Alternative Employment
Title: Alternative Employment
Warnings: Spoilers for GS4 Case 1/4, more or less. Nothing incredibly detailed.
Rating: G
Characters: Minuki and Naruhodou
Time Period: 7 years before the start of GS4
Words: Almost 1000
Through the rumpled curtains of Ryuuichi Naruhodou’s fourth floor apartment, the lights from a passing late-night train flickered over his closed eyelids. He opened his eyes and sat up, rubbing them, making to get up and attempt to coax the curtains into performing their appointed duty. But as his legs slipped to the side of his futon, they brushed against a warm form, lying on the floor next to him. He stopped, surprised, and leaned over to investigate.
Minuki, her cheeks flushed with the warmth of sleep, had taken her blanket and pillow and moved to sleep next to Naruhodou at some point after he dozed off. She was sprawled awkwardly over a part of the futon, her leg resting across it as if laying claim, her elbow jockeying for space but limited by the fact that she was sucking her thumb. Naruhodou smoothed her wispy hair, taking care not to wake her as he rose from the floor and walked over to the window.
The train had long since passed while he was distracted by his nighttime interloper. He leaned against the sliding door’s frame, peering through the window at the late-night pedestrians walking through his neighborhood. It had been less than a month since he’d been disbarred, and it hadn’t yet hit him that in his new role as a member of “Naruhodou Talent Agency”, he didn’t have to go to bed as early as he did when he was a lawyer.
It still hurt, thinking about it… a dull ache in his chest, like he’d been punched. His job had been in danger once or twice due to his own… Well, he didn’t want to think of it as incompetence, but there the word was. But this time, it had been something else, though he still wasn’t sure what. Sure, the evidence was questionable from the start, but evidence had always come to him in the strangest ways. He had tried to come up with an explanation that didn’t mean that someone had planned the whole thing, but he’d failed.
There were some benefits, of course. Without the necessity of cutting an impressive courtroom figure, he was able to dress comfortably again, and it was interesting to see the way people in the public areas of the Court Building treated him differently with a cap covering his familiar spiky hair. He’d spent some time in and out of the building trying to put the pieces together, recording interviews with the gadget he’d asked Akane to make for him. He’d hit a wall, though, and he didn’t expect to find any more useful information.
It had been impossibly hard when, a week ago, he realized that he was never going to go back to the life he’d had before. It had seemed like it would be easy enough to prove who had commissioned the false evidence, and that that person wasn’t him. But he was missing something vital that would enable him to connect the dots, he didn’t have nearly enough evidence to prove his own innocence, not without getting some impossible testimony from unwilling witnesses.
So, he had resigned himself to a change in career. He’d have to stop being a lawyer, and become… what? He reached up and jerked at the curtains, rearranging them so that they’d at least keep the light from the last few trains from waking him again. As he turned to lay back down, he noticed that the sleeping 8-year-old girl had wormed her way into his bed, dragging along with her something… rather larger than the teddy bear he’d given her to cuddle in her own bed.
He picked up her silk hat, which had rolled off the wooden marionette she was cuddling in his futon. He felt a momentary pang of guilt for dwelling on his own problems when this 8-year-old girl took becoming what effectively amounted to an orphan without her smile even faltering. And yet… the fervor with which she hugged the unyielding Boushi-kun reflected the grief that lay beyond the sunny smile. She’d told him she slept in her true father’s bed, before all of this happened.
He wrested Boushi-kun from her limp grasp, sitting him up against the wall across the room. Then, sliding her child-size futon from the other side of the room to right next to his own, he gently moved her sleeping body and slid into bed beside her. Her little hands responded to the warm body next to her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulder. Tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure what he was doing, he settled his arm over her back. She smiled in her sleep, and relaxed into the combined futons, and a deeper sleep.
Ryuuichi stared up at his ceiling, picking out the dusty, cobwebbed corners that he never got around to cleaning. He felt Minuki’s heart beat against his own rib cage. He couldn’t be a lawyer anymore, that much was clear to him at this point. Despite Minuki’s fond wishes, he was really not exceptionally talented at any performing art either, at least not enough for him to feel like it was his job. But through accident or design, being fired from his career as an attorney netted him a brand-new job with brand-new lessons to learn. He spent a few lazy minutes contemplating it, and decided as he was dozing off that being a father was certainly a challenging enough job for him, maybe even harder than being a lawyer was. The last train streaked its way past the window, on its way to the end of the line. It cast a glow through the curtains that illuminated the father and daughter, sleeping together on their combined futons.
