A big thanks to my beta-reader/muse Charshy, who made me write a better chapter than I might otherwise have done, and who tends to inspire me when I'm writing insipid, trite stories. You make me better than me!
This story should be updated daily, probably not at any specific time. If you read, please review! I love constructive criticism. Whether you review or not, I hope you enjoy this story.
When I was fifteen, I still hadn't decided on what I wanted to do with my life... or rather, I had, but no one liked the lifestyle I was about to choose, and if you grow up in a certain type of family, that amounts to the same thing. In a vain attempt to give me "direction," my parents in Sapporo sent me off to live with Uncle Sato during vacation. He'd told the family he was a police officer in Okinawa. When I showed up, I don't think he had the first clue what to do with me.
He put me up in a room in his apartment and left me to my own devices. I didn't see anything exciting about him. He didn't have guns, or a car with sirens, or even a police uniform in his closet. He didn't have cable, and I'd been forbidden even a radio, so I hung around the arcades. Never having been much of a gamer or a shopper, it didn't take long before I was bored out of my mind, and I decided there was no better waste of my time than to look through his stuff.
It was all mini-cameras and microphones and tape recorders.
I decided he was a spy, probably from China and not actually related to my family at all. It had been a huge mistake for my parents to send me to this too-hot island. I was going to show them up. I had to find out what he was doing, not just for me, but for Japan! So I followed him. I was pretty discreet about it, I thought.
The first time I tried, I guess he caught me at it. One second I was trailing him into this little shop that sold pots and pans, and the next, I had this note in my backpack wishing me better luck next time.
I tried again the next day, with pretty much the same results.
I wasn't stupid. There was no way I was going to tail him again, so I spent the rest of the afternoon searching the apartment for spy equipment. By the third day, I'd found a tracking bug buried in his things. I placed it in his bento box under the wakame as he was going off for the day, and wished him well. I waited a while before I followed the signal, only to find out that he'd given the damned thing to some guy in a blue tent camped out near a park.
Disgusted, yet starting to have fun with my new past time, I looked again. The fourth day, I found another tracking bug that I was certain I hadn't seen the day before. I picked it out of his stuff, but I didn't plant it. When he came home that evening, his face was pensive, and he kept eyeing me suspiciously, as though asking me where the bug was.
The fifth, there was another bug in there, and I left it in with the pen lights and button cameras, and I put my tracker discreetly in his jacket pocket, and I wished him well for the day before heading out on my own errands. I joined him for lunch, and he was so surprised when I snuck up behind him that he ended up dropping the sushi from his chopsticks onto the sidewalk. Then, he smiled, and we talked.
It turned out he had been a police officer, getting a high ranked investigator's position before leaving. It was too dull, he told me. He wanted to put his talents to use on something else, so he'd become a private investigator. I thought he was so cool.
Looking back on it, I think he just wanted to be paid to look at young girls taking off their bras, since the majority of his work was from husbands and wives who thought their significant others were cheating on them, and nine times out of ten they were absolutely right. I think he liked taking pictures of the sex that followed finding the affair, too.
As for my little games of following him around? He saw my little direction-finding vacation as a great way to get a cheap, part-time worker to handle the seedy, sordid details of his business. I saw it as an opportunity to learn something interesting, and to do something I was pretty sure my parents still wouldn't approve of.
I learned how to put a bug in a girl's purse without her noticing. I learned how to tail someone who thought they were being followed, how to make someone think they were losing their mind for noticing me more than once-- eventually, I learned how to make sure they didn't notice me unless I wanted them to see me.
I learned how to record conversations, how to set up tiny hidden cameras in houses when people were away, how to pick locks, the subtle art of breaking and entering and what the limits were between legal and illegal. I was a bit shocked when he showed me how to manipulate images to make it look like someone had been cheating-- to get your next case, you had to succeed on this one, and my uncle was a very popular man who left a trail of broken hearts, empty cashbooks, and satisfied customers behind him. I learned how to recognize the dangerous clients by looking into their eyes, to separate the ones with killer's eyes from the ones who were just angry enough to think they could kill... Uncle Sato even taught me how to shake the police, both literally and figuratively, in case you actually did something wrong.
It hit me hard when he died a couple of years later, victim of some husband who didn't accept being caught in the act, but I picked myself up, brushed myself off, and got myself into music. And I used all those things he taught me to get to the top.
Must have driven my parents nuts.
It was all going so well. And then...
Shuichi Shindou came along, with his perfect voice and his perfect smile and his perfect little in on NG president Seguchi's life. If I'd slept with Seguchi's brother in law, I'd have jumped to the top in a heartbeat, too. But I didn't, and I resented him for going lower than me. And I hurt him for it, tried to hurt Seguchi's brother in law for it...
And then Seguchi hurt me, proving once and for all that you had to be a ruthless bastard, whether you were a top private eye or a talented musician. You had to be willing to kill for what you wanted out of life. You had to understand that actions always had consequences, and that karma was something you could pay back while the other guy was still around to appreciate the lesson.
When I finally got out of the hospital, I realized something: there's not much difference between Taki Aizawa and Tohma Seguchi.
We're both willing to stoop as low as we have to if we can get what we want.
The only real difference is how much lower he'd already bent.