Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The streets were unusually quiet for this time of night. Everything was bathed in a gentle crimson glow, washing the roads and houses in a fascinating sunset-esque tint. Conan strained his ears to listen. It wasn’t just that traffic was conspicuously absent…the world itself had gone deafeningly silent. Not a single noise penetrated the air. Not an engine, not a bark, not even the hum of electricity pumping through the lit street lamps. Conan pushed air through his lungs in an attempt to speak, just to see if he could hear himself. Whether or not he actually made a sound, he didn’t know - he couldn’t even hear the breath he took.

Nothing to do, he began walking. His tools were all missing…he hadn’t gone out without them in so long it felt foreign. (Helpless.) Walking across town, he felt strangely light, effortlessly gliding up and down hills he normally struggled over. It was a very similar sensation to snowboarding on freshly packed snow. He was almost enjoying himself. And then, abruptly, the road ended. (And so did Beika.) Before him, over the crest of the next hill, was a wall of dusty red nothingness, a mist blocking his way entirely. It seemed to stretch on indefinitely, corralling him in on three sides to contain him in the town.

(He had a feeling trying to touch the thing would be a very, very bad idea.)

He turned back. Twin white orbs peered around a corner approximately ten meters away, watching him intently. They looked to be about two meters off the ground, although it was difficult to tell in the swirling haze. They didn’t seem to be attached to anything at all. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

Conan skirted around the street. He didn’t like the way they looked at him.

The misty red roads melted away, dripping like fresh paint, the dusty red walls around the perimeter peeling away like old wallpaper. Conan blinked. His shoes sunk into reddish brown sand, the gentle waves of a crimson ocean lapping at a rocky shore that dipped down to a small cliff below. There was no horizon - only the wall of a dusty red sky. Conan turned around. To his left were over half a dozen dilapidated buildings, eroded by the salty ocean spray. Up ahead lay the sharp crest of a hill, barring him from seeing anything on the other side.

Something about the weathered buildings lining the deserted beach drew him in. Conan stepped towards them but stopped when his ankle snagged something. He looked down, expecting to see a bit of seaweed or discarded chicken wire. Skeletal fingers dug into his skin, every bone held together with gnarly, rotted joints, connected to a tattered arm reaching over the dropoff from the rocks below. He hummed. Hearing the noise, finally free from the vacuum of silence, he knelt down to gently poke the fingers desperately clamped onto his leg.

“I know you’re angry,” he told it. “It’s okay. He’s gone.” The fingers loosened, peeling away from the red marks they’d left. Conan didn’t know what made him do it, but he reached out and patted the damp bones reassuringly. (The hand was only a little bigger than his own…it was obviously a child’s.) “I’ll let your family know.” The hand stretched up, waving a final farewell, and disappeared over the ledge. Conan turned back to the buildings. His gut instinct told him there were many such remains on the other side of that cliff, unidentified bodies left to rot without anyone knowing they were there.

He was drawn to the closest building to his left. Whether it was instinct or simple curiosity he didn’t know. The windows were frosty with cobwebs and dust. Pulpy newspapers and cardboard decorated the corners where they had caught splinters and nails and stuck fast. The door was padlocked, the shiny new lock jarring against the aged scenery. He knew he didn’t need to pick it. Conan reached out, not entirely sure it would work the way he expected it to. His hand slipped through the closed door, melting through it like nothing more than a ghost. He stepped through, red fog pooling in the corners, dust, debris and cobwebs coating every conceivable space inside.

Conan walked deeper, his shoes kicking up puffs of dust with every step. There were footprints besides his own, adult prints, trailing to a spot at the back where they disappeared. Other marks intermingled the prints, like something had been dragged or slid across the ground. He stopped where the footprints ended, above a nondescript wooden slab different from the rest of the concrete flooring. He reached through, finding a metal rung on the other side, and easily slipped down, passing through the floor like a spector.

The hall he found at the bottom was short, narrow and lit by a single bare bulb hastily fixed to the poorly carved ceiling. A dark figure lay slumped over at the end of the passageway. Conan approached quickly, reaching out to hopefully make contact with him like he’d done the skeleton. A solid force met his fingers when he poked his shoulder. He slipped his hand under his nose to make sure Hakuba was alright. Slow and steady breaths met his concerned gesture - it seemed he’d just fallen asleep. He left him where he was. As long as Hakuba was alive and none of that person’s concern, he didn’t need to worry about him.

Conan crept forward, reaching out to push through the brittle, salt torn metal plate of a door blocking his sight. He was almost startled - he partially knew what he had been expecting to find, but he hadn’t entirely expected Lion to still be there. (It was only the second time he had ever seen the man in person. Something new to his complexion were his slightly sunken cheeks and unhealthy yellowed tint, giving his face a sallow, gaunt look, clothes baggy around his shoulders and the bluish hue of veins visible on his forearms.)

Lion was hunched over something, humming a tune to himself that Conan didn’t recognize. Thankfully, he didn’t seem to notice Conan there, too preoccupied with whatever he was doing. In the corner to his right, in the near pitch black room, sat another slumped figure. He didn’t need to approach to know they were deceased. A horrendous conglomeration of organs piled in her lap, flies buzzing around the open ribcage, skin and muscle rotting off a half exposed skeleton, one eye still closely observing the man who had killed her. Conan walked closer, gently brushing her barely intact eyelid closed.

“I’m sorry,” he told her softly. “I’ll look for you.” It was all he could offer. Lion would never pay for his crimes, never face punishment for his actions. So many people would never get the closure of knowing he would spend the rest of his life behind bars for ripping their loved ones away from them. For dumping them off a cliff like trash and leaving them to be forgotten at the bottom of the ocean floor. Waves slapped the wooden frame above as the tide came in, droplets of water seeping through the cracks of the building’s concrete floor above. Conan scrubbed at his arms. It was cold down there, damp and dark and cramped. He turned to head back to Hakuba.

(Something about this room pressed an urge to leave down on him from all sides. He wanted to listen.)

“Finally,” Lion sighed, and Conan jumped, because he had frankly forgotten the man was still there for a brief moment. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s try this again, shall we?” Conan crept closer. He had an instinctual feeling that the man would never be able to see or hear him in this place. It was a kind of morbid curiosity that drove him to stand on tiptoe to see over his shoulder. As he’d thought, Lion didn’t so much as twitch at his presence. He didn’t know why he wanted to see, or what he was even expecting to see.

(Optimistically, he was hoping it was a dismantled gun he was cleaning, or a box of tools he was digging through. Conan had seen too much of humanity’s dark side to be that naive.)

Kaito squinted up at him through a spatter of some kind of whitish gooey substance, the rest of his body covered in so much rust colored blood that it was difficult to tell if it was his own or not, wrists and ankles firmly chained to the wall. He opened his mouth to say something and Conan quickly shushed him. Lion couldn’t currently see him, but he would if he was brought to his attention. Conan scanned the muddy concrete floor. A mostly melted candle stick, the wic still smoking, caught his eye first. It was the same color as the sticky looking blobs dripping across Kaito’s eyes. There were a few lock picks scattered around, (likely Kaito’s - Conan recognized the very, very faint copper colored tint on them) and a handful of needles.

A toolbox was sitting innocently on Lion’s other side, full of hammers and wrenches and all the typical types of tools that belonged inside, most of them clean, a few stained as if they’d been dipped in the same rust colored residue that covered Kaito head to toe. Conan glanced behind him, where even through the closed metal door, he could still see Hakuba, slouched over unconscious. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get them out, but if he was caught, Lion would be able to overpower him easily. He didn’t know why he was here. Maybe his only role down here was as an observer. (But he didn’t want to observe anymore. The waves, murky and dark, would start flooding the room any minute now.)

Conan blinked. Lion and his toolbox disappeared, only a smear of dried wax left where the candle had been. The alcove was much darker now, a narrow beam of dim light shining through the gap under the door being the only light in the room. (The rotting girl in the corner had disappeared, only a smear of blackish blood staining where she’d once sat.) He could still make out the outline of Kaito lying prone on the ground. Now that Lion was gone, he wanted to move closer, get a better look. He stayed rooted to the spot. (Why? He wanted to move. What prevented him from going closer?) On the other side of the room, Kaito twitched. Almost silently, he full-bodied spasmed, curling in tightly on himself as if in a vain attempt to protect his stomach.

Conan watched on, horrified, as the skin along his spine split open, oozing rivulets that burst into streams of blood, curling, crimson stained fingers digging through muscle and bone with sickening snaps and tears to reach out of where the spine should be to claw into skin. The hand latched fiercely onto his side, grabbing hold so hard blood bubbled up under the fingertips, searching and desperate. A second set of fingers emerged from inside Kaito’s back, clamping down on his shoulder harder than the first had, scrambling for any kind of firm purchase. Together, blood soaked and clumsy, they pushed upwards, ripping the drenched head and shoulders of a full sized human into the air.

Like shedding its skin, the bloody figure pushed and pulled, snapping bones and separating tendons, tearing muscles and spilling blood, dragging himself out of Kaito’s back like he was nothing more than an ill-fitting glove. Conan briefly tore his eyes away from the monstrosity, gurgling and choking in its freedom, to take a better look at his friend. Kaito was shuddering, seemingly unaware of anything around him, gasping for air even as blood lethargically dripped between his teeth. His back was a mess of red liquid, blackened in the dark, bits of muscle and small white bone fragments stuck to the edges of flayed skin and lying in gleaming puddles on the floor.

