Chapter Text
Heiji Hattori would consider himself a good pokemon trainer. Sure, he wasn’t exactly famous for it or anything, but his pokemon all loved him, and were happy with him, and that’s what really matters, right? He was content with that.
Heiji Hattori would also consider himself a good detective. Due to his strange luck, he ran into quite a few more cases than the average person, and they all got solved thanks to him. His inexplicable ability to speak to the pokemon involved helped a lot, he’d admit. But… he wasn’t satisfied. No matter how well he did, no matter how many cases he solved, no matter how many lives he ended up saving, there was always a name that came before his.
Shinichi Kudo.
Kudo was some hotshot teen detective from Saffron- he had famous parents and a fancy foreign partner pokemon, and the media just loved him so much. Whenever Heiji introduced himself as a teen detective, he was compared to Kudo. If he solved a case, it was compared to Kudo. If he were to dare to be proud of his accomplishments at home, his own father would say that he still wasn’t as good as Kudo.
Kudo Kudo Kudo Kudo- Heiji was sick of it- sick of that name . He swore to himself that one day he’d overcome that name- grow stronger than it, and the person it belonged to. His pokemon supported him, even if his father had scoffed and turned away whenever he mentioned his ambition.
Then of course, Kudo had turned up dead.
This monolith that had cast such a shadow over Heiji’s life for over a year now was just gone , crumbled away like it had never been there… and yet- Heiji couldn’t accept it. Sure, people had mostly stopped comparing them- after all, a living detective was better than a dead one any day, but…
Heiji had been counting on overcoming him. Knowing that his skills were sharper, and that his old man was dead wrong . But now.. Now he’d never get that chance. He was finally on top- in the worst way he could imagine.
“I just don’t get it- if he was so good then why did he die so easily?” Heiji mumbled into his pillow. He was supposed to be sleeping- but sleep had been evading him for weeks now.
“I don’t know, if you’re so good then why are you still whining about this?” His partner growled from her place leaning against the door. Lucie- a Lucario he’d raised from an egg to now, was probably his closest confidant- with Kazuha as a close second. Usually, she was fairly supportive of him, but he supposed he had been a little fixated on this for.. Oh wow, had it already been two months since Kudo had died?
“But, I mean he was-”
“So good, so talented, the detective to whom all other teen detectives are compared, yeah- I know. I’ve heard the spiel about twenty times already- you should get some new material soon or else I’ll be able to recite the whole thing word for word,” Lucie rumbled, rolling her eyes.
“...Sorry ‘bout that,” He pushed himself into a sitting position, sighing as he rubbed the circles under his eyes. Lucie sighed and pushed off the door, walking over to stand in front of him. She tended to be competitive about the dumbest things- a bit like her trainer, and so she refused to go to sleep until he’d already drifted off- meaning that now they were both sleep deprived.
“You’re not going to stop harping about it, are you?” She grumbled fondly.
“Probably not,” He sighed, running a hand through his hair.
“Well then, you might as well be productive about it- have there been any updates in the case?” Lucie tossed him his phone, and he blinked in the sudden light from the screen.
“Uhhh- nope. Just the same old stuff,” Heiji sighed, scrolling through article after article- obituary after obituary…
“Run through it again- you might notice something new,” Lucie barked, like it was an order. Heiji took it as one, and clicked into his very detailed note page on the subject.
“Victim Shinichi Kudo, age sixteen was found behind the ferris wheel operations building at Tropical Land at 9:47 PM by an officer doing a routine sweep after another crime was committed in the same park earlier that day. He was last seen alive by longtime friend Ran Mouri at around 8:15 PM, only a few hundred meters from where the body was found,” Heiji read aloud, his mind flipping through facts and timelines faster than he could verbally relay. Lucie nodded, crossing her paws.
“And? Was the witness useful for anything else?” She said, sending his mind spinning in a different direction.
“Her testimony states that Kudo had a pokeball on him when he was last seen- but the body was found without any pokemon present- inside pokeballs or otherwise, suggesting that the murderers stole it for whatever reason,” Kudo’s pokemon was the second casualty in this case- most overlooked it in favor of its trainer, but Heiji felt bad for it all the same.
“And the body?”
“One injury- a blunt force trauma wound to the head, but the autopsy determined that it wasn’t the cause of death. Even now, a cause of death has yet to be determined, since it appears as if his heart just stopped for no reason. Pokemon interference has also been ruled out- no psychic, ghost, or dark type energy residue was found on the body,”
“It is a puzzling case, to be sure,” Lucie growled, running a hand over her ears in a mirror gesture to her trainer messing up his hair.
“Exactly one witness with nothing to say, no evidence… pretty much a load ‘a nothing,” Heiji growled a little himself as he scrolled and scrolled and scrolled some more- there really was just… nothing here.
It was one thing for Kudo to just die , but it was another for him to leave behind so little to solve his case. Heiji would be beyond ticked if he ended up as one of the most famous cold cases of the century- but right now, that’s where this all was headed.
“Incompetent police…” Lucie rumbled, in a way that almost sounded like a purr. “Nothing for it- suppose you’ll just have to investigate by yourself?” She grinned at him, her fangs glinting in the moonlight.
Heiji turned the idea over in his head- he supposed that maybe. Just maybe, solving Kudo’s murder would make him feel better about the whole thing? The thought of it sent a shiver up his spine. He hadn’t liked the guy. He’d never met him- but he didn’t deserve to rot without justice, and if Heiji could get it for him, and prove something to himself in the process… Well, that was his business.
It was thoughts like that that finally let him sleep.