Chapter Text
It went down his throat like molten lava, coating his insides with fire. A fiery pain shot through his fingers and toes and set them ablaze from within, even as he thrashed against the arm hooked around his neck, prickling back up his spine and to his eyes where they turned blood-red with rage.
Then, the bottle came out and clattered to his side. He scrambled clumsily away from his aggressor, retching immediately, simultaneously expelling and taking in gulps of air too big for his strangled lungs. Hunched over the carpet on all fours, he wrapped his arms around his stomach and pushed, trying desperately to get it out of him. But no Baijiu came back up; it had all gone down as planned, and now… now, it was only a matter of time.
"H...Hattori..." he seethed through clenched teeth and a swollen throat. "Hattori...!"
Heiji stumbled as far back as his nerve would let him. This was it. Sucking in a breath, he steeled himself for the impending transformation. He had known it was going to be bad long before he had forced the bottle to his lips... he just hadn't realized how bad.
He wanted to look away, but he couldn't. 'Conan Edogawa' burned white-hot in his sights like the sun in the shape of a child, screaming and cursing his name as the Baijiu twisted and bent him in ways that shouldn't have been possible. Mercifully, his shrieking didn't last for much longer, but somehow the pathetic, confused sputtering which came afterwards was worse, even with the knowledge that the pretender was receding and Kudo-- the real Kudo-- was emerging.
Still, the stunning absurdity of it all kept him looking, kept him unblinking as his horrible gift showed him the child as he really was in his weakest moment, fighting a losing battle against a force beyond even his capabilities as it ruthlessly ripped him away from himself. He had stopped screaming, yes, but he hadn't stopped resisting, writhing and clawing at the carpet as he slowly and painfully succumbed to the inevitable.
Heiji didn't realize he'd backed to the edges of the room until he met the cold, plastic surface of false wood paneling. The jolt caused the truth to withdraw temporarily, but its absence only made things worse. The veil was deteriorating in real time. Kudo-- Conan flickered in his sights like a glitch, at one moment a child then something else at the next. Desperate for relief, Conan's clawed hands hooked into the collar of his own shirt and tore it to pieces, violently shredding the fabric from his burning body in an attempt to cool off, lurching forward when it did nothing to dry-heave once, twice, three times, silently cursing Hattori's name when he could. Nothing could stop it now, but still he refused to simply lie down and let Kudo lock him away again.
A smell like burning plastic suddenly assaulted Hattori's senses, burning the back of his throat. Merely watching the transformation was becoming more difficult and yet, in spite of himself, he still found himself simply unable to close off his senses to any of it.
Then, after a stretch of near-silence, Conan suddenly cried out and whipped forward, touching his face to the floor, raking at the carpet in a terrible frenzy. The acrid stench intensified as smoke curled off his flesh, bones visibly shifting just beneath the skin of his back. But soon his cries were no more, and he fell into an even more pathetic babble, spittle dribbling down his chin as the cold and calculating of the pretender was replaced with dumb, baser instinct, the Baijiu at last peeling back his mind to the correct persona.
Culled by the passing of time, its wild flailing gradually slowed. Hattori allowed himself to exhale. Only mere seconds had passed, but to him, it felt like hours.
Not another minute had gone by before his curse returned to him twofold, glazing over his eyes again like a second eyelid. There he beheld the blinding light once more, its shape now indescribable in the wash of its own brilliance, noticeably less childlike and beastly in a way he couldn't articulate.
Words failed him when he tried. He tried not to look directly at it, tried to tear away when he remembered to… but he was spellbound, an invisible force keeping his gaze fixed on the horror before him. He was reminded of the countless tales of men facing monsters in the myths he had heard growing up.
At this point, he couldn't even see Conan anymore… but the dreadful feeling that he was looking right at him roiled and hissed in the pit of his stomach.
As if to mock his uncertainty, the light exploded suddenly, consuming his field of vision as fingers of warmth wriggled under the skin around his eyes. Then came the shrieking.
Without warning, a terrible, piercing noise rang out in his head. Over and over it screeched what could've been his name, growled from a place he could have mistaken as his own conscience, but the cacophony of sound was enough to convince the part of him that could still think that it wasn't. Distressed, his hands clapped over his ears, but it didn't seem to help. The sound was impossibly loud, emanating from every part of him rather than anything he could swing at with his fists– screamed out from every part inside him from his guilty conscience to his overactive mind's eye.
He thought he could see a shape in the light, some suggestion of creature, bent over him with its hands held near his head like a child winding up to catch a butterfly.
Through some monumental force of will, Heiji screwed his eyes shut. The shrieking in his head didn't stop, even as he slid down to the floor, but to his surprise... it faded. Eventually… it faded. The room fell silent and the heat in his face dissipated. Was it... was it over?
Skeptical, and convinced he was being tricked, he huddled further into himself, expecting to be assaulted again as soon as he let down his guard. What now? he wondered into the quiet.
Nothing came. He waited.
But when nothing came, still… cautiously, he opened his eyes. The world blurred into focus. There was a shape ahead of him, face-down in the center of the room, naked and surrounded by scraps of fabric.
"Kudo?" he called. "Kudo!!"
Instinctively, he leapt to his feet and snatched the drapes from a nearby window, bounding over the empty Baijiu bottle and a pair of glasses on his way to the body. A barely-conscious Shinichi Kudo lay sprawled over the remains of child-sized clothing, slick with sweat and hot to the touch, breathing deeply as if recently woken from a deep sleep. Heiji threw the drapes over him immediately and lowered himself to his face.
"Kudo… is it you?" he whispered, staring into the eyes of who he wanted to believe– who he hoped was his friend, looking for a sign that he was no longer speaking to the pretender.
Shinichi took his time to respond, but Heiji got the reassurance he needed. Blinking slowly, he mouthed one, unmistakable, ‘Idiot,’ and offered him a weary smile.
For that, Hattori wanted to punch him on the shoulder. Wanted to. Instead, he bowed his head and hid his own face, too relieved to even joke around.
A pang of guilt thumped in Shinichi’s chest. His tired gaze landed on the pair of glasses discarded just a few feet behind Hattori’s heels.
“One hour, Hattori,” he breathed, his voice thin and knowing. Heiji lifted his head and stared at him with something like disbelief, his eyes widening. “One hour.”