Fandom
“Hey, Shotaro,” said Akiko without glancing up from her cell phone. “Do you have an account on Fuuto Current?”
Shotaro paused with his cup of coffee halfway to his lips. “What’s that?”
“It’s a social networking site for people in Fuuto. Apparently it just opened up a few months ago. I went to look for people we know and I found Watcherman, Santa, and, um… Ooh, even Wakana Sonozaki has an account!” Akiko bit her lower lip, stifling a snicker. Was there something she wasn’t saying?
“Hey, what about Queen and Elizabeth?” Shotaro asked. “Social media’s the kind of thing they’d usually be all over.”
Akiko snickered again. “Oh, yeah, they’re on here.”
“What’s so funny?”
“They’re really good writers, that’s all!”
“Writers? You made it sound like some kind of blog thing.”
“A lot of people post fiction on blogs. You really should see this, Shotaro,” Akiko said. She crossed the room to stick her phone in his face.
Queen’s username was xOxOjoshikoseiOxOx and her avatar was a selfie of herself and Elizabeth. The blog post Akiko’s phone was displaying had the title “Kamen Rider’s True Identity”.
Shotaro’s blood ran cold.
“No, no, keep reading!” Akiko insisted.
He scrolled down, bracing himself for the worst.
Private Detective Shotaro Hidari leaned back in his seat and sighed. Today had been a long day of looking for lost pets. He needed a break.
The door opened. “Hey, we’re closed!” Shotaro called, but he took it back when he saw who walked in.
Shiny green on one side, matte black on the other, it was the Kamen Rider.
“You won’t even spare a moment for me?” Kamen Rider said with a smirk in his voice.
“Yeah, yeah, you can stay.”
“For how long?”
“Take your time. Philip’s not coming home any time soon.”
The Kamen Rider undid his transformation to reveal a dashingly handsome man with wavy hair and strong cheekbones. He was several centimeters taller than Shotaro and a thousand times more attractive.
As soon as Kamen Rider was out of his costume, he and Shotaro embraced passionately. Their lips pressed together and—
Shotaro screamed.
Akiko took her phone back before Shotaro could do anything rash. Like throw it out the window. “There’s this whole weird subculture on FC dedicated to ‘Kamen Rider and Shotaro Hidari as a couple’,” she marvelled. “I guess some people noticed that Double’s bike is always parked outside the office and Double always shows up on cases you’re working.”
“How truly intriguing!” Philip grabbed Akiko’s phone out of her hand.
Akiko shrieked. “Where did you come from?!”
Philip grinned broadly. “Ah, this gets very interesting, Shotaro. You should have kept reading.”
“Don’t—”
“‘With one last kiss, Shotaro and the Kamen Rider broke apart. Shotaro shimmied out of his jeans’—”
Akiko gasped. “I didn’t hear about this!”
“—‘and bent over the desk’—”
“I would never use the boss’s desk like that!” Shotaro exclaimed. “Stop it, Philip, that’s enough!”
Even when Shotaro got to his feet and grabbed the phone away from him, Philip didn’t stop laughing. “I need to do more research on this fascinating subject…”
As Shotaro tried to talk him down, Akiko shouted over him, “Try the keywords ‘doujin’ and ‘BL’!”
Philip vanished into the garage, duster sweeping out behind himself ominously.
Shotaro had a bad feeling about this.
“Are you okay?” Kamen Rider asked, hovering worriedly over the detective.
“Yeah, yeah. Ugh…” Shotaro pushed himself up off the ground.
“You should leave the fighting to me. You’re not a superhero,” Kamen Rider pointed out. He rested his hands gently on Shotaro’s shoulders. “If I lost you…”
Turning bright red, Shotaro ducked away from the grip of his lover. “I’ll be fine! I’ve taken worse beatings than that, you know.”
“That’s true. And anyway, I know exactly how to patch you up.”
“How’s that?”
Despite the mask covering his face, Shotaro was sure the white-and-black Kamen Rider was grinning. “Have you heard of something called ‘healing cock’?”
Shotaro screamed again. He continued screaming the whole time he made his way into the garage. “Philip, when the hell did you sign up for Fuuto Current?!”
“Just today! Do you like my fanfiction?”
“No! I mean, I’m more like myself in this one, but— no!”
Philip beamed. “Don’t worry, partner. I can’t mischaracterize you like some writers do.”
“Don’t tell me you’re writing more,” Shotaro groaned.
“Indeed. My next story involves Shotaro’s mysterious young partner Philip walking in on Shotaro and the Kamen Rider in the throes of passion, and the jealousy that stems from finding out about their relationship.”
“Philip, the Kamen Rider is you and me!”
“Not online he isn’t.”
Shotaro had the strongest urge to bash his head against a wall.
“Don’t worry about it,” Akiko tried to reassure him when he returned to the office proper. “You know he’ll get bored of it in a few days.”
“That’s not soon enough,” Shotaro grumped.
“Jeez, why do you have no sense of humor? This is hilarious.”
“Would it be hilarious if I wrote stories about you and, I don’t know, Santa-chan?”
Akiko wrinkled her nose. “No, but Santa-chan’s a gross old man. That’s totally different.”
“Okay, then, how about Terui?”
Akiko froze. “Don’t you dare.”
Smirking, Shotaro sat back down in front of his typewriter and flexed his fingers.
“No way, Shotaro!”
The ensuing fight over the typewriter would go down in history as one of the bloodiest conflicts. Meanwhile, Philip sat in the garage, hunched over his Stag Phone, happily oblivious as he shipped the impossible ship.