Shinkane Week Day 5: untitled draft
By this point in his life, Kogami was grateful for moments where he could spend his time doing what makes him happy. Perhaps that was a considerably mediocre sentiment, some trite cliche from an old man's novel, but after long years of hunting and fighting demons and monsters and everything in between, it worked for him.
His hands moved on their own as he gathered all he would need for the weekend, packing everything neatly into an overnight bag. An alert on his wrist grabbed his attention, a call from his boss – so much for his time off.
“What is it?” he asked straight away, immediately resuming his packing while he waited for the bad news.
“Don’t hate me,” came Frederica’s apologetic but firm greeting. Whatever she wanted, it seemed there was no getting out of it. Kogami groaned inwardly. It seemed he wouldn’t be making it to Tokyo in time for dinner.
The car ride was long, but he didn’t mind it. He liked the time alone to think, to picture the weekend ahead of him and all that would encompass it, and when nightfall had completely ettled around him with still an hour to go before his arrival, Kogami gave her a call.
“You’re late,” she greeted, as soon as she picked up. He could tell by her tone that she wasn’t upset; these days her own work hours were long and arduous, so she was probably still working.
“It’s alright,” she said, her sweet voice as kind as ever. If he could listen to nothing else for the rest of his life, he'd die a happy man. “I had reports to catch up on, anyway.”
A mental picture came to mind then, Akane sitting at her desk and typing away dutifully at the keys. He missed her hands. If he listened hard enough, Kogami could hear the very taps he pictured in the background.
“Are you hungry?” Her reply came in a knowing hum, long past the point of marveling at how he always could tell when food was on her mind. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered asking anymore – especially when his tardiness all but guaranteed her answer.
After a brisk tapping of his fingers on the GPS to add her favorite food stop in his route, Kogami asked, “Whose office are you stuck in this time?"
Akane, still clacking away at her keyboard, was quiet for the slightest of moments, though it was so quick that he had to wonder if it was his imagination.
“Same as last,” she said.
His fingers clenched silently against the steering wheel, eyes narrowing at the skyline.
"Aren't you too old to be getting jealous of something so trivial?”
Despite her attempt to stifle it, Kogami could hear her snicker on the other end of the call.
"Right, and I'm not starving." The car was on auto-pilot, but he laid his foot on the accelerator anyway, pushing the speed up a notch. "You should be more grateful, you know. We wouldn't be able to do this at all if not for him."
He had nothing to say to that, and Akane seemed to take pity on him then as she changed the subject.
“Alright,” she said, and in her voice he could hear her smile. He couldn't wait to see it in person. “I’ll be finished by then.”
Walking in and out of the Ministry of Welfare’s building with leisure was something Kogami couldn't get used to. The memory of that privilege from his Inspector days was too long ago to resurface in any sense of familiarity, far buried beneath the cold walls of this prison and the mockery of waltzing into a locked paddy wagon in order to venture outside. Those days, too, were well behind him now, yet they hovered in looming as he stepped off the elevator, another ghost of his past that he'd likely never be rid of.
The smell of takeout dangling from his hands caught Akane’s attention before anything else, too focused on proofreading to hear the doors slide open or his heavy footsteps approaching her desk from behind.
“Twenty-six minutes,” Akane announced, though her eyes stayed fixed on the screen. “Impressive.” Kogami smiled, then ruffled the top of her head in greeting.
While he waited for Akane to wrap up work, Kogami took his place in one of the exorbitantly upscale armchairs in the middle of the room, setting the bagged food down on a table far too luxurious for his taste. And when she was finally finished, Akane leaned back in her seat and stretched the ache from her arms, then stood to do the same with her legs. In that moment Kogami took note of the consequential upward shift of her skirt from sitting down for so long, revealing a sliver more of her thighs than usual, and he felt guilty a moment later when he realized he had been staring, as if willing the hosiery to disappear from her skin.
But she didn't bother to fix it, either, as she strode from the chair at her desk to the armchair across from him. It humored him to think she noticed his fixed gaze and decided to let him have the little treat – but knowing her, it was more likely the painfully casual air about her within his long-awaited company that made her pay no mind to it. Still, his mind liked to consider the alternative, considering what would eventually become of their night, as it always did.