Chapter Text
Three days after moving into the Kudou mansion, Rei was sure of only one thing. There was no way in hell this was going to work.
Rei bent over the stovetop in the Kudous’ bright kitchen, making yakisoba with his sleeves rolled to his elbows and one of Yukiko’s old aprons slung over his turtleneck and jeans. The smell of onions and sesame oil frying washed over him, the hot crackle of gyoza browning in the cast-iron pan. Rei wasn’t crazy about the grinning Saguaro cactuses on his apron, but at least it didn’t have ruffles. And it was better than getting sauce and oil all over his clean shirt—his last clean shirt, since Akai’s carbon-copy black shirts and slacks were clogging up the washing machine.
Rei brought the knife down too hard and a clove of garlic catapulted away from him, pinging off the sink. As a general rule, he didn’t cook angry, because that was a good way to lose fingers. But he was making an exception, because if he didn’t cook, he was going to do something else with this knife. Like shove it in between Akai Shuichi’s ribs.
Rei was one of the best agents in the PSB. He could defuse a bomb with a bobby pin, push anything with an engine to 120 miles an hour, and hold his perfect smile with a stiletto pressed against his femoral artery, knowing he was one wrong word from an ugly chalk outline on the floor. But he had never felt more out of his depth than he did now, playing house with Akai and Shinichi.
Well, not Shinichi. Shinichi hadn’t really done anything. It was all Akai.
Yes, sure, he wasn’t actively trying to kill Akai anymore. And yes, out of desperation, maybe he’d let Akai take him out for a drink a few times, and not completely hated those nights spent leaning back on the barstool next to him, swapping stories and watching Akai’s lips twitch into a tiny smile behind the rim of his highball glass.
But there was a difference between what he could take for a few hours with a lot of whiskey and what he wanted to live with.
It had seemed so clinical on paper: Amuro and Subaru fall in love and take guardianship of Edogawa Conan. Three people who didn’t exist reinvented into a perfect suburban family. In one stroke, Akai’s cover got more credibility, Rei got some much-needed backup, and Shinichi got to be himself again for the most part, with someone qualified finally watching his back. But there was nothing clinical about actually living here.
It took everything he had, when Azusa had cornered him about his love life at Poirot yesterday, to hold onto his smile as she cupped her cheeks and exclaimed, “My, you two sure moved fast!”—to which he managed a strained, “Well, you know how these things happen.” These things being deep cover, of course, and happen in this case being a temporary alliance with the insufferable FBI agent now wedged into his life like a root canal.
Rei hoped they were pulling this triple cover off outside the Kudou mansion, but inside, they were tripping over each other—three people doing three separate loads of laundry, he and Akai shopping by themselves and bumping into each other in the garage carrying two sets of groceries. If you could call a trunkful of curry blocks, Calorie-Mate, and canned coffee groceries.
That morning, he’d woken up determined that today, day three, would be the day he nailed this undercover assignment with the same skill and efficiency as he always had. But then he walked down the stairs and found Akai Shuichi casually drinking coffee at the breakfast bar, and it was all he could do not to go for his gun.
And though his smile was bulletproof, his heart had nearly socked out of his chest when he dropped Conan off at school that morning and the boy threw his arms around Rei’s waist in a big showy goodbye. He knew it was fake—had been expecting it, even—but some part of him still turned a wild somersault watching that cute kid, his kid now, sort of, race off into the throng of second-graders with his backpack flapping and Rei’s lunch in his hand.
He’d squeezed in a few hours of paging through intelligence reports before noon. But he couldn’t get the doorbell to stop ringing—first Agent Camel delivering surveillance equipment disguised in a potted geranium, and then their chatty next-door neighbor armed with a welcome-to-the-block casserole, who pelted him with so many questions about the great romance of Okiya Subaru and Amuro Tohru that Rei was starting to worry she was a spy for the Organization.
Shinichi had brought home a permission slip for next Tuesday’s field trip, but Rei didn’t know if he was supposed to sign it or get Shinichi out of it. He’d wasted an hour frantically calling Yukiko in Switzerland or Senegal or wherever they were, because the amount of money in the bank account had to be a clerical error, only to be told she could put more in at any time, which was probably an offer but felt more like a threat.
