Chapter Text
The last harrowing week of December, a month after the fall of the Black Org and four hours into Shinichi-not-Conan’s massive multiple organ failure that four in-house doctors and a very panicked Professor Agasa are attempting to stymie, Haibara finally turns on her heel after another routine blood drawing as Shinichi rolls his sleeve down with shaking hands and tells him, “Let’s fuse.”
Shinichi blinks at her, too worn out to bother faking dramatics. If this had been a year ago, he probably would have held a small parade, and gloated about it for days for good measure. Now he just feels tired, and sick, and so old that his heart’s giving out on him.
No sign of that one yet. Not that Shinichi’s optimistic. Judging by the vocal pain in his lower chest and general nausea coupled with the color of what urine he’s been able to pass, he’s pretty sure his kidneys are about to become a bigger problem than they already have been.
“Right now?” he croaks anyway, just for a limp attempt at levity. The ribbing comes naturally to him; it’s good to know at least one of his crucial features isn’t failing. “Kind of a bad time. I’m surprised it even took this long, aren’t I your favorite patient?”
He bats his eyes at her. Haibara looks back at him so gravely Shinichi feels his heart creak a little in protest.
“You’re my only patient,” she says curtly, “and if I have any say in it, you’ll be the last.” She blinks hard, just once, then lets her gaze drift unmoored toward the ceiling, her eyes like pieces of sky. The gem nestled in the center of her throat winks.
“Will you,” she says, carefully, softer than Shinichi’s ever heard her, “fuse with me?”
A lump forms in Shinichi’s throat that has nothing to do with his respiratory system slowly but surely shutting down. Haibara doesn’t ask for these sorts of things. She’s said before that she doesn’t like fusion on principle, and more tellingly she’d identified fusion as a weapon the first time Shinichi met her, just like Bourbon and Vermouth. Even two years into a semi-civilian life, Haibara still has a foot in the grave of the Black Org, in the part of the world that studies the capacity of fusion in a purely offensive context and seeks to militarize love. It’s always about making a profit, and nothing generates profit like weapons of mass destruction.
But this isn’t about fighting. This isn’t like the time they fused on accident when Shinichi had thrown his arms around her and launched them both out of the bus window and they tumbled as one. This isn’t like when they melted into each other easy as breathing in the cave and he shoved her out when they heard the recoil of the gun. This isn’t even like the close shaves with the Org, breathless moments when they were something almost like a teenager again, tiptoeing the edge of a knife, shying away from a luminous red dot or the peppery smell of Gin’s cologne. The way their fusion is a handful of stolen seconds and knows best the heft of a handgun.
Haibara is asking to fuse not out of fear nor fury but for joy. Shinichi loves her fiercely for it, like he’s loved everyone he’s fused with.
He’s also intimately aware that she’s asking because she knows it’s her last chance before he dies.
“Okay,” he whispers, struggling onto an elbow and holding out his hand. “Okay.”
The thing about the Apoptoxin is that aside from its deadliness and its potency, it does exactly what it was intended to do. Revitalized youth isn’t so far from everlasting life, and offense is the best defense; what really sold the Conan persona was the fact that, much like other children his age, he fused liberally and often uncontrollably, without warning and without fanfare. Kudo Shinichi famously hated fusing, to the point of expounding upon the many possible criminal avenues opened up by frequent fusing in many interviews across many magazines, and in his personal life, he’d only ever really fused with Ran and with his father. Even then, he and Ran—Kyanite, Before—were an infrequent thing, again the result of the common childhood mishap here and there. Sometimes they danced just because, and every once in a while Shinichi did it to tease. So what? It doesn’t matter anymore, because as far as he’s concerned and as far as Ran knows, Kyanite is dead. There’s only Sillimanite now, small and serious and sad.
Whereas Kyanite was the single prominent fusion of Shinichi’s life Before, Conan has a veritable repertoire of fusions, accidental or otherwise. The Apoptoxin drew fine fractures down his gem, and it seems to have jostled something free in him that was stuck fast; ever since, if he so much as brushes against someone wrong, there’s a chance he’ll just fall into a fusion. The lack of intent is frustrating since all it ever does is lead to an aborted fusion and a lingering headache, but sometimes it’s worth it: leaning over to sneak a glance at Hattori’s case files and guffawing down at his luminous butter-blue hands, or grabbing Kid’s arms midair and twirling tall into fireworks of green and red, cackling, all fluttering bows and flapping cape and silly swirly glasses.
