Initiate Investigation
Jan. 1st, 2022 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerI haven't finished watching an lp of the game, so no full-game spoilers, just as noted.
(as it takes place largely during side stories, ignores plot timeline.)
As we don’t have an actual date that I know of for a plot detail in Judgment, guesses were made (151210)
Main Points:
Lost Judgment (spoilers until the end of ch 3 + some of the mystery and dance club plot + some major spoilers for first game)
follow-up to cracked mirror
Mystery: Why is Yagami-San Unhappy?
Chapter Summary: Amasawa notices Yagami is hurting.
Word Count: 2833
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Yagami/Kaito
kaito, tsukumo, sugiura, and saori do not appear in person.
Kyoko is observant. That’s pretty much her entire raison d'être. So she’s barely known the detective Yagami-san for a week, and she already knows a lot about him.
He’s a great detective, if unconventional. He smokes and drinks as if he’s just stepped out of a noir movie, and sometimes his case summaries sound like a voiceover from the same era. He’s responsible, though, despite the amount he spends of his paycheck on arcades and crane games, and doesn’t do those things in school. He’s trying hard to be a responsible, good mentor-figure and role model, despite the fact that he really doesn’t look like it and seems a little…what’s the way to describe it, rough around the edges? He even tries to keep the sarcasm at a minimum, although sometimes he slips, and he doesn’t even attempt to keep the bewilderment at bay, but then, at such times he’s caught off guard. He takes the whole ‘client confidentiality’ thing really seriously, so a lot of his stories are pretty vague, but she’s good about reading between the lines. He doesn’t dress like a noir detective, though. He dresses like a teenager, and while it does suit him, it is a little ridiculous, especially as he wears the exact same thing every day. (Uniforms don’t count. Those are required.)
He can be really lazy, if he’s not on a job, at which point he can get a little intense. But then, he’s in good company, there, with the likes of Sherlock Holmes, even.
And while he’s not entirely what she expected from a detective, especially not visually, he has the skills to back it up. He might be hiding his talents, depending, but he’s observant, he’s got the necessary curiosity…he’s relatively money-focused, but an offhand comment says he sleeps on his couch like a real noir detective and doesn’t even realize that’s horrifying. (From his perspective, she suspects, he’d just point out, confused, that it’s not like he can just put a futon in his office where clients can see, and practically, he can’t afford another place.) And even then, his love of a puzzle, of helping people, shines through. It’s just that he does actually have to eat, and pay his rent, and pay for his phone plan, and it doesn’t help that he visits arcades or participates in drone races or is a big eater.
He’s also incredibly intelligent. He’d told Kotoko-chan that he’d dropped out of high school, but he’d managed to pass the bar exam simply by studying. He’s no armchair detective, though—despite how intelligent he is, he’s not Nero Wolfe. He absolutely loves fieldwork. He might grumble about a few things, but his eyes light up when there’s the possibility of a chase or tailing mission, so he can’t fool her. She’d read about the nationwide scandal he managed to uncover simply by being some combination of being a genius and an entirely relentless seeker of the truth. No matter how much he might like to act laid-back, there’s a reason Ranpo sees him as the perfect partner—when he’s on the scent of a mystery, he just does not stop, no matter what gets in his way.
From what she can tell, he has no fear. No rational, ‘I’m in danger’ fear anyway. He’s mentioned a couple of times that bodyguards are nice and all, but there’s no substitute for your own hands (or feet). So she’s fairly certain he cares about her safety, and the thing about his martial arts coming in handy regularly is probably from experience.
But then she notices something else, right about the time that she wanders in to the dance club to try to find their club advisor and sees him in the middle of a dance routine: he’s smiling. It’s not like he never smiles, although he tries to be more serious for the MRC. But this is a real smile; he’s enjoying himself, even if he gets all awkward and self-conscious after the fact. And now that she thinks about it, even if he’s doing a good job hiding it by concealing all of the common body language and carefully keeping from talking about his personal life, he can’t hide away every sign.
