Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

NOW AND THEN

Chapter One

Shinichi isn’t jealous.

He can admit fine detective work when he sees it. The way Hattori revealed how for at least 15 years, an Osakan construction company purposefully rebuilt pipes to reroute gas through buildings to threaten and kill inhabitants, is impressive. Although there haven’t been any clues about ongoing tampering today, some of the houses are still standing, there are still people living in them. Kansai’s Public Prosecuter’s Office has taken over the case by now, and there are rumours about a huge criminal network involved. Families who have been involved with the construction company keep coming forward from all over the country, lamenting the loss of beloved family members due to sudden illnesses or mysterious deaths. Not each of them will be attributes to manipulated gas pipes, but some will. It’s much easier to find justice once you know what to look for.

Good for Hattori, thus. Shinichi is all for giving people credit when it’s due.

Therefore, he’s totally not jealous when Ran keeps talking excitedly about this case from Osaka for more than fifteen minutes to her father and little Conan over dinner. He’s way too cool for that. Basically, he’s the very definition of un-jealousy-ness.

“—and Kazuha-chan told me that there are probably ties to the Yakuza group that terrorized Osaka and Kyoto for so long, you know, the one that was smashed when the Kansai-administration did the regional coup in 2002?” Ran keeps going, no end in sight.

“Most of the Osaka syndicate went underground,” Kogoro mumbles and Shinichi is pretty sure he hears a hint of jealousy in his voice.

(Which he discovers because he’s such a good detective. That’s the only reason.)

The case is gaining nation-wide attention as more and more details are discovered. Hattori handed the federals a blueprint for a kind of criminal operation Japan hasn’t seen yet. Construction companies are bending over backwards to prove their clean and correct work. Politicians demand clarification, justice, protection and responsibility, depending on whatever party they belong to. The media is going crazy: firstly, because of the wickedness of it all – what do you do when you realise your children’s rooms can be flooded with gas any time? How long will you say no to the Yakuza when you have nowhere else to go? Secondly, because all of this has been uncovered by a teenage hobby-detective.

(Shinichi added the ‘hobby’ for emphasis. That’s what the media thinks of high school-detectives like them. It’s not as if he needs to belittle— He tried to bring a point of view across, that’s all.)

Said teenage high school-detective has appeared in the news before, now and then, just like Shinichi had. Hattori usually tries not to overdo it, since the media likes to pick on the fact that the head of the Osakan police apparently needs the help of his underage son. It tends to turn into bad publicity for the Osakan police force, which is as unwarranted as it is unfair, and it also annoys Heiji to no end when the focus falls on his age or his father instead of the fact that he solved a crime.

This time, however, Heiji made sure to appear in as many newscasts and newspapers as possible. It’s virtually impossible not to stumble across Hattori right now. It’s come to the point where Sonoko has started to pester Ran about his phone number.

(Shinichi wonders who’d win in a fight – Sonoko or Kazuha? Kazuha is frighteningly good in Aikido (she’s frighteningly good, period). But Sonoko is Sonoko.)

“You must be so proud about your onii-chan!” Ran exclaims and Shinichi discovers again how astoundingly bad both Mouris are at detecting sarcasm. Ran beams at him and Kogoro’s mood drops into dangerous lows as ‘Conan’ nods enthusiastically. “I wonder if Shinichi knows already?”

Little Conan tries his best not to choke on his miso. Shinichi does know, thank you very much; Hattori has made sure of that, even though Shinichi hasn’t heard directly from Heiji in two weeks. Not since they said goodbye half-heartedly in Osaka, when Hattori had barely so much as looked him in the eyes.

Not since Shinichi feels a weird and diffuse mixture of indignation and something he can’t name because, excuse him, he just doesn’t believe in paranormal mumbo jumbo. He still has to sneer about it: Heiji claims to see the last minutes of dying people and thinks he’s solving their murders. It’s as ridiculous as it is stupid, and Shinichi is almost offended that he had considered this Osakan idiot up to par with him. When he’s not offended, however, Shinichi has to think about the plethora of notebooks hidden in Hattori’s room, about what that means, and the worry eats away at him.

His current mood, right now, drops even further when Shinichi looks at the newspaper Ran has bought today and sees Hattori’s smug grin on page three. That grin, he knows, is directed only at him. See that, Kudou? it says. I was right about her.

It’s absolute nonsense. No one dreams about past crimes. Whatever Hattori uncovered, it wasn’t the solution to a weird dream he had had before. It’s a coincidence that the girl whose death he investigated is the same name he told Shinichi earlier. It’s a coincidence. Or maybe he already had read her name and projected it into his dreams.

Whatever. It doesn’t matter because it’s nonsense. Right?

“I can’t wait to tell Shinichi about it tonight!” Ran exclaims.

Shinichi decides that he will be very busy this evening. Busy. It’s not the same as being jealous.

“Ergo: It’s nonsense,” Shinichi ends his rant with a dramatic and resolute gesture. Unfortunately, his audience doesn’t applaud.

Ai isn’t paying much attention as she flips through some papers on her desk. He’s used to her aloof behaviour by now – Haibara doesn’t participate in most of the conversations until she has something profound to say, but she listens to everything. The professor, on the other hand, is sitting on the other side of the couch, a large cup of tea in his hands, and looks at him pensively. He’s obviously very invested, which makes sense, giving that Shinichi rarely comes over to hold emotionally-charged speeches.

“It’s impossible to dream about past deaths,” Shinichi repeats. He has been repeating this a couple of times already, and the lack of support is a bit disconcerting by now. He had counted on a much quicker assurance from his two scientific friends. “Nonsense. Right?”

“Highly unlikely,” is all that Ai offers without as much as looking up. Not exactly the enthusiasm he wanted to hear, but Shinichi takes it.

“Yes!” he calls, and points at her. “Impossible!”

Agasa-hakase hums. He’s playing with the string of the tea bag. “It doesn’t sound like Hattori-kun, though.”

“Trying to get attention sound a lot like Hattori,” Shinichi mumbles and feels bad about it immediately. Then again, the Osakan’s current media appearances are kind of proving his point.

(He still feels bad.)

“So, you say he’s lying?”

Shinichi shuts his mouth with a click and doesn’t know what to answer. That’s the question, right? Is Heiji lying to him? He doesn’t think so – Hattori may have the IQ of a chopstick (one (1) single chopstick), but he’s not a liar. At least, that’s what Shinichi thought. He’s been reconsidering what he really knows about his friend for the last few days.

His mind wanders to the notebooks full of gruesome death scenes. Who would fake something like this? What for? It would be way too much effort for a lie or a joke.

The alternative, however, isn’t much better. Shinichi has spent a lot of time concentrating on not going there, but now he talked himself into a corner: If Hattori is not playing a sick joke on him, the only other logical explanation is that he’s crazy.

“I don’t know,” is all he says for now. It’s heavy, and the Professor and Ai are smart enough to get the meaning.

He’s not sure why he came here and told them, to be honest. Of course, Shinichi is at the Professor’s a lot; here, they call him by his actual name. Here, they treat him like the person he really is. He doesn’t have to pretend, and it’s nice. He likes Ai and he likes the Professor – it’s just that he doesn’t really come here to talk.

“It doesn’t sound very pleasant, does it?” Professor Agasa asks. “Dreaming about death all the time.”

“Nightmares suck,” Shinichi agrees, and emphasizes the word nightmares a bit too much. It makes his voice sound weird, and Ai looks up when it tweaks. “It’s nothing more.”

Because that’s just the logical thing, right? And the best outcome among a bag of horrible options, because if Heiji is being plagued by nightmares, then Shinichi doesn’t have to believe in paranormal weirdness and Hattori doesn’t have to be a liar.

“If you think he simply has nightmares, why are you avoiding him?” Ai asks.

As always, Ai asks the right questions. Maybe that’s why he came here. Shinichi doesn’t need support to reject paranormal bullshit or conclude that Hattori needs professional help if he intends to stick to this story. He needs help figuring out what to do next – because he doesn’t know how to talk to Heiji about it. He still remembers Hattori’s disappointed face when he proposed a logical theory about the ghosty nightmares. It is, pun unintended, haunting him.

Shinichi is an overachiever. Always has been – good grades, expressive talents. Along came proud parents, happy teachers, impressed soccer coaches; he’s not used to people being disappointed in him. And Hattori, of all people, definitely never looked at him disappointedly before. It made something stir in his chest, and by now he thinks it might be a guilty conscience.

“Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong detail, Shinichi,” Professor Agasa coughs. The conversation is making him uncomfortable; Shinichi tends to forget how much the old man likes Hattori. “Whatever is truly going on, I wonder why he decided to tell you now?”

Shinichi looks at the old man, perplexedly. That is … actually a very good question. Hattori claimed to have these dreams forever. Definitely langer than they’ve known each other, which is about a year. He frowns at the thought; it feels longer (then again, it also feels much longer since he’s been Shinichi Kudou as well. Sometimes, he barely remembers.). Why tell him now? Or, to put it precisely: why tell him only now?

“He said it’s getting worse,” Shinichi thinks aloud and isn’t sure he understands what that means. But he remembers the tiredness that had crept into Heiji’s voice two weeks ago in Osaka.

“Oh, my.” Agasa shakes his head. Shinichi can already see how the old man is swaying. Agasa Hakase’s brain is big, but his heart is bigger, of course he takes Hattori’s side (still not jealous). “He told you because he wants your help, Shinichi.”

“My help?” Shinichi throws up his hands. There it is again – disappointment. It’s not fair! “What can I do about nightmares?”

Or mental illness, for that matter? It’s not like Shinichi, in his very special situation, is going to be a therapist anytime soon. He’s also not going to buy an Ouija-board and call on the spirits to leave Hattori alone, or cast some spell during new moon to appease the Gods or the elements or whatever, and –

“You can listen,” Agasa scolds. “Just be a friend.”

--and Shinichi feels like the biggest asshole on the planet. Shit.

“I …,” he starts. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know how to continue. “I’m hardly the right person for that.”

“Isn’t he the one who figured out your true identity?” Ai asks, voice still disinterested. “I guess it makes sense that he told you, of all people. He believed you, after all.”

Of course, Haibara joins the conversation only to kick him when he’s down. “He didn’t have to believe me, he figured it out. It was the logical thing.”

It’s scary how much he sounds like a sulking child right now.

“Well, he assumed you were a bit more open about things you can’t explain right away. Given your condition ...”

“Do you believe that one can dream about past deaths?” Shinichi asks, crisp.

“Of course not,” Ai answers immediately. “He has nightmares. He probably needs psychological help.”

“Tell you what, Shinichi,” the Professor smiles at him. “Why don’t you invite Hattori-kun over? We can run some tests on him. Let’s collect some data first.”

“Oh, we could finally use that EEG!” Ai agrees. For the first time this evening, she sounds actually interested. “It’ll be fun.”

‘Fun’ isn’t the word Shinichi would use to describe the situation. There’s Ran on the other side of the phone, talking excitedly about Hattori’s latest masterpiece, and Shinichi tries to sound interested for her sake and un-jealous for his own. At the same time, he’s trying to read a new newspaper article about the construction company scheme, and his brain rattles.

He can’t, for the life of him, figure out how Hattori knew what to look for. The case was wonderfully presented and air tight – as long as no one wondered where one would have to start to investigate. Hattori must have some source of intel he hasn’t made public.

A few hours later, he finally crumbles. It’s been nine days, and he’s tired of the silence. He misses his friend.

There, he said it.

You (2:23): Ok, how did you find out about the rerouted pipes?

It’s the middle of the night, but Hattori answers almost immediately. He texts in the middle of the night a lot, now that Shinichi thinks about it. He doesn’t want to think about it.

Hattori (2:24): There was a crack in one of her walls tha looked new. They jst painted her room.

You (2:24): You’ve been in her house?

Hattori (2:24): Na, it’s been torn down years ago.

Damnit. It doesn’t make sense. Shinichi is frustrated about the case, but at the same time, he’s happy they are speaking again. Hattori writes like he always writes, and that’s a bit reassuring.

Just be a friend, the Professor told him. It’s a hit that hurts. While he has a really good explanation why Shinichi can’t be a good friend to Ran right now, it doesn’t work with Hattori. He can’t hide behind Conan Edogawa for this one.