Warnings: Spoilers for GS4 Case 1/4, more or less. Nothing incredibly detailed.
Rating: G
Characters: Minuki and Naruhodou
Time Period: 7 years before the start of GS4
Words: Almost 1000
Through the rumpled curtains of Ryuuichi Naruhodou’s fourth floor apartment, the lights from a passing late-night train flickered over his closed eyelids. He opened his eyes and sat up, rubbing them, making to get up and attempt to coax the curtains into performing their appointed duty. But as his legs slipped to the side of his futon, they brushed against a warm form, lying on the floor next to him. He stopped, surprised, and leaned over to investigate.
Minuki, her cheeks flushed with the warmth of sleep, had taken her blanket and pillow and moved to sleep next to Naruhodou at some point after he dozed off. She was sprawled awkwardly over a part of the futon, her leg resting across it as if laying claim, her elbow jockeying for space but limited by the fact that she was sucking her thumb. Naruhodou smoothed her wispy hair, taking care not to wake her as he rose from the floor and walked over to the window.
The train had long since passed while he was distracted by his nighttime interloper. He leaned against the sliding door’s frame, peering through the window at the late-night pedestrians walking through his neighborhood. It had been less than a month since he’d been disbarred, and it hadn’t yet hit him that in his new role as a member of “Naruhodou Talent Agency”, he didn’t have to go to bed as early as he did when he was a lawyer.
It still hurt, thinking about it… a dull ache in his chest, like he’d been punched. His job had been in danger once or twice due to his own… Well, he didn’t want to think of it as incompetence, but there the word was. But this time, it had been something else, though he still wasn’t sure what. Sure, the evidence was questionable from the start, but evidence had always come to him in the strangest ways. He had tried to come up with an explanation that didn’t mean that someone had planned the whole thing, but he’d failed.
There were some benefits, of course. Without the necessity of cutting an impressive courtroom figure, he was able to dress comfortably again, and it was interesting to see the way people in the public areas of the Court Building treated him differently with a cap covering his familiar spiky hair. He’d spent some time in and out of the building trying to put the pieces together, recording interviews with the gadget he’d asked Akane to make for him. He’d hit a wall, though, and he didn’t expect to find any more useful information.
It had been impossibly hard when, a week ago, he realized that he was never going to go back to the life he’d had before. It had seemed like it would be easy enough to prove who had commissioned the false evidence, and that that person wasn’t him. But he was missing something vital that would enable him to connect the dots, he didn’t have nearly enough evidence to prove his own innocence, not without getting some impossible testimony from unwilling witnesses.
So, he had resigned himself to a change in career. He’d have to stop being a lawyer, and become… what? He reached up and jerked at the curtains, rearranging them so that they’d at least keep the light from the last few trains from waking him again. As he turned to lay back down, he noticed that the sleeping 8-year-old girl had wormed her way into his bed, dragging along with her something… rather larger than the teddy bear he’d given her to cuddle in her own bed.
He picked up her silk hat, which had rolled off the wooden marionette she was cuddling in his futon. He felt a momentary pang of guilt for dwelling on his own problems when this 8-year-old girl took becoming what effectively amounted to an orphan without her smile even faltering. And yet… the fervor with which she hugged the unyielding Boushi-kun reflected the grief that lay beyond the sunny smile. She’d told him she slept in her true father’s bed, before all of this happened.
He wrested Boushi-kun from her limp grasp, sitting him up against the wall across the room. Then, sliding her child-size futon from the other side of the room to right next to his own, he gently moved her sleeping body and slid into bed beside her. Her little hands responded to the warm body next to her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulder. Tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure what he was doing, he settled his arm over her back. She smiled in her sleep, and relaxed into the combined futons, and a deeper sleep.
Ryuuichi stared up at his ceiling, picking out the dusty, cobwebbed corners that he never got around to cleaning. He felt Minuki’s heart beat against his own rib cage. He couldn’t be a lawyer anymore, that much was clear to him at this point. Despite Minuki’s fond wishes, he was really not exceptionally talented at any performing art either, at least not enough for him to feel like it was his job. But through accident or design, being fired from his career as an attorney netted him a brand-new job with brand-new lessons to learn. He spent a few lazy minutes contemplating it, and decided as he was dozing off that being a father was certainly a challenging enough job for him, maybe even harder than being a lawyer was. The last train streaked its way past the window, on its way to the end of the line. It cast a glow through the curtains that illuminated the father and daughter, sleeping together on their combined futons.