He didn’t even have the energy to make a sound of pain. He wasn’t writhing, or screaming…he simply laid there, desperate to fill his lungs with air just to keep breathing. Conan could only watch as the shredded bits of muscle changed course, pausing in their slide down his back to reconnect with where they’d come from, the loose bits of snapped bone following suit. Moving in reverse like a movie rewinding, muscles and bones and skin knit themselves together, pooling blood sliding back and up to reenter the body it’d come from. The…thing…coughed violently, hacking up lungfuls of sticky wet blood, which oozed across the floor to snake up Kaito’s slowly mending spine and seep back in through the cracks.

Suddenly, it was gone. Every last bit of bone and muscle and spilled blood had disappeared, the only thing left a massive scar down Kaito’s back from the nape of his neck that vanished below his waistband. He convulsed again, a strangled sound choking out into the damp air. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed, completely limp. (Conan was at least grateful for that…he wouldn’t have to be awake to see what had crawled out of him.) Now free, still coughing and bleeding from scrapes on his hands and arms, Kid struggled to his knees, completely disoriented. He locked eyes with Conan, glowing white in the dark. He blinked once and they flipped like a switch back to the normal ocean blue Conan remembered.

“…who…are you…?” Kid rasped. Conan opened his mouth to answer. What was he supposed to say?

He blinked.

Sunlight streaming through closed curtains, Kogoro snoring from the bed beside him, his alarm ringing under his pillow and the smell of coffee faint in the air. Conan sat there, breathing, listening to his alarm and the birds and the meow of the alley cat Amuro had taken to feeding, the gentle pat-pat of Ran’s slippers as she made breakfast and the click-cli-click of the second hand on a clock that had double ticked for years. He switched off his alarm after a minute or two, fishing around for his phone under the covers. He didn’t have to scroll far to find Hakuba’s number.

‘Can I come over?’

Ding.

‘Bring drinks. Hakuba’s tea is disgusting.’

\( ‘ - ‘ )/

“-n’t touched anything! Why won’t-“

“-out! Now!”

Conan rolled his eyes and let himself in with the key he’d asked Hakuba to duplicate for him. He had been regularly visiting for a couple weeks now, giving Hakuba some much needed company and time to recoup his sanity. Kaito hadn’t exactly been the best patient, and leaving detective and thief crammed into one space without the ability to leave whenever they wanted often left Conan walking in on their various squabbles.

“-wasn’t trying-“

“-care, just get-“

“Oi!” Conan called out over the bickering echoing from somewhere deeper in the house. “I brought milkshakes and food.” He made sure to shake the bag of snacks he was carrying to prove he wasn’t lying. It usually drew Kaito to him like a magnet; he liked to drape himself dramatically over the nearest object to complain about Hakuba giving him nothing but “inedible” food. Or, as Conan renamed it, healthy food. As he swapped to his house slippers, though, he didn’t hear the quick, uneven hopping as Kaito excitedly maneuvered down the stairs or the quiet shuffle of Hakuba setting aside whatever he was working on.

In fact, he didn’t hear anything. Even the shouting had stopped.

Conan wandered into the living room. There was no sign of anyone having been there recently. He ducked in the kitchen. There was a plate with a stale half eaten piece of plain toast on it sitting abandoned on the dining table. Conan turned to the stairs, hesitating at the base, looking up at the shadowed landing. (Once Kaito had recovered enough to become fully aware of his surroundings, he had been understandably prickly about Hakuba having invited Conan into his house. He hadn’t been mentally prepared for that step just yet, it seemed.)

While Kaito was still irritated about it, Conan knew his address now, and had been begrudgingly invited back multiple times. He didn’t want to push it by wandering around, (even if he was curious to explore the house top to bottom,) so he’d made a rule for himself; he wouldn’t go anywhere unless expressly invited to. (At least for now.) After a minute or two, the floorboards above him creaked, and Hakuba clomped down the stairs, a receding red flush to his cheeks and his expression set in a heavy scowl, the cover of his new pocket watch rapidly clicking open and closed in his pocket.

“Ah, Conan, I wasn’t aware you were coming today,” he sighed, slipping a finger under the edge of his khaki colored eyepatch to be able to scrub at the bridge of his nose more effectively. “Would you care for some coffee?”

“Uh, sure, if there’s some ready.” Conan trotted after Hakuba. He made his way to the kitchen, fetching a mug to pour some apparently cooled coffee from the kettle. He didn’t seem to notice it had gone cold and silently passed the mug to Conan, dropping into a vacant chair at the table with a tired grunt. “What is it this time?” Conan joined him, taking a sip of the room temperature coffee. (It was strange…Hakuba usually didn’t overlook small things like that, even when he was upset.) He had never seen the other detective this irritated before, and Kaito had yet to appear from wherever he was. Hakuba sighed into his hand, scrubbing at his face as if he was attempting to physically wipe away his frown.

“…I found something,” he explained. “Kaito was rather ticked off about it, and while I understand why, I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. Honestly, he’s so-“

“What did you find?” Conan innocently stared back when Hakuba glanced his way, visible honey brown iris ringed in an ugly violet that told him that at least part of his mood was based on a recent lack of sleep.

“A room.” Hakuba dragged a hand through his hair, turning his attention to the stale bit of toast on the table. “It’s so dusty around here that my allergies were running rampant, and while I was attempting to clean, I began taking down pictures to clean them properly, and when one didn’t come off the wall, I wanted to check if it was affixed to it…well, he’ll be angry with me if I tell you which one, but I’ve already told you more than I should have, I’m sure. In short, I found where he stores Kid’s gear. As I’m sure you can guess, he was quite put out when he found me there.”

“He has a room for that here?” Conan hid a flush behind the mug. It was a dumb question…of course he would keep his gear nearby. (He’d just wanted to keep Hakuba talking. Kaito tended to skirt around problematic questions with teasing and subject changes. Hakuba tended to go quiet and get lost in his own thoughts. It made getting to the bottom of things a real chore.) Hakuba didn’t seem to notice the odd comment and hummed, the last hint of fiery red in his cheeks fading. He sighed again, dropping his head in his hands.

“…I tried explaining it was just an accident, that I hadn’t intentionally gone snooping, but he was just being so irrational…ah, no, I’m aware I am also at fault. I got a bit heated.” His head migrated down to lay on the table. “I tried to apologize…but I think I only made things worse. I’ve been staying here for over a month now, surely he knows that I would’ve found it long ago if I’d truly wanted to...”

“He knows that.” Hakuba looked so crestfallen when he glanced at him…he was worried he’d done something irreversible and it was clearly written all over his face. Conan smiled. “Trust me. He might not have been ready to show you yet, but if he really was worried about you looking around, he never would’ve let you stay so long in the first place.” He pushed aside the coffee. It left a filmy aftertaste…it must’ve been made hours ago, long before the argument broke out. “Maybe I can talk to him.” Hakuba tiredly nodded to the unlit stairs, faintly illuminated by the sunset’s glow.

“I would appreciate if you could at least calm him down…I’m afraid I’m not too good at that sort of thing.” Conan gave a reassuring nod and made his way back to the stairs. He let his feet fall heavy on the steps as a warning to Kaito he was coming and knocked on the closed bedroom door.

“…mm.” Conan let himself in, finding Kaito stretched out on his bed, facing the wall. Conan picked over the discarded crutches he should be using (and never did) and took up residence on the nearby desk chair. There were used mugs collecting on the bedside table, a few articles of clothing haphazardly left flung across the floor, a handful of textbooks in poor condition shoved in the narrow space between the desk and the bed. The room faintly smelled of disinfectant. The first time he had come, the room had been spotless, save for accumulated dust in the owner’s absence.

He cleared his throat in an effort to get Kaito to face him. It didn’t work.

“I heard. Wanna talk?”

“…no.” Conan absently let his gaze wander over Kaito’s back, fully intact and covered by a clean button down. (It was a far cry from the grimy, bloodstained scar left behind from broken and splintered bones and wriggling claws under skin ripping into the moldy basement-)

“Why not? Talking helps. We’ve been over this.”

“No.”

“You can try.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“…” Kaito rolled over with an irritated huff. (He was relieved to see that if not for the bandages still creeping white vines around his wrists and peeking through the collar of his shirt, he looked almost normal again.) He scowled at Conan. “What happened to privacy?”

“You relinquished most of it when we became friends. It’s especially not applicable when you pick fights with Hakuba over stupid stuff.”

“Hey-!”

“Sorry.” Conan held up his hands placatingly. “But it feels as if every time I visit, you two are at each other’s throats over something or other.” He set his elbow on the desktop and cushioned his chin in his palm. “You’re trying to drive him away, aren’t you.” Kaito propped himself up, his scowl smoothing into a familiar mask of apathy.

“Sometimes people just disagree, pipsqueak. There are personalities that don’t mesh, and we happen to be them.”

“I don’t believe that, and neither do you.” Conan nodded at the door. “You could have kicked him out weeks ago. You didn’t. You could’ve had Aoko help you instead. You didn’t. You want him to stay, but you’re deliberately trying to make him mad so he leaves on his own. Hakuba finding your secret stash was just a good excuse to push his buttons. So? What’s really going on?” He leaned back and relaxed, letting his body language convey he wasn’t trying to be confrontational. Kaito groaned in his throat and kicked himself into a fully upright position.

“You’re relentless,” he grunted. He scrubbed at his eyes, smudging the makeup concealing the same dark purple bags as Hakuba’s. Conan raised an eyebrow but purposely didn’t point it out. There was no way Kaito was in the mood for additional prodding at the moment. “Just so you know, I really am upset about Saguru - when I found him he was rifling through my dad’s records. And before you start lecturing me, I know I should’ve locked that door as soon as I could stand up again. I wasn’t thinking about it, alright?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You wanted to.”

“…”

Kaito sighed.

