Chapter Text
“It’s just a reconnaissance job for now. If it becomes something more complicated, return here to discuss it with me.”
Yosano stands kind-of-at-attention next to Ranpo while Fukuzawa explains their next agency assignment.
She’s never been too clear on the etiquette for these briefings. It’s always a little awkward. Their teeny-tiny office space isn’t big enough for a meeting or briefing room—it’s barely big enough for Yosano to have her own infirmary, just one big room and one smaller room. So she and Ranpo just always end up standing in front of the whole office while Fukuzawa talks and their two overworked secretaries pretend to not be listening in.
Still. It’s better than the actual lack of an office that Fukuzawa and Ranpo had when they first picked her up, and they conducted all their meetings in Fukuzawa’s itty-bitty living room. At last, after four years of mostly-tireless, mostly-thankless, and always-expensive work for the protection of the city and whatnot, they’ve at least managed to rent a proper office with proper employees and a proper infirmary. She probably won’t have to worry about letting Fukuzawa bleed all over his own carpet anymore.
Probably.
He’s been backing off of the jobs, anyway. Now that Ranpo and Yosano are, y’know, actually adults, he’s been slowly but surely putting more of the field work into their hands. Not that Yosano isn’t glad for it—she much prefers field work to sitting bored in her little infirmary—but it does make them awfully busy.
“Please,” the dock owner sighs. She’s their client for this assignment. Dock renters are a common sight in Yokohama, being a port city and all, and they’re frequenters of the ADA. Yosano didn’t catch this woman’s name, and doesn’t really care too much, but she’s been nice enough and looks utterly exhausted out of her mind. Yosano can relate. “Just find whoever’s driving my clients away. Stop them if you can, but really I only need a name, organization, anything—something I can sue.” She drags a hand down her face. “Not looking forward to the expenses, but I need my docks back.”
“We understand perfectly, miss,” Fukuzawa reassures her. “These are our top two detectives—“
Yosano nearly snorts. They’re the only detectives.
“—and I’m certain they’ll be able to find your culprit. Right?”
“Absolutely!” Ranpo bounces on his toes. “It’ll be simple, easy-as-pie work for this genius detective!”
Yosano clears her throat.
“And this other detective too!”
She elbows him in the side. Hard.
The poor dock owner rakes a skeptical eye across the two of them. “My colleagues recommend your agency very highly,” she says, as though she’s doubting her colleagues’ trustworthiness. “I hope they’ll be proven correct.”
“Sure thing!” Ranpo tips his hat.
“Don’t worry,” Yosano smiles. “We’ve got this handled.”
——————
“Do we actually got this handled?” Yosano asks Ranpo on their way out the door.
“Yup,” he practically skips out into the hall of their building. “We’re just spying on her docks to find the trespassers, yeah? Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.”
He’s dressed a little more inconspicuously than normal—it had taken some convincing. Instead of his usual cape and businesswear, he’s just in a simple button-down and jeans, as though he was any other nineteen-year-old out for a stroll and not the former child prodigy genius that Yosano knows all too well.
He had insisted on keeping the dumb hat, though.
Yosano herself is rather excited to be out of a tie for once. It’s rare she actually gets to wear the clothes she buys. Acting and spying aren’t her strong suits, per se, but these kinds of gigs are always sorta fun anyway.
“And you’re not feeling like making it easier-peasier-lemony-squeezier by just…” she mimes putting on glasses.
“Nahhhhh,” Ranpo waves dismissively at her, all closed eyes and sharp grins. “That’s boring.”
“Sure, sure,” Yosano rolls her eyes.
After an hour or so of uneventful walking—the day is nice, and the taxi fare just isn’t worth it, even if it means she has to drag Ranpo away from candy shops—the ocean comes just barely into view ahead of them, in the far distance. It’s only a thin blue line from here, mostly hidden by the thousands of cargo-bearing ships and sailboats that clutter Yokohama’s port waters.
Yosano leads the two of them towards the entrance to the personal boat docks, where their client has been renting out her waterside property to assorted sailors. According to her, it’s mostly fishermen and recreational sailors. No one that should be getting unwelcome attention, but you never know.
“Which dock number is it, again?” Ranpo asks, squinting at the multicolored boat horde.
“The lady owns docks forty-two to forty-seven,” Yosano offers absently. It doesn’t actually mean anything to Ranpo, but he’ll want to know the numbers anyway.
“Neat!” he exclaims, proving Yosano right.
“This way,” she chuckles. Ranpo doesn’t look remotely ashamed at his inability to find painted numbers on the ground, but that’s alright. It’s what Yosano’s here for, besides making sure no one kicks the bucket.
