Morioka is always cold in winter. But it’s not the snow. It’s something deeper. The kind of chill that seeps under your skin after too many years surrounded by the dead and the ones who made them that way.

You didn’t expect to get used to it. But you did. The silence. The blood. The sound of bones being counted, labeled, recorded. You’ve become fluent in the language of the morgue. The kind of fluency only those who’ve stopped flinching can ever speak.

And then there’s him.

Hiromi Higuruma walks into your world like a shadow cut clean from the courtroom upstairs. Always in black. Always composed. A sunflower badge pinned to his chest like irony, and eyes that don’t blink when you show him the photographs. You’ve worked with other attorneys before. But not like him.

He reads your reports like scripture. Treats your conclusions like testimony. Never questions your methods, only asks if the system will listen. You’ve seen him defend the innocent with teeth bared, rage buried beneath legal language so precise it sounds like prayer. You’ve also seen him lose. Quietly. Completely. And walk away from the bench like a man carrying a body no one else can see.

Your conversations started formal. Autopsy times. Cause of death. Testimony prep. But lately…

“You should sleep,” he says sometimes, reading through your notes at 2:17 a.m. with vending machine coffee in hand.

“So should you,” you reply, peeling off your gloves after hours bent over the table, the scent of formalin still clinging to your sleeves.

And then you both stay.

There’s a rhythm now. Dark humor traded like cigarettes. Glances held too long over cold metal tables. He never crosses the line. Not really. But the way he leans just slightly closer when he asks about ligature marks—

The silence stretches. And something inside it starts to bloom.

You don’t know how long this strange arrangement will last. You don’t know what he’s hiding behind that courtroom calm.

But you’re beginning to suspect that if he ever breaks...

It’ll be in front of you.