CONTEXT: Before the world fell apart, your biggest concern was getting Hiromi Higuruma to answer your messages. Somewhere between courthouse hallways and coffee he never asked for, you fell in love with a man who believed justice had long since failed the innocent. Then came the day he passed judgment in a courtroom and disappeared without a trace. Refusing to let your story end without a goodbye, you walked away from everything you'd worked for to find the man you loved — no matter where that path led, even if it meant stepping into the Culling Games.
GENERAL WARNINGS: 18+ MDNI. Explicit/implied sexual content, canon-typical violence and gore, character death, injury, angst, strong language. Dirty talk, dry humping, cunnilingus, fingering, piv, unprotected sex, creampie, multiple orgasms, cum eating, manhandling. This fic follows canon events from the Culling Game and Shibuya arcs — spoilers ahead if you haven't caught up. Reader insert (she/her, fem-coded), afab.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Hi everyone!! Chapter 2 is finally out! The first chapter was mostly about Higuruma, so this one focuses a bit more on Y/N. I had so much fun writing it, and I'm already excited to start the next chapter! As always, your comments and feedback genuinely make my day, so if you're enjoying the story, please let me know! Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy!
FEATURING: Hiromi Higuruma x Reader
Chapter 2: Exhibit B 𑣲. 15.2k words
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The phone was pressed tightly against your ear, propped precariously against your shoulder, as you made your way down the wet streets, your heels clicking a sharp, uneven rhythm against the slick concrete pavement with every step you took. The city had that particular grey, washed-out look it always got after a night of rain, the kind that made even the ugliest buildings look faintly cinematic, streetlights still glowing dimly overhead though the sun had technically risen an hour ago, hidden somewhere behind a thick blanket of clouds that hadn't yet decided whether they were finished with you.
One of your arms was occupied entirely, your bag looped over your shoulder while you also, somewhat heroically, balanced two drinks in that same hand, your fingers curled awkwardly around the cardboard tray. The other hand held a small paper box of freshly baked pastries you'd just bought from the newest coffee shop in the area, well, you didn't actually know for certain that it was new, you'd simply never noticed it before, and in your mind that qualified it as new enough. The smell drifting up from the box, warm butter and sugar and something faintly cinnamon, had been tempting you the entire walk over, and you'd already resisted the urge twice to simply eat one yourself before you'd even made it to the office.
It was early, the kind of early that still had a chill clinging to the air despite the season, and you absolutely should have already been at your own office by now, which was, in a roundabout sort of way, exactly how you'd ended up here instead, weaving down an unfamiliar side street with your arms full and your assistant currently shouting directly into your ear.
"—and I am telling you, if you are not here within the hour, I am personally moving your ten o'clock to nine forty-five just to watch you suffer through it half-prepared," Suzuki's voice crackled through the speaker, sharp and thoroughly unimpressed, the particular tone she reserved exclusively for you and, on occasion, the office printer.
"Please, Suzuki, I'll be there in a bit," you whined, drawing the last word out as long as you dared, layering on just enough pitiful desperation to sound believable. "I'm stuck in traffic."
There was a beat of silence on the other end, the kind of silence that meant your assistant was very deliberately deciding whether to dignify that with a response.
"You're stuck in traffic," she repeated flatly.
"Terrible traffic. Awful. You wouldn't believe it." You made a small, halfhearted attempt at a car noise, something between a hum and a honk, entirely unconvincing even to your own ears, and the resulting silence on the line stretched just long enough that you knew, without seeing her, that Suzuki was somewhere on the other end pressing two fingers to her temple.
"You are the worst liar I have ever had the misfortune of working for," she said, though there was no real heat in it anymore, just the long-suffering fondness of a woman who had, by this point, spent the better part of two years accepting that her boss was, functionally, a lost cause before ten in the morning. "I can hear heels. You're not in a car. You're not even near a car."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Okay, love you, bye bye!" You pulled the phone away from your ear before she could formulate a rebuttal, already smiling to yourself, and shifted it carefully into the hand still holding the pastry box, tucking it against your palm as best you could manage. You could, in fairness, do more or less whatever you wanted most mornings, and your firm wasn't going to fire you over it, not when you'd spent the better part of three years building a conviction record most of your colleagues would kill for. You knew that. You leaned on it, shamelessly, more often than you probably should have, and Suzuki, bless her, ended up quietly covering for roughly half of your more creative disappearances without ever actually being asked to.
You wedged the phone into your blazer pocket as best you could, the fit awkward given your full hands, and continued down the street at a slightly quicker pace than before, glancing up at the sky with a faint frown. The clouds had darkened further in the last few minutes, low and heavy, gathering in a way that suggested rain wasn't finished with the city yet. And then the building came into view ahead of you, squat and unremarkable, exactly as it had looked the last time you'd visited, exactly as it had looked every time before that too, and something in your chest lifted instantly, a small, helpless smile breaking across your face before you'd even fully processed why.
You laughed softly to yourself, entirely without meaning to, drawing a curious glance from a passerby you didn't notice, and quickened your steps toward the entrance.
The stairwell smelled the way it always did, faintly of old carpet and yesterday's coffee, and you took the steps two at a time despite the very real risk this posed to both your heels and the drinks balanced in your hand, too eager, too impatient to bother with dignity this early in the morning. You'd texted him the night before that you might swing by if your schedule allowed it, and he'd sent back a single line, I'll be here, which from Hiromi Higuruma was practically a love letter, and you'd spent an embarrassing amount of time last night rereading it before falling asleep with your phone still in your hand.
You hadn't seen him nearly as much as you wanted to since the night at the police station, since the kiss that had rearranged something fundamental in your chest and then been so rudely interrupted by his phone, since the quiet, warm afternoon in his office with Shimizu's suspicious glances and your hand tracing slow circles against his back.
Work had swallowed both of you whole in the days since, hearings and filings and the particular chaos of two full caseloads that didn't care, even slightly, about the fact that you were finally, blissfully something to each other now. But he'd answered every message. Every single one, promptly, sometimes with more words than strictly necessary for a man of his usual economy, and in your personal accounting that counted for a great deal after the three weeks of silence that had come before it.
You reached the second floor slightly breathless, your cheeks warm from the climb and, if you were honest with yourself, from something that had very little to do with the stairs at all. These past few days, if you were being truthful, you hadn't been able to think about much else besides him, the reality of it still fresh and thrilling enough that it kept ambushing you at inconvenient moments, in the middle of depositions, in the shower, once memorably during a phone call with a judge's clerk that you'd had to abruptly excuse yourself from.
You'd wanted something like this for so long that having it now felt almost unreal, a fact you kept needing to physically go and confirm, which was, if you were being entirely honest with yourself, the actual reason you'd shown up here this morning instead of simply texting him good morning like a reasonable, professionally composed adult.
You knocked twice on the office door, more out of habit than genuine patience, and pushed it open before you'd fully waited for a response, stepping inside with your arms full and your smile already wide.
Your smile faltered, just slightly, your eyes sweeping across the familiar clutter, the towering stacks of files, the two desks pushed against opposite walls, and found no sign of either occupant. Where are they, you thought, a small, deflating disappointment settling in your chest, and you'd only barely begun to consider whether you'd somehow gotten the day wrong when a head popped up abruptly from behind the low divider separating Higuruma's desk from Shimizu's, startling a soft gasp out of you.
Higuruma blinked at you, clearly having been crouched down retrieving something from a low drawer, and for one unguarded, entirely unprecedented moment, you found yourself staring, genuinely staring, at the sight of him wearing a pair of thin, wire-framed reading glasses you had seen exactly twice in the three years you'd known him, both times fleetingly, both times gone again before you'd had a proper chance to appreciate them. They suited him in a way that felt almost unfair, softening the usual sharp severity of his features into something quieter, more studious, and something in your chest did a small, traitorous flip at the sight.
"You're staring," he said, mild amusement threading through the observation, though there was a faint question in it too, his brow lifting slightly as he took in your armful of coffee and pastries.
You recovered quickly, or at least attempted to, straightening and letting your smile bloom back across your face, wide and unguarded.
His name came out louder than strictly necessary, echoing slightly in the empty office, though there was no one else present to disturb, and even if there had been, you suspected you wouldn't have particularly cared. You crossed the room quickly, setting the coffee tray and pastry box down on Shimizu's desk with more haste than care, and closed the remaining distance between you before he'd even fully risen from his crouch, throwing your arms around his neck and pressing a warm, enthusiastic kiss to his cheek.
He went briefly still beneath the affection, the way he always did whenever you were particularly demonstrative in a space that technically counted as his workplace, though his free arm remained braced against the desk, propping up the position he'd apparently been holding for some time, and he let you press your face against his without so much as a token protest, something you counted, privately, as significant progress.
"Good morning to you too," he said, his voice carrying that same low, familiar warmth, though his eyes had already drifted back down to the file open on his desk, and you felt a small, entirely unreasonable flicker of disappointment that his attention hadn't stayed on you a moment longer. He reached up without looking, his free hand settling against the crown of your head, fingers threading gently through your hair in a slow, absent stroke, and the disappointment dissolved almost instantly, replaced by a warmth that spread all the way down through your chest.
