Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The apartment changed at night, as if becoming a child again had rekindled old, nonsensical fears. In the shadows, the hallway stretched on forever and the doors yawned like open mouths. Any familiarity he had with the space during the day was gone, displaced by darkness, every creak of the floorboards roaring in his ears. The ticking clock was a bell tower in the distance. He reached his arms out, scrambling for handholds, and kept falling into empty air.

The rational part of his mind took a break from wrestling with the idea that he had been turned into a child to tell him that nothing around him had changed except for the light. It was the same hallway, the same floorboards, the same apartment that he had been staying in for the last three days.

Then why am I afraid?

The creaking floors sounded like snapping bones to him. He rested in a shaft of moonlight from a nearby window as he waited for his heart to stop hammering in his chest.

The Mouri’s apartment was tiny, but then again, so was he. At his new size, the shapes of beds, tables, and chairs were warped and elongated, towering over him. Reaching for a doorknob was a herculean effort. He picked his way through a dark forest of cheap furniture.

Down the rabbit hole, Shinichi thought. With the effort of a mountain climber, he summited a chair by the dining room table. The kitchen cabinets rose above him like monoliths, but he couldn’t remember which one held the glasses. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to get one down without dragging a chair over and waking the entire apartment.

What would they do if I did? Would they be angry? Would they understand?

It had been three days since the incident, and it all felt like a nightmare, each morning the false awakenings of a fever dream. Vivid memories played in his mind like an old film reel; the alleyway with the men in black, the detonation at the back of his skull, boot heels digging into his skin. Then, a drug, his throat aflame, spreading wildfire down his bones and sinew. Waking up as a child in a world so much larger, and infinitely more hostile.

An hour of panicked sprinting down unfamiliar streets, soaked in rain and mud. Going home was not an option; he had been in Beika for a case, and home was several late-night train rides down south. Even if he made it without getting picked up by some kidnapper, any normal person would call the police after seeing a bleeding child in too-large clothes taking the midnight express. Ultimately, the decision to stay was made for him when his tiny body finally collapsed in exhaustion in some park.

If by some overdue miracle he did it make it back home, then what? All that waited for him was an empty house and the paranoia of surviving one’s own attempted murder.

The creak of an opening door pulled him from his relived trauma. Down the hall, a tall figure tiptoed out of a bedroom, crossing the hall in soft, measured steps to the other door. It cracked the door slightly, dipping its head in to peek around. He watched its composure change in a flash, spine straightening in surprise, panic settling in like the cold shock of ice water. The figure pushed further into the bedroom, obnoxious snores leaking through the open doorway. It emerged, quietly frantic, moving quickly to the bathroom, the laundry closet…

She’s looking for me.

The figure stepped out from the hallway into the living room. He heard fumbling, the clinking of a metal chain. A lamp blazed bright, and the shadowy figure transformed into a young woman in wrinkled pajamas.

“Hey, little wanderer,” said Ran. Her tone was gentle, a vocal mask over her moment of worry. She sat down in a chair across from him, the movement so much easier for her than it was for him. “Why didn’t you turn on a light?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t remember where they were.” His voice was high-pitched and alien. His early attempts at a “child-like” voice were somewhere between screeching harpy and scary doll from a bad horror movie. He’d toned it down since then, but he felt it necessary to keep up the charade. A lost child was concerning. One that spoke like an adult was alarming.

She gave a small smile, looking down as she absentmindedly smoothed the tablecloth. “We could get a nightlight for out here. May make it easier for you.”

A nightlight. What’s happened to me? How far have I fallen?

His first thought after waking up in the park was that the woman called Mouri Ran did not look like the typical kidnapper. Detective instincts sputtered to life in his bruised and broken body, rattling like an old ceiling fan. She was young, likely in her mid-to-late teens, close to his normal age. Long brown hair. Thin, but there was muscle in her form, like that of a wrestler or judoka. He had no hope of overpowering her, a fact made very clear as she bundled him up and brought him here, to the home and business of her father, a private detective.

He called it a minor stroke of luck, like finding a silver dollar after falling down a well.

“For a moment, I thought you might have left.” She said it lightly, with a small smile, but there was concern there, in the way her eyes scanned his face. Searching for a reaction. The ice-water in her veins had not yet returned to room temperature. Did she think he would try to leave? He’d have to get a chair to reach the front door, and Ran had probably locked it tight.

To trap him in here.

No, no. A precaution, meant to keep a skittish child from wandering the streets at night.

Even after three days of living together, sharing meals, even solving a kidnapping case, he could never shake the fear that these people were with the men in black. That this was some elaborate set-up, a terrarium, a habitat to watch this little freak of nature that defied their poison and returned as… this. That any minute now, the men in black would saunter in and vivisect him on the kitchen table.

After all, why else would this family open themselves up to a strange boy they found collapsed in the park?

After the events of the last few days, his rationality felt like roadkill moldering in the sun. Every so often he would poke it with a stick in an attempt to resurrect it. He knew his paranoia was false, that the whole premise was so far-fetched. If they were actually with the men in black, it would be so much easier to cart him off to some white-walled laboratory filled with syringes and scalpels. Or they could just shoot him in the head here and now-

“Whatcha thinking about?” Ran asked.

The sudden question tore him from his thoughts, and he wondered how long he had been staring into space.

“Oh, umm. Nothing, really,” he said.

“Having trouble sleeping?”

“A-a little. I was going to get a glass of water, but I couldn’t find the cups.”

“Oh, Conan, why didn’t you say something? You should have woken me up if you needed help.” She stood up and walked to the kitchen counter, removing two glasses from the cabinets closest to the refrigerator. “Would you like ice?”

“Yes, please.”

She opened the freezer compartment and rooted around in the ice box, dropping a few cubes into two glasses before filling them from the faucet. She set one down in front of him. He instinctively reached one hand for it, before realizing lifting it would likely require two hands. Pushing down this brief moment of shame, he drank greedily from the glass, forgetting how parched he had been feeling.

Ran was watching him as she sipped her water. These quiet moments alone with her filled him with dread. At times like this, she would ask questions about his parents, his living situation, what he was doing after dark that day.

Why he had been covered in bruises.

Ran had gotten better at asking them indirectly, trying to catch him when his guard was down, and sleep deprivation was making it more difficult to evade her questions. He would defend himself with a constant wall of silence, but this strategy would only last so long until the Mouri’s became fed up with him, burning up all their patience and good faith.

His time here was limited. Sooner or later, a worker from child services would show up, interrogate him, and cart him off to an understaffed group home. They would search for his parents, but the pseudonym he gave them would, of course, have no parents. He certainly couldn’t use his real identity. No one would believe this child was once a high schooler who moonlit as a detective, and more importantly, the men in black had stolen his wallet and knew exactly who they had tried to kill. Might as well sit in a lawn-chair on the Mouri’s roof, light up a road flare, and wait for a sniper to put a bullet in him.

His best chance of finding the men in black would be here, with this detective.

He realized Ran hadn’t said anything for several minutes, and was now calmly scanning the apartment, sipping her water.

What was she waiting for?  

If you were going to question someone, now would be the best time, when the suspect is alone with nowhere to hide. She even made a play at being “good cop” by getting him a drink of water. Where were the questions?

On the first night, while riding in the car after the kidnapping case, she had asked him about his parents. He was tired, shell-shocked, dimly watching the glare of passing cars in the window above his head, and for a moment completely forgot he was no longer Kudo Shinichi.

“I don’t really talk with them much.” Not a complete lie. The calls had been more and more infrequent over the years. He wasn’t even sure what country they were in anymore.

Shinichi gasped as the nearby clock rang on the hour, chiming three times. He glanced at Ran, who was back to watching him, concern written on her face. He could feel his cheeks redden, hot shame welling up inside.

She saw that, he thought. Jumping at every loud noise, every shadow. I used to be a detective, goddamn it! I solved murders, I stared down criminals.

“Did you have another nightmare?” asked Ran.

“Y-yes,” he said. No use lying, she wouldn’t believe him anyway. His hand-me-down pajamas were soaked with sweat. Unbidden, the memory of wildfire surged through his skin, lighting his nerves like matchsticks. He involuntarily shuddered.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

He pulled his knees up to his chest, resting his head on them. He couldn’t keep up the silence forever and their patience would only last so long. He was surprised he had been allowed to stay here as long as he had been. The miniature cityscape of beer cans within the apartment signaled that Mouri Kogoro was unlikely to be a foster parent. He had to admit, he was a somewhat decent detective, when he wasn’t stewing in a haze of alcohol and bad TV dramas, but the man could barely care for himself. Out of everything else, waiting for the other shoe to drop was going to drive him insane.

He needed to divert Ran’s attention. Something to focus on besides the pseudo-child in front of her.

“Why are you awake?” he asked.

“To check on you.”

Shit. Swing and a miss.

“I’m okay. I’m not a baby. I don’t need checking on.” Ran’s mouth quirked up in a half-smile, filling him with humiliation.

He turned to look out the window, onto the alleyway behind the apartment. Grayscale buildings rose from the earth like tombstones, linked by webs of black power lines. Skyscrapers filled the horizon, gems of yellow and red light blooming from windows and radio towers.

Beika is much bigger than I thought. Lots of places for criminals to disappear.

The same could be said of me.

There was movement to his left, a blur entering his personal space, and he flinched away. Alarm bells rang in his head and the back of his skull throbbed sympathetically. He opened his eyes (when did he close them?) and saw Ran reaching across the table, frozen in place. Her hand hovered over his shoulder in a suspended attempt at comfort, shaking slightly. Her shadow completely eclipsed him. She retreated back into herself, eyes turned down to the tablecloth.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.”

It was too awkward to look anywhere else so he went back to staring out the window. Minutes dripped by, the only sounds that of the ticking clock and the late-night passage of cars on the street below. Finally, Ran stood up.

“Well, I think it’s a little late for both of us. Let’s try and get some more sleep. Don’t want to be tired tomorrow, right?”

He hummed an affirmative, still looking out the window. He was resigned to sitting in this chair for the rest of the night until he realized Ran didn’t immediately walk away, and was watching him expectantly.

That wasn’t a suggestion, he thought. That was a command. Children don’t decide their own bedtimes. I’ll have to get used to that.

Ran made sure he was following her as they made their way back through the hallway. In the lamplight, it no longer looked as menacing, as foreign. The shadows were purged and in their place was simple domesticity; framed pictures, an end-table with a vase on it. Shinichi cracked open the door to Kogoro’s (his?) room, the man’s snores bellowing outward.

