Work Text:
Prologue
The moon was generous tonight, shining in full like she was waiting for him to present her a jewel, a token of affection for her watchful eye over his escapades. But he didn’t have time to offer anything, no charm or praise on his lips or in his hands tonight.
It would feel like flying, if his heart wasn’t in his throat from fear. Not a fear of falling—he’d gotten over that long ago between various precarious ledges and midnight jumps from rooftops—but a fear of fault, the blame of Shinichi’s death would fall on his heart like an anvil otherwise. Because none of this, not the blood on his hands, not the figures laughing above, would be there if it weren’t for him and his deadly orbit. He liked to think he brought a flair to the crimes he committed, a promise that he’d do no harm except to those that deserved for their toys to be stolen away. That illusion had shattered with the first warning, a warning spelled out in bone and body and he’d kept going, kept trying even as the weight multiplied and finally pulled him down from his flight. He deserved a fate befitting the warning, a final goodbye in the moonlight.
Chapter 1
Shinichi felt out of place with his pressed pants and necktie, a first for him ever since he took the job. He’d been elbow-deep in guts and sewage pipes, but he never stood out like he did now, with each worker in jeans that passed by him with a quick furtive glance. Well, except one.
“Missed your bus into the business district? There won’t be much to see here until we finish checking the pipes, you know,” the voice said from behind him, making Shinichi turn away from studying the site’s skeleton scaffolding.
Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who stood out around here. He didn’t need to shake the speaker’s hand to know those long fingers were more nimble than construction work would normally require, the coin tumbling over his knuckles was proof enough of that. He held out his hand anyway, his polite smile turning genuine at the feel of cool skin and the callouses along the palm. There was a strength in the grip that could’ve pulled him off his feet if it wanted to.
“You work here?” Shinichi asked, glancing down at the heavy boots, the pants with their patches of dirt, and the curiously stained jacket. It would’ve been unimpressive in separation but together, they simply looked like they fit the messy nest of hair and crooked grin perfectly.
“Just for a few months. I was hired for the electrical work,” the man said, gesturing towards the top of the half-finished building. “Elevators especially.”
“Did you know the deceased then?”
The easy smile slipped off the man’s face, somber as he looked towards the construction site beyond the fence. “Not well. I knew his name but our work didn’t cross often.”
Shinichi opened his mouth to convey his condolences, the hard line of the man’s shoulders spoke of a weight and though he’d brought up the topic he didn’t want to leave it at that, but a shout rang out behind him.
“Detective!”
A tall well-built man strode towards him, waving a clipboard in one hand and holding his tie to his chest with the other to keep it from flapping into his face with a gust of wind. He didn’t wait for Shinichi to reply, but introduced himself as soon as he got close enough.
“I’m the site manager. They told me you’d come by later to see the area,” the manager said, looking at his papers in accusation.
“I prefer to come early,” Shinichi said, smiling placidly. It gave less time for people to prepare, and more time for him to deal with the unexpected. The man from earlier, with the beguiling hands and strong grip, had disappeared in the time it took him to greet the manager. While Shinichi had wanted to know his name for albeit personal reasons, he hadn’t missed the way the man’s smile had turned distant as soon as he’d been called away. He wished it was the usual reticence towards being interested in a detective rather than anything to do with the case, but his luck was rarely so good. There was more to the man than had met the eye at first glance.
Shinichi let himself be led into the site by the manager, his thoughts picking apart the carcass of attraction in his mind like a bit of carrion. The case was all that mattered.
Chapter 2
By the time Shinichi left, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or sigh at the antics he’d had to endure the whole day. The beginning was easy, he’d already seen the pathologist’s report and the body itself. A fall from the top floor, such as it was considering the half-finished stage of construction, had dealt a considerable amount of damage to it, but it had luckily, in the most morbid sense of the word, landed in such a way that the initial wounds had been largely preserved. Solid concrete doesn’t create such precise holes to the back of the skull, holes that killed him before he even reached the ground, and so a murder case was born.
The interview with the one who found the body was easy too; the woman hadn’t beaten around the bush with details or how little she’d known the guy. He’d been a loner by all standards and though everyone was rattled by the threat it cast over them all, no one at the site had appeared too broken up about his loss in particular. Except one.
Shinichi had been given a hard hat and free reign to inspect the area where the body had been found and where it had fallen from, which had yielded less than he would’ve liked. Metal beams don’t hold onto evidence for long, though the thin gouges hidden in a juncture were of enough interest that he forgot about the nausea-inducing sway in the structure, however slight.
From there, the day had gotten less productive.