You (2:40): Can you come to Tokyo for a couple of days? The professor wants to run some tests on you.

That’s it. Shinichi is offering an ear. Whatever the hell Hattori is going to do about it. Maybe Ai is right and they can find some proof that the idiot needs professional help. It’s what friends do, right?

Hattori (2:44): Sure 😊 summer holiday’s starting next week!

Shinichi realises that he held his breath and releases it slowly. Just be a friend, he thinks. And: Collect some data first.

What fun.

-tbc-

Chapter Text

NOW AND THEN

Chapter 2

Heiji wonders if for the first time ever, Kudou is happy to be stuck in the body of a tiny child: It makes avoiding eye contact so much easier. Also, a fidgety kid isn’t half as suspicious as a fidgety teenager.

Fidgety and Kudou aren’t words he ever expected to use even in the same paragraph, but since Heiji arrived in Beika half an hour ago and hopped off his bike, Shinichi is trying hard to act like nothing has happened between them.

For all his usual acting abilities, he sucks in this specific role and Heiji knows why: It’s about interpersonal relationships. The guy understands how one manipulates a conversation to get a criminal to confess, understands how to read body language to detect a lie and how to behave to not attract attention. He understands how other people behave, even if he doesn’t really get their emotions. Now, however, since he doubts Heiji, he doesn’t understand how their relationship works anymore. Thus, Mini-Cyborg Kudou doesn’t have a script anymore. He doesn’t know what to do.

It's beyond cute. And also, funny. Heiji wishes he had some popcorn to enjoy the show. ‘Conan’ has done a remarkable slapstick-y greeting during which he smiled broadly (and, he wants to believe, earnestly) when he spotted Heiji securing his bike, only to remembered that no, wait, Kudou Shinichi is too cool for school, therefore he toned down the smile and pace as he sauntered over. Heiji had simply raised his hand to his cap in his usual flippant greeting, probably just in the exact moment when Kudou had been so hyperaware of controlling each movement that everything had begun to feel wrong and forced. How had they greeted each other until now? Hug, handshake, high five? (answer: none) Heiji had basically seen every option playing in front of Shinichi’s inner eye in the matter of nanoseconds. In the end, the kid had stepped way too close, realized too late that there would be no hug, jumped back a step during which he registered Heiji’s wave, interpreted the gesture wrongly, held out his hand, understood that Heiji was just waving at him, kept his hand outstretched, became aware that he had kept his hand outstretched, wanted to rescue the situation by initiating a high five, remembered that he was way too small for a high five, ended up in a weird waving motion the Queen of England might have taught him, and only then blushed profoundly, stuffed his hands into his pockets, whirled around on his heels and started to talk about the hardship of restoring historical picture frames.

You know, as one does.

All along, Heiji hasn’t even said ‘Hi’.

For the first time in his life, Heiji really, really hopes that his life will flash before his eyes when he dies (he has ample reason to believe this myth to be untrue), because then he would forever die laughing at this moment.

It’s better than any apology. If Heiji ever needed a proof to know that Kudou feels bad about his reaction back in Osaka, this is enough. He decides to enjoy watching him struggle for a few minutes longer and then make sure the guy finds back to his usual smug and arrogant self.

“So,” he says after they walk through Beika for a few minutes and effectively interrupts Kudou’s ongoing picture frame-monologue (how much does this guy know about woodwork??), “what does the Professor plan to do with me?”

Kudou clams up immediately. “Just some tests, I think.”

“I asked you to keep it to yourself, Kudou,” Heiji says, because he deserves this one stinger. He doesn’t tell him that it is kind of thrilling that someone else knows, now.

The child flinches. “I think it was for the best.”

To find some evidence that he’s crazy. Yeah, Heiji would have probably done the same. Also, no matter how this will end, he’ll make progress: either he gets proof that he really is crazy, or he’s right and has proven Kudou wrong.

Speaking of which: “By the way, did you see my interview on Channel 2?”

Rubbing in his success and patching up a rocky friendship by solving heavy mafia crimes – someone give him an award, please.

“Everyone saw it,” the kid is rolling his eyes and that’s almost familiar. “Your Dad must be furious.”

Another added bonus – he’ll take lifetime achievement award, thank you. “Sooo furious.” Kudou is walking less hunched by now. Heiji decides that he is forgiven. “Anyway, I told my folks I’m doing some Kendo-camp, so we’ll have to make sure I return with some bruises.”

“I’ll make sure to tell Ai.”

Ohhh. Heiji beams at Kudou. He’s finally going to meet the infamous Ai Haibara? Kudou has told him about her, he’s heard her voice through the phone a couple of times, but so far, they never met properly. According to Kudou, she’s reclusive and not exactly a social person, bend on keeping her existence a secret from the Black Organisation that is so obviously set on killing her.

From what Heiji gathered, Kudou regards her as an equal, and that’s something. When the dude’s not talking about English picture frames from the Victorian era and how difficult it is to get oil paint out of sandalwood, he’s a force to be reckoned with. Any girl that impresses him has to be awesome.

He can’t wait to meet Ai.

Ai Haibara is the most horrible, stuck-up and exhausting person on this planet. In this universe.

All it takes is five and a half seconds and the two of them are at each other’s throats. Heiji greeted her, she didn’t respond, he made some awesome comment about clamped-up Tokyoites, she snapped at him about barely understanding his “rural incest-dialect”, he snapped back about the wonders of the ivory towe—

“So, you’re the one who thinks his dreams come true when he’s not falling off a ship?” Haibara taunts.

Heiji has argued with quick-witted furies all his life and rises to the challenge immediately. “You’re the one who develops poisons for a criminal organization, Kudou said?”

Compared to that girl, Shinichi is the warmest ray of sunshine that ever shone upon a meadow full of wildflowers and roe fawns. And that’s saying something, because the guy’s a prick on his best days.

Said prick lifts his hands helplessly. “I’m not choosing sides between the two of you!”

The Professor pushes himself between the two of them while Kudou is busy facepalming at the couch. “Heiji-kun!” he exclaims, “Welcome to Tokyo!”

Finally, someone doing a proper greeting. As always, Professor Agasa is a joy to be around, and the two of them fall into easy small talk while he ignores Kudou looking between the two of them in puzzlement and Haibara glaring daggers at him.

At last, the Professor claps his shoulders and pushes Heiji away from Haibara. “Now, now, why don’t we talk a bit about why you’re here, Hattori-kun?”

There’s a little table with tea and cookies on the other side of the lab, and the Professor is obviously trying to make this as comfortable as possible. Maybe he’s handling him a bit too much like a person who’s going to throw a tantrum any moment, but since Heiji happens to like Agasa-Hakase a lot (the only person in Tokyo, besides Neechan, unafflicted by social constipation), he decides to roll with the punches.

They sit down, Agasa and Heiji at the table, Shinichi moving to sit on the desk closest to them and Haibara lingering somewhere in the background, acting all disinterested.

Heiji takes a sip of the tea and suddenly feels very self-conscious. “Uh, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Haibara sneers (so much for the disinterested façade) and Kudou looks like he’s very hard trying not to make a comment. Heiji formulates a hypothesis about the apotoxin: It kills decent people, but if you’re an arrogant, cynical prick and don’t appreciate the bestest friends around you, you turn into a little kid.

Before he can continue his career in pure science, the Professor offers him a cookie. He’s the best. “Shinichi said you’ve been having intense dreams.”

That’s one way to put it.

“I dream about people’s deaths. Real deaths that happened a while ago,” Heiji starts, haltingly. It’s been years since he tried to make someone understand. Almost a decade before Kudou. Suddenly, he feels his pulse speeding up. “From their points of view. The deaths are real. The people were real.”

“How do you know?” Agasa asks.

“I investigate them. There are thousands of old, unresolved cases. But it’s not just murder,” he hurries to say. Oh man, there’s so much to say, and he already sounds like a lunatic. “It’s all kinds of deaths. Sickness, suicides, accidents ...”

One time, Heiji dreamed about an older man who died from a heart attack while having sex with his subordinate. The subordinate had been hired by another company to get intelligence. Heiji had just turned 14. Talk about awkward.

… And he shouldn’t be thinking about that one right now, because he feels his face heating up. “Anyway, once I solve the case, the dream doesn’t return.”

“It returns otherwise?”

“Yes. Always the same dream. It never changes,” because people’s deaths don’t change. Heiji pushes down the nervousness as he continues. “If I can’t solve a case, it stays for a long time. Some stick with me for months until a new one begins.”

These are the worst. The ones that return when he already gave up on them. Not only are the repeating deaths nerve-wrecking, the feeling of failure that builds up over the months is a serious issue. They reappear sporadically, sometimes, and rip open the wounds of his inadequacies.

Kudou chimes in. He has followed the conversation attentively until now, and Heiji is glad that he joins the conversation. He needs Shinichi on his side at last. “You said you don’t remember when it started.”

Heiji nods. “I don’t remember ever not having these dreams. My mom said I started waking up screaming when I was five.”

It didn’t stop for a very long time. For years, he’d been afraid of the dark, of the night, of sleeping, of monsters under his beds, within his sheets, of his bed being a monster itself, of everything a child can attribute to nightmares, until he had been old enough to understand that he should be afraid of the people he saw in his dreams. His mother had been at a complete loss, blaming his father for bringing work home with him. Heiji taught himself not to scream in his sleep the hard way, when they decided to get professional help.

Quickly, he’s shutting down this train of thoughts and also the conclusion that he might be as nervous as he is because the last time Heiji ever told anyone about the dreams, it had landed him in an institution.

“I do have regular dreams, though,” he hurries to say. Something normal to mute the craziness. “The death dreams used to be some nights apart. I dream about usual stuff in-between.”

“There’s no scientific explanation for an external source of dream material,” Haibara says from across the room. She’s typing something into the keys of her computer, not even looking up. “Dreams are created from within your brain. They are fragments of your experiences, random associations of impressions, unregulated by the brain’s subconscious mechanics during the periods of cranial recuperation.”

The atmosphere in the lab changes. Heiji wants to be mad at Haibara, but she didn’t say anything offensive – at least the parts he understood. Of course, she talks like a science lexicon. But she’s right: Where do these dreams come from? He can’t answer, can’t argue, and frankly, Heiji’s too tired to. Let the scientists find out.

“It’s getting worse,” he says, instead. “A few months ago, the regular dreams started to get fewer and fewer.”

It’s taking its toll. On his work as a detective, on his relationships, on his grades. Since he’s been in high school, Heiji used the sleepless nights that follow the most horrible dreams to do homework or study – lately he’s been too tired, and his grades are slipping.

The people around him are beginning to notice. Kazuha, for example. She’s always looked out for him, and lately he feels her gaze upon him more often, worrying and wondering. She keeps nagging him not to ride his bike when he’s too tired, for once, and she started handing him her study handouts more and more often without being asked first.

“Do you feel rested after you sleep?” Haibara pulls him out of his thoughts. Heiji realises that he kind of zoned out with the cup of tea hovering before his face. The Professor and Kudou are exchanging a glance.

“Yes,” he answers, belatedly. He feels rested after waking up from a death dream, even though waking up is almost never fun. Only a couple of deaths are peaceful and quiet. He wakes up shaking and sweating from the others. All in all, he sleeps less during the death dream nights; it’s just not as easy to fall asleep again, knowing you’ll burn or fall or drown. Heiji usually opts for dying only once a night. He’s used to the lack of sleep by now.

Haibara has gotten up from her chair and is walking towards them, now. Clearly, the small talk is over, and the tests will begin now. The professor has gotten up himself and rummages through a cupboard, Kudou has jumped down from the desk he’s been sitting on.

It’s weird how such a tiny person has such an impact to a room full of people. Heiji has often wondered how people bought Conan Edogawa, when the kid so clearly behaves like a much older person. He understands now why Haibara keeps to herself – she’s so obviously not a child, it’s scary (horrorfilm scary. Heiji thinks that fits to her personality quite well).

“We will perform an EEG,” Haibara tells him and doesn’t give Heiji the opportunity to disagree. “It will measure the electrical activity of your brain when you sleep.”

The Professor steps up and gestures Heiji to follow him into another room. “During sleep and dream phases, people usually produce very generic electrograms. We’ll start with that and see if there are any abnormalities.”

