#who scanned the code to open them will be a mystery unsolved to me

[sadsackpostteen]

Introducing: shared bicycles

Cr: weibo, more weibo

[shadesofdeviant]

My Body Is A Cage, But My Mind Holds The Key --| Chapter 1.

Pairing: Connor x Markus Rating: Mature

Connor Stern is a technological engineer and lineage acquisition programmer working on perfecting the Animus project for Abstergo Industries, when he is granted first hand experience of its work on "Subject 200" also known as Markus Manfred. But as the pair of them delve into the history of Markus' Brotherhood ancestors, secrets come to light, dangerous discoveries are made and somehow along the way, hearts are exchanged.

Detroit: Become Human AU set in an alternate Assassin's Creed Universe.

Can be read here or over on AO3 or FF.Net whichever you prefer.

The languid legato of a violin concerto echoed around the frosted glass walls of the laboratory, originating from the old-fashioned docking system dwarfed amongst the rest of the machinery where an incredibly scuffed once-blue iPod sat persevering through a now familiar playlist despite the early hour of the morning. The majority of the laboratory was taken over by a large ergonomically shaped examination table, clearly designed for its extended periods of usage; the thick coaxial cables that had originally remained hidden beneath the chassis of the machinery connecting monitors to transmitters were now snaked across the slate tiled flooring, whilst various components, processors and circuitries lay scattered like forgotten Christmas gifts. Yet despite this, Connor had somehow managed to not only find enough space to sit comfortably but to fan out blueprints, data sheets and printouts around him on the floor.

Fingers tapping idly against his kneecap on the beat as the next movement of music began with an up-tempo staccato display of the unknown musician’s dexterity, Connor took a moment to blindly reach for his flask of coffee and swallow a large mouthful before returning to his work. His eyes, narrowed and sharp, scanning rows upon rows of painstakingly typed coding, trying to find something—anything—that could be adjusted without ruining the overall functionality of the systems. He was close to finding it, he knew he was, and he was determined to find it tonight, even as his eyes started to burn from the strain.

Ever since he’d graduated with honours from University, proudly holding a double major in Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Connor had felt like he was starting to climb the walls in boredom from a lack of mental stimulation when he moved from job to job over the years as each one failed to mentally satisfy him. His Mother, sick of coming home to find various appliances, tablets and computer devices in pieces because he’d torn them apart simply to put them back together again, managed to secure him a job at her company researching a way to enhance and perfect their technology. She had originally suggested it simply to placate his need for intellectual activities with the hopes he would get his fill during the day and become less of a nuisance at home; she probably hadn’t quite meant for him to be holed up at 3am running on caffeine, on the verge of pulling his hair out because he just couldn’t see where the issue was.

Connor had always held a fascination for the work of the company his Mother worked for, his extensive intelligence and need for stimuli had led to Connor branching out into various fields throughout his educational years; teaching himself languages and conducting little scientific experiments, learning to play a variety of instruments and delving deep into history. And it had been the last one which had led Connor to an article debating the potential of Abstergo Industries attempts to extract ancestral memories from a subject’s DNA and utilising them to get personal insights of history, the likes of which have never been achieved before. The name of the company had leapt out at him, and it had been with a strangely emotional lump in his throat, that Connor had raced to his Mother’s study and rather unceremoniously stuffed the holopad displaying the article under her nose and asked if it was the company she worked for.

She’d quickly confirmed his queries and had even offered to let him take a look at the coding and blueprints for the machinery they’d been using for years to see what he thought of them, without him needing to ask. Of course, at age 17 Connor hadn’t quite realised it had been a test, even as his Mother placed everything across the table in front of him like an intellectual feast and perched almost regally opposite him. Not even as she’d so readily given up confidential answers to his curious questions, her eyes glinting when Connor had grabbed his holopad and started to make annotations on what he would potentially change to have the programs working more efficiently—and that had been before he’d even started University.

The idea of the “Animus”, as his Mother later informed him of its project name, was absolutely fascinating to him. Memories extracted from a person’s DNA, through their genetics passed down from generation to generation, using that to search back hundreds or potentially thousands of years to find out where they really came from, to experience first-hand what life was like in those ancestral times and to aid in the development of a greater historical understanding of the world. The potential was endless, all those minute details that were lost in history: colloquialisms and stereotypes, personal things that were not deemed important enough to scholars, philosophers or artists of the time and consequentially lost forever, could be re-discovered.

So, when the opportunity to join the company had been presented to him, with the stipulation that his role would solely focus around the Animus project, Connor had almost ripped his Mother’s hand off in his eagerness to agree. All Connor wanted was to help history expand the way technology had, it was 2038 and yet there was still so much that was impossible to work out in history. So many mysteries still remained unsolved: where was Cleopatra buried? Who was Jack the Ripper? Who actually killed JFK? Did Atlantis ever exist? And Connor was determined to solve them all. And now, as his ID badge proudly stated 'Connor Stern: Technological Engineer and Lineage Acquisition Programmer', he could potentially do that. However, he hadn’t been granted access to the previous subjects involved in the project, so whilst he was trying to find what could be altered to ease the acquisition and exploration of the DNA memories, he didn’t truly have any data on what needed altering and that was where his frustration lay.

As the staggered pattern of detaché style notes suddenly cut off mid-bar, Connor’s head snapped up in aggravation, a curse forming across his lips as the instantaneous ringing silence cut off his train of thought just as swiftly, only for it to promptly drop into oblivion at the form stood framed inside the now open doorway. His Mother, stood draped in the long flowing multi-layered satin of her tunics, in shades that complimented the cool almost silver undertones to her rich brown skin; the deep fires in the smoky quartz jewels of her eyes and the meticulously braided charcoal of her hair only adding to the constant regal elegance of her figure as she peered down at him in disapproval.

“Connor, what are you doing?” She questioned, the tone of her voice almost cutting through him like a knife despite the lack of force or volume behind it. He was almost thirty-one years old and yet that lilt to her voice still made him feel like a pre-pubescent being scolded for not doing his homework on time. “It is nearly four in the morning, and you’re broadcasting this cheap imitation of an Antonio Vivaldi masterpiece without any kind of consideration for the rest of the staff still working.”

“Excuse me, Professor Stern. But I made sure to adjust the insulation of the room accordingly before I allowed my music to start playing. The docking system is running at sixty percent of what it normally does during official working hours and the nearest co-worker is two corridors away and often uses sound cancelling headphones to help himself concentrate on his work.” Connor explained as he scrambled to his feet, slightly less smoothly than anticipated as his legs protested from being curled under him for so long, knowing better than to refer to the woman as ‘Mother’ when she was visiting him at work. Even if he was off the clock.

His Mother didn’t speak for a moment, her shoulders rolling back slightly as she drew herself up defensively at the fact he’d had the gall to answer her back without so much as an apology, before Connor watched as her eyes flitted around the frosted walls of the laboratory and round onto the small electronic panel screen beside her at the door informing everyone who looked at it, that the room was now fully sound-proof insulated. A sharp exhale from the strong line of her nose is the only indication she’s accepted his explanation before she was turning her focus solely back onto him once again.

“That still does not tell me what you are doing here at four in the morning when you supposedly finished at 9pm yesterday and aren’t due back in until 9am today.” She repeated, the bite to her words lessening as she allowed her arms to unfold and to gracefully manoeuvre to rest on Connor’s shoulders in a rare sign of concern. “You have been warned before about the dangers of overworking yourself, and if your health takes another setback I will have to discontinue your involvement with this project.”

“What?! No Amanda—You can’t do that! Not when I’m so close to perfecting the program!” Connor’s heart clenched tightly in his throat as he moved to quickly clasp her hands beneath his, taking them from his shoulders to hold them close to his chest as he intertwined their fingers, stepping closer to his Mother, his own Umber brown eyes shining as he pleaded silently with her, not missing the way her gaze lowered to the contrasting hue of his pale ivory fingers curled around her own.

That was another reason Connor hadn’t succeeded in perfecting the software yet; his health. Ever since he’d been a young child he had suffered with his lungs and immune system, having to be home schooled with private tutors for vast amounts of his childhood because he had simply been too ill to risk leaving the house for up to ten hours a day for school. But with the familiarity of his problems, came an almost resigned apathy from his Mother, where she became so accustomed to him rapidly becoming ill that it stopped worrying her and she simply stepped away for a few moments to notify the school and organise his tutors once again, before she was sweeping off to work in a swirl of satin without so much as a backwards glance to his bed-ridden frame.

In fact, the only time he could recall seeing her worried about him had been when the new Sports teacher at School had refused to accept he was too ill to participate, called him a liar trying to get out of class, and promptly forced him to join in with the long run around the School campus. It hadn’t taken long for him to realise Connor was telling the truth once the young boy had promptly collapsed to the floor wheezing, his chest rattling as his lips turned blue from lack of oxygen, and it hadn’t been long before he’d been fired once Amanda came blazing into the nurses room where an Ambulance crew were working on trying to stabilise Connor and verbally ripped the poor man to shreds for his idiocy and demanded he be removed from the School. Yet, once again, when Connor was back home and feeling much better in himself, she simply left him to it and placed the phone within arms reach in case he needed to contact the emergency services should he have a relapse. So, it was strange to see her so concerned in that moment when he was feeling rather well in himself for a change.

Amanda had never been particularly driven by maternal instinct. For the majority of his childhood, Connor could barely recall referring to her by the moniker of Mother, choosing to instead simply called her by her given name and not seeing anything wrong with such an act even as the rest of the students—and some of the teachers and parents—gasped in horror at the idea of a child doing so. She wasn’t his Mother, so he had not seen the need to call her so, and Amanda had not seemed to wish to be referred to by such a title either, even after she made it official and adopted him into her family name.

Connor had come to her before he’d had time to properly settle into his first year of Kindergarten, bruised and shaken, wanting his Mother even though his young intelligent mind had already started to comprehend why she wasn’t here and why he was now with this strange woman. As he’d gotten older, he’d slowly been drip-fed information about his former life; his parents and himself had been driving towards the Canadian border to visit friends for the Christmas holidays when the car behind them had skidded on black ice and slammed into the back of their car, causing his Father to lose control and slip across the frozen road, only to break through the barrier separating road from hillside, the car had tumbled towards the frozen river, smashed through the ice despite how solid it should have been at that time of the year and rapidly started to sink.

Connor didn’t have any recollection of the accident, nothing remained except a lingering dislike of ice cold water, but Amanda had eventually confided in him that the car had been submerged for an incredibly long time, his Father had died on impact crushed beneath the crumpled front of the car where it had concertinaed back in on itself, whilst his Mother and he had been trapped, battered and broken as the water steadily filled the vehicle. The coastguard had been quick to respond, but the time it took for them to get into the necessary hypothermia prevention gear had allowed the car to completely fill with water that at its warmest temperature was just below freezing. Both Connor and his Mother had fallen unconscious by the time the divers reached them, and being a child, his retrieval had been prioritised, which had unfortunately left his Mother to suffer from irreparable damage that had ultimately claimed her life a few days later in Hospital.

Connor had remained unconscious for nearly two weeks, battling pneumonia and sepsis, body damaged from severe hypothermia and broken bones; but his young body was resilient and untainted by toxic substances that adults liked to fill their bodies with, and before long had started to show signs of improvement. But the whole experience had left him without a fully functioning immune system, weak bodied, asthmatic and prone to viruses and infections potentially for the rest of his life. The only reason he’d been given into Amanda’s care was that he had no extended family, and the only other family friends were up in Canada and couldn’t afford another child to care for. She’d clearly not wanted a child, even Connor at the tender age of five had been able to see that, but she’d still taken him in and kept him well fed, warm and safe and let him grow in a secure environment with the proper care in place for whenever he was at his lowest health wise. She might not have ever been overly affectionate towards him, and had only really started to take a proper interest in him when it became apparent that his IQ and general intelligence were far above average for his age, but she had gone out of her way to commission the pharmaceutical branch of Abstergo industries to create medication for him to help with his health issues. And that’s what mattered to Connor in the end.

“You keep saying you are close to perfecting it Connor, and yet I am not seeing any results.” Amanda’s voice turned sharp once again as she detangled her fingers from his own, her eyes narrowing in on the organised chaos of information scattered around them. “I’m starting to think this is too much for you to handle.”

“No! It’s not that. Amanda I—Professor Stern, I’ve requested on numerous occasions to be allowed to observe the Animus in use to see how the program properly worked, but yet you have refused my requests. How am I supposed to adjust it if I cannot see how it needs adjusting?” Connor sighed as he ran his fingers back through his hair, this argument had been going on ever since he joined the company, yet his Mother had remained stubborn in her refusal to let him observe a session. “If I’m not allowed to observe the Animus in work, can I at least test it out myself?”

“Absolutely not!” The venomous reaction to his question had Connor taking a slight step backwards in surprise, having not expected such a response from the usually stoic woman. “You are not healthy enough to use the program, it puts a lot of strain on a subject’s physicality and you would not be able to cope. I will not have a repeat of your childhood Connor!”

“I—My apologies Amanda. I just know that I will be able to adjust the systems and coding and software if I could see how they actually interact and work with each other when a subject is exploring their lineage.” He spoke softly as he shifted to play with the line of his work lanyard tucked beneath the material of his sweater to prevent it from swinging in his face, needing something to occupy his fingers whilst he tried to ignore the thick disappointment settling in his stomach at the idea that he’ll never get to experience the Animus for himself. “Please. I promise I will only need one observation and I’ll be able to use the printouts with much more efficiency and be able to upgrade the software.”

Without another word, Amanda turned and plucked a discarded holopad from the desk beside her, fingers delicately dancing across the screen and letting Connor suffer in silence for a few moments. His curiosity starting to creep out as he watched and waited to see what was going on, hating how his fidgeting only got worse the longer she left his plea hanging in the air between them but not daring to try and break the silence once again without permission.

However, as she handed the holopad to him, the page changing from the security access check screen to a new subject file, his eyes widened in surprise, not quite daring to hope that she was doing what he thought she was doing.

“You have permission to observe the first session with this new subject. He will be coming in tomorrow and is scheduled to be submerged in the Animus at nineteen hundred hours. I am granting you a great lenience here Connor, do not disappoint me because there will not be a second chance for this.” Amanda stated smoothly, before turning on her heel and stepping out of the laboratory, pausing before the door slid shut behind her to glare over her shoulder at him, a glare almost as strong as her parting words. “Now get home and go to sleep.”

“I-I will! I promise!” Connor called out to the room, his words ineffectual due to the sound-proofing preventing the sound from reaching his Mother on the other side of the door, but needing to voice his gratefulness regardless. Glancing down at the holopad, Connor couldn’t help the giddy giggle escaping him as he let his shaking fingers swipe along the screen to read over the information profile of who had been titled ‘Subject 200’, pausing to focus on the headshot at the top of the screen once he’d finished reading.

The male in question was six years older than him, skin a warm tawny golden-brown, hair shaved close to his scalp, combined with a strong jaw lightly dusted with stubble to give him an almost intimidating air, Connor having to take a second glance when he registered that the subject’s left eye was green and the right eye blue. A rarity that somehow seemed to fit into the man’s face and gave him an air of uniqueness and mystery and had Connor curious to see if heterochromia was a trait that was prevalent amongst his ancestors as well.

Gathering his stuff together, Connor almost reverently tucked the holopad into his bag before doing what he promised Amanda and finally heading back home, being careful not to jostle things too much in case he lost the profile access, whilst simultaneously trying to move as fast as he could possibly manage without looking suspicious, especially with how sensitive the information he’d been given was. It wasn’t until he’d finished sliding into the front seat of his car and setting it to auto-drive home before he risked retrieving the tablet once again, unlocking it and sighing in relief as the profile once again flashed onto the screen; setting it aside to retrieve his personal holopad which he always kept on him to make notes on and opening it to a new document with the intention of creating himself a checklist of potential things to watch out for whilst observing. Taking his time to carefully type out the man’s name as a heading, pressing each letter slowly as if expecting everything to be revealed as him waking from a dream with each syllable he completed. Letting out an irrational puff of air that he’d been holding to try and calm his nerves, Connor smiled as he stared down at the man’s name now typed out to completion at the head of his list, knowing tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.

Markus Manfred.

[kpopfanfictrash]

Obsidian

Author: kpopfanfictrash

Pairing: You / Taehyung (V)

Rating: R

Warning: Murder mystery, future smut

Word Count: 5,704

Summary: The world of magic is divided into dark and light, witches and warlocks, choice and fate. You’re a prodigy of light, a witch who works within the police force. You’ve heard of Taehyung in passing, spoken in whispers as the warlock of dark who has the world holding it’s breath.  All this changes on the night you’re assigned as security for a mysterious singer named V and you come face to face with Taehyung himself. What happens after that might be fate.

It is 8:21 AM, which means I am late. 

Typically, I leave my apartment no later than 8:10 – eleven whole minutes gone and I haven’t even reached the office yet. As I hurry down the sidewalk, tugging my coat closer, I realize I need to skip one of my morning rituals.

Coffee, no way. Newspaper? I sigh, mentally giving up my morning paper. I’ll just have to read the news on my phone like the rest of the world. There’s just something comforting though, about holding real paper and ink. Sitting in my seat squished on the train, something tangible between my palms.  Not this morning, I guess.

The line at the coffee shop is long and I impatiently join the back, staring forlornly at the crowd of people before me. My hand twitches at my side but I ignore it, closing my eyes instead. When the line starts to move I reopen them, checking my watch. There are at least five baristas working the counter but it’s still not enough.

The woman in front takes an especially long time to order.

“I’ll have a tall – no, Grande – blonde roasted coffee. Two shots of vanilla, sugar free, with non-fat milk. One Splenda packet – only Splenda – and you know what, make the coffee a Venti.”

The cashier flounders trying to keep up and I sigh. It would be simpler if the woman just ordered a regular coffee and did the rest at the counter. 

The woman overhears me, and her eyes narrow over her shoulder. “Do you have a problem?” she snaps.

I flush, realizing that everyone is staring. “No,” I mutter, quickly looking away. “Not a problem, no.”

Facing forward again, the woman rolls her eyes. “Where was I? Oh, right.”

The barista repeats her order back to her and I barely stifle my groan. Instead I glance at my phone in my fist. Sliding it open with one hand, I shoot a text to my best friend.

Y/N: Dinner tonight? [8:34 AM]

Yoongi only takes a few minutes to respond, ellipses blinking away.

Yoongi: Depends [8:35 AM]

Y/N: On what? [8:35 AM]

Yoongi: On if you’re the one cooking [8:36 AM]

“Next customer!”

Ignoring Yoongi’s reply, I step forward. “Hi,” I say, scanning the boards. “A Grande coffee with one shot of hazelnut.”

The woman nods, writing this on a paper cup. “That will be $3.51.”

I wince handing over my credit card. “Thanks,” I say, sliding the plastic into my pocket.

Moving to the other end of the counter, I squeeze into place at the end. My coffee arrives quickly and I scoop it into my arms, nearly tripping when I make my way over to the milk. Just as I’m leaving someone behind me yells, “WATCH OUT!”

Scalding coffee pours down my arm as I gasp, stumbling sideways and smacking the man standing next to me. He frowns, grumbling incoherently while he slinks off into the crowd.

“Sorry,” I gasp, shaking my drenched sleeve. When I whirl around, to find whomever dumped the coffee, they’re gone. I scowl replacing my lid and, coffee dripping from arm to floor, grab some napkins on my way out. Best I can do is clean up on the subway.

By the time I find a seat on the train, the coffee has dried. I stare at the stain pitifully, leaning my head against the window and closing my eyes. As I do, someone tugs on my bag between my feet and I open my eyes to see a teenage boy in the middle of pick-pocketing.

“Hey!” I yell, snapping to attention.

The boy flushes, hand instantly withdrawn before disappearing into the crowd. I stare for a second, hovering on the edge of my seat before deciding he’s not worth it. He didn’t even manage to take anything. Exhaling deeply, I fall back in my seat. It’s not worth it to call the cops – I know this, as a police officer myself. That boy would get off with a warning and it’d take more than that to convince him not to do it again.

I stare out my window instead, watching the shadowy tunnel pass. My coat smells like coffee and I wrinkle my nose at my reflection. When my pocket buzzes, I realize I never texted Yoongi back.

Yoongi: Fine. Dinner and I’ll cook – well, my mom will because I’m at her place tonight [8:45 am]

Y/N: Sorry, I was getting coffee. And getting coffee split on me. Woe am I, today sucks [8:46 AM]

Yoongi: Just zap yourself clean. Don’t be a baby [8:47 AM]

Y/N: See, that’s the difference between us. I do not misuse my powers, unlike you [8:47 AM]

Yoongi: I hope you can feel me rolling my eyes. It’d take more than dry cleaning to make you go dark [8:48 AM]

Y/N: Ah, but that’s the first step Yoongles. So, 6:00 PM? [8:48 PM]

Yoongi: 6:00. I’ll be the guy holding the knife, threatening to kill you if you call me Yoongles [8:48 PM]

I laugh, sliding the phone into my bag. Yoongi always pretends to be pricklier than he really is. Sitting up straight, I glance at my sleeve and shake my head. Yoongi is wrong – I can’t dry myself. People on this train have been sitting next to me. Pressed up against me, right under my nose. They’d notice if I were to become suddenly clean.

