Moving to Tokyo was a different
kind of experience. Samuel wasn’t sure if it was because of the culture shock,
the language barrier, or the fact that he didn’t exactly have anyone to help
him out at the moment. His insides lurched for home, for sleeping back in his
comfy bed and waking up to the scent of pancakes and/or waffles, with his dad
getting ready for work, Jake studying his calculus, and his mom finishing up
the bacon.
Now, he thought, he would wake
up surrounded by cream-colored walls and a bed that wasn’t broken in yet. No
posters would deck the walls quite yet; no comics would be filling the
bookshelves. Home would smell of beer and cigarette smoke from now on, leftovers
from various fast food chains stuffed in the fridge.
He was on his own now, and that
scared as well as excited him.
If only he took up some more
goddamn Japanese, he thought sullenly, his luggage by his side while he waited
in a small café situated somewhere five minutes away from the baggage retrieval
area. He was to meet someone there, a superior at HQ – the place where he’d
work – the very next day.
Jesus.
So where was he?
He took a sip from his coffee
(too goddamn sweet for his taste, but he couldn’t complain) and tapped his foot
impatiently, folding his arms over his chest. Well, fuck. If the man didn’t
arrive any sooner, he’d have to stumble around in Tokyo using sign language
like some kind of idiot –
“Oh, there you are!” Samuel
looked up in surprise, all signs of irritation leaving his face as he met the
excited (and slightly anxious) gaze of a man older than he, coffee-brown eyes alit.
“I was worried that I’d never find you. Then again, I figured that the new
agents would like to stop and have some coffee to recover from the flight,” he
went on, the words jumbling nonsensically in Samuel’s ears.
What a ray of sunshine.
“Ah – I’m sorry, you must be
disoriented from your trip all the way from Bronx,” he apologized, pulling a chair
and sitting across him. Samuel gave a stiff nod. “Let’s see here…Samuel Peters?”
the man had pulled out a paper from his coat pocket, unfolding it and reading
the top.
“That’s me.”
“Excellent! Well, Samuel, my
name is Touta Matsuda.” Too-ta.
Mat-soo-dah. Shouldn’t be too hard to remember. “I’m going to oversee your
training for the next few months at HQ, but we’ll talk about that later.” Touta
extended a hand and flashed a brilliant smile, “Pleasure to meet new recruits.”
He sat there, dumbfounded
before shaking the other’s hand. “You speak English?”
“It’s a must, I have to say. It’s
one of the most common tongues. Thankfully, I can speak quite a decent amount.”
While Touta talked, Samuel studied him carefully. The man was a few inches
shorter compared to his 6’, slim and quite young, come to think of it, upon
looking a little bit closer. Touta was dressed in sleek business attire, the
other color aside from black and white being a simple golden-colored tie that
somehow brought out the brown of his eyes. “Shall we go?”
“Go?”
“Why, of course – you have to
settle in for the day.”
“Right, right. Sorry. It doesn’t
feel all that great to me yet,” he apologized, and Touta nodded
sympathetically.
“I understand. It’s a common
feeling, homesickness. But we’ll get you sorted out.” Samuel wondered who this we was, but thought less of it upon
seeing Touta rise from his seat, taking hold of the handle of one of his luggage.
“I’ll drive you to your apartment and then we’ll talk more about the job on the
way.”
* * * * *
Samuel listened as Touta drove
him to his apartment. “The last time I worked with a foreigner…that’s another
story,” the man chuckled.
So far, so good.
Touta Matsuda wasn’t someone he
was expecting. To be honest, he was expecting someone much older, had a cranky
atmosphere about him, and would simply drop him off at his apartment because ‘that’s how you learn shit when you’re an
adult’. Apparently, this other guy was different.
And he was okay with it.
“You’ll be under me until they
assign you to a separate squad,” Touta went on. “It always goes that way.
Newbies with me for a couple of months, and then the higher-ups manage to
filter them into separate squads of three to five members each that can
hopefully utilize their skills and work brilliantly.”
“Are you in a squad?”
“Me?” the Japanese blinked,
“No, not exactly. My work, really, is to train the newcomers and see to it that
their progress works its way up throughout the whole training session.” He
turned left and glanced at the side for a moment before driving on, “Now tell
me about yourself, Samuel.”
“It’s Peters,” he corrected.
“Peters,” Touta repeated
softly, then nodded with a chuckle. “Fair enough. Tell me about yourself, Peters.”
“Family life, expectations…?”
“Anything under the sun, I
suppose.”
“Huh. Okay.” He thought of it
for a moment then shrugged the initial apprehension away, “I wanted to get
away.”
“From your family?”
“Yes.” He hesitated a bit and
went on, “I have an older brother. Jacob – Jake. He’s studying to be a doctor,
three years older than me. He’s on his way there. I moved away because knowing
my parents, they’d force me to be something like him.”
“And yet, you picked police
work…that’s considerably more dangerous than operating people,” the older man
pointed out.
“Fair enough. But I had to get
away before they could force me into something I didn’t want to be. So I told
dad, I want to work for the police. He didn’t get me at first until I
emphasized ‘for’ and not ‘as’. So I researched for weeks until I found that you
guys had open applications for new ones like me. I filled it up, and then…here
I am.”
Touta nodded slowly, stopping
as the car halted to a pause. “Your dad, Mr. Nathan. He is a cop, right? NYPD?”
at Samuel’s confirmation, Touta hummed. “Not as a police but for the police…quite an interesting back
story you have there, Samuel. Did your parents support you?”
“Mom didn’t want me to leave,”
he admitted. “She asked me to stay in the States. Work with dad in the NYPD
instead. But I had to leave. I wanted to leave. Dad took it…nicer, but still
asked if this was what I really wanted.”
“Is it?”
He stopped.
“The training is going to be a
little tougher than you’d expect. You’re going to be asked to handle all sorts
of weapons, but also increase your logic, your analytic skills. You’re going to
learn body language, facial expression, how to tell if someone’s lying and how
to tell if they’re telling the truth. You’re going to work with blood and flirt
with death.” Touta looked at Samuel to gauge his reaction, and was satisfied to
see a not-so terrified look on his face. “Is this what you truly want?”
“I’m here already. Why the fuck
should I back out?”
And Touta knew that they had
hired the right man for the job.
“Perfect. You know, Samuel, I
have quite a feeling that we’ll work nicely with each other for the next couple
of months.”
The American didn’t want to
admit it.
But he felt that way as well.
Touta needed no other
confirmation, merely driving on with a pleased smile on his face.
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