And it’s worth it now, because Haibara is purposeful enough for both of them as she slips her hand into his and they unspool into light.
Boleite hurts, of course, because Shinichi-part hurts. He hurts all the time, especially with his cracking gem, the Apoptoxin drawing a cold finger across his throat, but shh, let’s not think about that —they hum, smoothing a hand down their front. They’re sat slung halfway on the couch, their legs unwieldy, the IV tangled in two of their arms. It’s nice, though, to sit—to be. Boleite is stolen seconds, a heavy handgun, the adrenaline seethe of frantic escape. Ai-part doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want that to define Boleite.
So Boleite sits still and quiet. Their mind is anything but—how could it be, a compound of two geniuses in their crafts—and yet there’s a serenity in this silence, in the razor-sharp intent with which Ai-part fuses, in the quiet comprehension with which Shinichi-part cooperates.
Boleite sits and thinks of cells and pyknosis and how fast the body decays. They think of saline and mineral replenishment and the staving off of death with the nourishment of the soul. There’s nothing philosophical to it; neither of their components are particularly fanciful and so neither is Boleite, but they have to admit there’s a beauty to the dovetailing of their expertise: death, its cause, its cure. The Black Organization thought they knew better, but Pandora was just another sapphire and the essence wasn’t about living gems, and the first Kid was able to get the secret of immortality to his son before he died. In Ai-part’s Before, she could have lived forever, her gem boiling away her ills, her wounds.
The blood of the Black Org lives forever.
Just before Boleite coughs up blood, they realize there is a way to save this happy ending after all.
Shinichi’s finally able to stand without assistance again in March. He’s surrounded by friends and family who clap and cheer, and the moment he collapses back into his bed, thoroughly exhausted and not a little smug, Hattori forces a brand-new soccer ball into his hands.
“I won’t be able to run for another few weeks and you’re already giving me soccer balls,” Shinichi says drily. “I’m hurt. This is a betrayal.”
“It’s aspirational,” Hattori says, cheerful and unmoved. “You can hang it up and it’ll inspire you to get PT done with faster, like.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“Oh yes it is, ya know-it-all. You know I finished that motivation theory psych course faster than you did—”
“I got shot during, asshole!”
“Stop shouting, you’ll wear yourself out,” Ran yells over the rising din of Shinichi and Hattori’s perennial verbal jousting, and of course Shinichi doesn’t listen, which means in about ten minutes he’s nodding off and Professor Agasa kicks everyone out with a promise to bring him miso later.
He’s still drowsing, head bobbing on his neck, when there’s a quiet knock on the door.
“Yeah?”
Haibara’s voice drifts through, soft and amused. “Do you mind?”
Shinichi sighs, stretches as much as he can. “Nah, come in,” and Haibara does so, even though they both know she would have just made herself comfortable even if he’d told her to go away. Haibara trots in, prim as ever in her sweater and pleated skirt, and sits at the edge of the mattress. They both stare at each other a moment, searching for words.
It had been Haibara, ultimately, who remembered Pandora’s secret—who remembered Diamond’s secret, all the way at the top of the pyramid, and how he was still alive and rotting away in prison despite the century and a half under his belt. He survived on money, sure, but most of it was blood, the pared-down Apoptoxin disguised as fire or as chatoyancy, the modifications made on each Black Org member’s gem once fully assimilated into the Diamond hierarchy. It had been a matter of minutes to contact Kudo Yukiko, and only a couple more to get in touch with one of the few surviving members left of the Org: Vermouth, who was understanding, and who was generous, and who, more than anything, chose to be kind when she let Haibara pry an inclusion from her star sapphire to save Shinichi’s life.
Haibara’s not dying the way Shinichi was. As far as Shinichi’s aware, nobody has asked her if she’s going to stay Haibara or if she’ll return to her identity as Miyano Shiho. For now, she’s as little as he’d been.
He wonders if Boleite will have gotten taller.
Haibara studies him a beat longer, then she smiles. She points at the glossy onyx at her neck first, the seaming lapis lazuli nesting between the wings of his clavicles next. She holds out her hand.
She says, “For the record, it wasn’t because you were dying,” and Shinichi laughs as they unspool once more into light.