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Leave them alone.
The child smirked. Pointed fingers danced across the felt, button-eyed faces of two, handmade dolls.
“Leave them alone?” he repeated. “Why?”
I said leave them alone!
He turned his head so his glasses caught the sun. Legs which couldn’t reach the ground kicked excitedly beneath the table.
“Or what, Shinichi-niichan?”
He waited patiently for a response, but was only met with silence.
“That’s what I thought,” he chuckled, flicking a claw across yarn bangs. The dolls, a man and a woman, merely smiled back at him. “You’re all bark and no bite, as you always have been.”
That’s not true.
He chuffed through his nose. How many times had they played this game? Shinichi never really had anything to say when he found the nerve to speak. “Be quiet, Shinichi,” he growled. “You’re boring me.”
And if it is, the voice continued, you’re the same. Or do you– do you forget where it is you come from?
Conan twitched. His fingers coiled around the torsos of his toys and squeezed. “Then show me, ” he dared.
Across the table, unseen to anyone but the child, sat the ephemeral specter of Shinichi Kudo. He glowed dimly in washed-out colors, translucent like a sandblasted pane through which the other children could be seen playing in the park.
He had his fist planted knuckles-down at the edge and a flimsy kind of determination in his eyes, the kind with only about half the conviction needed to be convincing. He was nervous.
I– I know you think I can’t do anything to you, the voice echoed. Conan would hear the words first in his head, then witness the specter mouth the same back to him half a second later. And you’re right, probably.
The child didn’t blink once.
But I think you forget that that’s my body you’re in, and that I still have some say in what it does!
Conan bared his teeth and hissed, feeling challenged. When he moved his face from the sunshine, there was nothing to hide the angry, red glow of his eyes behind his glasses.
But Shinichi was gone between blinks, and the voice ceased to continue hassling him. Still, he kept his guard up for an extra minute, suspicious that he might actually follow through on his threats for once, but when nothing happened…
His grip slackened, a frown turning his face. The dolls fell limp in his grasp again. Annoyed that Shinichi had riled him up for nothing, Conan separated them and fixed his attention on the woman, splaying her cruciform on the table. “All bark and no bite, after all,” he mumbled.
He combed her bangs from her face and tapped her button eyes with the point of his claw, then traced the stitching from her ears to her throat, careful not to nick the fabric. Nobody else could hear it, but she was screaming… screaming for help in a voice much, much quieter than Shinichi’s. Her voice resounded in his head alone with just as much integrity as a distant echo in a cave.
To this, the child simply smirked.
“If you beg a little harder,” he whispered to her, "and if you beg in just the right way… you could potentially sway me to reconsider. You already know what’s in store for you otherwise, don’t you?”
He shuffled in his pockets and came out with doll remains, stuffing and loose threads plainly caught in his claws.
The doll didn’t move. It couldn’t. But at the sight of fabric entrails strung between his fingers, her pleading devolved into hideous, choked sobs, babbling what he presumed must've been prayers for mercy.
Conan allowed himself to smile, to fully smile. Dirty little fangs jutted out from his gumline, kissed by the red glow of his eyes all the way up to his ears. He pressed the pad of his finger down against the doll’s throat and put a quick stop to her bawling, the sharpened edge of his claw already cutting into the felt without him really meaning to.
“You’re all the same to me,” he snickered. “Bugs beneath my feet. Toys to play with. Your lives are only as useful as I s—”
The words stopped mid-sentence, but not by choice. His voice caught in his throat and simply went no further, instead wheezing out in pathetic little sputters. Alarmed, he jumped to his feet and coughed, coughed once, twice, tried to sneak in a word here and there, but still there was nothing. He'd suddenly lost the capacity to speak and couldn't understand why.
He cleared his throat in an attempt to dislodge anything that might be stuck where he couldn’t reach, but only a frog-like noise managed to escape him. There was nothing there. So what then?
He figured it out when he was suddenly unable to move his right arm, too. The sensation was strange and phantomlike; he knew he still had an arm, could still feel it in the most basic sense—but it was deadweight. He couldn't move it at all.
He grimaced at his open hand lying open-palmed and motionless on the table, the useless limb pulling on muscles all the way in his neck as if he were lugging a bag of coal for an arm. Despite the unending shrieking to which Conan was no longer listening, the doll simply smiled back at him, and he perceived something like mockery shining in its button eyes.