Slightly disappointed, I watch the train slow to a stop. Truthfully, my life would be so much easier if I just used magic for myself. It’s not against the rules, per se. Light witches and wizards can use magic – it’s just when they use magic for personal gain where things get tricky.

It’s a slippery slope. One day you’re making sure you get a certain test score. The next you’re getting a certain job, a certain salary and suddenly you’re buying that certain lottery ticket. Sin begets sin begets sin. The descent to darkness is not difficult.

Which is why I try not to use magic much. Not if it interferes with what I like to call ,‘the big three:’ love, money and vanity. Love means relationships. No forced liking, no disliking – overall, just no messing with people’s emotions. Money usually means work. Only pertaining to things like career advancement or pay though, because I often use magic at my job.

I work in the police force, a detective for the area’s homicide department. The best department in the area, which has a lot to do with my special talents in the precinct. Witches and wizards use our power for good, which is exactly what I do. I take unsolvable murders, unrecoverable cases and solve them.

Cases with dead ends, ones with no evidence, trails with zero suspects – all of them end up on my desk. It’s rare I can’t find the answer and when I don’t, it’s usually because the truth is too incredible for humans to know. A demon in a bar, a vampire on the subway, a warlock in Time Square. It’s hard not to groan at this last one. That was a recent case, one which I reluctantly had to admit unsolvable.

Unsolvable to the human police force, at least. The warlock, I ended up taking care of myself. He was high on drugs and went off the rails, killing the girl he had sex with. When the case appeared on my desk, I knew right away it was magical. A warlock – it had to be. There is nothing so deadly, so destructive as a warlock or sorceress. Except perhaps the demons who spawn them.

Technically, I suppose demons give us our magic as well but that’s hardly the point. Warlocks use magic for evil. Use it for self-gain, for pride and for any number of the deadly sins. The dark holds no moral code, they believe themselves better than humans simply because they have magic.

Those with magic are born either dark or light. The dark are called warlocks and sorceresses, while the light are witches and wizards. Occasionally a person is born one way and crosses over but such things are rare. For the most part magic is born, not made.

I blink when the subway doors open, revealing my stop. Scrambling up, I push my way free from the packed subway car. “Excuse me,” I mutter, ducking my head beneath the arm of an older man. “Thanks.”

Once outside, I head for the stairwell. The right is packed with commuters and I fall in line behind them, checking my phone once more. 8:52 AM. I breathe a sigh of relief – I should be on time. Stepping from the subway, I hurry through the crowd of people. To my right there’s a loud horn blast and I turn just as the truck rolls past.

It drives straight through the puddle to drench me from head to toe. I gasp, blinking rapidly and clearing my eyes. When the breeze blows I shiver, wishing I wore a heavier coat today. This one clings to my skin, the air brisk with dampness. Glancing down, I see that it’s worse than I thought. The coffee stain is still present, making me look as though Monet painted a human. One color bleeding into the next and the next.

I sigh, gaze snapping up when someone laughs. I turn to see a girl I don’t know staring. She blushes when she sees me looking but whispers to her friend anyways, as though I don’t know what they’re talking about. I end up doing nothing, balling my hands into fists before crossing the street.

Halfway through the lobby I pause, eyes darting sideways. Before I can change my mind, I switch directions and head towards the restroom. No one from my work has seen me yet, I can just wipe myself clean and start anew. I can – but I shouldn’t. Entering the stall, I stare hesitantly at the wall. My rules exist for a reason. I don’t interfere with love, money or vanity. 

Chewing my lip, I consider. Even most light witches and wizards don’t adhere themselves to rules like mine. What’s a pimple here, a pound loss there? Some people attribute my idealism to iron-clad morality but I know better.

I don’t let myself start because I know that once I do, I won’t stop.

Closing my eyes, I exhale. I’m being dramatic – it’s just a change of clothes. Shaking my head, I crook my index finger. Instantly my clothes are dry, coffee stain gone. My clothes look as though I’ve just changed and I step from the stall to glance in the mirror. Fluffing my hair once, before leaving the bathroom.

My heart races, mind buzzing as I enter the elevator and it’s a struggle to keep my breath calm. It’s fine, I’m fine – I did nothing wrong. I’m also right on time – my right foot steps off the elevator at exactly 8:59 AM.

“Morning,” I call, striding into the office. Some of the precinct looks up, nodding or waving in my direction. I keep going until I reach my desk, lowering my purse and removing my coat.

Julia slides around the cubicle partition. “Morning, partner!” She sighs looking at my outfit. “Why do you always look perfect?” she asks, looking down at her own shirt. “I spilled tea five minutes after getting into this hellhole. Derek laughed, the asshole.”

I glare at the back of Derek’s head. Though my right pinky twitches, I manage to restrain myself. “Yeah. Well, Karma’s a bitch.”

Julia laughs. “True. So, have you checked your email yet?”

“Nope.” Pulling out my laptop, I plug it into my docking station. “What’s going on?”

“New case.” Julia blows on her mug of tea. “Weird murder, a girl was found by the stadium a few hours after a concert ended. Anyways – well. I’ll let you see the rest for yourself.” She shrugs, her expression vaguely uncomfortable. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”

I nod, clicking on Outlook. Once my email finally loads, I see what Julia meant. I wince while image after image scrolls by. “Wow,” I mutter, enlarging the last picture. Julia rolls her chair into my cubicle. “I see what you mean.”

Zoomed in, it’s more than a little disturbing. 

The photo is of a girl in the middle of an alley, limbs splayed out like a star. Dark, tousled hair drifts over her face – peaceful, almost like she’s asleep. There are no marks visible, no stab wounds or bullet holes. Nothing to indicate blunt force trauma.

It’s her veins though, which catch my eye. Beneath her skin the blood is an unnatural shade of black. I stare, mind whirring with possibilities. The woman’s body is pale, especially in contrast to the spidery lines. The blood beneath her skin appears solid, hardened. Cool, dark – black as obsidian.

“What is it?” I squint closer. “Is it blood, or some sort of chemical?”

Julia taps a finger on the screen. “It’s blood. The forensics lab ran tests and reported nothing unusual about the chemical content. It’s her blood, just… black.”

“Right.” Slowly, I scroll from right to left. “No marks on her otherwise?”

Julia nods in confirmation. “She died of a heart attack.”

“Odd,” I murmur, my head buzzing.

Its supernatural – it has to be. The fact that she died of a heart attack solidifies my theory. Oftentimes when young people die this way, it’s not because of natural causes. As I move closer I notice the girl is arranged – not fallen, but arranged on the ground. As though someone moved her that way.

“Any security camera footage?” I ask, turning from the screen.

“None working at the time.”

I sigh, sinking lower in my chair. “Okay. Let’s try and get to the scene today. Do we have detail on her whereabouts before the time of death?”

“Yep.” Julia points to the bottom of the email. “She went to the concert with friends. She was tipsy, but not drunk. One of her friends saw her get in a cab while the rest of them went to a club. We can’t identify the cab driver, and she never made it home. She was found in the alley several hours later by a couple walking back to their car.”

Reading quickly, I take this all in. “Okay, so we talk to the friends.” I’ll be the one to do that since I can tell if they’re lying or not. “We should check the surveillance camera footage in front of the stadium. We can search for shots of her getting in a cab. We should also visit the scene.”

Julia nods, swiveling in her chair. “I’ll get started on the first two but I don’t think you need to worry about the last,“ she sighs, making a face.

“What? Why?” I’m already scrolling, not really paying attention.

“Look.” Julia points over my shoulder at the screen.

I scan the email. “Captain Joann,” I groan.

Hello,

Exciting news for a lucky few! The mayor has called to inform that the local police force are temporarily overloaded. They need help at tonight’s concert and since there’s case overlap, I’ll be assigning a few for security detail to the singer V as part of his sold out World Tour.

Y/N, Julia, James, Derek, Louis.

Please report to me at the end of the day for further details.

Best,

Captain Joann

“Fuck,” I groan, setting my coffee down. “Like we don’t have enough on our plates.”

“I know,” Julia agrees. “It’s dumb. At least we can check out the area while we’re there.”

“That’s one thing,” I sigh, drumming my fingers on the keyboard. “No chance of getting out of it, you think?”

“Probably not.” Julia pauses, letting out an uncharacteristic giggle. “It might not be that bad. Have you seen V?”

Shaking my head, I raise an eyebrow. “Isn’t he a pop singer? I don’t really follow.”

“Neither do I,” Julia hastily backtracks. “I’ve just heard some of his songs. He’s talented. And hot,” she confesses, leaning over my shoulder. Her fingers type quickly, pulling up a search engine. “See?”

My eyes widen as images fill my screen. Picture after picture of a gorgeous guy - V. He has light brown hair and dark eyes. There’s a picture of him holding a microphone in one hand, single spotlight illuminating broad shoulders from behind. 

I force myself to look away. “He’s uh, okay.”

“Okay?” Julia laughs. “What kind of guys do you know where V is just ‘okay?’”

“I don’t know,” I blush, grabbing my coffee. “He’s just not my type.”

“And who is?” Julia’s tone is teasing. “Derek?”

“Oh, god,” I laugh, taking a sip. “Please never say such things again.”

Shrugging, Julia ducks back to her side of the cubicle. “I’m just saying.” Her voice drifts over the top. “Maybe tonight won’t be so bad.”

As I move towards exit the browser, I hesitate. Finger hovering uncertainly over the button before clicking hide, blushing furiously.

I might need that later. For research.

All too soon it’s the end of the day and we’re gathered in Officer Joann’s office. He closes the door behind us, sitting down on the edge of his desk. “Good to see you,” he nods. “Sorry about working on a Friday night.”

“No problem, sir!” Louis barely restrains from saluting. It’s a struggle not to roll my eyes.

“Right.” The Captain eyes him suspiciously. “Tonight is straightforward. You’ll be backstage, stationed between the stage and dressing rooms – except, well.” Rather awkwardly, Officer Joann clears his throat. “The singer has requested the two officers stationed by his dressing room be female.”

Unable to stop myself, I laugh. “Are you serious?”

Julia looks confused, glancing over at the Captain. “What? Why would he want that?”

Captain Joann closes his eyes before slowly opening them. “Something about females being better for his energy. I don’t know, but he donates a lot of money to the city and the mayor wants him happy. As long as it’s no inconvenience I don’t see a reason to fight it.”

“Uh,” Derek stares. “I think the reasoning would be… because it’s creepy?”

For once I agree, though I note so does Captain. He speaks like he knows this is dumb. Like he knows this is sexist and wrong but also that we can’t risk offending the mayor. Gritting my teeth, I decide it doesn’t really matter who stands in front of V’s dressing room. Male or female, we’re all capable of disabling him if he tries something. 

I reluctantly nod. “Fine. Whatever.”

Julia exhales. “Sure.”

“Excellent.” Captain Joann claps his hands together. “Julia, Y/N. I know you’re both working on a case in the area. Maybe you can canvas before the concert, or –"

“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?” Derek interrupts, raising his eyebrows. “What time does the concert start?”

“Ah.” Captain Joann glances at his watch. “Right. Be there at 7:30 – you should probably get going. Oh well,” he shrugs. “Canvassing another time.”

My answering smile is brittle, at best. “Great,” I sigh. Its 5:30 now – I’ll have to run to make dinner with Yoongi. “Anything else?”

“Nope.” The Captain shakes his head. “See you back on Monday. Good luck!”

As we file from the office, everyone is silent. No one dares speak until we round the corner. “This sucks,” James hisses. “I already had plans tonight.”

“With who?” Julia grins, reaching her cubicle. “Your mom?”

“Har-dee-har. No need to ask you your plans.” James narrows his eyes. “Sit at home alone. Again.”

Making a face, Julia pulls a bag over her shoulder. “Y/N, want to grab dinner?”

“Can’t,” I say, chucking my phone into my purse. “I already have plans.”

“Oh?” Derek pauses at the door to look back at me. “What?”

“Dinner,” I grin, walking across the floor. “Dinner with a dark and mysterious gentleman.” Waving, I disappear into the hall. “See you later!”

Min Yoongi opens the door to his mother’s apartment, looking me up and down. His hair is unkempt, tousled beneath his hat. “You’re late,” he scowls. Turning, but leaving the door open so I can enter.

“So happy you invited me!” I call out, stepping inside to shrug off my jacket.

Yoongi’s house smells great, like always – a mix of his mom’s cooking and him. The only wizard in a family of witches, Yoongi is the youngest, with three sisters. He doesn’t actually live at home, has been able to afford his own place since he was eighteen and sold his first video game. He usually just ends up here on weekends, stopping by to help his mom out.

Stretching overhead, Yoongi dodges his eldest sister’s son weaving in between his legs.

 “Hi, Mrs. Min!” I wave as we enter, spotting her over by the stove.

“Y/N!” Yoongi’s mother turns, wiping her hands on a towel. “Hope you’re hungry, I’m afraid I overcooked.”

I follow Yoongi around the edge of the kitchen table. “Don’t worry,” I grin. “I’m starved. Thank you for having me.”

“Nonsense.” Yoongi’s mother laughs, turning back to the stove. “You’re part of the family.”

“Hear that,” I say, nudging Yoongi’s side. “I’m family.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Yoongi walks towards his family room, collapsing onto the couch. “You’re the annoying little sister I never wanted.”

“I’m twenty-four,” I point out. “You’re only three months older than I am.”

“Three months older and wiser,” Yoongi drawls, sticking his tongue out at his niece. She screams happily, running from the room. “What do you want to watch,” he asks, picking up the remote. “Dinner probably won’t be ready for a little bit.”

“I don’t care,” I sigh, settling on the couch and tucking my feet beneath me. “We can keep watching that documentary, if you want.”

Yoongi nods, pointing the remote at the screen. “Any new cases?” he asks.

“One.” I pick at the cushion, debating how much to tell him. “It’s a weird case. A woman dead, heart attack. There are no external wounds and get this – her blood is completely black.”

Yoongi looks at me sharply. “Black?”

“Black as night,” I confirm. “It happened outside the stadium, so I’ve been reassigned concert duty as case overlap.” I roll my eyes. “I thought I’d stop by the crime scene on my way home tonight.”

“Those people take advantage of you,” Yoongi grumbles. “You know this, right?”

Shrugging, I watch Colombian coffee fields flick by on the screen. “What’s the harm?” I say. “They value me, they pay me well. I may work long hours but I’m the youngest and best detective on the force.”

Yoongi laughs. “No shit, you’re a witch. How do they think all these miracle cases are getting solved, anyways?”

“My own genius,” I grin, whacking Yoongi with a magazine. “I always manage to find ‘evidence.’”

Yoongi laughs before freezing. His eyes go wide as he flings out his hand. I whirl, spotting his little nephew frozen inches from the wall and start to laugh, realizing Yoongi stopped him just in time.

Exhaling, Yoongi scoots his sister’s son away from danger. With another wave, the boy unfreezes. Not having noticed any difference, he screams and runs into the next room.

Yoongi collapses back on the couch. “Ugh. Why do I even come back here?”

“Oh, stop,” I grin, nudging him. “You pretend to be mean but underneath, you’re a marshmallow.”

Peering up from the brim of his hat, Yoongi frowns. “I’m not. I’m horribly hardcore.”

“Hardcore people don’t use alliteration.”

Over in the next room, a child shrieks with laughter. Then yells, breaking out in a well-known clapping game. 

Yoongi groans loudly, dragging both hands down his face. “Not this rhyme,” he protests. “It’s been stuck in my head since the last time I visited.” He starts mouthing the words, deadpan while he claps to the beat.

One day there might / rise black as night / a shadow ever growing

Come if you dare / light’s chosen heir / and turn from darkness knowing

Your love will fall / betray them all / raise demons from the madness

The end is clear / find light my dear / for peace shall come with morning

It’s a jumping game, one we used to play as children and I wrinkle my nose. “Was this song always so… morbid?”

Yoongi laughs, sitting up. “The bit about your love betraying you is kind of rough.”

“You think that’s the worst?” I arch a brow. “What about ‘raise demons from the madness’?”

“Right.” Yoongi flicks a finger at the TV and the volume goes up. “That part is also depressing.”

“The remote is literally right there," I stare at him, incredulous.

Yoongi shrugs. “Sorry we don’t all suffer from your crippling sense of morality, O’ Prodigy of Light. Anyways, tell me more about this case.”

I roll my eyes. Yoongi likes to poke fun at my awards – which I’ll admit, are numerous. I’ve always been considered good at what I do. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it but in general, I’m talented in the eyes of the magical community. Okay, more than talented.

If is a good thing or not, I’m unsure. It usually means I end up attracting a lot of unwanted attention.

“I wasn’t able to look into it,” I sigh, sweeping hair back from my face. “Had a bunch of other cases to close today. I think I’ll head to the alley after the concert, scan the place and see if there’s any weird energy lying around.”

Yoongi nods, expression thoughtful. “You think it was a warlock?”

“I think so,” I muse. “But I won’t know until I get there. It’s odd.” I look over. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Normally when a warlock kills, it’s messier. They lose control and,” I gesture with my palms, “splat. This murder was planned, almost as though they were using her for something.”

“For what, though?” Yoongi asks, his eyes unfocused. “Hmm. I see what you mean.”

“Yoongi!” I gasp, slamming mental shields down. “Stop prying.”

He laughs, holding up his hands. “Sorry, sorry! I just wanted to see the photos.”

Glaring, I lower my mental shields again. It’s not a ton of energy to keep them up, more a habit than anything else. Blocking out thoughts is subconscious, a reflex learned when everyone can see your thoughts in childhood, whether you want them to or not. With Yoongi, I usually don’t bother. It’s not like I have anything to hide.

I lean back against the couch. “It’s odd though, right?”

Yoongi nods. “Yeah. She’s young – pretty, too. You don’t think.” He stops mid-thought, glancing sideways. “You don’t think... Taehyung?”

At the name, a shiver runs down my spine. Yoongi was right to lower his voice - Taehyung’s name is rarely spoken aloud, despite everyone knowing who he is. Taehyung is the prodigy of darkness, the bringer of night. He’s said to be incredibly powerful, though no one knows for sure what his specialty is. Or even what he looks like.

It’s smart, come to think of it. People fear what they don’t know, and nothing is known about Taehyung. Nothing but that he’s male, around my age – and that’s it. Whenever a particularly dark incident occurs though, Taehyung is the first to be blamed.

I look away from Yoongi. “Doubtful. Taehyung is smart – he wouldn’t do something this messy. Leave the body for human police to find? Amateur move.”

“Maybe.” Yoongi shrugs. “Unless he’s trying to send a message. You’re well known, Y/N. People always say your name in the same sentence as his – maybe he finally wants to meet you.”

I exhale, playing with the phone in my hand. As I replay the images to myself, I shudder. It’s all too easy to picture me, instead of that girl. Hair fanned, limbs askew. “If that’s the case,” I say, glancing sideways. “I’m not sure I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Maybe you won’t have a choice.”

“Yoongi, ever the optimist,” I grumble, standing from his couch.

Yoongi laughs, not too far behind. “I try to leave the sunshine for Hoseok. I’m a dark wizard, remember?”

I laugh at his childhood taunt. Yoongi is a bit of a conundrum, as far as wizards go. Dark and cynical but beneath, lies a heart of gold. It’s why he’s a wizard and not a warlock - why he’s as light as the sun. Yoongi hates to be reminded of this.

Grinning, I punch him. “You’re a soft marshmallow,” I tease, barely making it two feet before my legs freeze beneath me. “Ah, really?” I groan, glancing over my shoulder.

Yoongi’s eyes narrow. “Carry on,” he grins, waving a hand to release me. “But if you call me marshmallow one more time…”

“Sure thing. Yoongles.”

At the expression on his face, I break into a run.

Five minutes to 7:30, I’m outside the stadium. “Hey!” I call, jogging to catch up with Julia.

She stops before the doors, waiting for me bfore entering. “Hey yourself,” she grins, pushing them open. “Ready for a night of weirdness?”

As I follow her, I laugh. “Please. With all we’ve seen? What’s weird?”

The doors fall shut as Julia shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve heard a ton of rumors about V’s concerts.”

“Really? Like what?”

Our footsteps echo on linoleum floor. The hallway is empty, though I hear sounds of the crowd outside. The doors open at 7:45 PM, concert starting at 8:30. We’re supposed to be ready when the people come in. As we wander down the hallway, I peer into various rooms.

Julia glances around, lowering her voice. “I mean, have you heard any of his songs?”