“Wait a sec,” said Ran, vanishing into her room. She returned with a pale blue shirt, folded neatly.

“Change your shirt, you’ll catch a cold,” she said, handing it to him. He had forgotten he had sweat through it during the night.

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s true.” The fact that he barely left the apartment made it unlikely he’d be at risk for any infection at all, but, then again, his knowledge of biology had been twisted by current circumstances.

“Oh, really?” She bent down to his level, though still outside his personal space. He was surprised to notice that, for the first time that night, her smile didn’t look forced. “Just trust me on this one. I know it can be hard to listen to grown-ups, but hey, sometimes we know a few tricks.”

The shirt was probably from a few years ago, but it still was big enough that he could drown in it.

At least it’s soft. And not pink.

“Thank you, again. Goodnight.” He awkwardly clutched the gift to his chest and walked across the threshold into Kogoro’s room.

“Conan?”

“Hmm?”

“If you need anything, I’m right across the hall.”

Unprompted, a steam of memories strobed in his mind. His house, huge, filled with nothing but dust and empty rooms. Silent and without warmth.

“I’ll see you in the morning.” She waited for him to get back to his futon before closing the door. Before he realized it, he was already changing his shirt, the old one thrown into the corner and forgotten. The new one hung off him like a tent, but it was warm and dry.

The lamp in the hall stayed on the rest of the night.

Chapter Text

The morning was bright and without remorse. 

Shinichi grit his teeth as a stray shaft of sunlight sliced through his eyelids. He whined and pulled the blankets into a tight cocoon, willing himself into a dark and quiet place, away from this Alice-in-Wonderland nightmare he kept waking up in. He briefly entertained the thought that maybe he was still lying unconscious in that alleyway, the last few days the result of his brain sautéing in his own blood. 

More logical than turning into a kid, but not very comforting.

He was running on about two hours of sleep, and the last three nights were no better. Thoughts sluggishly pooled in his head, attempting to coagulate into something coherent. He had woken up in a new body, no identity to speak of, and was semi-abducted into probably the kindest form of house arrest. He had no money and no way to access any bank accounts. No resources to count on. No leads on the men in black. 

Oh, I was also nearly murdered. Can’t forget that. 

From within his blanket cocoon, he felt the room pulse around him, breathing in and out. His empty stomach heaved with it. 

In a disturbing way, he felt like he had been murdered. The life of Kudo Shinichi had been flayed from him like skin. All that was left were the ghosts of dozens of murder investigations haunting his dreams, clotted smears of unfelt emotions. They played out each night, unspooling his assault into a thousand different nightmares. He’d been stabbed, shot, carved up, strangled, left for dead; the only commonality was the poison, the flames down his spine, the snapping bones, the squeezing hand around his heart…

He felt a foot prod through his protective bubble. 

“Get up, kid, or I’m eating your breakfast.” 

Shinichi excavated his way out of the blankets into burning daylight, glaring at the bleary shape towering over him. Detective Mouri Kogoro seemed to cut an intimidating silhouette, when he wasn’t wearing pajamas stained with last night’s beer and chicken teriyaki. He gazed down at Shinichi with detached intensity, like the boy was a chalk outline of a murder victim. An unlit cigarette flicked back in forth in his mouth.  

“No one is eating his breakfast except him.” Ran must have had cameras installed in the apartment, because she was suddenly in the room, wielding a spatula like a rapier. Seeing Kogoro’s raised foot stepping on the seemingly-abandoned child, she delivered a small, swift kick to his shin. As he yelped, she handed him the spatula. “Make sure the eggs aren’t burning.”

Kogoro grumbled something under his breath about elder abuse before leaving to rescue his breakfast. Ran retrieved Shinichi’s glasses from the nightstand and handed them to the boy. She crouched by the side of his futon. 

“How are you feeling?”

He slid the glasses on and shrugged, avoiding looking her in the face. Light and noise hammered in his head. 

“Hey,” she said gently, lifting his chin to look at her. She smiled, pointing two fingers at Shinichi’s eyes and then reversing them towards her face. “Eyes on me. Remember what we talked about. Use your words.”

“I’m just tired.”

“I know you are, but let’s get some food in you.” 

“Can I have a few minutes?”

“Of course, but you better get it before it gets cold.” She squeezed his shoulder and left the room.  

Shinichi waited to hear the light bickering and clattering of pans in the kitchen before woozily getting to his feet. Ran’s old shirt was drowning him in faded cotton and he had to pull the sleeves up over his hands. He turned back to his futon and carefully peeled back the top layer of foam, exposing the spring-loaded guts of the inner mattress. He reached one tiny hand inside and pulled out a plastic grocery bag. Inside were several pilfered granola bars, some packets of dried fruit, an old subway map, and a handful of crumpled dollar bills totaling to about $10.

The guilt gnawed at him. The food was simple enough; Ran kept giving him snacks because he wasn’t eating, so he just set them aside for later, until he realized what a sizable stash he had. That had worked until she insisted he actually eat them in front of her. And the money…

He wasn’t a thief. He had spent too long as a detective to resort to that, but as he knelt on the floor, little fingers rubbing over the faded bills, the cognitive dissonance was too real to ignore. It mixed with his sleep deprivation and throbbed in his head like a second heartbeat.

I won’t be here forever, he thought. Sooner or later, I’ll have to leave. Or they’ll throw me out.

He was a charity case, nothing more, and he wasn’t going to wait for the Mouri’s to become fed up with him. If he was going to leave, it would be on his own terms. For that, he needed insurance. Just some food and money to get by. 

Kudo Shinichi may not have been a thief, but Edogawa Conan was.

—

“I can’t take him seriously when you dress him like that.” Kogoro leaned against the side of the stairwell, clocking Shinichi with a deadpan expression as he blew smoke in the vague direction of the air vent.

“Dad, he’s not a doll,” said Ran as she rolled up Shinichi’s sleeves for the third time that morning. “I don’t dress him.”

“He looks like your laundry pile became sentient and started eating my food. You keep stuffing him in your hand-me-downs, he’s gonna develop a complex, on top of everything else-“

“Dad, please shut up.” Ran adjusted the wool hat on Shinichi’s head, pulling it up out of his eyes once again, then rolling the edges up to hold it in place. “If you don’t, I’m flushing all your cigarettes down the toilet. Don’t listen to him, Conan.”

“You’ll never find them all. I got hidden caches all over the office. Come on, let’s go before we freeze.” Kogoro pushed the door open and strolled out into the cold morning air. 

Ran held back, absently tucking in stray pieces of his oversized clothing while he felt the dignity evaporate from his body. Today’s navy blue sweatshirt almost went down to his knees, while his pants were rolled up and held in place with safety pins. She checked his gloves for the third time, as if they had somehow gotten loose in the last thirty seconds while he was busy doing absolutely nothing.  

“I can do this myself,” he said quietly.

Her hands froze, fingers tensed in the air. “I know, I know. I’m sorry.” The concern in her eyes was so genuine that he had to fight the reflex to look away. “Are you sure you feel alright to go? We can try tomorrow, if you want.”

“It’s just a walk, right?” He tried to smile but it felt counterfeit. “I’m so bored, cooped up in here.”

“Right, right. It’s just a walk.” Her eyes unfocused, as if looking at something lurking in the stairwell behind him.

She’s trying to reassure herself more than me.

“It’s just a walk,” she repeated.

They stood at the threshold of the door, the light turned cold and silver as it passed through the frosted glass. When Ran held out her hand, he didn’t take it. 

Chapter Text

Beika towered over Shinichi like a disappointed parent. 

Humanity pressed in on all sides and he had spent most of the walk avoiding the crushing footfalls of indifferent pedestrians. Any remaining processing power was devoted to forming a mental map of the surrounding area, just to get a sense of where the hell he had been living for half a week. There wasn’t a lot left over, so the map came out looking like a crayon drawing on a greasy diner menu. 

Everything blended together into one caustic swirl. The streets were endless gray concrete, the buildings like Brutalist tumors of cement and glass. No landmarks stood out as familiar, which was probably to be expected; that first night he had been running low on blood and high on terror, the hours slipping into a murky film. Every memory he had was the same muddy color, soaked in rain, dim streetlights, and adrenaline.

A swinging handbag clocked him in the face. The lady at least had the decency to look admonished before continuing with her day. A hand seized him by the collar and pulled him clear of additional head trauma. 

“I told you to watch him,” growled Kogoro. As usual, he was addressing Ran rather than him. Kogoro very rarely spoke to “Conan” directly and Shinichi believed it was some kind of ego defense; acknowledging the little runaway’s existence would make it more difficult to drop-kick him to the curb later. “Kid’s like a twig in a river here.”

“I know, dad. I didn’t expect there to be this many people out and about.” Ran had taken up the rearguard of his security detail but had moved up to examine his bruised cheek. He’d felt her eyes on him the entire walk, brighter than the glare of the sun, and he squirmed under her scrutiny. “I can’t blame him for being stir-crazy. It’s the first time he’s been out of the apartment since he got here.”

“Like I give a rat’s ass. Here’s a lesson in parenting; if a kid sees an opportunity to vanish on you, they’ll take it.” Foot traffic parted around Kogoro like he was an ornery icebreaker. “Grab the part of him with the most meat and pull him if you have to.” 

“He doesn’t like holding hands. He’s…” She paused for a moment, looking down to study him. “Independent.”

“Yeah, he’s real independent. If he thinks he can take care of himself, he can find somewhere else to hide out.”

“Dad!”

The walk had been Kogoro’s idea, which was apparently a rare enough occurrence in the Mouri household that Ran flip-flopped between interrogating her father for ulterior motives and checking him for a fever. Her suspicion had dissolved when “Conan” had voiced his enthusiasm for getting out of the apartment; the little vagrant vocalizing any opinion at all was an equally rare occurrence. So, she bundled him up in enough layers to suffocate a seal and they made for the door.

It had taken Shinichi all of two blocks to realize this was a terrible idea and he would like to go home, but his home was many, many miles to the south and was probably being picked apart by a crime syndicate.

Every sensation was a jarring reminder of you do not belong here. He was lost amongst a sea of shifting legs, the throngs of people constricting around him like a tourniquet. He could feel the rumble of passing cars in his skull. There was a growing awareness of just how beneath notice he was, of how little space he occupied. The city was an engine of cold moving parts, of long femur bones caging him in. He was a moth flitting between its gears.

Just another brat, a homeless youth.

He shivered through Ran’s borrowed sweatshirt. Breakfast had turned to sawdust in his stomach and the two hours of sleep had long run dry. Paranoia moldered in the periphery of his thoughts and he flinched at every heavy footfall. 

