Learning from the Master

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Lost Judgment (spoilers until the end of ch 3 + some of the mystery and dance club plot)
follow-up to Initiate Investigation
Mystery: Why is Yagami-San Unhappy?
Chapter Summary: Amasawa starts digging into the mystery.
Word Count: 615
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Yagami/Kaito

        Tailing Yagami-san is much easier than tailing the likely (later, confirmed) sugar baby.  It’s odd, because he’s a detective and should notice, but Kyoko guesses he taught her well even within such a brief period of time.  It gets difficult whenever he decides to start scaling walls, so she loses him, but she doesn’t take that as badly as she might, because it has her thoughtful for a completely different reason.  Maybe she should start learning parkour, too, alongside disguise and martial arts?  It could definitely come into use.  And, of course, it’s not like she can ask Ranpo what he gets up to when Yagami-san calls him, unfortunately.
        She does follow him, once, to his friend’s detective agency and then ends up reading all about them on their well-designed website (obviously, Yagami-san wasn’t the one who worked on that).  Yokohama 99, apparently, has a lot of experience dealing with bullying cases, though they weren’t able to give specifics due to the whole confidentiality thing.  Instead, they talked about generalities: how they would approach these kinds of cases, success rates.  She doesn’t follow him in or let him know.  She suspects it would upset him that she knows where he works, even if that doesn’t strictly speaking involve her in his current job.
        She also learns that he’s a workaholic.  He hasn’t finished the job at her school (she’s fairly sure, even if from what she’s observed he doesn’t seem the type to drop the MRC the second he finishes), and yet he’s picked up several more cases.  He does intersperse, say, waiting for a phone call with hitting the arcade, which she’d already picked up on, but he doesn’t…really get time off.  He’s his own boss; he could give himself a break, but it’s almost as if he doesn’t understand what the concept means.
        She doesn’t see him in the company of Kaito-san, the man with the brilliant shirt, once.  He answers a call from him once, she thinks—she hasn’t learned lip-reading, not to the extent she’d like, but when he looks surprised and then says a name, it’s exaggerated enough that she’s fairly sure.  She’s not close enough to hear exactly what’s being said, unfortunately.  For all she’s found out about him, he’s a very private man, and tries to hide his emotions and problems, but the pain and longing soon leading into frustration are probably not just her imagination.
        He’s closing himself off to pain, and in the process the hollow look in his eyes is eating him alive.
        She does see Kaito-san on his own, once from a distance, one less so.  Both times he is apparently drunk, which…he’s an adult, it’s not as worrying as if the Professor got a teen to drink, he seems happy enough and probably has the alcohol tolerance for it, but still.  Drinking until you’re drunk is probably bad for you, and it might be a part of the situation, too—she’s read of plenty of domestic spats involving a differing opinion on imbibing alcohol.
        She still, worryingly, has no solution, but it’s becoming really clear that although she’d never admit it out loud, at the beginning, Kento might have had a point.  Maybe she’d been exaggerating what she’d seen because she’d been desperate to help out their advisor after everything that he’d done for them, or maybe she’d just been more nosy than curious.  Now, though, with the increasingly blank, sometimes bitter expression when he smokes (and he’s been going through more and more packs lately, which suggests he is in fact stressed), it’s pretty clear that this situation cannot continue, and if she can help at all it’ll end well, not poorly.