“I think?” I say, struggling to remember. “I’m not sure.”

Julia laughs. “No, probably not. They’re all uh, explicit. Sexually. V knows what he’s doing and his concerts usually end up kind of wild.”

“Oh.” A frown creeps over my face. “That’s odd,” I muse. “Wasn’t our suspect at V’s concert? Did her friends mention if she met anyone there?”

Realization dawning, Julia looks suddenly stricken. “Oh,” she says, glancing sideways. “I don’t think they said. Hm. We’ll check that out first thing Monday.”  

I nod, falling silent when we reach the next hall. I spot Derek ahead, ducking down a stairwell labeled STAGE in bright, red letters. A woman with a headset walks by, staring intently at her phone.

Julia grabs her elbow. “Excuse me,” she smiles.

The woman looks up, scanning us from head to toe. “Can I help you?” she asks, clearly hoping the answer is no.

“We’re looking for V,” Julia smiles.

The woman snorts, shaking free. “Aren’t you all. Excuse me, ladies.”

When she tries to move, Julia steps in front of her. Blocking her path and opening her coat to reveal the badge and gun. “We’re looking for V,” she repeats, still smiling. “We’re the additional security.”

The woman’s eyes widen. “Right, sorry.” The woman is suddenly all business, gesturing sideways. “Follow me,” she exhales, taking off down the hall. Weaving in between racks of clothing, dodging the refreshment tables and crew members.

She leads us down a side hallway, knocking once on the plain, black door. Waiting exactly five seconds before she peers inside. “V?” the woman calls, sounding nervous. “Your security is here.”

“What is this?” I mutter, leaning into Julia. “Are we his personal bodyguards, or…?”

Julia shrugs. “Like I said – weird.”

A low voice answers her, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I frown, folding my hands over the top of my coat. I can’t shake the feeling that something is seriously off. The air around us buzzes with electricity, though the generator is nowhere around.

Pulling back from the door, the woman smiles. “Come in,” she says, stepping aside.

The room is bigger than expected. Clean, draped with soft lighting and dark colors. I scan the place as I enter, taking in billowing fabric but no windows, tables piled high with booze and desserts. Velvety sofas pushed against burgundy walls, only one sofa set in the middle of the room.

Julia and I are not the only people present, though all the others are beautiful. Men and women, millling in various corners of the room. They pay us no attention when we enter. Most hold champagne flutes, all wear outfits more revealing than anything in my closet.

Swallowing, I struggle not to feel out of place. Low music plays, the scent of sandalwood and lavender drifting through the room. Beside me, Julia draws in a breath. I turn, only to realize she’s not looking at me.

In front of us, a man rises from the sofa. He holds a glass in hand as he walks forward and now I see, why Julia stares. Why the assistant seemed nervous, why everyone here is drawn, dragged or pulled towards this man’s existence.

He is beautiful. His features are straight and narrow, brow even. Hair maybe a shade darker than the pictures, or maybe it is just the lighting. Everything about him is enticing, from his body to his face – both strong and delicate, at the same time. It is as though he has been made to lure women in. Or maybe, to send them running. The moment I think this, his mouth curves in a predatory smile.

He comes to a stop right before us, gaze half-lidded and focused on Julia. Whatever he sees seems to satisfy him, because he smirks and turns sideways to me. The moment our eyes meet, he starts. I arch an eyebrow, unsure why he looks at me in this manner and, just as quickly, he hides his expression.

V – I assume he must be V – shifts his weight to lean back on his heels. He is dressed in a plain black shirt, unbuttoned halfway and tucked into leather pants cinched with his belt. Running a hand lazily through his hair, he tilts his head to one side.

“Hello,” he smiles.

His voice is deeper than I thought it would be. At my side, Julia stifles a giggle.

“I’m V.“ He pauses, dark eyes glinting the longer he stares. “I suppose though, you can call me Taehyung.”

[Master List]

Author’s Note: I hope you enjoy! I’ve been wanting to write this for awhile, so more fun things to come ~ thank you for reading!

Playlist: Howlin’ For You, The Black Keys; Machine, MisterWives; Stigma, BTS; Chains, Nick Jonas; Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked, Cage the Elephant; Arabella, Arctic Monkeys; Boy Meets Evil, BTS

[utsus]

Stolen Beginnings Naruto Hyuuga Hinata, Uzumaki Naruto AO3 @basilbees​ was kind enough to guide me towards this prompt about criminal!naruto and cop!hinata, which I thought was super fun. 💛

Summary:

Naruto had long since learned how to gauge a predator’s intent before the threat moved from eventual to emergent. He’d learned it the hard way as a young boy, with six facial scars to show for it.

It had taken him far too long to realize it, but now he was up to speed.

Hinata was a predator.

A pack of gum.

The sugary sweet flavor of watermelon on his tongue, and the way his hands had trembled.

There was a method to the madness of furtive theft, and Naruto played it with deft fingers and a smile. His very own orchestra, tuned perfectly to the sound of his own laughter, the airy apology as he turned back to a patron he’d bumped into and rubbed idly at the nape of his neck. He flitted down the street to their curses, vibrant and annoyed but so, so unsuspecting, and Naruto couldn’t help the smile that pulled at the corners of his lips. He dug his hands deep into his jacket pockets, an added bounce to his step, and did not stop walking until he was back in his apartment.

He pulled his hands from his pockets, a wallet filled to bursting in his right hand, and a golden watch glinting and gleaming in his left. He grinned, setting the wallet down onto his shoddy counter, the corner chipped, the surface dusty. He turned the watch over in his hands, brought it up to his ear and listened to the reassuring tick, tick, tick, with his eyes closed. It was almost soothing, he thought, being able to nearly touch something so all-consuming as time.

Almost, he thought, except that as it continued to tick, tick, tick, his own clock of freedom was waning. It wasn’t a secret, and he wasn’t one to lie to himself; he would get caught. Soon, probably, considering how long he’d been doing this and how close the cops were on his trail, nearly snuffling at his doorway.

He slipped the watch onto his wrist, a perfect fit, tick, tick, tick.

He reached for the wallet and went for the ID first, an uncharacteristic choice for a thief. But Naruto didn’t like to lie to himself, and that included lies of omission, so he looked at who he stole from and he studied the life that their documentation left exposed for him.

Komura Gin, 45, a pale man who needed a haircut. Naruto could relate, reaching up to idly tuck some of his bangs away behind his ear. He’d been a little too busy to worry about his looks beyond how best to blend in without looking like he was trying to blend in, and how best to make himself forgettable.

That last part had always been easy.

He set Komura Gin’s identification down against the counter with a gentle slip, and fingered through the contents of his wallet with a clinical eye. A good haul, several big bills and well-known credit cards.

Pictures of a family still growing.

Naruto pocketed the money and the cards, set the wallet against the counter just beside Komura Gin’s friendly smile. The flash of the camera had caught in the corner of his picture.

He didn’t seem like the kind of man to care.

Naruto moved further into the belly of his humble apartment, stretching his arms overhead with a groan. He slipped the credit cards out of his pocket and deposited them on his desk, right next to his laptop, where he would later put them to duplicitous use before cutting them up and disposing of them himself. The meager few years he’d spent in university learning about computer technology and coding had prepared him well for the future, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. There were many reasons that he had yet to be caught, but one of the most significant was that he knew how to cover his tracks.

It was simple enough to alter the location of the purchase history, especially since he had all of Komura Gin’s information, address and all. He would keep the purchases small, scattered, throughout the night. Odds and ends he’s never actually see or touch. Nothing extravagant.

He didn’t keep trophies.

The sunlight filtered in through his kitchen, over his shoulder, alighting each pigment of dust sailing loftily through the air, and caught on the glass face of the watch on his wrist.

Tick, tick, tick.

Naruto slipped the watch over his wrist, ran his thumb once over the face of it with a gentle tilt of his head, expression almost nostalgic—it was the last remnant of emotion he allowed himself to feel for the accessory, the person and the life it had belonged to only just that morning. He reached for a sanitary cloth, soft as velvet, and cleaned the watch with meticulous care, ensuring no trace of a fingerprint be left behind. He discarded it into one of his countless baggies, sealed and tied, and dropped it in a lightly growing pile of trinkets since stolen. They formed a tiny mountain, too sharp to be a hill, too thin to be a mountainous range; his own landmark of culminated goods.

Sunlight beaming through glass through dust through his home; falling silently over his claims.

No matter how high up he managed to climb, it was important never to forget where he had started.

A pack of gum, the summer sun.

Stolen beginnings.

 ✧

 Exhaustion was as intimate a partner as Hyuuga Hinata had found for at least the last decade.

At fifteen, she’d enrolled in the Hidden Leaf Police Academy, on an advanced track to becoming a detective. She’d been the youngest ever until recently, when Hanabi joined the ranks at fourteen and proved that each new generation of the Hyuuga family was more exceptional than the last. Not that anyone had ever questioned that, considering Hinata’s mother had been Bureau Chief and her father the captain serving under her—before the accident that took him from them all.

Now, her cousin was one of the youngest and most efficient police captains to ever run the force.

Her uniform hung heavily over her shoulders, buttoned to the throat, pants pulled snug over her hips. She let her forehead rest in her hand, eyes scouring over scattered pictures layered over her desk. Some had already fallen to the floor, but they had fallen face-up, so Hinata didn’t reach for them with anything but her gaze and open curiosity. She needed a bigger desk. Oak, preferably, but she wasn’t going to push for it. Mikoto needed a new chair, a good one to support her aging bones when she worked reception. Hinata had home furnishing bookmarks open behind the article she was periodically scanning and re-scanning, chairs of all shapes and sizes.

She frowned, reaching out to straighten one of the pictures, aligning it with those on either side of it, her hand coming back slowly to rub at her mouth. Where was the connection? What was its nature? If she could deconstruct the foundation of it, something that would attempt to distract them, then she could solve this string of murders in a matter of days. She was certain of it.

Hinata had a peculiar skill, a keen eye; she wasn’t known to miss a single detail.

It was what had helped her advance through the rankings to become a detective at age twenty; and not just a detective, but a good one. She had a mind for puzzles and an ability to empathize with anyone she encountered. Usually, this wasn’t a bad thing. It helped her understand those around her, and in turn, helped her understand herself better, too.

But it also meant that she could understand killers on their own level.

This one had sticky fingers; he took trophies from previous victims with shameless abandon. His pattern was bizarre, with so many unanswered mysteries. That, among other things, was why his dossier had been thrown on Hinata’s desk come Monday morning.

“Need a fresh perspective,” Nara Shikamaru had said, blandly. “A keen set of eyes.”

The folder had been heavy in her hands, the material of it catching against her fingertips. Their homicide supervisor with the highest percentage of closed cases wanted her perspective, her help. She had smiled up at him, radiant under his lazy appraisal, and said, “Then you’ve come to the right place, Shikamaru-san.”

That had been over a month ago, and now they had a string of six unsolved murders in front of them. Each body mutilated post-mortem, made to be humiliated. Each body found with miscellaneous items belonging to the previous victim. Hinata had realized that early on; that these mutilation murders were connected, that there was a single killer at work. The pattern was there, right before her eyes; it was easy to follow the trail he so purposefully left behind for them. She’d followed the trail of those trinkets, wallets and jewelry and paintings and phones, to the families of the previously deceased. It was a pattern she had found herself wrapped up in:

Arrive on scene. Study the layout, surveil the area. Confiscate the items left behind. Identify their owner. Recognize the name, the face before mutilation. Follow their trail back to the family. I’m sincerely sorry for your loss. Investigate the victim from their family’s eyes. Dead end.

New murder, new victim, same pattern, same process.

Hinata’s brain throbbed. She shifted, restless with questions and uncertainty, and took a break from the images of the items left behind, a compilation spread over her desk of a pattern she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around.

Her eyes found the article again, tracing over lines she’d already memorized. This case had nothing to do with the string of murders she was currently working on; the only hold over her that it had was in her curiosity.

A serial thief that a little-known news site had caught wind of. There was nothing about him in social media, or in the news—it seemed he was too efficient a hider to gain that kind of attention. It was only her love of the unacknowledged hard working reporters that had led her to find him. Had she not checked the Hidden Tribune, her favorite underappreciated news, he would’ve been lost in the cracks between official case files and new accounts of better understood crimes and injustices.

But the Tribune had caught onto him and so, too, had Hinata.

Their lead reporter described him as a fox, swift and cunning; there one moment and gone the next with nothing left behind but a faint recollection of a flash.

Orange and gold.

“How’s the case coming along?”

Hinata startled, blinking up at the voice over her screen. Neji stared balefully down at her, posture strung tight in perpetual severity. Hinata offered him a put-upon grin, leaning back in her chair with a sigh.

“Frustrating,” she admitted. “I can sense that there’s a deeper connection, one that ties things together more adequately then the pattern of displaying previous victim’s items as trophies of sorts. There’s something more under the surface, I can just barely feel it, but it’s evasive.”

Neji nods, a subtle gesture, and glances around the precinct with steady observation. Under his command, their force ran like a well-oiled machine. Hinata hid an amused smile at the memory of what the precinct used to look like before Neji had been appointed captain—so much dog hair and towers, towers of paperwork on every surface. Their new bureau chief wasn’t particularly known for being tidy.

“Do you have new considerations to report?”

Hinata bit her lip. “Not quite. I don’t want to report halfheartedly over something that isn’t emergent. I’ll have a report on your desk tomorrow morning, though.”

“That’s acceptable,” he allowed, nodding. He moved back a few steps, a purposeful distance, reinstating his authority—shifting from concerned cousin to commanding officer.

“Keep at it,” he added quietly, only for her ears, before striding away. Hinata grinned after him, amused and charmed, and set a reminder in her phone to remind him that they had plans for that coming Friday. Hanabi would undoubtedly invite herself before Hinata could even extend the initiation.

Hinata turned back to her computer and minimized the article without a second thought, moving on to more important and emergent matters. She sat upright and scooted back in against the desk, pushing the tail of her long hair back over her shoulder. She touched the picture closest to her, a pasture of watercolors signed with cursive and stained with blood.

She felt the heat in her temples as her focus rekindled, and her eyes began to scour over the evidence once more.

She would find the pattern, the one that was hidden so meticulously, and she would make it sing.

She always did.

 ✧

 Uzumaki Naruto could feel someone’s eyes on him.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. In his line of work, he had to be aware of those around him and their response to his presence in their vicinity, even when he wasn’t intent on working at that precise moment.

He didn’t turn to the gaze, not yet. He merely grabbed his tea from the attendant and thanked her, smiling with too many teeth, and headed for one of the only empty tables over by the window. For a moment, the pressure of someone’s stare was gone. He tried not to let his shoulders tense, tried to keep himself loose. He reclined in the hard, wooden seat, letting his head dangle backwards for a moment as though he were an exhausted university student taking a moment of respite in-between a schedule of studying.

That was, after all, the general air of the coffee shop he was currently in.

He sat back up slowly, wrapping his hands around his cup to let the warmth of it seep into his chilled palms. The pressure returned, right between his shoulder blades, and Naruto did not fidget. He pulled his laptop from his bag and opened it with ease, logging into social media just to search, since he didn’t actually have an account.

Some tiny little station in the heart of Hidden Leaf had somehow caught wind of him, and he couldn’t help but to be curious. Worried, too, but only a little. From the cursory research he’d done from a library computer the day before, it seemed the website—some Tribune or something—was run by a bunch of local university students. He wasn’t certain yet how serious they were about the gig; if they were just trying to decorate their résumé for future careers, or if they genuinely appreciated the justice of reporting.

Naruto took a careful sip of his tea, burning the tip of his tongue in the process, and blinked down at a Wikipedia page he’d randomly searched for. Someone was still looking. Naruto tried to think about his entrance into the shop, about his clothes, his bedhead. What part of him was standing apart from the rest, at least to this one person? He couldn’t locate them, it would be too obvious to turn and glance over his shoulder, and that would mean giving himself away.

He couldn’t let them know he was alert enough to their watchful gaze that he was feeling distinctly cornered. So instead, he kept track of them as best as he could and tried to remain as ordinary and unmemorable as possible. His jacket, a ratty orange thing with holes in the sleeve hems, was doing nothing to protect him from the cold of the morning. He’d need to get himself something a little newer soon, but he was fond enough of his hoodie that he knew he’d continue to wear it regardless.

He rubbed his hands together and pushed at his hair. He’d finally gotten that haircut a few weeks back, but already his fringe was growing out over his temples. He wondered if it was genetic.

Not that he’d know, having been an orphan and all.

A chair to his right scraped against the linoleum. Someone settled carefully into the seat, dropping a messenger bag against their legs. This was Naruto’s chance, he recognized silently, lifting his cup to his lips again. He turned with genuine, muted curiosity.

His first thought was that she was beautiful, in a way that almost hurt.

His second thought was oh, shit.

She was staring right at him, eyes shrewd, moving over his features as though systematically deconstructing every fragment of his expression. He felt undone.

He tried to offer her a friendly smile, stranger to stranger, and he watched her reciprocate it easily. She blinked once, a heavy fall of her eyelashes, and Naruto swallowed.

He turned back to his computer and couldn’t help the way his shoulders felt strung tight, a bow hitched and knocked and pulled. There was something about her, maybe everything, that felt powerful in a way that startled him. Her eyes were so clear, so unassuming even as they studied him, an insect pinned to a board and left to wriggle and writhe under her depthless perusal.

He forced his fingers to skim over the keys, had to keep up the persona of listlessly searching the internet even as she sat right there, just a turn of his head away.

He was hyperaware of her for the next hour, doing careless coding for his society-accepted job while she shuffled an endless amount of papers between her fingers and let her fingers fly over the keys of her own computer. She worked with purpose, with unerring confidence, and every time Naruto stole a glance of her from the corner of his eyes he found her totally immersed in the materials of her work.

She didn’t stare at him again, though he did catch her casting equally curious glances his way. After a suitable amount of time where Naruto felt he had been there long enough to be believable, he packed up and tucked his chair in. It almost felt rude to leave without acknowledging her, which was ridiculous and, frankly, worrisome. He was halfway between internally scolding himself and opening his mouth to offer her a quiet, aimless farewell when she suddenly glanced up at him.

Her eyes trailed over his features and then dropped to the holes in his sleeves and back to his gaze all in one go. Naruto’s mouth snapped shut.

“I like your hoodie,” she said, and Naruto felt jarred enough to trip against the leg of his chair as he edged around their tables. He regained his composure and offered her a wayward grin, rubbing at the hair over his nape in idle amusement.

“Thanks,” he offered, and forced himself to leave before he could say anything else. She had already noticed him more than he had ever wanted to be noticed, and that wasn’t safe. Especially when his target was finally leaving the place, right on time, and Naruto was planning on following her into the shopping district to rid her of her necklace and the scarf hanging idly over her purse.

Naruto didn’t look back even when he felt those shrewd eyes on him again. He only swallowed, heavily, before tossing his cup into the garbage and pushing through the doors. He turned to follow his target at a distance, pulling his phone out to pretend to look at messages he didn’t actually receive. His chest felt tight, and he realized he was nearly holding his breath.

He didn’t take a comfortable breath until he was three blocks away, inside the mall, bumping into a young woman who apologized to him even as he managed to slip her bracelet from her wrist and onto his. He waved it off and apologized, her bracelet hidden under the hem of his sleeve, and moved on to continue after his initial target.

He could still feel the pressure of that woman from the coffee shop’s eyes on him, even so far from her.

He hoped sincerely that he had left less of an impression on her as she had on him.

His freedom seemed to depend on it.

 ✧

 Weeks passed, and Hinata’s frustration only managed to grow. She still hadn’t found that missing piece in her case, and people at the precinct were starting to notice.

Muffled whispers and sidelong glances, covert and judgmental, and Hinata felt herself blushing more often than not with the added attention. It wasn’t as though she were slacking off—she had lived and breathed this case since the moment she’d found it on her desk. Her only lapses had been to maintain her nutrition and her sleep schedule, though the latter was most recently sorely lacking.

And sometimes she took a moment to peruse the Tribune, indefinably curious about that article from so far back. There was nothing new about the information or the thief, but still Hinata found herself coming back to it, a hitch in-between her eyebrows. Something about it felt…significant.

It was probably just her curiosity, and her desire to separate herself if even for a moment from the irritating lack of progress she had found in her own case.

Before long she had Shikamaru hovering over her desk, offering insight and advice, and a new pattern he had discovered. Hinata did not resent him for having found one—he was brilliant, firstly, and she respected him. She also just would not turn down a lead on this case. She didn’t have the luxury, and she wasn’t the kind of person to feel jealousy over something like that.

“It’s bothersome,” he started off, leaning his weight against the counter overlooking her desk. He rested his chin in the palm of his hand and ignored the bustling behind him, as agents Tenten and Rock brought someone in for processing. “But if you look at the pattern of items left at each new murder, you can see where they’re all pointing.”

