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marshmallowgoop · 2 years ago

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Demon Get Out, Luck Come In

Part of the DCMK Fanfic Server Anniversary Exchange 2022! For @shsl-box-worshipper.

Shinichi calls in the night. She recognizes him not by the number but by his voice. It's thick with weariness and exhaustion, and every word sounds pained, as though he's dying of sleep deprivation, or something he would never admit to, and merely talking takes all the strength he has left.

But it's unmistakably his. She holds on to the sound. She presses the phone hard against her ear.

Her father is out drinking at his favorite bar. Conan is already fast asleep—she brought him to bed after dinner, as soon as she found him in a crumpled pile on the couch, and he didn't so much as stir in her arms. His snores continued, the gentle rise and fall of his chest carrying on as she gently laid his head against the pillow and pulled sheets up to his chin, and that was the state she found him in only moments ago, before the phone call, when she cracked open the door and peeked inside.

Shinichi coughs. Then he yawns—the fourth she's counted in three minutes (and yes, she is keeping track, thank you)—and Ran thinks of her father slumped over the counter of a smoky pub, and she thinks of Conan so deep in slumber that little could wake him, and she feels safe, letting her scowl deepen, and her fingers fold into a fist, and her mouth spill out, “You don't call for forever, and when you do, you sound like your soul's being devoured by demons.”

He groans, sighs. A fluttery, “C'mon, Ran” escapes his lips.

Ran imagines what he must look like. She imagines his prideful, teasing smile, his blue eyes creased with unvoiced laughter.

Her mind makes him real. It always has, ever since his desk at school sat empty, ever since he called and asked, You wouldn't happen to be sitting alone in your dad's office, crying your eyes out, would ya? It always has, ever since her heart began mumbling its quiet, silly anxieties.

You'll forget him, it says. You won't remember his face.

She fills in the blanks he'd never solve for her. She spins fantasies, delusions. His phone pressed against his cheek as he walks down the street and talks to her. A bench beneath a tree, its branches coated in snow, and Shinichi seated there, clad in a blue coat fringed with white fluff. A hotel, where he’s staying on the fourteenth floor, and he can stand by the window with his phone in hand, can look down and see cars the size of his thumb.

His tone is playful, but the tiredness that’s taken hold of him still lingers, like the reek of fish in the kitchen when she’d grilled it half a day before, as he tells her, “You know there’s no such thing as demons.”

Ran answers quickly. “That’s just what you think. I don’t know that at all.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m a detective who embraces logic and reasoning. There’s nothing logical about a mystical creature that eats humans.”

He laughs, barely. It carries with it all the enthusiasm of a deflating balloon at a child’s birthday party. “Demons existing alongside us for so long, without any real, documented evidence? It’s completely nonsensical.”

Ran shuts her eyes. She’s not in a nice hotel with wrapped fruit and chocolates left on the bedside table, or an overwhelming stench of clean surrounding her, but she had been looking out a window herself, the one bearing her father’s name, where she could watch the snow that had been falling steadily all evening. The lights from the buildings surrounding the agency, and the dim orange from the streetlamps, brighten the darkened Beika sky enough for her to see the tiny flakes drifting to the ground.

It’s calming, she thinks. Millions of tiny, unique creatures with only one destination and one goal. All they have to do is fall. They would never have to worry about trying to get up again.

But now she doesn’t want to see it. She collapses into the chair at her father’s desk. It’s still loaded with emptied beer cans, left abandoned after a day of no work and no cases. A few have toppled over, leaking drops of alcohol onto the surface. Others are still upright, their tabs reaching towards the ceiling.

She could collapse into the mess. Shinichi sounds as though he hasn’t slept in a week. She’s not sure she’s slept in a week herself.

“It was a mistake to try to talk to you about this,” Ran eventually says. The bitterness is entirely intended but still burns her throat and stings her eyes. She’s cried in front of Shinichi a million times over, and yet she holds the tears in, leaning back in her father’s chair, letting head fall and hair slide off shoulders as she stares up.

She speaks before Shinichi has a chance to respond, or defend himself, or make excuses, or tell her uselessly, It puts me in a spot to hear you cry. “You never call,” she repeats. “When you do, you sound like you’re dying.”

She pushes away nightmares. Shinichi collapsed against the side of a phone booth, covered in blood. Shinichi in a hospital, surrounded by monitors, stuffed full of wires and cords.

“Do you have any idea what I’m going through right now?” she asks. “Do you even care?”

He breathes her name. She doesn’t listen. She tells him, “I’m worried sick about Conan. He’s still not well. I’ve tried to call the number his mother gave me, but she never answers. Or when she does, it’s only to laugh and tell me not to think too hard about it. That these things are normal for him.”

Ran swallows. Shinichi is silent. The ceiling is splashed with tiny remnants of color from outside, but to Ran, it may as well be an endless expanse of darkness.

So she sits up straight. She tears her eyes away. Her hands have grown sweaty, holding the phone, but still she grips it more tightly.

“A-and then you call me, and I have to worry about you, too.” She blinks, and the hot tears she’d been keeping inside rush down her cheeks. They run past her chin and fall to her skirt. They leave dark, tiny circles on the fabric—ugly stains that she wishes were made by the snow instead.

“What’s wrong with you all?” she asks. Her voice is little more than a whisper. It could be mistaken for nothing. “Why won’t you let me help you?”

Shinichi says more things to her. He talks for a long time. He doesn’t sound angry or irritated or even drained anymore, as though every last syllable takes a massive toll on his body.

But she can still hear the off-quality to his voice, the hurt that he’s trying so desperately to hide.

So she hardly listens to his platitudes, his promises that he’s fine, that Conan is just a child preparing for a growth spurt, that he’ll be back home soon, he swears. There's nothing he can't handle. He’ll solve this case and be back home.

When the call ends, she does fall into the mess of garbage and rot. She places her head in a cocoon made with her arms. She smells nothing but beer and hears nothing but her own sobs.