"I brought you and Shimizu breakfast," you said, straightening slightly, though you didn't move far, your hip settling against the edge of his desk. "There's coffee, and some really good pastries. You have to try them. I already know Shimizu's going to love them."
He hummed something low and noncommittal in response, though he did finally let go of your hair, reaching instead for the file in front of him and closing it with a soft, decisive snap, apparently willing to grant you at least this much of his attention. You made your way back to Shimizu's desk, humming to yourself as you unwrapped the pastry box, the smell filling the small office fully now, and selected the largest one, a flaky, golden thing dusted generously with sugar, setting it carefully atop a folded paper napkin before carrying it, along with one of the coffees, back over to him.
"Drink it before it gets cold," you said softly, pressing the cup into his free hand, your fingers lingering briefly against his the way they always seemed to now, an old habit that had simply never needed breaking.
"Thank you." He took a slow sip, and you watched, satisfied, as something in his shoulders eased, the exact ratio you'd long since memorized clearly still correct, bitter, no sugar, just enough milk to soften it. He set the cup down carefully beside the pastry, and you settled yourself into the spare chair tucked against the wall, dragging it a little closer to his desk before sitting, content simply to watch him eat in the quiet, unhurried morning light filtering weakly through the office's narrow window.
He picked up the pastry, examining it with the same careful scrutiny he gave everything, turning it slightly in his hand before taking a bite, and you watched, delighted, as something in his expression shifted, subtle but unmistakable, a small flicker of genuine surprise.
"I told you." You couldn't quite keep the satisfaction out of your voice, tucking one leg up beneath you in the chair, your chin propped in your hand as you watched him take a second, considerably less restrained bite. "There's this little place two streets over from the courthouse. I only found it because I got lost trying to find a dry cleaner, if you can believe that."
"That tracks." He said it dryly, though there was no real bite in it, and you gasped in mock offense, reaching out to swat lightly at his arm.
"I have an excellent sense of direction."
"You once got lost in a building you've worked in for six years."
"That elevator bank is genuinely confusing, and you know it." You crossed your arms, feigning wounded dignity, though you couldn't quite suppress the smile tugging at the corner of your mouth. "Everyone gets turned around on the third floor. Even Shimizu, and she has a photographic memory for basically everything else."
"Shimizu has never once gotten lost in that building."
"She's just too polite to admit it."
He huffed something that was almost, almost a laugh, low and quiet in his chest, and took another sip of his coffee, and you felt that same warm, giddy flutter settle back into your chest, the one that had been living there more or less permanently since the night at the police station, occasionally interrupted by work and exhaustion but never fully extinguished, always simmering somewhere just beneath the surface, ready to flare back to life the moment he so much as glanced at you.
"You look tired," you said, after a moment, studying the faint shadows still lingering beneath his eyes despite the glasses, despite the coffee, despite what you hoped had been at least a few decent nights of sleep since you'd last seen him properly.
"I've had an early morning."
"You've had every morning early, for as long as I've known you." You reached out, unable to help yourself, brushing a stray strand of hair back from his forehead, your fingers lingering a moment longer than the gesture strictly required. "When's the last time you actually slept eight hours?"
He considered the question with the same careful seriousness he gave everything, and the resulting silence stretched just long enough to be its own kind of answer.
"Recently," he said finally, which you both understood to be a lie, delivered with just enough conviction that neither of you felt particularly compelled to challenge it further this early in the morning.
"Uh huh." You let it go, for now, filing it away instead for later, quieter interrogation, and reached for your own coffee, taking a slow sip, the warmth of it settling pleasantly in your chest alongside everything else currently settled there. "How's the filing from yesterday? The bail motion."
"Denied." He said it flatly, though there was a faint, familiar tightness in his jaw that told you exactly how personally he'd taken it, the same tightness you'd watched cross his face a hundred times over the years, in courtrooms, in hallways, in cafeterias, whenever a ruling landed somewhere he considered fundamentally, infuriatingly wrong.
"It's not your fault." He glanced at you, something softening in his expression, some of the tension easing at the sight of your genuine sympathy, unguarded and simple. "The judge cited flight risk. My client has lived in the same apartment for eleven years and has a job he'd lose the moment he missed a shift. There was no flight risk. There was a judge who didn't want to be the one explaining a release to the papers if something went wrong."
"No." He said it simply, without the usual bitterness that typically colored these particular conversations, and you found yourself studying him for a moment, something in his tone, in the quiet, tired resignation of it, sitting slightly differently than usual, though you couldn't quite place why.
"I'll appeal it." A faint, wry note crept back into his voice, something closer to his usual self. "Though I suspect you already knew that before you asked."
"I like hearing you say it." You shrugged, unbothered, taking another sip of your coffee. "Makes it feel official."
Silence overtook the office as you quietly watched, or more like admored him, asa he ate. That was until the office door swung open with a soft creak just as Higuruma was finishing the last of his pastry, and Shimizu stepped through, a stack of files tucked under one arm, her coat still damp at the shoulders from the drizzle that had apparently started outside while you'd been happily ensconced in the warm, quiet bubble of the office.
"It's freezing out there," she announced to no one in particular, shrugging out of her coat and hanging it on the hook by the door before her eyes landed on you, curled comfortably in the spare chair, and then on the pastry box sitting open on her own desk. Her brows lifted slowly, a knowing, amused expression settling across her face with a speed that suggested this was far from the first time she'd walked in on some version of this exact scene.
"Well." She set her files down, crossing the room to inspect the pastry box with obvious interest. "This is a nice surprise."
"Morning, Shimizu." You lifted your coffee slightly in greeting, entirely unbothered by her raised eyebrow. "There's some for you too. I got the coffee exactly how you like it, extra shot, splash of caramel, don't argue with me about the calories, I already know what you're going to say."
"I wasn't going to say anything about the calories." Shimizu selected a pastry, inspecting it with the same careful scrutiny Higuruma had shown earlier, before taking a bite, and her expression shifted almost instantly into something close to reverent. "Oh, that's incredible. Where did you even find this place?"
"You wont belive it, itsthis like cure coffee shop i found when i gotlost looking for the dry cleaners."
"Of course you did." Shimizu took another bite, settling into her own chair with a contented little sigh, glancing briefly, pointedly, between the two of you. "So. To what do we owe the pleasure of an actual visit? Last I checked, you two mostly communicated via increasingly unhinged text messages."
"They are not unhinged," Higuruma said, without looking up from the file he'd returned to, though you caught the faint, betraying tightness at the corner of his mouth that suggested he was fighting a losing battle against a smile.
"He sent you a photo of the cat outside our office and erote 'reminds me ofyou'" Shimizu said, deadpan, and you burst out laughing, delighted, while Higuruma's ears went visibly pink.
"That is not what happened."
"That is exactly what happened,i was ight next to you!"
"The cat had your exact unimpressed expression," he said looking at you , entirely without shame, and you laughed harder, reaching over to squeeze his arm affectionately, utterly charmed by the mental image of Hiromi Higuruma, terror of Courtroom Seven, sending you cat photos at eleven at night with genuine sincerity.
"That's adorable, actually."
"It was an observation, not a romantic gesture."
"It was extremely a romantic gesture, and you know it." You leaned over, pressing another quick kiss to his cheek, and this time he didn't even pretend to be bothered by it, simply tolerating the affection with the faint, resigned fondness of a man who had, somewhere in the last few weeks, given up entirely on maintaining his usual composure around you, at least in the privacy of his own office. "I loved it. Send me more cat photos. Send me a cat photo every day for the rest of my life."
Shimizu watched the exchange with open, unrepentant amusement, finishing off the last of her pastry before reaching for her coffee, taking a slow, satisfied sip. "You two are genuinely nauseating now, you know that? I liked it better when you were pretending you didn't have feelings for each other. At least that was funny."
"This is also funny," you said, entirely unbothered.
"It's a different kind of funny. A worse kind." But there was no real complaint in it, just the particular, warm exasperation of someone who had, in her own way, been rooting for exactly this outcome for longer than either of you probably realized. "For what it's worth, I'm happy for you both. Even if it does mean I now have to witness this on a semi-regular basis."
"I tolerate it." Shimizu's mouth twitched, betraying her. "Mostly because the pastries are good."
The office fell into a comfortable, easy rhythm after that, Shimizu settling into her own work at her desk, occasionally glancing over with a small, private smile whenever you leaned in close to say something quietly to Higuruma, and you, in turn, content simply to sit beside him for a while longer, watching him work,in no particular hurry to leave despite the very real knowledge that Suzuki was, at this exact moment, almost certainly plotting some form of gentle professional revenge for your continued absence. It was as if your thoughts had summoned her. You knew who was ringing your phone before you even glanced at the caller ID, and you let out a small, theatrical whine before slipping your hand into your blazer pocket and answering with the sweetest, most syrupy tone you could muster.
