Oh, how he would love to chatter on and on about his favorite story of the series but something was nagging in the back of his mind. It still slightly unnerved him that Hakuba knew so much about him and that made him all the more suspicious about forgetting something that he talked about a lot in interviews.
Reporters were always asking things like that. What’s your favorite color? Do you like cats or dogs better? What’s your favorite book? If they asked that last question, eventually they would get bored and try to end the talk as quickly as possible and he supposed that was about half the reason he loved that question.
“Ah, that would be the story of Mr. John Douglas of Sussex. The one where Holmes and Watson receive a coded message from one of Moriarty’s droogs and discover that he’s to be killed. But when they talk to Scotland Yard they find out that the deed has already been done and then they go to investigate and find that Mr. Douglas actually hasn’t been killed at all.
"It’s The Valley of Fear, of course,” he explained, watching him closely out of the corner of his eye. He already knew that Hakuba was a Holmes fan himself from their previous encounters but he wondered if he would realize the lie. Since he had done so much research and all.
Hakuba might have choked had he not had the presence of mind to delay his reactions to allow for thinking time. But he did swallow – hard – and felt a twitching compulsion that screamed ‘IT’S A TRAP!’ Because, effectually, that’s what it was.
Really, he should have known that Kudou-san would pull something like this. After all, his senpai was brilliant, wasn’t he? While Hakuba had been trying to break the ice and get a conversation going, the other detective had seen an opportunity to test him. This put Hakuba in a very awkward position because, quite handily, he’d been caught in a lie with another. There was no way that Kudou would not have been aware of this.
It was an agonizing decision, that. Either continue to feign ignorance and look like an idiot who clearly didn’t know anything about Kudou-senpai… or call Kudou-senpai out on the false information and admit that he had been trying to be coy and clever to get him to talk. Both options were rife with embarrassment. He should have known.
“Ah, yes… I’m know that story…” Hakuba finally said, voice quiet as he considered his words carefully.
Internally, this might have looked much like a task master cracking the whip at thousands of hamsters running uselessly in spinning wheels. A fretter by nature to begin with, Hakuba was doing some serious mental overtime.
“…Ah, I… remember now, though… Wasn’t it The Sign of Four? Unless you’ve changed your favorite, of course… Ah, I’m quite partial to The Boscombe Valley Mystery story from the original Adventures Of book myself…”
Even admitting that much had been painful. Particularly as he was suddenly confronted with the fact that his favorite Sherlock story was one of the short stories contained in a collection from the original case files, and not one of the ‘proper’ novels… What did that mean? Was that going to be a problem?
God what was he doing talking to Kudou in the first place? They’d both been spoken of in the newspapers as the Sherlock Holmes of the new century, which made them at odds to begin with. Colleagues, perhaps, but… clearly Kudou was, well, Hakuba’s senpai. How embarrassing. Perhaps it would have been better to avoid ever meeting him and instead continue the long trail of letter after ignored letter.