---

The man who mutates Ran’s worry into fear visits the agency early in the afternoon, clad in a crisp gray suit and sweating as though he had run a marathon before climbing the steps to the office. The fabric stretched across his shoulders is flecked with dark, wet splotches, and he offers her a crooked, awkward grin between heaving breaths.

Ran wishes she could say that he’s a stranger, but she’s seen this man before. He’s hard to miss.

When she first caught a glimpse of him, back when Conan’s presence in her life was as fresh and biting as Shinichi’s absence, the words that immediately swam to mind were foreigner and big. He looked far too large for the little stairs that he rushed up and down again, but he carried on without faltering, taking the steps two at once, then three, on and on, in a pattern that never seemed to end.

The first time, Ran felt Conan’s grip on her hand stiffen, his tiny fingers trembling.

“There’s no reason to be afraid of people who look a little different than you,” she said with a smile. The smile stayed with her as she greeted the man who now stands in her doorway.

It was a fleeting, nothing interaction—a tourist exercising where he could, enjoying the Beika streets as he went. That was what Ran thought.

But then she saw him again. And again. Day after day, at different times, but seemingly always when she and Conan happened to be passing by, he was there, running up and down the stairs by the crepe and waffle shop she’d stopped visiting long ago, heart too burdened with guilt for the miserable, famished looks Conan would send her way regardless of how many expensive pastries she’d order for him.

The last time, only a day prior, the man’s eyes locked on to hers. She swore it, couldn’t mistake the flood of recognition that filled his features for anything else, and Ran very nearly kicked his face in. It’s only the possibility that he could be a genuine client for her father that keeps her from doing so now, as she stands holding the door open halfway, her eyes narrowed, face fixed in a scowl.

“Are you a stalker or something?” she asks.

The man flushes. “It’s not like that, I swear!” he says. But his eyes are wide, his irises little more than specks in a sea of white, and his mouth hangs agape, as though he doesn’t know what to say next.

It’s only after he runs a nervous, shaking hand through the shoulder-length hair that frames his face that he lowers his voice to a whisper and removes a card from his pocket. He holds it out to Ran.

“The truth is,” he says, cheeks reddening, “I’m actually a demon hunter.”

---

It doesn’t take the man long to explain himself to her father. He says that he knows Sleeping Kogoro’s famous for investigating murders, and he acknowledges that it’s a strange proposition, but there’s something odd happening around Beika, and could the great detective perhaps investigate three individuals?

Their pictures are laid out on the table situated between the agency’s twin couches. Ran recognizes them all. There's the married couple who own the crepe and waffle shop she no longer frequents, standing before their restaurant and smiling at an invisible cameraman, their arms wrapped around each other. And then there's Miss Azusa from Poirot, grinning broadly in bright sunlight, hand posed in a peace sign, looking as though the worst thing that could happen in this town is a spilled coffee.

Something about seeing their images here, painting them as culprits or criminals or perhaps demons, if this man is to be believed, turns Ran's stomach. But she thinks she can't feel as uncomfortable as the not-stranger, who had hardly seemed to fit through their doorway with his broad shoulders and towering height, and whose enormous fingers, wrapped around the teacup that Ran had passed his way, make the porcelain look as though it'd be more fitting for a child's miniature doll set than a real human person. Even the card that he'd retrieved from his pocket before settling down on their worn sofa, that she'd grasped by the top-right corner and gawked at incredulously, that displays the katakana of his name in a cold, icy blue, seems minuscule in comparison to him.

Ran wouldn't be able to voice it, but something tells her that it's not the foreignness or his size that give him the out-of-place quality that leaks and drips off of him more than his bafflingly excessive perspiration. Perhaps it's his words, and the words on the card that had set Ran's heart thudding in her chest. Perhaps it's her father's disinterest, the mocking evident in his tone.

But Mr. Andre Camel looks as though he would certainly rather be anywhere else but here. There's a dejected, pitiable intensity in his wide-set eyes, and he places the too-small-for-him teacup on the table with a trembling hand. He hasn't taken even a sip.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” he muses. His hand finds his hair, and he nervously pulls the soggy-looking strands through his fingers. He sighs and chews on his lower lip. “It feels like I'm asking you to do my job.”

Her father only grunts. He's smoking now, and the smell has sufficiently filled the room.

Mr. Camel continues, “But I've never come across anything quite like this. Normally, I know a demon, you know? But I wonder if there's some new technology they've come up with, something to cloak their energy, and I'm not much of a detective, so I figured....”

He stops. Smoke continues to dance around her, and Ran holds the now-emptied tea tray tightly against the school uniform she hasn't bothered to change out from yet. Her father is the greatest detective in the world. If there is a demon hiding here in Beika, he'd be able to catch it.

But her eyes find the two pictures on the table again. Her father would never. Not to people he knew.

“Even the greatest detective in the world can't detect something that's not real,” he says. The ridicule that had colored his tone throughout this whole conversation is mixed with something else now, something harder than mere making fun, something like anger. Maybe even malice.

Mr. Camel drops his gaze to their carpet, his shoulders hunched. For such a large man, he suddenly looks to Ran to be completely and utterly small.

He says he understands. He says it quietly and dejectedly, staring at his feet with the kind of mortified expression that Ran would sooner expect from a person who'd discovered their cat torn open on the road, thoroughly devoured by the tires of a car.

But then he offers money—a lot of it. Then he tells them, “Even if you find nothing, I want you to have it.”

“I work for a living,” is her father's cool reply.

Mr. Camel pauses by the door before he leaves. He's still wearing that troubled expression on his face, as if he's prepared to say something that his tongue won't let him voice, and while Ran doesn't notice it then, she'll know later that Conan watches the scene. He peers out from her father's room, where he had spent the day submerged in fits of feverish sleep.

