Makoto Nijima, who would have changed absolutely everything if she could, closed the messaging app and tried to get back to sleep. The alarm clock read 3:15 AM in an accusatory glare.
She didn't succeed for another two hours. The following day at work was hell.
***
It was several days later.
Makoto sat at her desk and stared at paperwork. The office buzzed around her. Phone calls, chatter, whatever. She couldn't seem to shut it out. A coffee sat, cooling, on her desk as she stared at the case file in front of her.
The file talked about a kid. 15 years old. Shoplifting at a 7/11 for baby food and diapers for his infant brother. His dad had lost his job and his mom worked at a department store. The mugshot showed a thin face, messy brown hair and terror in his eyes. The cops who brought him in insisted he got the bruises on his face from resisting arrest.
Fifteen. She tapped her desk with her pen, kneaded one of her eyes with the heel of her hand.
Akira was fifteen when he'd punched a politician.
Ryuji was fourteen when a teacher broke his leg.
Ann was fifteen when -
Stop it, she told herself. Focus on your job.
Her job. Hah. She was a cop. She'd always wanted to do something like this - not law, like her big sister, but something adjacent. And she'd been doing it. Hell, she'd been doing it for... ten years? And she was damn good at it. Better than laying bruises on children. She solved -
No. She hadn't solved anything, had she?
She'd brought mega-corporations to justice. Toppled the Weyland Consortium, exposed the crimes of the Jinteki Zaibatsu. And now she was here, behind a desk. What had happened? Had that all been a dream? A sick joke played on her before she had to go home to Japan and pay bills and work shifts? A long, crazy joke, fighting gods and forces of nature, saving a confused and angry woman from her own demons, and nudging her friends into the positions they couldn't see?
She remembered the way Ryuji and Haru looked at each other, and almost knocked her cup over in her haste to take a drink, fighting down the rancid feeling in her throat.
And now she was here, and they were elsewhere. Living better lives. Ann and Akira lived their strange double life, defending the world against the demons of the soul. Ryuji taught track for Olympian hopefuls and then traipsed to his home - Haru's coffee shop, the only thing she'd held onto after she'd sold Okumura Foods. Futaba ran an app store that earned so much money that Sojiro retired from Leblanc. Yusuke traveled the world with his own girlfriend, making art that dazzled the senses.
And she sat behind a desk, working for the system they'd fought against.
They must hate me.
It wasn't the first time she'd had that thought. She'd had that thought hundreds of times. They rarely asked after her. She'd seen Akira once, during the closing celebration of Leblanc. He'd been cordial but blank. They'd all been... awkward. She wasn't one of them anymore.
They must hate me.
This time it made her grimace, more than her cold coffee could.
What was she doing?
Paperwork.
The kid. In the mugshot. Lost and scared and alone.
Where were the Kobbers this year?
They must hate me.
Fifteen minutes later, she was walking out of the offices of the Tokyo Police, minus her badge and her gun. On her phone were plane tickets to Argo. She wasn't smiling, but she felt lighter.
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