He’d seen the man from before watching him while he worked, keen eyes following his every move and though there had always been enough distance to make eavesdropping impossible, Shinichi had a feeling the attention to his mouth wasn’t for any pleasurable reason.
But any attempt Shinichi made to get close on his own part was rebuffed. Scaling scaffolding with the agility of a monkey, stepping off the edge of a beam as easily as if he believed he could fly, even starting up a jackhammer once in lieu of acknowledging Shinichi’s advances and leaving his ears ringing for the better part of an hour. It would’ve impressed him if it weren’t for the need to answer all the questions that kept cropping up around the man in question.
Why was he working at the site? The manager had shrugged when asked, citing that they hadn’t needed more than his certification before hiring and there was plenty of money to be had in the specialization. As long as the work got done and no safety complaints were on file, being private wasn’t a deal-breaker. Who was he? The woman who had taken him up to the top had laughed and said ‘who wasn’t he’ would be a better question. Each worker who had ever talked to him walked away with a different answer and though there was a wide betting pool as to which story was the truth, no one attempted to get past the mirage.
By the end of the day, he hadn’t managed to find clearer answers nor a way closer to the man without him slipping away like smoke.
Chapter 3
The next day found him back on the site, minus the tie and suit jacket and the side-long glances when he pulled on the hardhat and started to climb the scaffolding. Shinichi had arrived early in the morning with the intention of finding a moment alone with the man before the work began, but though he searched for the distinctive jacket amidst those clocking in, he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of his quarry.
It was only on the way back home, the train’s rhythmic rocking lulling him into his thoughts while he waited for his stop, that he realized that he had some sign of the man after all. During lunch, idling away the time by watching the workers who had actually showed up, Shinichi remembered the gaggle that had formed around the water cooler to sign the birthday card of a coworker. It had been a split second, a hint of a habit that had slipped past Shinichi’s notice until hours later. But the nimble fingers twirling the pen had been unmistakably the same.
The face and build of the man, on the other hand, had been different, hair longer and tied back and with eyes sunken with age. Shinichi turned the conundrum over in his mind until sleep claimed him, and had arrived at the same conclusion as Sherlock, as ever. Ran might call him too much of a fan, but he couldn’t call himself a detective if he couldn’t follow the basic tenets of logic to their impossible conclusions.
What came after could only be called a game of cat and mouse.
A different persona each day, sometimes even multiple, often a mirror of someone who had missed the day, taken a different shift, or was simply not in the same room, and the man slipped into their place like a chameleon, donning mannerisms and accents like clothes. Shinichi learned dozens of names, family histories, and vacation plans, cycling through the workers until he could’ve called them friends if it weren’t for the sense of separation with every carefully polite, or openly irritated, answer. And still, the man slipped through his grasp with a grunt or a laugh or a scoff, each as easily as the last. If he wanted to catch him, he’d have to look at it all in a different light.
The moon wasn’t quite full yet, but its light was enough to thread the construction site in silver. The shifts had ended, the work wound down and the general clamor had faded into the settling night. A small light at the top could’ve been mistaken for that of a star if you didn’t look too closely. But Shinichi knew better.
What he didn’t know any better was how to climb the scaffolding in the dark, without a light to see the handholds or the uncertain steps. That it took him longer than he wanted was a fact he would have to live with, but the sight of the silhouette bent over a blowtorch was worth it.
“Burning the midnight oil, are we?” He straightened up, holding onto a strut.
The man lifted the goggles covering his eyes and looked at him with a slight smile. “Wasn’t going to disappear without finishing the job, I dislike leaving things unfinished.”
Eyeing the mess of wires beside the man, Shinichi said, “Why even come during the day then?”
“I like being chased.” The man winked. “Don’t meet many people who can keep up.”
The view of the city was marvelous, the project was touted as the highest building in the area and it was true to its name. The man had shed his jacket in the breeze of the heights and Shinichi caught a glimpse of where it had been draped over a beam as he stood up to meet Shinichi’s gaze. Where it had been stained a curious dull brown before, the pale orange had been bleached even lighter.
“You had questions for me? Or just about me,” the man said.
“You’ll answer them now?”
“I’ll answer one. You’ve caught up to me, that merits a truth.” Snatching up the jacket, the man pulled it on in one motion. Shinichi stepped closer, seeing a shift in the man’s bearing as if he’d donned a mantle on his shoulders instead of a simple jacket. Exactly what it meant, why he would treat any honesty as a transaction wasn’t clear to Shinichi but it was one more piece of the puzzle he’d turned over tonight.