Later, Ran will see that he looks healthier than he had in the morning, when she'd forced him to stay home from school. She'll see that the dark rings around his eyes have faded into something softer, more gray than black, but that his face still seems devoid of color, and he stands almost lopsided, as though he doesn't have the strength to hold himself upright. She'll see his hair in ruffled disarray, and the way the blue-green pajamas that she had gotten for him only weeks before, that had once fit perfectly, now hang off of him, leaving him swimming in piles of bunched-up fabric.

But later, she won't see the terror he holds in his tired eyes, as he stares at the not-stranger through a crack in the door.

Ran says, “I want to know something,” and Mr. Camel's hand slips away from the handle he had been so close to grasping. He looks at her, questioning, hopeful.

“You're always running up and down those stairs,” Ran tells him. “Why? If you're a demon hunter, shouldn't you be hunting demons, not stairs?”

For the first time, Mr. Camel doesn't look awkward and out of place. He smiles. He even laughs, and it almost sounds happy.

“It's important to stay in shape to hunt demons.” He says it as though he's a superhero, and she's nothing more than a curious, overly enthusiastic fan who needs to know to stay out of the way.

But then his awkwardness returns, as he adds, “And when I was using the stairs at the hotel, I got strange looks.” A grin comes over him, small and inelegant. “Kind of like what I'm getting right now.”

He turns the handle. “If you ever change your mind,” he says, stepping away, his back facing Ran and her father and the boy hiding himself behind the safety of a door, “give me a call.”

And then, just like that, he's gone.

Ran never sees him on the stairs again.

---

But she does see the number on his card again. Many times she finds herself staring at it. Many times she runs his words through her head.

Demons often shapeshift into their prey, he said, as he pulled out the photos of the crepe and waffle couple, of Miss Azusa downstairs. They take over their lives and get access to more food.

It's a notion that Shinichi would instantly dismiss. She can imagine his rebuttals, that prideful, teasing smile on his lips. How would they impersonate someone so well that no one would notice? he'd ask.

Ran has her own rebuttals to his rebuttals. No one would think that their loved one had been replaced by a demon.

Even Mr. Camel admitted as much. I know my work isn't... the most seriously regarded, he said. It'd been a part of his opening spiel. It came paired with a face as red as the spluttering setting sun.

A part of her has to wonder how he makes a living on such a career. That part questions where all the money he offered her father could come from. That part speculates that maybe the “demon hunting” is a front for something else, something more nefarious, something that she would expect from one of Shinchi's favorite detective stories (which he had a tendency of completely spoiling to her).

But another part—the part that Ran can't swallow down, that distracts her in class, that screams at her when she cooks dinner—considers that he's serious. There's something strange happening in Beika. Maybe something supernatural.

She thinks of this and little else when she returns home from karate practice one late afternoon and finds what looks to be an empty agency. Her father is not at his desk, surrounded by crumpled, empty cans of beer. There is no Conan watching TV or playing the soccer video game her father had used as a bribe to get him to stop ordering any more food from the restaurant they found themselves at in the midst of a case. (“A game would be cheaper than these entrees,” her father said.)

All is quiet in the office, in her home. The only sounds are the lingering remnants of chatter and the clinks of dishes from the cafe downstairs. The only noises are the tiny whirs of cars as they pass by on the street below.

But when Ran abandons her bright blue jacket and lets her school bag and karate gi leave her hands, she finds quickly that she is not alone. Conan is there, collapsed on the couch, a book over his face and an arm lolling off the side.

The gentle snores she missed when she entered become obvious. She stands watching for a long time, listening to the steady rise and fall of his breath. It's only after she knows she's been hovering there for more time than she should that she removes the book.

It's a mystery novel, of course, some Detective Samonji adventure that she knew Conan had already read. He got it as soon as he could and devoured it all in a single night.

Reading by the light of his phone, her father told her, grumpy and irritated the morning afterwards. His hair stuck up outrageously, as though a lack of sleep somehow contributed to more bedhead than usual.

She smiled at that. Just like Shinichi, she thought. Eating up new books like they were nothing.

Conan read the book again after that. He pored over the pages before dinner and sat clutching it even with dishes full of fish and rice and soup placed before him.

He whined when she snatched his treasure away. You need to eat food, she said.

As she closes the book now and places it on the table before her, she thinks that she'd certainly seen seen this particular novel many times after that, too.

But the tears don't come until she removes his glasses. Her throat burns, and she sits on the couch opposite of him, wiping absently at her left eye. It's not as if it's anything new, and that's what hurts. That's what turns her stomach, more than anything else.

It's as though she stepped into her memories. There is no mistaking it. He looks exactly the same. Exactly the same.

Mr. Camel's words ring in her head.

Demons often shapeshift into their prey, he said.

Demons often shapeshift into children, he told them.

They want you to let your guard down, he stressed.

Horrible explanations fill her mind. A demon killed Shinichi, she thinks. But Shinichi is famous, a public figure. His face fills TV screens. It's splashed across newspapers that her father rips to pieces.

The demon couldn't shapeshift into him. Someone would notice. They'd realize he'd lost his abilities. They'd know his mind was no longer the same.

Ran looks down to the glasses still clutched in one hand. Tears hit the lenses, splattering against the surface, and a sob escapes her lips.

It's loud. It's ravaged and ragged, more like a scream than a cry, and she doesn't quiet the sound quickly enough.

Conan stirs. He groans, sighs. He turns his small body towards her, mumbling softly, almost incomprehensively, “Sorry, sorry. I'm so sorry, Ran.”

He's sweating now. His breathing has hastened—he's panting, Ran realizes. His mouth is a small, open o, and his eyelids tremble but don't open.

Ran feels frozen in place. She can't think of Andre Camel's phone number scrawled at the bottom of his business card. She can't think of the nightmare scenarios her mind constructs.