“Conan, stay close to me.” There was iron in Ran’s voice but it was brittle and rusted, more pleading than commanding. He realized he had been close to falling off the edge of the curb into oncoming traffic, and she was suddenly at his side, guiding him away. He couldn’t look her in the face because he would have to acknowledge her gloved hand that kept drifting towards him, silently begging him to take it.

She’s just trying to protect me, he thought, but I can take care of myself.

The back of his skull throbbed with phantom pain, nerves twitching in remembered agony.

Like you did before? 

—

After the second time he was nearly carried away by a riptide of pedestrians, Ran’s patience had worn thin to the point where his safety overrode his autonomy. His little hand was now firmly clutched in her vice-like grip, keeping him anchored against the city’s meandering bloodstream. Surrendering the last dregs of his pride, he let himself dissociate from his body and be dragged along.

“I know you don’t like it, but I don’t want to lose you.” Her tone had softened but her hold on him stayed solid. 

Who are you?

The question came on unbidden, rising from a deep well. He knew in a superficial sense who they were, mostly by skulking through the apartment and exercising some atrophied detective muscles. He had taken in the framed pictures, the old police memorabilia, the bills and case files scattered on Kogoro’s desk. 

You’re Mouri Ran, sixteen years old, daughter of Mouri Kogoro. There are no photos of your mother in the apartment, although there is a frame on your nightstand of you, your father, and a woman, all smiling. You attend Teitan High School, and have a number of close friends there. You enjoy science and art but struggle with math. You are a student of judo and karate, and I’ve seen you throw a kidnapper across the room.

They stopped at a crosswalk, and Ran tightened her grip on his hand as the crowd filled in around them.

You found a six-year-old boy collapsed in the park and took him home with no second thoughts. You’ve clothed and fed him and he has barely given you anything other than a fake name. 

He looked over to Kogoro, who was leaning against the stoplight, cradling his lighter in his hands to shield it from the wind. 

You’re Mouri Kogoro, thirty-nine years old. A private detective, despite everything. You drink, smoke, and gamble, but still manage to get steady work. You don’t talk about your wife very often. You have an obsession with the singer Okino Yoko and bad TV serials.

Kogoro finally managed to get a spark and took a long drag off the cigarette. 

You were a cop once. Officers still recognize you. You live in your own head and leap to conclusions, but there’s still an old sharpness left. You look at your cases from years past. When you think I’m distracted, you study me like a set of fingerprints. There are bills you can barely pay, but I’ve never missed a meal.

Shinichi caught a glimpse of his reflection in a nearby window, and almost didn’t recognize the boy staring back.

Why am I still here?

—

Three blocks over, Shinichi’s sleep debt had descended into his legs and turned them into jelly. The concrete swayed underneath him, and he was relying on Ran’s grip just to keep himself upright. Mercifully, they had made it to the next intersection with the “walk” sign still unlit, giving him a brief respite. 

“Are you getting tired?” She asked, probably to be polite. It was clear to both of them that she had been half-dragging him since the last crosswalk. 

“Just a bit.” The lie stoked the embers of what little pride he had left, as he was led by the hand by a girl his own chronological age.

“There’s a park just over there.” She pointed into the vast distance to an oasis of green amongst the gray. “We can rest there for a bit. Home’s not too far off.”

Home?

“Yeah, home!” said Ran, strangely pleased. He hadn’t realized he vocalized that last thought out loud, instead of just letting it simmer in his head as he usually did. Exhaustion had reached the point where his mental wiring was crossed, leading to dangerous short-circuits.

“We actually went in a big loop, so you got a little tour of Beika.” She smiled down at him and jangled his hand in hers. “We’ll have to take you to the shops downtown some day. They’re really lovely.”

The fact that they had walked in a loop was news to him. His crayon-scrawled mental map didn’t match that at all, and it incinerated itself out of pure shame.

What did she mean by someday-

There was a familiar man standing on the other side of the crosswalk and his brain choked on the sensory input. Through the gaps in the foot traffic he saw flashes of a nightmare figure, dressed in black leather. 

No.

A family blocked his vision but he caught glimpses of silver-blonde hair blowing in the wind, tips like spears. 

It can’t be him.

He was suddenly back in that alleyway, dark and slick with rain. A piston driving into the back of his skull, pain screeching down his spine. Bruises blooming along his back and stomach. Face down in standing water and garbage. Then, fire down his throat, into the marrow of his bones. A hollow heartbeat in his ears. Joints popping, muscles tearing. Twisting, bending, breaking, remaking-

The “walk” sign blinked on, and the crowd began to move.

No. 

“Come on, Conan. I know you’re tired but the park’s just a little further.” Ran’s grip was steel and it pulled him forward into a death march. “I think there’s a vending machine where I can get you some juice.”

Sirens blared in his head and every nerve pulsed with the command of Get Away! The order collided with exhausted muscles that lurched to tepid action. His senses scrambled to find vectors of escape that didn’t involve running into traffic, but they were distracted by the phantom pains echoing in his skull. 

He ground his shoes against the concrete and pulled. Hard. Ran nearly toppled over at the unexpected force.

“Conan!”

He kept pulling, backing up onto the sidewalk but the crowd pushed forward, dragging him in the undertow. 

“Conan! What’s gotten into you?!” Ran had steadied herself and tightened her grip. All his backward momentum was halted, held fast by Ran. The crowd parted around them like a breaking wave, a few curious souls hanging back to watch the spectacle. 

“What’s the matter?” She tried to soften her tone but her eyes were full of panic. She craned her neck back to try and find her father, far ahead. 

“Let me go!” The man in black was approaching quickly. Shinichi yanked on Ran’s arm, throwing his whole body into the motion. His right shoulder popped, spiking fresh pain alongside the remembered. 

“Conan, please. Let’s talk when we get to the other side of the street. Just a little further-“

She shifted her grip onto his forearm and overpowered him with humiliatingly-little effort. He had to keep his feet moving forward or he’d be dragged along the asphalt on bloodied knees. They were in the middle of the intersection now and the man in black was nearly on them. More of the pedestrians had taken notice of Shinichi’s struggle.

“Let me go! You don’t understand!” 

“Then talk to me!”

He tried to use his other hand to peel Ran’s grip off, but it was like trying to break stone. Her fingers dug into his skin, the edges turning rosy. 

“Please, Conan.” Ran was begging, head snapping around, searching for her father. “Let’s just get to the other side of the street. You can tell me what’s wrong then, but please-“

She stumbled on a piece of broken asphalt. Her grip loosened just for a second, but she caught the edge of Shinichi’s hand. His glove came free.

The rebound sent him flying backward, colliding with someone’s shins. He shook off the impact and submerged himself in the mob, clawing his way through kneecaps and handbags. There were shrieks of surprise somewhere high above but he ignored them, tunneling his way back to the sidewalk. A wayward briefcase struck him across the face and he stumbled, falling flat onto cold concrete. His hand-me-down hat slid down over his eyes, becoming tangled with his glasses. The collisions of heavy boots reverberated around him and he reflexively pulled his limbs close, drawing tighter, tighter into himself.

Two hands grabbed him by the middle and he screamed. 

There was no pain. He was lifted, cradled tight into someone’s chest, arms wrapped around him. The concrete was too far below. Distantly, he heard Kogoro’s voice; “Show’s over, folks! You can all go home.”

 He squirmed pathetically against the hold. Ran’s voice was at his ear.

“Shh. Shh. It’s me. It’s just me.”

I don’t even know you.

“It’s just me.”

Who are you. 

He felt movement and realized he was being carried forward. His senses slowly rebooted, and he noticed the hat was still covering his eyes. With trembling hands, he pulled the tangled yarn free from his glasses, blinking in the noonday light.

Over Ran’s shoulder, he watched the man in black walk away, uninterested and uncaring. The figments of previous nightmares rolled off his form. The leather no longer matched. The hair wasn’t quite right.

It wasn’t him.

As the terror evaporated, exhaustion reasserted itself and he felt the world drift away. 

Chapter Text

For a time, the world was a black void, warm and full of static. It was the kind of deep, cavernous sleep he’d had only a few times in his life, when reality fell out underneath him and swallowed everything. All his troubles, all his doubts, all his thoughts. The kind of sleep where you forget existence entirely.

Then, the bliss evaporated in a puff of burnt coffee and the jarring sounds of dubbed Spanish telenovelas. In the span of two seconds, four days worth of trauma pierced his brain with the speed of a bullet and the precision of a back-alley lobotomy. Everything came flooding back; lying in the gutter, the burn and break of bones, the panic in the rain. Found by Ran, cradled tight, raincoat stretched over him as his ruined clothes stained her sweater. Unanswered questions and silent glances over meals. A full-blown meltdown in the streets, fleeing from figments. 

“You alive or dead, kid?”

When he opened his eyes, Kogoro was in his usual spot of glaring down at him from on high. A mug of black coffee steamed in his hands, the vapors mixing with the smoke that wreathed the office.

Out of instinct or hope, Shinichi held up his hands for the coffee.

“You out of your mind? Like you need any caffeine after that stunt you pulled. You’re lucky to get juice.” He took a large sip of it, because he’s a jackass, but he probably burnt his tongue so it all evened out. “Besides, Ran would skin me alive.” Having performed his obligatory wellness check, Kogoro stomped back over to his desk and walled himself off with a newspaper.

Even without caffeine to grease the wheels, Shinichi’s mind slowly rebooted. He was lying on one of the couches in the downstairs office, tightly wrapped in an old, faded blanket. Someone had placed his glasses on the coffee table. When he sat up to retrieve them, he felt an oncoming head-rush, bruises of violet color welling up behind his eyes. He fumbled for the glasses through the light show and settled their too-large frames on his face before laying back down.

He lost control today. Out in the gray city, where buildings and people stretched forever upwards, where eyes passed over him without thought, he saw something that wasn’t real, a borrowed shape cloaked in nightmare. Up to this point, he believed the one thing he had been left with after limping away from that alleyway was his mind. He answered to a different name, wore borrowed clothes, and slept on the floor of an alcoholic, but at least he had his wits. A flash of black leather and blonde hair and he’s suddenly lost all sense of self-preservation, throwing himself into morning traffic.

Kogoro cleared his throat once, twice. The newspaper crinkled as he flipped the pages. The woman on the TV believed her husband was having another affair, her voice not matching her lips.

“Where’s Ran?” Shinichi asked.

“She left.”

