The door to the big bedroom being locked usually meant that the adults were having a serious discussion about something, but as one of said adults wasn't home and wasn't going to be home until later that day, little Momoki wasn't quite sure what was happening. He had been standing outside of it for several minutes, banging on it every so often while asking for his father, yet there had been no reply to either aspect of what he was doing. "Come on, please let me in," he called, his voice beginning to turn to a whimper. "I'm lonely and want my dad right now!"

On the other side, it wasn't so much that Kaito was ignoring his son so much as it was he was trying to come up with some way to explain why he'd locked the door when he'd gone into the room that wouldn't make he was doing blatantly obvious. He hadn't wanted to be walked in on while he was ordering a couple new toys for his son to play with, or more accurately open, inspect, and then organize alongside similar ones, and now that he was done and had cleared away all evidence of the activity he needed a cover for what he was doing. "Sorry to make you feel lonely, but you knew I was in here the whole time. Not like I left ya here alone, right?" he asked as he unlocked the door, Momoki pushing it open and nearly tackling his dad to the ground once he'd gotten in. "You're really eager to spend time with me, I hope you know I love that about you."

"I really did get lonely, I don't like not being able to be with you." Squeezing his dad as tight as he could with his small arms, Momoki looked at his father with a large smile, one very similar to the one he typically gave others. The boy's face was almost like looking in a mirror for Kaito, the major exceptions being that Momoki's hair was long, black, and flat, and that his eyes held a seriousness in them that Kaito's never could. "When Mom's not here I don't like it when I can't be next to you. It's scary here sometimes."

"Scary, huh?" Kaito repeated, carefully pushing the child off of him so he could move around the room freely. "That's the first I've heard of this place being 'scary'. What's there that Maki Roll can do that I can't, that makes it less scary to be here when she's around?"

The boy scrunched his face in thought, before shrugging his tiny shoulders and attempting to grab his dad's legs in a hug a second time, getting pushed and held away before he was able to succeed. "I'unno, she just makes it less scary and you don't."

"That was a bad question then, I guess. Uh, let's try this a different way, what's there that you think is scary?" Even though Kaito loved his son to death and would never admit that sometimes he was annoyed by him, the idea that he wasn't as capable at handling threats as Maki was in the boy's mind did rub him the wrong way. That was just a sign of how much she'd taught the boy about what she did for a living, compared to what he did (which was stay at home with Momoki, since someone had to do it). "C'mon, if you're gonna say the place is scary you have to have a reason."

"Sometimes I hear little voices," Momoki answered, waving his hands around to show that the voices he spoke of weren't normal. "Mom says they're…ghosts? I think that's what she called them?"

The mere mention of the word ghosts made Kaito's skin begin to go pale, and he could feel himself beginning to grow fearful of what was potentially lurking around their home. "Listen here, kid," he began, trying to keep his voice as close to normal as possible, even though he was beginning to feel a bit like panicking, "there's no such thing as ghosts. Not even close to being real. Your mom's just making things up."

"'Cept she said they're real and they're here at the house," Momoki replied without missing a beat, ignoring the way his father cringed at his confidence in his statement. "I don't know what they are or what they want and—"

"They're not real, got it?" Raising his voice as he pulled his hand away from the child, Kaito could feel his entire body shudder at the concept of them living somewhere haunted. "If they were real, which they aren't, they wouldn't want to hang around somewhere boring like this, we've got nothing here that they'd be interested in haunting!"

"—yeah, Mom said that you'd say that." Thinking back to when he'd learned about ghosts and how they were what was making the weird noises in his room when he was trying to sleep, Momoki remembered his mother's exact words, the way she spoke with certainty as she declared the room haunted. "And I don't like these ghosts, so I'm not gonna deal with them. That's your job, Dad!"

Cringing once more, this time to the point that he almost backed up into the wall without realizing it, Kaito tried to put why this wasn't his job at all into words but the way his son seemed so determined, so certain that this was the way things needed to be handled…well, he wasn't exactly going to turn him down and break his little heart. "I guess I can sit in your room and listen for these noises that definitely aren't ghosts," he conceded after carefully considering the consequences of fighting further. "But you've gotta keep me company in there while I work, got it, Momo?"