She can think only of Conan, staying home from school after long nights of fevered dreams that leave him screaming and her rushing into the room and holding back tears and falling to knees and throwing arms around tiny shoulders and saying It's okay, it's okay, it's all okay, Conan. She can think only of his tired smiles, his guilt-stricken faces over breakfast, his baggy clothes, his sickly form crumpled on the couch as he gasps for air.

“I'll keep you safe,” she whispers.

ii.

It's something that he's painfully aware of, being in the realm of half-asleep, half-awake, where his dreams and reality melt and mix and merge. He's not sure he can deduce one from the other—the real from the false, the truth from the lie.

He thinks it's his dream, seeing Ran. She sits on the couch opposite of him, wearing a school uniform that appears as pressed and unwrinkled as it had to have been that morning, and still shines as brilliantly blue.

But she's not looking at him, no matter how many times she says his name.

She mumbles it again. “Shinichi,” she says. Her voice is soft but heavy, dripping in a kind of despair that haunts him more than even the gnawing emptiness in his belly that's always on the verge of swallowing him whole. “What would you do?”

Ran shakes her head. It's obvious that she's been crying. Her eyes are red. Her cheeks are puffy. Her nose looks inflamed.

But she continues to talk to him as though he's a ghost. “You'd solve this yourself,” she tells him, or the air, or nothing at all. “I know you would.”

And it is only here that Shinichi can realize, Oh. Of course. He is a ghost, in Ran's eyes. He cannot be anything else.

His body aches. He can't move, can't even do something as trivial as lift a finger or part his lips to make sound. But what kills him, and makes his heartbeat scream in his ears, is that he can't wrap his arms around her—not the arms that she'd want, anyway. What makes him feel the uselessness of his new form as strongly as the whap of old man Mori's hand against his head is that he can't solve whatever mystery plagues her—not with the voice she'd want to hear.

It has to be a dream. Dreams are the only place he can find reprieve from the pain that's been building in his stomach ever since the day he had become this. But the truth of the matter, the fact that this cannot be happening outside of his mindscape, doesn't make it any easier to open his eyes. He remains stuck where he is, watching the girl in front of him, and he can do nothing but think to himself, “Sorry, sorry. I'm so sorry, Ran.”

Salvation comes in the form of old man Mori. It's a slam of the agency door and a drunken crash into the chair at his desk. He must be back from mahjong. Shinichi must have fallen asleep on the couch, must have a book over his face to cancel out the bright lights streaming in from the windows emblazoned with the name of the old man's business. He must have fallen asleep after he came back from school, when his head felt so light and cloudy that reaching back in his memories produces little else but vague sensations, sights, and smells.

He cut his knee on the way home, he thinks. The dizziness had grown overwhelming, and he tripped on the sidewalk, scraping the skin just beneath his shorts, spilling out a stream of red that trickled down to his socks.

It was nauseating, the smell of the iron in his blood. He identified it immediately—the cool, metallic scent that reminded him of the rusting water fountains at the high school he can no longer attend.

He'd always tried to avoid drinking from those fountains. He only ever did if he'd forgotten his water bottle. But sitting there on the sidewalk, with the burning afternoon sun dripping warmth onto his stinging knee, the tiniest flicker of a thought crossed over him.

It smelled good. Less like blood, less like metal, less like rust, less like water that would make him stick out his tongue in disgust, and more like lemon pie after a hard day of soccer practice. More like Ran's beef stew. More like the scattered memories of his mother's curry and rice.

How long did he remain there, on the heat-soaked sidewalk, staring at the blood coursing down his leg? Did he ever take a cloth and wipe away the dirt, the half-dried wound? Did he climb up the steps to the agency, throw open the drawer that had been devoted to him, and close his fingers around minuscule socks that would replace his soiled ones?

Did he run his tongue across the broken skin to get it to stop oozing?

There's a dull ache in his head, but still he reaches back, trying to retrace the steps that had led him here, but all he can think is blood, blood, blood, and—

“Cancel any dinner plans!” Conan hears, and it's only then that he can open his eyes.

Ran is in front of him, on the opposite couch, still wearing her school uniform, though it doesn't look quite as pressed and unwrinkled as it had that morning, and its blue is more purple when drenched in the light of the setting sun that falls over her and fills her face.

And she has been crying. He can still see the trail where the tears had fallen. It shines almost-yellow in the light, as though to mock him.

Ran has also taken his glasses.

It's automatic, that he whines for them. He sits up wearily and forces his voice into the most obnoxious, grating, childish register that he can muster. “I don't like being without them,” he cries.

But Ran isn't paying attention to him. Her eyes are on her father, who says here, with hardly even a gasp of enthusiasm, “Big winnings tonight, kids. Let's get outta this joint. My treat.”

Normally, Ran's face would light up at the mere mention of an evening spent at a restaurant rather than leaning over a hot stove. She'd clap her hands together and smile a smile that spread across her entire face. Her eyes would sparkle.

But now she trembles. The glasses she'd taken, folded up and still clutched in her fingers, shake. Shinichi's stomach screams, but the sound of the wobbling frames screams louder.

Old man Mori continues, “There's this place out in Haido Town, some fancy-schmanzy Italian restaurant.”

Then he's quiet. He stares at one of the bent, fallen-over beer cans on his desk. Only after a moment of silence does he add, “And the guys were saying that the place is haunted by demons or something.”

Mr. Mori grins, sort of. It's bitter, unkind. “They say that lots of murders happen around there. Weird, unexplained deaths. If I tell that Camel bloke that the 'odd thing in Beika' is just some demonic pasta, it wouldn't be considered stealing to take his money, right?”

If it's a joke, no one laughs. Ran says nothing. Her face becomes hard, and her grip on the glasses tightens.

Shinichi says nothing, too. He doesn't even continue his charade of bellyaching about how naked his face feels.

But his stomach speaks. It rumbles loudly enough that he's convinced the entire building shakes with the noise, and panic sets in. Fear. Dread.