The questions from before all crowded to the tip of his tongue, the suspiciously cleaned state of the jacket at the forefront, but the words that fell out weren’t any of those concerns.
“Your name.” The other workers knew his last name, called him by it and sometimes joked about it too. Shinichi wanted something different.
“Kaito.” The name was accompanied by a tip of the welding mask, before he stepped off the beam into the abyss. Shinichi started forward but the workspace was completely empty, the maze of struts underneath revealing nothing and the only sound was his own startled gasp.
Chapter 4
Despite Kaito’s deadly exit the night before, he returned to the site the next day, meeting Shinichi’s gaze across the morning crowd before slipping away. Shinichi had only just begun his rounds in search when the scream of pain came echoing across the site.
He arrived at a concerned huddle to see the worker in the center cradling her hands, or what was left of them. Her fingers were a blistered mess, the remains of a blowtorch smoking on the ground at her feet, but what surprised Shinichi the most was the lack of surprise on the rest of the workers’ faces. The foreman shooed the rest away before leaving with the worker for the hospital, a pair of equally stony faces. Shinichi had had to stomach a lot of deaths, but also injuries, in his line of work; the resignation and acceptance in the others’ faces at the sight of the gruesome result had been akin to those on death row.
“She got lucky,” Kaito said, appearing at his side where only thin air had been before. Was that the only way he knew how to start a conversation? Startle the other into talking and then leave the same way, cutting the ends of interaction off with the flourish of a magician. Shaking his head, Shinichi turned to him.
Reading the look on his face, Kaito continued, “Let’s just say I didn’t start working here because I was in love with the benefits or bonuses.”
The conversation with the manager came to mind, the no-questions-asked approach to hiring. In some cases, it was a boon for those who needed a second chance after incarceration or simply a gap in work that didn’t have an acceptable explanation, but this time it likely wasn’t a good thing. Why else would they be so willing to turn a blind eye?
With the scene free of any onlookers now that the cause of the rubber-necking was gone, Shinichi took stock of what was left. The blowtorch lay in the dust, the tank’s sides torn open with the force of the explosion, its work unfinished, both intended and unintended. The label on the side of the mangled handle was just barely legible, designating it as the last of five torches.
Shinichi strode towards the office trailers, leaving Kaito behind. It was more than a little satisfying to hear the squawk of indignation behind him before the long strides of Kaito hurrying to catch up. Two could play the mysterious game, though he enjoyed the solving side more. Ran had once told him he never did realize when he was playing hard-to-get, but this once he could do it on purpose.
Inside the office trailer, the manager’s office stood vacant. Files and papers littered nearly every surface, the only thing with a semblance of order was the file cabinet in the far corner. Though it had been carefully covered with a similar layer of paper as everything else, the position of the cabinet spoke of a far higher importance than its shabby appearance portended. On closer inspection, the smell of the newly greased hinges and the labels written in apparent gibberish cemented his suspicions. After finding the drawers firmly locked, he fished around in his pockets.
“Looking for these?” Wiggling the lock picks before him, Kaito smiled at regaining the advantage. “Allow me.”
Trying to snatch the lock picks would end in embarrassment, Shinichi knew it in his gut, and so he reluctantly leaned out of the way. Shamelessly crouching down next to the lock, Kaito hummed tunelessly as he worked. It took more effort than Shinichi wanted to admit not to watch blatantly, both for reasons of discretion and because he knew Kaito would see.
“After you.” Kaito pulled the first drawer open, gesturing towards Shinichi with a bow.
“You’ve got three more to go,” Shinichi said as he pulled the first of the larger files out and began to page through it. Sheets of numbers, account details and transactions that would’ve been standard for any site of this size. Would have been, but as Shinichi did the math column by column, the sums weren’t quite meeting the expectations. Too much was being spent on features simply yet vaguely labeled “security”. Was it meant to be foundation support or even guards?
Hearing the click of the next drawer, Shinichi yanked it open before Kaito could get his quip in.
Blueprints. Exactly what he needed to confirm his suspicions. Unfurling the topmost one, he stared at the design revealed in plain white.
Kaito straightened up, pausing his work on the last lock. “It’s a safe.”
“It’s a trap,” Shinichi corrected, spreading the schematic out on the table.
Silence.
No rejoinder or even a glance towards him came from Kaito. Noticing a crumpled form in his hand, Shinichi could just make out the name of the injured worker and a faintly penciled set of double arrows, shorthand to indicate a switch.
It wasn’t hard to put together the pieces, or at least most of them.
“You’re in the middle of all this somehow.” There was no room for a question in his words, not when everything led back to one person.
