A bizarre crime scene. A brutal murder. A pair of suspects to whom there's more than meets the eye. As Detective Yamada Hizashi and his colleagues investigate the worst murder their town has seen in seven years, they find themselves skirting the line between reason and emotion, between stark truth and supernatural terror. The answers are out there. Yamada's not sure he wants to find them.
warnings: dark content, including murder, torture, body horror, and mutilation. vague but disturbing supernatural content. maybe erasermic, maybe not, not romantically focused. this is the prelude to another fic. not necessary to read in advance, but may be interesting to consider. all dividers by @cafekitsune.
part of the true crime prompt challenge I'm doing with @surlyraconteur! please make sure to check out her work as well.
"where were you that night?" (1500 words)
“This good-cop thing isn’t working,” Shirakumo mumbles as he steps out of the padded room. “He’s just been staring at me. I don’t even think he blinked.”
“He has been blinking. I’ve been counting,” Yamada says. Not much else to do – only one suspect in what the media is calling the Grey House murder is awake, and while Aizawa and Kayama are out dissecting the crime scene still further, Shirakumo and Yamada are doing an interrogation. Or trying to. “What do they have him on? It must be something pretty heavy.”
“Did the parents sign a release of information?” Shirakumo rubs his eyes. “If they haven’t, we can’t see his records.”
Yamada checks the binder he’s using to collect paper copies of all the electronic evidence. So far, it’s pretty slim. “We’ve got one. They’re really leaning into this ‘nothing to hide’ thing."
In Yamada’s opinion, the suspects’ parents have plenty to hide – they just haven’t realized it yet. Three kids entered the abandoned house, and both of theirs came out alive, while another family’s been devastated and the family of the driver who hit the second suspect is already trying to figure out how to sue them. If they haven’t lawyered up already, Yamada bets it’ll happen in the next twenty-four hours. Which means that Yamada’s got exactly that long to get something out of this suspect that he can use.
“Go check with the parents,” he suggests to Shirakumo. “Even though we’ve got the release, they’ll be more likely to keep cooperating if we act like they’ve got a choice in the matter.”
“Right.” Shirakumo rolls his shoulders. “What are you going to do?”
“Play the bad cop.” Yamada starts to set his binder aside, then changes his mind. “Wish me luck.”
Shirakumo nods and departs, and Yamada steps through the door into the padded room, where the older of the two suspects in the Grey House murder has spent the last thirty-six hours.
He’s not a very big kid. Tall, sure, but not all that broad. According to his parents and his school, he’s not much of an athlete – chess club and student council are more of his vibe, and video games are his main hobby. Compared to the corpse of his best friend and whatever the hell happened to his little sister, this suspect escaped from the house relatively unscathed. The most damage he’s taken is a bunch of nasty gouges from the barbed wire he got stuck in, to go with a big, deep, four-fingered scratch across his cheek.
That’s Yamada’s in. He sits down a safe distance from the suspect. “What happened to your face? Somebody got you bad.”
The kid blinks. His eyes flicker to Yamada, then to the binder Yamada’s holding. “What’s that?”
He didn’t say two words to Shirakumo, the entire time Shirakumo was in here. “It’s my evidence binder,” Yamada says. “Wanna see?”
The kid shakes his head. Okay. At least he’s communicating a little bit. “My friend was in here for an hour and you didn’t say a word to him. How come you feel like talking to me?”
“My sister,” the kid says. “What happened to her?”
“She got banged up pretty bad,” Yamada says. No point in lying, and if he can get the suspect talking about the other suspect, he might learn something useful. “They think she’ll pull through, but she hasn’t woken up yet. She’s not talking, same as you.”
Yamada doesn’t miss the way the kid’s shoulders relax. If it’s visible, he must have been insanely tense. “Wanna tell me what happened?”
“If I tell you, can I see my sister?”
“Uh – sure,” Yamada says after a moment. “If you answer my questions, I can see about making that happen. So let’s start with an easy one. Where were you that night? Or, uh – last night.”
“At the gate,” the boy says. He blinks. “It wouldn’t open.”
Huh. Yamada doesn’t remember seeing a gate at the house. It was basically a straight shot from the road to the front door – other than the barbed wire fence. “Which gate do you mean?” The kid looks blankly at him. “Where is it?”
“It’s here.”
“Like, here in this room?”
“Here,” the boy says again. “Can I see my sister?”
“I’ve got some other questions first,” Yamada says. “So you were trying to open a gate. If it’s here, how come you ended up at that house?”
“That was where the gate was. It wouldn’t open.”