For the third day in a row, he’d had to reorganize everything in the kitchen, because Akai had spent the night before senselessly shuffling things, moving the coffee and half the mugs to the lower shelf of the walk-in pantry next to Yusaku’s stale boxes of Oat Chex. And when Akai walked through the kitchen to pour himself another slug of that disgusting instant coffee he drank black as motor oil, he had the gall to suggest Rei leave things where they were. Which really just confirmed what Rei had always known about Akai: that he was the kind of person who did exactly what he wanted and didn’t give a damn about anyone else.
…Or so he thought, until he watched Shinichi, or Conan rather, pull out every drawer to make a ladder for himself to the upper cabinet, and realized Akai might have a reason for moving a few essentials below the three-foot line…
But it wouldn’t have killed him to say something about it!
Rei scowled, flipping the wok too hard and almost flinging yakisoba out onto the counter. Akai just irritated him. The way he handed over the paper every morning, like he already knew Rei wasn’t going to shoot him through the classifieds. The way he slunk up the stairs to his sniper post in the attic at night, like some squatter living in between Yukiko’s trunk of costumes and the Christmas decorations.
The way Akai stared at him with those inscrutable green eyes, like he needed a squad of FBI codebreakers to figure out what pick up laundry detergent meant.
And then there was all the rest of it. The old hate and the anger and the grief and the guilt, and the gut-sick anguish that hit him like a sucking chest wound whenever he looked at Akai just wrong.
But he was really, really trying not to think about that.
And somehow, Rei was supposed to walk around convincing his nosy neighbors and anyone else who asked that he was in love with that man. And not just love, but let’s-move-in-and-raise-a-child-together love, something he’d never felt or even steered within fifty feet of. He certainly wasn’t about to start—not now, and not with Akai of all people.
Which he’d maybe been a little too honest about that afternoon, as they rolled into the Teitan Elementary School parking lot to pick Conan up.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Rei said, leaning back in the passenger seat of Subaru’s ridiculous red Subaru 360 and glaring at the man behind the wheel. “I may have to put up with you, but I don’t have to like it. I only agreed to this because Shinichi got too close to the Organization last time and his cover was almost blown.”
“As was yours, if I recall,” Akai replied, in his infuriatingly calm way. Like Rei was going to forget it was Akai’s bullet that had silenced the Organization rat moments before he texted Gin and nailed Rei’s coffin shut.
“And if Kazami hadn’t shown up at the right moment, you would have been hauled in and arrested, because Okiya Subaru had no reason to be on that bridge in the middle of the night with a high-powered rifle,” Rei shot back. He wasn’t the only one who’d screwed up recently. “The point is, I’m only here so Shinichi doesn’t get himself killed. If I could do this without you, I would. So stay out of my way.”
Then he stepped out of the car, effortlessly slipping on his 3000-watt smile to wave at Conan’s teacher and usher him into the backseat.
In the kitchen, Rei blew his hair out of his face, flipping the gyoza before they went past crisped to burned. He’d hated Akai for a long time. He was good at it. And so far, he saw no reason to give up on a skill he’d spent so long perfecting.
So why was he still thinking about it all these hours later—Akai’s tiny huff of breath, almost a laugh, and the sardonic twitch of his lips then, like he’d expected nothing less?
Rei shook it off, untying his apron and throwing it onto one of the tall stools. Whatever was going on with Akai wasn’t his problem. Like he’d said—he was only here for Shinichi.
He scooped out the yakisoba and arranged the gyoza on a plate, staring down at the circle of perfectly crisped dumplings. Distracted, he’d made far too much for one person. He wasn’t going to debase himself by inviting Akai to dinner after their little chat in the car. But Shinichi had to be around here somewhere. They could eat together. That felt like something a fake normal family would do.
Silent by habit, Rei ambled toward the library. Shinichi had been holed up in there ever since he came home from school. When he poked his head in, Rei found him bent over the giant desk, kneeling on the rolling chair with his nose in a book. He had to fight down a little chuckle at the sight of those socked feet kicking unconsciously over the side of the chair.