At the other side of the lab, Heiji finds a makeshift sleep laboratory. They have rearranged two desks packed with laptops and screens, facing towards a door in the back of the room. There’s a smaller room adjacent, probably a storage room or originally built to house a bathroom or a kitchenette. The place is crammed, because they somehow hauled a camping bed into the room that is taking up almost all of the space. Random medical machines are lined-up at the wall – Heiji recognizes an EKG and an emergency trolley packed with ventilators, a pulse oximeter, and even a defibrillator. In the corner, he thinks he recognises a dialysis machine.

This is how gory horrorfilms begin. In any other makeshift laboratory-cellar, Heiji would turn and run, but here, he’s pretty sure this is all equipment the Professor hoarded over the years anyway. He’s still not too sad about what he says next when he realises that they are missing a crucial piece of information yet.

“Sorry, but there’s probably no use for all of this tonight,” he hurries to say. “I usually don’t have one of these dreams in the first night away from Osaka.”

Kudou appears behind one of the big desks with a handful of cables to look at him funny. “Seriously?”

Heiji shrugs, helpless; he doesn’t make the rules. “Yeah. I dream about deaths that happened in the area where I’m located. Once I’m somewhere else, I usually get a break until I dream about something that happens here.”

Kudou’s eyebrow twitches and he opens his mouth to say something, but shuts it with a click when the Professor, unperturbed by the news, pushes a screen on wheels closer to the bed. A plethora of cables with electrodes on one end are hanging from it. “That’s no bother, I wanted to collect as much data for comparison anyway. We’ll take a sample of your brainwaves while you are awake as well.”

“Not so sure Hattori will have brainwaves to begin with,” Kudou throws in and snickers smugly at his own joke.

No one laughs along, because Heiji is very distracted by a tray the Professor just grabbed, hosting a couple of needles and vials that look suspiciously like a set of blood sample instruments.

“Hattori-kun. Tell us more while you sit down.” Agasa-Hakase gestures towards the bed, and Heiji follows hesitantly. “So, there is a pattern?”

Obediently, Heiji strips down to his undershirt and tries to explain how the dreams work while the Professor takes a lot of blood samples and starts attaching the EEG’s electrodes to his head. The adhesive gel is cold and sticks uncomfortably at his hair, but Heiji is glad he doesn’t have to shave his head.

“That would mean your dreams are location-based,” Kudou summarizes after a few minutes, eyes on the laptop’s screen. By now, the EKG is beeping softly in the background, hooked to electrodes on Heiji’s chest. “You dream regularly about the deaths in Osaka, but when you travel anywhere else, the dreams only start at the second night?”

Heiji has come to the same conclusion a long time ago. He dreams mostly about Osakans or people residing in Osaka because he lives there. When he’s traveling, he usually gets one session of normal sleep as respite, before a new death dream about the area where he’s residing follows. It’s the only consistent correlation he has found so far.

“Oh, look at that!” Haibara’s voice pipes up. The girl has suddenly appeared in the doorway and stares intensely at the laptop’s screen. Her voice sounds shocked, almost scared – Heiji and the others freeze at her exclamation. “You do have brain activity! Who would have thought?”

Heiji buries his face in his hands. It’s such bad news that he’s with a crazy Professor and two smug teenagers shrunken to pint size  in a makeshift medical laboratory in the basement and still, he is the weird one.

“This is where you grew up??”

Heiji’s following little Conan into the Kudou manor. When they walked up to the house, he had been sure the idiot was messing with him. When he read the Kudou name on the door, he had begun to wonder if Haibara had somehow poisoned him and he is, in fact, deep in Lalaland right now.

The floor behind the entrance alone is bigger than Heiji’s room. There’s a staircase that screams Hollywood and the furniture is made out of rich, dark wood. The ceilings are high, and Heiji only slowly realises that there were three stories to the building – three.

Shinichi only harrumphs in reply without looking at him. He kicks off his little sneakers and throws a pair of slippers at Heiji, which hit his thigh and then fall to the floor unceremoniously, because Heiji didn’t pay attention. He’s just spotted the chandelier.

The chandelier.

“Dude, is this a mansion?”

“It’s a house,” Kudou answers, at last, and it’s very obvious he had had this conversation a couple of times. It makes him uncomfortable. Heiji thinks that whoever calls of this villa a house deserves to be uncomfortable. compared to this house, he might as well have grown up in a shoebox – and the Hattoris are far from poor. “This is a villa.”

“It’s a house,” Kudou insists and throws something at him. “And these are your keys.”

“It’s a castle.” Heiji looks down at his hands and finds that indeed, he just caught a pair of keys. “Why do I have keys?”

“You can stay here, if you want to.” Kudou shrugs when Heiji’s soul kind of leaves his body. “It’s a house. They build it like this in Los Angeles.”

Long story short, Kudou has decided that Heiji shouldn’t camp with the professor, who’s guest room is occupied by Haibara, and this time, he can hardly stay at the agency. Since the Kudou estate is empty for the time being, with him living at the Mouris and his parents out of state, no one would mind him staying here.

“Just stay away from the windows towards the street,” the kid lectures him as he shows Heiji the property. “You’ll be over at the Professor when it’s dark most of the time but be careful with the lights regardless.”

Heiji stumbles behind him and tries to take it all in. He’ll definitely get lost in this labyrinth, but he’s distracted by the pictures on the wall, which mostly show Kudou’s mother in various roles or gigs. A few shots of Yosaku Kudou as well, mostly couple shots from when they were a lot younger. There are only a few pictures of a fat little baby, and Heiji wants to tease Shinichi until he realises that so far, there hasn’t been one picture of Shinichi past the age of seven. There aren’t any family pictures.

He wonders if Kudou isn’t secretly happy to have left the empty castle behind him. “It’s a palace.”

“It’s a house.” They’ve arrived at a door Kudou opens. “You can stay in this room. Mine’s just next to it.”

The room Kudou has taken him to is a simple guest room. Spacious and pretty, but very unused and impersonal. It’s a lot bigger than Heiji’s room in Osaka. Heiji doesn’t really know what to say. “Thank you, I guess?”

He puts his backpack onto the bed (way bigger than his futon) and waits for Kudou to say something, but suddenly the kid’s awkward again. Just like he had been when they met up. Heiji’s busy with trying to figure out which floor they are on, which is why he doesn’t diffuse the tension. At last, Kudou blurts out: “I would have given you the keys earlier if I had known you needed a place to crash.”

Heiji blinks at him a few seconds until he gets it – Kudou’s thinking about the dreams. About his regular flights from Osaka that tended to land him in Tokyo in the last few months.

He shrugs, good-naturedly. “Well, I can hardly show Kazuha this place, she’ll never be content with another hotel room ever again.”

“Hattori …” Kudou meets his eyes, carefully. He must have been thinking about this non-stop while Heiji has been ogling Chateau Kudou. “Does Kazuha know about your dreams?”

Oh, so they’re diving into deep waters, now. Does that mean Shinichi believes him? Heiji walks out of the room again. “No, she doesn’t. Show me the kitchen?”

Kudou nods and leads him away from the room. “She must suspect something, at least.”

It’s a fair assumption. Kazuha has been his best friend since forever. Noone knows him better than she does. “She knows I have really bad dreams about death and murder regularly. She doesn’t know they are real.”

And she can’t ever know. With her fear of the supernatural, she’d freak out. And without Kazuha at his side, Heiji will go crazy, there’s no doubt about it.

Without Kazuha, he wouldn’t have made his this far. Back to the very beginning of their friendship, when they had managed to shackle themselves together for two days and Heiji had woken her up again and again with his nightmares, she has been amazing. He can’t lose that.

Kudou knows about keeping secrets from the people you like, and for once he’s catching the signals and doesn’t pry. “It’s nice that she keeps you company when you … travel.”

“Well, who can resist watching the Best in the West solve weird crimes?” Heiji tries to lighten the mood, but his grin fades when he opens the fridge to find it almost completely empty. There’s only an old carton of milk and a single, sad carrot. “When’s the last time you’ve been here?”

“A couple of weeks ago to collect mail.” Kudou shrugs. “I sometimes come here to get a book from the library.”

The library.

tbc

Chapter Text

NOW AND THEN

Chapter 3

“Shinichi-kun.” A warm hand on his upper arm wakes him up. “Ai, wake up.”

Awareness returns slowly. He recognises the Professor’s voice, then notices the uncomfortable position he’s in: Slumped over the hard and cold cover of a lab board, his head on his arms with his glasses pressing into the bridge of his nose. Next to him, a body is moving. Ai must have fallen asleep right beside him. He can feel the warmth of her body leaving as she straightens and yawns.

They’ve fallen asleep in the Professor’s lab. It happens to Shinichi a lot; the child’s body he’s stuck in needs a lot of sleep and, just like all little kids, he happens to flake out in the weirdest situations and in the weirdest positions once he’s after his usual bedtime.

He shakes his head to clear it, and then remembers why he’s in a lab past his bedtime: They’re running the EEG on Hattori. He must have nodded off while they waited for Heiji to fall asleep – turns out that waiting for someone to fall asleep who knows that everyone is waiting, three meters away, is absolutely awkward. It had taken awhile and a lot of complaining from Hattori’s part.

“He’s fallen asleep a while ago,” the Professor whispers. Ai rubs a hand across her eyes and leans over to watch the readings on the laptop. Behind it, two big screens are connected to the Professor’s computer, showing the same EEG readings in a smaller window as well as the basic ambulatory recordings Agasa had insisted upon. “He’s already in the second phase.”

Shinichi dares to get up from his chair to take two steps to the open door of the makeshift sleeping lab. Of course, he doesn’t find anything out of the ordinary – Hattori has rolled up on the bed and is barely visible under the blankets. He had complained about the cables and electrodes attaching him to different machines, but obviously he’s not bothered by them anymore. The EKG is beeping softly, and his breathing is deep and regular, just like the times before when they had slept next to each other when visiting.

Then again, Shinichi isn’t sure how often he had actually seen Hattori sleep, now that he thinks about it. A couple of times, sure. But given how often the guy shows up to stay a few nights or how frequently he hauls his friends to some remote vacation-slash-murder-scene place, he should have noticed that Heiji usually goes to bed after him and is awake before everyone else.

A little voice in the back of Shinichi’s mind has woken up as well and points out that he should have noticed a lot more things about Hattori sooner. It’s been criticizing him for a while now. Thank God Haibara chases it away for now.

“Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?” Ai asks, quietly, and Shinichi tiptoes back towards the others.

The Professor repositions the laptop to make sure they all have good access to the screen. “I wanted to make sure he’s fast asleep before we start talking.”

On the screen, there are four lines running across a white screen divided into even segments. They’re all shaky, wobbly, and sometimes, the first line from the top strikes out in a slightly higher amplitude, but then returns to a fairly regular rhythm after a few seconds.

“It’s normal,” Ai comments, unimpressed.

Shinichi has basic knowledge about what an EEG does. The brain is made up of millions of neurons that are connected in synapses and communicate via electric signals across the synaptic clefts. These small electric charges happen all the time as long a person is alive, and an EEG catches these signals to translate their frequency and amplitude into a jagged line, similar to the way an EKG works. The lines are never just as regular as a healthy EKG is, but they differ strongly depending on the level of awareness and state of agitation.

All he can read right now, though, is that Hattori is alive. As he watches the four lines on the screen, he thinks that this night might turn out to be very boring. “What are we looking at?” he asks, thus. Might as well learn something on the way.

Ai points to the upper line that’s running shakily across the screen. “That’s what we call the alpha wave. It shows frequencies of brain activity among 8 to 13 hertz, which correlate to a person being awake but relaxed. Hattori is asleep but not in a deep sleep phase, that’s why the line is still showing faint signals. It’ll smooth out in a few minutes if he keeps sleeping.”

While she speaks, the alpha line indeed flattens more and more, almost parallel to the flat line below. The Professor picks up where Ai stopped. “Ah, yes. Right on time,” he checks his watch and jots a few numbers down. “The line below the alpha wave is the beta wave. That one is only active when we’re awake, moving, thinking. It completely flattened out by now, and alpha is following. He’s just transitioning into the third phase.”

Shinichi thinks he should have done his homework. “Third phase?”