It's possibly the worst thing that could have happened. He wanted to refuse. He wanted to stay here, in the agency. He wanted to sleep, the only place where he could ever find himself free of the pain strangling his insides. He wanted to say he wasn't hungry. He wanted Ran to smile sweetly at him, the way she always does when she's hiding her tears. He wanted her to declare that she'd fix some soup for him when they came back, and he wanted to tell her no, and he wanted her to insist.

He wanted to feel as though he wasn't a nuisance. He wanted to feel as though she liked having him here. He wanted to feel as though he was actually himself. At least a little.

But there's no mistaking the sound that erupted out of him. He's famished and starving, and the hardness of Ran's face has morphed to concern.

“Did you not eat enough at school today?” she asks. Her mouth is set in a frown, and she has seemingly forgotten all about the glasses that are still in her fingers. “Did you skip the foods you don't like on your plate, and now you're too hungry?”

Shinichi shakes his head, which feels as though it's stuffed full of cotton that he'd almost wish would start poking out of his ears, if that would change the subject.

The truth is that he ate everything on his plate. The truth is that he kept running his tongue over the chopsticks long after he devoured everything, and that Ayumi felt so sorry for him that she passed over half of her bread, and Haibara looked as though he'd sprouted another head, or maybe like he'd risen from the grave (which he could admit was partly the truth, at least).

Sometimes, when the two of them are alone, he considers it. His mouth almost forms questions about lab tests, about side effects, about consequences to what had been done to him.

But it's not something to ever ask at lunch, when he sits surrounded by walls decorated with first graders' renditions of the kanji for mountain, and he eats encircled by children who don't deserve the burden of drugs and poisons and the unbelievable, sickening truth.

So he said nothing. He swallowed Ayumi's bread whole, without chewing. It was an act that disturbed everyone, even Genta, who stared at him not as though he were a zombie or mutation but instead something that had always been monstrous, like one of the creatures villainizing Kamen Yaiba on TV every week.

With Ran's hard gaze all over him, Shinichi can only shake his head guiltily. “No, I ate everything.” He tries at a smile, but the pain twists it, he knows it does, and his heartbeat quickens at the recognition that even his eyesight seems to be fading, the world taking on muted, almost pastel colors.

He tells himself that it must be nothing more than the light of the sun.

“I'm gonna get really tall soon!” he tries. “I'm preparing for a growth spurt! That's why I'm so hungry!”

He laughs. It sounds fake to his ears, and it must sound fake to everyone else's. Ran looks mortified. Her eyes are wide. She bites her lip. She drops his glasses to the floor.

Shinichi scrambles for them before she can as she spills out quiet apologies. He holds them with trembling fingers and shoves them on his face. When he looks up again, Ran is smiling, sort of. It's certainly more convincing than what he had managed.

“You're just about at that age, huh?” she says. Her facade doesn't falter. “We might need to get you new clothes soon!”

Shinichi expects a karate kick to the gut when he fixes things and returns. He didn't expect it here, but that's what it feels like. Everything hurts. The edges of his vision are blurry and non-distinct. She couldn't have thought of anything worse to say.

Ran knows as well as he does that his clothes are fitting worse and worse by the day. They grow baggier and baggier, the fabric hanging off of him more and more. No matter how much he eats, how much he hears murmurings between Ran and her father when they think and he thinks he must be asleep, Shinichi continues to lose weight. His ribs poke out of his skin. It's almost a blessing that he's swimming in the pile of too much that's become his outfits. Ran can't see the truth. Not the full of it. Not what she should never see.

It's a thought that's crossed his mind, more than once. The poison is simply a delayed death. It shrinks you, and then, it starves you. It's not the quick, instant, easy, effortless demise that Gin thought it was. It's slow, and painful, and...

And he smiles. He smiles broadly, flashing his teeth, lifting his arms up in the air exactly as he'd imagine a real six-year-old child would. He cheers and says, “Yay!” like he's excited, and no matter how false it sounds, how contrived, Ran continues to smile sweetly back.

“We'll have to go shopping sometime,” she says.

They leave about ten minutes later. This is as much time it takes for Ran to change out of her school uniform and brush her hair, and for the old man to throw up—at least twice, though Shinichi doesn't bother to count any more than that—in their only toilet.

“Are you sure you want to go?” Shinichi asked before they stepped out into the cold autumn evening. He stood by the door to the bathroom, already clad in his too-big blue-and-yellow hoodie. The last remnants of the flush that swept the old man's vomit away still rang in his ears. “It seems like you're not feeling very well.”

All this accomplished was a whap on the head and an irritated, “That's why I want to go out, you moron.”

So Shinichi finds himself in the backseat of a taxi, surrounded by people and noises and smells that cover the world in a glossy, hazy sheen, as though big greasy fingers had left behind smudges on his glasses.

But there's nothing marring the lenses. They're not even dented or scratched.

He sighs as he leans against the window. Watching the Tokyo streets blur by him in a flurry of lights and colors probably isn't the best way to ease his dizziness or calm his aching stomach, but something about focusing on the places outside of the car rather than the people inside of it does make him forget, at least for a moment, the neverending ache building in his stomach and threatening to spill over.

Will he vomit, like the old man? Will he faint? Will he ruin their night of pasta and garlic bread and salad sprinkled with cheese?

He certainly feels like he will, when he steps out of the cab and clutches Ran's hand as they enter the restaurant. It's not what he wants, but he leans on her more than usual, more than he should. He's not sure he can walk without her support.

They're able to find a table quickly. It takes even less time than it would have to be seated at the shoddy, unkempt restaurant that belongs to the family of a classmate in his elementary school.

He shakes his head at the thought. Sixteen-year-old Shinichi Kudo, calling a six-year-old child in the first grade a classmate. Maybe it's worse than his health problems, that these kinds of sentences form in his head. Maybe it's—

Ran grabs his hand again after they've settled down at their table. Her skin is warm against his, as though she is completely untouched by the cold outside.