He’s only human, after all, and no matter how hard they might try to hide the evidence, humans will always make some sort of mistake. Mostly, it happens when he thinks she’s not looking. Occasionally, he’ll play around on his phone (he has everything from gacha to Puyo-Puyo, but doesn’t know how to work some of the basic apps) when she’s doing homework, at the end of his visits, and sometimes he’ll stare off into space for far too long, with a lost kind of look in his eye. Yagami-san is unhappy about something. She’s seen how he deals with obstacles at work, too—Sawa-sensei won’t talk to him, okay, he’ll just try again, those students keep being a pain, he’ll beat them up or befriend them, whatever works. In the generalities about the cases he’d worked, he’d never sounded frustrated, only determined, when describing things that would bother most people, like the interference of yakuza. It’s clearly something personal.
Which is why, the time he forgets his phone in the club room, she immediately snags it and begins trying to figure out his password. He hadn’t been terribly careless when signing in, which means she didn’t catch much of a glimpse when he’d entered it himself.
As usual, Kento speaks up and tries to be the ‘voice of reason’. “Sis, I really don’t think you should be doing this…” Fortunately, Kotoko-chan had left not an hour before; she’s an unknown, as of yet, and unlike her brother Kyoko doesn’t know how the newest member of the MRC would react to this kind of thing.
She pulls out her fingerprinting powder. That should help. “On the contrary, what kind of detective would I be if I just let this situation continue?” He doesn’t tend to wear gloves, so she’ll probably get some pretty good prints. She’ll have to wipe it off before she gives it back, though.
Her brother sighs. “You should just ask him about it like a normal person, maybe?”
Asking questions is the detective’s bread and butter, but she’d already considered and discarded that approach. “He would find that ‘inappropriate’, I think. Talking about his personal problems with a student.”
Kento crosses his arms and introduces even more logic into the fray. “That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be doing this. You don’t want to tick off our advisor enough that he leaves, right? We were lucky enough to find him in the first place.”
Hmm. That’s actually a decent point. She pauses to think. “I don’t think he’d get mad, really. Maybe disappointed.” And that thought hurts a little, because he’s quickly become someone she does want to impress, an adult whose opinion she actually cares about. But in the end… “…I think he’ll understand if I explain I’m worried about him. But I still won’t get anything out of him that way, so it’s better that I go looking for clues before I confront him with the evidence.” The 1, 2, 5, and 0 have been touched, and it looks like the 1 has been pressed more often, from the amount on the 1, it’s been pressed more than the rest. She stares at it for a minute, mentally thinking about possible combinations, before it hits her, and she quickly searches for something on her phone—yep, she was right. It’s times like this that there’s a clear age difference, or he would know not to choose a password someone could research on their phone. That being said, it’s slightly concerning that he has the date of Terasawa-san’s death as his phone lock numbers. He does utterly seem like the type to obsess about the woman he couldn’t save, particularly since he’d almost entirely left being a lawyer behind, but it doesn’t seem…exactly healthy?
That could be the problem, perhaps. She’ll have more of an idea when she gets into his phone.
He mostly uses calls and texts, from the looks of it. That, and his camera-phone. That takes up most of his storage, and it seems like he uses that for all of his detective pictures. Not that she does much more than glance at the image previews—she doesn’t want to intrude on the privacy of his clients at the same time.
He has more than a few people in his contacts list, which is surprising, considering he doesn’t seem to talk about his friends or really give much of an impression he was anything but a loner. Then again, she does vaguely remember the students mentioning other ‘repairmen’ who came to the school the same day, so it’s entirely possible that she’s just overlooking things. After all, it was hard enough for Yagami-san to come up with an excuse to stay in the school, let alone his buddies.
There’s a possibly-nationalized foreigner, who seems to have kept him updated on gang activity, there’s a woman who seems to be his landlady who’s opened an izakaya below him and who regularly seeks advice on new dish recipes, there’s the law office that according to various newspaper articles by one Hattori Ko he used to work at, as well as separate numbers for each of the lawyers now working there. He doesn’t seem to have removed the number for the deceased member of Genda Law Office, either. Nor, oddly, has he removed the number for what looks to be a yakuza family office. She vaguely remembers the name ‘Matsugane’ from the piece about the court case, and looks it up, and yes, that was the name of the family Captain Hamura Kyohei worked under, so that’s Tojo and disbanded, by this point. Odd. He even has someone with just the name Charles, no surname, not even a picture.