"Got it!" the boy chirped in reply, once again tackling his dad into a hug. "Mom's gonna be so proud when I can sleep all night because you got rid of the ghosts!"

Kaito wasn't exactly sure how he'd manage to get rid of whatever it was making the noises that were being improperly labeled as a haunting, but he knew that if he didn't give an investigation a shot he wouldn't be doing his best, and he always needed to do his best for his kid. With that in mind he corralled Momoki out of the bedroom and into his own room, where the floor was buried in all sorts of boxes of different collections organized by what they were. How the boy could be so certain that the noise was caused by something that wasn't tucked away in one of his many boxes, Kaito didn't know, and he was going to find that out for himself over the course of sitting in there, listening for whatever was to come.

Despite having so many things he could have been playing with, or at least reorganizing into further categories for the sake of his collecting, Momoki chose to grab some paper, push a couple boxes around until he had a clean spot on the floor, and sat down with a pen in hand. "I'm gonna write a story about you," he told his father, as he put the pen to the paper, before lifting it up and tapping his chin with it. "I just don't know what I'm gonna write."

"Take your time, can't rush perfection." His hopes weren't exactly high for whatever the kid was going to write, but the least Kaito could do was be encouraging for the process. "I'll be right here with you until we find these so-called ghosts." He paused, thinking about what might be running through Momoki's mind as a potential story idea, before adding, "Just, uh, whatever you decide to write about, don't let it be about anything spooky or ghost-y. We want it to be a good story, yeah?"

"I write only good stories for my dad!" A burst of energy made its way through Momoki as he figured out what words he was going to use to write his story, and so he was furiously scribbling things down on his paper, Kaito trying not to pay too much attention to what was being written. He didn't want to be hovering over the boy's shoulder to monitor the contents of the story, but at the same time if the word ghost came up even once he wasn't sure how he'd handle it. There was zero chance their home was haunted, this was all something Maki had suggested to pay him back for…who really knew what, and now he was going to have to spend all day dealing with this nonsense because there was no way Momoki was going to drop the subject anytime soon.

Sitting there in the bedroom was beyond boring, but he couldn't do anything besides sit there in silence, the only sound he could consistently hear being the scratching of the pen on the paper. There weren't going to be any otherworldly experiences there, he knew this for a fact, but he had to pretend that there was a chance just to please the boy who might have already forgotten that he'd been on a ghost hunt in the first place. Right as Kaito was beginning to consider asking if they could be done, Momoki threw his pen and grabbed the paper happily, holding it up in the air. "Are you finished with the story already?" he asked the boy, seeing the paper get waved around in response. "Who's going to read it, you or me?"

"I'll read it to you, 'cause I wanna be the one to tell you what I wrote!" Standing up, Momoki dramatically cleared his throat before holding the paper right up to his face, preventing Kaito from being able to see what might have been written on it. "Once upon a time—"

"Nice start, good stories always start like that."

"—Dad, don't interrupt me! Once upon a time, there was a cool dad named, uh, I don't know what his name is but he's super cool! He loves stars and space, but he loves his son Momoki more than anything else!" He took a deep breath, before lowering the paper to reveal his face to his blankly-staring father, who had received exactly what he'd been expecting in regards to the story. "That's the end, I ran out of ideas."

"Never would've guessed that would happen to you." However long it had been that Momoki had been sitting there writing, half those words that he claimed to have written most likely weren't down on the paper and Kaito knew this. "Go put that away and, er, work on cleaning this place up. I can't do a good job hunting for these 'ghosts' if I can't walk around your room without stomping on all your toys."

Momoki grumbled something about being told to clean, but he at least began doing as directed, putting his paper away on a shelf before looking at the mess that his room held. "I don't think I can clean this on my own. There's too much stuff."

