who should be arrested before Kaitou Kid. And for a guy who’s been chasing the best thief in the world for 20 years, well, it should be easy pickings, right Inspector?”
“Easy pickings?”
“Right. So you choose. Are you gonna keep chasing the Kid, who won’t even be stealing anymore? Or are you going to go and use your talents to do some real good?” Kid eyed him steadily, not a single flicker in his gaze, until Nakamori lowered the shining cuffs and then slowly slipped them back into their place. The thief’s face split into a grin “Knew you’d see the right idea!”
“Don’t get too cocky. One foot wrong, and I’ll track you down.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Relationship returned to something like normalcy, they both fell into silence. Kid, shaking himself gently, put his hands out and levered himself up. He stood with just a slight forwards stoop, left arm held a touch stiffly. His steps over to the window, though, were confident and regular. He put a gloved hand on the thin glass and slowly slid it open, cool night air flowing in.
“Kid?”
“Yes, Inspector?
“Why are you here? You knew I’d read the paper, I wouldn’t have come back otherwise. You didn’t need to tell me it’s over.”
Kid turned all the way around this time, leaning back against the bottom of the window sill. His hair drifted gently in the breeze, moving like a slow tide.
“Of course not.” The thief slid up to sit on the window sill, more a shift of his weight than a hop. His eyes were bright again, shining like the moon in the dark sky behind him. “I came to say goodbye.” That cold seriousness again, a frozen lake in an empty land.
“Goodbye?”
“For me, and for m– the old man.” He waited a second, as if to let the feeling sink in, before smiling. The carefree arrogance wasn’t there, though, just a simple sincere smile “After all, it’s not much of a disappearing trick if no one knows you did it on purpose, is it?”
Nakamori, slightly baffled by it all, couldn’t muster a reply.
“Well, then, Inspector. Happy hunting. And goodbye.”
“But – wait –”
Kid gave a jaunty wave of a white-gloved hand, and tipped his weight backwards, out the window to disappear in a flutter of white. Jaw gaping, Nakamori rushed forward to stare down at the pavement ten storeys below. There was no sign of the glider, no triangle of white soaring off into the sky. But, there was nothing on the well-lit pavement below, either. Of course. Because when Kaitou Kid meant to disappear, he did. Completely.
Nakamori leaned forward, resting his elbows on the thin window sill, and stared out into the night sky. The white moon, all alone, shone in the darkness.
After a while, Nakamori returned to his desk, sat down, and pulled out a pile of forms and a blank piece of paper. He stared at them for a few minutes, pen in hand. Then he shoved the still-blank papers back into his drawer, closed the window and turned out the light.
Nakamori Ginzo locked the door behind him, walked out of the quiet stationhouse, and went home to his daughter.
Series: Magic Kaitou
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Notes: Follows Slip and Fall/ Pride Goeth Before, but stands alone
Summary: "Almost a year ago now, Inspector, you did me a favour. I've come to repay it. You need to leave the country now, you and your daughter." When the nets begin to close around the Black Org., Kid makes a visit.
The first thing Nakamori did, arriving at his wayward nephew’s creaking house in Thailand smelling of sweet wood and cigar smoke, was arrange for the delivery of the major Japanese newspapers. The second was to forbid Aoko from leaving the house on her own. The third was light a cigarette, and down a neat whisky.
For five days it felt like all he did was sit on the slowly rotting deck listening to the constant chucking of the birds in the trees and chain smoking while waiting for the next day’s paper. On the sixth day, ignoring Aoko’s ranting about having done nothing at all in their vacation, he booked a flight back to Japan, sheet of newsprint clutched tight in his hand.
The title page was splashed with bold font and several photographs of teenage boys. The main header read “‘Black Organisation’ toppled by teenage detectives” and went on to give a description of said organisation, currently thought to be behind dozens of murders, robberies and financial crimes as well as hundreds of other illegalities. There were several articles detailing the amazing work of one Kudou Shin’ichi from Beika, assisted primarily by an Osakan kid, Hattori Heiji. There were the beginnings of several international articles, continued in later pages, on the arrest of ‘Black Organization’ members across the globe. And, squeezed into one small corner, was a tiny picture of a white triangle in a black sky and the headline: Kaitou Kid sighted in Tokyo. The article that followed, only two paragraphs, explained that the Kid had been spotted by several citizens flying over the city, despite not having issued a theft notice, and indeed no jewel had as of yet been reported stolen. And finally that one witness had come forward claiming he saw the glider crash, although no evidence had been recovered to support the statement.