“Whatever.” He hobbled to his feet, limping his way slowly towards the closet. Conan would’ve offered to help him, but he was too short to do anything about it currently. Kaito used the closet door frame as an anchor to lean over and press an ear against the bedroom door. After a moment, he shuffled his way back, moving as far back into the room as he could go, gesturing for Conan to follow him. He dropped onto a spot on the floor in the corner farthest from the hallway, forcing Conan to also pick a spot on the floor in order to be close enough to hear him when he lowered his voice.

“…look…I…” a coin appeared and disappeared in his hand, fingers moving to itch deep red scratches along his exposed wrists. “Don’t tell me it’s silly, I know it is, I just…I…augh, this shouldn’t even…”

“What’s wrong?” Kaito glanced at him, dropping his eyes down to stare at the fresh deck of cards he’d produced to rapidly shuffle through.

“…I…I’ve been…dreaming.” He winced, as if the very admission was too embarrassing to be said aloud. Conan waited for him to continue. He didn’t.

“So have I,” he offered helpfully. Kaito gave him a strange look, the cards loosely falling into his lap. “They’re…they’ve been unusually violent lately.” Kaito kept staring. He seemed fixated on Conan’s face, squinting slightly against the last rays of sunlight beaming through the window.

“…have you…y’know…seen a beach? In your dreams? With…like…buildings on it?” Conan frowned.

“How did you know?”

“I...” Kaito gripped both wrists tight, nails digging into skin. His face had gone ashen, bloodless and very nearly lifeless. “…you haven’t…I dunno…seen…me, or, or Saguru…have you?”

“Yes. Last night, actually.”

“…” hands still clenched around his wrists, Kaito staggered to his feet, pacing tight, uneven circles on the round rug by his bed. Conan quietly got up and stood on the rug, breaking his pattern. He motioned to the bed, crossing his arms. Kaito hesitantly sat on the edge. Conan swung up beside him, watching to make sure he didn’t try walking on his bad leg again.

“What’s going on?” Concern was gently churning in his stomach. He immediately clamped a lid on it. He had to be careful here…Kaito seemed to be able to pick up on it, and tended to clam up even more if he caught so much as a whiff of it. “You can tell me. It’s probably nothing I haven’t heard before.”

“…doubt it.” Kaito blew out a breath, hunched over his lap, gaze drifting across the floor in nonsensical patterns. “Saguru…he hasn’t been…he can’t sleep. He told me it started right around when Akako got involved in everything…I thought it would go away over time, but it’s getting worse. He hasn’t slept in three days. I don’t know what to do anymore, he isn’t sleeping and he won’t leave and just go home for a break for a couple days; I don’t even know if he can think straight anymore, he sometimes just sits and stares at the wall for hours and even when he sleeps it’s like he zones out more than anything and I-I just…I-I don’t know how to stop it, I c-can’t-“

“Slow down.” Conan shifted a bit closer, making sure he was within easy reaching distance to be able to ground him physically if necessary. Kaito glanced at him, chest heaving slightly. He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. His hands shook slightly when he peeled his fingers free one by one and settled them in his lap. “Start over. He hasn’t been sleeping? Do you know what’s causing it?”

“Me.” Kaito picked at a hangnail, back to tracing invisible patterns on the floor. “Pretty much right after I was…uh…t-the incident…he started having dreams. I could see him in mine, too. Part of him, anyway. He’s just a pair of eyes in the corner of the room, watching me. I thought it was cuz of whatever weird voodoo Akako did to ‘connect’ us, but I kinda thought it’d go away once Kid…once I went back to normal. But, it hasn’t, and Saguru doesn’t even want to sleep anymore. No matter what I do, he won’t sleep at all on his own.”

“Have you talked to him about it?” With the way Kaito froze, guiltily staring down at nothing, the answer was no. Conan refrained from rolling his eyes. “I’m willing to bet he hasn’t brought it up, either, then.”

“…”

“Is that all? You’re still sharing dreams and Hakuba stopped sleeping?” Conan tipped his head. “It doesn’t sound that crazy to me. In fact, I’d say that’s pretty normal after everything you’ve been through lately.”

“…there’s…that’s not…” Kaito pushed both hands through his hair, spiking it oddly in all directions. “I think…he’s hiding something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” He fisted his hands in his lap, scraping a nail up and down the side of his forefinger. “I just…I can’t find my phone. I’ve been using Saguru’s.”

“I noticed.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to call Akako…she seems like she would know a way for us to stop sharing our dreams. I thought if I kicked Saguru out of my head, he’d go back to normal. But…every time I try…he stops me. Says he’s already planning on it and he’ll get around to it. But he never does. I don’t know why he won’t let me talk to Akako…I tried doing it without him seeing, but she didn’t answer. And now with you-“ Kaito stopped, his lower lip caught in his teeth. Conan leaned forward.

“Now that I, what?”

“…I…you…I-I saw you. Last night.” Kaito turned away slightly. “I didn’t think it was actually you. Saguru’s the only one…ah.” He shuffled a bit to the right away from Conan. Conan frowned and hopped off the bed to walk around and stand in front of him.

“Hm?”

“…augh. Fine.” Kaito heaved a sigh and drew his knees up, hunching over them. “…I…you can’t tell Saguru.” He looked unusually anxious when he met Coann’s eyes, something swimming in his gaze that was a bit too clouded over to make out what it was. Conan nodded. “…I…don’t think…all my memories are back.”

“…you…what?” Kaito tucked more of his face behind his knees. Conan was sure that if he could, he would vanish entirely. (He was selfishly grateful that Kaito was too sore to pull off his typical disappearing act.)

“I think…mm. My dreams have always been…kinda abstract, y’know? But they’ve been getting more and more detailed lately…and when I go see Aoko…things don’t…look right. She sometimes says something that I can’t understand no matter how much she repeats it. I still can’t really remember my parents. They’re…fuzzy. Even when Saguru talks to me…sometimes…it sounds like he’s saying gibberish. I know it’s not him…I can read his lips, but his voice just…doesn’t make sense. Something…something’s wrong with me.” He pressed a hand against his stomach, wincing.

“I…don’t laugh…but…I feel…something…moving. Sometimes.” He rested his fingertips against his upper ribcage, staring out at nothing. “Right about here.” (Fingers writhing under the surface eager to escape-) Conan cleared his throat and his mind. There was no way. Haibara had assured him that while the drug was experimental, it wouldn’t have the same short duration that Conan’s did, simply because of their differing symptoms. (But what if…?) “I don’t…” Kaito’s voice dropped to a near silent whisper, rubbing absent circles in his chest. “I don’t…I-I don’t…feel right. I don’t…feel human anymore.” Conan froze. What else was he supposed to do?

“…what do you mean?” He asked, eerily calm even to his own ears. Kaito didn’t bother looking back up at him. He buried his head behind his knees, effectively blocking Conan from his sight entirely.

“I remember…telling Saguru something. That…that Kid wasn’t human. Not anymore. I don’t know why…why would I say that? He’s…he’s me, isn’t he? Why wouldn’t he be?” He took a short breath. “But…I can feel him. He’s…changed. I can see his memories…they’re so hard to pin down, there’s too many and I can’t…but…L-Lion…he wanted something. A drug. I thought…I thought I found it. But Kid’s memories…I think…what I found was fake.” A small brown vial appeared in his hand, balancing perfectly on his kneecap. “Someone…someone swapped it with alcohol. That’s why he killed his men…he thought they did it. But…they didn’t. It was…someone else. A-and I think…whoever it was…put it in Kid.” He finally glanced up, flinching back at Conan’s shocked expression. “It wasn’t…it was no miracle drug.”

“What was it?”

Kaito shrugged.

“Something unnatural.”

“Unnatural?” Conan crossed his arms in an effort to have something he could focus on besides his swirling thoughts. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know what to make of any of this. Hakuba clearly wasn’t doing well mentally. Kaito was unreliable in terms of accurate information, with his memories still scrambled, but he strongly suspected he wasn’t lying. They needed help. They needed someone safe to go to. (Haibara. He had to get them both to Haibara. She would know what to do. She could call Akako…she could help.)

Before that, though…

“Can I check something really quick?” Forehead wrinkled in confusion, Kaito nodded, unraveling just enough to be able to plant one foot back on the floor. Conan clambered up on the bed, and when Kaito tried to turn and face him, he lightly pushed at his shoulder to keep him facing forward. Conan breathed in and let it out. He just needed to see if it was there. He grasped the bottom of Kaito’s shirt and slowly lifted it. He was only halfway when he stopped. He had his answer.

In the fading light, he could clearly make out the remains of a deep scar, running almost perfectly down the entire length of his spine.

(It could’ve been a trick of the shadows…but Conan could swear that he saw the quickest, shortest imprint of a hand appear just under the skin.)

Chapter Text

“No.”

Kaito was scowling. He couldn’t really understand why, but he was definitely upset about something and Conan had the unfortunate job of figuring out what he’d said to prompt such a reaction. (Hakuba was too busy staring dazedly at the house to even pay attention to the increasingly tense discussion. It was…mildly concerning.)

“She can-“

“No.” Kaito’s scowl deepened, feet planted firmly on the sidewalk.

“But, if you just-“

“No!”

“Why don’t you want to see Haibara?” He couldn’t figure it out. Sure, Kaito probably didn’t trust her for a lot of different reasons, but Conan knew that so long as he had an escape route available, he was usually fine being with anyone, anywhere. If nothing else, the front door was wide and unguarded. Kaito shuffled back a half step, nearly bumping into Hakuba at his elbow. “We came all the way here. She can-“

“No. I…I just…no.” Hakuba blinked and raised an eyebrow at him. It took Conan a second to realize that Kaito had grabbed the blonde detective’s wrist, white knuckled and shaking slightly. It was a bit late to be getting cold feet, honestly, considering they were already on the professor’s lawn. But something about Agasa’s house had spooked him, and he’d mulishly dug in his heels at the gate and refused to take another step. Conan moved closer, nudging Kaito away from the entrance. The shaking lessened significantly, his grip on Hakuba relaxing.