The professor explains to him how sleep is usually divided into stages: Stage one is the transitioning into sleep, light sleep usually attributed by alpha waves that slowly dissipate when the sleeper continues to sleep. The second phase is characterised by physical changes as the body temperature drops, muscles relax and breathing and heart rate slow down. This is where the alpha wave usually evens out completely.

It's interesting to listen to all of this. On the Professor’s screen, he sees Heiji’s heart rate drop indeed, among other numbers, according to what they tell him.

“Ah, there it is,” Ai says and points at the laptop screen. Under the line that signifies the beta wave, another line has begun to spike. It had been there before, shaky and wobbly, but now it’s obviously taking over the show. “It’s a delta wave. This one only appears during slow-wave sleep. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.”

There’s a tint of frustration in her tone, but Shinichi’s too fixed upon the screen. “What does it do?”

“It’s the wave with the lowest amplitude and frequency a healthy brain can produce. It means that he’s asleep and the body is regenerating.”

“That’s good, right?” Shinichi doesn’t get why Ai sounds so frustrated. Isn’t sleep for regeneration?

“That brainwave is associated with dreaming,” the Professor explains, gently. Shinichi’s eyes widen and he looks back at the delta wave. It’s a lot more jagged than the other waves he saw before. “Typically, night terrors appear during the transition from one sleep stage to another. Ai’s first guess had been that Hattori’s issues stem from lack of slow-wave sleep.”

Ai shrugs. “Well, there’s one more transition phase. We’ll just have to wait longer.”

Before Shinichi can ask, Ai grabs one of the bowls of chips the Professor has prepared and starts explaining the other sleep phases. There are four, and Hattori just entered the third one – still not REM-sleep, as Ai’s pointing out. REM sleep, the last phase of a sleep cycle, is the one with the intense dreaming.

Shinichi soaks this information up like a sponge (sooner or later, there will be a weird case for which he’ll be able to apply this knowledge. There always is.) and stares at the screen. “So, he’ll have the dreams in this phase or the next?”

“If he has a dream,” Professor Agasa agrees. “We’ll only know when he wakes up and tells us.”

“If they are even dreams,” Ai corrects.

Shinichi swallows, not sure if he understands what she’s implying. The Professor quietly argues with her, stating that the EEG they did yesterday, when Heiji was awake, had been normal and healthy. They begin to discuss things like K-complexes and sleep-spindles, and Shinichi tunes them out. He’s still not sure what outcome he wants to see, if there even will be a visible outcome to begin with. What is he going to do if the EEG turns out completely normal, but Hattori still claims to see death in his dreams? So many ifs.

Time passes like that, until suddenly the line under the delta wave, which keeps being jagged, starts to sprout.

“What’s that?” Shinichi asks and points to the screen.

“Theta wave,” the professor nods and looks at the watch. “He’s entered REM sleep.”

The theta wave has higher amplitudes and frequencies than the delta wave. It’s the lowest line on the screen, therefore Shinichi assumes all of the brainwaves involved in sleeping and dreaming are now involved. Since neither the Professor nor Ai are agitated, he guesses that the EEG is completely ordinary.

“He transitioned smoothly,” Ai says and shifts on her chair. “The brainwaves are ordinary. This is a waste of time.”

Shinichi presses his lips together and stares at the jagged lines in front of him, willing them to tell him something. The line indicating the alpha wave is also getting active again. From the corner of his eye, he sees the numbers indicating Hattori’s heart rate and blood pressure rising up. “Something’s happening,” he says, sitting up straighter.

Ai and the Professor lean over. “Nah,” Ai says, dismissively, and waves Shinichi’s excitement away like a fly. “That’s normal during REM sleep. Muscle atonia kicking in.”

“Your body doesn’t move according to your dreams, right?” The Professor translates, good-naturedly. “You’d wake up all the time, otherwise. During sleep and especially during the dream phases, your brain orders muscle atonia so your limbs aren’t moving. Only the eyes move according to your dreams, that’s why it’s called rapid-ey—”

“What the fuck is that?” Ai’s voice suddenly interrupts them.

Shinichi whirls around to the screen and can’t see anything wrong with it. “What?”

No one answers. Instead, Ai and the Professor suddenly burst into motion, both hitting the keys and pointing at numbers and figures on the screen, talking over each other. Ai pushes Shinichi away as she reaches over the desk to grab a pen and doesn’t even pay attention to the stack of scientific articles she knocks over in the process. They ignore him completely.

“Did he wake up? That spike in alpha –”

“With that theta? No way.”

“Is he moving!?”

“What is it?” Shinichi asks again, not sure yet if it’s the right time to get agitated or if the science nerds are just freaking out about something normal people wouldn’t (it happens).

Ai looks at him with big eyes, then points at the screen. “That’s a beta wave, Kudou,” and, when he’s not reacting, knocks her finger against the screen. “You don’t have beta waves during sleep. And you don’t have theta waves when you’re awake.”

But Shinichi clearly sees both of them on the screen. He blinks, but there they are: The line below the alpha wave, which had been flat all the time, is now moving. In fact, all of the lines are striking out now, delta as smoothly as before, alpha almost flat but jittery. It’s the theta and the beta waves that are beginning to dominate the EEG.

Beta waves indicate being awake. Theta waves indicate being asleep. They should be mutually exclusive, but here they are. Huh. Shinichi turns to the Professor and tries to ignore the chill that’s running up his spine. “So … It’s not ordinary anymore?”

“It’s not possible, Shinichi. Beta waves of this amplitude and frequency are only possible when you’re awake and moving.”

Well. According to that beta wave, there’s a lot of moving involved, which doesn’t make sense at all, because they’re only three metres apart from Hattori and when he leans over, he can see that the guy is lying absolutely still. The line of the EEG, however, is about to go crazy, while the delta and alpha waves are slowly flattening again.

With Ai and the Professor moving around and Shinichi’s attention completely drawn to the impossible EEG, it takes them a few seconds to realize that something else is off: the soft beeping in the room has picked up speed. A lot of speed. It’s the EKG machine the Professor has hooked up to Hattori before.

When they notice, they notice at the same time – Heiji’s heart rate is off the roof, along with his blood pressure. The Professor and Ai slow down to concentrate on the ambulatory readings, and Shinichi again leans across the table to get a good look at the bed in the adjacent room. Heiji’s sleeping peacefully.

In the relative tranquillity of the moment, he notices how an eery, unpleasant feeling spreads through his guts. Not exactly like a chill, not exactly painfully, but a queasy, shaky quality that takes a hold of his innards. Hattori was right, something is definitely wrong. The EKG still keeps picking up speed.

In the room next to them, however, Heiji’s chest rises and falls slowly, regularly. No one needs to explain to Shinichi that no one sleeps through such a pulse rate. No one’s breathing should be so slow with such a heart rate. Then again, no one should be awake and asleep at the same time, right?

Somethings is wrong. The strange feeling reaches his chest. Something is wrong with Heiji.

“Is this recording?” Ai asks and the Professor hums. They’re still watching.

“Why isn’t he waking up?” Shinichi asks. The theta and delta waves are still going strong.

No one answers him.

He’s glued to the chair, to the screen. They all are – and while part of Shinichi wants to run over to wake up Hattori and end this sick joke, the other part is following the EEG and the bio values transfixed and curiously.

It continues like this for a short while, maybe for two or three minutes, with the three of them staring at the screen. It’s long enough to lure them back into some sort of calm; and while the theta wave is still going crazy on the EEG, the beta wave seems to calm down a bit, the EKG’s beeping finally slows down again to a normal heart rate.

“I’ve never even read about something like this,” the Professor muses, at last.

“It’s probably just a mistake,” Ai answers, and Shinichi thinks she sounds obnoxiously sure again. “Some of the electrodes must have come off.”

“We haven’t even recorded all brainwaves, so we don’t have the complete picture.”

“Right. We’re probably just missing too much data to understand.”

It sounds like convenient explanations for difficult readings.

Shinichi, who doesn’t know anything about current sleep research or application options of EEG electrodes, notices how the numbers indicating Hattori’s heart rate and blood pressure keep dropping even after they reach regular values. Just like before, when his whole body had powered down to fall asleep. “Is he transitioning into another sleep phase?”

The Professor checks his watch. “Usually, REM sleep takes a bit longer, but after we’ve just seen, maybe he’s dropping into phase two?”

“No, theta’s still active,” Ai disagrees. “He’s still in REM.”

The sleep phases and wave patterns don’t match up anyway, REM or phase two, everyone thinks but no one needs to say. Apparently, they have found what they were looking for – there is definitely something weird about Hattori’s sleep. They keep looking at the numbers, at the bio values are dropping back to where they had been during stage two. The heart rate that had been going a mile per second just a minute ago is slowing down, the blood pressure is dropping, but the theta wave is still strong. Shinichi snickers at the thought that Hattori might be doing this just to annoy Ai.

Then, Shinichi thinks that that blood pressure value has dropped low enough to annoy Haibara. It keeps falling, and he doesn’t think it’s funny anymore.

“Ummm,” he starts, “why is blood pressure still falling?”

The Professor rubs a hand across his chin and leans forward. “Maybe that’s the atonia settling in? Like a belated, stronger reaction? Theta and beta are both still active.”

“That’s some nightmare,” Shinichi murmurs, as they watch the numbers decline respectively, while the EEG still keeps tracing beta and theta waves. He doesn’t know what to think about it, what to do.

Of all people, it’s Ai who sets him into panic mode: Calm and collected Ai, who tries so hard to keep aloof and detached from it all. She has stayed silent for a while now, following the readings on the screen, and when she turns to him with the corners of her mouth twitching into a twisted smile, Shinichi’s stomach drops for good. “What kind of dream is this supposed to be, Kudou? His oxygen saturation is declining.”

On cue, both Shinichi and the Professor turn to look at the small, inconspicuous number in the upper corner of the second computer screen. It shows the oxygen saturation of Hattori’s blood. Its surveillance is part of regular intensive care protocol and required for the machinery to work smoothly, which is actually the only reason they included it for this particular testing session – because there is definitely not a single reason why nightmares should be messing with your oxygen saturation. The only reason why oxygen saturation is dropping is during medical emergencies, such as –

The number drops below 75 percent, and that’s the last straw. Suddenly, Shinichi is able to pull his attention away from the single number to look at the greater picture. Suddenly, he realizes that all of the numbers and the lines on the screens are dropping. Every single one.

All three of them are jumping up from their seats at the same time.

“Blood pressure’s only 60 to 40!!”

“Brainwaves are crashing. All of them!”

On the screen, Shinichi watches in horror how all of the lines are going down in chaos, a complete mess without any pattern. It fits eerily well to the jagged EKG line next to it, which has begun to spike irregularly but superfast.

In socks, he skids towards the open door, the Professor close on his heels. It’s all but three steps, but Shinichi actually has to catch his breath when he catches the doorframe.

“Heiji!!”

The gunshot isn’t as loud as she expected. She’s thrown back, somehow manages to stay on her feet, but the pain doesn’t come immediately. It’s slower than expected.

Nothing is as expected, she thinks and would have laughed, but staying upright is suddenly much more difficult than it should be.

The men are gone when she looks up again, but there are footsteps nearby. Then there’s a kid in front of her, and she needs a moment to understand why the kid is as tall as she is – she dropped to her knees at some point. She doesn’t remember the moment. Somehow, she feels like she’s missing a lot of moments.

“Masami!!” A high voice calls, close, and she thinks it’s a name that should mean something to her. It’s not her name, but there’s a reason these two are calling her Masami.

But then she loses balance or strength in her legs of both and falls. It doesn’t really matter – everything is spinning, anyway.

Shock, she thinks, and remembers why there is something hot and sticky running over her fingers. She’s been shot, ah, yes. She’s dying.

Someone’s pulling at her cloths, turning her over. Small, gentle hands.

“What happened, Masami-san??” The girl asks, fear making her voice go up an octave. “Hang in there!!”

“Ran-neechan! Hurry up and call an ambulance. And then everyone else!!” The boy orders.

Steps, again. The girl is running away, to get help – it’s too late. She has spent their exchange paying attention to the warm and sticky liquid she discovered. It’s blood. Of course it is; she snickers a bit at her own sluggishness, Shiho would have scolded her for being so slow. Then again, Shiho would have scolded her for getting shot in the first place.

Shiho … A flicker of a smile, of kind eyes and a warm voice, reaches through the fog that clouds her head. Please make it out. Please be safe.

