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Kirishima Kei, being a most logical, rational man, is entirely unphased when he figures out that Daisuke Ito from accounting is running a betting pool on their boss and his relationship with a certain Takaba Akihito, ex-abductee, current status undefined.
Their organization is sketchy in no uncertain terms but is interested in looking legitimate, and as such any shenanigans bearing partial resemblance to normal office behaviour is tolerated, if not encouraged. It's bad form to leave his black book out in the break room, however, even if Ito is running the game only during lunch hour and not clocking the time - like a model employee - and Kirishima thinks it's his good deed of the day to inform Ito not to do so again.
"What's your over/under, the terms, and how long is the bet going for?" Kirishima has a choice of tolerating, encouraging, or reporting this to the boss, but in this case he decides to go for abetting.
"Right now? 29/70 on the boss taking Takaba out on an actual date within the next six months," says Ito. "But don't you think you have an unfair advantage, Kirishima-san?"
Ito has a good face on: unreadable with a convincing faint smile, mildly interested, pink-cheeked in the face of imminent danger. He's probably wasted in accounting; given the rate of people they're losing in Fukuoka lately, perhaps Kirishima should consider moving Ito to wetwork.
Kirishima ponders this out loud.
"I'm putting 2000 yen on under," Kirishima says, and snaps a photo of the black book sitting on Ito's desk with his phone before leaving the bills on top.
When the MD goes missing and the kid shows up at Sion ranting about needing to see Asami, Kirishima should have called Ito to switch his bet, but Takaba has always been a continuous value, taking on any number within the infinite, predictably unpredictable and ever changing, and using him in any sort of calculation would be his first mistake.
Kirishima keeps his thoughts of Takaba to himself and reports the incident to the boss dryly and without additional inputs.
"Keep him away from the club," says Asami. "He's drawing too much attention to himself."
It's a degree of care Kirishima's not used to hearing, bordering on concern, and he tweaks the numbers to 34/65 in the filing cabinets of his mental office. It's not a 39/60 yet - after all, Asami didn't exactly take out his gun and unloaded it on Kirishima on the spot for shoving Takaba down a half flight of stairs.
He's in the break room with Suoh before he speaks his thoughts, "I really think we should contain him."
"If that were possible we would have done it long ago," says Suoh.
Takaba skews all of Kirishima's numbers, which Kirishima is convinced should be a crime punishable by death.
"Usually, neutralization is the option in cases like his," Kirishima takes his coffee black, and at 9pm with five hours left to go he pours himself a full cup. "We should have done that first time around."
They sip their coffee in silence, but when it ends it's with Suoh looking genuinely concerned, the contours on his forehead even more bunched up than usual as he clasps a hand on his friend's shoulder, saying, "We will just both pretend you didn't say that."
Suoh goes apoplectic when the boss runs lone gunman style into Ikebukuro to rescue his little one-time abductee, now two-time abductee by two different people and rescued by the first, possibly out of the wok and into the nabe pot, but the boss actually has a tendency to pull stunts like these. Asami has been worrying his subordinates with his one-man-army feats since his teen years, so Kirishima tries not to get too stressed.
He doesn't switch his bet, either.
Suoh lets him know that the boss actually took the kid home straight from Ikebukuro and Takaba wasn't seen leaving until 9am, clad in a too large tracksuit with pants and sleeves rolled up and sneakers too large for him, looking as angry as a pitbull, and maybe Kirishima should think about switching to over.
"It's within the acceptable variance of his behaviour," says Kirishima, pushing up his glasses until it does the magical shine thing, at about 10 degrees to being parallel with his face. "Entirely bracketed within his standard deviation."
Ito's in the breakroom with him at the time, and chimes in, "Words are coming out of your face, but I'm sure they're not meant to be used that way."
Suoh ignores the interjection, but he does say to Kirishima, "Please consider the Monty Hall problem, my friend."
"That's not applicable in this case," Kirishima rejects the possibility of a third door. "This is not me being stubborn about door number one. There are only two doors, and the probability of under is still higher than over."
The next time he sees Ito in the breakroom, he learns that the odds are now at 47/52.
Asami Ryuichi is attractive to the point where he doesn't really need to pay for sex, but the company he wants in the quantity he wants the month after the kerfuffle in Ikebukuro demanded an army of professionals. Not to mention that even with Kirishima's excellent organization and research abilities as well as an eidetic memory, there are only so many Takaba Akihito doppelgangers living in the vicinity of Tokyo doing sex work and it takes true skill to schedule an entire month without repeats.
If Kirishima never has to look at another urisen catalogue again it would be too soon.
Kirishima makes the requisite phone calls to proprietors without catalogues, repeats the same requirements - young, preferably blond, about 175cm, very lithe and athletic - and does end up booking a month worth of appointments, sometimes three a night and concurrently, only to cancel fully half of them when Asami waves him in one day looking bored, telling him not to bother, he would really much rather get some sleep.