Shikamaru pushed away from the counter and walked around to stand behind her. He pointed at the pictures laid across her desk, glossy under the halogen lights overhead.

“Starting with the most recent murder, Mr. Fukushima, the personal belongings left by his body belong to the victim before him, Ms. Aoishi. And the belongings found by her body belong to the victim before her. And so on.”

“Right,” Hinata agreed, though none of this information was novel. She didn’t rush him, however, and waited patiently for his reverie, knowing all the while that if he had found it then it was there, and how had she missed it? Her eyes burned over the images, frozen moments of time with awful depictions of human beings and the intimacy of their home space, and a stranger’s belongings just beside them.

“Well, follow the trail back. All the way back.” Hinata watched Shikamaru’s finger trail through the air, from the most recent victim, over those in the interim, before finally stopping on the very first victim they’d found.

Jiraiya Monogatari.

“The belongings,” Shikamaru continued lightly, sounding bored. “The trail—“

“It ends there,” Hinata interrupted, eyebrows scrunching together. She pursed her lips. “We have yet to find the owner of the belongings left at that first scene.”

“Right,” Shikamaru agreed, shifting closer to her so specialist Aburame could move behind him, his steps familiar enough for Hinata to know him without having to look. Shikamaru moved back right afterwards, polite if apathetic, and rested his hand on the top of her chair. “We definitely need to keep looking for them, but what’s important here, what we’ve missed up until now is the importance of this being a dead end. We basically just accepted it as someone we couldn’t find but will continue to try to find. But there’s more to it than that.”

Shikamaru didn’t pose the sentiment as a question—But what if there’s more to it than that?—He was the picture of confidence, not an inkling of uncertainty in his voice. Hinata admired that aspect of him; his perfect confidence in himself.

Hinata picked the image of the first victim up and held it before her, studying the belongings, replaying Shikamaru’s words in her mind. It was sudden, when she realized where Shikamaru was going with this. When she saw the finding he’d uncovered. She was nearly breathless with the indication, the abrupt spark in an otherwise dry case.

“They’re not a dead end,” she whispered, understanding. “They’re part of the same trail, the same pattern. They just lead backwards.”

“Yeah,” Shikamaru added, and Hinata turned over her shoulder after a long moment of studying the evidence. Shikamaru ran a hand through the tail of his hair and shrugged, careless and lackadaisical even after having made such a pivotal discovery. Hinata grinned up at him, small but true, with silent gratitude.

“This murderer,” Shikamaru began, glancing over her shoulder to the image in her hands, his eyes narrowing. “He’s careful. Meticulously so. Every scene mirrors the one before it perfectly, except for the differences in items left behind. This first one is special. Compare the belongings, Hinata. What do you see?”

Hinata glanced through the pictures, her eyes trailing over every detail.

“They’re detached,” she muttered, setting the first scene back into alignment. “Wallets, random jewelry, artwork. They’re almost…purposefully random. Nothing personal.”

“And the first?” Shikamaru asked.

“It’s almost—“ she began, searching for the word. It came to her abruptly, slipped from her lips with open wonder. “Intimate.”

“Exactly,” Shikamaru agreed, walking back around the counter in his normal indolent gait. He leaned his hip against the marble. “The items left behind at that first scene and their unfound owner; they’re crucial to this investigation. We just don’t understand why, yet.”

“It could just be that this was his first kill. That could make it intimate.”

“Does this scene look like a first kill to you?” Shikamaru asked, and Hinata eyed the evidence again, already shaking her head. Too neat, too precise.

A contained shout voice through blood and belongings.

“Then why did he make this unfound owner stand out?” Hinata wondered aloud, forgetting for a moment that she had a captive audience in her superior and those in nearby desks, who had subtly begun to listen in on their joint brainstorming. “It’s like he threw the owner right into the spotlight. These items are so unlike all the others. They break the pattern.”

“And create something new,” Shikamaru surmises, glancing up at the ceiling where rainwater had leaked through the previous year, staining the creases between panels.

“We have to find the owner.”

Shikamaru didn’t look at her. “We’ve been looking.”

“We need to look harder,” Hinata insisted, glancing up from the pictures to stare at her superior with intent. “They’re the key.”

“This case has a lot of closed doors,” Shikamaru sighed, lilting. “There’s bound to be more than one key.”

“Perhaps,” Hinata allowed, though she refused to back down. “But this missing owner, their part in all of this—they’re the master key, Shikamaru-san.”

Shikamaru turned to her, then. He studied her expression, the unflinching line of her determined shoulders. After a long moment of appraisal through which Hinata had no idea what he thought of her or her words, he simply shrugged. He peeled himself away from the counter and tucked his hands deep into the pockets of his uniform, which still to this day looked unfortunate on him—as though he were a child dressing up in his father’s clothes, too baggy and stiff to fit his sluggish character.

“Maybe,” he allowed, at last. He turned from her and sighed again, heavily enough for his shoulders to rise sharply and fall heavily. “The evidence will tell us, in time.”

Hinata agreed, but Shikamaru was already making his way down the hall and they didn’t have time. She glanced back to the pictures, her eyes drawn to the belongings at the scene of the first victim. She studied them astutely, unblinking.

A red scarf with a mother’s loving message sewn into the material; a flip book with only a single picture of a deceased family within its worn pages; and a homemade recipe book, filled from front to back with neat, thin writing.

Hinata scraped all of the images together and secured them back into their file, tucking it away in her desk as she logged out of her computer. She forgot entirely about the protein bar she’d packed for herself in the top right drawer of her desk and was already heading down the stairwell to the evidence room. She turned a corner and smiled tersely when she saw the chief leaning against the gate, most likely harassing the agent working the evidence desk. When she was close enough to spot him, she couldn’t help the way her smile grew.

“Shino-san,” she greeted, before turning to the chief with a brief, polite salute. He blinked at her, amused and eternally chagrined with her penchant for manners regardless of however many times he had informed her they were unnecessary with him. Chief he might be, but he didn’t care for the formalities of the position. That was no secret.

“Chief,” she greeted, before turning back to Shino. “They’ve got you working in evidence today?”

“Yamanaka-san has the flu,” Shino answered quietly, tilting his head. “I was available.”

“It sure is interesting having a sociological analytics specialist tucked away in the basement, where nothing else is even alive.”

Hinata casted the chief a bemused look, though he seemed unaffected. He pushed away from the wall and lifted two fingers in farewell, before tucking his hands in his pockets and lumbering back towards the stairs. His shock of gray hair disappeared around the corner a moment later, and Hinata gave her good friend her full attention.

“How are you today, Shino-san?”

“Content,” Shino answered, hesitating for only a moment before admitting, “It’s cold down here.”

Hinata laughed quietly, nodding. “Ino-san says it keeps her on her toes.”

Shino hummed. “What can I get for you, Hinata?”

“The evidence footlocker for case #7.”

She watched one of Shino’s eyebrows curve up over the brim of his sunglasses, silent curiosity. He didn’t question her, however, and simply went back to retrieve her requested bin. She tapped her fingers against the counter, listless with a new lead. She wanted to do a hundred things at once, though she knew that she needed to put one hundred percent of her focus into each detail so as to not miss anything pertinent. She was good at calming herself down, at honing her focus. She took a few deep breaths and ignored the slightly elevated pace of her heart rate.

Shino came back with a small sealed bin in his hands. He scanned it and allowed his fingers to fly over the keys of his computer, logging and documenting. When he finished, he slid the bin through the hole in the fencing that separated the evidence from the rest of the room.

His hand remained on top of the bin, however, and Hinata glanced up at him curiously.

“This bin,” he began, almost hesitantly. “It’s from the first murder.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve looked at it before.”

“Yes,” Hinata agreed, wanting to wince for having to look twice, even if she knew others wouldn’t even normally consider that a blunder. But for her, for a Hyuuga, having to look twice was an embarrassment. She doubted that Neji or Hanabi would have missed it the first time around.

Breathe in, breathe out.

“I missed something,” she admitted honestly, unabashedly humble. Shino didn’t react much, other than to slide his hand forward to cover her own. He offered a single comforting squeeze, and Hinata smiled. He was a good friend, one of her best, and she appreciated his lack of judgement.

“I’ll have it back to you by tonight,” she promised, grabbing a pair of gloves from Shino’s station and moving into the joint room and heading for the back corner, where several potted plants and flowers lined the wall.

She settled in with the bin in front of her and unlatched the lid, preparing to slide it open and off. She took a moment to glance at the flowers, her eyes catching on the sunlight shade of a beautiful sunflower. She’d bought them ages ago, wanting to spruce up the basement with some flora but not wanting the plants to suffer for lack of sunlight. During the day she set them upon the windowsills of the precinct, allowing them an abundance of sunlight. But at night she brought them down to the basement, and let them sit under the fluorescent lights that research claimed would help them grow.

The sunflower stood out, thriving; stained a bright, beautiful orange under the glow of the pink fluorescent lights.

“Okay,” she sighed, removing the lid and setting it aside on the empty chair beside her. She slipped into the gloves. The scarf was the first item she saw, and the first she touched. It was a brilliant, scarlet red; still soft, even while it was ratty and threadbare. She ran it between her gloved fingers and could feel the durability of it, and knew that it was made to last.

She turned it over and over in her hands, studying the little stains and the tears, the message sewn messily into one end: to keep you warm, always

Intimate, Hinata thought again, swallowing. Her heart lurched and she set the scarf aside, reaching instead for the flipbook. It was no larger than the palm of her hand, with about ten slots made for small pictures. Only one of the slots was filled, with a single picture worn at the edges, as though someone had thumbed at it frequently. A trio, new in every sense of the word: a young man with a shock of golden hair, caught in a moment of exuberant laughter; a young woman with a cascade of scarlet hair, expression frozen in rapturous wonderment; a baby boy with his father’s golden hair, his mother’s bone structure, cradled in their loving embrace.

A family.

The Hidden Leaf’s police force had done their research, covered all their bases. They’d done facial recognition scans, hunted down these strangers and prepared to investigate them, to ask their questions. Instead, they found the ruins of their life detailed briefly in three documents.

There had been an accident, an earthquake in the inner city; their home had been destroyed with them inside of it, leaving a crater behind in the earth. As if a monster had crushed them under its fist. Three death certificates were all that was left of them—well, Hinata silently amended, three death certificates and three personal items left behind at the scene of a gruesome murder.

Hinata closed the flipbook. She couldn’t look at it much longer, it was too private, too cherished, and it felt like she was intruding. It didn’t matter how silly that might have been and it didn’t matter that there was no one to criticize her for it. This family had passed.

But still, it didn’t feel right to look any longer than necessary.

The last item in the bin was the recipe book. It made Hinata curious; at first she’d assumed that it belonged to one of the parents, the mother or the father—her guess had been the father. The handwriting was tall and thin and when she thought of the woman with the red hair, she thought of the uneven stitched message in the tattered scarf, a patchwork of effort. The handwriting was more precise, less chaotic. Highly detailed.

But handwriting analysis threw them all for a loop: it was an unknown. It was difficult enough finding written proof of handwriting from the parents, who seemed to never write anything down, but Hinata’s investigative team managed to find a couple old university assignments. The handwriting didn’t match—didn’t fit.

They ran it through their database for days, searching and searching, until finally they found it—found him. An elementary school teacher working on the outskirts of Hidden Leaf, closer to the surrounding forest than the city.

Umino Iruka.

His school wasn’t the closest to the family from the flipbook; in fact, it was just about the furthest they could get without moving to a new district.

It was also, apparently, no longer his place of work.

As if the case itself wasn’t frustrating enough, they hadn’t been able to find Umino Iruka’s current place of residence, nor workplace. It was as though he had disappeared, though he did not have a death certificate to prove it. He was still out there somewhere with vital answers to this yet unsolved case, and Hinata hadn’t a clue where to find him. They’d checked every school in Hidden Leaf, from the inner city to the outskirts and even beyond their own gates—nothing.

He had vanished, as fickle as a speck of dust on the breeze.

What was his connection to that small family? He was older than them, but he could still be a family friend. Was he the child’s uncle? Godfather? The child had perished before reaching school-age, so there was no way that he had ever been the boy’s teacher.

He was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit this particular puzzle, and it was infuriating.

It had been months since they’d put a halt on looking for him in lieu of continuing to focus on the key factors of the case. They still had an agent on him, but there was only so much Temari could do to find a needle in a haystack that stretched impossibly far and wide.

Hinata focused in on the facts, instead. That included Umino Iruka’s recipe book. She had lost track of how many times she had studied the pages, from front to back, looking for clues, for hints, for details that stood out. But all she found time and time again were recipes for highly nutritious meals. What the recipe book did show Hinata was Umino Iruka’s character—he cared deeply for whoever he had given these recipes. They were thorough, measurements exact, and each dish had an appropriate amount of all the necessary nutrition for a healthy mind and body to continue to grow well.

Hinata couldn’t put it into words, but even his handwriting felt protective. Doting, even.

It was this thought, simple as it might have been, that triggered an incredible epiphany. It was suddenly so clear, right there before her eyes like it had been for months, only now she could see it.

The murderer left behind impersonal items for every murder but the first, as though none of the victims meant enough to him for that kind of meticulous care—and if that were true, then the first victim did. The first victim was meaningful. Shikamaru had said as much, too, that the first victim opened up a new path in the opposite direction, one they’d never suspected before now.

All three items, the scarf the flipbook the recipe book—all of them were made with love.

“He knows them,” Hinata breathed, and a shadow of the same confidence that she imagined Shikamaru had felt in himself flickered through her, a comforting heat. Her heart raced in the cage of her chest, adrenaline pumping through her system. She felt breathless with the breakthrough, shaken by the realization. “The murderer and whoever owns these items—they know each other.”

She glanced to the scarf, red as that young woman’s vibrant hair, the flipbook concealing the moment of joy captured forever in a single frame, the recipe book in her hands. Personal items, intimate belongings, important for emotional value rather than monetary value, and it was so clear.

“Who are you?” She whispered, eyebrows scrunching down in concentration. She placed the recipe book alongside the other two items, cherished items, and folded her hands in front of her lips. “Why this family? Why were they important to you?”

She reached out again, touching the scarf and the flipbook, her gloved fingers resting against them. Out loud she asked, “Who do these belong to?”

And in the privacy of her own mind, where she felt free to make boundless leaps without sufficient evidence to support them, a single daunting theory rose into her consciousness.

She set her hands on the edge of the table, spine straight and shoulders tensed. She could hear Shino shift on his rolling chair, a single squeak before he settled. Her heart raced, blood pumping in loud, coursing waves in her ears. Everything in the world seemed to grow unreservedly loud, a cacophony of individual instruments playing out of tune. The lights overhead buzzed like beehives, Shino’s chair an instrument of wind squeaking through the halls, the dull whirring of a fan on the other side of the room growing to a roar.

And yet, above it all, a single question reigned:

Are you killing or them?

Hinata did not get much sleep that night.

 ✧

 Naruto was more than used to stepping outside of his comfort zone. One could say that he lived for it.

The bus jostled over the dirt road, hitting potholes and rocks and swerving easily to avoid gulfs in the decrepit road. They’d passed the walls of Hidden Leaf more than an hour ago, and Naruto’s would be the next stop. Right smack dab in the middle of nowhere; a tiny town that one could walk through completely in under half an hour, with a gas station and a motel with broken fluorescent lights on the roof. There was a tow yard, too, and several fast food restaurants—open twenty-four hours. Magnificent ramen.

But Naruto wasn’t looking to stay within the town. When the bus finally stopped at the gas station, his destination deviated through the trees, deep into the dense brush of Hidden Leaf vegetation, where a single house structured in the canopy could be found by a familiar eye.

Naruto was used to putting himself in danger and dealing with the factors involved, and the potentiality of consequences. In those situations, he had nerves of steel and an iron stomach. It had taken him over a year to get control over his stomach and not throw up after plucking some miscellaneous item from someone’s person. It had taken him even longer to train his hands to stop shaking afterwards.

He still had an untamable heart, though, that insisted on racing.

It raced now, too. The signs rose in him without his consent, fear in the secretions that dabbled over his forehead and down his sideburns, worry in the tense line of his shoulders, his clenched fists.

Putting himself in danger was one thing.

Putting a loved one in danger was another altogether, especially for someone who had no one else but that loved one.

Naruto noted the change in vegetation when he came upon the flower garden, a familiar sight in shades of lavender, pink, red, orange, and the brightest of yellows. If he put his mind to it, he could name each flower. He had spent enough time here to have learned those lessons well.

He glanced up into the canopy, watching the way the leaves shifted and allowed streams of gold to filter through them, lovingly touching their faces in shades of healing. And there, amongst the gold, was a small wooden house held aloft in the branches. Naruto knew where the ladder was by memory and ascended it easily, calling out with a bird-like whistle, laughing lowly when creatures around him responded in kind.

The creature he’d intended to call came to the doorway a moment later, hair pulled into his customary tail, smile as soft and kind as Naruto remembered.

“Iruka-sensei,” he greeted, dropping down onto the veranda he himself had laid out so many years back. Iruka had a washcloth in his hands, which he passed to Naruto the moment he straightened.

“What have I taught you, Naruto,” Iruka chided, watching as Naruto took the warm cloth and wiped the sweat from his face, neck, and the tops of his shoulders. He scrubbed at his hands and wrists, too, the skin that managed to peek out from under his sleeves. He grinned resplendently, unwilling to be cowed by his teacher’s scolding when he felt so overwhelmingly fond. Even still, he cooperated.

“I’m home,” he announced, and Iruka’s smile was everything bright and good in Naruto’s world. He stepped forward and brushed the back of his hand over Naruto’s forehead, having to push himself on the tips of his toes to reach easily, and wiped away a stray bead of moisture. The gesture was so paternal Naruto felt himself flushing, wanting to rub at the nape of his neck in embarrassment.

“Welcome home,” Iruka answered softly, taking the dirtied cloth from Naruto’s hands. “I’ve made ramen.”

“Woah!” Naruto called, following Iruka as he turned and headed back into his home. Naruto closed the door behind them with more care than he probably needed, and was immediately hit with the smell of home-cooking, his favorite dish made by his favorite person. “You’re awesome, Iruka-sensei. What’s the occasion?”

Iruka moved towards a basin filled with water and dipped the cloth into it, ringing it out until it looked clean as new. He hung it over a suspended rope with other material items spread over it, drying in the forest air coming through the screen door.

“It’s not often that I get to have a family meal,” Iruka answered easily enough, reaching into a massive pot to stir with a wooden spoon Naruto had stolen from a vender when he was seven and gifted to Iruka. He’d gotten the usual scolding of his life for his lifestyle, though Iruka was inarguably soft on him given his understanding of Naruto’s past. Iruka understood, too, that someone like Naruto just needed someone on his side, regardless of whether what he did with his free time was right or wrong. As someone who had lost his parents when he was an infant and had grown up in a system of foster homes—by fact or misfortune, each more destructive than the one before—and eventually moved to living on the streets by the time he was six, it was a wonder that the worst he did was steal.

He was fairly certain that that was a major part of the reason that Iruka only scolded him, and didn’t turn him away altogether. That, and he loved him.

“Ditto,” Naruto agreed, quieter than usual. “What can I do to help?”

“I’ve pretty much covered all of my bases, actually,” Iruka replied, reaching into his cupboards to pull two ceramic bowls down to the counter. Naruto had lifted them from a department store when he was ten. He looked around and saw milestones of his growth and development all throughout Iruka’s apartment, thoroughly immersed in his life.

When he was too young to truly understand, he had felt pride whenever he caught Iruka using or displaying or wearing something that Naruto had stolen for him, even when his teacher scolded him and discouraged his behavior. When he grew old enough to understand his place in the world, he would experience moments of panic, or uncertainty—had he pushed himself on Iruka so much so that he had cornered him in his own world of thievery? Did he want a way out? Did he only use the items Naruto stole for him because he felt forced? Iruka had shut that thought process down right quick when he’d managed to draw it out of Naruto when his stomach had been full and his heart had been heavy enough to spill.

And now, as a twenty-five-year-old man comfortable with the hand he had been dealt—and the one he dealt himself daily—he simply felt content at seeing Iruka use the treasures he had coveted for him. He’d learned, though, that Iruka appreciated things he could use more than things he could display. It was typical of Iruka to grudgingly accept Naruto’s pilfering so long as the result of it meant he had more tools to garden with, or cook with, or wash with—rather than a fancy watch to wear, or a fine woolen coat to keep him warm in the winter. Iruka would not let Naruto spoil him with grandeur; but he had grown to accept gifts he could put to work.

Naruto grinned thinking about it, even as he turned and studied the framed artwork he’d lifted from a museum on the farthest side of Hidden Leaf, a simple painting of a vegetable garden, edged in peonies. He had been fifteen. Iruka allowed some exceptions, and Naruto thrived in that narrow window of acceptance.