There is a flood of images pouring in front of her inner eye. She can’t stop it, can’t grab a hold one of the images. A house, a lab. Big hands, a kind smile, a little baby in a crib. A school, a message, university. Scary people, her parents’ voices that sound more and more desperate. A gun, money. A dead person.

Little fingers are still pulling at her and chase the images away. The boy is trying to keep her upright, and he’s talking to her. Just when he somehow nudges her into a sitting position, the pain flares up suddenly and pierces the numbness and the fog. She groans when she remembers.

She’s going to die tonight. She failed.

“It won’t do any good, it’s too late for me anyway,” she manages to say, and coughs. I’m so sorry, Shiho-chan.

The boy is still talking. She tries to concentrate on him instead of the pain. There is a numbness behind it, she can feel it. She just has to wait.

The boy is blabbering right now, staring at his bloody hands. Something about a transmitter? This is not an ordinary boy, she thinks, but it’s more and more difficult to focus.

“Who are you?”

The boy looks at her, much more serious than a little boy ever should. “I’m Conan Edo … no.” Something flickers in his eyes. For a second, her mind plays a trick on her and she feels like she’s looking at a much older person. “My name is Kudou Shinichi, detective!”

The name rings in some corner of her mind, but it’s too far away. Little by little, the memories and knowledge that she collected, everything that made her, are slipping away. Even the pain, the gunshot wound tethering her to the here and now, has dulled down again to a weak throbbing.

She’s going to die, and she didn’t manage to end the organisation. Shiho-chan will still be caught up in their crimes. She’ll never –

“Heiji!!”

There are people in his room, almost standing on his bed, and Heiji stares at them like a deer caught in the headlights. Both of them are staring at him just the same.

They woke him up when they barged into the room, and the images of the dream are overlapping with reality. The kid’s arm is outstretched towards him, gesture abandoned halfway, frozen in midair. There’s no blood on his hands, and that doesn’t add up.

Heiji’s only catching up slowly, mind still foggy. His heart is still beating wildly in his chest, but there is no dull pain, no numbness spreading through his body and his limbs. No warmth leaving his body too soon, on the contrary, it’s quite cozy beneath the blanket of his bed.

Ah, he thinks, and the universe shifts into known patterns again. He’s awake. This is now, you’re here, he thinks, the old mantra, and blinks at the kid. The reason why he’s so confused is right in front of him. As if he didn’t just had a little chat with him, in another life.

‘My name is Kudou Shinichi, detective!’

tbc!

Chapter Text

NOW AND THEN

Chapter Four

What the hell.

What the actual, fucking hell?

Heiji is standing next to the Professor in front of the laptops of the makeshift sleep laboratory and tries to focus on Agasa-Hakase and Haibara. They’re pointing at the screens to the different brainwave lines, rewind the record to zoom into specific time stamps, and mark segments in different colours. They’re talking over each other all the while.

“This is when you transitioned into third phase, Hattori-kun, the delta wave is behaving regularly, but here …”

“… that sleep spindle correlated to a rise in cardiac muscle activity, therefore we know for sure the muscle atonia hasn’t set in yet. Ten minutes lates, here, however, there is no accompanying …”

So, there’s some good news, after all – at least Heiji has decided to interpret it as such: The nerds are taking him serious now, because his EEG has delivered some surprising data. Heiji thinks he should be more interested, given that this is about, well, his brain, and the others all seem awfully concerned for his well-being. In fact, right now he’s slowly sipping from a cup of tea the Professor has insisted on brewing in the middle of the night “to calm down”, although Heiji’s the only calm person in the room. The Professor has finally stopped checking his pulse after half an hour and even Haibara, the most horrible person on the planet, hasn’t said one evil word at him since he woke up.

Unfortunately, Heiji can’t gloat. The dream he just had … the death of the young woman … it was weird. Weirder than his usual weird dreams. His thoughts keep trailing back, because it wasn’t right. At first, when the Professor and Kudou had all but thrown him out of bed, he hadn’t even been sure if he had woken up from one of the death dreams. It had felt like one, yes, but …

But it wasn’t, right? It couldn’t be – there was the Black Organization and Conan fucking Edogawa, and that’s just a bit too much. He must have had a normal dream for once – even though they are getting rarer, Heiji does have normal dreams. About school and Kazuha and his homework beating him at Kendo or Kazuha beating him with his homework… the usual stuff, impressions of his daily experiences bent into dreams by his subconscious. It’s only logical that his mind has worked Kudou and the BO into his dream tonight – because he’s here right now, because he wants Kudou and the others to believe him so badly. It’s what normal people’s brains do, right? Right? They process the impressions of the day into dream images. Haibara had explained earlier how it works.

Just because it has never happened with one of the death dreams before doesn’t make it impossible. Maybe it happens all the time and he just doesn’t remember? Unfortunately, though, it had definitely felt like a death dream. Heiji thinks he is kind of the authority here and that should count for something; he just knows how it feels to be shot in a death dream compared to a normal dream. He’s had practice, thank you very much. Also, there are these weird EEG readings that indicate that at least something extraordinary has been going on.

Kudou a.k.a. Conan-kun, the main reason for his extraordinary confusion, is standing a few steps apart from the desk and the little group of people. Similar to the way he had stood next to him when he, she, had been dying in that puddle of her own blood. Kudou is staring daggers at his face, hasn’t stopped ever since Heiji’s woken up, and it’s starting to annoy him.

“You okay?” he asks, therefore, after taking another sip from his tea. He’s careful not to empty the cup, because the Professor would surely turn cartwheels to make him another one and Heiji doesn’t want that.

Kudou is blinking at him, then his expression falls. “Am I –?? Hattori, are you okay?”

Heiji only shrugs. He answered that question already. More than once, actually, but apparently no one believes him. He’s pieced together what happened when everyone had talked at the same time after waking him up: His vitals and brainwaves had made a deep dive, by now they have shown him the records. It doesn’t look pretty, but honestly, he can’t muster up the energy to get worked up about it. He wakes up in various states of alarm and anxiety, depending on the kind of death, every night.

The Professor and Kudou didn’t even wait for the woman to die before barging into the room. After basically jumping onto his bed, they had taken all of the important vitals only to find that all of his bio values were recovering smoothly and quickly.

“You’ve been shot, yes? How often, again?”

Haibara’s voice pulls him back to the current situation. Heiji had described the dream in rough sentences when they had all calmed down, only told them that a young woman had been shot and bled to death. Out of instinct, he had left out the part about the men in black that had wielded the gun or freaking Conan Edogawa standing next to him, speaking to him. To her. Oh, for fuck’s sake.

‘No, my name is Shinichi Kudou, detective.’

After all, it was probably just his subconscious messing with him. If he tells them now, they’ll stop taking him seriously. This is his only chance.

“Heiji?”

Kudou’s voice is shaking just a little bit. Heiji turns to him and realises that he hasn’t yet answered Haibara. He smiles apologetically and rubs his head. “Once. It was once.”

Ai turns back towards the screen and types something into her protocol. The Professor is looking at Shinichi, Shinichi is looking at him. It’s unnerving. It’s replacing the images from his dream, as if things weren’t complicated enough. Heiji hasn’t had a chance to write things down and is itching to somehow solve this mystery.

He needs to make sure whether or not he had an actual death dream first. Good thing there is an established method for making sure. Thus, Heiji yawns. “I’m tired. Do you want to do this again?”

(…)

Someone’s pulling at her clothes, turning her over. Small, gentle hands.

“What happened, Masami-san??” The girl asks, fear making her voice go up an octave. “Hang in there!!”

“Ran-neechan! Hurry up and call an ambulance. And then everyone else!!” The boy orders.

Steps, again. The girl is running away, to get help – it’s too late. She has spent their exchange paying attention to the warm and sticky liquid she discovered. It’s blood. Of course it is; she snickers a bit at her own sluggishness, Shiho would have scolded her for being so slow. Then again, Shiho would have scolded her for getting shot in the first place.

Shiho … A flicker of a smile, of kind eyes and a warm voice, reaches through the fog that clouds her head. Please make it out. Please be safe.

There is a flood of images pouring in front of her inner eye. She can’t stop it, can’t grab a hold on one of the images. A house, a lab. Big hands, a kind smile, a little baby in a crib. A school, a message, university. Scary people, her parents’ voices that sound more and more desperate. A gun, money. A dead person.

Little fingers are still pulling at her and chase the images away. The boy is trying to keep her upright, and he’s talking to her. Just when he somehow nudges her into a sitting position, the pain flares up suddenly and pierces the numbness and the fog. She groans when she remembers.

She’s going to die tonight. She failed.

“It won’t do any good, it’s too late for me anyway,” she manages to say, and coughs. I’m so sorry, Shiho-chan.

The boy is still talking. She tries to concentrate on him instead of the pain. There is a numbness behind it, she can feel it. She just has to wait.

The boy is blabbering right now, staring at his bloody hands. Something about a transmitter? This is not an ordinary boy, she thinks, but it’s more and more difficult to focus.

“Who are you?”

The boy looks at her, much more serious than a little boy ever should. “I’m Conan Edo … no.” Something flickers in his eyes. For a second, her mind plays a trick on her and she feels like she’s looking at a much older person. “My name is Kudou Shinichi, detective!”

The name rings in some corner of her mind, but it’s too far away. Little by little, the memories and knowledge that she collected, everything that made her, are slipping away. Even the pain, the gunshot wound tethering her to the here and now, has dulled down again to a weak throbbing.

She’s going to die, and she didn’t manage to end the organisation. Shiho-chan will still be caught up in their crimes. She’ll never –

Mi-chan. Focus.

It’s a word that cuts through the fog, but it’s also a voice. It’s an order, but also a feeling. She hasn’t heard that voice in a long time, didn’t even know she still remembered, but in some way, it makes sense, doesn’t it? She’s closer to her mother now than she has been for a long time. Maybe she has been calling for a while, but she’s only now able to hear her, close to death.

Her mother always has had this intensity about her. Her quiet way had made every word she uttered, every emotion she showed, important. If her mother talked, everyone listened.

She listens now.

Focus.

Right. She’s dying. That’s no excuse for not protecting Shiho, for not working towards a better world.

“Detective?” she asks, voice unsteady, and pulls herself upwards. Her body is so heavy, the numbness already took her legs. It doesn’t matter. She tries to focus on the boy in front of her, her only lifeline to the here and now. “You placed …a tracker?”

He’s looking at her with big eyes behind the almost comically large glasses. He had shown a small smile a second ago, and now some agitation sips into his voice, a bit of excitement as he answers and asks about her partner in crime, the dead giant.

She failed to hurt the organisation, spectacularly so. But maybe she can get justice for Hirota-san and Kenzo-san, who didn’t have to die. Maybe, with her last dying breath, she can still escape from their clutches, from their evil plans.

She tries to explain as quickly as possible and the boy listens. He nods a few times as the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall – but then all composure is gone in a second, he flinches badly, just because of one word.

“Organisation??”

She has to cough badly and finds that her arms are too weak to hold her upright anymore. They’re like a distant memory, and she feels it slipping away further and further. Quickly, she grabs his hand, smearing blood all over his wrist, before she’ll forget how to do that.

“Please, listen …” The words are disappearing, falling apart on her tongue. Darkness creeps in. “.. I have to tell you …”

She tells him about the suitcase full of money, even though she doesn’t care about it anymore. But she wants to go with this tiny little win. If her life has been wasted to these cruel assholes, if she can’t save Shiho, maybe she can, at least, place this last sting. It’s all she has right now. This and the darkness creeping into her vision.

Someone’s panting, and only part of her realises it’s herself. Breathing has become difficult. Difficult to breathe in, and when she does, the air disappears into the darkness. Difficult to breathe out.

“I don’t want to be exploited anymore,” she gasps, and can’t make out the boy’s expression. He’s slipping away. No, she’s slipping away. “I’m counting on you … my little detective.”

There are steps and voices, far away. She tries to make out her mother’s, but can’t.

The darkness is cold.

He finds her suspiciously easy, and even though Heiji is in fact a brilliant detective, unparalleled in quick thinking, known for his deadly deducing and infallible logic, a wizard of his trade, some even say, surely one of the great minds of his generation, he has …

He has …

Uhm.