“I was the one who asked her to help,” Conan reminded him. “She’s just going to make sure nothing’s wrong, that’s all.” Kaito quietly studied the house, squinting up at it. He hummed in his throat, relinquishing his grip on Hakuba to wrap around and dig into his own arm.

“It’s just her?” Probably.

“Yes.”

“…’kay.” He shrank behind Hakuba. The blonde glanced down at Conan and shrugged. He made his way to the door, Kaito hot on his heels. Conan sighed to himself. It had taken a lot of convincing to get them to agree to let Haibara check them over. (A bit too much convincing, honestly.)

She was ready and waiting for them in the living room, arms crossed, her box of instruments at the ready. Kaito stopped dead when he saw her, refusing to move closer. Either not noticing or used to it by now, Hakuba left him at the door and cordially greeted Haibara, settling himself on the sofa across from her. Conan attempted nudging Kaito forward. He didn’t budge. He struggled to find what Kaito was looking at, because from what he could tell from his vantage point closer to the ground, it surprisingly wasn’t Haibara. Following his gaze led him to the box on the coffee table, filled to bursting with a stethoscope and antiseptics, medical wrap and different sized bandages. It was only different from Agasa’s well used kit for general bumps and scrapes by the clearly defined Haibara characters scratched into the metal lid.

Conan frowned. There wasn’t anything visible that should’ve put him off. (He hated having to make guesses with Kaito - it was always a gamble, and he didn’t like getting it wrong.) He tugged on Kaito’s sleeve, pulling him down within earshot.

“It’s fine,” he whispered. He even managed a smile. “She’s my friend.” Kaito hummed his reluctant acceptance. Conan still wasn’t entirely certain he’d addressed the real problem, but it seemed to be enough. Kaito skirted around the offending box to perch awkwardly beside Hakuba, squashed into the narrow space between him and the arm of the couch. Haibara raised an eyebrow.

“…we should get started.” She looked up at Hakuba, silently asking for permission, and he nodded, allowing her to clamber up in the empty space on his other side to peer into his eyes with a penlight. She moved the thing side to side for him to track, her frown deepening by the second. “Mm. That’s what I thought.”

“What do you mean?” Conan asked.

“I mean,” Haibara hummed distractedly, “that Hakuba’s definitely missing more than a couple day’s worth of sleep. His visual cognition is more than slow and something in his optic nerve appears swollen, but I don’t have the tools or skills to be able to discern what. That’s mostly what I wanted to check him for.”

“You can tell that much?” She leaned back with a barely concealed sigh.

“Unfortunately. I’m no specialist , so I can’t address any of those issues here and now. Although, as for his lack of sleep, while you could argue that it’s not unusual, I don’t think it is. There’s likely a cause for it that I believe goes beyond a bad dream or two.” She paused just long enough to shake her head at Hakuba in disapproval before turning to give Kaito a once-over. “As for him - I’ve run through a few scenarios and tested what I could from a bit of blood I swabbed while you were off chasing Kid. I think I can confidently say at this point that his symptoms were not caused by the antidote. I can still check with a fresher sample, but I doubt I’m wrong.”

“Then, what caused them?”

“Let me see if I can explain this as simply as possible.” The penlight in her hand rapidly flickered off and on as she clicked the power button repeatedly. “I can’t know for absolute certain what Kuroba was given that split him in two. My only assumption is that it was the apotoxin, as you told me. Splitting a part of oneself into a completely new being with a physical form is unheard of; however, I can’t say it’s impossible, especially after seeing what effects it’s had on you. In light of that, I designed this antidote slightly differently than yours. At its core it’s still the exact same medicine. The biggest difference between the two is that, while I designed yours with the intention of strictly nullifying the poison, I had to include a special bonding agent to counteract the specific aspects of it that would’ve separated Kid from Kuroba.” She looked over at Kaito, stiff as a board, staring at her with blatant distrust. “May I?”

“…mm.” Haibara hopped up on the arm of the couch, repeating what she’d done with Hakuba and shining a light in his eyes. (Kaito tried leaning away. It earned him a scathingly disapproving frown.)

“Currently,” Haibara continued absently, “the best comparison for what’s happened is that it’s as if his body is fighting a tough infection. The apotoxin is a foreign substance, after all; it makes sense that he would try to reject it.” Haibara dug out and held up a thin strip of paper. “To confirm, I’ll need that new blood sample-“

“No.”

“Fine. Saliva works, too.” She held the paper up to his face. Kaito frowned at it.

“What?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m supposed to lick it?”

“That’s right.”

“Ew.” He hesitantly licked the strip, wrinkling his nose in response. “Ew,” he reiterated. Haibara slid off the couch, disappearing into the basement for a moment and returning empty handed.

“What I’m looking for is a white blood cell count. It needs a few minutes to set, but I suspect that it will tell me what I already think is true. Kuroba, you’ve had an allergic reaction.” Kaito blinked dumbly at her.

“…to what?”

“The apotoxin.”

“I’m allergic?”

“That’s what I said.”

“And that…did all this?”

“Most likely.”

“There’s no way.” Conan weakly waved a hand in front of him. “How could that even happen?” Haibara shrugged, tucking her hands in the pockets of her coat. Her eyes had softened, gears spinning behind her gaze in muted disbelief.

“That’s the thing. I’m not sure. The apotoxin is and has always been intended to kill, to be a poison that would leave no trace. Simply by surviving, Kudo, you became the first human anomaly, the exception to the rule. This, I’m afraid, is also an exception, so I’m unsure how to approach solving this. I think that Kuroba’s immune system went into something of a shock and tried to correct the chemical imbalance as best it could.” She smiled at Conan’s nervous frown. “It is, however, impossible for him to be allergic to the antidote as well. Simply sensitive.”

“But…what kind of allergy would cause Kid and Kaito to separate like that?” Haibara shrugged.

“I need to do much more research to tell you that. This is just my best hypothesis…I’ve eliminated most other plausible possibilities. It would be far more helpful to have another blood sample, but if that option is off the table, then I’ll need some time to run tests on what I do have. That’s all I can really say at this juncture.” She poked Hakuba’s kneecap. He jolted, as if waking from a deep sleep. (Conan’s eyebrows lowered - he’d looked like he had been following the conversation up to this point.) “As for you - you haven’t taken it yet, have you?” Hakuba scrubbed at his eye, a scratchy groan rumbling in his throat.

“Ah…apologies, taken what, exactly?”

“That friend of yours, Koizumi.” Haibara crossed her arms. “She told me she gave you something that would sever your connection to one another. I’ll be honest, despite her best explanations, I still don’t see how you could be connected in any way, or how it could be broken through medicine. However, I do think it would be in your best interest to try taking it anyway, even if just to see if it helps. You can’t continue to function this way without it. If you try it’s only going to cause irreparable damage.” Both Conan and Kaito gave her a strange look. She returned them with a curiously raised eyebrow. “What?”

“It…can be broken?” Kaito glanced at Hakuba, who had taken to looking down at his lap, guiltily rubbing his thumb over his knuckles in a repetitive pattern. “Akako said it can be fixed? When? With what?” It was very, very faint, but Conan clearly heard his breath catch in his throat. “You knew…and you didn’t do anything? Why?”

“I intended to,” Hakuba told him, the most alert Conan had heard him be recently. “Believe me, I did, but…well…I was taking care of you, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to put it off for a little bit…” he fished a bite-sized piece of white chocolate wrapped in wrinkled clear plastic out of his shirt pocket. “To be honest,” he murmured, turning the chocolate over in his hands, “Akako has been texting me nearly every day. She claims she knows I haven’t eaten it yet…I simply…didn’t feel right doing it so soon.”

“Why not?” Kaito’s voice had frosted over, his expression smoothed out into an unreadable mask of neutrality. (One of the only downsides of Kid being returned where he belonged, Conan thought.) Hakuba immediately picked up on the mood change, straightening in his seat with a defensive frown.

“Why would I?”

“So you stop doing this!” Kaito stood, fingers flexing at his sides as if he couldn’t decide if he should clench them into fists or not. “That’s why you wouldn’t let me talk to her? So I wouldn’t find out? Look at you! You’re barely functioning, and for what? If you have a way out, take it!”

“And leave you to deal with your dreams alone?” Hakuba stood too, expression clouding over in a brewing storm. Conan cautiously offered a “maybe we should talk-“ and was swiftly ignored. “I can’t do that, not now!”

“I don’t want your help! Take the stupid medicine!”

“Not until you’re better! I can’t - I won’t fail you again, not if I can help it!” Nothing about Kaito’s posture changed, but Conan noticed a distinct chill in his body language that settled over him like a heavy cloak. Without another word, he marched to the door, slipped on his shoes, and left, letting the door bang shut behind him. Conan took off after him. He’d barely gotten halfway down the block when he caught up. He was sure that Kaito’s limp was the only reason he hadn’t gotten much further.

“What’s wrong?” Was the obvious first question. While Kaito still had an apathetically neutral expression plastered on his face, his tense shoulders and stiff gait gave away the roiling emotions buried underneath. He hummed in his throat, something harsh and grating that Conan translated as ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ “You realize that’s not going to solve anything.”

“Obviously.” Kaito huffed and pushed a hand through his hair, tugging agitatedly on stubborn knots. “I just…why does he do this?” His forefinger found its way between his teeth, pinpricks of blood pooling to the surface of his skin. “Reckless…I don’t…he’s an idiot!”