“You’re smug,” Iruka muttered suspiciously, without ever having to turn around to know it. Naruto’s heart swelled with affection as he pulled Iruka’s seat back from the table, waiting there as Iruka scooped ramen into each bowl and moved to the table. He set Naruto’s food down first, but accepted Naruto’s help in scooting him in towards the table. Iruka waited for Naruto to take his seat across from him, and when Naruto glanced up at him he watched Iruka try to suppress an amused grin. Iruka gestured for Naruto to take the first bite, and though it was but a simple thing, wanting Naruto to eat first, Naruto suddenly felt close to tears with affection.

Iruka was so, so kind.

Naruto took his first bite and closed his eyes around the flavor of it, and the warmth. He couldn’t honestly tell how much of that soothing heat was from the food, and how much of it was from loving Iruka and being loved in return. When he opened his eyes, Iruka’s smile brought laugh lines up beside his eyes. He used to tell Naruto that he’d never had those wrinkles before meeting Naruto, and that from the moment he’d seen him as a boy he’d known he was going to cause him wrinkles. When they had begun to appear, he’d made a point of bringing them up in conversation, and always with this muffled smile—trying so hard to hide how charmed he was by Naruto, and how little he actually cared about wrinkles on his face.

Naruto had joked, “At least they’re happy ones, right? And they make you look even more handsome, sensei.”

“Flatterer,” Iruka had snuffled, charmed despite himself.

Naruto watched Iruka take his first bite, chewing a bit before making a similarly content expression as Naruto had. Naruto said, “I was feeling a little smug, yeah.”

“What about this time?”

“Don’t say it like I’m always smug!”

Iruka pointed his chopsticks at him, one eyebrow ticking up. “Really?”

Naruto ducked his head in faux-embarrassment, reaching up to mess with his hair. “The painting,” Naruto admitted, glancing up from under his fringe to gauge his teacher’s expression. Even though Iruka had long since given up on boldly scolding Naruto for his choice of delinquency, sometimes Naruto still expected some negative emotion to flicker across Iruka’s face. Even now, so many years later, he still expected Iruka to tire of him some day, even as he fought tooth and nail against the thought. “And the spoon, in the ramen bowl. And the scrunchie in your hair, if I’m remembering right.”

Iruka blinked at him, chopsticks at his lips. He took his time chewing, swallowed completely before setting his chopsticks down beside his bowl and sitting upright. He studied Naruto for a long moment, and Naruto wondered what he was thinking. What he was seeing; a scruffy, scarred, bedraggled young man with jaded eyes and a surefire confidence in himself that seemed to come from absolutely nowhere.

Iruka said, “I love that painting. I use that spoon with just about every meal I prepare—it’s perfectly curved. This scrunchie is my favorite, you know that.”

Naruto smiled, a shy thing. He ignored the stretch of his scars, so familiar a feeling he barely even regarded it at all. “Because it has flowers on it.”

Iruka’s eyes gleamed, bright with affection. “Sunflowers.”

Naruto ducked his head again, lifting his chopsticks to his mouth to hide how great his smile had grown. They ate comfortably together, offering idle conversation in-between bites. Iruka worried incessantly over him, asking question after question about his well-being, his job and his work, his health. Naruto asked him what he’s been doing to keep himself busy, learns that Iruka has planted new vegetables he’s trying to grow and that he’s working on writing his own recipe books from scratch. He’s dabbled in writing a book for himself, too, one about nutrition interweaved with gardening and cooking—all his favorite things.

Naruto soaked in the comfort and the warmth of his presence and his home—their home, as Iruka considered it. It’d been ages since Naruto had worked himself up to visiting Iruka, ensuring that he wasn’t in danger of being caught and leading the trouble to Iruka’s doorstep. It didn’t occur to him that he was equally, if not even more protective of Iruka than Iruka was of him.

After they got up to rinse their bowls—and the pot that Naruto had polished off by eating directly from it with the wooden spoon—Iruka encouraged Naruto out onto the veranda with him. There were two cushioned rocking chairs out there that they’d constructed together, and each took their respective place. Naruto curled up in his chair, both of them facing the expanse of the evergreen forest before and around them.

“So,” Iruka started, and by his tone Naruto knew that the conversation would shift to serious matters. He didn’t mind. “This time it took you even longer to come back home. Are you worried?”

“I’m sorry about that, Iruka-sensei, really.” Naruto apologized, shifting to make his chair rock. Iruka maintained an even rocking motion with practiced ease, all from periodic taps of his foot against the veranda flooring. “You know how it is.”

“I know what you tell me,” Iruka disagreed, “And what I infer from your behavior.”

Naruto pursed his lips. “What do you think exactly?”

Iruka didn’t hesitate. “I think you’re in trouble. Why else would you wait so long to come back?”

He didn’t say, to me, because even Iruka had insecurities. Naruto wanted to reassure him, but wasn’t sure of what words he needed to say to do that. So instead, he answered with honesty, knowing that Iruka would appreciate that, too.

“I’m not really in trouble,” he admitted, watching the leaves of the canopy above and around them shift in the lightest of breezes. “It’s just that the longer I do this, the more likely I am to get caught, y’know?”

Iruka remained silent, pensive and considering. Naruto added, “I have to be more careful now.”

“You should always be as careful as possible,” Iruka chided quietly, a gentle reprimand and a frequent impasse they often arrive at. He broached another a moment later: “If you stopped doing this, you wouldn’t have to be so careful all the time anyways, Naruto. It would be easier.”

Naruto debated for only a moment between honesty and omission. Honesty, as always, won.

“I don’t know how to explain it any different than I have in the past, but I don’t just do this for no reason. The things I take, the people I take them from, they could easily get them again. But the kids that I send them to have nothing. No family, no legacy. Many times, no toys or treasures. I give them a chance to have things they might never have. Even if you think that’s an excuse, it makes me feel good. It helps me to take control of myself.”

Iruka sighed, an edge to the sound. Naruto tensed, preparing for another argument they’ve already had. Instead, Iruka remained quiet for several long moments, long enough that Naruto started to relax.

“You know how I feel about it,” Iruka offered, so quietly he barely even disturbed the air around them. “Just be careful, and be safe, Naruto. It’s not your responsibility to take care of every orphan in Hidden Leaf.”

If not mine, Naruto thought immediately, then whose?

But he didn’t say a word, only continued to rock there with Iruka at his side, an accepting if slightly critical presence.

“You need a new jacket, Naruto.”

Naruto grinned. “I think I can manage that.”

Iruka blew a raspberry, unworried. “We both know you don’t steal for yourself. Maybe I can learn how to knit, or something. I can make you one.”

It’s unconscious, the way Naruto suddenly remembered the red scarf he’d grown up with. A gift from his late mother, he’d been told, with a message inscribed on the hem. His heart pounded, a powerful and discomfiting lurch of muscle. It was just a scarf, he tried to remind himself.

But even still to this day, it felt like a loss. Like a part of him was missing. He could still remember the day he had returned to his apartment and been unable to find it—the countless days he’d retraced his steps for it. The countless thoughts of what if—what if someone had lifted it? Was that exactly what he deserved? But that seemed an impossibility, and he dismissed it as such. When he was in public, he was hyperaware of himself and those around him. He would’ve noticed. He would’ve.

He still couldn’t imagine why someone would take a scarf, unless they simply liked the color. It wasn’t well-made. It was uneven and ratty, with stains and some fringe missing. They could’ve found something more efficient

For Naruto, it had been priceless.

A token from his dead mother; a reminder that he had been loved by a parent, by parents, at one point in his life. Even if he had been too young to remember it.

And now it was gone.

Not the only memorable item lost or stolen from him, either.

The only picture he had of his parents. The first recipe book that Iruka had ever made him, entirely by hand.

Someone had targeted him personally—struck purposefully at the heart of him.

He forced himself not to dwell on it, not when he was with Iruka. He’d have plenty of time to feel the emptiness of loss later when he was alone and in the privacy of his own apartment.

“I like my jacket,” Naruto argued softly, not putting much into the dispute. Similar words said in a softer voice seeped through his consciousness, and he remembered the woman from the coffee shop—the woman with the shrewd, unblinking stare. The woman so beautiful it’d hurt to look at her.

The woman who had looked right through him.

I like your hoodie.

Iruka didn’t pay his sudden lapse in attention any mind. Instead, he continued to chatter on about how he’d been looking for another hobby to keep him busy when he wasn’t elbow deep in the soil, fostering his gardens. Naruto swallowed, listening with half an ear, and decided maybe it would be for the best if he got a new jacket after all. Part of him wanted to keep it even more now that he remembered that the ratty orange material had gained that stranger’s temporary favor, her kind smile.

The rest of him screamed danger. She looked too close. The last thing Naruto needed was to get caught because of his favorite orange hoodie.

And yet…he was undecided on the matter. Regardless, he wouldn’t mind being an excuse for Iruka to pick up another new hobby, and he would gladly wear anything Iruka decided to make for him.

He would wear it lovingly, and this time, he wouldn’t let it out of his sight.

“Maybe obsidian,” Iruka mused to himself, as Naruto continued to stare out into the gradually darkening forest. “Something a little subtler than that garish orange.”

Naruto stiffened. “Hey!”

 ✧

 “You look like shit,” Inuzuka Kiba informed her, the venom of it replaced by apparent concern. “Are you getting any sleep at all?”

Hinata wasn’t fond of lying, and especially not to her loved ones. But the concern on Kiba’s face was concerning, and she didn’t want him to worry about her more than he needed to.

“Some,” she offered, lifting her tea up to her lips and deliberately avoiding Kiba’s gaze. Kiba had made it perfectly, as he always did. It was made specifically for her, little hints of lavender and honey throughout, and it never failed to soothe the kinks in her system.

The shop was still empty, save for Hinata and Kiba’s coworkers steadily taking the chairs down from tables. She’d made it a habit to visit him often, to sit in the middle of a bustling environment of relaxing university students chattering and typing away on their computers. Tired, smiling mouths and eyes bright with something between exhaustion and determination; a ratty orange hoodie.

A kind, scarred smile.

Today, however, she had come before opening. She had places to be today, and people to see. 

Kiba was frowning at her, displeased with her answer and the reality of it etched in the dark circles under her eyes, the lines of fatigue by her lips—too much frowning, and pursing.

Tapping her fingers against the counter, she offered him something vague, her words chosen purposely: “The same killer struck again yesterday.”

Kiba’s eyes widened. He’d pestered her about the case early on when she’d first received it and they’d been eating Chinese straight from the cartons at her place. She’d given him the barest of bones, a vague outline, as much and as little as she could.

She didn’t tell him that the pattern had been broken, though. That was something she couldn’t share with anyone, not even one of her best friends.

“Shit,” Kiba exhaled, lifting a hand to remove his work visor and running a hand messily over the top of his head until his hair stood on end in every direction. He put the visor back on, crooked and sideways-facing, and if Hinata had not been thinking about a fresh murder, she might’ve laughed.

“Yeah,” she sighed, shoulders deflating. She moved away from the counter, tea in hand, and lifted a hand in farewell. “Well I have to get going. I just wanted to stop by real quick and see you. Hope you have a good day—and thank you for the tea!”

“Be careful, Hinata,” he responded, leaning heavily on the counter with arms crossed over his chest. The bright red Ichiraku Coffee logo across his chest disappeared behind his crossed forearms, and Hinata turned with a nod to head back into the city.

It didn’t take her long to reach her destination.

The home was run-down, one of a community of similarly structured homes locked away behind a gated fence and high, pristine block walls. Once, this community had been beautiful; thriving with families and children playing on the streets, their parents laughing and gossiping, their cousins playing at the pool.

But that was all before the fire of ’05.

Now, only a few homes remained standing—but just barely. Charred obsidian coursed up and over and all around each home, a crispy reminder of what had happened there. The city had tried to pass a movement to knock the place down, clear the slate, and start anew. But a single resident with power behind his name thwarted them with ease, in only a few words, and a signature.

She went to see him now.

She glanced at the slip of paper with his address written in her messy scrawl once more, then lifted her knuckles to gently rap against the wooden door. For several long moments, there was nothing. No sound of life, not even around her—it seemed even the birds avoided this side of town. She hadn’t seen a single squirrel, thought briefly there was a chance she’d seen a butterfly, but she wasn’t sure. She waited, shifting her bag on her shoulder, and heard no footsteps. But then the door opened, and there he stood.

The victim of the most recent attack; an outlier, because he was alive.

Uchiha Sasuke appraised her with a level of indifference that chilled her. His dark eyes were wide, doe-like, but there was nothing in their depths to even catch a gleam in broad daylight. There was blood dripping down his jaw and the beginnings of discolored skin over his temple, every shade of murky dawn. He moved to the side, widening the open space of his doorway, and made no move to gesture her inside. Hinata realized immediately that Uchiha Sasuke was a meticulous kind of man, who did not waste energy.

“Hi there,” she greeted before crossing the threshold. “Have you received medical attention, Uchiha-san?”

Sasuke didn’t respond to that, merely slid the door shut behind them and moved around her with silent steps. He led them into the belly of his home, too big for a single person to be living here, so empty it made her ache. Her eyes trailed over the pale nape of his neck, his proud shoulders, his confident stride. Then, they leapt from his shoulders to the scene he brought her to, messed up furniture and a blood stain trailing back through the kitchen, where the killer apparently escaped. They’d run the blood through their systems, and not a single match had appeared. They were chasing a ghost.

“He entered through the kitchen,” Sasuke recounted, his voice gentler than Hinata had expected. “He did not expect a fight.”

“Sure looks like he got one,” Hinata offered neutrally, shifting around Sasuke’s shoulder to better observe the front room. “How did you know he wasn’t expecting a fight?”

“I was asleep. And he had a katana.”

Hinata blinked, turning over her shoulder to study Sasuke’s expression. Not a puzzle piece out of place, the perfect picture of structured apathy. His bone structure was noble; his jaw thin, his cheeks razor-sharp. The arrow of his nose was perfectly straight, without a single notch to signal any sign of past damage. Unsmiling lips.

“He had a katana?”

Sasuke’s lips twisted, the first sign of true emotion on his face; sheer displeasure.

“It didn’t belong to him.”

“How do you know that?”

“He didn’t hold it properly,” Sasuke explained easily, far more patient than Hinata might’ve imagined him to be. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would appreciate explaining every detail, and Hinata was smart enough to put together the pieces, but even she needed a vague outline in order to know what pieces applied. “He was sloppy.”

With this, Sasuke shifted so that the wound Hinata had not seen became her sole focus. A single slash in his side, not emergent but enough to have stained his shirt with his own blood. Hinata hurried to his side, wondering if she should call for help or maybe contact Sakura and see if she had a shift today. Sasuke was already shaking his head, however, and lifted the hem of his shirt to show her that a practiced, efficient stich-job had already been done. It took Hinata only a moment to realize that he must have stitched it himself.

What kind of man was Uchiha Sasuke?

“Are you sure you don’t need medical attention, Uchiha-san? I know someone at the hospital. You probably need antibiotics.”

Sasuke’s head shifted, a sharp negation. “I have sufficient supplies here.”

Hinata didn’t want to push, but she couldn’t help her incredulous expression, eyebrows lifted. She let it go, though, in favor of turning back to the scene of his almost-murder.

“So he’s using a katana, but he doesn’t have a clue how to use it.” Hinata chewed lightly on her lower lip. “I can’t imagine a scenario where a strange man with a katana, however poorly wielded, would still lose against an unconscious man. Especially considering that he has killed before.”

Sasuke shifted on his feet, and it was so bizarre but Hinata would’ve said he looked embarrassed.

“I’m a light sleeper.” He explained lowly, then when she glanced up at him inquiringly: “A very light sleeper.”

Instantly, without her conscious control, Hinata remembered the fire she’d read about in the news, seen on TV, and gone to explore on her own after the crowds finally dispersed and left the sole survivor of the region alone. She remembered the flames, and her university background in psychology reared it’s ever-relevant head with a single term: PTSD.

She did not show Sasuke the expression of sympathy that moved over her without her control, before she could tuck it away. He would not want it; would resent it. Instead, she merely nodded her head and tried to extend whatever she could make of a weak olive branch in his direction.

“I struggle with sleep often, doing what I do.” She swallowed. “I could definitely be a deeper sleeper.”

Sasuke didn’t respond, but she felt no judgment from him. When she glanced over her shoulder at him once more, he was studying her with something akin to curiosity.

“Okay, so he attacked you while you were sleeping, you fought him off, and he escaped?” Hinata frowned. “Might be naïve, but it seemed like you had the upper hand. I’m guessing this blood stain isn’t yours.”

“No,” Sasuke agreed. He fell silent again, not answering her initial inquiries. She waited for him for as long as she felt comfortable before turning to face him completely. She needed to gauge his expression while she asked him questions, to better understand the situation. To better understand what she was seeing here, in the aftermath. She opened her mouth to pose her questions again, to paraphrase them, when he finally spoke.

“I did have the upper hand,” he admitted, with no lack of confidence. “But he escaped.”

Hinata studied him unblinkingly, critically. “You allowed him to.”

Sasuke frowned, his eyebrows dipping down in frustration. He ran his hands through his hair, an uncharacteristically telling gesture coming from him.

“I didn’t allow him to go.” Hinata watched him search inside himself for the words, the truth. He didn’t seem the kind of man to lie, but she knew that intuition wasn’t enough to trust something like that.

“He said something to me,” Sasuke admitted, and his tone pieced everything together for Hinata at once—he was embarrassed. “And it messed with my head. Just long enough for him to disappear.”

“What did he say to you?”

Sasuke’s posture straightened, drawing all of his walls back up.

“It has nothing to do with this.”

Hinata studied him critically, frowning. “Isn’t that something I should decide?”

But Sasuke was already shaking his head, repudiating. “I’m telling you that it has nothing to do with this. It has to do with me.”

“Are you not a part of this investigation?” Hinata refuted, crossing her arms over her chest. Her uniform pulled taut over her shoulder blades, stretched over her chest.

“I am,” he agreed, not backing down for an instant. “But the information I was told is mine alone.”

Hinata tried not to scowl. Sasuke looked imposing, indomitably so, as though nothing could scratch even the surface of him. It seemed incredible that someone had even managed to draw his blood, for how careful he was.

It was this reasoning that led Hinata to back down, if only for now. She would come to him again, probably soon, to ask him about that mysterious statement—the one that had distracted him or ruined him enough to let a murderer who had been trying to kill him escape. As a victim, she understood that in this circumstance, his safety was priority. On top of that, she was certain he was suffering from PTSD, so his mental health was already in a delicate state. She wasn’t about to fracture an already shattered patchwork he was so meticulously attempting to re-work into a complete picture.  If the message he was unwilling to divulge was important to his mental health, she would let him covet it.

So long as it wasn’t vital to saving other lives.

“Do you remember where the items left behind were? Exactly?”

“Yes,” he intoned, studying her for only a moment longer before moving further into the room. Hinata reached into her bag and removed three pictures of the items left behind. He crouched and marked each spot with two swipes of his pointer finger over the hardwood flooring. Hinata placed each photo in its respective spot, and studied the room as a whole with them in place.

They had already spoken with the parents of the previous victim, and ascertained that these three items had belonged to their son. Hinata studied them, wondering if anything would be out of place. Sasuke was supposed to be dead beside them, and yet there he stood, right next to her, shrewd eyes staring blankly at the scene of his would-be death.

She wondered if he was so unaffected by this because he had faced death once before, when he was but a child. He had survived that attack, too.

“The only factor that’s different from the previous murders is that you survived him,” Hinata voiced aloud, making the decision to tentatively draw Uchiha Sasuke’s particular kind of gifted mind into the case as more than just a victim, but a possible resource.

“The previous murders involved three items left behind,” Sasuke began, and Hinata hummed in agreement.

Then, he said: “Not this one.”

Hinata turned to him, confused. “I’m sorry?”

Sasuke reached into his pocket and removed a folded knife, the handle of which was made from a beautiful cut of onyx stone.

“There was a fourth and fifth item.”

Hinata’s heart began to race, hungry for answers, for the possibilities of this twist in the case.

“Was this reported? Did the investigators get this information? Do you know who the knife belongs to? What is the fifth item?”

“It was not reported,” Sasuke responded easily, turning slowly to face her, the knife still clutched in the palm of his hand. “Because the knife belongs to me.”

Hinata paused, all of her questions grounding to a halt. Sasuke’s eyes flickered between her own, suddenly curious yet again, before they dulled back into the recesses of indifference.

“Someone attempted to steal this knife from me several days ago, on market street.” He blinked, lifting the knife to stare at the handle, and the tiny symbol of a scratched out leaf Hinata could just barely make out. “He failed. Obviously. But it went missing a few days after that, and reappeared when the attempt was made on my life. The fifth item was an earring my mother had made for me.”