Heiji has forgotten where this trail of thoughts started, damn it. Sighing, he grabs the coffee pot and pours himself a fresh cup, still hoping that the caffeine will kick in and convince his brain to work.

He’s sitting in Professor Agasa’s kitchen while the others still sleep. In order to pass the time productively, Heiji has begun to look for the dead woman in his dreams and make coffee … which turned out to be a sad affair. He’ll need to bring some good coffee next time he’s visiting; the Professor’s blend is terribly weak. No wonder no one’s solving this apotoxin-issue, with this dishwater.

It’s already his third cup of dishwater, however, and the fact that he hasn’t yet saved the newspaper article about the dead woman is the only reason he’s not attempting to spill some over his keys to see if it was strong enough to even damage –

Ah, yes! Heiji remembers where he trailed off. The newspaper article!

Alright: He finds her suspiciously easy, and even though Heiji is in fact a brilliant detective, it’s too easy even for him. Heiji doesn’t dream about deaths that are this easily solved. He had needed all but two minutes to have the article about Masami Hirota, the woman he dreamed about, on his screen, along with a name, picture and everything. The scenery, low quality print as it is, is exactly what he remembers. There is more the story, though. After all, he knows that Masami Hirota has been killed by the Black Organisation. Kudou had been with her when she died. Only a few more clicks were needed to find out that there are absolutely no records about a woman called Masami Hirota. Outside of the fake case she had contacted Kogoro Mouri with in order to get the money back, she didn’t exist.

So, fake personality, fake name. He had had a feeling about it already – the thing with names in his dreams is difficult. Sometimes he wakes up with the victim’s name as clear on his mind as sunshine. Sometimes he wakes up and has no clue whatsoever. Heiji thinks it makes sense, after all he’s not explicitly thinking about his name all the time even though he knows what it is – depending on the situation, it sometimes is a salient feature and sometimes it’s not. The same goes for gender, by the way, or nationality. With Masami, as he’s calling her for now, he had an inkling about the name because even though Kudou and Ran-chan had called out to her, she never truly responded to the name.

She had very much responded to the voice calling her Mi-chan, on the other hand, which could be a nickname for Masami. Or for a lot of other Japanese girls’ names.

Heiji makes a quick note on his laptop and ends up looking at the picture on the newspaper article again. The black and grey ink is more than splotchy in the background, but he can clearly make out Ran-Neechan and Kudou behind the covered corpse – and they’re wearing exactly the same clothes as he dreamed. Nee-chan is hugging little Conan Edogawa from behind, his oversized glasses must have reflected the light of the camera flash, making it hard to tell what he’s thinking.

When he had first seen the pair in the background of the picture, a weight as heavy as Kazuha’s shopping bags had been lifted off Heiji’s shoulders; His brain hasn’t played a trick on him. He’s not crazy and he’s not just dreaming vividly. He checked his sources, he found the evidence: Tonight, he had dreamed the dream twice, exactly the same. With two normal sleep cycles in between according to Haibara, he has ended up right where he had started, with a beating heart and the coldness of death still lingering on his fingertips. It’s exciting: Kudou can back him up about Masami, match his sources with another, living point of view.

And then, another thing had clicked when he realised the other implication of this specific dream: Masami Hirota’s death is not just a crime that needs to be solved, it’s a proof for him – for Heiji. For the first time in his life, Heiji has actual, tangible evidence that Kudou can back up. No one else had been there but Kudou when Masami Hirota died. No one should know what Heiji knows now.

‘No, my name is Kudou Shinichi, detective.’

If he plays this right, Kudou will have to believe him.

There are two points to make: One, solve Masami Hirota’s murder in the same way he solves all the other dream murders. After all, there obviously is more to it than what the newspaper article wrote. Two, present all of that to Kudou and force him to acknowledge that Heiji knows about a conversation the kid has had with a dead woman, knows about something no one should be able to know.

It's a lot to take on a morning that starts with bad coffee.

At least, the research keeps being easy – hacking into Tokyo’s police data base, Heiji finds Masami’s pathology reports that come with a photograph of her face and an estimated guess of her age. Digging deeper on google, he finds a deceased teacher of Shizuoka’s Nanyo University with the name of Professor Doctor Masami Hirota. He has taught a long time – definitely along the years the dead woman would have studied, had she attended college.

Heiji zooms in on that. It’s as good a start as any, and he remembers Mi-chan thinking about university for a short moment. Skimming through Nanyo University’s homepage and a couple of alumni online fores, he finds pictures of Professor Hirota’s classes. It’s easy to deduce what years to look for since the pathology report gave him her approximate age. And true enough – after clicking through a couple of boring yearbooks, he comes across a photo of a group of young people surrounding Professor Hirota. They’re wearing uniforms that look like old safari outfits or maybe they are at an archaeological excavation site? Anyway, the important part is: Next to the Professor, young woman is laughing into the camera, and Heiji recognises her immediately. According to the names written below the picture, her name is Miyano Akemi, and her smile is infectuous.

Heiji smiles back. Nice to meet you, Mi-chan.

It’s afternoon and Heiji has a plan. He’s not entirely sure if it’s absolutely brilliant or horrendously stupid, and usually these are the most exciting plans. This one has so much relying on it, however, that even Heiji’s enthusiasm for crafty plans is dampened.

For the umpteenth time, his eyes travel from the school building in front him to his scrawny handwriting on the pages of the notebook he has brough with him. He has to decide. It’s already 4 p.m. on a Friday, the weekend is nearing. He won’t get this chance anytime soon.

Ah, to hell with it, he thinks at last, and shuts his notebook. He knows by heart what’s written on the pages anyway. He’s dreamed the images four times by now, Akemi’s memories stand as clear in his mind as his own do.

The Professor and Haibara wouldn’t be happy to hear, but Heiji has done a little bit of science research without them. The second he had found his designated room in Kudou Manor, he had lain down to sleep. This time, he had made sure to have his notebook nearby and to use his regular method of writing down everything he saw, heard and knew.

He’s done this for years now, and as always, his notes present Heiji with a lot of paths to follow. After realising that Akemi Miyano basically disappeared from the public eye after graduating a couple of years ago, he turned to another clue, one that had been nagging in the back of his mind ever since he woke up from her death the first time.

There had been a couple of memories creeping their way into her vision when she died. Sceneries, images of architecture: A house, a lab, a school, university. He already found the university, but when he had walked back from the Professor to Chateau Kudou this morning, it had hit him: He knows the school! It’s Teitan elementary school – he knows because he picked up Kudou and Ran-Neesan, whose high school is right next to it, earlier this year when he visited with Kazuha.

Concentrating on this part of the dream, a memory became clearer after the fourth dream: Akemi hid something in that school. There was a little hutch, and next to it, she buried something. He remembers small, delicate hands covered in earth, remembers the sound of a school bell. It had to be important to appear close to her death.

So, this is why Heiji checked the homepage of the Teitan schools and found out that Teitan high has summer school classes right about now. It’s why Heiji had this crazy idea to enter Kudou’s old room, plunder his wardrobe and find his high school uniforms.

It’s why right now, Heiji is dressed in a Teitan high school uniform that is slightly too small for him.

And, finally, it’s why he’s hiding behind a tree across the street from the Teitan schools like a creep in someone else’s stolen, ill-fitting school uniform and can’t quite bring himself to enter school grounds and risk being seen, because Heiji will die of embarrassment on the spot if someone recognises him dressed in the clothes of his rival Kudou Shinichi.

But this week’s summer classes will end soon and that will be his last chance to get on school grounds at least somewhat inconspicuously.

He sighs and pushes himself forward – he has done weirder stuff to solve crimes. At least, he’s pretty sure neither Ran-Neesan nor her blond friend will run into him since they don’t need summer classes, and no one else knows him in Tokyo. At least that’s what he hopes. Maybe he needs to reconsider the benefits of starring in almost every newspaper or news broadcast, damnit.

To his relief, no one is bothering him as he makes his way across the school grounds. He’s right on time as the bell chimes and the students pour out of the classrooms and into the hall and yards, quick to finally leave school behind and enjoy their weekends. They do what all students do: They leave school quickly and then dawdle only a couple of meters away, clustering in groups and hanging out. They take all possible paths to leave the school grounds, and Heiji falls in line with a scattered group that walks across the Teitan elementary school yard.

They pass the large main door with the three stairs Heiji has seen Conan leap up with his friends the last time (and then, when he realised Heiji had been watching, the douchebag had tried to play it cool and fell back into his usual slouch), and when they made it past the main building and walk straight ahead, Heiji smoothly steps to the side, off the street and follows the wall of the main school building. There’s a line of trees that shield the children’s play area from the street area naturally, and Heiji quickly steps behind them and out of view.

The sense of Deja Vue hits him immediately, and it’s as weird as it always is to recognise a place he’s never been to before. He sees the playground with the sand box for the very small kids that just started preschool and the jungle gym that must have changed over the years. For some reason he can’t explain, the green bars are wrong and the slide had been somewhere else when Akemi had been a pupil here. He knows because she remembered before she died, and even though he wouldn’t be able to reconstruct what the playground had looked like back then, he just feels what’s different.

Then his eyes fall on the shed, and his heart misses a beat. It changed as well, because Heiji remembers the wooden planks in the background of Mi-chan’s memory, but there always has been a shed for small animals like bunnies and guinea pigs. She remembered this place, he remembers this place, and it only takes him a few seconds to get the right angle, to place the shed and the tree so that he knows where to start digging.

Heiji looks around for the last time, makes sure no one is watching him, and sits down. He packed a small gardening shovel he found in one of the Kudou’s supply cabinets in Kudou’s old satchel (real leather) and starts digging.

The feeling of deja-vue is overwhelming as Heij’s hands get dirty, just like Akemi’s had. Heiji doesn’t particularly like this feeling; it’s difficult enough to separate his feelings and memories from the dreams’ sometimes, and when he begins to recognise places or people, it tends to get confusing. In Osaka, where he solves most of his cases, it has become so bad that sometimes he can’t even tell apart whether or not he was actually at this site before, remembers the dream person or remembers himself following the dream person’s memory. When he had been a kid, it had been impossible to distinguish between dreams and real life, and he has gotten in a lot of trouble for ‘lying’ because he had insisted on having seen the Statue of Liberty or that he had been around when the tsunami hit in 1983.

Ah, memories.

Heiji’s shovel pushes against something hart, at last, and his thoughts are returning to the here now quickly. Carefully, he lifts an object out of the shallow hole and looks at it curiously. It’s a bento box, not very big or heavy. He remembers her little hands holding it and putting it into the ground to shovel earth all over it again.

Carefully, Heiji pulls at the lid – usually he likes to examine his findings in a safer space, but somehow he doubts that Akemi hid something dangerous or nasty when she had been thirteen. On the contrary, Heiji has nothing but warm and fuzzy feelings about this box, and he learned to trust his gut in these matters.

In the box, he finds a note that reads “For my classmates!” in the handwriting of a child and a photograph of a bunch of kids standing in the same spot he is crouching right now, in front of the rabbits and guinea pigs. Underneath the photograph, the box is filled to the brim with small objects – chalk, a small stuffed animal, a notebook filled with crooked and askew Hiragana and Katakana characters, and so on.

Children’s stuff. It’s a time capsule.

Heiji dimly remembers that Kazuha and his own elementary class did something like this. It had been the last week of elementary school and everyone had been sad and afraid for what was to come. All of the graduating classes had built time capsules, wrote letters or exchanged gifts.

Akemi’s memory glimpse didn’t show him any other kids or teachers. Did she hide her class’s time capsule on her own? Did she collect all of these things herself without the others knowing about it? Heiji wonders if she had some hidden motif, hid some secret, while he rummages through the stuff. He can’t find anything suspicious, though.

Then he fishes out an old polaroid, backside first, and reads a few sentences jotted down in a very girly handwriting: ‘My dear Shiho, since you’ve got such a high IQ, I’m sure our parents will make you study abroad, and take over their research someday. But remember this. Even we can’t be together, Dad, Mom and I all love you. Your Nee-san, Akemi.’

Huh, Heiji thinks, little sister. Interesting. Akemi thought about this Shiho a lot when she died, maybe that’s what he’ll have to investigate to solve whatever stayed unresol—

He’s in mid-thought when he turns the polaroid, and all of his thoughts come to a crashing halt when he immediately realises that he knows Shiho Miyano, just under another name.