It shouldn't feel like a personal attack, a reprimand for not getting his boss exactly what he wants, but Suoh gets him totally bombed that night on whiskey because friends always let their friends look as wrecked as they feel.
Next he tries arranging lunch dates with male models, but it's hard to find models in the 175cm range near the age of twenty who isn't also a gold digger, so he only manages three before the boss again tells him: don't bother.
Kirishima didn't double major in accounting and actuarial science to arrange dates for the CEO of his company, but not being able to do so in an exemplary manner just makes him feel like that much more of a failure.
Asami gets a spring cold, the kind of thing most people take a week to get over, but Kirishima is very attentive, and largely due to his care, the boss is much improved in four days instead of the national mean of seven.
Kirishima restarches all of Asami's shirt collars, triple presses the pleats in each pair of trousers and arranges them neatly hanging by the cuffs; in the process of which he finds a silk tie hanging in the closet that looks entirely ruined - water stained, seams stressed, and stretched in all the directions a tie shouldn't be stretched in. He's about to toss it out with the rest of the burnable garbage when his boss intercepts.
"Leave that there," Asami says from his perch on the bed. "And please stop looking for things to starch."
Kirishima's employer has always been a known quantity, the discrete variable that all his calculations can work around, being predictably competent in all things and a pillar of their organization. So it is a complete surprise when Asami is distracted enough to forget the name of a client the day their limo screeches to a halt before Takaba Akihito, who is apparently so young he does not yet know the basic rule of looking both ways before crossing the street.
He waits until the kid gets out before rolling down the partition the full way.
"You were just speaking to Yamada-san, sir."
"Right," says Asami, showing no sign that he's distracted. "What did I call him?"
"Yoshida, sir," Kirishima says, and rolls the partition back up.
The partition snaps shut, but not before he hears his boss muttering, "What is happening to me."
It's alarming how many unforeseen events has been occurring as related to a Takaba Akihito, and now Baishe and Hong Kong are involved and Kirishima thinks maybe this is his life: dealing with the wreckage created by Asami Ryuichi's recklessness with people's hearts.
Kirishima ups his bets to 3000 yen, a perfectly illogical thing to do, not because he thinks his boss has no skill with romance at all, but because he cannot possibly deal with another one of Asami's destructive exes in the mix so he's nixing the possibility with irrational hope.
On the histogram of Kirishima's experience with his boss, Asami Ryuichi, tonight has been, so far, off every chart Kirishima has ever devised. It is outside of the box graph, entirely unmappable, and if punched into a calculator would have read undefined - approaching infinity from both ends in an exponential fashion, a continuous variable divided by zero.
Asami is taking a walk in the rain, without his bodyguards, without an umbrella, and has refused even the most rudimentary protection, so Kirishima is stuck following him at walking speed with a car.
Thankfully, or not, he has Suoh to keep him company.
"I wanted to be a historian," Suoh says, his face the usual inscrutable mask. "Still have the Imperial Studies degree."
"I/You should write a book," they say, in nearly perfect unison.
At one point, Kirishima had wanted to be a mathematician, but it's the difference between material physics and architecture; one is much the same as another, but one is theory and the other involves actual buildings - practical work's always more fun. He doesn't regret his track in the expertise of doctoring books and running Asami's underground through upwards of 323 shell companies and another 88 subsidiaries and a wetwork division paid entirely in pachinko special prizes, but a moment like this, though far and few, does make him question his life choices.
Watching his boss positively dripping rain water and barging into Takaba Akihito's home at three in the morning, Suoh and Kirishima parks the car in a suitably inconspicuous location and waits for fifteen minutes before Suoh says to his long time friend, "I'm off the clock."
"Me too," Kirishima says, feeling a little sullen about future chaotic incidents increasing in frequency due to a Takaba's continued existence in his box graph. "He can go on and walk home. Or call a car. Or drive himself."
"I will buy the first round," Suoh says, and pats him twice on the back.
Being a logical and most rational man, Kirishima Kei walks into Ito's office the next day and switches his bet to over; unfortunately, everyone's been watching Kirishima's choice in the matter and all but one person switches within the next twenty-four hours, so his bet is worth exactly 100 yen in winnings and probably not even worth the chance of discovery.
Two months later, when the bet is finally up and Asami still hasn't taken Takaba out on a proper date, Kirishima walks by Ito's office to find him pasty, overly caffeinated, and looking much persecuted. Kirishima pauses in the doorway and watches as Ito spins around in his chair, shuddering at Kirishima's presence, before burying himself in a pile of accounting reports stacked so high it is likely bulletproof and can reliably be used as a fort.
Kirishima is not one for idle gossip, nor is he one for wild guesses and baseless rumours, having no room in his ledger for philosophical conundrums such as: what is the square root of negative one.
However, he cannot help wondering about the identity of the one single bet on under when his boss stops by Takaba Akihito's home the day after the pool dissolves, and proceed to add a bill to his black visa to the tune of exactly the sum of the pot, blowing all of it on top-tier takeout sushi.