"Too much, huh? Which means it's time to start getting rid of things?" Those words were met with a scream as a reaction, the boy unable to handle even hearing the idea of anything he'd collected being removed from his possession. "Seriously, Momo, if you don't work on keeping things cleaner, I bet your mom's gonna start selling things she thinks you don't need anymore. Do you want her to pick what she's gonna sell, or do you want to keep everything you've got?"

"I don't ever wanna get rid of anything, and Mom knows that! I've gotta clean up so she lets me keep all my things!" That was the boost the kid needed to get to work, and so Kaito found himself watching him stumbling all over the boxes of toys and collectables that he'd acquired in his relatively young life, trying to gather things together that were a set so that they weren't lost. This took much longer than the attempt at writing had, but it seemed to be more profitable because after a while, there was actual living space visible there in the room, even if there wasn't much Momoki could do with most of the stuff there.

Somewhere in the shuffle of toys and boxes a somewhat eerie sound filled the air for a moment, and Kaito couldn't help but perk his ears to the sound. Momoki didn't seem to notice that something was making noise, but he'd perhaps gotten a bit into the whole "ghost-hunting" thing that he'd told his son he was doing and now he was going to pay for it. He could feel himself clamming up, his hands feeling awfully sweaty for him not doing anything but sitting there in the room, and he was looking around to see where the noise came from. When it happened again, he was able to pinpoint that it was coming from the vent in the ceiling, but it certainly was not the vent itself making that noise.

That wasn't something he wanted to investigate on his own, but he knew that if the boy heard it, he'd have to do it anyway so there was no point in sitting around waiting to get told he needed to check the noise. He was able to reach the vent with ease, and it was when he was trying to pull the cover off of it that Momoki noticed he was doing something at all. "What's going on?" he asked, setting down the small box he was holding into a larger box before walking to stand at his dad's side. "Did it break?"

"No, it's nothing, go back to cleaning, I've got this." The cover came off with a hard tug, and the eerie noise filled the room once more, making Momoki scream and Kaito jump at the suddenness of it starting, the cover falling from his hands and hitting the floor at his feet. It took them both a while to calm down, their hearts racing from the shock, but when they were both mostly collected Kaito looked up at the exposed vent and saw that, just inside of it, there was a little box taped to the side.

As he reached for the box, the sound happened again, but he wasn't going to be fooled by it once more (even though Momoki was, and he had bolted across the room to get away from it, begging his dad to come with him). The tape broke at the slightest touch and the box fell right into Kaito's waiting hand, and once he turned it off there was no longer any sound that was going to haunt them. Of course, this meant that a certain someone had intentionally set all of this up to get him to do something with his day that he didn't normally do, and Kaito wasn't going to sit back and let Maki get the upper hand at any point. He had to come up with a plan of his own for retaliation, and it had to be just as bothersome to her as hers had been to him.

That's what led to a few nights later, after another father-son day spent at home in which Kaito made no effort at all to keep the boy from having things that a young kid shouldn't have been having. His plan was to hype Momoki up on as much sugar as he could before Maki got home, then letting her have to deal with a child bouncing off the walls while he went out and did things of his own for a couple hours. What he got instead was coming home to a quiet house, Maki sitting peacefully in a chair leafing through a magazine that she set aside as soon as he got back. "Whose idea was it to give him all those snacks?" she asked, before following up with, "Because one, Momo doesn't know how to keep secrets from me so I know it was you, idiot, and two, he was always going over to play with friends tonight so his jittery ass isn't even my problem."

"I…thought that maybe you'd rethink sending him over there if he was acting weird?" The truth was, Kaito hadn't thought about the logistics of his plan at all, he'd just wanted to get under Maki's skin just like she'd managed to do to him with the fake haunting. "Seriously, you didn't actually let him leave, did you?"

"Sure did, and that means any crying, screaming, or getting sick he does because of you? Not my mess to clean up." Without another word, she picked her magazine back up and threw it directly at his face, before standing and leaving the room. Kaito took the hit without protest but ran after her, begging her to rethink what she'd done because he certainly hadn't thought anything of it.

A/N: happy birthday to me have some domestic kaito/maki fic