It’s Ai Haibara, exactly as he knows her, hugging her elder sister Akemi Miyano.

Heiji breathes out for a long time. You’ve got to be kidding me, Kudou.

-tbc-

Chapter Text

NOW AND THEN

Chapter five

A couple of days pass, and they’re … more awkward than Shinichi expected. Somehow, the dynamics among their little secret scientific experimentation group don’t make sense.

For one, Shinichi’s not the centre of attention but watching from the sidelines. It’s not a very humble thing to say and Ran would roll her eyes at him in that specific way, but it’s a fact – without trying, Shinichi usually turns out to be pivotal in whatever is going on around him. Right now, though, Ai and Agasa-Hakase have thrown themselves into finding the cause of Hattori’s apparent affliction – Ai has buried herself in books and scientific papers about neurology, sleep research and the intricacies of medical engineering. Professor Agasa has committed himself to collect as much data as he can get, and thus spends his days coming up with new ways to haunt Hattori for blood tests, DNA samples, to conduct long-term ECGs or oxygen saturation tests. And Hattori, all the while, good-naturedly plays lab rat and reliantly provides the strange but replicable data Ai and the Professor, in turn, obsess over. All in all, they took the possible shattering of their scientific beliefs quite well.

Hattori, meanwhile, isn’t behaving like the annoyingly cheerful smartass that he normally is. Maybe Shinichi’s projecting, but something’s not adding up – in all the months they’ve known each other, spending time with each other has always been a priority. Now, ironically, they have all the time in the world and Heiji’s even bunking in his own house, yet somehow, they don’t seem to find the time together. Shinichi’s awake when Hattori sleeps, and when the three Tokyoites sleep, Hattori disappears. Sometime in the later afternoon, they reassemble at the lab to with their testing and sampling, and then the cycle starts again.

Shinichi joins them, but honestly, no one would miss him if he stayed away. To make a long story short: he’s completely useless, and that’s beyond frustrating. For whatever sadistic reason, the universe isn’t even helping with a case in Mouri’s agency or random corpses that pop up around Shinichi to keep him busy. He’s bored and frustrated and that’s not how summer break should be like for a 7-year-old.

16-year-old!!

Damnit.

He’s zapping through the channels of the old TV the Professor has setup after Conan and the Detective Boys started crashing at his place, when the doorbell chimes. Agasa-Hakase hurries to open the door for Hattori, right on time for his evening sessions.

Shinichi hears them small talking in the hallway (apparently, Hattori bough some Northern delicacies the Professor likes – Shinichi doesn’t remember having ever talked to the old man about food), drawing nearer to the living room.

“There’s absolutely nothing on,” Shinichi says instead of a greeting, changing the channels, and slightly nods to acknowledge Hattori waving at him.

Heiji slouches over the couch’s back. “When I was your age, I used summer break to be outside.”

“Not much to do outside,” Shinichi answers, staunchly ignoring the tease (he’s actually months older than Hattori, for God’s sake), and inconspicuously takes a good look at the other. Heiji seems tired, he thinks, which is understandable – given all the data they have, Hattori didn’t have more than three to four hours of REM sleep a night. They don’t know whether the nightmares count as restful sleep yet, but looking at Hattori now, Shinichi takes an educated guess. “No new crimes. Even Kogoro is bored.”

At this, Heiji rolls his eyes passionately. “I meant, playing with your friends. Jeez, Kudou.”

He is spending time with a friend, Shinichi thinks, a tad of bitterness mixing into his thoughts. Hattori, on the other hand, doesn’t seem very invested in spending time with him. Sure, he’s here to finally get this dream-thing sorted out, Shinichi gets that – it’s just that he can’t shake the feeling that Heiji is avoiding him. There’s no other reason why the other detective wouldn’t share the dream case with him; usually, the idiot’s bending over backwards to recount his evidence or solve a case with him.

“Haibara didn’t want to play duck, duck, goose, unfortunately.”

That elicits a laugh, and it feels good. “Wouldn’t take that one personally. What about your little friends?”

“They’re little.”

“Ach, you’re looking at this all wrong.”

Small talk, when there are three riddles he’s nowhere near to solving: He has no idea what is actually going on with Heiji and the dreams; allegedly, there’s a murder case involved but he can’t solve it because he still can’t make himself accept that it’s real; and Hattori is avoiding him, about which he should probably do something.

Ugh.

The Professor, having stashed away the foodstuff, walks through the living room towards the basement. Hattori pushes himself up to follow suit, and Shinichi feels a petty little sting when he realises that Heiji didn’t bring any food delicacies for him.

“Why are you avoiding me?” He asks, thus, straightforward because that’s probably the only way Kudou Shinichi will ever be able to tackle an issue that involves emotions.

Hattori actually freezes midstride. “Huh?”

Busted, Shinichi thinks and turns down the TV. “You’re avoiding me. Are you mad at me about something?”

Hattori sighs and clearly doesn’t want to be here. Well, they have that in common. “I’m not … It’s complicated.”

“Are you mad because I didn’t believe you? No,” he corrects himself. They’re past that one, Hattori wouldn’t have come to Tokyo otherwise. “It’s because I told the others, right?”

“What?”

“You asked me to keep the dreams to myself.”

It’s been bugging him for days. Ever since he realized that the dreams aren’t a lie – whatever the weird lines on Hattori’s EEG mean, wherever they come from, they have some sort of very real impact and that was why Heiji had told him and him alone. He had broken that trust quickly, even though he had done it for the idiot’s well-being.

“I only told Agasa-Hakase and Haibara because they could help me understand. And because I knew they’d help you.”

“Actually, Kudou,” something manic flashes across Hattori’s eyes. “I’m glad you told them.”

Shinichi falters without feeling relief. That’s good, right? Or … not?

“Sure!” All of a sudden, Hattori’s beaming at him. It’s his usual no-worries-in-the-world-grin, and it literally came out of nowhere. “It’s nice to be able to share your problems, Kudou!”

That seems to be Shinichi’s cue to say something, since Hattori is looking at him expectantly. Unfortunately, Shinichi hasn’t learned his lines. “I …guess?”

Heiji’s smile falters a bit, but he doesn’t let go. “Doesn’t it feel good to be yourself around here? Didn’t it feel good when I found out?”

“I was terrified when you found out,” Shinichi clarifies (not for the first time). “But yeah, I guess I know what you mean.”

“And I’m sure you’d just love to tell someone else, right?”

Shinichi feels the soles of his feet itching. This is thin ice – the issue of his identity is a slippery slope. While it’s on his mind constantly, while he wants to talk about nothing else but who he is and what the Organisation did to him, he easily panics when the issue actually comes up.

Unresolved trauma, the Professor would call it, and Shinichi would snort and act unbothered. But there might be something to the words, because as soon as the topic pops up, Shinichi’s thoughts are tangling. A small hole appears in his stomach, the same one that sometimes overtakes his whole body and then fills with panic.

He swallows to keep it down and tries to regain control over the conversation. How the hell did Hattori manage to hijack it so quickly?? “It’s too dangerous. You know that.”

“So, you never told anyone else? Never ever?”

“Of course not.” Telling people meant danger – both to them and to him. If the Organisation learned about his survival, they’d leave no stone unturned. No one would survive. It’s a possibility that keeps him awake at night; images of the Professor, Ran, Hattori and Toyama, Haibara, even Kogoro, even Sonoko, murdered in some alley. A violent murder with robbery in the agency. A random motorcycle accident somewhere between Tokyo and Osaka. Another kid that disappeared on her way to school.

And yet, Shinichi sometimes barely holds back the words. It’s me. It’s me, Shinichi. He wants to scream them at the top of his lungs at Shibuya crossing. At Tokyo central station. Down Fuji-san for all the world to hear.

“They would kill anyone who knows,” he says instead, calm and collected. In control. “No one can know.”

He’s in control. He has to be.

Hattori has more to say, it’s clearly visible on his face, but instead he shuts his mouth. “I see.”

A light cough reaches him from across the room. The Professor is standing in the doorway, looking worriedly from one detective to the other. Shinichi didn’t notice him returning.

“Hattori-kun?” Agasa asks, politely.

Heiji nods, slowly. “Coming.” Breaking eye contact, he leaves the room to follow the old man into the lab. Shinichi falls back into the cushions of the sofa. It feels like he barely missed a bullet, even though he never even knew that he had been fighting a duel.  

It's day seven, closing in on evening, and Hattori is running on a treadmill the Professor has conjured up. There are all kinds of electrodes and cables attached to him, a familiar sight by now, although Shinichi has no idea why Hattori is running on a treadmill, electrodes and cables, etcetera. Hattori himself had just shrugged when asked and almost lost his balance in the process.

“So, where have you been today?” Shinichi asks, nonchalance forced, as he pretends to have something to do in the lab. It’s two days since the weirdest conversation on every timeline in every universe happened, and he thinks that they should slowly but steadily return to normal.

“Kōtō,” Hattori answers, slightly out of breath after running for fifteen minutes. “Harbours.”

Shinichi perks up. Kōtō? That’s actually quite a trip from Beika. Except for the baseball stadium, there’s not much to see, and it’s off-season. “Why?”

“Never been there.” Hattori, having learned absolutely nothing, shrugs, almost slips again, and finally slows down the treadmill with a furtive glance at Agasa-Hakase. “How about you?”

Shinichi blinks. Of course he’s been to Kōtō before, he’s seen every corner of Tokyo. It’s his home, after all. “Sure.”

 “Any special occasion?”

Shinichi’s brow furrows. What is Hattori trying to get at? The harbours aren’t exactly a scenic sight for a stroll, it’s an industrial area. In fact, it’s quite dangerous there, a lot of crimes happen and – ohhhh. His heart misses a beat. “You’ve been investigating.”

Hattori stops the treadmill at last. “Yes.”

The hair on the back of Shinichi’s neck are standing up at the change of atmosphere. There’s no need to specify what Hattori’s been investigating – there’s only one case of interest right now. The one that could proof whether or not his friend should start looking for psychiatric help in Osaka.

Heiji’s getting off the treadmill and throws a fresh towel across his shoulders as he walks across his room to reach for his backpack. From the corner of his eyes, Shinichi sees the Professor leaning over to look from his desk in confusion, as the stream of incoming data dries up.

Before anyone can say anything, though, there’s noise and movement coming from another source: Haibara has just entered the lab, waving a stack of papers in her hand.

“I think I’ve found the problem,” she proclaims without a care in the world about any conversation she might have interrupted. “We’ll just have to add two electrodes, and I’ll need an hour to upgrade the software.”

“Ah, Haibara,” irony drips from Hattori’s voice as he turns back towards the room. “Just the person I was looking for.”

Ai ignores him in her usual lofty behaviour. “So far we used the standard EEG electrode array,” she says to Professor Agasa and only to Professor Agasa. “There is another system, still in trial phase, that separates the signals more distinctly into waves, especially delta.”

“There won’t be an EEG session tonight,” Heiji disagrees, loudly, and crosses his arms.

Ai, at last, turns around to glare at him – he’s messing with her experiments. It’s an unforgivable sin.

Shinichi has no time to feel for her. He feels the excitement of the mystery, the rush of fighting injustice, taking over. “He solved the case!”

“This is a waste of time,” Ai sighs, just when Heiji says “A few days ago.”

The Professor finally enters the room and leans against the wall. Everyone is here at last, looking at Hattori now, and Shinichi feels his heart beating faster – not just because there’s finally something going on he can relate to. This is what he needs, he realises. Brain waves are interesting, but he needs a case and waterproof evidence and motives to decide whether or not he believes Heiji.

“Tell us.” He prompts and feels the sweat on his hands.

Hattori takes a breath and nods, slowly. “I’ve been seeing the murder of a young woman in Tokyo. She was shot in the harbours of Kōtō. It wasn’t hard to find her, actually, so I wasn’t sure why I’ve been dreaming about her. Her death has been recorded and all.”

“That doesn’t mean much,” Shinichi offers, because he can’t help but puzzle along. It’s an unfortunate but well-known fact that there are a lot of case reports full of holes, bad judicial decisions and unclear details. “With detectives like Kogoro out there, cases remain unsolved all the time.”