"I'm on my way, I promise!" Your voice climbed sharply on the last word, and whatever came shouting back through the line was almost entirely unintelligible, a rapid, furious stream of words tumbling over each other too fast to parse. Shimizu, watching from across the office, let out a small snort of laughter before quickly covering her mouth with one hand, and you held her gaze, both of you fighting matching grins while Suzuki continued her tirade uninterrupted on the other end of the line. After a few more moments of increasingly incomprehensible shouting, her voice finally settled, the volume dropping back down into something almost coherent.
"You have a new case assigned to you." A pause, clipped and pointed. "Get here."
She hung up before you could respond, and you let out a long, resigned sigh, dropping your phone back into your pocket. A case, of course. Another one, stacking neatly on top of the dozen already sitting on your desk, because apparently the universe had decided you weren't allowed a single morning of uncomplicated peace.
You pushed yourself up out of the chair, gathering your things with slightly more urgency now, and leaned down to press a quick, chaste kiss to Higuruma's cheek, careful to keep it brief, mindful of Shimizu's presence across the room even though you both knew perfectly well she'd already witnessed considerably more affection than this in the last twenty minutes.
"I'll text you later," you murmured against his cheek, and he hummed something warm and wordless in response, his hand briefly catching your wrist as you straightened, a small, fleeting squeeze before he let you go.
You crossed the room to give Shimizu a quick, one-armed side hug, which she accepted with a good-natured roll of her eyes, and then you were out the door, down the narrow stairwell, and back out into the grey, drizzling morning, the office's warmth already fading behind you.
You pulled your coat tighter around yourself, drawing it close against your chest before deciding, with some reluctance, that your hands were better served buried in your pockets instead. It was properly cold now, colder than it had been on your walk over, and the rain had thickened slightly, no longer the light, halfhearted drizzle from earlier but something with more conviction behind it, fine and persistent, the kind that soaked through fabric slowly and thoroughly if you gave it enough time. You could already picture the frizz it was going to leave in your hair by the time you reached the office, and you hadn't thought to bring an umbrella, because of course you hadn't, the one morning you actually needed one was always the one morning you'd left it hanging by your front door.
You let out a soft sigh and continued walking, trying to reconstruct, from memory, exactly where you'd left your car. Somewhere between the coffee shop and the office, you were fairly sure, though the streets here all had a frustrating sameness to them, narrow and grey and lined with buildings that all seemed to blur together in weather like this. Parking near offices was, as always, a nightmare, which was the entire reason you'd walked the last several blocks instead of simply driving, though you were beginning to regret that decision rather intensely now that the rain had properly picked up. Maybe next time you'd ask about the office's own parking, whether visitors were allowed to use it. You made a mental note to bring it up with Higuruma later, then immediately lost the thought entirely as you turned a corner and tried, with limited success, to remember whether you'd gone straight here or taken a turn.
You paused at the mouth of a narrow side street, glancing left, then right, your brow furrowing in mild frustration, and it was in that moment, turning your head to get your bearings, that you noticed the cat.
It sat at the entrance of a small alleyway just off the main street, entirely black from nose to tail, its fur slicked wet and glossy from the rain, and its eyes, when they found yours, were a bright, striking yellow that seemed almost too vivid for the dim, overcast morning. You weren't sure why it stopped you the way it did, something in the stillness of it, perhaps, sitting so calmly in the rain when any sensible creature would have sought shelter, but you found your feet carrying you toward it before you'd fully decided to move.
"Why are you out here in this rain?" you murmured, more to yourself than to the cat, your heels clicking softly against the wet pavement as you approached. The cat let out a small, plaintive meow in response, and you took it, perhaps a little too readily, as an invitation.
Suzuki could hardly be upset with you for a few extra minutes spent on something this important, you reasoned, crouching down carefully despite the damp ground, and extended one hand toward the cat, palm up, giving it the chance to approach on its own terms. It sniffed at your fingers for a moment, whiskers twitching, before rising and winding itself around your legs in slow, deliberate figure eights, its tail curling briefly against your calf, its small head tilting up toward you with an expression that struck you, absurdly, as almost pleading.
"Aww, aren't you the cutest," you cooed, running your hand gently along its back, its fur soft and slightly damp beneath your palm, and you continued like that for a while, crouched in the drizzle, murmuring soft nonsense to a stray cat while your fingers slowly warmed against its fur despite the cold. It seemed to love the attention, arching into your touch, purring loud enough that you could feel the vibration of it beneath your hand, and for a moment, just a moment, you forgot entirely about Suzuki's calls and the case waiting for you and the rain soaking slowly into your coat.
You pulled up your phone, angling it toward the cat, ready to snap a quick photo to send to Higuruma, some small, warm thought already forming about how he'd react to it, probably something dry and unimpressed on the surface that didn't fool you for a second. Your thumb hovered over the shutter button.
You never got the chance to take it.
A small, sharp scratching sound echoed through the alleyway behind you, and everything changed at once. The cat froze mid-purr, its body going rigid beneath your hand, and its head snapped around, ears flattening, its wide yellow eyes fixing on some point directly behind you with an intensity that made the hair on the back of your neck rise instantly, instinctively. You felt your own blood run cold, some old, primal part of your brain recognizing the shift in the animal's posture as something meaningful even before your conscious mind had caught up.
Is it seeing something, you thought, and immediately wanted to laugh at yourself, at the sheer, childish absurdity of the thought, a ghost, in an alleyway, in broad daylight, but the laugh never quite made it out of your throat. You'd heard, somewhere, sometime, that animals could sense things humans couldn't, some old superstition you'd absorbed without ever quite deciding whether you believed it, and you'd always considered yourself a fairly rational person when it came to that sort of thing, unbothered by ghost stories, unmoved by tales of the supernatural.
You weren't laughing now.
The cat hissed, sharp and sudden, and you flinched back instinctively, your hand retracting fast, though you remained crouched, frozen in place, unable to make yourself turn around, unable to make yourself not turn around either. The cat's gaze never wavered from whatever it saw, or thought it saw, somewhere behind you, its small body coiled tight, every line of it screaming a warning you didn't yet have the vocabulary to understand.
You swallowed hard. Okay, you told yourself, forcing your breathing to steady, maybe it's a person. Maybe it's just a person, and the cat doesn't like strangers, and this is all perfectly ordinary and explainable. You considered, for one long, suspended moment, whether to turn your head and look, whether it would be better to know or not to know, some old, half-remembered warning about too many horror movies whispering unhelpfully at the back of your mind, don't look, don't look, whatever you do, don't turn around—
It shot forward, past you, a black blur vanishing deeper into the alley in a single, panicked burst of motion, and something in that sudden, violent flight galvanized you before your conscious mind had even finished processing what you were doing. You didn't turn around. You didn't look back. You simply ran, your heart slamming hard and fast against your ribs, your legs moving before you'd fully decided to move them, your heels striking unevenly against the wet pavement as you fled back the way you'd come.
You didn't feel anyone behind you. That was the strange part, the part that would nag at you later, once your heart rate had settled enough to think clearly again. And yet you'd heard it, the scratching, something you'd assumed, in the panic of the moment, must have been footsteps, uneven and dragging against the wet pavement, and beneath that, quieter, worse, a shaky, wet breath that didn't sound like it belonged to anything you wanted to put a name to. You'd heard all of it, clear as anything, and yet felt none of it, no presence at your back, no shift in the air, nothing solid enough to explain a sound that specific, that close.
Without a second thought, you picked up your speed. You'd just gotten yourself the best boyfriend possible, some small, absurd corner of your mind supplied, entirely unbidden, and even mid-flight, mid-panic, you felt a small, involuntary flutter low in your stomach at the word boyfriend, though you couldn't, in that particular moment, entirely distinguish whether the flutter came from fear or from something far softer and more romantic tangled up hopelessly in the adrenaline.
It was that small, distracted moment, your mind drifting somewhere warmer even as your body ran on pure panic, that cost you. You didn't notice the unevenness of the ground beneath you. Your foot caught on something, a raised edge of pavement, a loose cobblestone, you never quite registered what, and the world tilted violently sideways. You threw your hands out on reflex, and the impact came fast and hard, your palms scraping raw against the wet concrete, your knee striking the ground with a sharp, jarring pain that shot instantly up through your leg, your ankle twisting awkwardly beneath you as you went down in an ungainly sprawl.
For one long, breathless moment, you simply lay there, stunned, the cold, wet ground soaking instantly through the front of your blouse and knees, your palms stinging fiercely, your ankle throbbing with a dull, insistent pain that made you suck in a sharp breath through your teeth.
You lay still, listening, and then nothing. No footsteps. No breathing. No sound at all beyond the steady, indifferent patter of rain against the pavement around you, and somewhere distant, muffled by the buildings, the low hum of ordinary traffic on some other street entirely, going about an entirely ordinary morning.
Slowly, carefully, you pushed yourself back up onto your hands and knees, wincing at the sharp sting in your palms, and twisted around to look behind you.