“What?!” He sat up too suddenly and the head-rush returned, spilling colors across his vision.

The newspaper bent backwards and Kogoro stared over the crease. “To go to the store.”

“Oh.” A strange feeling welled up and sputtered out within him. He laid back down and pulled the blanket tight even though the geriatric heater was running today. He could hear it snarl and groan through the vents, breathing out warm, musty air. Ran must have won the daily argument of “frostbitten toes versus empty bank account.” She had a way to coax the ancient machine to life while Kogoro lamented the loss of gambling and nicotine funds. 

“She was going to get groceries on the way back,” said Kogoro. “That didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you now.” It wasn’t phrased like a question.

The office swam around him as he shook off the vestiges of sleep. He turned his head to the side, resting on his cheek as his memory attached meaning to shapes. The lights were turned off and the shades drawn low, holding back the late afternoon; either for his benefit or to soothe Kogoro’s potential hangover. Strips of sunshine splashed against the the wall and motes of dust fell from the vents, bursting into golden flame when they touched daylight.

He had only been down here a handful of times, none of them unsupervised. In some ways, it was a living diorama of a hidden war, of father and daughter battling for territory. Newspapers and magazines were lined up with geometric precision, but every pocket of order and cleanliness was ringed by empty cans and cigarette debris. The scent of industrial-strength cleansers clashed with smoke and unwashed clothing. Ran’s relentless determination to make her father somewhat presentable met its match in Kogoro’s vice and utter disinterest. 

A fault-line of fresh plaster spiderwebbed across a wall. Someone had driven their fist through it, and he honestly didn’t know who was the more likely culprit; Kogoro or Ran.

Car horns blared below in late afternoon traffic. The woman on the TV confronted her husband with a crescendo of Spanish guitars.

There had been very few quiet moments in the Mouri household and he was the fulcrum of most them. They would ask questions and he would stay silent or fill the gaps in the empty air with nonsense. The nights were quiet only on occasion, his sleep cut to ribbons by nightmares. While he may have brought justice to many victims of murder, their ghosts haunted him all the same nowadays. The skeletons in his closet had picked the lock and found their way out. 

“What happened out there, kid?” Kogoro’s voice was distant and mumbled into a cigarette. 

He had been shaking like a leaf and didn’t realize it. He turned to face the inside of the couch and counted the repaired seams in the fabric. 

“This silent act is real cute, you know that?” said Kogoro. “You may have Ran wrapped around your finger but I’ve seen your type before.”

You’ve seen nothing like me.

“I barely know Ran.” Shinichi’s voice was smothered by couch cushions. “I barely know you.”

“And we know nothing about you, and it’s not for lack of trying, sunshine.” A chair screeched against the ground and Shinichi heard a giant’s footfalls approaching. 

This is the moment. 

He had finally exceeded the patience of Mouri Kogoro. He could almost taste the sidewalk, the mix of cold air and exhaust fumes.

The footfalls moved past him. A door creaked open, and a mix of shuffling cardboard and distant, murmuring curses breathed out from it. He jumped out of his skin when something impacted the coffee table with a sound like a diluted frag grenade. Scattered pieces of plastic shrapnel impaled the back of his head. He reached a hand back without looking and studied its shape with his fingertips.

“A puzzle?” He held the jagged piece in his hand, deep green and faded with fingerprints. Either this was a convoluted torture mechanism he couldn’t see the other end of, or a distraction. Ran had tried the latter the first night, dragging out old toys from a dusty sarcophagus buried deep in her closet. He pantomimed interest but it was a poor performance and Ran saw through it. Don’t worry, we’ll find something you’ll like. I promise. 

If it was a play at distraction, it was a two-player game. Kogoro sighed explosively, collapsing onto the couch with a symphony of popping joints. He hunched over the table, squinting at pieces while pushing them around with his finger.

“You expect me to do this by myself?”

The sheer improbability of this scenario jammed the gears in Shinichi’s head, but his hands moved mechanically, responding to years of dopamine conditioning. Shinichi liked puzzles in both childhoods. 

“Sort out the edges first, brat.”

“I know how to do a puzzle.”

“Congratu-fucking-lations, I now know a single thing about you.” His tone was steel wool but there was something like mirth clinging to the edges.

Within minutes, they had built a framework, some nameless wilderness or discount national park. The packaging was little help in their efforts, torn to pieces by a preschool Ran. Shinichi’s tiny fingers flicked away fields of blue sky as he searched for fragments of tree lines. The telenovela reached its climax, beginning with the couple physically fighting and then ending with passionate kissing. The credits rolled to a medley of latin tunes. Kogoro grabbed the remote without looking and flicked it over to a crime drama.

“This used to help calm Ran down when she threw herself on the floor screaming.” Kogoro was falling behind, his jumble of gray stone pieces not quite becoming a mountain.

“I didn’t do that.” 

“You sure as shit came close, or worse.”

“I’m fine now.” 

“Bullshit you are. You forget that little show you pulled out on the street already? Or did that fall knock some sense loose from your head?”

It’s amazing that Ran turned out the way she did if this was how her father spoke to children.

“It won’t happen again.”

“Uh-huh. Sure it won’t. Pardon me for wanting to make sure I don’t have a ticking time bomb sharing a room with me. And would it kill you to lengthen your sentences a bit? You didn’t shut up when that rich asshole’s daughter was kidnapped, but now you can’t speak words more than one syllable? Flex some of that first-grade vocabulary, would ya?”

Shinichi had the makings of a sunset in his hands, gold fading to purple and then black. 

Kogoro steamrolled on as he tried to jam two pieces that clearly didn’t fit together. “I’ll ask again, because I’m great and patient and all that jazz. What happened today? Any minute now I’m gonna get a call from the inspector and he’s gonna tell me that a young, handsome private eye and his daughter were seen abducting a small child off the street in broad daylight. What do I tell him?”

“You could tell him that’s what Ran did four nights ago?” The words came out dry and bloodless from a place he couldn’t name.

The fist’s impact against the table rattled through Shinichi’s elbows into his teeth. The puzzle took flight for half a second. Kogoro opened his mouth once, twice, then snarled and took a long, lung-popping drag from his cigarette before drowning it in an overfilled ash tray. Over the span of a full half-minute, he massaged his face with his hands. The heat faded from him like the glow from the ashes.

“Someone messed you up bad, kid, didn’t they?”

Kogoro’s words found doors inside Shinichi that he clearly wanted to stay closed. He tore his attention into two halves, one focused on matching the tree line to the skeletal husk of Kogoro’s mountain peak, while the other half-listened to the crime drama in the background. He sutured wood to stone while a man screeched his innocence at his sister’s murder.

“You’re scared. I get it.” Kogoro’s voice was quiet dust. Shinichi fumbled a piece the color of jade and lost it amongst the piles. “You seem to like facts, so let’s speak a common language. There are no missing children with your name in the area. We’re still making turns in the other precincts, but nothing’s coming up. So either your name is fake or your parents aren’t looking for you.”

Both statements were true. One had been true for much longer than the other. 

“Edogawa Conan is my name.”

“Sure. Let’s go with that for now.” Kogoro had abandoned the puzzle completely. “You said something the other day to Ran, about not speaking with your parents for some time. That true?”

Shinichi felt the reflexive need to wall himself off again. He returned to the jigsaw sunset, untangling fragments of purple night. He could almost connect it to the outer frame.

“This little act of yours is starting to get on my nerves. There’s a pattern to abuse and you don’t fit it. You got the bruises and the trigger reflexes, but normal kids slip up and say something. Now you,” He jabbed his finger at Shinichi. “You’ve said almost nothing since you got here. You’re editing your story. You’re trying so hard to not give up anything that you’re lighting signal flares without even realizing it.”

At this point, lying was taking too much energy. “I haven’t spoken with my parents for a long time.”

“So they abandoned you.”

Something sharp and red throbbed in Shinichi’s chest and all sensations were suddenly too much. Acrid smoke crawled into his nostrils, and the strips of sunlight on the walls burned bright and hot. His eyelids fluttered and he began coughing. It was a miserable sound.

Kogoro noticed the change but kept up the pressure. “This isn’t an interrogation, kid. It’s a conversation.”

“Then why did you wait until Ran was gone?” He couldn’t get enough air. Kogoro got up and clattered the shades aside as he tried to open a window, mumbling about the wasted heat. A cool wind circumnavigated in the room, sucking out the smoke and vent dust. 

Kogoro sighed and headed back to his desk. “If you’re gonna be a drama queen about it, we’re done for today. Go upstairs and wash up before dinner.”

“I’m sorry.”

Kogoro craned his neck back, watching with hooded eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Something cracked inside of him. The dam had been broken but what was pouring out wasn’t what either of them expected. “I didn’t mean that about Ran. Or you. About abducting me. I know the difference. I just-“ He felt the same as he did on the street; a panic, nerves soaked in lye, the red-lining of his autonomics. A loss of control. But this tasted different.

Guilt.

“I haven’t been fair,” said Shinichi. “I don’t want to be here but…" He trailed off, the statement floundering for an ending he couldn’t fish up. Ran scooped him from the gutter and her father gave him a roof, some meals, and a place to sleep. Things could have been so much worse. 

I want to go home.

He was angry. Beneath the exhaustion and confusion and bone-deep survival instinct was a white-flamed anger that everything, everything had been taken away from him. Only now did he realize that he had no control of that flame and it was burning the very bridges he was hanging from. He was angry with Kogoro. He was even angry with Ran. Every kindness they gave revealed more of what he had lost. 

The breeze from the window made ghostly patterns of the smoke. His eyes stung. Kogoro leaned down on one knee, his voice quiet.

“What happened to you, kid?”

Shinichi drew the old blanket around himself. There was a tag on it that said Ran in lopsided letters. “I can’t tell you right now.” He expected screaming. He expected being cursed out. Instead, the man rose to standing.

“You’re ten-thousand red flags wearing the skin of a small boy, you know that?” His voice was tired and gutted. 

“I know it doesn’t make sense-“

“The only thing that’s made sense this last week is you having a nuclear meltdown in the middle of the street. That tracks with everything. That’s in the handbook. The rest of what you’re serving up, I can’t make heads or tails of. The way you talk, the way you move.”

That line of questioning was going to places he definitely couldn’t give answers for so Shinichi switched railways.

“You could have kicked me out as soon as Ran brought me back with her. You didn’t.” His eyes watched the carpet because it was too much to look elsewhere. “Thank you.”

“City’s full of strays and the system here is kept together with tape, rubber bands, and too little charity money. I’m doing you a favor. You want to leave? Door’s right there.”