“That’s what I thought, so guess how surprised I was when I found out who was involved!” With a triumphant smirk, Heiji holds up a copy of a newspaper article. Shinichi needs a second to recognize it – and when he does, his brain freezes. “Can you think about any inconsistencies, Kudou? No, wait, don’t give it away.”

It’s the newspaper article about Masami Hirota, who died about a year ago in Kōtō harbours – right in his arms, so to speak. The newspaper article shows a picture of the crime scene, and Conan and Ran are easily recognizable in the middle of the photograph.

Masami Hirota. It’s Ai’s sister. Shinichi’s stomach knots because this is not just going to be crazy, this has to go down badly. He’s trying to think his way out of this, but Heiji continues before he comes up with something. “The easiest solution was to identify Masami Hirota properly. After all, her case file never once lists her real name.”

They must have entered the twilight zone. He never told Hattori about this case. While it’s possible the idiot found it by chance, how the hell was he able to find out that Masami Hirota wasn’t the woman’s real name? He himself found out only after Ai told him – Ai!

Shinichi tears his eyes away from the newspaper article just when Ai whirls around to him. “What the hell, Shinichi!?” she hisses, anger in her voice. Anger, and something else.

It’s fear.

In the police records, Ai’s sister has been framed as a bank robber who killed her partners in crime and was shot in turn by an unknown person. On paper, it looks like the perfect crime syndicate struggle, an internal conflict, and it’s ironic that it is as much absolute bullshit as it is completely true: the Black Organisation appears nowhere on paper. They made her rob the bank, kill her partners, and then shot her. Shinichi knows, because he knew what to look for. And because Ai filled in the blank spots later.

He's seen the police reports, read the newspaper articles. The lie is bulletproof, the Organisation untraceable and Masami’s identity never once questioned. How the hell did Hattori know what to look for?

“Her real name?” Shinichi asks, voice shaky, and tries to gain control. Gather information. Stay cool. Next to him, Ai is breathing heavily, shaking with rage. Stay cool, he thinks, a bit desperate.

“Yeah,” Hattori visibly enjoys this. He focuses on Haibara for the next bit. “Her real name was Akemi Miyano.”

It’s just a couple of syllables, but each one feels like a punch to the stomach. The Professor is the only person moving, slowly making his way towards them to stand next to Ai, laying a hand on her shoulders. He’s pale. Half-heartedly, Shinichi wonders if they all are.

Suddenly, Hattori turns his head to look at him. His eyes are piercing into his, and Shinichi flinches. “I mean, names are important, right, Kudou? That’s why you told her yours just seconds before she died.”

It’s like the air in the room has just lost all oxygen, because suddenly, Shinichi understands. He remembers and understands and it shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t be, yet it’s true: Right before Masami aka Akemi died, he told her his real name. He told her, a dying woman, and no one else.

‘Who are you?‘

‘I’m Conan Edo …No, my name is Kudou Shinichi, detective.’

He never told anyone about it. There never was a point to it. There hadn’t been a point to begin with, but back then, Conan Edogawa hadn’t been a reality for long, it had all been so new and Shinichi had still believed there would be a cure. He didn’t want the world to forget about Shinichi Kudou, and it had felt good to tell her – which was exactly what Hattori had tried to get him to confess a couple of days ago. It’s all true.

But it’s still impossible.

Shinichi isn’t giving up on the rules of reality that quickly.

“Someone must have overheard,” he forces out weakly, and thus affirms Hattori.

There’s a gasp coming from the Professor or from Haibara, Shinichi doesn’t care enough to find out. He concentrates on Hattori, who is rolling his eyes.

“I knew you’d say something like that. The only people who knew about her whereabouts were her murderers. And if they overheard the two of you, you wouldn’t be alive anymore.” Heiji’s calmer than Shinichi’s ever seen him. It’s scary. Everything about this is scary.

He’d be dead because Akemi was murdered by the Black Organisation. If they overheard him, he’d be fish food by now. He told Hattori just a few days ago, right in front of the Professor. Heiji doesn’t even have to mention the Black Organisation, because he knows they know he knows and Shinichi has given him all of the answers to any argument he could try to throw at him now. He’s trapped him with his own words.

Shinichi’s still trying to find a loophole. A lapse in logic. Because the only other person who had been there when he had told Akemi his real name, had been Akemi herself. Akemi is dead. There was no logical way Hattori, who hadn’t even been around back then, could know. They didn’t even know each other back then.

“Is this a joke?!” Ai finally found her voice again. It’s shaky, but it’s more than Shinichi would get out right now. “Are you two playing a game with me?”

“I kept following Akemi’s leads,” Hattori turns back towards Haibara. There had been a bit of joy in Heiji’s face when he saw Shinichi’s realisation, but it’s completely gone when he fishes an envelope out of his pockets. “I still had a mystery to solve, after all.”

Ai crosses her arms. She found her confidence again, though there is a lot of defiance in her stance. “Kudou told you all of this. There’s no mystery.”

Shinichi shakes his head, but no one is paying attention to him.

“Akemi didn’t regret her activities in the Black Organisation, since she did it to help her family.” Slowly, Hattori’s opening the envelope. “The one thing she regretted, though, was not being able to help her sister.”

Ai flinches worse than Shinichi. Slowly, torturously slow, Hattori pulls out a few sheets of paper and sorts through them. “Apparently, her whole family worked for the Organisation, more or less voluntarily. Akemi worried about her sister. She wanted her to be free.”

Shinichi’s brain shortcuts when Heiji hands a photograph to Ai. “She was afraid you didn’t know how much she loved you, Miyano Shiho.”

The name hits like a bomb.

Ai had snatched the photograph and drops it immediately after hearing her real name. She almost falls a few steps back. Her eyes are wide and Shinichi recognises the panic he knows so well. Haibara’s even more afraid of the Black Organisation than he is, and Heiji just exposed her.

Her eyes are flickering from Heiji to Shinichi, and when she sees his expression, the shock that has to be apparent on it, she loses her cool. In an instant, Ai turns on the back of her heels and bolts out of the room.

Shinichi stares at the photograph on the ground while Ai’s steps are still audible, then a door slams. It’s a picture of Haibara and a girl that looks like a young version of Akemi. Shinichi’s never seen it before. Why– how does Hattori have a picture of Akemi Miyano and Ai??

“I found it in a time capsule Akemi buried in your school,” Hattori answers, anticipating Shinichi’s thoughts. “She remembered it before she died.”

“You …” Shinichi’s throat is dry. He wets his lips before continuing. “You saw what she remembered when she died?”

Instead of answering, Hattori holds another piece of paper out for him. Shinichi grabs it, ignoring his own shaking fingers, but before he can unfold it, the Professor suddenly moves.

He grabs Hattori by the fabric of his shirt and yanks him close. “You,” he says, dangerously low, and points towards the door Ai just disappeared through. “Go fix this.”

The Professor barely reaches Heiji’s chin, but somehow, he’s still towering above the Osakan – moment’s over. He’s one of these quiet people who’d scare Sauron himself once you managed to get them angry. For once in his life, Heiji doesn’t argue but barely manages a nod before the Professor pushes him out of the lab.

With a grunt, the Professor turns towards his desk. “And you,” he says towards Shinichi, who’s staring at the paper in his hands. “Come here and look at this.”

Hattori’s horrible handwriting fills the whole page. It’s a word-for-word protocol of Conan and Masami’s dialogue in Kōtō.

His thoughts are going a mile per minute, trying to catch up on what happened in this room just twenty minutes ago. Trying to find out what it means, trying to accept that Hattori was right about everything and trying to find an explanation that exposes the lie at the same time.

It’s exhausting, and scary, and Shinichi doesn’t understand why the Professor is forcing him to look at a pile of papers right now. He has pushed a stack into Shinichi’s arms and keeps bringing more and more stacks, handing them to Shinichi one after the other. Mechanically, Shinichi takes them, pretends to look at them, and hands them back.

There are charts on most of the pages. Charts full of numbers and values Shinichi doesn’t read, lost in thoughts. Print-outs of an ECG, of the EEG, of more numbers and values. A lot of three-letter-acronyms in caps.

He doesn’t feel like looking at test results. This is not the time to do paperwork. Doesn’t the Professor understand what just happened??

“Was Hattori right about what he said?” Agasa-Hakase demands to know before Shinichi can ask.

He nods, then shakes his head. Then he nods again. “What am I looking at?”

The Professor hums and leans back. “Test results.” He points at various pages on the pile. “Long-term ECG. Blood pressure. Blood values.”

Shinichi hands them back over and shrugs. He has no time for this. It’s been almost half an hour since Hattori left the lab to look for Haibara, and Shinichi needs to talk to him. “What about it?”

“I’m worried,” the old man says and sighs. “Shinichi, whatever these dreams are, they have a real impact.”

He’d say! Shinichi looks at the Professor with big eyes. “He knew Haibara’s name! Yes, there’s an impact!”

But Agasa just shakes his head and points at the papers. “I mean these. They should be different.”

The Professor rarely bothers him with unimportant stuff, so Shinichi pushes the frustration aside and tries to concentrate on the here and now. “Different how?”

“He said he’s doing kendo for years, right?” The Professor asks and Shinichi hums in affirmation. “That’s a demanding sport. Is he training regularly?”

“As far as I know …” Hattori’s part of his school team and fighting tournaments. Shinichi doesn’t know much about kendo, never cared much for it and really doesn’t care for it right now for God’s sake, but from what he’s seen, Heiji’s quite good at it.

“And he’s athletic,” the Professor agrees and hands Shinichi a page with another chart he can’t read. “These aren’t values of a sporty teenager.”

Shinichi’s tired and doesn’t even look at the page. The Professor finally gets the cue and points at one of the lines on the paper.

“This value indicates Hattori-kun’s cholesterol levels. I’ve been taking them regularly for the past week. They’re way too high for a sixteen-year-old.” He moves his finger to another line. “And these calcium levels are off the charts.”

The numbers don’t tell him anything, but Shinichi believes what the Professor is saying. “So?”

“You’ve seen how his blood pressure and heart rate jump during the dream cycles.”

Yes, Shinichi remembers vividly. The first time Hattori’s heart rate had crashed under 50, they had thought he’d died. Afterwards, they watched in awe how heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen levels returned to normal time and time again after the Osakan woke up from the dreams. While Heiji’s regaining his breath, his heart rate slows and his blood pressure rises. As a result, the graphics on the diagrams are looking like a minefield. Jagged and dramatic.

“These numbers indicate that his body’s experiencing at least parts of what he’s dreaming,” Agasa surmises, and for the first time, Shinichi’s able to focus because that … that doesn’t sound good. “And it’s causing long-term complications.”

A bad feeling spreads through Shinichi’s guts, similar to the one he felt when he had watched the brain waves misbehave for the first time. “Long-term complications?”

“He’s been physically experiencing near-death situations every night for years,” the Professor explains. “I think it’s taking its toll on his cardiovascular system. It’s only logical.”

“Logical,” Shinichi repeats, voice flat. He’s beginning to understand. Shit.

“His system is being flushed by stress hormones every night. These have to go somewhere. His heart is fighting for survival again and again. Most people don’t have that kind of physical stress until they actually die.”

Shinichi feels a weight on his shoulders and leans back. Every number on every page hammers in the reality of the situation: This is real, they tell him. This is real with all of the consequences. Hattori actually experiences the deaths of people. People like Akemi Miyano, whom he told his real name before she bled out, before her system went into hypovolemic shock because there wasn’t enough blood to fill her veins, and not enough oxygen reached the muscles of her heart to keep it beating.

Shinichi’s head is starting to hurt really bad.

“You’re saying … he’s sick?”

“No,” Agasa hurries to say. “Not yet. But … it’s not healthy.”

Yeah, he can see that. Shinichi isn’t a doctor, but he has basic medical knowledge, especially about pathology. He knows what constant stress does to one’s arteries. He knows how long kidneys need to flush out stress hormones like adrenaline and cholesterol.

“What are we going to do?” He asks, feeling just as small as he actually is.

The Professor sighs sadly and shrugs. “Run more tests. Gather more data.” He looks at Shinichi. “Help.”

They’ve had this conversation before. Shinichi nods. In the end, it all fits so well he might find it amusing if he weren’t so tired – just like his thoughts, just like his battles, his conversations are spinning in circles, as well. After everything, Shinichi always ends up right where he started.

r&r!