The Ghost-type Detective CH1 (Based on the Phantump Conan AU by @livmadart)
(Ao3 link)
Shinichi was so stupid. He was an idiot, a gosh darn fool. And now, because of his disregard for his own safety, he was… he was…
He choked on the pain, closed his eyes against the burn, and wished for all it was worth that it would just end faster. He knew, deep in the recesses of his decaying heart that it would end, and there was only one way that it would.
The small sliver of his brain that wasn’t consumed with agony was swirling with thoughts, hopes and regrets. What was Ran going to think? He’d never wanted to do this to her… He had no idea what had happened to Sherlock- his pokeball had been taken when Shinichi had been hit. All he could do… all he could do was hope they’d be alright…. Alright without him.
He could feel the moment his heart stopped.
He wasn’t breathing, his heart wasn’t beating, and he was still in the most agony he thought possible. After a few excruciating, infinite moments, everything stopped. The pain vanished, his vision faded, the sounds of the park dropped away, and even gravity itself stopped holding onto him.
So… he was dead, then.
Honestly, for a moment all he could feel was relief. The pain was gone, and in those last moments that had been all he’d wanted. He’d never imagined anything could burn like that. The pain of death, he supposed.
In the next moment, he realized something. He was still thinking. He had none of his senses, he hadn’t even a vague idea of his surroundings, but he was still thinking. He still had a mind. He sure, one hundred percent sure that he was dead, so… what was this? He waited a moment more. Nothing changed. He was still alone with his thoughts, trapped in this void.
Moment after moment passed, he had no idea how long it had been. His mind swirled with overlapping thoughts, the only thing he was capable of. Was this it? Was this all there was for him? This nothingness with only himself for company?... Forever?
He discovered something. When you’re made of nothing but thought and emotion, fear is a powerful thing.
He didn’t want to stay like this, the idea sent chills of panic through him that rattled his whole being. No no no no no. He mentally cast about, searching wildly for anything else, anything besides himself.
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be trapped like this, he… he really didn’t want to be dead. Gosh, Ran, Sonoko, everyone… he couldn’t stand the idea of never finding out what happened to them. He’d thought that he might be at least able to- to observe or something, not, not…
He felt something.
There, a flash of… of warmth. The first physical feeling he’d had since losing his life. With that one sensation to ground himself, he could determine that he existed in some capacity outside his own mind, and he could tell that the warmth was coming from the left. There was a left! He latched onto it, with all of his fragile being, and pulled with all his mental strength. It got bigger- or, maybe he got closer to it?
It was so warm- almost hot, but that was fine, because it was something. He really did feel like he was getting closer, almost close enough to touch it…
All at once, his five senses returned.
He could feel the cool night breeze brushing against him, he felt heavy again- though, not nearly as heavy as he thought he should. He smelled sugar, and meat from the amusement park, and he could hear the last lingering screams of delight from the remaining guests on the rides. He blinked, finding he had eyelids to move.
Immediately, he wished that he had never opened his eyes at all. The moonlight shone down on the little clearing behind the ferris wheel building, illuminating the corpse cooling on the grass. Shinichi’s corpse. It lay there, contorted in an odd position, eyes wide open and glazed. Blood stained the area crimson red, having spilled liberally from anywhere it could have.
He felt like he was going to be sick. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Ran that he was unfazed by gruesome sights, but this… this was him.
Still, when he’d regained his awareness of the world, he’d hoped that somehow, somehow he’d survived. Maybe someone had found him and resuscitated him or something, or that his heart had restarted as a fluke, but… The third person perspective of his own broken corpse wasn’t reassuring. But, if he hadn’t returned to his old body, then…
He looked down at himself, and felt sick for an entirely new reason. The body he’d found himself in was… well, whatever it was, it wasn’t human.
He didn't quite have legs anymore, or anything really. This new body of his was a simple tendril of gray, with two smaller nubs for arms. When he tried to move his hands, the nubs curled. Such a simple action, yet it made his head spin. It was so incredibly strange, he was supposed to have fingers, legs, toes, anything, but suddenly he didn’t anymore.
Slowly, ever so slowly, ignoring the roiling feeling in his gut (did he have one of those anymore?) He reached up and touched his face. He felt… wood. The bark of a tree, rigid and cold, nothing like the human skin that he remembered. He opened his mouth, taking a deep, shuddering breath in, the bark moving to accommodate the action.
He pulled his nubs closer to his chest; new, unfamiliar instincts guiding his tail to curl around his body. He tried, desperately, to clear his mind. He knew that if he kept thinking, that very soon he’d figure out what was going on, and for once in his existence he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to realize what had happened, he didn’t want to figure out what he was. He’d just… sit here for a bit. Enjoy not being dead, and ignore everything else.
Despite himself, his mind kept moving.
He’d… he’d died on the edge of the forest that ran through this part of the park. Sure, his corpse was lying on carefully mown grass, but he had a feeling it was close enough. When he’d been younger, his mom had told him scary stories of kids who wandered into the trees and never returned… as humans, anyway. At the time, he’d been fascinated. The presence of a certain, rare pokemon in the forest being an indicator of missing kids? It was something he might use, as a detective.
Now…
The pokemon in question were called a ‘Phantump’, they were little ghost-grass types that often arose from kids dying in forests, and their souls possessing tree stumps. Of course, many of them were natural born pokemon, but the stories had clouded their reputation as long as they’d existed.
This is what I get for dying in the woods behind Tropical Land, Shinichi thought bitterly, winding his tail even closer around himself. The proximity to the trees was enough. Sixteen was young enough. The newly cut stump just at the edge of the grass, the same one Shinichi was currently perched on, was more than enough.