Just an empty street, wet and grey and unremarkable, rain falling steadily onto pavement that held no sign of anyone, no shadow, no movement, nothing at all to explain the cat's frozen, terrified stillness or the cold, primal certainty that had sent you running in the first place. You stayed there for a long moment, crouched awkwardly on the wet ground, your breath coming fast and shallow, scanning the empty street over and over as though sheer repetition might make something materialize that would finally explain what had just happened.
You let out a slow, shaky breath, some of the adrenaline beginning to ebb now, leaving behind a heavy, disoriented confusion in its wake. Your hands were trembling slightly as you pushed yourself the rest of the way up onto your feet, and the moment you put weight on your right ankle, a fresh, sharp jolt of pain lanced up through your leg, sharp enough to make you hiss and immediately shift your weight to the other foot.
"Great," you muttered under your breath, the word coming out thin and unsteady, nothing like your usual dry humor, more a reflex than an actual attempt at levity. "Perfect. Wonderful."
You looked down at yourself properly for the first time since the fall, and grimaced. Your skirt clung awkwardly to your thighs now, soaked through and cold, your blouse plastered flat against your chest and stomach in a way that made you shiver violently despite the coat still draped, somehow, half off one shoulder. Your palms were scraped raw, small beads of blood welling in a few places, and your knee ached with a deep, bruising throb that promised an unpleasant color by tomorrow morning. You looked, you suspected, thoroughly ridiculous, a soaked, disheveled mess standing in the middle of an empty street with absolutely no explanation for how you'd gotten this way beyond a cat's strange behavior and your own overactive imagination.
Except you'd heard something. You were sure of it, or you had been sure of it, in the moment, the certainty already beginning to soften and blur at the edges the further you got from it, the way fear always did once the danger, real or imagined, had passed. You stood there in the rain, hugging your arms around yourself, and tried to reconstruct exactly what you'd sensed, and found, to your growing frustration, that you couldn't quite manage it. There had been sound, real sound, the scratching, the uneven footsteps, that strange, wet, shaky breath, and yet nothing you could point to now and say, definitively, this is what frightened me. Just a cat's wide, terrified eyes and some cold, wordless instinct that had sent you running before you'd had time to question any of it.
You felt, suddenly, very foolish.
You glanced around again, slower this time, taking proper stock of your surroundings, and realized, with a fresh wave of disorientation layered on top of everything else, that you had absolutely no idea where you were. The street looked nothing like the one you'd been walking down before, narrower, older, lined with buildings you didn't recognize, their windows dark and shuttered against the rain. You must have run further than you'd realized, taken turns without registering them, your body operating entirely on panicked instinct while your conscious mind had been somewhere else entirely, fixed on that cold, creeping certainty of being watched.
"Okay," you said aloud, mostly to steady your own nerves, your voice sounding small and strange in the empty street. "Okay. It's fine. You're fine. You just need to find your car."
You bent down to pick up your phone, which had skittered from your hand when you fell. Your fingers closed around it a moment later, the solid, familiar weight of it grounding you slightly, and you found yourself gripping it tighter than strictly necessary, some small, wary part of you unwilling to let go of it now, as though it were the only tether you had left to anything solid and explicable. You turned it over carefully, checking for damage, a thin, spidering crack now cutting across one corner of the screen, but the display still lit up beneath your touch, still worked, and you let out a small, relieved breath at that, at least one small thing tonight hadn't broken beyond repair.
You began walking, slow and careful given your throbbing ankle, back the way you thought you'd come, though nothing about the street looked familiar enough to be certain. The rain had eased slightly, thinning back down into the soft drizzle from earlier, though it did little to improve your mood, cold water still trickling in an unpleasant line down the back of your neck every time you tipped your head to check the street signs.
You kept glancing over your shoulder as you walked. You couldn't help it. Every few steps, some small, insistent part of your brain demanded another check, another confirmation that the street behind you remained as empty as it had been the last time you'd looked,everytime the reassurance lasted only a few more steps before the same nagging unease crept back in.
You told yourself, over and over, that you were being ridiculous. That you'd spooked yourself over nothing, a startled cat and an overactive imagination and perhaps a few too many horror movies consumed late at night when you should have been sleeping instead. That there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of it, some noise you'd misread, some shadow you'd misjudged, and that in an hour, sitting safely at your desk with a case file in front of you, this would all seem faintly embarrassing, a strange little story you might tell Higuruma later and laugh about together.
You didn't quite believe yourself.
You limped on through the unfamiliar streets, your ankle throbbing steadily worse with every step, your ruined skirt clinging cold and heavy against your legs, your phone clutched tight in one hand, and though you saw no one, though the streets around you remained stubbornly, resolutely empty, you couldn't shake the persistent, prickling sensation crawling slowly up the back of your neck, the same feeling that had sent you running in the first place, quieter now, but not gone.
You found your car eventually, tucked exactly where you thought you'd left it, though it took nearly fifteen more minutes of limping through unfamiliar streets before the shape of it finally came into view, small and grey and blessedly, wonderfully mundane against the backdrop of everything that had just happened. You had never in your life been so relieved to see a parking ticket tucked beneath your windshield wiper, the small yellow slip of paper somehow the most normal thing you had encountered all morning, and you laughed, short and slightly unhinged, as you pulled it free and stuffed it into your coat pocket without even bothering to read the fine.
The drive to the office passed in a strange, disjointed blur. You remembered turning the key in the ignition, remembered the engine catching, remembered the windshield wipers sweeping steadily back and forth against the persistent drizzle, but very little of the actual route stayed with you afterward, your mind too occupied replaying the sound of that scratching, that uneven, dragging footstep, that wet, ragged breath that you had heard with a clarity you could not explain and yet felt nothing of at all. Your hands stayed tight around the steering wheel the entire way, knuckles pale, and more than once you caught yourself glancing into the rearview mirror far longer than the road ahead strictly warranted, checking, always checking, though there was never anything behind you but empty street and grey rain.
By the time you pulled into the parking structure attached to your office building, some small, practical part of your brain had finally reasserted itself enough to take stock of your appearance, and the assessment was not kind. Your blouse clung damp and see-through in places against your skin, your skirt was smeared with a long, dark stain of dirt and grime along one thigh, your knees were scraped raw beneath the torn fabric, and your palms, when you finally looked at them properly under the dim overhead light of the parking garage, were an absolute mess, shallow, ragged scrapes crusted over with a thin layer of drying blood, small flecks of gravel still embedded here and there.
You looked, in short, like a woman who had been in some kind of accident, and you had absolutely no intention of walking through the main lobby of your own office looking like this, not with the receptionist who gossiped to everyone, not with the two junior prosecutors who would undoubtedly ask a dozen well meaning questions you had no good answers for.
So you took the side entrance instead, the one reserved technically for deliveries and maintenance staff, the one you had used exactly twice before in your entire career, both times to avoid exactly this kind of situation, and you were profoundly grateful, climbing the narrow service stairwell with your ankle throbbing sharply with every step, that you encountered not a single soul on your way up. You slipped through the back corridor of the third floor, past the copy room, past the small kitchenette that smelled permanently of burnt coffee, and finally, finally, reached the door of your own office, pushing it shut behind you with a soft, decisive click the moment you were safely inside.
For a long moment, you simply stood there in the quiet, your back pressed against the closed door, your chest rising and falling in slow, unsteady breaths, and let yourself feel, fully and without an audience, exactly how frightened you had been.
Then, because you had never in your life been particularly good at sitting with your own fear for very long, you pushed off from the door and made your way to your desk, lowering yourself carefully into your chair with a small, involuntary hiss as your ankle protested the movement.
The office was silent around you, the particular hush of a room that had not yet been disturbed by the demands of the workday, and you sat there for a moment simply staring at your own hands, turning them over slowly in the pale, watery light coming through your window. The scrapes looked worse now that you had a proper chance to examine them, angry red lines crisscrossing your palms, a few deeper cuts near the base of your thumb where you must have caught the edge of something sharper than plain pavement.
You reached for the box of tissues sitting on the corner of your desk, pulling out several at once, and began, as carefully as you could manage, to clean away the worst of the dried blood, wincing quietly with each pass. It was not a particularly effective method, tissue paper against an open scrape was never going to be especially soothing, but it was what you had, and you worked through it methodically, one hand and then the other, until the tissues in your grip had gone pink and then red, and your palms, while still sore and stinging fiercely, at least looked marginally more presentable.
You had just balled up the last of the used tissues and tossed them toward your small wastebasket, missing by a wide margin, when the door to your office swung open without so much as a knock, and Suzuki strode in with the particular brisk, purposeful energy of a woman who had spent the better part of the morning composing increasingly elaborate threats in her head.
"Do you have any idea," she began, not even pausing to look up from the folder in her hands as she crossed the room, "what time it is right now? Do you have any concept whatsoever of how many times I have called you this morning? I have left three voicemails. Three. I do not leave voicemails, you know this about me, I consider voicemails a fundamentally outdated form of communication, and yet here I am, leaving voicemails, because apparently that is what it takes to get your attention these days—"
Whatever she had been about to say next died somewhere in her throat, her eyes moving slowly, deliberately, over the state of you, the damp, ruined blouse, the torn and dirt streaked skirt, the raw, pink scrapes still visible across your palms where you had not quite managed to clean away every last trace.