“Could you hurry it up?” Kento hisses at her, and she rolls her eyes. This will take the time it takes, and it’s not like she hears anyone coming down the stairs.
Near the top, though, there’s a name. Kaito-san ♥. She vaguely remembers that from the stories about the case, too, and yep, when she opens the contact, just like Yagami-san, this Kaito-san appears to have a favorite set of clothing.
There’s something about that heart, though. Yagami-san seems utterly clueless when it comes to romance, unless it’s all an act because he’s trying very, very hard not to notice some of the dance club members have a crush on him, which is fair and she would do exactly the same in his situation. One of the times they’d been tailing a suspect, a woman who’d dropped something had just stood there flirting with him, and he looked as bewildered as he had when she’d been insisting he could in fact infiltrate the dance crew. In any case, it could be an inside joke between the two. Hard to know without reading the emails, really. Sometimes, Yagami-san can certainly speak without thinking, but he is also very, very good with language when he puts his mind to it.
“If, uh…if you’ve found some sexting, or something, you really shouldn’t be reading it, sis,” he points out, and she wonders for a second before realizing she’s probably blushing, too, judging by the heat in her cheeks.
“There’s nothing like that,” she protests, and it’s utterly true. There isn’t anything yet, and there might not be.
‘Better not be making kissy-faces with Sensei’, is the last thing in there, from Kaito-san ♥, and she nearly drops the phone, because there’s a half written message in reply that never got sent.
‘Of course not. I only want to do that’ before Yagami-san gave up. Mentally, she fills in the ‘with you’ even as she scrolls up. It could be someone else, but her gut instinct is saying that it isn't. Jealous teasing about Sawa-sensei, which is met with terse, sarcastic, annoyed comments or completely ignored. Insistence that he’s being too hard on some Kuwana-san guy and that they should go out drinking, or to karaoke, or.... Interestingly, while Yagami-san seems to find Sawa-sensei annoying to deal with (and half of that might be the way Kaito-san treats him after, though he doesn’t particularly enjoy her insults, either, judging by the tone of his texts), he seems to absolutely despise this handyman guy. She makes a mental note to look Kuwana-san up, too.
Still…Yagami-san is old-fashioned. The kind of guy to pick a publicly available number associated with their name to lock his phone. He doesn’t tend to use emoji or stamps or anything else when texting. That makes the heart significant, she suspects. It is, however, merely one clue out of a larger puzzle.
She notes Kaito-san ♥’s phone number and quickly goes back into his pictures, because that shiny orange shirt is pretty eye-catching—there! She opens a picture—the two of them are smiling, even if it looks like they’d just gotten into some kind of fight, judging by the scrapes on their face. Kaito-san’s arm is slung around Yagami-san’s shoulder, while Yagami-san’s is around the man’s middle—not as suggestive as, say, his waist, but still, it’s possible. They’re facing the camera, but angled toward each other, just slightly, with very little space between them, and they’re both smiling. She’s never seen Kaito-san before, so doesn’t know if he smiles often, but Yagami-san’s smile is wider, happier, than she’s ever seen it, even at dance practice.
She moves on to some of the other recently contacted people—Sugiura also seems to be bothering him about Kuwana-san, which could absolutely explain his moodiness. Someone named Tsukumo is much less…nagging…and doesn’t mention Kuwana-san once, mostly asking about his phone or various applications. He seems far more knowledgeable than Yagami-san.
She hesitates slightly before reading the ones from Saori (Shirosaki-san, the lawyer), since she wants to actually fulfill her promise to keep out of the investigation that had brought him to Seiryo and doesn’t know if that’s involved, but then, this could be said of any of these texts and should really have occurred to her before this point.