“Ran locks it at night.”

“See, you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t tried to leave.”

“I was just testing it.”

“You failed. And before this little pow-wow ends and you go back to acting like a prisoner of war who refuses to give up state secrets, just do one more thing for me. Something for Ran and I as we give you the infinite kindness of letting you live here and take food from our mouths.

“Let your guard down a little. Say something every once in a while. Doesn’t need to be about your past, but stop acting like a damn ghost haunting the apartment. You’re worrying Ran and annoying me.”

Shinichi correctly assumed that staying silent now was the wrong move. “Okay,” he replied. 

“Now, go and wash up before Ran gets home. She gets wind that I was smoking around you, she’ll be shoving my head into the oven tonight. Get.”

The cold breeze and the heater battled for supremacy. Shinichi decided to take the blanket with him. As his feet made contact with the floor, a hand settled on his shoulder. It was astonishingly gentle and reminded him of Ran.

“Was it him?”

“What?”

“Whoever you saw on the street? Was it him? The one who did this to you?” The words were detached and clinical, pulled from life experiences that didn’t involve booze or TV. 

“…No. It wasn’t him.”

“Good. Now vacate.”

Shinichi made it three steps to the door before turning back. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I’ve opened Pandora’s fucking box now by giving you permission to speak, haven’t I?”

In years past, Shinichi questioned others with the authority of an investigator, dressed in suit and tie. Now, he was barefoot on a dirty carpet, drowning in a sweatshirt while clinging to a borrowed blanket. “You said the city was full of strays.” The blanket twisted under his fingers. “So why me?” 

Kogoro heaved his feet onto his desk and tilted his head back to catch the fresh air from the window. His eyes were closed. “Because you’re the stray my daughter brought home.”

Chapter Text

“Dad was smoking around you again, wasn’t he?” Ran towered in the kitchen doorframe, the flowery apron and spatula not quite dulling the edge in her voice. Pots boiled behind her, wreathing her in steam, like the ghost of cigarettes past. 

Shinichi tried to look less incriminating as he stood in newly-changed clothes and smelling of lemon shampoo. He had spent the last 30 minutes trying to scrub the evidence off of him, and instead of reeking of tobacco he now reeked of tobacco and citrus. 

There were ample chairs and couches to hide behind but Ran’s height gave her tactical superiority. His first instinct since becoming Conan was to run at any sign of conflict, whether it be physical, verbal, or parental. 

“What are you making?” He asked innocently. 

“Pasta,” said Ran, with the finality of a stone wall. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I want to be impartial while I’m staying here,” said Shinichi as he sidled up against the couch, immediately regretting his choice of words. Polite diction was great at getting out of sticky situations involving amped-up criminals and large, blunt objects. It was unnerving coming out of a kid’s mouth. 

Ran looked unimpressed before blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes and kneeling down in front of him, smelling of tomato sauce and oregano. Her attention was blinding and he found a patch of carpet to focus on instead. 

“It’s not good to be around smoke. It’ll make you sick. I know you know this, you’re a smart boy.”

Lung cancer was at the bottom of his list of Current Risks to my Health and Safety. “I don’t want to interrupt both of your daily routines while I’m here,” said Shinichi. “I’ve already caused enough trouble.” Sensations from that morning flickered up his spine, of sour fear and cold concrete at his back. 

“You’ve been no trouble at all,” said Ran, clearly lying through her teeth. “And you are not interrupting any of our routines. If anything, things were getting a little too boring around here.” He could sense a small smile behind her words but he was too busy investigating the carpet for tiny criminal activities to look in her the face.

Yes, he thought. What a way to break up the monotony. Adopt a child. 

“I’ve been trying to get dad to quit smoking for years,” Ran added. “Maybe having another set of lungs in the house will be the kick in the head he needs.”

“If he wouldn’t quit for his daughter, why would he quit for me?”

The silence was staggering, the kind of thunderclap realization that accompanied masterful deductions. And he just performed it on the teenage girl who took him in and was guilty of protecting him from a stint of chemo. “Well… He…” she began.

Proof of god manifested in the kitchen as the pot chose that moment to boil over onto the kitchen counter and floor. Bubbling water sizzled against the heating coils and sent gouts of salty steam through the door.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” cried Ran as she hurried back into the kitchen, grabbing an oven mitt and hefting the pot off the stove with one hand. She found a washcloth and began mopping up the residue from the counter. “Stay right there! I’ll be right back!”

Shinichi did not stay right there but didn’t have many hideaways to choose from. Locking himself in the bathroom or Kogoro’s room seemed like a slippery slope, involving scolding and doors busted off their hinges. He could head back downstairs but the memory of Kogoro’s ham-fisted interrogation left him feeling breathless and dizzy. Also, he’d come back to dinner reeking even more of tobacco, which would only add fuel to Ran’s self-righteous fire.

It took both hands to pull himself onto the couch, wedging his tiny form into a deep groove near the armrest. In the reflection of the window, he watched Ran return her kitchen to order, muttering words under her breath. She swore when she thought no one else was looking.

Why’d you go and do that, he thought to himself. Push away the only person who seems to give a shit about you. 

The reflection warped as rain began to fall, pattering against the window.

She doesn’t care about you. She cares about the mysterious little boy she found in the park. The one she’ll grow sick of when she learns what he’s really like. If he doesn’t keep his damned mouth shut. 

He laid there for probably 15 minutes, listening as ground beef sizzled in tomato sauce. The couch cushions were worn and pleasantly soft. His skin was still pink from hot water and the lemon scent had finally overpowered stale cigarettes.

There was a lot to be thankful for, he reasoned. These people were not trying to kill him; granted that was a low bar to cross but given the last few days it felt important to mention. He was warm and dry and food was being prepared as he sulked in self-pity. Yet, the tension was still there, live wires sparking under his skin. Adrenaline still oozed through his blood after his paranoid fit in the streets, and that sour surge spent its dying hours giving Shinichi miniature panic attacks all day. 

Or was it guilt?

His mouth dried up. His conscience had flip-flopped back and forth the last few days from “I owe these people nothing” to “I owe these people everything”. What could he even give back? All the money Kudo Shinichi had was tied up in his name, his reputation, his trust fund, and his fingerprints. None of those were his anymore. Maybe the fingerprints, he thought, but he took a moment to investigate his hands, idly wondering how much of his body had changed. 

Was this even what I looked like as a kid? He tried to recall images from photographs but there weren’t that many hanging around the Kudo mansion.

At some point, Ran had returned to the living room, taking approximately six whole seconds to find his hiding spot. She crouched down on her haunches, far enough away to be non-threatening but still within reach. Her hair was frizzy with steam.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said, her face a neutral mask. “Ever since I got home. Can I ask why?”

The couch’s fabric suddenly became very interesting.

“Hey, enough of that.” She gently guided his gaze back to her, pointing two finger’s at Shinichi’s eyes, then back to her own. “Remember, eyes on me. Use your words.”

“I’m sorry for causing so many problems,” he said. 

“Conan, you’ve been an angel since you’ve gotten here.” He couldn’t ignore how she began rubbing her right wrist, where his tiny fingers had tried to pry open her grip that morning. “We enjoy having you around,” she lied again.

This was honestly worse than Kogoro’s interrogation and the air suddenly became too thin, up here on the heights of the couch. He wanted to squirm his way into the depths of the cushions and carve out a place to sleep forever, if he could fall asleep without needing to have a nervous breakdown in the process.

Her patience was a tender worm under his skin, gently eating away at him. “Is there anything I can do to make you see you’re not a burden to us?”

Kogoro’s words echoed up through smoke-clouded memories. Let your guard down a little. Say something every once in a while. Stop acting like a damned ghost…

“Can I help with dinner?” He asked. The thought came out of nowhere, and the speed at which his mind changed direction nearly broke his neck.

She blinked in surprise. “Oh?”

“I want to help,” he repeated, the speech center of his brain seemingly undamaged by the mental torque. The rest of it scrambled to follow suit. Ran stood up, looking just as dazed as he felt. 

“Uhm. Okay.” She held onto the couch for support as she dizzily wandered back into the kitchen before halting just past the door. “Hold on.” She turned the burner down low and double-checked the pasta water for errant explosions before exiting the room. Shinichi had enough of a brainstem left to put one foot in front of the other, and enough reason to realize what he’d just asked of her. He went from hiding away from her attention to stepping into the heart of her domain, the one part of this claustrophobic apartment that was hers. He crammed his hands into the too-large pockets of his pajamas, taking in with subtle alarm how different a kitchen looked from this low angle. The countertops may as well have been on the moon. The pot full of bubbling water was already on strike 1, so he fixed his focus on it on Ran’s behalf before realizing that he could do nothing to stop it from boiling over again. Worse, he was the perfect height to get third-degree burns across his entire body if it did.

Ran returned with the step stool from the bathroom and placed it on the counter farthest from the stove, which wasn’t very far in this tiny kitchen. After a beat, she grabbed some disinfectant from underneath the sink and wiped it down. “Okay, you’re all set.”

His pride died slowly with each step, but he was too far gone to run away from her again. At least the counters no longer looked like distant castle walls. At the summit, there was a cutting board in front of him, laden with tomatoes and a large knife. He picked up the knife, needing both hands to do so, and began to steady it over the smallest tomato.

Ran was on him instantly and the knife was carefully plucked from his hands. “Nope. Nope. None of that.” She sheathed it in its block far away from him. “You can make the salad.”

“I can be a lot more helpful if you let me.”

“You can keep a lot more blood inside you if you listen to me.” Ran filled her arms with already-chopped ingredients and laid them out in front of him. “We don’t even know what your blood type is.”

“It’s O negative.”

“I don’t want to know why you know that, and you probably won’t answer if I ask.” Then, as if she just processed his words, “Oh, that’s mine, too.”

She returned to the stove now that he was disarmed and pacified. He began throwing handfuls of sliced romaine lettuce into the bowl, chewing on the fact that this task would probably only take 30 seconds for her. Behind him, she slung metal and water and sauce like a machine; he was more likely to lose blood if he got too close to her than the knife.

Somewhere between the slivers of onion and the chopped bell peppers he realized it had been years since he had cooked with someone. His mother certainly didn’t cook; the kitchen was the domain of the Help and god forbid her fingers became stained with dishwater. On some bored nights he snuck down and watched the cook prepare meals, stepping out of the shadows into bright fluorescent lights to ask for a snack, only to be taught how to correctly measure “by weight, not by volume”. The cook’s words echoed in his head, down dusty halls he hadn’t recalled in some time. Muscle memory made him pick the seeds out of the pepper husks, just like he used to as a kid. He blinked steam away from his eyes.