He screwed his eyes shut, shoving his nubs into the holes in his bark to hold them that way. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t happening. Any moment now his alarm would go off telling him it was time to get ready for Tropical Land, or he’d wake up in the hospital with that nasty head trauma, something, anything.
He didn’t believe any of that, of course, but it was a sweet little lie, and he needed a little sweetness after tasting his bitter new reality.
“Woah, I’ve never seen that happen before,” Shinichi froze, the little whisper carrying down to him from the trees above. A witness?
“No duh,” Another voice hissed. Shinichi carefully pulled his nubs away from his eyes, opening them and loosening his tail.
“Do you think he's okay?” Yet a third voice whispered. All three of them were coming from the tree above, what…
“Think about that real hard,” The second voice sighed. It almost sounded like a man, a man with a high, whistling tone. So, nothing like a regular man, but still.
“Should we do something?” The first voice chittered, her tone laced with anxiety. “I feel like there’s something we’re supposed to do in this situation,” The way she spoke, it almost sounded like-
Oh. They were pokemon. Their strange, whistling chirping voices weren’t human. They were pokemon.
Carefully, and with quite a bit more hesitance than he might use normally, Shinichi looked up, craning his neck to see into the trees above. Sitting there, staring down at him in obvious concern, were three pokemon. A pidgey, a hoothoot, and a sentret.
“...Do you think he can hear us?” The third voice, the one belonging to the sentret, whispered.
“I’m gonna go with yes,” The hoothoot, owner of the second voice, sighed.
“Hello!” The pidgey called down to him. “Are you alright?”
Shinichi blinked up at them. What his ears were hearing and what his eyes were seeing didn’t quite agree. Pokemon should not be able to speak in a language he could understand. He was sure there were logical explanations for this, but he buried them. Cover it all in sweet little lies.
“Again, no, he is obviously not alright, what is wrong with you?” The hoothoot said, rolling his massive eyes. The pidgey ignored him, rolling her own eyes before hopping off the branch and gliding down to Shinichi’s stump. He startled as she landed in front of him, his tail twitching.
“Hmmm,” she hummed, looking him over. He blinked at her, his skin crawling with the sudden acute attention. “You do seem physically alright… how are you feeling?”
He didn’t speak, didn’t make a sound. He had a sickly creeping feeling that if he did, quite a few of those sweet lies would dissolve. He didn’t want that, not yet.
“Oh no, can he not speak?” The sentret fretted.
“Well, that’s not unthinkable,” The hoothoot tilted his head in interest. “Most pokemon can speak very little at birth, after all,” Shinichi winced, electing to ignore him from now on. “Then again I know little about ghost types, perhaps we should contact a pokemon who does?” Yes, a very good thing Shinichi had decided to ignore him.
“Oh yeah! That’s what you’re supposed to do! Get another ghost!” The pidgey suddenly chirped, hopping at the edge of the stump. “I’ll go do that, ‘kay? Wait here!” She took off in the next second, the wind from her wings shaking his leaves.
…He was going to ignore that, too.
“There she goes,” The sentret sighed, wiggling a little before jumping down into the grass. She waddled up to him, moving much less suddenly than that pidgey had. “My name is Stripes, the old hoothoot up there is Mike, and the pidgey is just Pidgey,” She nodded to him, putting a paw on her chest. “I’m sorry this happened to you.” He didn’t say anything, shoving the rise of… something into the back of his mind with the rest of his thoughts.
“It’s certainly interesting to meet you,” Mike hummed, still staring down at him with interest. Shinichi wasn’t sure he much liked that look.
“I found her!” The chirping voice of Pidgey drifted through the trees, and she reappeared a moment later, landing on Stripes’s head.
“Who?” Mike asked, tilting his head the other direction.
“Me,” A new voice said. This one was oddly, almost human, with a slippery gravel sort tone to it that Shinichi could have sworn he’d heard before. He strained his eyes for the source of the voice, staring hard into the shadows Pidgey had emerged from. For a moment, he couldn’t see anything, then a shape seemed to coalesce out of the darkness. Large and rounded with pointed spikes, and huge, toothy grin. A tremor ran through his whole body at the sight. A wild gengar.
“Oh! Haruna!” Stripes said, turning to face the newcomer. She sounded pleasantly surprised.
“Who else?” Pidgey huffed proudly. “I can’t think of any other ghost types in these woods.”
“Well,” Mike commented. “Not anymore.”
“So this is him, then?” the gengar, Haruna, hummed, taking in the whole scene before her luminous red eyes landed squarely on Shinichi’s new form. He did his best not to shake, but even in the best of circumstances being the center of a wild gengar’s attention was a bad thing. “Oh don’t worry little thing, I’m not going to hurt you,” She purred, stepping right up to his stump.
She towered over him like this, her teeth glinting in the moonlight and her large, searching eyes boring right into his. Still, he didn’t say anything, didn’t make a single noise even as she reached for him. She wrapped her cold claws around him, pulling him into the air, away from the stump. His tail drifted in the wind as she held his small body aloft, looking him over in much the same way Pidgey had.
“He hasn’t spoken yet?” She murmured, glancing at the other pokemon.
“Hasn’t made a single sound,” Mike shook his head.
“Oh, I understand that,” She hummed, refocusing back on him. “That’s alright, you don’t need to speak yet, you don’t have to speak at all if you don’t want to,” She pulled him close, holding him tight against her cold fur. He couldn’t help it, he was shaking now. “It’s all new, isn’t it? I’ve been where you are, I know how hard everything is at the start.”
He looked up at her, her scarlet eyes gleaming with nothing but genuine empathy and care. Was she really…?
“It’s alright,” She grinned. “I can help you!”
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