“Why do you say that?” Truthfully, Conan wanted to know more about what this connection they supposedly had was and how it was affecting them. It directly correlated to why Hakuba had made the choices he had and why Kaito was as upset as he was now. Hakuba had given him a brief overview before, but it’d been incomplete and all he’d really gleaned from it was that the connection was some form of intentionally shared telepathy. (A type of extremely sensitive empathy, perhaps. Whatever it was, it had to be strong to elicit this kind of response.)

“Why? Because he promised!” Kaito sharply rounded a corner, heading away from the train station Conan had assumed he was going towards. (A good sign - if he wasn’t trying to head home yet, it meant he was willing to talk.) He limpingly marched partway down the street before suddenly pausing mid-step. Conan nearly ran into him. “I don’t…he promised,” Kaito said quieter. “He told me he would be careful. That he wouldn’t do anything crazy. But…he still followed me, I got him involved, and I…I…” he buried his head in his hands. “I hurt him, too,” he admitted so softly Conan almost missed it. “He’s stretching himself thin for my sake and he won’t stop…I-I just…” Conan elbowed his leg, making sure he bothered to look down at him.

“You’re reckless, too, you know,” he chided. “The way I see it, he’s doing exactly what you would do in his place.” He tipped his head. “Am I wrong?”

“That’s not-“

“Am I?”

“…”

“Listen,” Conan said quieter, “Hakuba is doing his best. It might have been a poor decision on his part to not break this connection sooner, but he really does want to help.”

“I know that.” Kaito sighed, moving a hand covered in bite marks to rub at his shoulder. “Believe me, I know he’s trying…I just…he shouldn’t try so hard.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.” He did. He had known for a while, actually. Hakuba trying to help in his own way was entirely unhelpful if he hurt himself in the process. Kaito had never been able to stand people with a self destructive personality. (The irony wasn’t lost on him.) Conan elbowed his leg again.

“You should tell him that, then.”

“I’d rather die.”

“Don’t be such a baby.”

“I’ll do what I want.” Kaito grunted, shifting his hand to rub at his stomach irritably. Conan narrowed his eyes.

“Something wrong?”

“…no. I don’t know.” He scratched harder through the fabric of his shirt, digging his fingers in deeper than he needed to. “Just…itchy.”

“What, mosquitoes?”

“No…it’s fine.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and continued walking, taking longer strides and meandering down side streets much more aimlessly than before. “Anyway, how, uh…how are you doing? With that?” He nodded to the cast still wrapped around Conan’s wrist. Conan flexed his fingers, moving his arm in a rotating motion.

“There were a lot of little fractures, but it’s healing well enough - they said the cast can come off soon.” Kaito probably wouldn’t tell him if he asked about himself, (he rarely did unless under duress,) but if it was someone else… “How’s Hakuba? Besides the lack of sleep, I mean.” Kaito hummed, stopping at a playground Conan often took the kids to and rested his arms on the top of the chain link fence enclosing it.

“Not terrible, all things considered.” One hand moved up to scratch red streaks on the inside of his wrist. His other arm was still bandaged, not that it stopped him from attempting to scratch there, too. (Wearing short sleeves exposed just how many bandages still decorated his arms, running up and disappearing under the fabric.) “It’s just…just his eye.” Kaito angled away enough that Conan couldn’t see his face. “He bumps into a lot of stuff. He says he’s gotten used to it, but he still looks at things like he can’t really see them or hits his head on doorways. He can’t read anything and he keeps dropping stuff, like he can’t grip it properly.”

“…it’s not-“

“Gonna tell me it’s not my fault?” Kaito chuckled humorlessly, the scratching becoming insistent. “Right. He finally went to a doctor the other day, you know. They told him he’d waited too long to get corrective surgery. The injury’s permanent. He won’t ever see out of his right eye again.”

“It’s not as big a deal as you might think.” Conan breathed a tired sigh. “I can’t say you’re completely innocent, obviously, but I know you weren’t thinking clearly at the time. Hakuba…it seems like he’s accepted what’s happened and is learning to live with it. Being all mopey like this isn’t helping - he might think you consider his efforts pointless.”

“I don’t think it’s pointless, I’m taking responsibility.”

“First time for everything I guess.”

“Hmph.” Kaito relaxed, most of his tension burning away. “You’re such a pain.”

“Yeah, I know.” They settled into a comfortable silence. Conan glanced up at him, still absently scratching his wrists and staring at an indeterminate point on the other side of the park. He didn’t want to ask, now that he’d finally settled down, but he was curious. (It’d been on his mind for weeks…he’d meant to ask yesterday when he’d dropped by.) “So…have you learned anything? About what happened to Aoko?” Kaito glanced at him with a confused frown.

“What about her?”

“Back when you and Hakuba went missing; Koizumi said she’d been attacked. Was it related to the organization? Was it random?”

“What are you talking about?” Kaito was frowning now, some of the color bleeding out of his face. Conan’s eyebrows shot up.

“Didn’t they tell you?” He was surprised. Surely someone would’ve relayed what happened to him - if not Hakuba, why not Aoko herself, or Koizumi? Surely they wouldn’t all have kept something like that a secret from him. (Unless they hadn’t…had Kaito forgotten if they even told him?)

“I’d like to think that I would remember something like that,” Kaito told him flatly. (Apparently he’d picked up on his unspoken observation.) “What do you know about it?”

“Not much,” Conan said honestly. “Just that someone attacked her and Koizumi stopped it. I tried asking her about it in private, but she didn’t seem to feel comfortable telling a kid what happened.”

“Course she wouldn’t…she’d keep that kinda thing to herself.”

“Would she keep it from you? Aren’t you close?” The icy stare directed his way lacked its usual ire. Not that he ever got terribly mad with Conan, but he seemed too…distracted to be upset.

“…”

“Sorry. I just thought maybe you could find out what happened. She would talk to you.”

“…right.”

“Mm.” Conan’s face scrunched up inquisitively as he watched Kaito’s hand move back down to his stomach, scratching a bit too roughly. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Kaito reached under his shirt to scratch at his skin more effectively. Conan climbed the fence, settling on top. He was about eye level to Kaito’s chest at that height.

“Can I?”

“You worry too much, you know that?”

“What’s your point?” Conan crossed his short arms. “Besides, I usually have a reason to be. You can’t tell me I don’t.” Kaito mimicked him, folding his arms over his midsection. Though, it wasn’t the same stubborn gesture as Conan’s…his fingers were digging into his sides, his arms shaking ever so slightly. (Like he was protecting himself…)

“…no…it’s fine.”

“Is there some reason you don’t want to show me?” Kaito shuffled back a step or two, not letting up the pressure on his stomach.

“…”

“What is it?”

“It’s not…I-I don’t…” a short huff. “I don’t…want you to see them.” Conan cocked his head.

“See…what?” He didn’t know why Kaito would be hesitant to show him the rest of his injuries. Conan didn’t know and hadn’t seen the full extent to what had been done when he’d been taken, of course, but he knew the scars were there. (They both knew it wasn’t pretty.) Kaito moved back more, already shaking his head.

“Only…I’ve only shown Saguru…I-I don’t…want anyone else to see.”

“See what?” Conan pressed. Kaito shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortably looking away. (It bothered Conan whenever he wouldn’t make eye contact. Like it was something he couldn’t tell him without pretending he wasn’t there.) Kaito hummed softly in his throat, anxiously scanning his surroundings for something. (Looking for any kind of excuse to stall, most likely.) His eye caught something across the street and he abruptly froze. He angled in front of Conan, the arm he shot out to block him from what he’d seen already trembling in what Conan assumed was either fear or rage. (Or both.) “What’s wrong?” If he’d seen someone dangerous, maybe remembered something important…

Kaito didn’t answer. A deep, low rumble bubbled up from somewhere in his chest. (It was angry, almost animalistic-) He shot across the street, beelining towards someone sauntering past, someone with terracotta hued skin and a lopsided grin - (but Lion’s already dead, the organization disposed of his body months ago-) and before Conan could process what was happening, Kaito hauled back and punched the man in the face. Whoever it was toppled like a stack of bricks, letting out a yelp of pain and surprise. Conan shook himself out of his stupor and darted over to grab hold of Kaito’s arm, already winding up for a second swing.

“Oi, what are you doing?” Rather than answering, Kaito swept him off the ground, arms locked tightly around his chest to hold him close. He was breathing erratically, more animalistic growling rumbling deep in his throat. “Calm down, it’s not him, I promise.” Conan glanced down at the unfortunate victim, rubbing at a quickly forming bruise on his cheekbone. “I’m so sorry, he wasn’t-“ Conan stopped when the man finally looked up, a disgruntled scowl plastered on his face.

“Friend of yours?” Amuro grouched, sizing up Kaito with a frown. “Haven’t had someone catch me off guard like that in a while.” At his voice, Kaito’s arms loosened ever so slightly, just enough for Conan to have the space to wriggle around and make eye contact. Kaito was at least focused and aware, though now he looked uncertain, glancing between Amuro and Conan, a faint keening sound catching in his throat. His breathing hadn’t settled, his pulse still too quick.

“It’s alright,” Conan said quietly. He didn’t know if Amuro could hear him, but so long as Kaito believed he couldn’t, it was fine. “I know him. You remember Amuro, right? From the cafe? You’ve had a few run-ins before. At heists.” It probably wasn’t the best thing to bring up at this point, but the quicker his memory triggered, the better. (He might consider Amuro dangerous in some way, but he wasn’t his kidnapper, and that was what Conan needed him to understand the most.) Kaito shuddered. The noises rumbling in the back of his throat intensified as he moved back, Conan no more than a teddy bear in his arms and about as useful.

“…a…heist?” Kaito shook his head. “No…you can’t…y-you shouldn’t…”

“He’s not going to hurt us.” Amuro was giving them a weird look now, still sitting on the ground where he’d fallen.