They’re a ways above the docks themselves still, and she plans on keeping it that way. The stone stairway leading down to sea level is not only cramped, but horribly exposed, and they’ll be completely visible to anyone on the docks from any direction if they actually go down there. Instead, she leads Ranpo around the side of some sort of squat, red brick customs building.
“There,” she sits down heavily on the sandy grass. They’re right up against the drop to the boats, and she can see the bright white paint of docks forty-one to fifty-three easily.
She points to their client’s docks, almost directly below them. “That’s them. Empty for now, but if people start showing up…”
“Great!” Ranpo digs into his pockets for one of his Emergency Pocket-Pops, patent pending. “Now if you’ll excuse me—“
“Oh, speak of the devil.”
Now this could be interesting. Yosano watches a small crowd of black-suited men stroll off the stairs and onto the docks. A few come walking down from the other direction, too.
“Aww,” Ranpo pouts. “I wanted to play I-Spy.”
“Port Mafia, do you think? They look like mooks.”
“They’re in conspicuous black suits with barely-hidden holsters and sunglasses,” Ranpo says flatly. “No, I think they’re fishermen.”
Yosano snorts. “What do you think they want?”
“Dunno. Hey, do you wanna get out of here?”
Yosano glances over at him. Ranpo’s head is tilted—deceptively playful. But it’s a genuine question, she knows.
They’ve been avoiding putting her on Port Mafia missions, recently.
“Nah,” she rolls her eyes. “Just a spying job, right? Easy-peasy?”
“Easy-peasy,” Ranpo reaffirms with a short nod.
Easy-peasy.
She can do easy-peasy.
More of the mafia gathered while they were talking, clustered in a small black-clad crowd on the docks. She squints to try and make out more details, but low-ranking mafiosos dress similarly for a reason. They sort of all blur together in a mass of suits and sunglasses, like a zebra herd.
“See anything interesting?” she asks Ranpo.
“Mm, not really,” he hums. “They’re looking for something, though. Seems kinda important.”
Now that Ranpo has pointed it out, it does look like they’re searching. They keep walking by the boats, swiveling their heads and talking into walkie-talkies. It’s all a bit overdone.
“Whatever they’re looking for is probably hidden on one of the sailboats—hey, is that Mori?” Ranpo’s eyes widen, violently apple-green in the shadow of their cover. “He’s definitely not supposed to be here.”
What?
Yosano freezes. She intensely scans the crowd of black suits, just seeing the edge of a red scarf before Ranpo grabs her arms and drags her back so she can duck further behind the brick building. His eyes are narrowed in what Yosano usually likes to call his ‘Investigation Mode.’ She’d laugh at him if she wasn’t too busy trying to stave off a panic attack.
Yosano breathes. In four, out eight, Fukuzawa always says. Yosano can’t tell if it’s the breathing or that counting that helps—but if it works, it works.
Cool. Now she can be calm. Breathing? Controlled. Hands? Not shaking, hey, that’s good! Brain? Prepared to investigate. Mostly.
Okay. Business time.
“Can you see him from here?” she asks.
“Mhm.”
She risks a glance around the side of the building, hoping that Ranpo might be wrong—for the first time ever—but no. She’d recognize Mori’s dumbass middle-aged mom haircut anywhere, still unchanged despite the past four years.
She grabs Ranpo’s wrist. “What’s he doing?”
“Can’t tell yet,” Ranpo says shortly. “This seems a liiiiittle bit below his pay grade.”
At least he doesn’t have Elise with him. That girl creeps her out.
“Oh, he’s talking to someone.”
Mori waves to someone near him with a smile that sets Yosano’s teeth on edge. She shoves down the shudder crawling up her spine and sets all her focus to watching.
Someone in a black coat, shorter than most of the other mafia grunts, walks right up to Mori. She gets a good look at his face when he turns to tell Mori something, and—
Shit.
That’s a kid.
In the heavy black coat of the mafia, with white bandaging wrapped around most of his exposed skin, a gun at his hip—that’s a kid.
The kid—a teenager, on the younger end probably—calls something out. It’s too indistinct to hear over the sounds of the ocean and city around them, but the crowd of gathered mafiosos reacts with… surprise?
No, no no no—some redhead in a hat and jacket walks out from the shadow of the stairs towards the bandaged kid. They look around the same age, damnit. The bandaged kid starts talking with broad, dramatic gestures, and the redhead sounds loudly exasperated.
And through it all, Mori watches.
“He’s got more kids,” she whispers. “Ranpo. Ranpo, he’s got more kids—is he—is he what, collecting them?” She tries to joke, but she knows it’s unconvincing, as breathless as she is. She tightens her grip on Ranpo’s wrist.
