Chapter Text
Kaito had always wondered what dying was like. Now that he was experiencing it firsthand, he could say one thing for sure—it wasn't fun.
For starters, it hurt. It hurt so much that it almost felt like his bones were melting into liquefied marrow—and perhaps they were—and his body ached all over as if he'd just completed a century-long work out. His vision was blurry and dark, his head throbbing like a pulsating second heart, his thoughts swimming from the fever that was relentlessly attacking his brain. His skin was hot and sticky with a thick, salty liquid. He didn't need to glance at the substance to know it was his own blood.
Oh, well. It was going to happen eventually. He'd known from the start that fighting against the Ravens was a suicide mission, something only someone with a death wish would try. You'd have to be out of your mind to even think about it, let alone actually attempt it.
Had he been out of his mind? Perhaps a little. Tantei-kun and the task force clearly thought so.
Despite the desperate situation he was in, Kaito laughed. It was a strangled, maniacal sound, and almost certainly made him sound more than a little deranged. But he'd never cared about seeming unhinged before, so why should he start now? There was no point to it. Besides, it wasn't like there was anyone nearby to hear him anyway.
Speaking of which, where were Nakamori and the task force? Kaito had escaped from the heist venue by hang glider; there should have been a hoard of police cars eagerly pursuing him from below. But this time, there had been nothing. And when he had stopped for a break in a nearby abandoned warehouse, the Ravens had found him, and forced him to swallow a red and white pill of an unknown substance.
An unknown substance that turned out to be very, very toxic.
His corpse would be found eventually, dressed in Kid's signature outfit, and his identity would be discovered. His mother would be devastated. She had already lost her husband; how would she cope with losing her son too? Nakamori would be horrified. Aoko would be furious at him for lying to her initially, for making her family suffer. But then the grief would kick in, and she'd cry and cry and cry until she had no tears left to shed.
At least when he was dead he wouldn't have to see her cry,
He realised suddenly that he couldn't move his limbs. Was his body shutting down already? Was he going to die that soon? He had so much more he wanted to do with his life. Find the right person, learn to ice skate, become a world famous magician, maybe even conquer his fear of fish. There was so much more he wanted to do.
Would Tantei-kun cry, he wondered? He'd never seen the child cry before, not even once. Such an odd child, Edogawa Conan was – a mystery that never shed a tear. Would the boy be at all sad if Kaito died?
Probably not. Tantei-kun only knew Kid, the illustrious phantom thief. He knew him as a rival, someone to battle with and try to defeat at all costs. He didn't know Kuroba Kaito, the boy who loved magic with a passion, the boy who flipped Aoko's skirt in order to spark a reaction, the boy who was deathly afraid of fish and terrible at ice skating and had a mildly unhealthy addiction to triple chocolate fudge ice cream sundaes.
He knew of Kid, but he didn't know Kaito.
The thought was sad and strange and painful, and didn't quite make sense to his exhausted brain.
He knew these were his final moments. He knew he should be thinking of his mother, his father; of Aoko and Nakamori-keibu; of all those people who had had such a huge impact on his life, who he cared about. Yet the only thing on his mind was the way Tantei-kun's cowlick stuck up no matter how hard he tried to smooth it down, and the way whenever he figured something over his lips quirked into a lopsided smirk and those blue, blue eyes gleamed dangerously behind their oversized frames.
Kaito would never see those blue eyes again.
He didn't want to die.
Time ticked by, and Kaito's clock shuddered to a halt.
And, somehow, restarted.
✧～✧～✧
"Hey, kid, wake up!"
Kaito pried open eyes heavy with exhaustion and blinked, his vision gradually sharpening. Directly above him was a man's face. He appeared to be wearing a police uniform of some sort—a task force uniform?
Was he still at the heist? Kaito jolted upright, eyes wide with horror. Panicked, he checked his wrists for handcuffs—surely they'd be there, glinting silver under the moonlight?—but found nothing. His wrists were bare. Glancing upwards, he stared at the man. Behind him were multiple other taskforce members, all with the same concerned expression on their faces. Yet something struck Kaito as odd about them; all of a sudden, the task force members all seemed awfully tall, taller than they had been earlier. It was an unpleasant, disorienting sensation, and he shook his head in attempt to clear it.
"Are you all right?" The man's voice was high-pitched and gentle, the way one's voice went when one spoke to small children. Kaito scowled. What, was he being treated like a kid now? How old did they think he was, six?
He got to feet, brushing himself off, before abruptly realising that his clothes were much heavier on him than they should be. He was practically drowning in swathes of thick, blood-stained fabric. Alarmed, Kaito stumbled backwards, staring down at his hands, which upon standing had been immediately blanketed by waves of white material. Trembling violently, he shook his sleeves down his arms to gain access to his hands – and very nearly screamed aloud.
His long, slender hands, deft from years of sleight-of-hand, were gone, replaced instead by tiny ones with short, slim fingers and trimmed fingernails. He flexed his fingers, and the miniature fingers obeyed. There was no doubting it—those little hands were his. But how?
People didn't de-age, just like that. They grew older. Becoming younger shouldn't have been possible. It couldn't have been.
But, somehow, it must have been, because he was currently about five years old, and the taskforce were towering over him like human giants.
That same man knelt down, asked what his name was, why he was covered in blood, why he was wearing Kid's suit, if he had any clothes his size, and Kaito just stared, his brain unable to process the flood of new information.
It didn't make any sense.
So Kaito did the only thing he could think to do in the situation—he ran.