Rei had always liked Shinichi, even before he had any idea who he really was. Honestly, what was not to like about a pocket-sized detective who had the police wrapped around his finger and hid his brilliant mind behind enormous, adorable blue eyes?
Admittedly, living together came with some new challenges. He was learning fast that the flip side of Shinichi’s fierce independence was that getting anything out of him was like pulling teeth. Rei strongly suspected he’d been trained in counterinterrogation techniques, which explained how but not why he couldn’t get Shinichi to tell him what he’d actually liked out of his spicy curry bento and what he’d just choked down.
And Shinichi was a fantastic liar, particularly when it came to lies of omission. (Technically rolling in at eight o’clock, escorted by Takagi and a car of grateful Division 1 detectives, did qualify as coming home after school, but Rei felt he’d left out a few pertinent details, and honestly, would it have killed him to text.)
For the most part, Rei thought they got along. But sometimes, just sometimes, Rei felt like he was bumping into something where Shinichi was concerned. A wall. For being so headstrong most of the time, Shinichi was a little too…polite. And Rei knew enough about deep cover to know that polite was what you were when you weren’t being yourself.
He didn’t want Shinichi to feel like he had to keep up a front—not here, in his own house, and not with them. But he had no idea how to broach that subject with a boy who wouldn’t even debrief on his lunch box.
Shinichi was deep in whatever he was doing—hadn’t looked up, though Rei knew Shinichi sensed his eyes from across the room. That seemed to be one of his many talents. Rei moved closer until he could see the book spread out on the table. It looked like Alice in Wonderland, one of the old versions with black-and-white sketch illustrations, the corners bent and ruffled above Alice and Tweedledum heartily shaking hands. Shinichi had set up a chessboard, too, and he was toying with one of the black rooks, twiddling it absently in his fingers.
Rei braced one hand on the desk, leaning down with a smile. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Shinichi replied, distracted. He squinted up at Rei. “The White Rabbit only appears in Wonderland, right? Not in the sequel—Through the Looking Glass?”
“As far as I remember,” Rei hedged. It had been a long time.
Lewis Carroll wasn’t Shinichi’s usual reading material. And surely they wouldn’t have assigned something so juvenile in his correspondence classes for talented and gifted high schoolers, where Kudou Shinichi was technically getting his education. This must be for a case—though Rei didn’t remember hearing about any murders on the police scanner.
“Do you need any help?” he asked.
Shinichi’s eyes flickered up to him, and then away—a look Rei didn’t know how to read at all yet. “I’ve got it,” he said, some little note of reluctance in his voice Rei couldn’t place. He had the sensation of stubbing his toe against that wall again. Usually, Shinichi didn’t hesitate to talk through his cases. Maybe Rei had misread this.
Or maybe he was just sick of them already and wanted some time alone.
Still, Rei persisted, straightening and smiling down at Shinichi’s bent head. “Hey. It’s almost seven. You hungry?”
The rest of the invitation—Do you want to have dinner with me?—was right there on his tongue. But it died when Shinichi propped his chin on his hand and pinned him with a flat look.
“You don’t have to do this, you know. Hover, I mean. I can take care of myself.”
“Oh,” Rei replied. “Right.” He felt a little winded, the words too bright, like he was taking orders at the café in his Amuro voice. He took a step back toward the door. “Well, I’ll…I’ll leave you to it. But let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“I’m not going to need anything,” Shinichi promised, keying something into his cell phone.
Rei retreated for the door, sort of kicking himself for intruding in the first place. Of course Shinichi could take care of himself. He knew that. He wasn’t trying to imply otherwise. But they’d eaten together before, after a case or on a slow day in Poirot, when he’d make Shinichi one of his sandwiches and then sit with him at the counter, listening to stories of Mouri’s latest blunders while stealing potato chips off the edge of his plate. (Which seemed fair, since the whole thing was on the house.) He’d thought moving in together would mean more of those moments, not less.