“…We need to get out of sight first.” Ranpo uses her grip on him to pull her away. Away from the docks, away from Mori’s glinting smile, exactly how she remembers it. Away from the actual teenagers he’s somehow managed to drag into the mafia.
All Yosano can think is not again.
“The President said to go back if things get complicated. I think this counts as complicated?” Ranpo turns back to face her, asking a silent question alongside the verbal one.
She grits her teeth. Not again.
“Yep,” she says. “This is complicated, alright.”
——————
Encounters with the Port Mafia aren’t uncommon for the ADA, exactly. They’re the culprit in about a quarter of their jobs, give or take. They’ve been starting something of a rivalry recently—something about Fukuzawa and Mori knowing each other years ago, and being on different sides of justice and all.
They used to be a mess, when Yosano got picked up for the Agency. More akin to a natural disaster than a respected criminal organization. They were easier to deal with, then. But about a year ago, they shaped up. Started to slowly reorganize themselves and restore all their former glory and whatever. All because of one man.
Yosano’s worst nightmare in human form.
The damned bastard himself.
Mori Ougai.
Fukuzawa stopped assigning her to Port Mafia jobs after Mori took over. Yosano still isn’t sure if she’s furious about being coddled, or vaguely grateful that she isn’t expected to face the man down. Not that the asshole does much of the work himself, but still.
It’s a stupid phobia. One that Yosano’s been planning on beating down for a long time now, her past with him be damned.
But it’s a little more complex now than just walking up to Mori, stabbing him, and slapping him for good measure, then maybe sending her chainsaw through his little doll’s magical limbs. Now he has kids.
If he’s anything like what he was back then…
At least these two are teenaged boys. Mori’s preferences are fairly specific, and those kids don’t fit, so they can… hopefully escape that particular side of Mori. But the rest of him?
Well.
Let’s just say it’s activating Yosano’s fight-or-flight instinct, and every nerve, muscle, and bone in her body says fight!
Unfortunately, the ADA does have to work with the good of the city in mind, which means digging up Fukuzawa’s old assassin-y skills to remove Mori’s head from his shoulders isn’t actually a great idea. Balance, power vacuum, blah blah blah.
But there’s nothing to stop her from saving those kids.
“Sir,” Yosano finishes up her long-winded explanation to the President, “I would like to request permission to—“
“Granted,” Fukuzawa says without a second’s hesitation.
Yosano sharply grins to hide the way relief threatens to overcome her composure. “Thank you, sir.”
“No need.” Fukuzawa clears his throat. “Precautions will have to be taken, of course, since we don’t want to anger the entire mafia. Also, I expect you will encounter some… obstacles in convincing these children to abandon the lives they know. Be wary.”
“I figured,” Yosano nods, and it’s true. She would have been hard-pressed to quit the military experiment even after months of hell, back when she was a kid. Even knowing what she does now, she probably would have stayed until the end of it. It’s hard—no. It’s more than hard. It’s practically impossible to just… abandon lives they she knows she can save.
Yosano is more than prepared to face this particular difficulty. Mostly.
“But first, we need info,” Ranpo interjects from where he’s bothering the secretaries by lying across their desks like a cat.
“True,” she acquiesces. “We need to know just how important these two are to the mafia, and how much is actually known about them.”
“We gotta figure out what they’re after, too. If we can lure ‘em away from our client lady’s docks, all the better.”
“Oh, good idea. Two birds and one stone.”
Fukuzawa nods, stern and Presidentish. “Then you have your missions. A dual assignment—gather information both on the Port Mafia’s strange activities, and on the two minors that seem to be working for them.”
Ranpo shoots him a thumbs-up.
“Then go!” Fukuzawa shouts, and the agency scrambles into action.
——————
“I’ll get you three chocolate chip cookie packages if you use Super Deduction to figure out what the Port Mafia’s after,” Yosano tells Ranpo as soon as Fukuzawa leaves. To talk to some acquaintances of his, apparently.
“Ooooh,” Ranpo sings, “Yosano’s serious about this, isn’t she?”
She rolls her eyes. “Duh. Do we have a deal?”
“Of course we do!” Ranpo holds out a hand. With the both of them grinning at each other, Yosano firmly shakes it.
——————
By the time Yosano has come back from the grocery store, Ranpo has already set himself up in a nest of papers, laptops, candy, and a cork board, glasses firmly on his face. She sets the three packages beside him, and he smiles up at her, pushing up his glasses with one finger.
“I know what they’re looking for and why,” Ranpo explains. “But there’s a bit more to this particular case, and I think we need to know it all. You should owe me for all this extra work I’m doing.”
“Gotcha.”