She just has to scroll up for a little before finding a relatively crucial detail (carefully skimming and not fully reading the other texts, though it appears he leaves most of the more important details to calls rather than text): ‘Is Kaito-san still being ridiculous?’ from Shirosaki-san.
‘I could understand if he was jealous of her. I’d still be confused, but…I could understand. Trying to focus on the investigation, though.’ It’s still not conclusive proof, but it’s very close. If she could just see a little bit more…
“Sis, stairs!” She hears them, too, but it’s nice for Kento to look after her. Hastily, she closes out of the app and relocks the phone, hastily wiping off the fingerprinting powder before throwing it on the table.
It’s shortly before Yagami-san saunters into the room, and his eyes light up as he sees the phone. “I would’ve emailed you about the case of the missing phone, only…” he inclines his head at it before picking it up casually.
“It’s kind of hard to do that if you don’t have your phone to begin with,” Kyoko agrees.
“Plus, replacing it would be kinda a pain.” She feels briefly guilty about not paying him for all this extra work, helping the students, but he does seem genuinely invested and it’s not like they have any real money to pay him with anyway, despite the famous grandfather.
“You should take extra care then, Yagami-san,” she scolds, doing her best to swallow her nervousness about the prospect of getting caught, and his teeth flash in a bright, goofy smile that doesn’t quite reach his sad eyes.
“I’d be in a lot of trouble without this. Sorry, Amasawa, but I’m keeping a client waiting as it is…” He really is apologetic, because he is taking his duties seriously. Someone else might have just used the position as a cover, but no, he’s actually putting in the effort, despite the fact it doesn’t pay him anything.
“Oh, I would never want to get in the way of an active case. Good luck, Yagami-san!” She waves, and he nods gratefully and immediately is off at the fastest pace he can manage without actively dashing through school halls.
Kenta sinks in his chair. “One of these days, you’re going to give me a heart attack, sis. Can this please be the end of it?”
“Au contraire, mon frère, the investigation has just begun.” She’s not entirely sure of her next steps, though, so it might take a bit. Still, he deserves to be happy, and he does look pretty happy with this Kaito-san. All she has to do is figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Can't be too hard, right?
(as it takes place largely during side stories, ignores plot timeline.)
As we don’t have an actual date that I know of for a plot detail in Judgment, guesses were made (151210)
Main Points:
Lost Judgment (spoilers until the end of ch 3 + some of the mystery and dance club plot + some major spoilers for first game)
follow-up to cracked mirror
Mystery: Why is Yagami-San Unhappy?
Chapter Summary: Amasawa notices Yagami is hurting.
Word Count: 2833
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Yagami/Kaito
kaito, tsukumo, sugiura, and saori do not appear in person.
Kyoko is observant. That’s pretty much her entire raison d'être. So she’s barely known the detective Yagami-san for a week, and she already knows a lot about him.
He’s a great detective, if unconventional. He smokes and drinks as if he’s just stepped out of a noir movie, and sometimes his case summaries sound like a voiceover from the same era. He’s responsible, though, despite the amount he spends of his paycheck on arcades and crane games, and doesn’t do those things in school. He’s trying hard to be a responsible, good mentor-figure and role model, despite the fact that he really doesn’t look like it and seems a little…what’s the way to describe it, rough around the edges? He even tries to keep the sarcasm at a minimum, although sometimes he slips, and he doesn’t even attempt to keep the bewilderment at bay, but then, at such times he’s caught off guard. He takes the whole ‘client confidentiality’ thing really seriously, so a lot of his stories are pretty vague, but she’s good about reading between the lines. He doesn’t dress like a noir detective, though. He dresses like a teenager, and while it does suit him, it is a little ridiculous, especially as he wears the exact same thing every day. (Uniforms don’t count. Those are required.)
He can be really lazy, if he’s not on a job, at which point he can get a little intense. But then, he’s in good company, there, with the likes of Sherlock Holmes, even.