He hesitated for a second in the doorway with the urge to turn around—but Shinichi would feed himself, right? Boundaries. Rei was trying not to smother him, or make him pull away any farther than he already was.
Still his mind churned as he made up his plate and put the extras away in the fridge, digging out his laptop to keep him company.
What had he expected, anyway? This was just a cover. A proximal arrangement of mutual advantage. He knew better than to get too attached. Shinichi hadn’t asked for anything, clearly didn’t need anything from him. So why did he feel like he was failing?
Rei was used to eating dinner alone over his case files. Somehow, it felt so much more pathetic at the Kudous’ massive dining room table, the house vast and silent around him. He didn’t know what a real family was supposed to look like—hell, he barely knew what a fake family was supposed to look like—but he had a sense it didn’t look like this.
Though he worked through a cup and a half of green tea, Shinichi never poked his head out of the library. Eventually, Rei gave up, heading upstairs and extinguishing the lights one by one. He paused for a second on the landing, listening to the soft creak of Akai’s footsteps in the attic overhead. Then he slipped into his room and went to bed, feeling frustrated and more alone than he was used to.
In the middle of the night, something jerked him up in bed. Instantly awake, Rei pushed up on his elbows, listening hard. The house was loud with creaks and groans he hadn’t catalogued yet. But underneath it all, he could just make out a noise from the kitchen—the sound of someone moving stealthily, soft footsteps, the low scrape of metal. Like a spatula. Or a knife being slid out of the knife block.
Rei swore. He snagged the .45 under his pillow and ducked out into the hallway in his T-shirt and sweatpants, making his way silently down the stairs toward the kitchen light spilling into the hall. Whoever it was, they were brazen, turning the lights on. Maybe Subaru and Amuro’s whirlwind romance and shotgun adoption hadn’t been as convincing as he’d hoped.
From the kitchen, he could make out the rustle of someone rifling through the drawers, and then a sharp crack. It was a squishy, organic sound. Rei refused to think about what that was. Heart hammering, he pressed his back to the wall for a three-count. Then he whipped around the corner to find his gun leveled squarely at Akai Shuichi’s forehead as he stood at the counter, making scrambled eggs.
Rei stared at him, floored. Akai looked a little taken aback himself. His shirt was half unbuttoned, like that was an acceptable way to walk around a house with other people in it, his black hair disheveled and still wet from a shower. He raised his hands in surrender—one of them holding a whisk, the other a cracked eggshell.
Oh. So that was the squish he’d heard.
“What the hell are you doing?” Rei hissed, lowering his gun. He clicked the safety on but didn’t put it away—wasn’t positive yet that he wasn’t going to use it.
Akai frowned and went back to whisking. “Making dinner. I just got off a four-hour briefing with Washington. I wasn’t expecting a standoff,” he explained, with a little half smirk that made Rei tempted to shoot him after all.
Rei glanced at the microwave clock. “It’s one in the morning. Are you trying to wake Shinichi?”
“I’m not making that much noise,” Akai replied, tossing the eggshells into the trash with a crunch.
Rei just waved at himself and his gun, which felt like a pretty solid rebuttal.
Akai gave him one of those long, inscrutable looks, as if measuring how serious he was. Then he sighed and set the whisk down, reaching into the cabinet for the bourbon instead.
Rei caught his hand before it could close over the bottle.
“What the hell, Akai.” He scowled. “Is this how you were living before—all-night phone calls, mainlining canned coffee and whiskey? No wonder you always look like death warmed over. Even Shinichi knows better than…”
But he had to break off the rebuke halfway when Shinichi ambled into the kitchen clutching a box of stale crackers and an instant ramen cup.
Shinichi froze like a deer in the headlights, his tiny fingers stiff around the Styrofoam. It wasn’t even good instant ramen—it was the brand they sold on the lowest shelf of the convenience store, so salty it could take off a layer of your tongue. Rei could tell the cup was still more than half full. And he knew for a fact just how old those crackers were, because he’d thought about tossing them when he reorganized the pantry, and only kept them in case of an emergency. This didn’t qualify.
He could feel his eyebrow twitching, but he bit down on the first two things it occurred to him to say, letting go of Akai to cross his arms over his T-shirt.