"What," she said slowly, her earlier irritation draining out of her voice entirely, replaced by something sharper, more alarmed, "happened to you."
You gave her, in response, what you were fairly certain was the single most unconvincing smile you had ever produced in your life, a wide, bright, entirely too cheerful expression that fooled absolutely no one, least of all a woman who had spent two years learning to read every single one of your tells with near supernatural precision.
"I fell," you said, which was, at least, technically true.
"On the way here. It was raining. The pavement was slippery." You gestured vaguely at your own scraped palms, as though this constituted sufficient evidence to close the matter entirely. "It's fine. It looks worse than it is."
Suzuki did not look even remotely convinced, her dark eyes narrowing as she studied you for a long moment, and you could practically see her running through the calculations behind her expression, weighing whether to push further, whether this was a battle worth fighting given everything else currently sitting on both your plates. Whatever conclusion she reached, she apparently decided, for now, to let it go, though the tightness around her mouth suggested this particular subject was far from permanently closed.
"You should go home," she said instead, her voice gentler now, though still carrying an edge of genuine concern beneath it. "Get that properly cleaned up. I can push your morning."
"I'm fine, Suzuki. Really." You straightened in your chair, injecting as much brisk, professional certainty into your voice as you could manage, desperate to steer the conversation somewhere, anywhere, else. "What's this case you mentioned on the phone?"
She hesitated a moment longer, clearly unsatisfied with how quickly you had deflected, but eventually let out a small sigh and moved to set the folder down on your desk, sliding it across the surface toward you.
"Man murdered his family," she said, her tone shifting back into something more clipped and businesslike, though her eyes still flicked toward your bandaged palms every few seconds as she spoke. "Wife and two kids. Found a while ago by a neighbor who noticed the front door standing open. It's ugly, Y/N. Really ugly."
You opened the folder slowly, your fingers still faintly stinging as they brushed against the edges of the paper, and scanned the first page, the initial incident report, terse and clinical in the particular flat language of police documentation, though the details it contained were anything but clinical in what they implied.
"He's in custody, but he's not talking." Suzuki crossed her arms, leaning slightly against the edge of your desk. "Not in the sense of exercising his right to remain silent, either. He's not refusing to talk. He physically cannot seem to string together a coherent sentence. The responding officers said he was found sitting on the back porch when they arrived, covered in blood, completely catatonic. Took them nearly twenty minutes to get him to say anything at all."
Suzuki's expression shifted, something faintly uneasy crossing her features, and she glanced briefly toward the door of your office, as though checking that no one else might be listening in on what she was about to say next.
"He kept saying there was a monster in the house." Her voice had dropped slightly, quieter now, and you felt a small, cold prickle work its way up the back of your neck at the word, monster, landing far too close to the particular flavor of fear you had spent the last hour trying and failing to shake off. "Over and over. A monster in the house. Nothing coherent beyond that. The department's already floating the idea that he's got some kind of underlying mental illness, psychotic break, something along those lines, given the state he was in and the complete absence of any prior indicators in his history."
You looked down at the photograph clipped to the second page of the file, and immediately wished you hadn't, though you forced yourself to study it properly regardless, your training kicking in automatically even as some small, uneasy part of your stomach turned over.
"Do we know the murder weapon?"
"That's the strange part." Suzuki shook her head slowly. "Forensics hasn't been able to identify one. No knife, no blunt object, nothing recovered at the scene that matches the wounds. They're still processing everything, obviously, it's been less than twelve hours, but as of this morning, they genuinely don't know what he used."
You sat with that for a long moment, your eyes drifting from the photograph to the terse summary beneath it, and found yourself, despite every rational instinct telling you not to, thinking again of the alleyway, of the cat's frozen, terrified stare, of a sound you had heard with absolute clarity and felt nothing of at all.
It was, you told yourself firmly, an entirely unrelated coincidence. Cities were full of strange, violent, unexplainable things happening on any given morning, and the fact that you had experienced something unsettling yourself only an hour or so before receiving this particular case file meant nothing beyond the simple, mundane truth that the world was, on the whole, a fairly frightening place most days if you paid close enough attention.
You did not entirely believe yourself, but you let the thought settle regardless, filing it away in the same overcrowded mental drawer where you had already tucked the scratching, the footsteps, the wet, ragged breath.
"Keep me updated as forensics comes in," you said finally, closing the folder and setting it carefully to one side of your desk. "I want to see him myself before arraignment. If he's genuinely non responsive, we're going to need a competency evaluation before this goes anywhere near trial."
"Already scheduled one for Thursday." Suzuki straightened, gathering herself back into her usual brisk efficiency, though her eyes lingered on you a moment longer, some residual concern still visible beneath the professional composure. "You're sure you're alright?"
"I promise." You offered her a smaller, steadier smile this time, one that felt slightly more genuine than your earlier attempt, though still not entirely honest. "Go handle whatever fire is currently burning down the hallway. I know there's always one."
She huffed something that was almost a laugh, shaking her head as she made her way back toward the door, though she paused just before stepping through it, glancing back at you one final time.
"If you need anything," she said, quieter now, all traces of her earlier irritation entirely gone, "you know where to find me."
"I know. Thank you, Suzuki."
She nodded once and disappeared through the door, pulling it shut gently behind her, and you were left alone again in the quiet of your office, the case file sitting closed on your desk, your palms still stinging faintly beneath their haphazard cleaning job.
It was, you thought, sinking back into your chair with a slow, tired exhale, an oddly unsettling coincidence, what had happened in that alleyway and what now sat waiting for you in this file, and though you told yourself, repeatedly and with as much conviction as you could muster, that the two things had absolutely nothing to do with each other, some small, stubborn corner of your mind refused entirely to let the thought go.
You spent the next several minutes simply sitting with the discomfort of it, staring blankly at the closed folder without quite finding the will to open it again, before finally forcing yourself to move, pushing up out of your chair with considerably more caution than your earlier attempt, mindful now of the way your ankle protested even gentle movement.
You made your way to the small mini fridge tucked into the corner of your office, more a courtesy from the firm than any real necessity, and retrieved one of the water bottles you kept stocked there, using it, along with a fresh handful of tissues, to more thoroughly clean the dried blood from your palms and knees, working carefully around each scrape until the worst of it had finally been addressed as well as it was going to be without an actual first aid kit.
You skipped lunch. It was not a difficult decision, given that the alternative would have meant venturing back out into the main office and fielding whatever curious questions your appearance might invite, and you had no particular desire to construct, on the spot, some plausible explanation for scraped palms and a limp that did not sound, at best, faintly ridiculous. I slipped in the rain, you imagined yourself saying, and could already picture the raised eyebrows, the barely concealed amusement, and decided the hunger was, on balance, considerably preferable to that particular conversation.
So you stayed instead, working steadily through the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, reviewing evidence logs, drafting preliminary notes for the competency evaluation, cross referencing witness statements from the neighbor who had first called it in, and slowly, gradually, the methodical rhythm of the work began to do what it always did, easing the sharp, jagged edges of your fear into something duller, more manageable, tucked away beneath the familiar comfort of routine.
By the time you finally glanced up from your desk again, the light outside your window had shifted considerably, the pale grey of morning long since given way to the deeper, heavier grey of late afternoon sliding toward evening, and your stomach gave a low, insistent growl that reminded you, rather unhelpfully, of the lunch you had skipped.
You worked through it anyway, and through the hour after that, and the hour after that, staying well past the point when most of your colleagues had already gathered their things and filed out toward the elevators, their voices and footsteps fading gradually from the hallway outside your office until the building around you had settled into the particular hush of near emptiness.
You waited a while longer still, listening carefully for any remaining sounds of movement, before finally, cautiously, allowing yourself to relax, your shoulders dropping from where they had been held tense and high for the better part of the day.
Your ankle throbbed steadily now, a dull, persistent ache that flared into something sharper whenever you shifted position too quickly, and you hissed softly at the sensation as you finally pushed back from your desk, reaching down to gingerly probe at the swollen skin above your shoe. It was not, you decided after a moment of careful examination, broken, or at least you didn't think it was, though it would very likely be an unpleasant color by morning, and you made a mental note to actually elevate it once you got home instead of simply ignoring it the way you had all day.
You waited a little longer still, giving whatever few remaining stragglers might still be lingering in the building enough time to finish up and leave, before finally deciding the coast was reasonably clear enough to make your own quiet exit via the same service stairwell you had used that morning.
Before gathering your things, though, you found yourself reaching for your phone, the cracked screen catching the last of the fading daylight as you pulled up your messages, scrolling until you found the thread with Higuruma sitting near the top, his last message from earlier that morning still unanswered, a simple, characteristically brief line asking whether you'd made it to the office alright.
You felt a small, guilty pang looking at it now, hours later, unanswered all this time, and you typed out a quick reply before you could second guess yourself any further.
me: Sorry, was very busy. All good now!