Beyond Sasuke speaking so casually about an attempted murder on his own life, Hinata found herself floored by this new information. Her mind raced, her heart thundering in her chest. She took a step towards Sasuke without conscious thought, her eyes bright with the chase.

“Uchiha-san,” she asked, nearly breathless with wonder. Determination hardened her features, curbing the excitement into something more professional. “Did you see what the man who robbed you, and then later attacked you looked like? Can you identify him?”

Hinata’s excitement took a plunge when Sasuke stared at her for several long moments before shaking his head. She felt her shoulders fall, just a little, but wouldn’t let this crush her enthusiasm. She had new information on the case, and she could follow it.

And then, Sasuke added: “I cannot identify the man who attacked me. His face was covered with some kind of gnarled mask. But I was able to see something of the attempted thief.”

Hinata blinked, eyes still deer-in-the-headlights wide. She immediately pulled her transcriber from her pocket, booting it up and ensuring that she had access to her work laptop even this far from the station. She did, and everything spoken into the recorder would be automatically transcribed onto a file in her computer, ready for her to peruse and reflect on later.

“Would you mind repeating that, for the record? And then describing what is still missing, and what you were able to see of the thief?”

Sasuke complied without hesitation, repeating his statement and adding what Hinata believed to be the most important information yet. The earring was a red and black pinwheel, no larger than Sasuke’s smallest fingernail.

“The thief was blond,” he described with a single slow blink. “He was about my height, so 168 cm. He was tan, and scarred.”

Hinata nodded, encouraging him for any other detail he could possibly recall. She was so relieved to finally have something new to chew on in this case, something that could lead her closer to the killer, closer to putting him away where he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again. She thought about what Sasuke had already given her, the reveals, and her mind circled something acerbic and biting she couldn’t quite get a grip on.

It came to her at the exact same moment that Sasuke remembered one last detail about the thief, and the potentiality of her realization coupled with Sasuke’s was enough to send her reeling.

Sasuke said, “He was wearing an ugly, bright orange hoodie.”

Two thieves, Hinata realized with dawning dread, growing rapidly. Possibly working together.

Her murderer could have an accomplice.

And she thought she might know him.

 ✧

 Naruto had been tailing a young man for the better half of the morning, planning on lifting his jacket the moment he stayed still for a bit. After more time than Naruto usually stuck around for, he found himself sitting inside a familiar coffee shop, with a familiar cup of tea before him. His quarry was a few tables away, and he’d already shrugged out of his jacket. Naruto was watching him closely while he pretended to edit his real but recently neglected thesis on artificial intelligence.

He heard the chair nearest him scrape against the linoleum, but paid it no mind until the person spoke to him.

“Hi there,” she greeted, and Naruto blinked. He turned and found the same beautiful woman he remembered from weeks back in this same coffee shop, who’d complimented his hoodie and hadn’t stared at his facial scars.

“Hey,” he responded, surprised. He felt himself staring at her, knew that he should look away, but there was something about her that was captivating. It felt impossible to look anywhere else but at her. She smiled, just enough to show a glimpse of teeth, and Naruto felt his heart give a heavy thud.

She responded to his surprise with embarrassment, heat filling her cheeks.

“Sorry, you probably don’t even remember me. I shouldn’t speak so informally.”

“Oh,” he started, waving his hands a bit. “Oh no, it’s fine! Totally cool. I remember you.”

The woman blinked, and Naruto thought with amusement that it was her turn to be surprised. Her cheeks were still sunrise pink, the softest shade of bashful.

“You do?” She asked, and Naruto laughed. He rubbed at his nape, mussing his hair there.

“Oh yeah,” he laughed, unashamed to be honest with her. Well, honest about this. “You’re kinda unforgettable.”

She sat upright at that, physically startled. For some reason, that bothered Naruto—that she wouldn’t recognize how charming she was, or how beautiful, enough to startle at a simple unattached compliment.

He frowned at her, studying her. Last time, he’d only really gotten enough of an impression of her in the short time they’d shared the same space to remember her shrewd eyes, her kind smile, the heavy fall of her dark hair.

Now, he saw so much more, and all of it delighted him.

She was heavier than he remembered, strong and sturdy, but it was the softness of her speech and her shyness that still made Naruto think: delicate. There was notable definition to her biceps, muscles well-trained and well-used. He wondered what her profession was, if she played sports for a living or if she worked in the fields. Maybe a personal trainer? He wished he could see more of her, but the table hid most of her from his view.

Of what he could see, however, he found himself hopelessly, helplessly attracted. There was ink on her bicep, large blue and violet roses in varying states of bloom, outlined in black with beautiful evergreen leaves and accompanying orange brambles. The tattoo climbed up into her sleeve, and he thought he could just barely see the paw of some creature intertwined with the petals, but her sleeve hid the rest of it from view.

“Well,” the woman cleared her throat, brushing off her embarrassment. Naruto’s eyes leapt from her tattoo back to her eyes, and it was easy to find himself staring. “I don’t even know your name.”

Naruto smiled, showing teeth. “I don’t know yours either!”

“Ah,” Hinata squeaked, nodding as though she couldn’t believe she’d been so rude. “I’m Hinata.”

“Hinata,” he repeated, tasting her name in his mouth and watching the way the heat in her cheeks spread down to her throat. He grinned cheekily. “Makes sense! I’m Naruto.”

“N-Naruto-kun,” she reiterated, stumbling a bit. He wondered if she was as suspicious of him as he was of her for not having given a surname. She seemed to be struggling over the use of his first name, her polite nature undoubtedly recoiling, and that was enough to amuse Naruto into distraction.

“Not to give you a line, I’m seriously curious, but do you come here often? Since, y’know, this is the second time I’ve seen you here.”

“Oh, yes,” she responded easily, exhaling to shake off her nerves. Did he make her nervous? “A good friend of mine works here. I like to come visit.”

Naruto hummed, nodding his head.

“It’s nice here,” Naruto said. “If you don’t mind the chatter.”

Hinata smiled, turning a little more to face him. “And you don’t mind?”

“Nope!” He exclaimed, reclining in his seat, the picture of comfort and ease. “I don’t really do great in silent places. I like the noise.”

“Really?” Hinata hummed, bumping her bag a little with her elbow as she rested her face in the palm of her hand. She was watching him, eyes soft and wondering, and Naruto couldn’t resist gazing back at her. He felt his lips continuously inching up in the corners, and it was bizarre that a perfect stranger could make him feel so happy in so little time, with so little interaction. There was something soothing about her, that drew him in.

Well, at least that was one of the reasons he felt drawn to her.

“I keep telling Kiba-kun that it’s a little cold in here,” Hinata continued, and Naruto assumed Kiba-kun was the friend that worked there. Naruto’s eyes fell to Hinata’s exposed arms for only a moment, a cursory glance, and noted no goosebumps there. When he met her gaze again he smirked. She ducked her head a little, uncomfortable for some reason.

“You should bring a jacket next time,” he responded blithely, blinking down at her. She grinned up at him, rolling her eyes.

“I know, it’s silly of me.” She blew a puff of air up at her bangs, amusingly frustrated. “But I don’t have any good jackets at the moment. Not like yours.”

Naruto’s eyebrows jumped up. “Mine?”

Hinata’s eyes sparkled, amused. There was something else there, too, hidden in their pale depths, but Naruto couldn’t name it. The hairs on his nape stood on end.

“Yes!” She laughed, bringing her free hand up to cover her mouth. “It looks…well-loved.”

Naruto glanced down at his hoodie, noted the holes in the sleeves, the stretched out front pocket, the stain on the hem. He met Hinata’s eyes again and couldn’t help his hearty laughter, bringing his hand back up to rub at his nape in amused embarrassment.

“It’s a good hoodie!” He defended himself, smiling so widely his eyes clinched shut. “It’s been with me through a lot! Believe it!”

“I bet it has,” Hinata responded, and there was something in her tone, too, that sent chills down Naruto’s spine. It was almost too direct. As if she were looking for something under the surface.

Naruto’s expression fell in waves, his laughter stuttering to a gradual, breathless stop. He traced the subtle curves of her beautiful, rounded face, and wondered what she was looking for.

Naruto had long since learned how to gauge a predator’s intent before the threat moved from eventual to emergent. He’d learned it the hard way as a young boy, with six facial scars to show for it.

It had taken him far too long to realize it, but now he was up to speed.

Hinata was a predator.

“It’s funny,” Naruto began, trying to keep his tone as casual as possible. Even as he saw her for what she was—a wildcat lurking in the shadows, preying on some part of him she’d honed in on—he found her charming. His instincts set off alarm bells, told him to run, to make an excuse, get up, leave this place, and never come back; he’d allowed himself to have too consistent a pattern, visiting one place regularly, and it was stupid. And he knew better.

But the bells paled in comparison to the orchestra of his racing heart, the drums of his pulse in his ears, the heat of a symphony playing under his skin every time she glanced his way. Even when he found her studying him, searching and seeking, he felt himself smiling.

Maybe he was a fool, deserving of a creature less predator and more prey, but—

He wanted to get closer to her. He would have to walk a fine line, play a dangerous game, but Naruto had never backed down from a challenge he thought he could match. He’d learned in this life that sometimes, not backing down from a challenge meant running first and coming back prepared. That survival didn’t always mean brute force. That sometimes, he had to get creative.

So he did not run.

“You visit your friend here a lot?” He reiterated, pursing his lips in faux-curiosity. He wasn’t proficient at mind games, was too heavy-handed, but sometimes that worked in his favor. Sometimes, that backed a sneaky predator into a corner. “Then shouldn’t you have known they let this place run cold?”

Hinata blinked, just once, her only noticeable reaction.

“I do come here often,” she replied, and Naruto couldn’t tell if the words were spoken a little too slowly to be unaffected. “It’s just that I usually forget until I get here. It’s usually warm outside, anyways.”

“That’s true,” Naruto said, but he knew that he’d caught her. For some reason, she was hyper-focused on his hoodie. Had she seen him steal from someone? That last time, their first meeting, had she followed him? But he’d been so careful.

“Do you not mind the heat, then, Naruto-kun?”

“The heat?”

Her smile turned coy, only just so, but Naruto was watching for it.

“Just the same, it’s always so hot. But both times I’ve seen you, you’ve been in this hoodie.”

Naruto didn’t falter. “It’s my favorite, after all!”

Hinata laughed, nodding her head.

“It’s certainly…unique.”

Naruto narrowed his eyes at her, tone playful. “What’s that supposed to mean, Hinata?”

Her laugh sounded genuine, was genuine, but Naruto refused to let his guard down. Even if she was the most beautiful person he’d ever been lucky enough to meet.

“It’s just,” she started, before pausing to think carefully about her words. “It’s so bright,” she eventually said, grinning. “It’s not a common color to see people wearing all the time, I guess.”

Naruto considered that for a moment, pursing his lips. Finally, he grinned until his eyes pinched shut.

“I guess I’m one of a kind!”

When he peered over at her again, there was something about the sharpness of her eyes, narrowed ever so slightly, and the sly curl of her lips that made Naruto think of a trap snipping shut. She shifted, and her sleeve pulled up enough for him to see enough of the creature to name it.

A lynx.

After a heavy moment’s pause, Hinata smiled softly and said, “I guess so.” Her voice was amused, wrapped around gentle, unassuming laughter. Naruto swallowed, and the trap he could feel around his throat felt less like steel and more like bone, like teeth.

A series of rings distracted Naruto out of the frightening mental image and he watched as Hinata frowned down at her phone before looking to Naruto apologetically.

“I’m sorry, I know this is rude, but I have to take this.”

“Go ahead, yeah,” he responded easily, turning back to his computer to give her some semblance of privacy. At least, he pretended to. He listened to every word she said while pretending to continue to edit his thesis, erasing and replacing apostrophes.

“Okay,” she sighed, quiet enough that he could barely hear her over the bustle of the shop. He glanced over his shoulder and saw her back facing him, and realized that she was a little shorter than he’d suspected, though not by much. Naruto swallowed and forced himself to turn back to his computer, because if he didn’t, then he wasn’t sure if he could stop staring at all. She had the shapeliest hips he’d ever seen and a beautifully tapered waist and he was so, so screwed.

“Bye,” he heard over his shoulder, lifting a hand to pound a fist lightly against his chest, right over his thudding heart.

He didn’t turn to her until she spoke to him, not wanting to seem as though he’d been listening to her conversation—which had been basic, and boring, a friend she was going to leave him to go see. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t even certain if he would’ve minded getting caught looking at her. He was honest about most things, and his appreciation for the shape of her, for the whole of her, even as someone he was certain was a threat to him, was not something he would hide.

“Naruto-kun?” She inquired, reaching out and touching her fingertips to his shoulder so gently he could barely even feel the weight of her touch.

“Yeah?” He asked, and pretended that his voice hadn’t come out choked, startled by her voluntary contact. Why hadn’t she asked him about the scars?

“I have to go,” she explained, coming more fully into his line of sight. She drew her hand back as if she hadn’t even realized she was still touching him, squeezing her fingers once against the strap of her bag. “I do come here often, but not usually for long periods of time. Do you think…will I see you again?”

Bold, Naruto thought, warm with satisfaction. He ignored those ever-persistent alarm bells in his mind and smiled up at Hinata, his eyes heavy-lidded. For her, he would toe the line of danger. He didn’t know which direction the strike would come from, only that it would come.

For whatever reason, she was a predator, and he was her prey.

“Yeah,” he said, bobbing his head. “For sure, yeah. I’ll call out to you next time I see you, believe it!”

Her smile bloomed over her entire expression, an entire season of healing in the blink of an eye.

“See you again.” She turned before she could see him wave, before she could hear him respond. He watched her weave through the tables full of university students and office workers taking their lunch breaks. He wondered if she’d look back, if he could catch her eyes just one more time.

She pushed through the doors and was gone.

Naruto sat back in his seat, exhausted by the tension of their interaction. What kind of game had he played in to? What about him and his hoodie were so important to her? Was there more in her interest about him than suspicion, as there was more in his about her?

He hoped so. He really, really hoped so.

He took a sip of his long-forgotten tea and choked on the coldness of it, the acrid bitterness of unstirred sweetness. He set it back down by his laptop with a bedraggled sigh, perching his elbows on the table and holding his head in his hands.

He glanced idly to his side, past the empty table where Hinata had been just a moment before, and saw another empty table. But it was more than just an empty table, to him.

It had belonged to the man and the jacket Naruto had been planning to lift.

He blinked, and thought, hell.

Next time, then.

 ✧

 Hinata called Kiba back after she was sure she hadn’t been followed, and she was in the relative safety of her vehicle. He answered on the first ring, and impatiently demanded an explanation for why she’d instructed him to call her a certain amount of time into her conversation with the man in the orange hoodie—Naruto.

“Why did you want me to call you like that?” Kiba had demanded, talking so fast there wasn’t space for Hinata to get a word in edgewise. “Did he do something to you? Were you in a sketchy situation and you didn’t even tell me, you just had me call you, which is such a shitty thing to do. I could’ve been your backup, y’know? Clyde to your Bonnie—“

“Y’know, Kiba-kun, in that reference we would be the criminals.”

Kiba had gasped over the line, and Hinata had done all she could to hold in her amused laughter. Instead, she’d only rolled her eyes as he exclaimed, “Was that fox-boy a criminal?”

“Fox-boy?”

“The scars, Hinata, you can’t tell me you didn’t notice them. They look like whiskers. And, I don’t know, he’s weasel-y somehow.”

That time, Hinata couldn’t hold in a single snort of laughter. “Wouldn’t that make him a weasel, then?”

Kiba had groaned. “No, no. Too…I don’t know. Tricky. Mischievous.”

Hinata had only hummed, starting her car and running her phone through the central system rather than holding it in her hand. She pulled into traffic and headed in the direction of the precinct.

“He isn’t a criminal,” she had finally said, though after her conversation with him she was less certain of that than ever. In fact, she was even leaning specifically in that direction, but she didn’t want Kiba to harass him and set him onto her trail.

“Then you don’t like him?”

“That’s not it,” Hinata had said immediately, embarrassed by her own insistence. Kiba picked up on it instantly, and luckily or unluckily, derailed completely to harass her about her new crush the entire drive back to the precinct until she finally had to force him to let her hang up.

She put her car in park and turned the key until the motor fell silent, and she considered what all she had learned. And what she had felt—still felt. She knew next to nothing about the man, but something about him was endearing. She felt drawn to him, curious and intrigued and—yes, admittedly, hopelessly attracted.

Of course she had noticed his scars. It would be impossible not to, what with their being six of them, jagged lines spread out over his cheeks, a mockery of whiskers.

But Hinata had scars of her own, and she knew that it was bad for her to prod them herself, and worse still for someone else to. So she hadn’t said anything about them, and had found it easy enough to fall into the endless blues of his eyes, instead. Even his smile called to her, thrilling in its easy humor. He was an honest guy, not easily embarrassed, and under his idle gaze she felt caught.

She felt distressingly comfortable around him already, almost familiar, as though in another life they had been more than perfect strangers. Even his name felt familiar.

Naruto.

Why did that sound so familiar?

Hinata pulled the key from the ignition with a sigh, and headed into the precinct while rotating her shoulder. It felt a little stiff, probably from yesterday’s target practice challenge with Shino. She’d won, but only by a narrow margin.

She greeted Chouji, their weekend receptionist, with a friendly nod and a quiet, “hello.”

She glanced down the hall towards the bureau chief’s room and found Nara Shikamaru standing in front of his desk, his hands held loosely behind his back—not cuffed. An important distinction, in this building.

She wondered for a moment what they were discussing, if it was her case or another, and dismissed the thought as unnecessary. She threw herself into her seat, rolling back a few feet only to scoot back up to her desk and log swiftly into her computer. Some familiar uniforms walked past her desk, calling out friendly hello’s, and she returned them with a wayward wave, already immersed in the articles she’d pulled up.

She didn’t really know what she was looking for, only that there was something to find in the thousands of words that encompassed the paperwork involved in this case. She sifted through report after report, reading everything from the timestamp to the notes listed in the margins—most of which was in her own scrunched handwriting.

She scrolled through the comprehensive stack of scanned photos from every scene, her eyes missing nothing she hadn’t already uncovered. She quickly lost track of time, unaware of the shifting shades of the sky through the window, from effervescent blue to lavender to muddled eggplant until the only source of light came from the halogen bulbs overhead. She thanked several colleagues for their hard work as they headed home, her attention glued to the screen or the paperwork in front of her, the notes in red, in pink, in blue; the post-its she’d gone back and added later, with new findings and postulations, theories and theoretical.

A few minutes after Chouji called out his goodbye, someone approached her desk. She didn’t hear the footsteps lumber up beside her, only saw someone hovering in her peripheral vision. It was noticeable enough that she managed to tear her eyes from the computer screen to glance up and find her bureau chief standing there leaning against the counter over her desk, his chin resting in his palms as he lounged.

“Yo,” he saluted, his heavy eyes trailing over her exhausted features. She knew what he was seeing, but she wasn’t about to back down. She was on the verge of something huge, she could feel it—this was exactly the kind of intuition that she had followed her entire life, the same one that had allowed her to get where she is today.

“Chief,” she acknowledged amiably if a little tiredly. “Are you heading home?”

“Sure am,” he responded blandly, picking at what appeared to be a sugary stain on her countertop. She would have to have a polite talk with agent Sai about eating donuts over her station. “And, if I’m not mistaken, it’s also time for little overachievers to be heading home, too.”

Hinata didn’t bristle, knew the chief well enough to know when he was being protective of someone he was fond of. Hinata was lucky enough to count herself among the measly few of that category—their chief was rather…prickly. And fastidious, too.

“Soon,” Hinata promised gently, leaning back in her seat to blink up at him. His wealth of gray hair seemed even more unruly than usual, but it could’ve just been the fact that her vision was blurring at the edges from looking at the screen for too long. “I’m…I think I’m onto something.”

Kakashi raised his eyebrows. “Anything I can help you with?”

Hinata glanced up into his tired eyes, the lines of exhaustion on his face. She wasn’t the only one having a hard time, working herself to the bone just to find something, anything to point them closer to a murderer. She found herself shaking her head, unable to keep Kakashi from a full night’s sleep when he looked close to falling over.

“No, I just have this feeling…it’s hard to explain.”

Kakashi hummed, unconvinced. He studied her expression as she gazed unseeingly at her screen, as if waiting for the answers to leap out at her.

“Let me give you some advice,” he offered dully, with a single heavy blink. “Often when we’re lost on the road of life and we’re looking for clues, we’ve actually already found them. We just have to retrace our steps, back to the start.”

Hinata flicked her gaze to his amused expression and blinked slowly up at him.

“Um,” she said, not wanting to be rude. “Okay. I’ll…follow my intuition. I can’t take a break now though, Chief, else I might lose the trail entirely.”