“This is what you meant by taking care of yourself?”
Shinichi sort of winced. “No. I mean, I was going to make something. But this was faster, so…” He trailed off with a shrug, trying to surreptitiously dump out the soggy noodles he’d clearly forgotten about. But surreptitious was impossible, when he had to stretch up on his tiptoes just to reach the sink.
Akai looked bemused. Rei pinched the bridge of his nose, wrestling with himself and what he wanted and how ridiculous they all were, tiptoeing around each other like illegal renters stuffed into an AirBnb. Then he tucked his gun into his waistband and picked up the bowl of half-blended eggs.
“No,” he decided, snatching the whisk and leveling it at them. “Sit down. Right now. If you’re hungry, then I’ll make something. But we’re not going to sit here eating scrambled eggs and crackers at midnight like a bunch of unwashed college bachelors in a filthy crash pad.”
Shinichi wrinkled his nose at the thought. Akai chuckled. “I guess that’s still ahead of you,” he mused, ruffling Shinichi’s hair. “Something to look forward to.”
Rei elbowed Akai and jerked his chin at the refrigerator. “Make yourself useful and heat up the gyoza.” He wasn’t above stabbing him in the chest with his eggy whisk. Call it revenge for monopolizing the washing machine.
Shinichi waved his hands, a little flush staining in his cheeks—embarrassment, Rei thought. Something he’d never seen on Shinichi’s face before. “Ah, no—seriously, you don’t have to do that. I’m not even hungry, so—”
“Sit,” Rei repeated. And then couldn’t help his little smirk when Akai caught Shinichi around the waist, still protesting, and dropped him onto one of the high stools before he could escape.
As Rei set about turning Akai’s scrambled eggs into a green onion and mushroom omelet, listening absently to the beeping of the microwave and to Akai telling Shinichi about some slobby roommate he’d had at the FBI training academy, he felt something easing in him—a tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying. The night felt warm again, the heat of the kitchen sinking into him as Akai set out the gyoza and bowls of dipping sauce and Shinichi perched at the breakfast bar, fiddling with his phone.
Rei knew there was some kind of natural law about teenagers and phones. But he took a chance anyway, nudging Shinichi’s arm as he reached for the pepper grinder.
“What have you been working on all night?”
Shinichi blinked, one gyoza hanging off his chopsticks like he’d forgotten all over again that he was supposed to be eating. “Oh. That. There was a flyer stapled to the telephone pole by Beika Park.”
Shinichi lifted his phone. Rei squinted at the photo. In between the concert posters and the lost cat flyers, right at eye level on the pole, was a plain sheet of white paper: just a QR code and a few words in black ink. Follow the White Rabbit. Simple and basic. Too basic.
Rei’s jaw tightened. “Looks like a recruitment portal.” He’d known a few criminal enterprises that drew potential members in with tactics like that. It wasn’t how the Organization recruited—that usually had more to do with putting a bullet in the right kneecap at the right time—but they weren’t the only game in town.
Akai slid up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the phone. Why he couldn’t just walk around the breakfast bar and look at it from a reasonable distance, Rei had no idea. He refrained from shoving him off only because Akai looked deep in thought.
“Could be an intelligence game. The FBI runs recruitments like that sometimes—trying to hook young programmers, natural geniuses, that kind of thing.”
Shinichi frowned. “Yeah, I wondered about that. But the QR link just leads to a puzzle. See?” He flicked his thumb, and an app screen came up: numbers and letters strung along a line of arrows. At the top of the screen, a red timer was stopped and blinking at four minutes left. “There’s not much chatter about it online yet, which makes me think they’re only running it locally for now. But when you log on, you get a pop-up message offering a thousand dollars cash for every code you solve.”
“That seems like a lot of cash for a game,” Rei said.
Shinichi shrugged. “Could be anything. A publicity stunt. A recruiting operation for a tech company or a syndicate or even the cybercrimes division. I don’t know yet. But I’ll find out.”
