Chapter Text
Shinichi knew it was a mistake the moment he did it. But it was too late for regrets now. He was tangled up in the Sentinel’s thoughts, being pulled deeper and deeper into a mind he had no place being in. Too deep to get back out of.
“How did you get in here?”
Shinichi felt a shiver run up his spine. The voice was cold. Colder than the wind that whipped around him, stealing his warmth and numbing him down to the bone.
“What? Too good to answer, Detective?” The voice questioned from the dark, its owner hidden behind blowing snow and midnight pitch.
Shinichi licked his lips. “What is this place, KID?”
“Home, sweet home.” The voice replied. “Now, don’t you think its time you answered some of my questions?”
Shinichi spun in place. The voice had been right behind him. Close enough that he should have felt the thief’s breath against his skin. “Where are you KID?”
“Detectives, always asking questions, but never answering them.”
“You Zoned out.” Shinichi explained as he stared out into the darkness. “And I Reached Out without thinking.”
“I think what you meant to say, was that you couldn’t pass up the chance to catch me.”
“No. I wouldn’t… we’ve never been like that KID.”
KID’s laughter felt like nails on a chalkboard. “Haven’t we? You are the detective from the clock tower, aren’t you? Reappeared at the most inconvenient of times.”
“I… Yes. But… I didn’t know you then.”
“And you think you know me now?”
“Of course I do!”
The thief laughed again, the sound seeming to echo off the walls of blowing snow. “Really, now. If you are going to lie, at least try to make it believable.”
Shinichi stumbled back a step. This wasn’t KID. It couldn’t be KID. The mind was far too cold to match the man. “It’s not a lie.”
“No?” KID questioned as he walked out of the storm. He was in costume. Or something that resembled his costume. A white suit, a matching top hat, and a monocle in place over his left eye. Only this version of KID was colorless; Skin pale, and hair iced over and covered in frost. The vibrancy that Shinichi had believed to be at KID’s very core, conspicuously absent.
Shinichi swallowed harshly. He’d seen that expression before. It looked back at him from the mirror every morning. It was desperate yearning, mixed with unsurmountable despair. “It’s not a lie.” Shinichi repeated.
“Then do call me by name won’t you, Meitantei?”
Shinichi licked his lips. KID was testing him. And he was going to fail. “I don’t know it.”
KID cocked his head to the side, a single, dull indigo eye trained on Shinichi. The other hidden behind a frosted over monocle lens. “Yet you claim to know me.”
“I know what you let me see.”
KID’s eye narrowed, his lips turning up into a sneer. “That single night you tired to shoot me off the top of a building?”
Shinichi shivered, but not from the cold. He’d long since lost the feeling of touch to the arctic air. “No. All the nights I chased you.”
“All the…” KID’s words died off, a spark seeming to light in his visible eye. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on Shinichi’s part. “Tantei-kun?”
Shinichi smiled, brittle as glass. “KID.”
The wind stopped howling as KID knelt, his right hand reaching out as if to check that Shinichi was real.
“I can’t be myself in the real world anymore.” Shinichi told the thief; as if that would be enough to reconcile the teen he’d been with the boy he’d become.
And maybe it was.
Snow stopped falling as the clouds overhead cleared away. “That makes two of us I suppose.” KID mused, his usual cadence sounding wrong alongside the chill in his tone. The thief straightened. “No reason you can’t be you, while you’re here though.”
Shinichi blinked. Where exactly was here? Before him stretched a garden of colorful roses, every row a different hue, and every single bloom preserved forever in a coat of ice. “What is this place, KID?”
KID frowned. “I told you, Tantei-kun. This is home.”
“But it’s so…”
“Grand? Magnificent? Awe inspiring?”
“Cold.”
“Ah… that. I hardly notice anymore. It’s been this way for years. No sense in making a big deal about it now.”
Years. The word seemed to echo in Shinichi’s ears. Behind the grins, and the laughter, and the breath-taking pranks, KID’s mindscape had been like this for years. “Doesn’t your Guide worry about you?”
KID shrugged. “They probably would, if I had one.”
“You’re only a 1S?” It didn’t feel right, but it was the only explanation that fit. If he’d tested as anything higher, KID would have been bonded at the same time he came Online.
“On paper.”
Shinichi felt a knot form his throat. The implications of that statement... KID must have taken over his predecessor’s role before he’d ever come Online. Then, one day, he’d found himself here. In a wasteland of snow and ice. Alone. With no way out.
Home, sweet home. The thief had said. And now that Shinichi was really looking, he could see it. The effort KID had poured into this place. A place he’d spent more time in than any Sentinel should have to. Because those roses weren’t really roses, just ice, sculpted from stalk to petal. The colors added one thread at a time, the hues all fashioned from the blues and reds of KIDs missing accessories.
There was KIDs vibrancy. Spread thin across an empty, white world. Heart wrenchingly spectacular, in a way that only KID could be.
“Well, you’d best be going, Tantei-kun.” KID’s trademark grin stretched across his face. “I’ve got a daring escape to complete.”
And you’ve got someone to get back to. Words unspoken, written clearly in lonely indigo eyes.
Shinichi woke to the gruff voice of Nakamori-keibu. “Don’t feel too bad, Conan-kun. KID’s a slippery bastard.”