And while he’s not entirely what she expected from a detective, especially not visually, he has the skills to back it up. He might be hiding his talents, depending, but he’s observant, he’s got the necessary curiosity…he’s relatively money-focused, but an offhand comment says he sleeps on his couch like a real noir detective and doesn’t even realize that’s horrifying. (From his perspective, she suspects, he’d just point out, confused, that it’s not like he can just put a futon in his office where clients can see, and practically, he can’t afford another place.) And even then, his love of a puzzle, of helping people, shines through. It’s just that he does actually have to eat, and pay his rent, and pay for his phone plan, and it doesn’t help that he visits arcades or participates in drone races or is a big eater.
He’s also incredibly intelligent. He’d told Kotoko-chan that he’d dropped out of high school, but he’d managed to pass the bar exam simply by studying. He’s no armchair detective, though—despite how intelligent he is, he’s not Nero Wolfe. He absolutely loves fieldwork. He might grumble about a few things, but his eyes light up when there’s the possibility of a chase or tailing mission, so he can’t fool her. She’d read about the nationwide scandal he managed to uncover simply by being some combination of being a genius and an entirely relentless seeker of the truth. No matter how much he might like to act laid-back, there’s a reason Ranpo sees him as the perfect partner—when he’s on the scent of a mystery, he just does not stop, no matter what gets in his way.
From what she can tell, he has no fear. No rational, ‘I’m in danger’ fear anyway. He’s mentioned a couple of times that bodyguards are nice and all, but there’s no substitute for your own hands (or feet). So she’s fairly certain he cares about her safety, and the thing about his martial arts coming in handy regularly is probably from experience.
But then she notices something else, right about the time that she wanders in to the dance club to try to find their club advisor and sees him in the middle of a dance routine: he’s smiling. It’s not like he never smiles, although he tries to be more serious for the MRC. But this is a real smile; he’s enjoying himself, even if he gets all awkward and self-conscious after the fact. And now that she thinks about it, even if he’s doing a good job hiding it by concealing all of the common body language and carefully keeping from talking about his personal life, he can’t hide away every sign.
He’s only human, after all, and no matter how hard they might try to hide the evidence, humans will always make some sort of mistake. Mostly, it happens when he thinks she’s not looking. Occasionally, he’ll play around on his phone (he has everything from gacha to Puyo-Puyo, but doesn’t know how to work some of the basic apps) when she’s doing homework, at the end of his visits, and sometimes he’ll stare off into space for far too long, with a lost kind of look in his eye. Yagami-san is unhappy about something. She’s seen how he deals with obstacles at work, too—Sawa-sensei won’t talk to him, okay, he’ll just try again, those students keep being a pain, he’ll beat them up or befriend them, whatever works. In the generalities about the cases he’d worked, he’d never sounded frustrated, only determined, when describing things that would bother most people, like the interference of yakuza. It’s clearly something personal.
Which is why, the time he forgets his phone in the club room, she immediately snags it and begins trying to figure out his password. He hadn’t been terribly careless when signing in, which means she didn’t catch much of a glimpse when he’d entered it himself.
As usual, Kento speaks up and tries to be the ‘voice of reason’. “Sis, I really don’t think you should be doing this…” Fortunately, Kotoko-chan had left not an hour before; she’s an unknown, as of yet, and unlike her brother Kyoko doesn’t know how the newest member of the MRC would react to this kind of thing.
She pulls out her fingerprinting powder. That should help. “On the contrary, what kind of detective would I be if I just let this situation continue?” He doesn’t tend to wear gloves, so she’ll probably get some pretty good prints. She’ll have to wipe it off before she gives it back, though.
Her brother sighs. “You should just ask him about it like a normal person, maybe?”
Asking questions is the detective’s bread and butter, but she’d already considered and discarded that approach. “He would find that ‘inappropriate’, I think. Talking about his personal problems with a student.”
Kento crosses his arms and introduces even more logic into the fray. “That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be doing this. You don’t want to tick off our advisor enough that he leaves, right? We were lucky enough to find him in the first place.”
