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Nothing pissed Daisuke off quite like being woken up early. But being woken up at 2am by HEUSC whirling like an alarm on his nightstand was certainly even less favorable. After a few seconds of grogginess, he picked up the earring and put it to his ear, too slowly coming to the realization that it was a distress signal. Only one dumbass would trip HEUSC at such an ungodly hour. Daisuke’s eyes opened a little wider.
“What’s happened to Kato?” he grumbled, not even asking who was in trouble. He knew. “Where is he?” He pinned the earring in place and grabbed his sunglasses for a visual aid.
“Kato-sama is currently at the front door of the residence,” HEUSC answered just as Daisuke was going to pull up his vitals. He faltered.
“Kato is here?” he repeated, moving to pull up the security feed to his front door instead. There stood Kato – or, rather, he was slumping against the front door, arms folded across his stomach. Everything about this situation completely threw Daisuke for a loop, but there wasn’t time to ask questions. He hastily rolled off of his bed, shoved on the nearest pair of slippers, pulled a robe over his arms, and hustled from his bedroom down to the foyer. There were so many questions he had, he probably could’ve asked HEUSC, but his head was so full of how and why and Kato that he couldn’t think straight at all. Something had to be incredibly wrong for Kato to come to him in the middle of the night.
He pulled the front door open, eyes wide and slightly breathless. He might be more composed had he not just woken up. “Kambe,” Kato coughed, trying to stand upright only to stumble forward. Daisuke caught him by both biceps and kept him steady. He could make out fingerprint-shaped imprints around the inspector’s neck and noticed the red rawness around his wrists. He tried to meet his eyes, but they seemed a little glassy, like he was struggling to stay awake. Daisuke was refraining from trying to fuss over the man’s state and search for any more damage that had been done to him.
“Kato, what happened?” he asked instead, doing everything in his power to be as calm as possible. Like things weren’t rapidly firing off in his brain and doubling every moment he continued to look at his partner’s state. “Who did this to you?”
“They don’t know I’m gone,” he mumbled, clearly trying but failing not to lean into Daisuke. “Please let me in.” Daisuke pulled the older man inside quickly and locked the door hastily behind them. He decided to lead Kato into the nearest sitting room and eased him into an armchair.
“Kato, you need to tell me what’s going on,” he said again, uncaringly sitting on the coffee table in front of the detective. Kato took a few steadying breaths, massaging his wrists and carefully removing his varsity jacket. Daisuke inhaled sharply. The exposure of his arms and clearer view of his neck just made the markings there all the more obvious.
“I don’t want you doing anything rash,” Kato explained. “It’s nothing worth you going to take care of yourself-“
“Tell me who did this to you,” he repeated once more. Kato could come at him with all his ‘do this the right way’ sentiments once he knew exactly why he needed to go beat these bastards into submission.
Kato closed his eyes and exhaled.
Haru was thankful that the convenience store near his apartment stayed open past 12am. On nights where he gets really caught up in his work, he doesn’t always take time to do his shopping when he means to. It was only 1am – hardly that late, really – when he’d bought what few things he needed and started his walk back home.
It was a really nice night out – clear sky and cool air. He was so lost in the atmosphere that he almost didn’t notice the car that had followed him all the to his apartment complex with their headlights off. Something immediately felt off. Slipping one hand into his pocket, his fingers closed around his phone just as he heard one of the car doors open. Haru was somewhere in between trying to just get to his apartment or turning around to face whoever it was behind him. Though his guard was up, there was no real control in the situation as long as his back was still to them. Jaw tightening, Haru eventually turned around when he heard heavy footsteps closing in.
“Oi, is there a problem-?” he started to ask, only for the stranger to quickly lunge at him. Haru’s grocery sack fell to the ground and scattered everywhere as he quickly brought up his arms to counter the assailant’s attacks. They were fast and certainly strong, but nothing that Haru couldn’t easily handle. He managed to twist their arm into a standing arm lock, keeping them in place. “What’re you doing here? What do you want?”
They didn’t answer, and Haru noticed too late that a second person had been in the car and snuck up behind him during the scuffle. They threw Haru to the ground and straddled him, and two heavy hands came down and closed around his throat. He was thrashing under their weight, pushing at their arms and trying to fight them off in every way he could think, but he couldn’t fend them off. His vision was starting to get blurry as he struggled to breathe.
“What… do you want?” he croaked, still trying to tear his blunt nails into the attacker’s wrists. Their grip loosened enough for Haru to suck in some air.
“You know Kambe Daisuke, right?” they asked, voice low and gravelly. A man’s voice. “You’re his partner. Kato Haru.”