Kaito started for the door, the paper still clutched in his hand, knowing that removing evidence of their passing would take Shinichi enough time for him to slip away. Sure enough, when Shinichi stepped back into the overcast day, Kaito had disappeared.
Chapter 5
“You knew.” This time the drop didn’t bother Shinichi quite as much, the view was still as breathtaking as always but he’d found his 'sky legs' at their last midnight meeting.
His hands shoved into a compartment in the elevator’s side, Kaito didn’t look away from his work and simply shrugged. Somehow, Shinichi thought the silence would have dissolved by now, that the charm and cheek would have recovered in the interim and Kaito would be back to his wordplay. He should’ve known, his line of work forced him to confront the thread of causality often enough, it never got easier.
“Here’s what I know. The person financing this whole project has a hobby, of collecting things that should be on display somewhere better than a vault or a gold-infested bedroom wall. You start working here and the number of malfunctions go up. None reported officially, but your coworkers talk. You’ve survived everything they’ve thrown at you. Faulty fuses, the beam that should’ve flattened you, the nail gun that went haywire.”
Kaito’s hands went motionless in the compartment, still not looking at Shinichi.
“They can’t hit you, but you have a weakness of almost a hundred people. It’s not your fault.”
“It should’ve been my hands,” the hoarse whisper scraped against Shinichi’s heart.
“And if it had been, how would you have been able to open that secret cavity you're tampering with?”
Indigo eyes turned to him, finally meeting his gaze.
Shinichi smiled softly and continued, “You’re not the only one who can read blueprints.”
“It’s useless. By the time it’ll be of any use more people will have been caught in the crossfire, and I can’t live with that.”
“Then let’s take a different approach. You don’t have to wait, Kaito.” No sooner had the name left his mouth than a sound from behind Shinichi made him turn. A figure dressed in black and holding a nail gun stood on the other end of the beam.
“Jump.” The command was simple, emphasized by a jerk of the nail gun to the side and a pointed look at Shinichi. “You first.”
Shinichi’s mind whirled as he tried to think of a way to avoid his intended fate, but the man stepped forward and fired the nail gun. The nail pinged off the beam he was holding onto for support, but the ricochet still hit his hand and the sudden lancing pain was enough to make him let go.
The only thought that flashed through his mind as he fell, was that of course it would’ve been hard to find any evidence, any damage the nails left would’ve been reduced to the barest of pits on the metal beams.
His stomach leapt into his throat, his balance lost and he’d only just managed to get a step closer to Kaito. He threw his hands out to try and find a handhold but nothing came within reach, only the abyss reaching up to embrace him.
The moon loomed overhead as if to let him complete his deadly journey to the bottom in a heavenly spotlight, affording him the greatest of stages for his demise. He knew he was falling, but in the first moment of his plummet, he felt as if he were floating.
The next second a hand grabbed his arm and he heard an anguished cry from above him. The jerk to a halt was more painful than the nail gun’s glancing blow, his shoulder protesting the sudden stop but Shinichi was grateful that his stomach had settled back to where it should’ve been.
“Don’t scare me like that,” Kaito said, with a measure of familiar buoyancy returned to his voice. His grip was iron-fast around Shinichi’s arm, one that wouldn’t be broken. This was an attempt he’d been able to do something about, action was always the best cure for helplessness. If all it took was a little near-death encounter, then Shinichi had plenty of practice with those.
“You owe me more answers for this one,” Shinichi said once he’d caught his voice back and detangled it from his intestines.
Kaito swung him back onto the scaffolding, carefully holding him until he had gotten his grip and balance again. Letting go of where he’d been hanging, Kaito landed next to him gracefully, a bird landing on a perch.
“That’ll take at least all night to explain.”
Shinichi looked up at the trussed body of the assailant above them, a plethora of wires encircling the man. “I can fill in quite a few gaps, don’t worry.”
“Perhaps there’ll still be a few things that’ll surprise you,” Kaito said, his smile enough to warm Shinichi after the chill of the fall.
Chapter 6
Working in homicide hadn’t given Shinichi much overlap with the cases that dealt with art theft; that department had a far more secretive and lengthy process for solving their crimes than his. But the up-tick in successful recoveries of lost-cause pieces hadn’t escaped his notice in the past year or so, especially once they made it to the news. The department had been tight-lipped about their new methods: citing a software called White Hat, the purpose or origin of which was never explained no matter the number of pointed questions.