The whirling dervish behind him had gone silent and Ran was now double-checking his work over his head. She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Good job. Now add the dressing and toss it with these.” She placed two large, mismatched salad tongs on the counter.

The scent of meat and marinara must have pulled Kogoro from his stupor, his heavy footfalls reverberating up the stairs. He lurked at the kitchen’s edge, leaning against the doorframe, smoke mixing with steam in his presence. 

“It’ll be ready in a sec. Be patient,” said Ran, catching his complaint before it left his mouth.

“I see you’ve put the freeloader to work.”

“Call him that again and I’m throwing all this delicious pasta out the window.” Her tone was sickly-sweet but her eyes hardened as she rattled the saucepan against the burner. “Followed by you.”

“Just glad he’s earning his keep.”

“He asked! He said he wanted to be helpful.” She took three plates out of the cabinet and set them next to Shinichi. “At least someone is.”

Shinichi realized that Kogoro was blocking the door and the floor was still slick with pasta water and floor cleaner and he had no way of escaping this conversation. Despite the vast differences between them, both members of the Mouri family simply didn’t care if there was an audience to their squabbles. He got dizzy thinking about the abundance of sharp objects and scalding liquids around them and he held onto the counter for support. He sent a desperate plea for safety to the god of kitchens and boiling-over pots. 

Desperately wanted to fade into the background, he busied himself with the salad, trying and failing to dish it out onto each plate. If need be, he could cover his escape by throwing a cup of water on the burner to make a smokescreen.

“Oh, I finally got it,” drawled Kogoro, snapping his fingers lazily in the air. “You brought home an indentured servant. I always knew that chirpy demeanor hid a shrewd, cutthroat intellect.”

“Maybe it’s just nice to have someone on my side for once,” said Ran, sticking her tongue out at him. 

All his attention was focused on the salad bowl. Why was it so damn tall. And the tongs so unwieldy. He was playing an arcade crane game just to get tomatoes onto a plate, some falling onto the floor. 

“So, you conscripted a child in your war against me. That’s against the Geneva convention.”

“Can you even find Geneva on a map?”

With surgeon-like precision, he got one damned tomato onto a plate, taking every scrap of sleep-deprived concentration he could muster.

“Somewhere in Europe. By some lake. They didn’t fight, but they had the balls to tell everyone else in the world who and what they can draft.”

“Actually, the Hague regulations on forced conscription predate the Geneva convention by fifty years.” It took Shinichi three more tomato transfers before he realized he made that comment, and the only sounds in the kitchen were bubbling pasta water and the fan over the stove. He sheepishly turned his head to see both adults in the room staring at him in blank confusion. 

“Uhm,” was all his brain was able to supply at the moment. 

The eyes of the Mouri family bored holes into him for what felt like two eternities before Kogoro yawned, stretched, and backed out of the room. “Wake me when dinner’s ready and the kid’s done with his history lesson.”

Shinichi sublimated his tension by putting too much salad onto each plate, ignoring the corona of gentle concern radiating off Ran. She took the tongs away from him and slid the plates further down the counter. 

“I can see you’re really concerned about our health,” she said breezily, “And was that your fun fact for the night?”

The nearly-empty bowl became very interesting to look at.

“Oh, come on,” she whined dramatically. “We were doing so good. Was it dad? I can run defense for you tonight if you want.”

The onset of nausea was sudden and overwhelming, a noxious mix of salad dressing and lemon soap and tomato and cigarettes.

“I’m not hungry anymore.” He turned to step off the stool but Ran caught him the shoulders, hands soft but unyielding. She knelt down, ignoring the bits of wet salad that had fallen to the floor. 

“Conan, you can’t keep running away anytime something bothers you. Sometimes you need to stick it out. Here, in this apartment, you’re safe. I know dad and I can come off a little strong but you have nothing to worry about from us.

“If we are bothering you, say something. We’re both tough,” she said, giving a fierce smile and holding up a fist. “We can take it. We can take anything you throw at us.”

You’re wrong about that. 

“Tonight, we’re going to have dinner. We won’t ask you any hard questions if you just have a normal conversation with us. I know you can do it. It could be about anything.” She brightened up, “Even the Geneva Convention.”

He felt the dam shudder again, overflowing, pushing against the bricks he’d laid that afternoon. 

“I know dad talked with you earlier today, and that probably wasn’t easy.” She got closer and lowered her voice, “I can make him play nice. Just give me two minutes.” She mimed cracking her knuckles.

His brain must have been trying to shake someone off its tail all night because it abruptly changed direction again.  “I’m sorry for running away this morning.”

A dozen emotions cycled across Ran’s face before settling on a cross between perplexed and relieved. “You don’t have to apologize,” she lied for a third time that night. “But I’m glad you did.” She chewed on her lip, ironically struggling to look him in the eyes for once. “…I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why you had to get away so suddenly?”

His frontal lobe tried to spoon-feed logic down his throat, that his reasons for fleeing like a scared jackrabbit weren’t unusual. Taking away the whole “freak poison turning me into a child” curveball, the whole situation seemed cut and dry; he had been beaten and left for dead in an alleyway. Anyone would understand that. Anyone would be haunted by that. He could confide in the Mouris just that detail.

But he didn’t.

“No,” he whispered.

Frustration flickered across her face but it was quickly smoothed over with sixteen years of practiced restraint. Ran had the patience of an angel, but it was one of those righteous angels with a flaming sword. She could be held off but she’ll have her way eventually. “Well, we’re here when you’re ready. And I guess I did promise we won’t ask any hard questions. But…” she said, making sure his eyes found hers again, “No more running away. If you ever feel like you have to run again, come to me or dad. You understand?”

“Yes,” he assented.

“Do you promise?”

Her pupils were dark and wide and reflected a stranger back at him. “I promise,” he lied. 

Chapter Text

Hello everyone! Apologies that this isn't a true update, but to anyone interested, I just released a sort of shorter "side-story" to Living With Strangers, entitled Misplaced Venom. You can find it under my username, within the new "Living With Strangers" collection, or the URL below.

I originally wrote it as being part of the Living With Strangers AU, but I honestly think it would still work as a stand-alone story that fits in with the canon (mostly, give or a take a few liberties). It takes a break from Shinichi/Conan's perspective and shows an outsider's view into the semi-functional Mouri family.

Living With Strangers is still ongoing, so don't worry about that! I just wanted to try my hand at something else, and if people were interested in this story, they may be interested in this little detour, as well. Thank you for all your support!

(Also, please let me know if this kind of "cross-posting" is frowned upon. I apologize if it is!)

A short synopsis below:

Misplaced Venom

Synopsis: Ayumi comes home covered in scrapes and dried mud. "We caught bank robbers, mama!" she shrieked in horrifying delight.

How does a young parent deal with her daughter suddenly becoming entangled with bank robbers and murderers? She thinks about the old cigarettes in her raincoat pocket, mechanically washes dishes before vomiting into the sink, and deliberates on ways of confronting this child's parents.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/43176033/chapters/108514926

Chapter Text

Shinichi kept the blanket tight around his shoulders because he was cold and for no other reasons. He thumbed the fabric, its pastels faded by years of washing machine tumbles and the erosion of kitchen floors. The edges were frayed but some steady hand had taken thread to it, patching it up in spiderwebs of bright blue. 

Ran was mining for hand-me-downs in her closet and getting lost in brief bouts of nostalgia while he bundled himself into the corner. She had set him up with a cushion and a stack of dogeared kindergarten books while she procedurally dismantled her childhood in order to rustle him up a wardrobe. Rain drummed a steady lullaby into the window.

“This looks nice.” She reached over and held the shirt in front of him. He dutifully held his arms out to his sides so she can size him up. “Boys like skulls, right?”

He scrunched his face involuntarily. “Sequins?”

Her smile didn’t falter. “In the shape of a skull!”

“Sequins.”

She pouted. “Okay, well, I’m gonna call it a ‘maybe’.” She folded it neatly and placed it in a rapidly overflowing pile of ‘maybe’. The nearby ‘yes’ pile was paltry and Shinichi felt queasy with dinner and a misplaced sense of guilt. Her kindness meant well but it scraped a little more pride off the bone with each ruffled fringe and flower-patterned sweater. 

He spoke up because he was well-adjusted and secure and all that. “I didn’t expect you would have worn that when you were… my age.”

A giggle echoed up from the closet. “That was a very short phase. Thought dad might like it.”

“How did he react?”

“He thought I was gonna join a biker gang. Folded up some black construction paper into cones to make spikes for my tricycle.” 

“I’m sure you were very menacing.”

“The most menacing!” She beamed over her shoulder in an utterly un-biker-like way. “For about 2 weeks. I don’t think dad liked it as much as he said.”

He thumbed through one of the picture books. The dog found his way back home again. The family gathered together for a group hug. “He probably saw enough skulls in his work,” Shinichi said without any bite. Ran professionally ignored it, like she did to most of the disconcerting things he said without thinking.

He agreed to an oversized purple hoodie and vehemently denied a floppy kindergartener’s hat. Ran sighed, heaving another container from the depths and dredging through the contents. “I know it’s not much, but you can’t wear the same two shirts everyday. For one, that makes dad and I look bad. Two, I’m not doing laundry that often.”

“I can do the laundry,” said Shinichi, flipping through another book to learn, indeed, that the mouse and the cat could become friends.

“The laundromat is four blocks away.”

“We walked farther than that today.”

She picked the lint off a sweater and didn’t look at him. Her tone was light. “Are you forgetting the part where I carried you home?”

He kept his eyes glued to the pages in case the story got better in the third act. The warmth in his face was because of animal friendship. Nothing else.

He made his way through the pile of books as Ran hummed a tune from a decade ago that she must have also exhumed from the closet. He leafed through them mostly as a kindness to her, cycling through glossy, sun-faded images. The books seemed out-of-date even ten years in the past and half the pages were marred with crayon scrawls. 

They were obviously secondhand, maybe third or fourth. Some had names of previous owners at the beginning, written in shaky, backwards letters. Others had the faded stamps of old libraries in them. Either they were never returned or never intended to be returned. 

When he was actually six, he remembered devouring a detective novel so quickly that he ripped a page during the climax. He ran into his father’s office weeping ugly tears, holding back sniffles as the man casually repaired it with a paintbrush and glue. He left the book on his desk, weighted down with a heavy antique clock. Be careful, Shinichi. Not everything can be so easily mended. 