“If there is something demonic here,” she says. “I'll protect you!”

Shinichi speaks without thinking. “But you're terrified of demons and ghosts, Ran.”

She flushes. Her hand falls out of his and instead busies itself with smoothing out the skirt she changed into purely for this excursion. It's one he hasn't seen before, he thinks—it's a lighter blue than their school uniforms, as bright as the Beika sky on its clearest days, and the fabric falls to her ankles, where white ruffles poke out from the ends. Maybe she got it during that shopping trip she'd accompanied Sonoko on the other week, the one he wasn't allowed to join.

“I love you,” she said back then, leaning down so that she could look him in the eyes, “but Sonoko doesn't always want to babysit you with me. You understand, right?”

Just because he understood didn't mean he liked it.

Ran says now, “But most 'demons' and 'monsters' are just people in costumes! And people aren't scary, right?”

The red that colored her cheeks only moments ago has vanished. She tilts her head at him, smiling, but it's strained. Hurt. Desperate.

“And you'll give me strength, won't you, Conan?” she asks.

Shinichi doesn't get the chance to respond on account of a scream breaking out behind them. It's the kind of loud, terrified, desperate screeching that he's heard all too often.

But it's not the sound that alerts him to what happened. It's the smell.

Of course, he's in an Italian restaurant. It's filled with smells, and all of them attacked him as soon as he entered. There's garlic, and wine, and the perfume of the patrons, and their shampoos, and lotions. There's the whispered breath of the outdoors, of trees and dirt, of cold, crisp air. There's the homey fragrance of burning wax from the candles placed on tables, and the acrid reek of cleaning supplies used in the bathroom, and Shinichi picks all of it up, devouring it as though smells could be enough to satiate the emptiness threatening to tear a hole straight through him.

But none of those smells matter. The one that does, and the one that sets his heart racing as he realizes what it is, as he jumps to his feet and runs to the source, as he hears Ran call after him but he keeps running anyway, is the smell of death.

It's a middle-aged man. He's fallen to the gaudy, scarlet carpet of the restaurant, and his mouth hangs wide open, blood spilling out and oozing past his lips. It drips down his chin and pools up on his brilliantly white blouse, and if Shinichi were thinking right, he'd take note of the abandoned plate of spaghetti coated in red sauce, and he'd wonder what kind of person would choose to wear white to consume such a meal.

He takes no such notes now, though. There are flickering streaks of color bouncing at the corners of his sight. Everything is hazy, as though the restaurant is coated in smoke. Outlines of people and objects disappear. He wonders how he remains standing. He's so dizzy he could collapse.

Ran and old man Mori are by his side in a moment. They say things to him, Shinichi thinks, but he hears none of it. His attention is fully on the dead man—whom Mr. Mori quickly confirms is indeed dead.

It's not as though corpses are an unusual element of his life. It's not as though he hasn't been here before, at a restaurant when someone drops dead before he can have a bite to eat or even a sip of the complimentary water.

But never has he been so transfixed. Never has he found himself staring at the blood and... licking his lips?

Shinichi holds a hand over his chest. His heart races against his palm, as fluttery as a newborn bird, and his breathing comes just as hurried.

It's only here that he recognizes his name.

“Conan!” Ran cries. She's crouched down in front of him, her hands on his shoulders. Shinichi couldn't say how long she'd been standing there, how long she'd been calling for him. He can barely see her. He can barely see anything but the corpse that Ran should have concealed from his sight with her body.

“You shouldn't be looking at things like this,” Ran says. She stands up, and she moves in a way that Conan knows to mean that she's going to bring him into her arms—where he won't be able to get away.

So he runs.

He doesn't think. He races out of the restaurant, the bell ringing in his ears as the door closes behind him, and he runs aimlessly down the streets. His insides feel as though they're going to explode, and his body is hot no matter the raw, icy fingers of the night air wrapping around him. His breath comes and goes in rapid, heaving gasps.

It's only when his lungs feel as though they're on fire and reducing themselves to ashes that he stops by an empty alley. He places his hand on a red brick wall and doesn't care when he slides his palm down the surface and feels the skin break. He coughs and splutters. The world around him twirls and spins. It dances in hypnotizing, nauseating circles.

“What am I doing?” he asks nobody at all.

But he finds that he's not alone.

“Running from a corpse because you wanted to eat it?” a voice asks.

iii.

She shouldn't have waited so long.

The signs were already there, even when she first laid her eyes on him in that tiny, suffocating classroom that she now calls hers.

She saw the baggy clothes. She saw the massive appetite, the desperate reaching for every last scrap of food. She saw the weary, hungry glances that were obvious even to those who didn't know to look. She saw the forced smiles, how sickeningly blatant they were.

(She'd list a tendency to stare at dead bodies here, too, but that was probably an issue before any APTX 4869.)

Kudo looks at her with an expression she can't read. Panicked? Angry? Scared? All she knows is that his eyes are the size of dinner plates and almost seem to shine red here, in this darkened alley lit only by the dimmest street lamps.

One hand holds him almost steady against the wall; the other is clenched in a fist. There's sweat pouring down his face. He's panting. He looks horrible.

Of course he does. Anyone would, if they raced away from a scene like he did. If they felt what he did.

Any human, anyway.

“Haibara?” he eventually manages. He swallows and stands straighter, which really isn't that much straighter at all. “What are you doing here?”

She takes the spare tracking glasses off her face, folding them slowly and deliberately as she hides them in her pocket. “Stopping you from being an idiot, Kudo,” she says.

It's dark. She can hardly see. But she imagines he flushes.

“At least I'm not the one saying impossible things,” he counters.

Ai shrugs her shoulders. “Sure,” she says. “How about you consider this? An old man seeks eternal youth. A monster tells him, 'If you kill me and drink my blood, it can be yours. But you will be a monster like me.'”