“Really?” Hatake Kakashi posed, quirking the eyebrow split in half by a gnarly vertical scar that had cost him his left eye. “You’re going to give me excuses, little one? Do you know who you’re talking to?”

“Chief,” Hinata began, tone insistent, but Kakashi clicked his tongue at her.

“I am the king of excuses,” he boasted, buffing one of his fists against his chest. Then, as if realizing he’d just admitted some vitally important secret to her, he pointed right at her with a deceptively gentle smile. “Not that you heard that from me, of course.”

Hinata laughed under her breath, and couldn’t help the fondness of her smile. “Of course.”

“Of course,” he repeated with an appreciative nod. “Well, since you’re being such a peach I guess I won’t lecture you about stealing my brand.”

“Does that mean you won’t sass me for staying a little late, too?”

“Sass?” Kakashi snorted, eyes wide. Hinata was so used to the entirely white surface of his fake eye that even seeing him so uncharacteristically expressive didn’t phase her. “Well.”

“I suppose if you stayed a little late today, that would be okay.” Kakashi’s smile shifted, grew barbed edges, and before the “thank you” Hinata had on her lips fell to the wayside he added, “After all, tomorrow is your pet rabbit’s special anniversary, and you cannot miss that again. And the bureau completely supports the practices that foster healthy emotional well-being in our operatives. So of course you have my…permission, to leave early tomorrow afternoon. Lunch is probably an ideal time, don’t you think?”

Hinata, properly backed into a corner and wondering how she had ever thought she’d get out of this safely when her opponent was Kakashi, merely sighed.

“Of course,” she reiterated, and Kakashi’s smile lost all of its edges, softened into something affectionate and rare.

“Of course,” he repeated once more, tapping his knuckles twice against her counter. “Drive home safely, Hinata-chan.”

“You as well, Chief,” she called after him, shaking her head as he lurked through the precinct and headed to the private parking structure just behind the building.

Hinata sat up with a low groan, flexing her tailbone before leaning back over the keys. It seemed like so long ago that she’d spoken with Naruto, and longer still since she’d had a proper lead in this case. She flickered through page after page of evidence, her eyes scanning every line even in their weary exhaustion. She should have gotten herself a cup of water, but the canteen felt so far away, sitting over there across the room.

The files started to blur, and somewhere in-between reading a family member’s statement—my son had just turned nineteen—and studying the blood splatter on a fan of credit cards that had been left behind Hinata was wading out into the ocean.

Speckles of sand fluttered around her ankles, the water frigid and chilling her to the bone, but she did not shiver. The sun was close enough that she could touch it; it didn’t burn, but her skin came back gold and gleaming where she’d made contact. She dipped the fingertips of her left hand into the surface of the ocean, and when she brought her hand up in front of her she was holding a threadbare scarf. She ran her fingers over it lovingly, as though it were a pet, as though it were alive.

And it moved under her fingers, unspooling into the ocean until it sank through the layers of cyan and cobalt blue, until the depths of the ocean swallowed it hole. Hinata blinked and she was at the scene of a crime, her gun steady in her hands, her heart racing so loudly in her ears she couldn’t hear a word being said. She could see faceless people around her, some in uniforms, some in street clothes, all of them shouting.

What were they shouting? All she could hear were the waves, the ocean, the blood, her veins.

A flash of orange in her peripheral vision, but when she turned, no one was there. She glanced straight ahead and she was shouting, too. What was she shouting? Where was the air needed to shout, if she could still feel herself breathing? Was the water getting in? Would she be able to get it out?

The suspect turned around so that he was looking right at her, and he was the only creature who had a face.

Or maybe he was just too familiar to her to ever be anything but recognizable, strikingly so.

Her father stared at her without saying a word, not an ounce of fear in him even as he stared down the barrel of her gun. They were alone, had always been alone, just the two of them and the sun. She reached for him with one hand open, the other wrapped around a gun, and her father did not reach back.

Instead, he turned to look over his shoulder. Her eyes followed the same trail, and they were wet, her cheeks chilled. When had she started to cry?

A familiar coffee shop. She looked back to her father, to her open hand and her clenched gun still aiming for the heart of him. It had been so long since she’d seen him, since she’d seen him, since she’d seen him without blood marring his air of jaded perfection. Where was the hole in his body that had taken him from her, from Hanabi, from Neji?

Where was the bullet she’d found a fingers breadth under his skin; ground zero of a shattered wing, right under his left shoulder blade. She had been six.

Her father turned back to her and his lips parted around a single word, familiar even in this reality. Hinata didn’t hear a sound, but she read it on his lips.

Ichiraku.

She blinked and he was right in front of her. Finally, finally he reached out to her, standing there right in-between her reaching hand and her clenched gun, still lifted. He touched her cheek, trailed his fingers over the softness of her skin, the wetness of her tears. His lips parted and when he spoke it wasn’t with his own voice.

It was Kakashi’s.

We just have to retrace our steps, her father said with Kakashi’s voice. Back to the start.

She looked over her father’s shoulder, studied the garbled blur of red in an inconsistent garble of characters held suspended over the shop’s entrance. She knew it to mean Ichiraku, the coffee shop’s title card.

Written in bright red, swooping characters; almost as if all of them were connected by a single red strand, a red string, a scarf, tattered and torn.

We just have to retrace our steps,

Ichiraku.

Back to the start.

Naruto.

Hinata gasped and awoke to the feeling of panic, of anxiety. She had fallen asleep partially on her keyboard, and a silent error message blinked repeatedly at her. She blinked back, trying to regain control of her rapid breathing, and a moment later she bypassed the error and dove deep into the case files until she found the specific file she was looking for.

The very first file, the very first murder, the very first trio of items left behind on scene.

She knew her way around these files better than she knew the layout of her own home, so it was easy to find what she now knew she was looking for. She pulled up the file on the investigation done into the family whose picture was tucked lovingly within an old flipbook down in the ice-cold evidence room. Her eyes scanned the file until she came across the names of the deceased, a dead-end in every since of the phrase, except that it wasn’t.

There, next to their archived identification pictures, was the deceased parents from the recovered flipbook.

Namikaze Minato—deceased.

Uzumaki Kushina—deceased.

And there, just below their information and their beautiful, smiling faces was a single name, buried under mountains of hard evidence and indefinitely cast off as extraneous material—until now.

Uzumaki Naruto—deceased.

“Got you,” Hinata whispered.

And a single tear slipped over her cheek.

 ✧

 Uzumaki Naruto had been called a fool many times in his life, but never before had he ever believed it as much as he did when Hinata turned out to be Detective Hyuuga Hinata of the Hidden Leaf Police Force.

His day had started out as any other day would, with him singing lowly in his cramped shower, all shoulders and elbows and knees. He’d hesitated for a breathless moment before tugging his favorite hoodie on over a clean white shirt, a snug pair of ripped black jeans. His favorite sneakers, with the bottoms melted from getting too close to a campfire.

He successfully lifted from three different people and managed to swipe Iruka a new and fancy set of pens for his new recipe book all before noon. When his stomach spoke up to remind him that he needed to eat, he thought about a coy smile and rose-stained cheeks, and a stare that moved through him with heat.

That was how he found himself at Ichiraku, waiting with equal parts restlessness and hope for Hinata to show up. He waited an hour before he realized it was a long shot, downtrodden and sulking he packed his laptop into his bag and prepared to leave. He tried to cheer himself up by thinking about the possibility of visiting Iruka that coming weekend; giving him the pens Naruto had researched to death before stealing.

He glanced up unconsciously towards the doors when he heard the overhead chime, not really expecting to find her, moving out of habit. He stilled completely the moment his eyes met hers, the recognition zapping between them like a livewire and gone just the next second, because she was—what she was wearing, it meant that she—

Naruto couldn’t move, not a muscle not an inch. He remembered this feeling, the startled realization that he had made a mistake somewhere along the way and was now as vulnerable as wounded prey, cornered and static. A sequence of foster parents snarling and apathetic, both, flashed behind his eyes.

Hinata in a Hidden Leaf Police uniform was the last image to appear, and though Naruto willed it away with everything he had, it remained. She didn’t even keep up the pretense of getting something to drink, she made a beeline straight for him. Naruto wondered if she had been staking the place out, waiting for him to appear, a bug in her masterful web. He swallowed, and only regained movement in his tensed muscles when he forced himself to straighten up, let his bag drop back to the floor with his laptop weighing it down.

He tried to loosen his muscles, to seem as approachable and innocuous as possible. Like a man who had nothing to hide.

“Hinata,” he forced himself to call out to her, hiding his left hand against his thigh where he clenched it into a fist so tight his knuckles turned white. Only for a moment, however, before releasing when she was close enough to touch. Bizarrely, the smile that rose to his face was genuine. Even now, seeing her in her crisp, royal blue uniform, a clear sign for an active criminal to run the other direction, he was glad to see her.

He was a fool.

“It’s good to see you,” he greeted her, and allowed his eyes to openly scan over her body, from the very top button fastened at her throat, to the gun holstered at her hip, to her roughened and worn work boots. “Wow,” he laughed, lifting his hand to scratch idly at a sideburn, his fingertip just barely touching the end of one of his scars as he kept up the play between them. She might not have enough on him to be lethal, just yet. She might just have an idea. If that were the case, then he could finagle his way out of this and disappear the next day. He was used to making himself disappear. He ignored the sudden ache that arose at the thought of never seeing her again, because that was ridiculous. “I thought you were a student from the local university, but man was I wrong. You’re a cop!”

She broke their pattern for the second time that morning by pulling out the chair across from him rather than the one adjacent to him, at her own table. She smiled at him and there was so much hidden behind a shaky mask that Naruto instantly knew she wasn’t yet the emergent threat he had thought her. She was struggling with something, and though her smile was sincere and her acknowledgment was warm, her usual luster was muted.

And then, while Naruto was still trying to convince himself that he wasn’t reeling, she threw another curve his way.

She said, “I’m a detective, actually.”

Naruto paled and thought, oh shit.

“Damn,” he said, and the surprise of his tone was as authentic as the bead of sweat suddenly trailing down his nape. “That’s awesome! I never would’ve guessed.”

Her resulting smile was wry, as though she got that a lot. She didn’t seem offended, however.

“What do you do, Naruto-kun?”

Naruto did not read too much into that inquiry. It was a common question.

“I work in IT right now at the local university, but I’m about to graduate.”

“What’s your major?” Genuinely curious.

“Ah, it’s kind of a mouthful. I study computer technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence.”

Hinata’s eyes brightened, surprised.

“Wow, Naruto-kun. That’s pretty awesome too.”

Naruto laughed, a stunted reaction. “If the cops need an expert IT guy, feel free to drop my name.”

At the same time that Naruto mentally kicked himself for repeatedly referring to the police as cops, something someone with a grudge or bias would do, he watched something curious flicker over Hinata’s expression. He tilted his head wonderingly, silently encouraging her to voice whatever she had perched under her tongue.

“That’s as good a segue as I’m going to get, I think.” This, she said under her breath, almost to herself. She straightened up and her uniform pulled tight across her chest, and her name badge gleamed, catching his attention.

Det. Hyuuga Hinata.

Hyuuga, Naruto thought, praying for his balls not to crawl up inside of his body. Hyuuga, as in the infamous police family the news loved to boast about—youngest trainees every generation, highest ranks, swiftest advancement through the ranks, elevated intelligence.

Keen intuition.

All-seeing eyes.

Naruto was so, so fucked.

If he made it out of this with freedom, he promised himself he’d actually start watching the news so he’d never have to feel this blindsided again.

“Your name is actually already at the station,” she started to explain, sitting with her back against her chair, as far from him as she could get without scooting away. He wondered if that was purposeful, and almost unconsciously scooted closer.

Naruto frowned, preparing himself for her big reveal. Whatever she had to say, it all started here. There was no use dragging it out. “What? Why?”

Hinata closed her eyes and sighed, a long moment to herself, before locking her eyes onto him with open perusal. Predator-mode, Naruto thought in pathetic amusement.

“There’s this case I’ve been working on for several months now,” she explained, and though Naruto was verging on panic, he still managed to notice for the first time the dark moons under her eyes, the lines of strain by her lips. She looked exhausted. “And your name is associated with it.”

Naruto swallowed, forcing his expression to appear confused and concerned without overdoing it. “What kind of case? The only trouble I’ve had with the law has been with foster parents.”

The words slipped out of him before he could even recognize them for what they were: the honest truth. One moment Hinata looked startled at the mention of his past, and the next it was as though she had filed that bit of information away for another time and was moving on with her original line of thought.

“There’s been a series of murders,” Hinata began, and Naruto felt all of the air leave his lungs. Relief made him light, eased the tension in his shoulders enough to allow him to project a more efficient façade of innocence. “And at each scene, the killer leaves three belongings behind. The items he leaves don’t belong to him, or even to the person he just killed. He uses items from his previous victim. Only, the first victim we found had some interesting things that, at first, we couldn’t trace.”

Naruto tried to wrap his head around this information, genuinely concerned and curious.

“Because, what, you’d need a previous victim for that guy too?”

“Well, simply put, yes.” Hinata continued to study him, eyes sharp and all-seeing. Naruto let her see, encouraged her to look now that he knew she was inquiring about something entirely different than his proclivity for robbing people. “But one of the items we found at the scene of that first murder leads right back to you, Naruto-kun.”

Naruto stopped breathing. “Me?”

Hinata nodded, the epitome of critical composure. Someone pulled the seat beside them out—the seat Naruto had thought of as Hinata’s, and sat at her table. Hinata glanced away from him for the first time to offer the other patron a friendly if muted smile before scooting in close to their own table, closer to Naruto. He pinched his thigh to distract himself from the lavender scent of her perfume, which he was now close enough to smell.

“You,” Hinata agreed. “Or, more precisely, your family.”

Naruto wondered how many punches Hinata was planning on throwing; none of them pulled, all of them ruinous.

It took Naruto several long, breathless moments to respond. He glanced around the coffee shop, needing to distract himself. When he blinked, he thought he could remember the quaking, but that was ridiculous.

He had only just barely turned two.

“Hinata…” he trailed off, having to clear his throat. Until now he’d convinced himself that he’d gotten better at this. At talking about what he never had like it was okay to never have it. Like anything about his past before Iruka was okay at all. This was all he had to offer, and all that he could manage: “I don’t remember them.”

Hinata was patient with him, and when he looked back to her from the corner of his eyes, still turned away, all he saw in her expression was genuine kindness, and the smallest hint of sadness she couldn’t seem to veil.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I have to ask, though. A picture of your parents holding you as a baby was found at the scene of the first murder.”

If Naruto had to describe what it felt like to feel one’s heart shatter to pieces, he would lead with this: it felt like the aftermath of burning. Like all that had ever been left of you was a patchwork of charred pieces, and a single detail in the grand scheme of things could crush you like an earthquake, until all that you were and all that you had been was this: ash on the heel of a monster called life.

Naruto closed his eyes and focused on breathing.

“That picture,” he choked, and a single tear pushed out from behind his closed eye. Honesty had never hurt so badly, but then, he had not had experience with admitting these things out loud to anyone other than Iruka, and even then, he left things out. “Was taken from me when I was a child.”

“Someone robbed you? Your home?”

Naruto did not say, what home?

Instead, he said, “I was robbed on the street. He thought it was my wallet. His mistake, thinking someone as poor as I was would even have the need to own one.”

Hinata winced, a subtle, inadvertent reaction. Naruto turned back to her fully, crossing his arms over his chest—an excuse to hold himself together.

“The flipbook,” Hinata clarified, so very carefully. She was treating him like spun glass.

“My flipbook,” Naruto amended quietly, nodding. He hadn’t thought about that picture for years, years, and now it was all he could see whenever he blinked. His father’s smiling face, his mother’s blatant awe; him cradled between them as if he were loved, as if he were precious.

He watched Hinata struggle with something behind her lips, watched her gnaw on her cheek and tap her hands against her thighs. If her tone and expression had not been enough for him to recognize how careful she was being with him, her inability to just be honest with him would have given her away instead. It was then that Naruto realized that the punches were going to keep coming, indefinitely. That a lifetime of punches were in store for him, some of them deserved, some of them not.

He was so tired of trying to dodge them. She had seen a picture of his parents. He felt raw.

And he wanted her honesty.

“I won’t break,” he reminded her, watching the way her eyes jumped to his almost guiltily, unsure. “If you push me, I won’t break. So come on, Hinata. Ask me your questions.”

He watched the way she physically steeled herself, pushing her shoulders back and sitting up straighter in her seat. He didn’t miss the way she fisted her hands, though, or the way she pressed them into her thighs hard enough to bruise.

“How do you feel about the thief who stole that picture from you?”

It was not the question he was expecting. He frowned, wondering if it was a trick. He was so tired of playing games.

“Angry,” he replied honestly, a snarl of an answer. Just that next moment, however, he deflated, shoulders drooping. He had aired his grievances about the situation before, over and over with Iruka’s ear to listen, his voice to soothe. Enough time had passed for Naruto to move on. “But I understand why he did it. I know what it’s like to have nothing. He thought it was a wallet. He thought it had money in it. He didn’t know it was the only picture of my family that I ever had.”

Naruto wondered for a moment why Hinata wasn’t writing any of this down, wondered if she was recording.

“Are you recording this?” He asked, not upset but curious. Hinata shook her head, a calm negation. She smiled slightly and lifted a hand to tap idly at her temple, her voice soft.

“I won’t forget.”

Somehow, that was reassuring.

“Naruto-kun, how did you survive the earthquake? And how did no one discover that you had? You were just a baby.”

She didn’t have to explain what she meant. There was only one natural disaster that had ever mattered to him, only one quake that had decimated his family, his home, and any chance at an ordinary life. It was her second question that he focused in on, wondering if he had to tread lightly here for his own protection. It was difficult for him to plan so far ahead, to see the future clear enough to know that if he said this, then the possibilities of that could occur. He could only clearly see here, and now, and Hinata’s open expression of wonder.

“I don’t remember. No one ever told me, either. I went from the hospital directly into the foster system before I could even understand that I existed.”

Naruto took a moment to have some of his tea, remembering their last meeting and his cold, wasted tea. Not this time, he thought with amusement he didn’t really feel.

“They gave me their last names,” he explained, tone deceptively nonchalant when internally he felt like he was freezing over. “I didn’t get to choose, and no one in the system remembered my surname anyways. My mother’s line died before it could even get to me.”

“Well,” Hinata began hesitantly, ever-careful. Her words were so gentle they soothed some of the chill he felt in his bones. “That’s not exactly true now, is it?”

Naruto felt the corner of his lips quirk, his eyes heavy with sudden fondness.

“I guess not, yeah.” He thought about it, and a genuine smile inched its way across his face when he added, “I am Uzumaki Naruto, after all.”

Hinata’s eyes widened, as though she had somehow gotten concrete proof of something she’d only just suspected, and it was that reaction that reminded Naruto that she was investigating a murder, that she was a detective. That he was a subject to be studied, even if she hadn’t discovered his crimes. It was far too easy to trust her, to want to lean into the warmth of her gentle kindness and just breathe.

“So you were in the foster system,” Hinata nudged, unconsciously leaning towards him. Drawn in.

“Until I was six, yeah. It was easier for me to live on the streets.”

That was a lie, it wasn’t easier but it was less painful. He wasn’t about to get into why.

Hinata’s expression dimmed, melancholy hanging on every beautiful slope of her face. He slid his tea over to her, smiling when she only blinked at the beverage.

“Try it,” he offered, smiling. “It’s delicious, believe it.”

“Uh,” she stuttered, one hand tentatively reaching out for the cup. “Are you sure?”

Naruto liked that she didn’t ask why, that she just asked permission. “Of course!”

He watched her lift the cup to her lips, careful not to spill, careful not to burn her tongue. She took the tiniest sip he had ever seen, and then a heartier gulp when she caught his disapproving glare. She set the cup back on the table and blinked, swallowing before a smile blossomed.

“Wow,” she said, and Naruto couldn’t help his muffled laughter.

“It’s that good,” he agreed easily, arms still held crossed over his chest, but held loosely now. “It makes everything better. You should ask your friend to make it for you.”

“I might,” Hinata laughed, her hand still on the top of the table. Naruto hesitated for only a blink before reaching out to rest his hand over hers, to offer a single supportive squeeze. He knew she’d let him touch her, she was a cop—a detective after all, and that warmed him.

“How would you know what to call it?”

Hinata froze, lips parting and then closing. Her cheeks gradually grew pink until she finally admitted, “My friend, Kiba-kun, he knows who you are. I figured I could just ask him to make me what you usually get.”

Naruto’s laughter was choppy and surprised, and he watched Hinata put her face into her hands, utterly embarrassed.

“Oh!” He crowed when he’d finally managed to settle down. “You’ve talked about me before?”

His amusement took a turn when he realized he may have mistaken what exactly she had talked to her friend about regarding him. Maybe it hadn’t been an interest for interest’s sake conversation.