Shinichi barely noticed his fingers slowing down to a careful, glacial pace as he cradled the book in his lap. Words and pictures collided as cats and dogs and mice went on adventures and mended friendships and for the love of god shoot me now- 

While he stewed in literary limbo, Ran had found a few solid color shirts and some faded jeans that he assented to and happily bundled them up. 

Something prickled the back of his neck like a stray tag. “Why did you keep all your childhood clothing? You could probably get some money from it secondhand. Your father didn’t want to have another chi-.” Ran’s hands faltered and a container crashed to the ground with a plastic thunk. He shut his mouth. 

Dust billowed from the open closet’s mouth and settled onto the room like late spring snow. Ran would have washed them anyway to clear out the smell of disuse and old family traumas. Shinichi cleaned his glasses with a corner of the blanket and let the situation fade into blurry shapes.

Ran knit herself back together in slow breaths and opened a window to let out the dust and let in the smell of rain. “Dad wanted to sell them. And yeah, maybe it would have been better to do that. A little extra pocket money.” Her voice was ribbons held taut. “But I said no. He worked extra hours to pay for some of this stuff. I had a purple rain jacket that I wore every day in the spring until I overheated during recess. The zipper was busted and they almost had to cut it off me.” She laughed without color. 

“He used his holiday bonus on it.” She stood up and wiped her hands on her pants. “Instead of repairing the TV. It just felt wrong to get rid of all of it. It’s like a calendar. I can picture perfectly the days he gave each one to me.” She turned to him with a hand-repaired smile, still loose around the edges. “And if I got rid of them, there wouldn’t be any for you.”

“Lucky me.”

“Oh, hush.” She reached a dust-smeared hand out to muss his hair but stopped at the last moment. At some point she gleaned the patterns in his behavior that he pretended weren’t there. He flinched when the sun went down.

“Did you have any clothes that were special to you?” she asked.

His parents had tailored suits for him since he was eleven in order to take him to press events and book signings. They lost their luster when he realized they were a smokescreen. Kudo Shinichi was at the forefront but it wasn’t him in the photographs; it was Yusaku and Yukiko’s child, dressed to fit the picture but not expand beyond the frame.

In his lap was a beginner’s science book. A caterpillar crawled across the pages and became a chrysalis. The rest of the page was torn off. “Maybe.”

“What about those clothes I found you in?” Her expression didn’t change, placid as rain. The directness of the accusation was so nonchalant that it cut right through his defenses into the red and raw. 

He saw the reflection of the book in the window above him. The pages were reversed, the chrysalis breaking open to reveal a caterpillar.

“Were those your clothes or someone else’s? They looked far too big for you.” She wasn’t quite looking at him, still humming under her breath as she rooted deeper into the closet. 

The ease of her interrogation was staggering and served as the missing genetic link between her and her father. On that first night, thirty minutes of gentle coaxing got him out of Kudo Shinichi’s oversized, muddy clothing and into Ran’s leftovers. That evidence was currently bleeding dirty water into a plastic bag in a corner of the bathroom. It was an answerless question that moldered there for days like a tumor, waiting to metastasize into the rest of the Mouri’s life.

What reasons could there be for an apparent child to be blitzing through the city, at night, during a rainstorm, tripping on an adult’s clothing. The reality was illogical. The possibilities were gut-wrenching. Kogoro had been a police officer and had likely descended into the hellish underworld of the city where things like that were as common as concrete. The man had a daughter, and fears like that don’t die swiftly. 

He wanted this conversation to die swiftly but it squalled and suffocated on Ran’s bedroom floor, banging its corpse in noiseless death rattles. Ran stilled in the silence but didn’t look at him, preferring to gaze out the window into a waterlogged skyline.

~^~

The sleeping bag had the smell of dust and deep closets and the inability of a little girl to leave her father alone at night, no matter how many times Ran had washed it. Shinichi wormed his way into its crevices until the air grew stale and warm with his breath. He thought of dogs returning home to their families. He thought of mice and cats becoming friends. He thought of caterpillars spinning chrysalises without knowing what or when or if they’ll turn into anything. He thought of anything other than the pound of feet against floorboards and voices through walls.

“Can you be reasonable just once in your damn life!” shrieked Ran.

“This is the most reasonable I’ve ever been.” Kogoro’s reply was infrasonic.

“I’m not leaving him alone. You saw what happened today on the street. What if that happens again when I’m not here?"

He thought of the method actors his mother introduced him to, the ones who threw themselves into a role so deeply even they forgot who they really were. 

“We had an arrangement. I gave you a few days off. You had the weekend. Now, you go back to school.”

“Every week you tell me to skip a day to help you in the office. What’s so special now? Is it because I have someone else to take care of instead of you?”

“People are going to notice.”

“I don’t care about people.”

“Despite my best efforts, you do.”

He thought of torn pages without someone to mend them. He thought of pastel blankets restitched with bright blue thread.

“Give me another day. Please. He’s doing so well now.”

“Obviously you must have picked up another kid when I wasn’t looking because there is no way in hell we’re talking about the same one. Did you find him while you were fishing the other one out of morning traffic?”

“He talked to us today. Both of us. Like, actual, real conversations. And we made dinner together-“

“The brat’s short but if you lower the bar anymore for him, he’ll trip over it.” 

“Dad, this is progress. I’m worried if we pull the rug out from under him, it’s all just gonna go away.”

He thought of children’s clothes packed away with no one to wear them, unfinished puzzles and unreturned library books, and other things without endings.

“He’ll be fine until you get back after eight whole consecutive hours. He’s known you all of four days. Cut the cord, you’re not his mother.”

“If I’m not watching out for him, then who will!?”

“You’ve forgotten who the parent is here. This never was a discussion. You’re going to school.”

“This is the first time you’ve ever been concerned about my education. Why now!?”

He thought of binges on the couch and secondhand smoke and purple jackets and abandoned kids with no name and how none of these pieces fit together. 

Ran’s voice was glass on the floor. “Why do you care all of a sudden?”

He thought thoughts until the flow of noise and vitriol under the door slowed to a trickle. He dreamed of reverse chrysalises, of butterflies turning into caterpillars. Sleep took him as his body broke down, wings shriveling, liquifying into some squirming larvae. A helpless, wriggling thing on the Mouri’s floor.

~^~

The old detective didn’t keep his files under lock-and-key and Shinichi wondered why he expected better.

Ran didn’t bother to lock the door tonight knowing that her father was likely going to gutter himself in the office and surgically purge the memory of their argument. Kogoro lay draped over the couch. The glass of bourbon was half-full. The bottle was empty. 

The puzzle was still there, half-finished. 

Shinichi sat himself under the shelter of Kogoro’s desk and watched moonlight refract through rain. His father used to hide his manuscripts in the lowest drawers of the library desk. Shinichi would read them under lamplight and that memory of thievery resonated today in his newly-young bones. 

Maybe Kudo Shinichi was always a thief. Of information, of privacy. Of time. Edogawa Conan certainly was. The shapes were becoming less distinct. He pawed sleep from his eyes and rubbed a layer of grit from his glasses. The office steamed in cold humidity as rain settled into its joints. He still hadn’t given up the blanket.

The first drawer primarily held pencils and cigarettes and coupons, with layers of congealed debris underneath. An old photo of Ran. Lists with letters long faded. Everything there was too old and out-of-date to be useful.

The second drawer was much like the first, alongside sheets of blank paper (ruled and unruled), an old letter opener, a copy of Ran’s school calendar, and 3/4’s of a bottle of Akashi White Oak that was either a gift or set the man back a pretty penny. 

The third was getting closer. Notes from recent work, mostly snooping on cheating spouses. Security details. 

The fourth was where he found the notepad. 

Kid says he’s six. Looks younger. Acts older.

Shinichi had no fucking idea how old he actually was now. Six was a wild estimate based on shaky measurements in reflections and sheer panic. It fit him just as well as anything else did in this world.

The list of notes was short.

Claims Edogawa Conan as an alias. Found in Boruko Park. Clothing for an adult. No identification. 

Abrasions and bruising, too many to count. Kid denied further exam. Probably should have insisted.

Almost fucked up the kidnapping case. Almost.

There was a list of behaviors the old man had noticed over the past few days, including: 

Quiet but watches. Everything. 

Twitchy. 

Seems wobbly on his feet. REALLY should have insisted on further exam. Or hospital. 

Still alive. Can’t be that bad.

Evades questions like they’re bullets. 

The letters became thicker here, pressed in with more force. 

He’s playing dumb. 

The last note stood out to him. 

Ran’s too attached.

He rooted further into the drawer and emerged with the motherlode. Faxes between Kogoro and a man named Megure. The name sounded familiar, maybe a police officer, but the headings didn’t match any legal briefing style he knew that was used by the precincts. There were lists of other Edogawa’s in the area. Cases of missing children, many long cold, the kids either grown or not. A handful of schools whose names he didn’t recognize which evidently didn’t recognize his fake name either. There was a picture of him sitting next to Ran, taken within the last few days and already developed, catalogued, faxed, and shuttered away. Shinichi didn’t remember a camera.

None of this had the air of a real investigation. The hallmarks weren’t there. There were protocols to be done, examinations made, witnesses interrogated. When he haunted the periphery of the kidnapping case, the cops there barely looked at him. The only one he had spoken to in the last week had given up his badge in favor of sprawling on the couch, slowly suffocating on his life choices. 

This was off the books. 

He combed through the rest of the notes and was planning to dig into the man’s active case files when the room became suddenly and abruptly silent. Heart plunging into ice-water, Shinichi crept around the other side of the desk. Three seconds of apnea went by before Kogoro started breathing again. Albeit poorly.

Shinichi bundled the papers exactly as he found them and eased the drawer shut. With the evidence gone, the only law he was breaking was that of bedtime instead of espionage. Gas tank empty but engine still revving at the redline, he summited the opposite couch and wedged himself into the corner until he stopped vibrating. The man across from him dozed fitfully.

Neglect was a beast that took many forms but Shinichi was mostly used to the cold. A home where the hearth burned out and frost bloomed over the windows. Empty rooms and wintry silences. If that fire had either died or moved away, he didn’t know. Maybe the fire didn’t like to burn when he was around.

The Mouri’s was warm, muddled neglect, of smoke and stale air. It was spring-time mud trailed in from the street. Sloppy promises from red-tinged faces. Room’s full of noise but devoid of any presence. A corpse still in the process of dying instead of one frozen over. 

The office swam in lines of ancient smoke. Shinichi wiped the wetness from his eyes with an overly-long sleeve.