Hmm. That’s actually a decent point. She pauses to think. “I don’t think he’d get mad, really. Maybe disappointed.” And that thought hurts a little, because he’s quickly become someone she does want to impress, an adult whose opinion she actually cares about. But in the end… “…I think he’ll understand if I explain I’m worried about him. But I still won’t get anything out of him that way, so it’s better that I go looking for clues before I confront him with the evidence.” The 1, 2, 5, and 0 have been touched, and it looks like the 1 has been pressed more often, from the amount on the 1, it’s been pressed more than the rest. She stares at it for a minute, mentally thinking about possible combinations, before it hits her, and she quickly searches for something on her phone—yep, she was right. It’s times like this that there’s a clear age difference, or he would know not to choose a password someone could research on their phone. That being said, it’s slightly concerning that he has the date of Terasawa-san’s death as his phone lock numbers. He does utterly seem like the type to obsess about the woman he couldn’t save, particularly since he’d almost entirely left being a lawyer behind, but it doesn’t seem…exactly healthy?
That could be the problem, perhaps. She’ll have more of an idea when she gets into his phone.
He mostly uses calls and texts, from the looks of it. That, and his camera-phone. That takes up most of his storage, and it seems like he uses that for all of his detective pictures. Not that she does much more than glance at the image previews—she doesn’t want to intrude on the privacy of his clients at the same time.
He has more than a few people in his contacts list, which is surprising, considering he doesn’t seem to talk about his friends or really give much of an impression he was anything but a loner. Then again, she does vaguely remember the students mentioning other ‘repairmen’ who came to the school the same day, so it’s entirely possible that she’s just overlooking things. After all, it was hard enough for Yagami-san to come up with an excuse to stay in the school, let alone his buddies.
There’s a possibly-nationalized foreigner, who seems to have kept him updated on gang activity, there’s a woman who seems to be his landlady who’s opened an izakaya below him and who regularly seeks advice on new dish recipes, there’s the law office that according to various newspaper articles by one Hattori Ko he used to work at, as well as separate numbers for each of the lawyers now working there. He doesn’t seem to have removed the number for the deceased member of Genda Law Office, either. Nor, oddly, has he removed the number for what looks to be a yakuza family office. She vaguely remembers the name ‘Matsugane’ from the piece about the court case, and looks it up, and yes, that was the name of the family Captain Hamura Kyohei worked under, so that’s Tojo and disbanded, by this point. Odd. He even has someone with just the name Charles, no surname, not even a picture.
“Could you hurry it up?” Kento hisses at her, and she rolls her eyes. This will take the time it takes, and it’s not like she hears anyone coming down the stairs.
Near the top, though, there’s a name. Kaito-san ♥. She vaguely remembers that from the stories about the case, too, and yep, when she opens the contact, just like Yagami-san, this Kaito-san appears to have a favorite set of clothing.
There’s something about that heart, though. Yagami-san seems utterly clueless when it comes to romance, unless it’s all an act because he’s trying very, very hard not to notice some of the dance club members have a crush on him, which is fair and she would do exactly the same in his situation. One of the times they’d been tailing a suspect, a woman who’d dropped something had just stood there flirting with him, and he looked as bewildered as he had when she’d been insisting he could in fact infiltrate the dance crew. In any case, it could be an inside joke between the two. Hard to know without reading the emails, really. Sometimes, Yagami-san can certainly speak without thinking, but he is also very, very good with language when he puts his mind to it.
“If, uh…if you’ve found some sexting, or something, you really shouldn’t be reading it, sis,” he points out, and she wonders for a second before realizing she’s probably blushing, too, judging by the heat in her cheeks.
“There’s nothing like that,” she protests, and it’s utterly true. There isn’t anything yet, and there might not be.
‘Better not be making kissy-faces with Sensei’, is the last thing in there, from Kaito-san ♥, and she nearly drops the phone, because there’s a half written message in reply that never got sent.
