The city had always been a slab of concrete laid over rot. Not integrated, not hammered, not poured; it was laid upon bodies, odor, and corruption up until the last miserable brick. It was cheap, the whole lot of it; neon buzzing like static nerves over a skyline choked with cigarette smoke and failed ambition, coiling in the corners of every alley, bar, and breath. Rain oozing out from cracked gutters, smearing newsprint headlines no one believed anyway, and someone always selling, buying, or stealing. Either be lives or political votes, it didn't matter.

More often than not, the city didn't sleep, either. It just shuts its eyes and hopes the blood dries by morning. Nothing ever dried, not truly; not lies, not secrets, not the leak on the ceiling that dripped rhythmically by the right side of the wooden mahogany desk filled to the brim with useless papers and other trinkets. Nothing dried, but some things cracked, like the masks people wore day by day. Everyone hid theirs, yet used them daily.

Gojo Satoru kept his in his pocket, right next to a fake copy of his old badge and a worn packet of Lucky Strikes that weren't his.

He's a private eye now. Used to be a cop until he wasn't⎯until, well, until he realized the justice system was truly, really fucked. The original badge? Gone. Just as well. It hadn't meant much since he tossed it in a drawer and started taking cases the department wouldn't touch. Missing girls, daughters of nobodies. Dirty money. Dead men with clean shoes and no records. Numbers that didn't matter in the scale of society.

The office he 'rented' was on the fourth floor of a building no one remembered ever being built. A bit cramped, it was above a pawn shop, the kind of place with a flickering hallway bulb, a ceiling fan that spins with a very annoying groan, and a wallpaper that peeled like the dead skin of a talon; slowly and in small pieces. His name, though, was etched on the frosted glass of the door⎯backwards, if you were on the inside looking out.

The phones don't ring much anymore. The clients came in desperate or drunk⎯, unusually both, if he was lucky. And Gojo just listened, sometimes even doodled or scribbled nonsense at the footnote of a worn leather notebook when it got boring enough, to then nod once and simply say: "I'll take a look."

Today, unfortunately, was one of those days.