“Um…if it’s worth anything, yeah, I don’t make a habit of attacking random kids in parks.” He held up his hands placatingly. “I don’t think we’ve even met.” Conan sent him a quick look begging him to shut up. He didn’t know if his message got across. Kaito was not going to respond well to someone like Amuro until he relaxed. Kaito squeezed him like the plushie he’d been demoted to.

“…you trust too much,” Kaito muttered, glaring down at Amuro. “You gotta…y-you have to be more careful.” His eyebrows lowered, a dark, twisting shadow of…something flashing in his eyes. It bloomed the beginnings of unease in Conan’s chest. “I-I can’t…I won’t let you get hurt. Not again.” The card gun flashed silver in his hand. Conan instinctively reached for it in an effort to hide it, (Amuro can’t see-) and was a second too late for Kaito to hold it out of his reach. That dark…something…seemed to seep out of his eyes, warping around his body and curling like warped vines. The arm still wrapped protectively around Conan spasmed, grabbing him a bit too tight, the rhythm of his breathing suddenly changing.

(Something’s not right-)

“I have to keep you safe.” The tone of his voice was too low. “From everyone.”

Chapter Text

“I’d drop that if I were you,” Amuro warned, slowly climbing to his feet. He had a steely glower firmly locked on the card gun trained on his eye. “It’s never a good idea to point a weapon at a stranger.” He clenched his fists and dropped into a loose fighting stance. His glower became a grin, sharp and bright and a little too excited for Conan’s liking. Kaito took the bait and fired. Amuro sidestepped easily, jumping back to add more distance. An older man walking by let out a startled yelp when Amuro nearly crashed into him.

His concerned sound turned heads. That wasn’t good. Conan was stuck watching helplessly as panic erupted around them, people fleeing to empty the sidewalk, screaming about the ‘man with a gun’ and his ‘hostage.’ Amuro charged to throw a right cross. Kaito evaded, firing several consecutive rounds. Amuro dodged and swept a leg out to trip him up, Kaito rocked back on his heels, and suddenly Conan was being spirited away down a string of back alleys. People around them let out frantic screams as Kaito continued firing behind him. Conan could only assume Amuro was following close behind, matching them step for step, waiting for an opportunity to counter. Conan tugged on Kaito’s sleeve to make sure he had his attention.

“Slow down; let me talk to him, it’ll be fine!”

“No…it won’t,” Kaito wheezed. He swung over a guardrail into oncoming traffic. The air filled with the concerned blasts of horns from motorists as they bolted across the road to the opposite sidewalk. Conna heard the scrape of Amuro’s shoes hitting the concrete milliseconds after them. He squirmed around to face him, not able to do anything else from his demoted position of teddy bear.

‘Let me handle this,’ he silently mouthed. ‘I’ll explain later.’ Amuro incredulously raised an eyebrow as another card sailed past his head, needing to vault mailboxes and bulldoze through pedestrians just to keep up.

‘He threatened me. With a gun,’ Amuro mouthed back, very slowly and very deliberately. ‘He’s actively shooting at me. With a gun.’

‘It’s not real!’ Conan protested.

‘With. A. Gun,’ Amuro reiterated, eyebrows scrunched close together in utter disbelief.

‘It’s complicated!’

‘How?’

‘Later!’

‘Why not now?’ Conan stared blankly at Amuro, expertly dodging and weaving everything from traffic to trash cans to keep up, Kaito occasionally firing a card behind him to ensure Amuro kept his distance. Now was far from a good time to try to explain. He would argue it was the absolute worst time to explain, actually. If he tried shouting aloud, Kaito would hear, and there was a good chance he would either become confused or even more upset. If Conan silently signaled the problem to Amuro, it would take far too long and things would get lost in translation. (He didn’t even know what the problem was, not really. He couldn’t explain something he didn’t understand.)

Maybe noticing something in Conan’s face, or maybe even finally taking the overt hints he was dropping, Amuro’s expression gradually shifted from befuddlement to resignation. He slowed to a stop, and Conan quickly lost sight of him in the crowd. He silently promised to come back to find him as soon as he could.

He belatedly realized that he had been so preoccupied with Amuro that he hadn’t been paying attention at all to where they were headed. He twisted around to look ahead. Kaito was sprinting full speed through, at his best guess, the southside of Tokyo, near the train lines. Apparently not noticing their tail had disappeared, Kaito took a sharp turn, plowing through the lines at the station. He nimbly leapt over the ticket readers, ignored the shouts from a security guard for him to stop, and wound his way through the waiting crowd as gracefully as a cat.

He was moving concerningly close to the yellow line, steadily inching closer and closer to the edge as he ran. Conan reached up to tug on his shirt to grab his attention - maybe he hadn’t noticed? Kaito moved closer and closer and closer and Conan’s heart plummeted out of his chest when they dropped off the platform ahead of a braking train blasting its horn. They were bounding down empty tracks and beelining for a deserted platform across the way before Conan could even process that they were somehow still alive. By the time he’d retrieved his heart from the bottom of his stomach, Kaito had sprinted to the next platform, scrambled to the surface, and bolted towards the exit that led to the other side of town.

He had no idea where Kaito was going, but he at least needed to stop running, and Conan needed to hurry up and figure out how to stop him. His uneven breathing had long devolved into harsh, wheezing rattles, the arm protectively wrapped around Conan’s waist shaking out of tempo with his footsteps. Kaito would probably keep going until his body gave out. They turned onto a relatively empty residential street. (It was stupid, but they’d drawn more than enough attention to themselves already.) Conan drew in a deep breath, filling his unhelpfully small body with as much air as it could hold.

“Stop!” He shouted at the top of his lungs. Startled, Kaito stumbled to a halt. He pivoted, frantically scanning their surroundings for any sign of Amuro. “Put me down,” Conan said firmly, frustration leaking into his voice. Kaito obligingly lowered him to the ground, disappearing the card gun who knows where. Conan clamped onto his wrist and tugged on it until Kaito turned to look at him, eyes dark and heaving for breath with a concerningly loud rattle clattering from somewhere deep in his chest. “Sit. Now,” Conan snapped. “You need to calm down.” Kaito flinched. He compliantly sank down to sit on the sidewalk. Conan rubbed agitated circles in his temples. He hadn’t meant to sound so angry.

(While his heart was back in his chest where it belonged, it was still pumping the dredges of adrenaline into his veins.)

“I need you to calm down,” Conan repeated a bit softer. “We have to talk.” Kaito nodded, dropping his gaze to the ground. His breathing was worryingly haggard, rough and dry and grating. Conan had no specific idea where they were, but if they were on the south side as he surmised, Kaito had just sprinted at a dead run across practically a quarter of Tokyo. Conan’s eye caught movement at the corner behind Kaito. A flash of terracotta hued skin and bleach blonde hair. He dragged both hands down his face in exasperation. How Amuro had caught up to them, he didn’t know. (Frankly, he didn’t care, so long as he didn’t trigger another wild chase through town.)

He waited with slight dread and baited breath for Amuro to approach. The agent shifted side to side with some uncertainty but ultimately stayed where he was, half hidden by a brick wall, loitering near the intersection. At least he seemed to understand that pushing the issue at the moment was the worst thing he could do. That left Conan the chance to work through his biggest current problem in peace, sitting in front of him and looking a bit too much like a kicked puppy.

“Can we talk now?” Conan asked tiredly. (It wasn’t even noon and he was already drained.) Kaito glanced at him, the warped shadows in his eyes from earlier absent. He peered into the distance behind Conan, turning to look at the houses to each side. He breathed out a rattling cough and looked back at Conan.

“…where…are we?” He croaked. Conan shrugged.

“Still Tokyo, I imagine. Though with how fast you were going, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out we ended up all the way down in Hakone.” Conan scrubbed at his eyes. “And? Are you okay?”

“…no.” Conan’s head snapped up. Had he heard that right? In all the time he’d known him, Kaito had never admitted to not being okay, not once, and especially not when asked point blank. (He hated discussing his problems, no matter how small.) Kaito shifted uneasily, shrinking back, wrapping his arms around his middle again, that same protective shield as before. “I’m worried. He’s dangerous. You can’t trust him.”

“Why not?”

“…he’ll hurt you.”

“And why do you think that?”

Kaito’s eyes flickered white - (it had to be a trick of the light) - and he barely unfurled enough to stretch out a hand towards Conan’s head.

“I’ll show you.” Conan had to be seeing things. A faint red mist swirled around his fingertips, drifting aimlessly through the air. It looked so similar to the walls of dense mist from his dream, loose and hued with crimson, but that couldn’t be right. He had to be imagining it. (Right?)

Apparently sensing something was wrong, Amuro abandoned his post to start moving their way as the space between Conan and Kaito filled with fine red particles. Conan hardly paid him any mind. He could tell this required his attention much more urgently. The mist was mesmerizing to watch, curling and twisting like thin wisps of smoke.

(It was pretty, in a way, sparkling like fresh fallen snow under the sun.)

He blinked.

The world around them flooded with a dull maroon fog, everything deafeningly silent. No birds. No cars. No wind. Walls of dusty red mist on the horizon corralled them in on three sides, a sunset-esque tint to the air despite the late morning it was supposed to be. (Everything else looked the same. The houses. The sidewalk. The trees. He knew they weren’t in the same place as before.) Conan’s gaze wandered to where he’d last seen Amuro. Somehow, wherever they were, whatever had happened, he had come along for the ride. He’d paused in his rush to reach them, frozen and wide eyed in the middle of the sidewalk not too far away. When he looked back, he realized Kaito had dropped his head in his hands, like whatever he’d done had taken a tremendous amount of effort. He gestured for Amuro to stay put while he handled…whatever this was. (He hoped he’d listen this time.)