The kid’s tone is flat, inflectionless. He’s not moving in his seat – hasn’t moved in hours, not since Shirakumo sat down across from him. Yamada’s not an expert, but he’s willing to bet that the kid’s either drugged to the gills or completely psychotic. Or both. “The gate was at the house. The gate’s here now. Is that right?”
“I want to see my sister.”
Perseverative speech, flat affect, what looks a lot like catatonia. Was there any mental health history in the kid’s record? Yamada doesn’t remember seeing it, but he knows from Kayama, who majored in psychology so she could become a sex therapist before switching to being a cop, that the late teens are when a lot of psychotic disorders start to show their teeth. “Three more questions, okay? Then I’ll take you to see her.”
The kid doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t repeat his demand. Yamada casts around for a question that’ll be helpful. “How much do you remember about what happened at the house?”
“Everything.”
“Who scratched your face?”
“It was his fault,” the boy says, and a jolt travels through Yamada’s nervous system. “It wouldn’t open because of him.”
Motive. That sounds like motive to Yamada. Neither the kid nor his parents have invoked their right to an attorney, and everything that happens in this room is being recorded on a closed-circuit TV. “He must have messed things up pretty bad if you wound up with your face like that. What did he do?”
The kid’s eyes slant away from Yamada’s, and he mumbles something. Something about a key, or the key, and Yamada can’t get him to repeat himself. Okay. Yamada asked three questions, the kid answered three questions, and if Yamada wants to keep this rapport going, he needs to hold up his end of the bargain. “Hang on a second. I’m going to go talk to some people, and then we can go see your sister.”
The nurses say he can’t go without two orderlies to guard him, and Shirakumo wants to put him in handcuffs, but he hasn’t been charged with anything yet. Since the victim and the suspects are all kids, and this case is practically designed to drive the media wild, Yamada’s going to avoid the visual. The kid seems to be walking okay on his way up to the ICU, where his sister’s still under close supervision. “Like I said, she’s kind of in bad shape,” Yamada cautions as they step through the door. “She’s not going to be able to talk or anything. You can just see – yeah, there she is.”
The only person who looks worse than the twelve-year-old suspect is the actual corpse. She’s wrapped in bandages practically head-to-toe, her face bruised and her eyes almost swollen shut. If she was like that when she went tearing out of the house, no wonder she never saw the car that hit her. The suspects’ parents are sitting beside her bed, and at the sight of their son, they both break out into nervous smiles. “I’m so glad you’re here,” his mother says, her voice wavering. “I know your sister –”
She breaks off in a shrill, horrifying scream. Yamada hears the sound of shattering glass from somewhere on the unit, but that’s nothing compared to what’s happening next to him – the suspect lunging forward, so fast and sudden that the orderlies can’t get a good grip. In a split second, he’s up on the bed, looming over his sister. The suspects’ mom faints, while his father and Yamada and the orderlies seize the kid and yank him off the bed. He’s fighting like a lunatic again. Just like he was when the EMTs were pulling him out of the fence.
Yamada fucked up, big-time, and he’s not even partially equipped to manage it. The orderlies pile onto the suspect, and more come running. Nurses to check on the mom. A nearby security guard to stop the father from interfering with what’s happening to his son. Nobody’s paying attention to the girl in the bed. Yamada, feeling sick to his stomach, turns to her.
Her brother’s torn up her face. There are bloody nail-marks on her cheekbone, furrows dragged into her forehead. She’s already beat to shit from whatever happened in that house, and Yamada went ahead and let this happen, too. “I’m sorry,” he says, and for the first time since she collapsed trying to crawl away from the accident, the second suspect opens her eyes.
Happy birthday to both Monkey D. Luffy from One piece and Oboro Shirakumo aka LoudCloud from My hero academia / Vigilantes! Also happy children's day!
I believe that they would have the same type of relationship that Luffy and Koby have because Shirakumo is a boy of the law and a hero while Luffy is a mad man crazy lad who fucks around and finds out. I think that they're party would be SO loud and full of people, one of which is not Aizawa because it'd be his version of hell
So I’m not exactly new to Tumblr but I have been absent since 2018, so here is my contribution to it. E n j o y the art
You will be seeing Rooftop Four brain rot
☁️ A little preview for my fic for @headinthecloudszine! A Shirakumo lover's dream, this zine is full of so much amazing content for the sweetest cloud boy. 🥺 ☁️
🐈 I wrote a little bit of my pro hero AU for the SFW project!! 🐈
✨ Preorders open until June 11th! ✨
Definitely check it out if you're a fan of Shirakumo and his little squad. Everyone put so much great work in.
Thanks again to the mods for inviting me!!! ☁️🐈✨💖🥺
