Cutscene: My Favorite Things
My Favorite Things
"Hm-hm hm-hm-hm, hm-hm hm-hm-hm..."
Daisuke Itami stared vacantly through the glass window pane that offered him the mere, cruelest sliver of a glimpse of the outside world. It hardly offered him any respite as he sat within the sterile confines of his hospital room within Yumezaki Municipal.
Ultimately, he just found it made the sharp throb at his back all the more pronounced.
The doctors had told him it was nothing short of a miracle that he had survived. The attack had missed anything vital. 'Surgically precise,' they called it; just a fraction of an inch one way or the other, and he wouldn't have even made it to the hospital. But with all the blood he had already lost by the time he arrived, even they weren't sure he was going to make it.
Daisuke Itami had merely smiled, and politely thanked them for all their help.
The information broker's gaze finally broke away from the window sill still tempting him with a place he couldn't reach. The room he resided in was empty and quiet. A part of Yumezaki's singles ward, the white-walled room was sterile and bereft of anything that might have indicated someone - anyone - had visited. No flowers decorated the table; no "get well" cards piled up at the countertop. Daisuke Itami was alone.
"... brown paper packages tied up with string... hm-hm-hm hm-hm-hm hm-hm-hm hm..." The music, half-spoken and half-hummed, slipped vacantly from the violet-and-blue-haired man's lips as his eyes shifted their bland gaze towards the ceiling. Thin fingers tapped along to his humming in a jazzy rhythm.
Though the room was empty, the man had not been without visitors. It had only been an hour ago that the police had finished questioning him; the hospital had been legally obligated to contact them, in cases like his.
"... I was trying to find some shelter in Hirasaka during the typhoon when someone hit me from behind and before I knew it, my back started bleeding," he had explained amiably to the officers. "I guess they were just some opportunitists looking to cash in on the storm. Hopefully you can find them! With everything that's gone on in this city, I'd hate to think thugs would just be allowed to run rampant like that without consequence." The officers had given him a few more scrutinizing looks, a few more prying questions, and then moved on.
The police likely wouldn't dig too far into it. With the aftermath of a storm like that, and with all the problems at Akashi Prison, they probably had their hands too full to put that much time into what, at worst, looked to be a mugging gone bad.
Just imagine, he thought to himself as he looked at the drywall coating the ceiling bitterly. Only a few years ago and I'd probably have to be dealing with her instead. That might have made things messier.
His face clenched up further in irritation. The beating of his fingers against his armrest grew a touch more erratic as he shifted like an excited dog stuck in a pen. The nauseating flare of pain that spread from his back dissuaded him from doing this much longer. His eyes shut.
"... I simply hm-hm-hm my favorite things..."
"... hm-hm-hm hm-hm hmmm-hmmm..."
Daisuke Itami's cheerful whisper echoes against the morbidly empty halls of Akashi Prison's solitary confinement cell block. Blood that was once water sloshes thickly around his knees as he literally skips his way through the coffin-ridden, lonely expanse. Shadows float by, seemingly oblivious to, or perhaps uncaring of, his presence.
Around his finger he swings a heavy key ring; the multitude of keys seem to jingle along to his cheerful song.
"Raindrops on roses and hm-hm hm hm-hm..." Behind him, rows and rows of cell doors have already been opened. Each one of them holds a coffin within, half-submerged within the blood sea. Only two more doors remain unopened. One to the left of him, a coffin barely visible within the simple glass viewing port of the thick steel door. And the other...
Daisuke Itami turns to his right leisurely. He slides the key into the cell door's socket. Behind him, his left hand withdraws a simple knife's handle.
Click.
"... these are a few of my hm-hm-hm hm..." Daisuke Itami leans in. He peers scrutinizingly at the lone figure within the cell reserved for the worst of monsters. The blade of his butterfly knife folds open, gleaming against the lifeless light of the prison's backup power.
He smiles.
"Hiiiiiiiiii."
Daisuke Itami's eyes opened to once more stare at the inescapable blandness that surrounded him. His brown eyes, dull and rung with rings of fatigue, looked at the emptiness of the table standing at his bedside.
"... and then I don't feel..."
And from within the confines of his self-imposed prison...
... He smiled.
"... hmmm, hmmm~."
