FAKE Ficlet: First Piece Of The Puzzle
Title: First Piece Of The Puzzle
Fandom: FAKE
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ryo, Dee.
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Vol. 5 Act 14.
Summary: A crime scene stirs up old memories for Ryo about his parents’ deaths.
Word Count: 497
Written For: My own prompt ‘FAKE, Dee/Ryo, The smell of death,’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
The smell of death hangs heavy in the small, crummy apartment. It’s a mix of the coppery scent of blood, the acrid tang of cordite, and the even less pleasant odours of bodily fluids and decomp. As homicide detectives, Dee and Ryo are used to it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to endure, and they breathe through their mouths in order to smell it as little as possible, although that means they can practically taste the gunpowder residue that seems to be hanging over everything. The walls, the furniture, and the ceiling, as well as the bodies of the deceased, are riddled with bullet holes; this wasn’t just a shooting, it was a massacre.
There are three bodies; one on the living room floor and two still lying sprawled across the small bed in the cramped bedroom. Whoever killed them must have moved fast; from the positions of the bodies, they didn’t have a chance to even get up before they were gunned down. The shooter, or shooters, must have been splattered with their victims’ blood, there’s just so much of it.
Moving through the apartment, careful not to touch or step in anything, Ryo takes in the scene as dispassionately as he’s able to, but it’s disturbing in ways that he wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone else. It’s not just the violence of the attack, nor is it the blood and the stench, these are things he’s seen and experienced many times over his years on the force. It’s the nagging sense of déjà vu when he looks at the bodies, a man and a woman, on the bed. There are literally dozens of bullet holes in them, and it reminds him uncannily of the body of his father as he’d last seen him, lying on the table in the morgue, almost unrecognisable because he’d been shot so many times.
“Ryo? Something wrong?”
To an outsider, Dee’s question would have sounded odd. Of course something is wrong; three people have been brutally shot to death. But that’s not what Dee means. Ryo seems unusually distracted in a way he can’t quite put his finger on.
“Huh?” Ryo hadn’t even registered his partner’s approach until he spoke. “Oh, it… it’s nothing.”
He’s not being honest though, it is something, he’s just not entirely sure what. Could the deaths of these three people be connected to the deaths of his parents ten years ago? On the surface it seems unlikely, ten years is a long time, but what if they are? Perhaps solving this case could give him the answers he’s been searching for since he lost his parents all those years ago. It’s the reason he became a cop in the first place, to find out who killed his family and bring them to justice.
Maybe he’s just found the first piece of the puzzle that’s going to lead him to them. He’ll never be able to rest until he knows the truth.
The End