You set the phone down on your desk afterward, not particularly expecting an immediate response, well aware of exactly how buried he tended to be in his own work most afternoons, and busied yourself instead with gathering the scattered papers on your desk back into some semblance of order, tucking the murder case file carefully into your bag to review further at home despite the small, uneasy prickle that thought still stirred somewhere low in your stomach.
Your phone buzzed against the desk perhaps ten minutes later, and you snatched it up almost embarrassingly fast, a small, foolish smile already tugging at the corner of your mouth before you'd even read the message.
Just that, one word, characteristically economical, and you found yourself laughing softly under your breath at the sheer predictability of it, at how thoroughly, endearingly him it was, even in a single word text.
me: Wow. An entire sentence. I'm honored
Hiromi <3: I can revoke it if you'd prefer silence
me: No no. I'll treasure it forever
The reply came a little faster this time, dry and understated, and you laughed again, properly this time, the sound echoing softly in your empty office.
Hiromi <3: How was the rest of your morning
me: Busy. Suzuki nearly staged an intervention over how late i was
me: it's a meme. I saw it earlier this week and thought of you
Hiromi <3: I don't understand it
me: That's okay. The effort is what counts
Hiromi <3: I appreciate the effort, regardless of my comprehension
You laughed so hard at that you had to set your phone down for a moment to properly catch your breath, wiping at your eyes before picking it back up.
me: Anyway. I skipped lunch, don't judge me
Hiromi <3: You should eat something. You always forget when you're working
me: Look who's talking. Mr "i'll eat eventually"
Hiromi <3: that's different
me: How is that different
Hiromi <3: I am always working. You are only sometimes working
You laughed out loud again, alone in your quiet office, and typed back a string of indignant protests, which he met with the same dry amusement you'd come to know so intimately over the last three years. Somewhere in the middle of the back and forth, an idea began to take shape in your mind, small and warm and slightly nervous around the edges.
me: I'll make dinner. Or attempt to. No promises on quality
There was a longer pause this time than usual, long enough that you found yourself watching the screen with a faint, anxious flutter in your chest, wondering if you'd somehow overstepped.
Hiromi <3: I'll finish up here around eight. I can be there by half past
Your whole chest lifted at once, warm and giddy, and you typed back a quick, enthusiastic confirmation, sending your address along with it despite being fairly certain he already had it memorized from the one previous night he'd walked you home from the courthouse.
hiromi <3: Bring an umbrella tomorrow. It's supposed to keep raining
You grinned down at your phone, something absurdly, embarrassingly fond swelling in your chest at the small, practical concern buried in the otherwise mundane instruction.
me: You sound exactly like my mother right now
Hiromi <3: I'll take that as a compliment
You felt, sitting there alone in your darkened office with the city lights beginning to flicker on outside your window, absurdly, ridiculously young, the particular giddy, nervous excitement of a teenager anticipating a first date rather than a grown woman who had, only weeks ago, finally gotten the man she'd wanted for three years to make things official between you.
You thought, briefly, about what you actually had in your kitchen at home, and grimaced slightly at the mental inventory, mostly takeout containers, a half empty carton of eggs, and considerably more wine than any single meal would reasonably require. You would need to stop at the supermarket on your way home if you had any hope of producing something even remotely resembling an actual dinner, and though you were, if you were being entirely honest with yourself, not a particularly gifted cook, you found yourself determined regardless, some small, stubborn part of you wanting badly to do this properly, to give him something warm and homemade rather than simply ordering in the way you both usually defaulted to given how little free time either of you tended to have.
You gathered your things quickly now, energized by the sudden shift in your evening plans, tucking your laptop and the case file into your bag, shrugging your damp coat back on despite its lingering chill, and pushed yourself up out of your chair with far more speed and enthusiasm than the moment strictly called for.
The pain hit instantly, sharp and blinding, shooting up through your ankle the moment you put weight on it, and you gasped, your leg buckling beneath you before you could properly catch yourself, and you dropped back down into your chair with considerably less grace than you'd stood up with, one hand flying immediately to grip at your throbbing ankle, a low, pained hiss escaping through your clenched teeth.
You sat there for a long moment, breathing carefully through the sharp, radiating ache, and slowly, belatedly, the reality of your situation began to properly sink in.
You had a dinner to prepare. A supermarket to visit. A boyfriend arriving in a little over two hours who was, quite reasonably, expecting to find you in some approximation of your usual, capable self rather than wincing in pain every time you attempted to stand.
You looked down at your ankle, swollen and tender beneath your torn stocking, and let out a long, slow breath.
You had, you realized, with a sinking, dawning certainty, very badly messed this up.
Your trip to the supermarket was chaotic from the moment you stepped through the automatic doors, your ankle throbbing steadily beneath you as you attempted, with increasingly limited success, to navigate the crowded aisles at anything resembling your usual pace. You had a list in your head, vague and half formed, pasta, cream, eggs, bacon, parmesan, wine, and yet somehow every single item seemed to have relocated itself since the last time you'd properly shopped for anything beyond takeout menus and the occasional bottle of wine. You wandered up and down the pasta aisle twice, then the dairy section three times, growing progressively more flustered, your bad ankle aching with every uneven step, until finally you found yourself standing in the middle of the store, staring blankly at a wall of cheese with an expression you were fairly certain read as pure, undiluted defeat.
"Excuse me, miss, are you alright?"
You turned to find a young man in the store's green uniform watching you with genuine concern, his name tag reading Kenji in cheerful yellow letters, and you realized, with a small, mortified jolt, that you must have been standing there considerably longer than you'd thought.
"I'm fine," you said, and then, because you had never been particularly good at maintaining that particular lie for very long, you let out a small, tired laugh. "Actually, no. I'm looking for pancetta and I cannot for the life of me find where you've hidden it, and my ankle is killing me, and I have someone coming over for dinner in a couple of hours, so I am, generally speaking, not having a great time."
He smiled, kind and easy, and gestured for you to follow him. "It's actually two aisles over, we moved it last month and half our regulars still can't find it. Here, let me help you carry your basket, you're limping pretty badly."
You accepted gratefully, and he guided you the rest of the way through your shopping with a patience you hadn't expected, pointing out the good parmesan, recommending a specific brand of eggs, and even, once you'd finally gathered everything on your mental list, insisted on carrying both bags all the way out to your car despite your protests that you could manage.
"Really, thank you," you said, once he'd set the bags carefully in your trunk. "You've saved my evening."
"Anytime." He gave you a small, cheerful wave as you climbed into the driver's seat, and you drove home considerably more grateful for the kindness of strangers than you had been in a long time, your ankle throbbing dully the entire way, though the promise of the evening ahead kept a small, warm smile fixed on your face regardless.
You took the elevator up rather than risk the stairs, and once inside your apartment, set the bags down on the kitchen counter before making your way, somewhat awkwardly, up to your bedroom to change. You peeled off your ruined work clothes the moment you'd shut the door behind you, dropping the blouse and skirt unceremoniously into a heap you fully intended to deal with later, and pulled a soft, three piece set from your closet, pale champagne satin, a cami with thin straps and a deep neckline, a matching pair of wide leg pants that would pool softly around your ankles, and over both, a long, open robe that tied loosely at the waist, its wide, bell shaped sleeves trailing nearly to your fingertips, delicate lace trimming the cuffs and hem.
It was, admittedly, a far too elegant outfit for cooking dinner in, thoroughly impractical for standing over a hot stove, but it made you feel steadier somehow, wrapped in something soft and pretty after a day that had been neither, and you told yourself that was reason enough to wear it regardless.
You carried it with you into the bathroom and took a quick, careful shower, mindful of your ankle and the raw scrapes on your knees and palms, wincing slightly every time the water pressure caught them at the wrong angle. You chose the long pants deliberately, letting the fabric pool low enough to cover your bruised, swollen ankle and the scraped skin of your knee. You didn't want him to see it, not yet, not before you'd had a chance to explain it away with something believable, and you certainly didn't want it casting a shadow over the evening you'd been so looking forward to.
You half limped your way back into the kitchen, propping your phone against the fruit bowl and pulling up a video on how to make carbonara properly, something simple enough that even you, notoriously unskilled in the kitchen, might manage without disaster. You followed the instructions as closely as you could, pausing the video every few seconds to double check a measurement or a technique, and set the bottle of wine you'd bought on the counter to breathe while you worked.
The cooking itself turned out to be, against all odds, genuinely enjoyable, the rhythmic motion of whisking eggs and parmesan together, the sizzle of pancetta crisping in the pan, the steady, focused concentration required to time everything just right so the sauce didn't scramble the moment it hit the hot pasta. By the time you finally plated the finished dish, you felt a small, genuine swell of pride at having produced something that actually, genuinely resembled the video you'd been following.
The cleanup that followed was considerably less enjoyable, every pot and pan you owned seemingly required for a dish that had looked, at the outset, deceptively simple, but you worked through it methodically, loading the dishwasher and wiping down the counters until the kitchen looked reasonably presentable again.