Haru coughed and gasped for air. “What about it?”
“I think that says enough,” the other assailant – a woman – answered. So they wanted money, then.
“He doesn’t care about me,” Haru huffed out. It was a lie, he knew that, but anything to convince these people to let him go. “You won’t get any money from him no matter what you do.”
“I’m sure there will be something to convince him,” the man said, grip tightening again, cutting off Haru’s breathing near-completely. “Why don’t you go ahead and sleep on it?”
Once again Haru was fighting, much weaker than before, refusing to give up. His chest was quivering as he desperately tried to breathe. He was starting to spasm in pure panic, the man’s hard eyes glaring down on him. Haru did everything, tried to cry out for help, even. But without air, eventually he couldn’t keep moving. His eyes rolled back and fluttered shut.
When he woke up, it was dark. He felt himself folded up in a confined space. A space that was rumbling around him. He tried to move, but his knees were pretty much trapped near his sternum. His hands were also bound tightly by rope, though in front of his chest. He could hear the static of a radio behind him. He was in the trunk of that car.
His lungs felt sore, and his neck muscles burned, but at least he was breathing right. Shuffling as slowly as possible, he squinted and tried to make out what little surroundings he had as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Priority number one was escape. His phone was no longer in his pocket, expectedly, so breaking out of the trunk was his best option.
Haru had never had to escape a trunk before (surprisingly), though he had trained for it. He listened to the outside. It sounded like a busy street, even at this hour. Though he wasn’t sure the traffic would be enough cover for the sound of the trunk opening. But he also knew that newer cars made in the last twenty years or so had a release so that the trunk could be opened from the inside. He twisted his body, awkwardly feeling for a cable or switch along the door or roof. Finding nothing, Haru grumbled and rolled carefully onto his stomach. From what he had seen, the car did appear modern enough that there would be a release cable by the front seat of the car. He dug his fingers into the carpet underneath him and pulled, tearing it up in time with the sound of traffic outside so that it was less noticeable.
And he felt it. A thin cable running along the floor. Haru waited for the engine to rumble loudly before gripping the cable tightly and yanking it as hard as he could. The small door popped open and cool air rapidly flooding the space. He held it so that it wasn’t wide open, though, in order to wait for the car to slow down enough that he could safely jump out. He didn’t want to alarm any cars behind him with his current situation.
The car was slowing into a left turn, so Haru took his chance to push open the door enough for him to slip out relatively smoothly, only tumbling slightly onto the concrete. Not enough to hurt. The woman driving behind his kidnappers was definitely as startled as Haru would have expected, but he didn’t have time for that. He had to move.
Ducking into the first alley he reached, Haru hunted through the damp space for anything he could use to cut away his bindings.
A dull, discarded pocketknife just beside a dumpster was about as good as he could expect.
It too far longer and was far more difficult that Haru would have liked, but he’d hacked the ropes away and was back upright and running. Every headlight illuminating the world around him sent his heart pounding, but he needed to find out where he was.
And, by some stroke of luck, he wasn’t far from the safest place he could end up.
“You need a physician to examine your neck for any serious injuries,” was the first thing Daisuke was able to say when Kato finished explaining what had happened. “That man could have done serious damage.”
“I’m gonna be fine, Kambe, really,” he argued, one hand subconsciously running over the darkening bruises on his skin. “I just… since they know where I live…”
“You can stay here as long as you like,” Daisuke said almost embarrassingly quickly. “…If that’s what you want, that is. I assure you that you’ll be safe here.”
“That’s all I wanted to ask you for,” the inspector replied, giving him a small, relieved smile. “We can work on finding and catching those guys tomorrow when I can report it properly to the police. So please don’t try and go after them.”
“Why would I do that?” Daisuke asked, knowing damn well how stiff and on-edge he looked through Kato’s whole story. Really, how could he not want to go after them? Every time he looked at the injuries tainting his partner’s skin, it continued to fuel the rage bubbling underneath his skin. Kato knew.
“Look at me. I’m okay. I’m alive,” he said gently. “There’s no need to run after them now, is there?”
Daisuke pulled his lips into a tight line. “I suppose not.”
And he let that be the end of it, escorting Haru to a guest room before finally returning to his own bed. Though he certainly wouldn’t fall asleep for a long while. He could only think of what person dared put their hands on Kato and strangled him into unconsciousness. Every possible filthy person that would dare do something so ugly for money – if money was all they really wanted. What they might have done if Kato didn’t escape. Daisuke clenched and unclenched his fists, wanting nothing more than to drag these people out and bury them in the deepest reaches of Hell.
But he would settle for giving Kato a place to stay.