At least he could say he felt something, though. In the next moment, that was no longer true in parts of his face. Vision in his left eye suddenly ceased between blinks. His cheeks twitched, numbing as facial muscles peeled back his lips to a strange, unnatural scowl, the wolf teeth he normally kept hidden glistening menacingly in the light.
He couldn't say it, but he knew what was happening. Shinichi. That misbehaving—
Without commanding it to, his right hand left the table and flew clumsily towards his face. It moved unnaturally, as if being puppeted through the air on a string, and raked his forehead as the claws just barely missed his face. He snarled, immediately moving to restrain it with his other arm, but that started to seize, too. The Shinichi arm flung towards his face again, this time landing in his hair, whereupon it grabbed a messy handful of bangs, dragging downwards on his scalp with the weight of a grown man.
Conan grimaced, annoyed. A low warning growl rumbled in his throat. There was an attempt to twist his entire body in order to encourage the rogue arm off his head, but it wasn’t strong enough, and instead pulled uncomfortably at the meat of his shoulders.
It’s no use, Conan, he heard Shinichi speak. Leave them alone and do as I say, or I’ll–
Conan snarled back, the noise much deeper than should ever come from a child.
“Back off, Kudo,” he growled.
I mean it!
“Back off!”
But Shinichi wouldn’t relent. The rogue arm yanked forward suddenly, hefting Conan into the table with an annoyed grunt, nearly crushing the dolls which still lay there hopelessly in his shadow. He hissed, agitated by the impact but mostly bothered that the continuous tugging at his scalp was finally beginning to ache enough for him to care.
In fact, he had been chalking up the heat in his body to the sunshine of the afternoon, but… it was hardly shining brightly enough for him to burn . Why did he feel so feverish?
He made another attempt to grab at the Shinichi arm but found that his left hand, too, had mostly seized mere inches from his face, the inch-long claws pointed menacingly towards his eyes. He could still wriggle his fingers, but the effort was like scraping ice from a windshield.
For a moment, Conan thought he felt something like fear creep down his spine. The imagined sensation of being cut through like butter prompted him to suck in a breath, and hold it.
I told you it was no use!
The will to resist returned to him twofold. Suddenly emboldened—and imagining Shinichi ahead of him—he twisted his hand so his own claws were no longer pointed at himself, instead pointing them downwards. There was still little to no slack in his joints, so he thought he was safe, but the subsequent relief was short-lived.
When they had turned far enough away, his arm suddenly released as if he had sprung a trap. He swung down into the table without meaning to, the supernatural force of his resistance released in one go, claws embedding deep into the wood just hairs away from the doll. He shouted in frustration, drawing stares from some of the nearby children.
Give it up, Conan!
Conan scowled.
I'll show them what you are if you don't listen!
There was an impatience knotting in the pretender’s chest, the kind that made him feel like he was approaching the edge: his muscles felt tight, the skin around them felt tight, and the desperate, ever-growing need for release bled into every part of him as an unstoppable urge to violence. Each time Shinichi prodded at him, he felt like this was going to be it, that would be the last straw… but he never lost his cool.
He narrowed his eyes into the crook of the arm still locked over his face. On his sleeve, he saw the ambient glow of both red and blue diffused across the fabric.
“Hrrff… hrf…..”
Well, maybe this time really was it.
Properly enraged, Conan shrieked . Without a moment’s hesitation, his jaws split wider than humanly possible to a mouth full of angry, pointed teeth, and he bit down into his elbow with a vengeance, ravenously shredding right past the wool and into his own flesh.
If there was any pain, it didn’t register. But he didn’t care. He could hear Shinichi screaming and that in itself made the consequences worth it.
Are you insane?? he demanded. Stop!!!
There was blood, yes. Lots of it. He’d bit down hard. His teeth broke the skin with alarming ease as if it were mere tissue paper, and even with his mouth fully clamped around the wound, blood escaped into the remnants of his sleeve full force, saturating the fabric until it could hold no more and began to trickle down his skin and onto the table. The doll, caught directly in the line of fire, was quickly stained red.
Stop!!
