I looked down at my woven-white hands, something was missing.
My eyes puckered up at Kuroda; his tie was lazily melting off the nightstand next to him, his resting head in his hand.
"...What?"
"A penny." I repeated, I said it a little louder this time. Kuroda looked at me like I had asked for his gun, there seemed to be some confusion on his part. "It's this bronze-coloured little coin---like, it's a cent, you use it to buy things."
He yanked his hand up and interjected. "I gave you a penny half-an-hour ago."
"What?"
Kuroda looked at me with this daunting stare, he rubbed his face, slow, with both hands like the world would cooperate with him if he pressed hard enough.
He shoved his hand in his pockets, rummaging through pieces of whatever he kept inside of there, he fished out an assortment of coins, flicked out a bronze coin at me.
My motor skills weren't the most fine-tuned at that moment, the coin hit a lazy arc and fell just short of the wall near the bed.
Kuroda's throwing skills were also to blame.
My socks slid against the tiled floor, I knelt down at the coin, picked it up and felt an emergence of nostalgia; like I were meeting an old friend.
I pressed on that metal coin like it were a charm, my heart was doing something stupid as I stared down at it.
"Can you just sit down?" Kuroda sighed, his voice was only an echo.
I waited for the coin to enter a slot in my mind like a vending machine, so it could give me the answers I could only see through some hazy wall.
"I am sitting." I murmured.
He looked at me, then at the bed, then at me again.
I sat down.
Before Kuroda could pick his favourite thought that twisted in his mind and get a voice to sound out of his mouth, the door opened without a warning or a knock.
Two bodies stepped into the room, the type who didn't need to knock.
They weren't in uniforms, they were in suits; white-collared shirts with it's sleeves clean and neatly rolled up, one of them still wore a black-blazer, thin enough for the warm spring weather, the other had his neatly folded around his arm with an unopened notebook made up of papers stapled together dangling from his hands.
They rolled in like it were clockwork, like they'd been at it the whole day.
Kuroda straightened his back, they looked at him first. That is, after they inspected the room with their glaring eyes; the window and the light that poured out of it, then the bed, they didn't look at me.
"Sergeant," the one who smelled a couple shots too short of a coffee spoke, he stopped himself, corrected himself with a nod. "Sir."
Their eyes landed in my direction last, the one who smelt like cold air and ink looked down at the paper's he had been gripping, the blank page at the back was cracked and creased with the humidity from outside.
"Aspres Amari." He read out loud, he relaxed his arm, allowing it to drop to his side with the paper. "Or, pardon my rudeness, was it Ruth---no, no, Molly, maybe Marion? Dana every now and then, Terry..?"
Kuroda's hands tightened around the armrest of that small chair, it looked like it were closing in on him.
"Which name are you using today?"