Chasing an idle thought, he checked Kogoro’s hands for stray cigarettes ready to burn holes in the couch. As he opened the man's palm, the enormous hand latched onto his wrist, swallowing it. Shinichi froze.

“Eri…” Kogoro slurred. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

Name filed away for later. The palm was sweaty and bled heat into his skin. Shinichi lingered there for far too long until he slipped it out from the man’s fingers. The heat lingered for even longer. 

~^~

There were poorly muffled whimpers on the other side of Ran’s door.

The clock in the hallway had rung at midnight, sixteen minutes ago. It was a new day but this one hadn’t ended and at this point it looked like it never would. 

Ran had fulfilled her promise of a nightlight he didn’t ask for and the hallway glowed in frosted silver. He didn’t ask for a lot of things but they gave anyway and he wasn’t sure what to do with that. His knuckles barely grazed the door and the sniffling stopped. Six seconds of silence.

“Dad?”

Shinichi stood on tip-toes to grasp the doorknob and push it away. Silver light edged its way into dusty darkness. It made strange shadows of the heaps of clothing on the ground, abandoned during the argument. Ran was barely visible, half-drowned in her comforter with her hair pulled to one side. She combed her fingers through it.

“Oh, Conan, you’re still up?” There was no discernible temperature to her voice. 

“Can I come in?”

“What do you need, sweetie?”

What did he need. He sat himself down on the floor by her bed. She emerged briefly from her cocoon to pull him up but he waved her off before his nerves got the better of him.

Like it always did since he woke up in that alley, the night twisted even the vaguely familiar into a funhouse nightmare. Maybe he wasn’t used to so many things being larger than him, and when darkness eroded away the details, all he was left with were shapes. Shapes could be anything. And he had a lot of skeletons that could fit into those shapes. He was disappointed that the nightlight helped but was more disappointed that it didn’t help that much. 

Ran let the quiet linger as long as she could. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wro-“

“Does your father yell at you often?’

He looked up at her from the floor. He could only tell that she blinked when two dots of silver in the dark briefly disappeared.

“Conan, is that why you’re still up? You don’t need to worry about me and dad. He-“

“Please answer the question.” The day was too long and the night even longer. Somewhere down in her comforter she shivered. He wondered what his words sounded like when filtered through this body, this voice. 

She took a breath and slowly released it. “He doesn’t yell often. I usually yell at him. When he does it… well, that’s when I know things are serious.”

“He’s not a very serious man.”

“He’s allergic to seriousness, I think, up until he suddenly isn’t. Everything’s a joke until he decides it’s not and then we all play catch-up.”

“I imagine that puts a lot of pressure on you.” 

“It does,” she admits. Maybe it’s easier for her to talk to him like this. When it’s harder to see who the voice is actually coming from. “But when the chips are down, he’s there for real. He’ll get it done. He always does."

A cat yowled in the alley somewhere down below.

Ran shifted in her bed to look down at him closely. “When I say ‘the chips are down’, it’s a poker thing. It means-“

“I know what it means.”

“Of course you do,” she murmured. Two hands gently grasped him under the armpits and he flinched. The hands held still for a moment until he stopped shaking before lifting him up to the foot of her bed. After settling him in a pool of discarded sheets, she scooted back into the headboard until the distance became tolerable. Still wrapped in her comforter, her shape was indecipherable, throwing weird, soft shadows between the nightlight and moonlight.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.”

“You like that blanket, huh?”

He had forgotten it was still hanging off his shoulders. Another new constant like his fake name and having to reach for things. He told himself it was just because of the cold but it had been warm down in the office. “Did your father make this for you?”

“I don’t remember. It’s always been there.”

Shinichi tried to count in his head how many things had ‘always been there’ that didn’t end up leaving.

Ran cocked her head to the side. “You put yourself to bed?”

“Yes.”

“That’s awfully grown-up of you.”

“I’m used to it.” Lying past midnight took effort he didn’t have.

“Do you often do things on your own?”

“Mostly.”

Ran slouched forward and wrapped the comforter tighter around herself in a mimicry of his own position. He thought of cocoons and chrysalises. “You shouldn’t have to do that.”

“Like you did?” There was no teeth to the question. It was as honest as he wasn’t.

Ran looked at him as if truly realizing he was not a dream simulacrum and was, in fact, here in her room. “You okay?” A pause. “That’s a really stupid question, isn’t it? Of course not. You’re here.” She gestured to the darkened space around them, littered with leftover clothing and secondhand books. It was a secondhand life, really. “If things were okay, you’d be with your parents, with your family, instead of…” she took a deep breath. “With us.”

“I’m okay with not being with my parents.”

She made a noise between a chuckle and a watery hiccup. “I’ve spent so long trying to get my parents back together. I just thought… I thought everyone would want that.”

Eri. I’ll be up in a minute.

“But, like, you’re okay with being here, right? We’re treating you well enough?” She was desperate and unsure of who she was trying to convince. “There’s nowhere else you’d rather be? Because if there was, we can… we can take you there. Just tell us.”

“You need to go back to school.”

Whatever was left of her that Kogoro didn’t shatter tonight was crushed under Shinichi’s heel. The comforter pulled itself down over her face. “Not you, too.”

“I don’t want to be the reason you’re here all the time. You had a life before I came here. You should go back to it.”

Her face reemerged and light blinked off it in streaks. “I won’t be another person that… that leaves you.” 

“I can function on my own. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. But you don’t need to worry or… or… rearrange your lives around me. I can be left on my own, I can cook my own meals, I can do my own laundry. You don’t have to worry about me.” At some point he had stood up. He wobbled on the mattress and even while seated, Ran still towered over him. What he saw of her face looked frightened.

“Sweetie, let’s just-“

“Just carry on with your lives.” 

“Conan, it’s been a long day.” She extracted her hands from blanketed depths and made soothing, circular motions. “You’re overtired. Let’s get back to dad’s room. We can both just lay down for a while. Or you could stay here. I could read you a story-“

“I’m not fragile and stop treating me like I am!”

Her arms were a blur of motion intended to scoop him up but an overclocked amygdala and newly-born nyctophobia won out. He recoiled so hard from her touch that he lost his balance on the mattress, tilting towards the corner of the bed. The ceiling was dark, the floor was dark, and there was a knife’s edge of nightlight in between.

He stalled at a 70° angle, Ran’s hand wrapped around his outstretched wrist. Nine frantic heartbeats later, she resettled him and retreated back to the headboard to give him some space. She had emerged fully from underneath her bedspread now, and in the dark her body was lean, angled architecture over his head, like the night she found him in the park. A stranger in the rain.

He had forgotten who had been trying to comfort who in this scenario. 

A chain clinked nearby and the nightstand lamp blazed bright as morning. It clinked two more times and the light became softer. Ran stood up and knelt down on the floor with the other abandoned things. Shinichi’s blanket had fallen to the ground at some point and she placed that back on the bed.

“Let’s start over.” For the first time since he’s known her, his eye level was higher than hers. She wasn’t looking down on him.

“Okay."

“I don’t think you’re fragile. I think you’re very strong. You… you probably think I’m just telling you that because you’re a kid, and that’s what adults are supposed to tell kids, but you are strong.”

She’s a kid, too. He had forgotten. So had she. 

She sniffed. “You can tell me if you’re scared, but part of me is worried that you’re not scared. At least, not as much as you should be. Sometimes I think you don’t understand all of what’s going on here. And sometimes I think you have a better handle on it than me.

“I’m- we aren’t doing these things for you because we think you can’t do them. We’re doing them because we want to help.”

Honesty was something that bled from him when he was cut too deep. “I’m afraid of where I’m going after this.”

“After… this?”

“When I have to leave here.”

Some of her old fierceness returned. “Conan, I swear, you will always be welcome in this home.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I can.” It was a foolish promise, full of salvaged hope from some hidden place. How long had she held onto it, waiting to spend it on this moment. On him.

“It’s up to your dad.”

“I’ll handle him.”

“And the police.”

“I’ll handle them, too.” 

Downstairs there was a former cop and a desk drawer full of paperwork that was deciding his fate. In the bathroom was a bag of mud and bloodied clothes shed from him like skin. Parts of the world were moving around him and he could do nothing but hold on for dear life. 

At least there was a hand holding onto him, too. 

“Okay,” he breathed.

The tension drained from her body. “We can work on things together. I promise not to treat you like you're helpless, and you can promise not to feel so guilty all the time."

He nodded.

"And we both can promise to work on dad together. Because he needs it. Desperately."

He nodded more emphatically.

She scrubbed the wetness from under her eyes. "Do you want to sleep in here tonight?”

“No.”

“Do you want a story?”

“No.”

His heart still hammered in his chest and his fingers tapped out-of-sync rhythms on his knees. She relocated a stack of nearby books onto the bed. “I won’t think any less of you.”

“I’m too old for stories.”

“Really…” Her tone was skeptical. “Alright, fine.” She pushed the books aside and hopped back onto the bed, legs crossed in a lotus position. She tabled her hands and rested her face on them, eyes wide and bright. “Then read me a story.”

What.

“What.”

“Please?” She stared him down with an absurd innocence, long limbs tucked away, patient and waiting. “I'm not too old for stories.”

It was hard to reconcile the sheer unreality of his new life with this kind of average, everyday goofiness. He wadded the sheets in his fists. “You’re patronizing me.”

“If you think you can fall back asleep after all that, be my guest. I feel like I ran a marathon and need a cooldown.”

“Go watch TV in the living room.”

“I don’t want TV, I want a story. Please? You can pick whatever one you want. Or, here,” she shuffled through the stack. “It doesn’t have to be a story story. It could be nonfiction.” She selected a book and flipped through it before shoving it into his lap. “Here, “photosynthesis”. Teach me about that.”

His head swam with mood whiplash. The rain had stopped outside but the clouds covered the moon again. The nightlight left just enough darkness in the hallway to make him feel cornered but it couldn’t survive in whatever saccharine-sweet world Ran had conjured out of nothing.

“I’ll make you a deal.” She stuck her hand out. “Read me a story, and I’ll go to school tomorrow.” 

She was every bit as vicious as her father. He accepted her bargain. He was accepting a lot of things lately.

They shook on it. Her grin was Cheshire as she rewrapped herself up in blankets and Shinichi angled the book towards the light. Once she was settled, she pointed finger-guns at him. “Okay, go.”

~^~

He woke up the next morning in his sleeping bag. Ran’s room was empty. There was a sticky-note on his forehead.

“Thanks for the story! Have a good day!”