She pauses, for dramatic effect. For reasons she doesn't have time for. “Does the old man take it?” she asks. “Is it worth it to live forever, if that life is the life of a monster?”

Kudo groans. Maybe he rolls his eyes, throws his most disapproving glare at her.

Ai thinks he does. She thinks she sees it, just barely, in the orange glow that defines an evening in a cold Beika alley.

“What are you talking about?” he eventually asks. “There's no such thing as immortality, and there's no such thing as monsters.”

She answers immediately. “I think you know as well as I do that there are plenty of monsters.”

Ai doesn't mean for her voice to sound so harsh, so jaded. But any anger Kudo might have had for her finding him like this seemingly melts off his face.

“I'm sorry,” he tells her. “But you know that's not what I meant.”

Ai ignores him. “I think you need to come back with me to the professor's,” she says. “You can tell the girl at the detective agency that before she finds you here. I don't think it's a good idea for you to see her now.”

“But it's a good idea for me to see you and the professor?”

“A better idea,” Ai agrees. “At least we know how to help you.”

Kudo doesn't move. He stares at her intensely, starved for information, for salvation, relief. It's a look that says, You know?

Ai turns away. “And you're not going to like it,” she says.

It takes Kudo a moment to respond. He's so quiet that he may as well not even be there anymore, on the brink of death, suffering in ways that he would never voice. His breathing is no longer the pained, ragged breaths that they had been when she found him. They come soft and shaky, a terror that's flecked with anger, and his words are hardly audible, when he says bitterly, “It's not like that's anything new.”

It takes Ai too long to realize that it's because she messed up. She should have been here sooner, should have said something before. She should have known that Kudo would never let on how bad it had gotten, that he'd never reveal how close he'd been all this time.

She should have done something. She shouldn't be doing this now.

When she finally turns her gaze back towards the monster that she created, he's completely lopsided, falling against the brick wall, and his eyes are hardly open anymore. “How long have you known?” she's sure he asks, but the words come out slurred and mumbled, as messy as a drunk man's drawl, and before Ai knows it, he's collapsed on the ground, and she's well aware that he's hardly breathing at all anymore.

Later, she'll barely remember what she does here. It will be a blur in her mind, a rush of events that never should have happened.

She screams his name, she thinks. She shakes his cold, collapsed body.

She remembers things she's wanted to forget.

---

She still has dreams, sometimes.

In her dreams, it might be after school, when she's walking home with Kudo and the kids. Kudo might be kicking a soccer ball the entire way, the ball bouncing up and down, filling her ears with a pattern of whap, whap, whaps. The others might be talking about something Ms. Kobayashi said in class that day, or maybe they'll be laughing about how quickly Genta ate his lunch. It will all be normal and ordinary and regular.

As normal and ordinary and regular as Ai's life can ever be, in any case.

But whatever the scenario, she'll always catch a familiar figure from the corner of her eye. The conversations will become meaningless, nothing but noise. The black-and-white soccer ball leaping into the air will no longer exist.

And she'll stop in place. And she'll run.

The kids will call after her. Even Kudo will, using the kind of tone reserved for the girl at the detective agency, stuffed full of worry and concern, compassion and fear. The gentle whap, whap, whaps of the soccer ball will vanish. She'll see the abandoned ball rolling on the sidewalk as she goes. She'll see that Kudo became so distracted that he didn't bother to even catch the ball in his small, mutated hands.

But she won't look back. She'll race forward, and she'll see her sister, looking exactly as she had in her final days: little more than skin and bone, with a face as white and pale as the moon hanging high in the sky. Dark circles will stand out under her eyes, and her hair will be devoid of its once-enviable shine and volume, hanging limply in messy strands. Her lips will be so cracked that parts have been left bright red and bleeding.

“Forgotten about me already?” she'll ask. Her voice will be quiet enough that anyone else could mistake it for the whir of the wind. She'll smile gently, in a way that Ai would now expect from Kudo's sweetheart, the cut-up pieces of her lips shining in the dying light of the sun.

And Ai will catch her breath. She'll say, “Of course not.”

But her sister will shake her head. She'll step forward, and it will become obvious how overly large her clothes are, how pitifully they're held up with a large belt around the woman's waist. Her sister will lean down, making her eyes level with Ai's, and she'll say something that the girl can't understand, something that she's never been able to hear.

And then it will happen, all at once. Her sister will wrap her arms around her, but the arms will quickly no longer be the arms that had always held her close with the silent promise that I'll get my precious little sister out of here. They'll be massive and hulking and as red as the woman's bleeding lips. Twin horns will spring from her head, curled and gray and spiraling towards the sky, and when Ai looks into what had been her sister's face, she'll find bright yellow eyes staring back, and rows of sharp teeth.

And the mouth will open wide. And she'll hear the gunshots.

And she'll see Gin.

And her sister's crumpled body.

And the smile of the man who killed her.

“I've always wanted to see her blood on the snow,” he'll say. He'll step over the body. He'll grin at Ai, or her dead sister, his eyes glinting, and for the first time, Ai will realize that it is indeed snowing. It's falling all over her. It's catching in her hair. It's melting on her sister's too-big clothes. It's piling up on her sister's head.

Her sister, who once more looks like her sister.

Gin will say, “If snow is pure, and demons are the opposite, what better resting place for a demon is there than the snow?”

Ai's mind never lets her relive the rest. She always wakes up.

---

But Dr. Agasa notices.

He wakes one night after she does, no doubt startled into consciousness from her battered breaths and the half-scream that leaves her lips. She stares wide-eyed at the wall before her and panics when he says her name, a shuddered gasp pouring out as she looks his way and sees not Gin, holding the gun that had killed her sister, smiling at her as though she is nothing but food on a plate to be devoured, but instead an old man with soft eyes creased in concern, wearing pajamas dotted with bears and a sleep cap that hangs lopsided on his head.

He fixes her tea that is too sweet. They sit on couches, opposite of each other, where Ai can look out the window and see that there is no snow, only drops of rain splattering the glass.