Knowing that the incidents were attempts to kill Kaito by the black market trade boss made the remaining missing pieces fall into place for Shinichi. What he hadn’t expected was just how literal the department had been in their naming. Kaito tipped the top hat in his direction, the monocle flashing in the moonlight of the next night and hiding his smirk.
“This doesn’t make it harder to steal things?” Shinichi asked, sardonic.
“I like a challenge.” Kaito crouched at the skylight, concentrating on the movement inside as he kept his hand on the holster at his thigh. Shinichi frowned, the gun at odds with what he knew of Kaito.
“What’s that for?”
“I’m not letting them get to you again.” The brim of the hat obscured his eyes, the smile on his face without context. There was such a thing as an action too far, perhaps it hadn’t been a motivator in the right direction as Shinichi had hoped.
“Kaito, don’t—”
“Your mind’s too much on murder, my great detective.” Kaito pulled him back from the glass, pulling out the gun and aiming for the bolt at one end. A quiet thwip and the window swung down soundlessly into the darkness, a King of Hearts standing vigil where the lock had been.
Holding Shinichi close, Kaito whispered in his ear, “Hold on.”
The inside was dim, lit only by the flashlights of the guards, and the rows between the crates were shadowed and ink-dark. Kaito navigated the stacks easily, running the length of the rows and descending to dispatch any guards he came across before returning to his vantage point above. Shinichi kept pace below, checking the labels for the hidden shipment they needed. Stopping in front of a crate, he squinted at the writing on the side, trying to sort out what had made him pause on this one’s label in particular. The corner a few dozen meters ahead began to gain definition as a guard approached, not yet in sight but the light enough to illuminate the faint marks across the paper, as if it had been splattered with paint. Picking out the letters the splatter marked and descrambling them took another minute but by the end, Shinichi was certain that his search had ended.
It was only then that he realized the faint light from around a corner up ahead had started to gain altitude. Looking up, he saw the guard climbing the crates towards Kaito, whose back was turned to deal with a guard on his other side. Shinichi scrambled up the crates, heart in his throat and though he could see Kaito straighten from dealing with his guard, the other had begun to straighten up and take aim.
Shinichi knew his hands were scraped with splinters from the speed with which he was climbing but he couldn’t stop, not when he could do something about it. Just as the guard aimed squarely at Kaito’s back and pulled the trigger, Shinichi jumped into the fray between them, his gun cocked and ready but everything else except Kaito’s safety fled his mind in the moment.
Two loud bangs reverberated through the warehouse, followed by Kaito’s voice shouting and Shinichi was pulled out of the mire of pain by two hands holding him up.
“Did it hit you?” Shinichi gasped. He needed to get the question out, needed an answer before he needed anything else.
“Why did you do that!?” Shaking his head, Kaito struggled under his weight as he tried to find a position that wouldn’t aggravate the wound. The guard was slumped below, his head dangling over the edge of the crate and in the moment, Shinichi didn’t regret the neck pain the man was sure to wake up with. Shinichi felt Kaito heft him into his arms and run for the exit. Kaito’s fingers dug into Shinichi’s side as if afraid he would disappear, but all Shinichi could focus on was the tears dripping onto his cheek.
“Kaito,” he croaked out, shifting the arm that he could still feel most of and pressing the button on his watch, before clinging to Kaito’s tie—the color matched the stain spreading across Kaito’s jacket—and finding the words to continue. “I found them… Row AA…. Number 43…Tell them…you’re done…you’re free.”
He drifted out of consciousness to the sound of Kaito’s voice and the tinny chatter of the police on the other side of the line, relief flooding through him.
Chapter 7
“You couldn’t visit me normally?” Shinichi said to the nurse, shifting into a sitting position when she opened the door. Kaito turned around, his polite smile morphing into one of embarrassment.
“I was just going to fluff your pillows, check you were still alive and leave.”
“You were planning to just leave again?” Shinichi frowned. “Good thing all that running after you in the construction site paid off.”
“You took a bullet for me. I should’ve been able to keep you from doing that.”
“I would do it again.” Glancing down at the worrying hands held in front of Kaito and the fragile smile, he understood. “I’m not like those workers. I willingly stood in the line of fire for you, Kaito, because I wanted to. It was my choice.”
Kaito finally met his eyes. “Why?” His voice was hoarse, a mannerism he hadn’t lost when his voice switched from the nurse’s.
“You’ll have to let me catch you to find out,” Shinichi said softly, turning his hand up on the bed. Even that small amount of movement resulted in a spike of pain, but he didn’t let it show on his face.
Kaito took his hand slowly, as if he thought it would close again before he could.
“That’s a dangerous chase,” Kaito said.
“I’ll enjoy it.”