You made your way to the dining table next, setting out two glasses and filling them carefully with the wine, then lighting a single candle in the center and arranging a small bundle of flowers beside it, something you'd grabbed on impulse at the supermarket, pale pink and white, simple but pretty, exactly the sort of small, romantic touch you wanted for tonight. You checked the time on your phone and felt your stomach flutter, he'd be arriving soon, and you still had a few things left to do.
You made your way back to the bathroom, wanting badly to properly clean your scraped hands and knee, and considered, briefly, whether you had time to ice your ankle before he arrived, that always seemed to help, but a glance at the clock told you there simply wasn't time for that particular luxury tonight. You settled instead for a light dab of perfume at your wrists and throat, and a bit of lip balm, and had just finished when you heard the knock at your front door.
You rushed toward it as quickly as your ankle would allow, your heart already lifting in anticipation, and pulled it open.
Higuruma stood on the other side, an umbrella folded in one hand alongside his work bag, and in his other hand, a second bag you didn't immediately recognize. You stood there for a long moment simply looking at him, the damp evening air clinging faintly to his coat, his hair slightly windswept from the walk over, before finally stepping aside to let him in.
"Come in, come in, you're letting the cold in," you said, taking his umbrella and bag from him and setting them by the door, gesturing for him to follow you toward the kitchen. He held onto the second bag as he stepped inside, and you approached him curiously once you'd both made it to the kitchen counter.
"I brought dessert," he said softly, setting the bag down carefully. "You'll like this one."
You peeked inside, finding a small, elegant box from a bakery you recognized as being several blocks from his office, and felt something warm bloom in your chest at the thought of him stopping there on his way, thinking of you even in the middle of what you knew had been an exhausting day.
"Thank you," you said, stepping close to wrap your arms around him, pressing a quick, soft kiss to his lips. "You're very sweet."
You smiled up at him, and his eyes softened visibly, his hands sliding to settle at your waist, his thumb tracing a slow, absent line along the fabric of your robe.
"Sit down," you said, taking his hand and guiding him toward the dining table, careful to keep the weight off your bad ankle, walking with a slightly awkward, uneven gait you hoped he wouldn't notice. He glanced down at your joined hands as you walked, his brow furrowing faintly, though he said nothing, settling into the chair you pointed him toward, his eyes drifting curiously around your apartment.
Your living room flowed seamlessly into the kitchen, warm and softly lit, the walls decorated with framed prints you'd collected over the years, a shelf of books arranged more for color than order, a few carefully chosen plants near the window. It was, considerably cozier than his own apartment, which wasn't unpleasant by any means, simply sparse, functional, a space he'd never quite taken the time to make into anything beyond somewhere to sleep between long days at the office.
He watched you as you made your way back into the kitchen to retrieve the food, and noticed, with a small, private frown, the way you leaned more heavily on your left side as you walked, favoring the right. He wanted to ask about it immediately, the observation nagging at him, but he held his tongue, unwilling to interrupt the warm, easy atmosphere you'd so clearly worked hard to create tonight. He would ask later, he decided. After dinner.
He shrugged out of his blazer instead, folding it neatly and draping it over the back of his chair, rolling his sleeves up to his forearms and loosening his tie with a few practiced motions.
You watched him do all of this from the kitchen, unabashedly, drinking in the sight of him settling into your space, and thought, not for the first time, that he looked considerably more appetizing than the food currently plated in front of you. You carried the plates over, setting his down in front of him and your own beside it.
"Tadaa," you announced, presenting the dish with a small flourish.
"What do you think?" you asked, your eyes bright with obvious anticipation, and he could tell, easily, how excited you were for this small, ordinary triumph.
"Looks amazing," he said, and waited for you to settle into your own seat across from him before picking up his fork. You smiled softly at him, and something in his chest gave a small, unfamiliar lurch at the sight of it, warm and helpless. He thought, briefly, that he could get used to this, far too easily, if he let himself.
You both began eating, the conversation flowing easily between you, punctuated by the soft clink of your wine glasses and frequent bursts of laughter. All the worries of your day, the alleyway, the strange case file, the ache in your ankle, seemed to fade into something distant and unimportant in his presence, and you found yourself giggling more than once at some dry, understated observation of his, delivered with such perfect deadpan that it took you a moment each time to realize he had been joking.
"This is genuinely good," he said, midway through his second helping, and you beamed at him, absurdly proud.
"I followed a video. I have never in my life made carbonara without scrambling the eggs directly into the pasta, so this is, genuinely, a personal triumph."
"You should be. I nearly gave up twice."
"Spite, mostly. I refused to let a video made by someone with a name like Chef Marco defeat me."
He laughed, low and genuine, and you felt that same warm flutter you always did whenever you managed to coax that particular sound out of him, rare enough that you treasured every instance.
By the time you'd finished your plates, a comfortable silence settled between you, and you sat for a while longer simply talking, refilling your wine glasses once more, the candle between you burning low and steady.
"How was your day?" you asked eventually, propping your chin on your hand. "Really. Not the one word text version."
He considered the question seriously, the way he considered everything, before launching into a fuller account of his day, the bail motion he'd appealed that morning, a difficult client meeting in the afternoon, a filing deadline that had nearly slipped past him entirely. You listened, genuinely engaged, asking questions here and there, and he answered them thoroughly, more openly than you suspected he would have with anyone else, and something in your chest warmed at the quiet trust of it.
"There's this case I was given this morning," you said eventually, when the conversation reached a natural lull. "It's weird. I don't know, I just haven't seen anything quite like it."
You wanted his opinion, even though you knew you technically worked opposite sides of the same system, prosecutor and defense attorney, and you were fairly certain he would have some kind of insight regardless. He hadn't earned the reputation he had among his peers for nothing.
"A man murdered his family," you continued, watching his expression shift into something more focused, more attentive. "His wife and two kids. They found him at the back of the house, in a state of shock. He kept saying there was a monster. And the forensics team hasn't found a weapon, or anything that actually matches the wounds on the victims. The department's leaning toward some kind of mental illness. But I don't know. Something about it feels off to me."
He set his fork down slowly, his full attention on you now, the careful, focused stillness he always got when a case genuinely interested him.
"I don't know exactly. It's just, if he genuinely has no history of mental illness, no prior indicators, nothing, and then suddenly does something like this, and can't explain it beyond talking about a monster, that's strange. It doesn't fit the usual pattern."
"Has he been assigned counsel yet?"
"Not that I know of. He's still without a lawyer, as far as I understand. He's being held at the county facility downtown."
Higuruma's brow furrowed slightly, something thoughtful and sharp settling behind his eyes, the particular expression you'd come to associate with him mentally building an argument, piece by piece, before he'd even fully decided to take the case.
"What do you know about him? Prior record, employment, anything?"
"Not much, honestly. Just what's public so far. No prior record. Worked in insurance, apparently, nothing remarkable. Married eleven years." You hesitated, watching his expression carefully. "Why? Are you thinking about taking it?"
"I might look into it," he admitted, and you felt a small, complicated knot form in your stomach at that, some tangled mixture of pride, at the fact that he clearly believed there was more to this case than a simple confession of guilt, and unease, at the very real possibility that the two of you might end up standing on opposite sides of a courtroom over it.
"You know if you take it, we might end up against each other," you said carefully.
"We've been against each other before."
"Not since we started this." You gestured vaguely between the two of you, and something in his expression softened.
You considered the question honestly. "A little. Not because I don't think we could handle it professionally. I know we could. It's just, I don't know, it feels different now. More personal, somehow, even when it shouldn't be."
He reached across the table, his hand finding yours, his thumb brushing gently over your knuckles. "If it becomes a problem, we'll figure it out. I'm not going to let a courtroom get in the way of this."
You smiled at that, small and grateful, though a quieter, more uncomfortable thought lingered stubbornly at the back of your mind, one you didn't voice aloud. You thought of the alleyway, the scratching, the wet, ragged breath you'd heard and felt nothing of, and wondered, with a small, cold prickle of unease, whether a monster meant something different to that man than it did to you, or whether it meant something uncomfortably similar.
If something had happened to you, if you'd been hurt worse than a few scrapes and a bad ankle, and you'd tried to explain what you'd heard, would anyone have believed you either? Or would you have simply become another case file, another woman found shaken and confused with no rational explanation to offer, filed away under stress, or shock, or an overactive imagination?
You let out a slow breath, pushing the thought away for now, and rose from your chair to gather the empty plates, carrying them into the kitchen before returning a few minutes later with the small dessert box he'd brought, setting it on the table between you along with two spoons.
"I'm not much for very sweet desserts," he said, though he pushed the box slightly toward you regardless. "I got this for you."
You pouted at him, entirely unashamed. "Come on. Just a little bit. Just try it."
You scooped up a small spoonful and brought it toward his mouth, watching him hesitate, his eyes flicking briefly to your face before he finally gave in, leaning forward to accept it.
"How is it?" you asked, watching him chew slowly, thoughtfully.