The lights, when Nakamori finally reached his office seven hours later, were turned out. As he had left them. He turned them on with a heavy hand, breath held tight in burning lungs. The chair behind his desk was swivelled around, back facing him. He had no memory of which way it had been facing when he hurried out a week ago to collect Aoko and book a flight from a public phone.
He shut the door behind him with a quiet click and locked it himself; the bolt slid home without complaint. “Hello?” His voice was gruff from a week of constant smoking.
Slowly, the chair swivelled around.
The first thing Nakamori noticed was that the Kid’s top hat was gone, and that there was a crack running through the frame of his monocle. His dark hair, standing rebelliously on edge, seemed to the Inspector to be slightly singed at the edges. His face was gray and lined. He was slumped back in the chair, in what was either extreme relaxation or a state approaching collapse. Only his eyes were near to their usual brightness, shining in the head of a person who in all other respects appeared completely exhausted and quite possibly injured. “Hello, Inspector. I see you heard the news.” His voice was nearly perfect, only a slight edge suggesting a throat tightened by overcompensation for tired vocal chords, or simple pain.
“Kid – are you – ” Nakamori took a step forward and paused as Kid’s eyes flashed. The thief didn’t move otherwise.
“I’m fine, Inspector. Perhaps just a few too many late nights.”
“Assisting in the capture of the, what are they calling it, that Black Organisation?”
“As good a guess as any.”
“The newspaper said you crashed your glider.”
“I believe it actually said one witness reported thinking I crashed my glider. I do read the papers, Inspector. Especially if there’s a chance of my being mentioned.” He gave a cheeky grin, which held a hint of a grimace.
“Did you?”
“Did I what? Read the papers? I just told you – ”
Refusing to rise to the bait, Nakamori ploughed through the words, “Crash your glider.”
“Of course not.” Under Nakamori’s hard stare, he loosened slightly. “However, I may have had a slightly bumpier landing than usual…”
“So you crashed it.”
“‘Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,’ Inspector.”
“You look like you crawled away from it. On three limbs. Through a mine field.”
“Uphill both ways? Really, that’s a little unkind. As a matter of fact, I did walk away from it. Actually, ran. If I hadn’t, I doubt I would be here in your delightful company now.”
Nakamori opened his mouth to make a cutting reply to the Kid’s teasing tone, and then stopped. Because although he was trying to turn them into a lie with his voice, his eyes said the words were true. That he had almost been killed, again. Goddamn reckless kid. Goddamn reckless Kid.
“And now?” Nakamori spat out, watching the thief shift in a lithe movement that was nevertheless stiffer than his usual.
“Now? Now what, do you mean? Or now, am I safe? I’m certainly safe, Inspector. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I’m not sure about that,” groused Nakamori, but Kid wasn’t really listening anyway. He was staring over Nakamori’s shoulder, eyes looking a long way into the distance. Or, possibly, the past.
“As for now what…” In the hush of the office, it seemed to Nakamori that Kid was waiting for the words as much as he was. After a moment, he found them. “Now Kaitou Kid performs his biggest trick ever. He makes himself disappear.” Any veils dropped from his voice, confidence and arrogance disappearing along with the simpler underlying changes Kid always made to project his voice to fill a room and to maintain the same constant amount of energy behind the words. He spoke in a near whisper, more to himself than Nakamori.
“And that’s it? No more Kaitou Kid, no more thefts, no more midnight chases? What will you do?” The clear unvoiced thought: What will I do?
Kid shrugged, attention still not entirely on the here and now. “I’ll go back to being … who I am when I’m not Kaitou Kid. Live my other life. There’s plenty of jobs where the Kid’s talents’ll come in handy. Kaitou Kid was never who I was. He was just my night time job. Like a part time job, but with better wages and worse hours.” Kid smiled, another new expression. Nostalgia.
A moment later it disappeared from his face, and his eyes snapped into focus, staring straight at Nakamori. “And you, Inspector? Now that the Kaitou Kid Task Force’s on the way out? What will you do?”