‘Of course not. I only want to do that’ before Yagami-san gave up. Mentally, she fills in the ‘with you’ even as she scrolls up. It could be someone else, but her gut instinct is saying that it isn't. Jealous teasing about Sawa-sensei, which is met with terse, sarcastic, annoyed comments or completely ignored. Insistence that he’s being too hard on some Kuwana-san guy and that they should go out drinking, or to karaoke, or.... Interestingly, while Yagami-san seems to find Sawa-sensei annoying to deal with (and half of that might be the way Kaito-san treats him after, though he doesn’t particularly enjoy her insults, either, judging by the tone of his texts), he seems to absolutely despise this handyman guy. She makes a mental note to look Kuwana-san up, too.
Still…Yagami-san is old-fashioned. The kind of guy to pick a publicly available number associated with their name to lock his phone. He doesn’t tend to use emoji or stamps or anything else when texting. That makes the heart significant, she suspects. It is, however, merely one clue out of a larger puzzle.
She notes Kaito-san ♥’s phone number and quickly goes back into his pictures, because that shiny orange shirt is pretty eye-catching—there! She opens a picture—the two of them are smiling, even if it looks like they’d just gotten into some kind of fight, judging by the scrapes on their face. Kaito-san’s arm is slung around Yagami-san’s shoulder, while Yagami-san’s is around the man’s middle—not as suggestive as, say, his waist, but still, it’s possible. They’re facing the camera, but angled toward each other, just slightly, with very little space between them, and they’re both smiling. She’s never seen Kaito-san before, so doesn’t know if he smiles often, but Yagami-san’s smile is wider, happier, than she’s ever seen it, even at dance practice.
She moves on to some of the other recently contacted people—Sugiura also seems to be bothering him about Kuwana-san, which could absolutely explain his moodiness. Someone named Tsukumo is much less…nagging…and doesn’t mention Kuwana-san once, mostly asking about his phone or various applications. He seems far more knowledgeable than Yagami-san.
She hesitates slightly before reading the ones from Saori (Shirosaki-san, the lawyer), since she wants to actually fulfill her promise to keep out of the investigation that had brought him to Seiryo and doesn’t know if that’s involved, but then, this could be said of any of these texts and should really have occurred to her before this point.
She just has to scroll up for a little before finding a relatively crucial detail (carefully skimming and not fully reading the other texts, though it appears he leaves most of the more important details to calls rather than text): ‘Is Kaito-san still being ridiculous?’ from Shirosaki-san.
‘I could understand if he was jealous of her. I’d still be confused, but…I could understand. Trying to focus on the investigation, though.’ It’s still not conclusive proof, but it’s very close. If she could just see a little bit more…
“Sis, stairs!” She hears them, too, but it’s nice for Kento to look after her. Hastily, she closes out of the app and relocks the phone, hastily wiping off the fingerprinting powder before throwing it on the table.
It’s shortly before Yagami-san saunters into the room, and his eyes light up as he sees the phone. “I would’ve emailed you about the case of the missing phone, only…” he inclines his head at it before picking it up casually.
“It’s kind of hard to do that if you don’t have your phone to begin with,” Kyoko agrees.
“Plus, replacing it would be kinda a pain.” She feels briefly guilty about not paying him for all this extra work, helping the students, but he does seem genuinely invested and it’s not like they have any real money to pay him with anyway, despite the famous grandfather.
“You should take extra care then, Yagami-san,” she scolds, doing her best to swallow her nervousness about the prospect of getting caught, and his teeth flash in a bright, goofy smile that doesn’t quite reach his sad eyes.
“I’d be in a lot of trouble without this. Sorry, Amasawa, but I’m keeping a client waiting as it is…” He really is apologetic, because he is taking his duties seriously. Someone else might have just used the position as a cover, but no, he’s actually putting in the effort, despite the fact it doesn’t pay him anything.
“Oh, I would never want to get in the way of an active case. Good luck, Yagami-san!” She waves, and he nods gratefully and immediately is off at the fastest pace he can manage without actively dashing through school halls.
Kenta sinks in his chair. “One of these days, you’re going to give me a heart attack, sis. Can this please be the end of it?”
“Au contraire, mon frère, the investigation has just begun.” She’s not entirely sure of her next steps, though, so it might take a bit. Still, he deserves to be happy, and he does look pretty happy with this Kaito-san. All she has to do is figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Can't be too hard, right?