Maybe it had been a suspicious sort of thing.

Naruto frowned, and Hinata misinterpreted it enough to rush to explain herself.

“Nothing bad, I promise,” she said. “He just saw us together and asked how we knew each other and then he riddled me with questions for the better half of an hour.”

“I don’t know if I wanna know what kinds of questions,” he laughed.

“Pushy ones,” Hinata grumbled, glancing over to where Naruto was sure she could see her friend clearly working behind the counter. “But I promise, nothing bad.”

Naruto hummed, considering. After a brief pause, he grinned at her. “I believe you.”

Her answering smile, radiant as it was, made his admission worthwhile.

“Speaking of pushy questions,” she shifted, expression apologetic. “What did you do to survive, when you lived on the streets?”

“For money, you mean?”

Hinata flushed, but didn’t back down. “Yes.”

“So many things. Too many things. Luckily I could get jobs as quickly as I could lose them. I was strong, even as a kid, so I did a lot of manual labor. Some work in the fields. A lot of time at vendors, selling vegetables that old people grew.”

Hinata’s eyebrows ticked up in surprise. “Venders?”

Naruto studied her, not wanting to make stereotypical judgements, but it was simply the reality of their differences in socioeconomic standing. Her name tag gleamed, catching his attention again, and he remembered that she had grown up in one of the wealthiest families this side of the West.

“In the poorer towns, they have venders that—“

Hinata cut him off, as politely as one could do so. “I know what venders are, Naruto-kun. My jurisdiction is far and wide within Hidden Leaf, and I have several friends that grew up on the far side of Leaf’s west sector.”

Naruto paused, shocked. He was inexplicably pleased to have been wrong, and his admiration for Hinata only seemed to continue to grow. Even if she was pushing her way into his secrets and edging dangerously close to the origins of his criminal activity. Some part of him in the back of his mind wondered if that was her intention.

“Oh, yeah, well,” he stuttered, caught off guard despite himself. “Venders were a huge part of how I got cash. And working there had some serious perks; you wouldn’t believe the amount of cabbage I’ve eaten in my lifetime.”

Hinata grinned, shaking her head. Simple understanding with no need for explanation.

“I see,” she said, and her voice rang with muffled humor. A bell yet un-rung. Naruto grinned in response.

“What about you?” He asked, pushy without hesitation. “What were you before you were a defender of justice?”

Hinata sputtered over the title, only half-posed in jest. Her cheeks flared and he could see in her a kind of pride that straightened her out, pushed down on her shoulders.

“Ah,” she sighed, “I have always wanted to be a detective, Naruto-kun. Ever since I was a little girl. My mother was Bureau Chief, and my father was lead detective there for a while.”

Hinata hesitated, eyeing him carefully. Naruto pretended not to notice the added focus and merely blinked at her, his smile as lofty as it was lazy.

“I have a lot of family in the force,” she continued after the pause, apparently finding in him something that made her remain cautious. He wondered where he’d made a misstep, and if he had the capacity to make up for it. Her eyes were as shrewd as ever, though, and he could see in the taut lines of her posture that she was closing off. “I went straight into the Academy and advanced from there, over the years. I never had time to be anything other than what I knew I wanted to be.”

Hinata smiled. “And I’m happy for it.”

“That’s what matters most, right?” Naruto hedged, leaning his weight on his forearms. The table’s surface was cold under the heat of his skin. Someone behind him choked, their beverage probably going down the wrong pipe. When Naruto glanced around, the café was as boisterous as always, and the lights inside were ever-humming. He could see Hinata’s friend at the counter, casting periodic glances their way. Naruto turned back to her and smiled.

“As long as you love what you do and you’re doing it for the right reasons,” he said, thinking of Iruka, “Then it’s the right thing to do.”

Hinata watched him, a sudden stillness to the frame of her. Despite the warning bells in his head, Naruto did not back down from her probing stare. He gazed back at her, a touch more fondly than he probably should have, especially in the face of her veiled distrust of him, but—

He liked her.

After a pause even she couldn’t veil for normalcy’s sake, Hinata said, “I don’t know if I quite agree with that, actually.”

Naruto couldn’t help the quirk of his lips, the jaded smirk that bloomed over his confident expression as he leaned back in his chair. He crossed his feet out in front of him under the table, his hands sliding down into his pockets. He didn’t respond to her, and she took the initiative to continue.

“Some things are not right, or just, simply because we love them.” She watched him sharply, her eyes piercing into him, hooks to flesh. “It’s important that you know that, Naruto-kun.”

At that, she pushed her chair out from their table, the legs screeching against the linoleum flooring; a piercing cry to shatter the peace of their understanding. Hinata rose to her full height and shifted her bag over her shoulders, aimlessly tucking her hair behind her ears. She tucked her chair in without hindering his outstretched legs, a practiced sort of efficiency to her every move, and Naruto watched and watched and couldn’t look away.

His heart raced in his chest, prey caught in a bone cage, sealed with Hinata’s barbed kindness.

She turned over her shoulder one last time and offered Naruto one parting sentiment, equal parts a warning and a threat:

“Even if something is done out of love,” she said stoically, an angel of justice, strung tight and standing tall, shoulders thrust back with lawful pride, “If it causes harm or hardship, it is not just. It is corruption.”

And with that, she strode evenly through the room, never once looking back to him; not even with the heavy weight of his considering stare haunting her shoulders, so proudly pulled taut. Naruto felt himself swallow, just once, a gavel falling, and wondered how much time he had before she came for him. He wondered if anyone could see the tremble of his skin, the jerking of his muscles. The fear and the excitement, bot

 A lynx, he remembered suddenly, pressed into her skin in droplets of ink.

And it was reckless and foolish—the most foolish thing he had ever done in his life and he had done many foolish things—but still he felt the stirrings of interest in the base of his gut. Even with his throat between her teeth, he found himself smiling.

There was something special about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly, evasive as she was, inherently. She was beautiful and she was strong and there was a kindness to her that edged between the slits of his ribs, pierced right where it counted.

And he didn’t mind it.

Dangerous as it was, as she was, he didn’t mind.

Naruto wondered if this conflict of interest was how Icarus had felt, as he fell.

That there was beauty in the breaking, and the fall worth it all.

 ✧

 Naruto could have run.

He could have never picked up the phone; packed what few things truly belonged to him and made it out west to Iruka for good.

He could have escaped this.

Instead, he had answered his phone. He had agreed to meet and answer some questions.

He had brought himself to the station.

He wanted to see her.

They did not handcuff him, but they might as well have. The door of the interrogation room was heavy, and sealed with a violent whoosh. In front of him, in her stark but stunning cobalt uniform, Hinata stood facing him. She watched him carefully, but there was an indifference to her stare that irritated him; as though just by being within the walls of the precinct all that had transpired between them was forgotten.

She looked at him like he was a stranger.

He didn’t like it.

Naruto sat at a small table with a small glass of water within arm’s reach. He was not sweating or shaking, and his heartbeat was steady. He did not look away from Hinata, even as he knew that he was being observed through the two-way mirror over her shoulder.

She did not pace; she remained relatively steady, only shifting her weight every now and again in-between questions. Many of them, as she had informed him at the beginning of their session, were the same she had asked him at Ichiraku. Only this time, they were being recorded—with his permission.

Some, however, were new; like the ones inquiring about his whereabouts on certain dates, and whether or not he had known Jiraiya Monogatari personally.

He had.

“Jiraiya was like a funky uncle to me,” Naruto explained honestly, resting his hands on the tops of his thighs. He wanted to grip the material of his jeans, the edge of the table, anything he could get his hands on to settle himself. Hinata had to have known that she was pulling sensitive information from him—personal, intimate information he had never shared with anyone before. Even Iruka was unaware of some of the information Hinata fished out of him.

“I met him when I was still working at a vender, when I was twelve. He would buy radishes from me. I never saw him eat ‘em, but he’d always buy ‘em. And he’d bring me gifts.”

Naruto left out the part about the gifts being stolen goods, and Jiraiya being the mentor who had taught him the skill of pickpocketing in the first place.

Instead, he continued on as honestly as he could while edging around the criminal background of both himself and his mentor. Hinata blinked once, considering, and continued to watch him hawkishly.

“I didn’t know much about him outside of that relationship, though.”

“It sounds like you knew Jiraiya Monogatari better than you’re letting on.” Hinata hedged, and Naruto wondered if she were truly suspicious or if she were merely playing devil’s advocate for those watching through the mirror. He truly didn’t know which was true, and there wasn’t an inch of Hinata that gave her away. She was as solid and unbending as steel.

Naruto clenched his jaw, twice, two lapses in control. “He was nice to me when no one else was.”

“And was that it?” Hinata asked, insistent. She took a few steps until she could rest her hip against the edge of the table, her arms crossing over her generous chest. Naruto couldn’t help the way his eyes trailed over her, drawn to the structure of her uniform and how well she wore it. He just barely prevented himself from swallowing, not wanting to show any signs of weakness. “He didn’t take you under his wing, teach you anything while you lived on the streets?”

But Naruto was incomprehensibly partial to Hinata in uniform. He didn’t mind her tone of voice even when it just barely dipped into an acerbic pool, something turbid and clinical. He didn’t even mind that she was bringing up his past again, his life on the streets. He could see the paths she had weaved around them, the different ways she circled him, preparing to come in for the kill. She knew that something about him was off, that something was wrong, but she was pinning him for the wrong crimes.

He was not a murderer.

And he was not a traitor, either. Years of training under Jiraiya’s care flashed through his mind and Naruto had a moment to be thankful that it was unconstitutional to use truth serum on regular old potential criminals.

“I barely knew him,” Naruto repeated.

Hinata paused, a noticeable deficit that caught Naruto’s attention. She studied his expression and there was an unusual seriousness to her with an edge of something new swirling in the depths of her gaze, almost pleading. It was as though she were offering him an out if he had one, encouraging him to take it if it existed at all; wanting him to take it.

He had nothing for her, and so he said nothing at all.

He could almost literally see the hope leave her, exhaled out of the depths of her lungs. Her shoulders sagged for only a moment, a deep and heavy breath that must’ve been riding her insistently, before she straightened. She turned to him completely, squaring her body language off against his with barbs and edges. Everything about her was treacherous, a jungle cat lurking in the shadows, slowly circling.

She was every ounce a predator, and Naruto would only just realize that she wasn’t shy about using what leverage she had to corner him completely.

She said, “It seems quite the coincidence that Jiraiya Monogatari, the infamous pocket thief of Hidden Leaf, would come into your life as a child and not leave any lasting impression.” She ignored completely, purposely, the way that Naruto stiffened. He couldn’t regain the loss of control, his unconscious reaction to her knowledge of the not-so-hidden truth, and by the time he wished he could, she was already speaking.

Almost haphazardly, as if she weren’t about to deliver the second in a vicious one-two punch, she added, “Especially considering that you have a penchant for the same recreational activities.”

Naruto felt his heart fall through his chest. It was somewhere down there by his feet, his ankles, and he took a flickering moment to wonder what it would feel like to be weighed down by shackles, by chains—

Because that was where he was headed.

He stared up at Hinata with clear eyes, perhaps for the first time since he had met her, and still he did not want to turn away. She was every inch the statue of justice he had imagined her previously, a soldier and a statute both. He could see the disquiet in her expression, those ever-expressive eyes. That she took no pleasure in exposing him, catching him, capturing.

That this was difficult for her; he, a relative stranger to her, enough of something to unsettle her.

It was the thought of Iruka finding out about this that kept down the smile pushing valiantly at his lips. Iruka, alone in the outskirts of a no-name town, waiting for Naruto for months, for years, wondering. Worrying and suspecting. The eventual realization, the crushing acceptance.

Naruto didn’t want to do that to him.

“Recreational activities?” He asked, and watched clearly as Hinata frowned, her expression pinching. She knew she had him, well and truly caught, but there was not a chance in hell he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. He was going to make this as difficult as he could—even if that meant making it difficult for her, too. In this case, he realized, especially so.

“I don’t get what you mean, Hinata.”

“I never would’ve guessed, when I first met you,” Hinata responded unflinchingly. She sounded critical, more so of herself than anything else. “I didn’t even see what was right in front of me.  Yellow and gold; blonde and scarred; a tattered orange jacket.”

Naruto frowned, cocking his head to the side even as his heart gave its first lunge of the evening. He urged it back into submission.

“You said it yourself, really.” She continued, solemn and self-depreciating. “You and that hoodie are one of a kind.”

“I’m not sure I get it,” Naruto started, playing dumb and finding his eyes caught on the gleam of Hinata’s wet lower lip. “Based off of those few things, you think I’m a criminal?”

Hinata didn’t hesitate. “A thief, yes.”

Naruto paused, letting her response speak for itself for lack of sufficient evidence.

“I don’t mean to be rude, Hinata, but don’t you think you need more evidence than that?”

“Of course. There are many blonde men with scarred faces in this town.” Hinata agreed seriously, easily nodding her head. She glanced down at her boots, scuffed them briefly against the tile before glancing up at him through her eyelashes for only a moment. She spoke even as she stared down, a posture of defeat with words of triumph. “But I also just so happened to witness one of your most recent outings. If I remember correctly, it was an ascot, a pair of sunglasses, and a purse.”

Naruto didn’t move a muscle, not even to blink. He felt how well and truly cornered he was, and wondered if Hinata was lying. He didn’t think that she was, something of his intuition telling him that while she might’ve had the capacity to be an excellent liar, she wouldn’t utilize it. Too shady.

So that meant she was telling the truth—and that meant he was screwed.

All of the laidback rebuffs he had planned slipped from his memory, and all he had left in him was simple frustration. She wasn’t looking at him, was still looking down at her boots. Naruto watched her carefully for several long moments, trying to find the right words. None of them felt right, because none of them were true.

He was so blindsided by the fact that she knew, she knew—more about him than he had ever imagined, that he could barely think. How long had it been? Was his silence stretching, telltale of a guilty conscience, a lack of excuses?

Why wasn’t she looking at him?

Frustration was the monopolizing feeling coursing through him, like heat in his veins. She hadn’t once referred to him by his name since he’d gotten to the station, not even to welcome him, nor to invite him inside. She was putting distance between them so rapidly he had whiplash, and he hated it.

She was beautiful even as she cornered him and cut off his future, his freedom, and yet even for all of that, he couldn’t hate her.

“Say my name, Hinata,” he said, and it was her turn to be shocked. He watched her eyes leap to his, wide-eyed with lips parting in surprise. She pushed away from the table and pointedly ignored the two-way window behind her. Naruto ignored it as well, watching her as she began to pace. Though she seemed every bit the wildcat, Naruto suddenly felt power reinstated within him. He was at a structural disadvantage, caught and seated and captured, but in this strange connection that had begun to grow between them, he was the stronger.

Because unlike Hinata, he had nothing to lose.

And, well, even if he had? He was still the kind of person who would’ve went all in anyways.

Hinata managed to rein herself in enough to continue trying to push and prod him, to incite some sort of anger or frustration that would get him to confess. But she underestimated the frustration he felt at being ignored by someone he had thought he was growing close to—the first person he’d wanted to keep around in years.

She tried to goad him, said, “I wonder even now if you were thinking of what you could steal from me, that day in the coffee shop.”

“When we first met,” Naruto agreed without actually agreeing to the crime. “You didn’t know me or my name then. You do now. Say it.”

Hinata glared at him, eyes flashing. She turned on her heel and continued to pace, jarring her head in one sharp negation that Naruto assumed meant she had declined interference from whoever was watching the show. Naruto had nearly forgotten they were there, he was so focused on her.

“Say me name, Hinata.” A challenge, plain and simple.

His tone worked, stopped Hinata’s pacing as she spun on her heel to face him. She raised her chin, haughty and untouchable in her crisp cobalt edges.

“This is not the time to be playing games, Naruto-kun,” And before Naruto could do anything other than smile with satisfaction, Hinata threw yet another punch: “You are suspected of murder.”

Naruto shot straight up in his seat, hands coming to grip the edge of the table. His surprise was not feigned, and the satisfaction of having gotten her to say his name, to admit to their intimacy—however brief—fell to the wayside.

“What?” He asked, shocked nearly to silence. Hinata studied his expression for flaws, for cracks. She folded her arms over her chest and said, “The first victim, Jiraiya Monogatari, was a man you knew well. He taught you how to pickpocket. How to steal. He was also the first man found dead in this string of murders I’m working on. Your family’s personal effects were found on scene.”

Naruto, heated with the accusation, snarled, “I would never hurt him! I loved him!”

Hinata’s eyes flashed with something like triumph mixed with sorrow, as though every time he came closer to admitting his criminal activity both sides of her responded in kind—the detective and the friend he had made.

“I thought you barely knew him, Naruto-kun,” and oh, he thought, it was a twisted kind of cruel for her to use his name now only as a weapon. She was more dangerous than he could have ever imagined, and all the same, he felt a stirring deep in his gut that felt like a wave of heat.

Interest. Excitement. So poorly timed.

Naruto gritted his teeth. “I knew him enough to love him. He was good to me.”

“If you lied about how well you knew him,” Hinata forged ahead, relentless in her pursuit of the truth. “Then why should we believe you now, when you say you didn’t kill him?”

“Because I loved him!” Naruto shouted, fists banging on the table. His rage boiled over, and he realized all at once that this, too, was a trick. Maybe Hinata didn’t mean for it to be, but a killed capable of murder might have a temper, might be proud and easily angered.

And he was showing all the signs to her and whoever was behind the glass.

“What motive would I have?” He finally asked, deflating. Worry rang him dry.

Hinata didn’t move, not even to shift her weight.

“Jiraiya Monogatari is the reason that your parents are dead.”

Naruto stopped breathing. He was exhausted with so many surprise hits, each of them aiming for organs more vital than the last. His mentor, his friend…responsible for the death of his parents?

“You’re lying,” he snarled, low and mean, baring his teeth. Hinata flinched, not from the tone nor the insinuation, but from the truth she was being forced to deliver to an unsuspecting son.

“I’m not, Naruto-kun.” She whispered, voice low and even.

“There was an earthquake.”

“The ground shook, yes,” Hinata hedged, and when Naruto looked up at her his expression was as drained as it ever had been. He felt more raw than he could ever remember. He thought, how could someone so beautiful be so cruel? But even then, he knew that the cruelty wasn’t entirely her fault. It belonged to whoever clouded his past with lies, whoever forged the truth of his and his parents’ lives with falsehoods.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means the ground shook,” Hinata repeated. “At least, that’s the story that was to be reported. In truth, Naruto-kun, there was an explosion. An attack. And your Jiraiya was there when it happened.”

Naruto closed his eyes, wanting to bow his head, to tuck into himself until he was as small as he could become, small enough to disappear, even. He grit his teeth and counted to ten, pictured a river and a forest and a leaf, so many things he’d used to calm his anxiety over the years, but nothing worked now.

“Why was it covered up like that?”

“It’s a long story,” Hinata began, lifting a hand when he opened his eyes and snapped, “I have a right to know.”

“You do, of course you do,” she agreed. “And you’ll have plenty of time to hear it. But right now, we have a different issue at hand.”

Naruto’s jaded smile was a sharp and sardonic shadow across his jaw. “Are you going to detain me?”

“Detain?” Hinata questioned, and he could hear the way she restructured her voice with steel. He watched her beautiful lips wrap around the words, her fair skin paler than usual. She was exquisite, unique and indomitable, and he liked her. “You have already been detained, for questioning.”

He liked her.

“What I am going to do, as a detective of Hidden Leaf,” Hinata pushed on, straightening her shoulders even as the light left her eyes, a sadness she couldn’t or wouldn’t withhold from him covering her expression in shadows. “Is arrest you, for three counts of witnessed theft and seven suspected murders.”

Naruto’s heart clenched. He thought of Iruka again, and everything in him ached. A prison cell couldn’t be awful—he already had barely anything to his name, and his studio apartment was barely larger than a cell would be. It was the loss of freedom, the loss of Iruka, and even the loss of the innocent relationship he had begun to form with Hinata that hurt him.

He couldn’t help but to plead, “Hinata, please, you have to believe me. I would never hurt anyone. I would never kill anyone.”

Hinata frowned, trying desperately to keep up the façade of a lawful detective upholding rightful justice. But she was wrong—she had to know there was something off. She wasn’t the same statue of conviction as she had been; there was uncertainty in her, enough to give Naruto an inkling of hope.

“Please,” he begged, not even knowing exactly what he was asking of her other than this one truth: to believe him when it counted, when he was telling the truth. He had not murdered anyone.

“Uzumaki Naruto,” she whispered, at just the same moment that the door behind him opened up and he could hear the clank of steel against steel. Shackles for the bare skin of his wrists. He watched Hinata with heavy eyes, exhausted and raw and unashamedly himself before her.

He rose to his full height, the only real advantage he seemed to have over her, and watched her beautiful lips shape the words: “You have the right to remain silent.”