But Nakamori was staring, fists locked tight, shoulders tense, breath coming short and strong. “Only a night job? I’ve been chasing you for my entire career. I gave up my life, my family, my pride, my self-respect to chase the Kaitou Kid, and you’re telling me it was only a game to you? That you’ll just quit and it won’t matter? Easy as taking of your damn hat?” He shoved his hand under the back of his coat and drew out his handcuffs, held them tight enough to whiten his skin. “I should arrest you right the hell now, throw you in prison. Make those twenty years worth something for me, since you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass.”
Kid’s eyes widened in shock, and he sat up in the chair, faltering when it swiveled unexpectedly under him. “Hey, hey, now, Inspector, I-”
“You what? You were kidding? You were lying? You were-”
“I was doing a job.” Kid, surprise controlled, stared at the handcuffs with calm eyes. “I was doing a job. Like you. A job I had to do. Wearing a dead man’s face, a dead man’s clothes, to finish his work. Make the world a better place, maybe. Help a couple of people, probably. Stop some evil sons of bitches, certainly. Yeah, I had fun sometimes. I got shot sometimes, too, for a vendetta I inherited. This was never what I wanted to be. It was what I had to be, filling in a place until the work was done. Now it’s done. Now Kaitou Kid can rest in peace. And his ghost can leave this kid alone.”
“And the Inspector he’s been haunting all these years?”
“The Inspector can go back to doing what he’s supposed to be doing. Protecting the public. Chasing down guys who are meaner and sleazier and more violent than the Kid, and putting them where they belong. I’d like to think you can believe me when I say that if you’re trying to clean up the world there’s a lot of people who should be arrested before Kaitou Kid. And for a guy who’s been chasing the best thief in the world for 20 years, well, it should be easy pickings, right Inspector?”
“Easy pickings?”
“Right. So you choose. Are you gonna keep chasing the Kid, who won’t even be stealing anymore? Or are you going to go and use your talents to do some real good?” Kid eyed him steadily, not a single flicker in his gaze, until Nakamori lowered the shining cuffs and then slowly slipped them back into their place. The thief’s face split into a grin “Knew you’d see the right idea!”
“Don’t get too cocky. One foot wrong, and I’ll track you down.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Relationship returned to something like normalcy, they both fell into silence. Kid, shaking himself gently, put his hands out and levered himself up. He stood with just a slight forwards stoop, left arm held a touch stiffly. His steps over to the window, though, were confident and regular. He put a gloved hand on the thin glass and slowly slid it open, cool night air flowing in.
“Kid?”
“Yes, Inspector?
“Why are you here? You knew I’d read the paper, I wouldn’t have come back otherwise. You didn’t need to tell me it’s over.”
Kid turned all the way around this time, leaning back against the bottom of the window sill. His hair drifted gently in the breeze, moving like a slow tide.
“Of course not.” The thief slid up to sit on the window sill, more a shift of his weight than a hop. His eyes were bright again, shining like the moon in the dark sky behind him. “I came to say goodbye.” That cold seriousness again, a frozen lake in an empty land.
“Goodbye?”
“For me, and for m– the old man.” He waited a second, as if to let the feeling sink in, before smiling. The carefree arrogance wasn’t there, though, just a simple sincere smile “After all, it’s not much of a disappearing trick if no one knows you did it on purpose, is it?”
Nakamori, slightly baffled by it all, couldn’t muster a reply.
“Well, then, Inspector. Happy hunting. And goodbye.”
“But – wait –”
Kid gave a jaunty wave of a white-gloved hand, and tipped his weight backwards, out the window to disappear in a flutter of white. Jaw gaping, Nakamori rushed forward to stare down at the pavement ten storeys below. There was no sign of the glider, no triangle of white soaring off into the sky. But, there was nothing on the well-lit pavement below, either. Of course. Because when Kaitou Kid meant to disappear, he did. Completely.
Nakamori leaned forward, resting his elbows on the thin window sill, and stared out into the night sky. The white moon, all alone, shone in the darkness.
After a while, Nakamori returned to his desk, sat down, and pulled out a pile of forms and a blank piece of paper. He stared at them for a few minutes, pen in hand. Then he shoved the still-blank papers back into his drawer, closed the window and turned out the light.
Nakamori Ginzo locked the door behind him, walked out of the quiet stationhouse, and went home to his daughter.