Rei twirled the spatula, considering. The flyer left him uneasy—something about the bluntness of it, hung up in broad daylight in the middle of the city but too bland to raise any flags. But so far, Shinichi seemed to have it handled. He could always step in and ask the PSB to investigate if things got more serious.
Akai leaned his hip against the counter, smiling—that fond little smile Rei remembered from their nights at the bar, just a quirk of his lips that somehow softened his whole face. “So? I take it you solved the first code?”
Shinichi grinned. “Obviously. The hint is the White Rabbit. All you need is a clock. As long as you remember everything’s reversed and backward in Wonderland, it’s child’s play.”
Rei didn’t mean to turn and share a smile with Akai. It just sort of happened. And then suddenly he was remembering all the things he liked about Shinichi, and the few he grudgingly admired about Akai, and wondering if maybe, just maybe, it was worth trying to make this work after all.
Akai’s eyebrows pinched.
“Rei. Your omelet.”
“What?” Rei asked, not in any way following. But a second later he caught it too, the smell of eggs just on the edge of burning. Rei cursed and ducked under Akai’s arm, wrestling the omelet out onto a plate. It was a little crispier than he’d be willing to serve at Poirot. But it wasn’t like he was feeding gourmets.
“Ah—sorry. I distracted you.” Shinichi stuffed the phone back into his pocket, wincing as Rei waved off the smoke with a towel.
“No, it’s—it’s fine,” Rei coughed, forcing the kitchen window open before he set off the alarm. “Don’t worry about it. They’re better with a little color.”
Akai was smirking at him again. Without even thinking about it, Rei leaned over and whipped him with the dish towel. Akai looked shocked, and Rei was honestly a little shocked himself—you didn’t whip someone with a dish towel if you were still thinking about shooting them. He forced the moment away by shoving the omelet plate into Akai’s solar plexus.
“Here. You eat it, since this is all your fault in the first place.”
Akai’s crooked eyebrow said his definition of fault was pretty elastic. But he took the plate without argument—and then had the audacity to smile as he swallowed down the first bite.
“You really are a damn good cook, Rei.”
Rei rolled his eyes. “Compared to you, I’m fantastic. But that’s a low bar.” His ears felt a little warm, though—from the burning eggs, obviously. Not the compliment.
“No, he’s right,” Shinichi said, cheekily snagging the last piece of gyoza. “I mean, you didn’t have to cook. But this is probably better than instant ramen.”
“Only probably?” Rei demanded, reaching across the bar to give him a rigorous hair-mussing. But he kept his voice light, because in spite of all the hedging, Shinichi was smiling, sort of choking on the dumpling he’d tried to swallow too fast, and Rei had been missing that smile.
It was long past three when he finally slid back into bed. The alarm going off at five, for his routine pushups and two-mile perimeter jog, felt like a railroad spike in his head. It was worth it for what came with it: the memory of Shinichi leaning into the breakfast bar, totally relaxed for the first time, and of Akai pausing outside his door, his low voice murmuring, “Goodnight, Rei,” before he vanished into the dark.
Two days later, he cornered Akai at the base of the attic stairs.
“I’m establishing family dinners,” Rei told him, arms crossed. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, six o’clock. Attendance isn’t optional.”
Akai’s forehead furrowed, his eyes raking over Rei’s face like he was reading every micro expression. Rei waited for whatever was coming—the mockery, the dismissal, the assertion that a real agent wouldn’t get distracted by an unnecessary time suck like eating together, even though they were sort of parenting here, damn it, and surely that meant some compromise. But in the end, all he said was, “We have a meeting Wednesday nights at six.”
We meaning the FBI, Rei assumed. “An important meeting?” he pressed.
Akai’s mouth twitched. “Status update.”
“Change it,” Rei said, and then stared at him until Akai realized he wasn’t budging and pulled out his phone.
“Jodie, I need to move the status meeting tonight. … Family dinner. No, I’m not joking.”
Rei smiled faintly, watching Akai shuffle away and listening to the thud of the closing front door that meant Shinichi was home. Maybe this was just a cover, a temporary association. Or maybe he didn’t know what it was yet. But he wasn’t ready to give up on it, and that was a place to start.