“It's the fourth time this week, Ai,” the professor says. His voice is thick with worry, and Ai consumes that feeling more than she does the tea. The warmth of his words twists inside her stomach. There's a dizziness in her head, a building emptiness in her gut. The rain-streaked window almost looks smudged.

He won't push her to say anything. Ai knows he won't. He's as patient as he was the day he found her, when he held an umbrella over her crumpled body and led her inside, when he got her into dry clothes and fixed her tea that was too sweet, when he listened to her sloppy explanations, when he swore that she would be safe with him.

But she wishes he would push. She wishes he would ask. She wishes she could say what she's kept hidden from him, from Kudo. She wishes she had more time. She wishes she were anywhere but here.

And yet, somehow, she's here. She's here, wrapped in a blanket that smells of the professor's cologne, staring out the window as a lone car slowly drives past, its lights throwing streaks of yellow into her eyes and onto the professor's floor, and she merely says, “Bad food at lunch. It gives me nightmares.”

The professor sighs. He's quiet, and then he says, “If you ever want to talk about anything, I'm here.”

She swallows the lump in her throat. But she says nothing.

---

It's about two hours later that Kudo finally wakes up again. He's wrapped in a crimson blanket on the same couch that Dr. Agasa would sit Ai in every time her bad dreams woke him with her.

But Ai sits opposite of Kudo instead of the old man, holding a mug of coffee in her hands but not drinking, just staring.

Not at Kudo, she'd say. She'd say she isn't looking at anything at all. Not the way his breathing has calmed. Not the way the sweat has disappeared from his brow. Not the way there finally looks to be some color in his cheeks again.

When he wakes, he rises rapidly and inelegantly, springing into an upwards position and placing a hand on his heart as he shouts one name.

It's not hers, but she's the only one who can respond.

“No,” Ai says. “Just me.”

His eyes slide over towards her, confusion lining every inch of his face. “Haibara?” he asks, and she's too slow to place a hand over the huge bandage on her arm. She knows he finds that before anything else.

There's a sense of terror in his voice, after he swallows, looks her up and down, and asks, “What happened to you?”

“We'll get there,” Ai answers, but she clutches her coffee more tightly, as if to say, But I don't want to. “How are you feeling?”

He must be running the night's events in his head because it takes a long moment for him to acknowledge the question, and when he does eventually speak, it has nothing to do with what she'd asked, and he's scrambling to leave the couch.

“I have to go back to the restaurant and solve that case!” he splutters, but as soon as he stands, he slips and falls to the carpet.

Ai finally takes a sip of her coffee. “You're not going anywhere,” she says. She's sufficiently burned her tongue. “The case has been solved. You should give your caretaker more credit.”

Kudo sits up where he's landed on the floor. “Oh,” he says. “That's... good.”

“Yes, so you have no excuse to leave,” Ai agrees. “We've already told the girl from the detective agency that you're staying here for the night. You got so spooked by the case that you wanted Dr. Agasa's new game to cheer you up.”

“Now she's going to think I need therapy, too,” Kudo grumbles. But he stands and places himself back down on the couch anyway. At least Ai doesn't have to knock him out with her own tranquilizer dart.

“In any case,” Ai says, “we want to monitor you for the night to make sure you'll be all right. That was way too close. You should have said something sooner.”

She hates the words as soon as they come out, but guilt crosses Kudo's face anyway.

“It was that bad?” he asks.

“Worse than you could imagine,” Ai answers automatically.

“But you knew,” Kudo says, echoing her own thoughts. His voice takes on a fiercer, louder volume as he adds, “Do you know how much it's hurt Ran to have to deal with... whatever's wrong with me?”

He doesn't say it, but Ai hears the unanswered questions. Why didn't you say something before? Why did you let me suffer?

“I didn't want it to be true,” Ai tells him. She doesn't look at him, at his eyes staring holes into her. She doesn't say, But I knew it was true. She focuses on the dark depths of her coffee.

It was her idea to handle this alone. But it's times like these that she misses the doctor's insight. He's known Kudo for the boy's entire life. The doctor would know what to say. He'd support her, even if she made the wrong choice. He wouldn't blame her, not the way that Kudo would.

“Well, whatever it is, it seems to be true,” Kudo pouts. He looks exactly like the child her drug had transformed him into. “Are you ever going to be upfront with me?”

“Idiot.” Ai says it without thinking. “I have been. Your detective brain just can't comprehend it.”

He stares at her blankly. It's not that she'd expect any brain to understand it.

---

It's not something that can be explained.

That's what she winds up telling the doctor, the fourth time they find themselves on opposite couches drinking tea too sweet when they ought to be sleeping.

“Explain it to me anyway,” the doctor says.

She taps her fingers against her mug. It's as bright and yellow as a sunflower.

Or as her sister's eyes had been moments before she died.

It takes her a long time, but eventually she finds the strength to ask, “Professor, do you... believe in the supernatural?”

---

Kudo doesn't. Ai knows as much. He would never believe, even if everyone around him could deduce the truth.

But he has to realize. He has to understand.

“That's ridiculous,” he says, laughing slightly, though there's not a trace of humor in his voice. “Don't be silly. That can't be true.”

Ai continues to stare into the depths of her coffee. She doesn't know if she hopes to find her reflection looking back, with her pitiful, weary eyes, but she finds only black, only darkness, the only light nothing more than a tiny crescent stretching around the rim.

“D-don't be ridiculous,” Kudo says again. His voice trembles and wavers. Sweat beads down his forehead.

Ai drinks. She drinks and thinks of the one she called her sister, the one who said to her, You know you shouldn't think of a demon that way, the one who starved herself in the hopes that it'd give her the strength she'd need. She thinks of blood in the snow, of corpses, of cutting herself open so that Kudo could stand here with panic in his eyes and power behind his fear.

The coffee is ice cold.