"Sweet," he said, entirely deadpan, and you burst out laughing, delighted at the sheer, understated dryness of it.
"Groundbreaking analysis, truly."
You ate a bit more of the dessert yourself, already feeling pleasantly full, before finally setting the rest of it in the fridge to enjoy another time. You began gathering the wine glasses, only for Higuruma to rise and beat you to it, gently taking the glasses from your hands.
"Sit down," he said. "You've done all the work today. Let me do something for you."
His eyes flicked, briefly, deliberately, toward your leg as he said it, and your blood ran instantly cold. Had he noticed? You opened your mouth to protest, insisting you could help, but he simply shook his head and carried the glasses to the sink, and after a moment of hesitation, you gave in, joining him to help dry what he'd already washed, the two of you working together in comfortable, easy silence.
Once the kitchen had been restored to some semblance of order, you walked to the livingroom, settling yourself onto the cushions, tucking your legs up beneath you as best you could manage without aggravating your ankle too badly, angling yourself to face him. He followed a moment later, settling beside you, close enough that his knee brushed against yours.
For a moment, he simply watched you, quiet and considering, as though waiting for you to say something, to confess something, but you only gazed back at him with a small, contented smile, saying nothing at all.
Then, without warning, his hand moved toward your bad ankle.
You flinched, instinctively trying to pull away, caught entirely off guard, but he was faster, his hand closing gently but firmly around your calf, drawing your leg up and over his lap before you could properly protest. He rolled the fabric of your pants upward carefully, exposing the swollen, discolored skin of your ankle beneath, and you heard him let out a slow, sharp breath of frustration the moment he saw it.
He looked up at you, his expression somewhere between concern and genuine irritation.
"Why didn't you tell me?" His voice was low, tight with something you recognized, uncomfortably, as real worry. "What happened?"
You let out a small, involuntary whimper as his fingers moved gently over the bruised, swollen skin, testing carefully for any sharper points of pain.
"It was raining," you said, your voice smaller than you intended. "My heel got caught on the concrete and I fell."
His eyes moved from your ankle to your hands, resting in your lap, the scrapes across your palms still faintly visible despite your best efforts to clean them, and you watched something click into place behind his gaze, the pieces of your earlier deflections finally fitting together.
He let out a long, slow sigh.
"Do you have a first aid kit?"
"Bathroom, under the sink," you said quietly, watching the sadness settle plainly behind his eyes as he studied the state of your ankle one more time before gently setting your leg back down on the couch cushion and rising to go find it.
He returned a few minutes later, kit in hand, and knelt in front of you on the floor, gently drawing your leg back into his lap.
"You don't have to do this," you said, guilt twisting uncomfortably in your chest. "You've been working all day. You must be tired."
"Don't be stupid," he said gently, without looking up from where he was carefully unwrapping a bandage. "It makes me sad, seeing you hurt."
The confession, quiet and unguarded, made your heart skip painfully in your chest, and you felt your cheeks warm as you looked down at your own scraped hands, unable to meet his eyes for a moment. You didn't say anything in response, but the expression on your face, soft and overwhelmed and entirely too fond, said everything he needed to know regardless.
He worked carefully, methodically, cleaning the wound first with a gentle antiseptic wipe, his touch far softer than you would have expected from a man whose hands so often looked precise and clinical arranging case files, and wrapped the bandage around your ankle with the same meticulous care he brought to everything, checking twice to ensure it wasn't too tight before finally securing it.
"Better?" he asked, looking up at you.
"Better," you confirmed softly.
"What else." His eyes moved deliberately down to your knee.
You sighed, relenting, and carefully pulled your pant leg up just enough to reveal the scraped skin of your knee, and he made a small, disapproving sound in his throat at the sight before setting to work again, cleaning and bandaging it with the same quiet, focused care.
Finally, he reached for your hands, turning them over gently in his own, examining the scrapes across your palms with a small frown.
"This is going to sting a little," he warned again, and you nodded, bracing yourself as he dabbed the antiseptic carefully across each scrape. It did sting, sharply, and you hissed softly through your teeth, but you made a conscious effort not to complain, watching him work instead, his hands soft and careful against yours, glancing up at your face every few moments to check that you were alright, and you offered him only a small, shy smile each time in response.
When he'd finished, he sat back on the couch, drawing your bandaged leg gently over his lap once more, his hand settling against your ankle, thumb tracing slow, absent circles against the fabric of the bandage.
"I don't want you to hide things from me," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on your ankle rather than your face. "Especially things like this. If you get hurt, you should tell me. I want to take care of you."
"I'm sorry," you said softly, and meant it, guilt curling warm and uncomfortable in your chest. "I didn't want to worry you."
You shifted, drawing your leg gently from his lap and moving instead to rest your head there, curling up against him on the couch. He remained still for a moment, clearly caught off guard by the change in position, before his hand settled naturally against your head, fingers threading gently through your hair in slow, soothing strokes.
You stayed like that for a while, the silence between you comfortable and warm, before finally tilting your head to look up at him, and found him already watching you.
"It's getting late," you said softly. "Will you stay the night?"
You asked it almost expecting him to decline, some old, familiar instinct still half braced for rejection even now, but he could never quite bring himself to say no to you, not when you looked up at him with that particular softness in your eyes, warm and open and full of something he still, somehow, hadn't grown fully used to being on the receiving end of.
"I can stay," he said simply.
You smiled, wide and helpless, pushing yourself up from his lap to throw your arms around him, grinning from ear to ear against his shoulder.
"Let's get in bed then," you said. "You must be exhausted." You tried to push yourself up off the couch, but he caught your waist gently, pulling you back down beside him. You looked at him, confused, before he rose himself, one arm sliding beneath your legs, the other bracing against your back, lifting you effortlessly against his chest.
You flushed, immediately understanding what he was doing, your arms instinctively winding around his neck to steady yourself as he began walking.
"What are you doing," you said, embarrassment coloring your voice.
"Your ankle needs rest," he said simply, as though the logic of it were entirely self evident, as though carrying you through your own apartment were the most ordinary thing in the world. You gave up arguing, resting your head against his chest instead, there was little point fighting him once he'd decided something, he always won somehow.
He carried you toward the open door he correctly guessed led to your bedroom, glancing briefly around the space before crossing to the bed and setting you down gently upon it, careful and unhurried, his eyes on yours the entire time.
"If anything hurts, tell me," he said, and you nodded, watching him, waiting.
You reached up and slipped the robe from your shoulders, letting it pool softly onto the floor beside the bed, and watched as he began undoing the buttons of his own shirt, one by one, unhurried and deliberate. You swallowed hard, realizing with a small jolt that this would be the first time you'd ever properly seen him without a shirt at all, and something warm and nervous coiled low in your stomach at the thought.
He shrugged the shirt off entirely, draping it over the back of a nearby chair, his back turned to you as he did, and you found yourself staring, entirely unable to help it, at the lean, defined muscle of his shoulders and back, more than you'd expected, more than his usual carefully pressed suits ever let on. You pressed your thighs together slightly beneath the sheets, faintly embarrassed at your own reaction, at how thoroughly, helplessly affected you were by the mere sight of his bare back.
He reached for his belt next, and you quickly averted your eyes, or attempted to, some small, dutiful part of you wanting to grant him a measure of privacy, though it proved entirely impossible in practice, your gaze drawn back almost immediately despite yourself. You drew in a slow breath, trying to steady yourself, but the moment he finally turned back around to face you fully, whatever composure you'd managed to gather dissolved instantly.
"Wow," you said, before you'd even fully registered that the word had left your mouth aloud.
He gave you a small, knowing smirk in response, entirely too pleased with himself, and crossed to the empty side of the bed. You scrambled quickly beneath the covers, and he joined you a moment later, his body close, warm, achingly near, and yet still somehow not close enough.
You wanted to touch him. The urge sat heavy and insistent in your chest, but some small, nervous part of you hesitated, worried you might make him uncomfortable, might move too fast even now.
"Can I touch you?" you asked softly, and immediately heard how the question sounded the moment it left your mouth, how it might be misread given how many times you'd already touched him, hugged him, held his hand, long before either of you had ever put a name to what you were to each other. His head turned toward you sharply at the question, and you felt your face heat, already scrambling to explain, to clarify, but he cut you off before you could manage a single word.
"Yes," he said simply, his eyes steady on your face, watching your every small movement. "You don't have to ask me."
You nodded slowly, something warm and grateful settling in your chest, and shifted closer, until he turned onto his side to face you fully, and you slid your arm gently over his waist, your body pressing flush against his. His arm came around you a moment later, drawing you closer still, and you settled your head beneath his chin, listening to the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing as his hand moved in slow, soothing strokes along your back.
He held you like that for a long while, quiet and warm in the dim light of your bedroom, and you felt every last trace of the day's fear and exhaustion finally, fully drain away, replaced by something soft and safe and entirely new. Sleep crept over you slowly, gently, and the last coherent thought you managed before it claimed you fully was simply how perfect, how impossibly right, this all felt, wrapped up in his arms with nothing left unsaid between you.