“What did you do?” He asked carefully. His voice echoed like he was in a cave, the only noise in a soundless world. Kaito grunted into his palms, his lungs still rattling like a broken fan.

“…I…I dunno, I-I just…knew I could do it. I had…to show you something.”

“You wanted to show me this?” Kaito shook his head. Conan bit back a sigh. That meant there was somewhere else in this place he wanted to go and Conan was not at all pleased with that prospect. He vividly remembered what happened the last time he was in this bloody hued world and he would prefer to not see any more. The fog absently drifting around their ankles with no wind billowed closer, wrapping cool tendrils around them. The distant misty walls began peeling like old wallpaper, stripping back from the red sky as the roads melted away like fresh wet paint.

Conan blinked.

His shoes sunk into brownish red sand, crimson waves splashing behind him as they washed up on the shore. (Amuro didn’t come with them, that time. Conan had to lock that thought down for later…he had bigger things to focus on at the moment besides what determined who went where in this strange place.) To his right was a small cliff, half dead plants sagging over the edge, mahogany hued leaves gently fluttering with no wind. More sounds returned, very quietly. The leaves rustling, the waves gliding up on the sand, Kaito’s still rattling breaths drifting up from the ground. To Conan’s left lay a string of buildings, spread far enough apart that they vanished into the fog after about the ninth structure, making it difficult to discern how many there actually were.

The closest one caught his attention - it was dilapidated, soggy torn newspapers caught on protruding nails at the base of the framework, cobwebs clouding cracked window panes. The door was weathered by salt, a shiny new padlock clasped around the rusted bolt lock. It sat a bit further back than the others, more on solid ground than sand, the roof sagging and the wood paneled sides buckling from the strain of the years weighing it down. Conan’s natural curiosity drove him to want to approach, but a hand snagged his leg to stop him from getting closer.

Conan didn’t really know how to describe Kaito’s expression when he looked down at him. A familiar frown met him, partially washed with apathy, but…there was something more, something so incredibly tiny, that told him Kaito was hiding genuine terror behind that stupid mask. He didn’t say anything. He pointed to the cliffside, brittle with salt torn rocks and dropping steeply down the side Conan couldn’t see from this angle.

There was a child on the grassy knoll a few meters away, barely bigger than Conan was. His clothes were tattered and his skin dirty and pale…whatever was left of it. Half his head was missing, his exposed skull and eyeless socket pitch black and empty. His bones were barely held together by saggy, rotted joints, his hands skeletal. His head sat cocked, watching them through an unseeing eye. Conan didn’t know whether to approach or not. Everything was so similar to the dream he’d had before, just…altered. He knew the child was angry, he knew he wouldn’t hurt him, but…he also had an overwhelming feeling he should keep his distance this time.

Over the part of the cliff Conan couldn’t see reached another hand, this one bigger and much…newer, with less exposed bone and more bloated skin. The hand was joined by a second, lifting the head and shoulders of a young woman into view, probably closer to Conan’s real age, dragging her body up onto the dry, withered grass. One by one, more hands clawed onto the ledge from the cliffs below, soulless body after body gathering on the knoll and standing around. Like they were waiting for something.

(He felt like he was staring down a zombie hoard before they attacked.)

Once they had all gathered, (or, at least, once they stopped appearing from the rocky crags,) Conan counted them and ended up with thirty. He wondered if there were more down below that didn’t have enough of a physical body left to make it up the rocks. There were a variety of different ages, some teens, some elementary school children, a few middle aged adults. Something struck Conan about the crowd, something that formed a pit in his gut. There was a glaringly obvious similarity staring him in the face that tied them all together.

(The pieces fit together in a confusing way. But, if there was a connection, he had to note it.)

All of the elementary school students were male, roughly the same height, and, from what Conan could tell through the red fog, all had black hair. A few wore cracked glasses, more didn’t have any eyes left. They huddled together around the boy with half a head, watching him through empty sockets.

All but two of the teens were female, roughly the same height, with slightly longer than shoulder length hair that once used to be a variant of a pretty chestnut brown. (One still wore a dirty blouse stained in such a way Conan was sure she’d died by her carotid artery being severed.)

The remaining two teens were male, possibly foreign, with disheveled blonde hair and about the same height as each other. They stood slightly apart from the rest, as if even in death, they were too shy to get closer to the others.

The adults were a mixture - a couple of older men who looked to have been in their sixties or seventies, faces hollow and sunken, hunched over beside a handful of middle aged women with short, disheveled hair, all of them gaunt and sickly looking.

(The biggest problem was that Conan could almost recognize most of them, if he squinted.)

(He did not like the conclusion he was drawing.)

“Hey, Kaito?” Conan pointed at the waiting crowd, a cluster of not-quite familiar faces watching him with eyes that didn’t work. “Are they meant to be-“

“You.” Kaito swallowed, unmoving from his spot near Conan’s feet. “…and Aoko…and Saguru…and-“

“What happened to them?”

“…Lion.”

“…what?” Conan didn’t like the answer any more than he predicted he would. He’d known Lion was a terrible person, had no doubt kidnapped many other people besides Kaito, but for them all to look so similar to the people he knew…

“He took them,” Kaito explained, tone soft and detached. “Said if I didn’t tell him…what he wanted to know…he’d kill them. I didn’t…I-I told him I didn’t know anything, I-I couldn’t tell him anything…he just kept taking them, and hurting them, and d-dumping them…over and over and over and-“

“Oh…I see.” A big piece of the puzzle clicked for Conan then. This was what Kaito had wanted to show him. What he wanted to prove to him, about being cautious around ‘dangerous’ people. This was why Kaito was so distraught anytime Conan got even the smallest injury. Why he was so desperate to protect him from anything or anyone he deemed a threat. Why he was so nervous around Haibara’s first aid kit. (He’d no doubt have watched the almost recognizable people on the cliff be tortured to death with Lion’s ‘tools’, one after another. If there were thirty, maybe more, he would’ve had to see lookalikes to his closest friends be killed every single day he’d been held captive.) There were so many, the group largely consisting of the girls with chestnut brown hair and young boys about Conan’s height.

(Lion clearly favored the ones that had no doubt gotten him the best results.)

Kaito shifted, immediately drawing Conan’s attention. He picked at the hem of his shirt for a minute, boring holes in the dusty dark sand, before sitting up a bit straighter and hiking it up to his collar. Conan had to lean in close to see better in the dull light. The bandages that were supposed to be there had gone missing. Kaito’s abdomen was littered in puffy pinkish scars and still healing bruises, hardly an inch of undamaged skin between his shoulders and the waistband of his pants. Conan studied the marks carefully to sort through the mess.

Some were perfectly straight lines, arranged like tally marks in a row across his collarbone. There were fifty three in total. A little lower were more general scratches, running jagged patterns across his chest in a jumble of incoherent marks that had required stitches. Just below those…raised red welts were crammed into every last bit of skin, barely legible characters popping out.

“Iroha,” he read to himself, “…Aya. Rei…Fumiko. Hiro…Yuri…Yui…Haruka…” His heart sank with each new stroke. All of them, every single scar below Kaito’s ribcage, was a name. There were so many, cleanly cut but deep and swollen. They were the names of the victims standing silently over the cliffside, he was certain of it. Kaito lowered his shirt once Conan’s voice drifted off, too shocked to keep reading.

“He didn’t…want me to forget,” Kaito murmured, twisting the edge of his shirt up in anxious knots. “All the people…I killed…because I wouldn’t talk.” Conan opened and closed his mouth several times, no words miraculously popping out. A good thing, he supposed…he didn’t know what to say to that. Kaito didn’t appear to have the same problem. Words kept spilling out, faster and faster. “I wouldn’t have forgotten anyway…I-I mean, I guess I did, but I didn’t mean to…I didn’t mean to forget. I-I didn’t want to. I thought…I-I thought if I said something, told him anything, he might stop, b-but they just kept coming, I didn’t know what else to do…there were so many of them a-and I didn’t……’m sorry I didn’t wanna tell you, I-I just-“

“Okay. It’s okay. I just…I need a minute.” Kaito went quiet. Conan covered his eyes, taking in slow, even breaths. He needed a second to process. When he pulled his head out of his hands a moment later, the thirty decaying people had vanished from the grassy knoll. (Probably for the best. It was difficult to think with the group of undead watching him.)

There was too much going on to sort through all at once. He had to start with the most pertinent problems first.

This place they were in was…odd, to say the least. He couldn’t stop the flashes from his dream surfacing, unhelpfully blotting out any other thoughts. It was unmistakable. He had been here before. He had promised the small hand that had grabbed his ankle that he would find his family. (He briefly wondered which one of the dark haired children it had belonged to.) He had told the girl in the basement that he would look for her. (One of the girls on the cliff who’d climbed up from the ocean floor…) Those promises may have been made somewhat rashly, but he always did his best to keep his promises. The fact that he’d made them in a dream didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know if he was dreaming now or not.

And now there was…all this, too. He really would’ve preferred to not have learned anything else about those three weeks Kaito had gone missing. (Now that he knew, he couldn’t just ignore it. He had questions and he wanted answers.)

Conan sighed. He was committed to this now. He would look for the girl, find the boy’s family, and hopefully sort Kaito out at the same time. He could do that.

(Probably.)