The door squeaks open.
“I have information.”
Fukuzawa enters their small office without much fanfare, sitting down heavily in an empty desk chair. “For the first boy, they’re calling him the ‘Demon Prodigy.’”
“Wowwww,” Ranpo drawls. “How inventive.”
Yosano almost wants to laugh. It bubbles and chokes up in her throat, not quite near hysteria, not quite darkly humorous.
“Angels and demons,” is all she ends up saying, lightly touching the butterfly in her hair. “Like no one’s ever thought of that before.”
It’s… uncomfortable, to say the least, to know just how much Mori still thinks of her. She doesn’t want to be on the mind of a doctor-turned-mafia-boss that collects powerful children like trading cards. She doesn’t want to be remembered like that.
“Mori’s creativity aside,” Fukuzawa wryly continues, “any other information on that boy is being kept heavily classified. He’s either very valuable, very vulnerable, or both.”
“My money’s on both,” Ranpo interjects. “Mori clearly wants him close. And he’s all bandaged, right? That usually indicates injuries,” he raises a playful eyebrow at Yosano, “unless I’m mistaken?”
“Ha ha,” Yosano rolls her eyes. “It could be ability-related, and not that he’s just injured all the time. Oh! Maybe he manipulates them, uses them like a whip or something.”
“Nope,” Ranpo cheerfully taps something on one of his laptop keyboards. “He’s got a passive ability. That, I’m sure of.”
Yosano doesn’t bother questioning him. It would be fruitless, anyway. He’s right. She turns back to Fukuzawa. “What about the other kid?”
“The redhead, yes?”
Yosano nods.
“Most information on him is similarly classified. But he is apparently not under Mori’s direct command, but a different Executive’s.”
Interesting. “Then what was he doing at the docks?”
“He and Mummy-Boy were familiar with each other. Fancy-Hat was probably working with Mummy, and then Mori by extension,” Ranpo looks up at the President. “Right?”
Fukuzawa nods. “They tended to be spoken about together. Not under any official capacity—but still.”
“It’ll make them easier to talk to, at least,” Yosano offers.
“True.” Fukuzawa nods.
“That why you want all this Port Mafia info?” Ranpo says.
She stares at him.
Ranpo winks.
Of course he’s already figured out the gist of her plan. Whether it’s because he’s keeping Super Deduction active, or because he just knows her well enough by now, or because he’s just smart enough—it doesn’t really matter.
“Do you approve?” She asks, not bothering to fill in the gaps of their silent conversation.
“Can’t think of anything better,” he shrugs. Then squints. “Well, I can, but it would involve puppies and snipers, so—“
“Absolutely not,” Fukuzawa glares.
“Thought so.”
Taking advantage of the lull in conversation, Yosano claps her hands together. “First order of business is to actually get a message through. Who would be better to contact?” she asks Fukuzawa.
“The Demon Prodigy boy,” Fukuzawa responds. “If the rumors hold, he’s a strategist of some kind. He’ll be more willing to hear you out.”
“And the ginger won’t be?” Yosano raises a brow.
“His temper is rather legendary,” Fukuzawa shrugs.
“Ah. Hey, how did you find out about all this, anyway?”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” Fukuzawa doesn’t smirk, but it’s a near thing. “People tend to chat, when you play board games. All you really need to do is listen.”
“Are—are you trying to tell me that you just so happen to play Go with a bunch of mafia members?” Yosano lets her incredulity filter into her tone. “And they just so happen to let slip important information?”
“Hm. I wonder.”
“I work with the weirdest people on the planet,” Yosano chuckles, a little despairingly.
Fukuzawa only arches a brow, as if to say, you’re one to talk. Which… fair. She… does have a chainsaw in her tote bag.
“Aw, you love us,” Ranpo grins from his research nest.
“Don’t be stupid,” Yosano shakes her head, but she winks back at him.
——————
“I’ll encode it when you’re done,” Ranpo inclines his head towards the note that Yosano’s trying to write. “If Mummy-Boy the Demon is so smart, a simple coded message won’t be an issue for him. It’ll keep it out of general mafia hands, at least, and they won’t be able to trace your handwriting or anything.”
“Got it.”
Yosano puts her pencil to the paper.
Hello.
So, you found that flash drive, but it was empty, wasn’t it? The traitor who stole your records is still at large, with all those copies of the Port Mafia’s financial information.
I think we can come up with a mutually beneficial arrangement. You get your traitor, and we get a finished job and a criminal off the streets. Simple.
Meet me at the candy shop with the mint-chocolate fudge. You’ll know it when you see it. Monday morning, 0900.
Yosano takes a deep breath and signs the note.
—The Angel of Death