Conan merely hummed. If at all possible, he bit down even harder, if only to hear Shinichi sing louder.
In fact, he had almost forgotten he was waiting for Shinichi to relinquish dominion over his rogue arm until it finally began to yield. As soon as he felt some semblance of control return to him, he twisted violently, whipping the hand off his scalp and onto the soiled table, though not without taking a sizeable clump of hair with it.
“Incidental,” he seethed through the stinging, with a mouth full of blood. And to his own surprise, he laughed, even as the children began to scream.
But he wasn’t done.
Livid beyond rational thinking, Conan seized the bloodied doll before him and in a single, unbroken motion, chomped down on her head as if she were meat on a skewer. His fangs tore into the felt with sickening ease, separating it from the body as easily as ripping a sheet of wet paper.
Dissatisfied with the carnage, he dug his claws into the seams of its back and pulled that apart, too. The fabric stood no chance and exploded immediately, the white cotton fluff which burst out landing in his lap as red snow. In a frenzy, he slammed his hands against the edges of the table and touched his forehead to the slicked surface, gleefully dressing his face in visceral madness. Somehow, the second doll escaped his wrath, left cowering at the edge of the slaughter.
“Look at what you did, Shinichi,” he hissed.
Ignoring the pandemonium he had spurred around him and the loss of feeling in his right arm, Conan tilted his head, both eyes glazed over in red, and stared out across the booth where he knew the specter should appear. It never did.
“Look at what you did. Look at what you did. Look at what you– you– Look at… Look…”
His voice cracked. Tortured lungs wheezed out what was left of his dignity as a thin gasp. He surrendered to revulsion, revulsion of himself, ribbons of steam visibly curling off his skin, and craning his neck towards the sky he cried out, cursed something, anything , his clawed, bloody fingers cricking and trembling at the edges of his tinted periphery.
The metallic taste in his mouth suddenly disgusted him on a guttural level. His stomach churned, and as he shouted towards the heavens, his throat opened to harsh, acidic misery.
Reality crashed into him like a bucket of ice water.
Bolting upright as fast as he did electrified his senses. The apartment inhaled as he did, its walls appearing to withdraw as if he had been boxed in. The heaping gulp of much-needed air was rich enough to make his chest burn, but enough to chase away the nightmares, and soon the world bent back into shape, presenting itself to Conan Edogawa as a middle-aged man’s bedroom at three in the morning.
Conan sat for a moment in the dark, hunched over himself as he caught his breath. A wandering eye drifted towards Uncle Kogoro, who slept noisily—but peacefully—in his bunk, undisturbed.
Relief was not the correct descriptor for what he was feeling. He buried his face in the crook of his arm, dusted away the lines of salt on his cheeks. Squinted at his fingers, declawed and child-proof, rolled up his sleeve and examined his elbow for broken skin. He was whole. And there were no evil, red pinpricks of light shining in his reflection across the room, either.
He wasn’t relieved, just… just…
He pulled his knees to his chest and rocked on his bottom in contemplative silence. Only a dream , he tried to convince himself. It was just a dream.
It made him angry, though. All of it, dream or not. Shinichi, leering at him from within his own head, blackmailing him with threats of so-called 'exposure…' the children, screaming at him in terror, as if he were something other . Monster. Monster.
Or do you forget where you come from?
Conan grit his teeth, and curled tighter into himself. He bunched the blankets at his feet and finally pulled them back over, rolling onto his side. Buried up to his chin in fleece, he scowled at the bedroom door. Of course he knew where he came from. Of course he knew who he was. He was Conan Edogawa, pint-sized sleuth and… temporary… pseudonym of… Shinichi Kudo…
Blood rushed to his face. Temporary?
He shuffled beneath the covers and unveiled his hands, soft and unsoiled. The phantom calls of the screaming children echoed in his ears, ghosts of bloodied dolls and despondent imposters flashing in his mind’s eye.
How haunted he was by things which sullied a child’s innocence, and yet… here were his hands, clean and unspoiled by that which tainted grown men. Ironic.
His thoughts drifted. Indeed, what had he ever done not to deserve his own place in the world?
“...Well, Shinichi?” he murmured to no-one.
In the quiet, something powerful ignited in his chest.
He knew what had to be done.
Shinichi had to go.