“We should head back,” Conan said aloud. Not at all because he didn’t like this blood tinted world. He wasn’t unsettled. He wanted to go find Amuro, that was all. (He didn’t even know how to get back. Kaito should know, right?) But, he didn’t hear a responsive sound. Conan looked down. Kaito was gone. He’d left trailing marks behind, heavy and dragging, wandering crookedly through the sand. Conan traced them and, as he’d suspected, they led to the dilapidated structure on the beach. The padlock was missing, the eroded door cracked open. “Are you kidding me?” He grumbled. “I take my eyes off him for one second-“ Conan trotted through the sand towards the weathered building. He stuck his head inside, more than ready to drag Kaito out physically if necessary, but found the room empty.

Towards the back, there was a small wooden trapdoor that was flipped open. Conan peered over the lip, finding a familiar metal rung ladder dropping down to a hollowed out pit. How Kaito got down there, he had no idea. After all that running through town, he shouldn’t be able to stand, let alone climb a steep ladder. (He shouldn’t have even been able to run in the first place.) Conan reluctantly climbed down. It was a bit…different than he expected. The long passageway from his dream was now much shorter, ending abruptly only a few meters away. The single lightbulb attached to the low ceiling was dim and flickering, casting moving shadows on the rough hewn walls. The whole thing looked like it’d been built in a rush.

(The damp, cramped hall had an uncomfortably claustrophobic atmosphere to it.)

Crimson drops of water leaked through the cracks of a concrete ceiling, running down the walls in streaking patterns. The tide was coming in. They couldn’t stay long. He didn’t like being down here. Conan scrubbed at his arms. He hadn’t seen any, but he still felt the ghostly sensation of bugs scuttling up and down his arms. He pushed open the metal plate of a door at the end of the passage. Sure enough, however he’d gotten down there, Kaito was there. Conan’s eyes instantly slid to the right, just to check. No girl with a missing eye and all her internal organs removed watched him from the corner.

(He was a little bit upset for feeling relieved.)

Conan stepped deeper into the small space. Calling it a room was generous. It was barely a scraped out hollow, more of a chiseled cave than anything. There was room to move, but four adult people would be cramped inside. Kaito was on his hands and knees, squinting in the dark, searching the ground for something.

“We need to head back,” Conan told him. Kaito cracked a hum, continuing to brush his hand against the packed dirt. Conan closed his eyes, counted to three, and knelt down beside him. “What are you looking for?”

“…it’s not here.” Kaito sat back, disappointment swimming in his gaze as he scanned the ground.

“What’s not here?”

“…nothing. It’s probably gone.”

“Will you tell me about it later?”

“Depends.” He shifted, rocking forward to get to his feet. Conan raised an eyebrow curiously. Predictably, using the wall to keep his balance wasn’t enough to keep Kaito upright, and he dropped unceremoniously to the ground. He huffed. Apparently he knew he was fighting a losing battle. Conan couldn’t help but feel mildly intrigued. He wanted to know what Kaito was looking for. (His desire to stay and look for whatever it was lost to his greater desire to leave and hope it wasn’t important.)

“Do you know how to get out of here?” To be honest, Conan wasn’t entirely sure where ‘here’ was. He didn’t know how they got here, and the sooner he got back to a relatively safe place he could actually concentrate in, the better. “Can you do that…sparkly thing again and send us back?”

“Uh…” Kaito studied his hands intently for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I did before.” He avoided Conan’s gaze when he added a bit softer, “…and I’m sorry. About earlier. That guy startled me. I kinda blanked after that.”

“I know. We should really figure out a way to handle that when it happens, though.” Now seemed like a pretty good time to remember that Amuro was in this strange misty world with them somewhere and was wandering around alone in an area likely far away from them. (He was definitely getting into trouble on his own.) Conan pointed at the concrete ceiling, still seeping drops of crimson hued water through the cracks and puddling on the packed floor. “For now, we should at least get out of here. I have a feeling this whole building will be submerged when the tide comes in.”

“…it does.” Realizing it would be too much of a hassle to attempt getting back to his feet at the moment, Kaito resigned himself to dragging himself across the ground in a tangled mess of limbs. “You probably saw it, but there’s a hill behind the beach. It’s pretty tall. The water level reaches the crest of the hill and completely buries these old buildings in water.” Conan shuddered. The soft roar of waves above them, lapping at the base of the structure, felt a bit more intimidating now that he knew it was about to bury them down there.

“How long does it take for the tide to recede? A couple hours?”

“About ten. Maybe twelve.”

“Wait, then…” If this really was the place where Kaito had been kept when he’d been abducted, how would Lion have been able to come and go? The pressure from the waves alone would’ve prevented him from opening the door and kept him just as trapped. And if the ceiling was already leaking…

“Yeah. It floods. This place wasn’t exactly professionally built. Thankfully it only gets about waist high. There’s a small drain somewhere on the floor.” Kaito grasped the first rung of the ladder, pausing to look back at Conan. “I know what you’re thinking - it’s written all over your face. No, there’s not some secret passage we can explore. That insane guy always barely beat the tide in, and stayed until it left.” Conan immediately picked up the unspoken part - Lion must’ve had a base of operations nearby to be able to watch for the tide and have easy access to the beach. Having access to an organization base, even an abandoned one, could have valuable clues, even if Amuro had warned him that everything had been cleared out the moment Lion died.

They had worked fast. Amuro had told him privately that they’d scrubbed Lion’s identity and any trace that he had ever even existed. No photos. No records. They’d burned his remains and buried the bones. They’d wiped any connection with the two subordinates who had ended up dead in some nondescript drug testing facility that Hakuba once mentioned. Conan wished in hindsight he’d thought to rummage through Lion’s pockets when they came across his body, but he’d been a little distracted at the time. Even if the base was empty, it was still worth investigating.

He just had to find it.

Kaito managed to climb up through the trapdoor, and Conan quickly clambered after him. The waves had already begun washing sand and mud in the door, making the floor slippery and soaking through their shoes. Kaito dragged himself upright using the frame of the doorway. Conan hummed disapprovingly and stepped outside first.

“I hope you know that it’s stupid stunts like this that’s lengthening your recovery time. The longer you take to heal, the longer-“ he stopped. Conan scrubbed at his eyes. Squinted through the red haze. Glanced back to make sure Kaito was seeing what he was seeing. (Based on his wide eyed stare, he’d clearly noticed, and probably hadn’t heard a word he’d just said.) Emerging from the fog, cresting over the hill, was a deer. A very, very big deer. Its eyes glowed white with no visible pupil. It was a deep rose color and its back stood about as tall as the dilapidated buildings around them. Its antlers branched up and out like actual tree limbs, delicately picking its way through the sand with dual riders on its wide back.

Conan frowned.

He couldn’t believe he recognized the two figures on the enormous animal.

Amuro looked way too proud of himself, perched behind the thing’s shoulders, a smug, beaming grin plastered on his face. Hakuba was clinging to his back like a sleepy koala, nervously tucked up in a ball. Conan, obviously, had a million and one questions to ask. Amuro beat him to it.

“Need a ride?”

“…what in the world did you do?”

“He’s my new friend. I named him Berry.” Hakuba quietly grumbled something, refusing to look up from his death grip on the back of Amuro’s jacket. Conan didn’t know how to respond to that. His brain defaulted to ask the next most crucial question.

“Where did it come from?”

“Out there.” Amuro helpfully jerked his thumb towards one of the misty red walls, blocking them in on every side but over the ocean. “I had a feeling I shouldn’t, but I touched one of those walls, and this guy popped out. He seemed friendly, so I asked him for a ride to where you were.”

“…and he helped you because…?”

“I dunno. He’s tame enough. I didn’t even have to do anything. He laid down so we could get up here, and he took me right to you.”

“And why did you touch the wall?” Conan’s natural instincts to preserve his life still rang warning bells through his system and told him not to even approach one of the walls, because touching them was dangerous. The next rush of water broke against the back of his knees. The tide was coming in faster than he expected. He still had no idea how to leave this world. There was nothing more to gain by being here until the tide went down. Conan looked up at the deer, towering above him, its breathing a heavy ‘whuff, whuff’ that ruffled his hair. He glanced back at Kaito. He was sickly pale, still clinging to the doorway just to stay standing. Conan heaved a tired sigh. It wasn’t like they had any other options.

“Nevermind. …how do we get up there?”

Chapter Text

It happened again. The shelves were empty, only a dozen spices and a half eaten sleeve of crackers left in the whole house. Aoko blankly stared into the fridge, where there should’ve been leftovers from dinner and fresh groceries from her trip to the store only yesterday, and found nothing but a couple of empty containers that had been left in the fridge instead of put in the sink. The pantry was empty. The fridge was empty. The freezer was empty. The remains of a few scattered and torn wrappers lay in crumpled heaps around the trash bin. And there was no explanation for it.

This was the fifth time - and it was happening more often.

Aoko dutifully collected the garbage to properly throw it away. She had been planning to make cookies that morning to bring next door, then make lunch for herself. She couldn’t exactly do that if her ingredients were gone, flour spilled all over the pantry and stacked in peaks at her feet. She dropped the last scraps in the bin and grabbed the house phone. She wanted to get to the bottom of this. She was hungry. Familiar numbers were punched in, the speaker irritably held up to her face.

“Second divi-“

“Dad! What is wrong with you? If you’re still hungry after dinner or you wanted to bring some stuff to the station, just tell me that next time!”

“…Aoko? What in the world are you talking about?” The genuine confusion in his voice gave her pause. He was a notoriously bad liar, at least to her. There wasn’t a hint of guilt in his tone. The first few times it’d happened, she had been annoyed, sure, but she hadn’t said anything, hoping he would come clean on his own. (She really thought it had been him.)

“You don’t know anything about the food going missing?” Aoko couldn’t help but snap. It was only the two of them at home most of the time. There were only so many suspects, and it certainly wasn’t Aoko.

“What food? If you need to go shopping, that’s fine. Just slow down the spending as much as you can, okay? We’ve been burning through grocery money pretty fast these last couple months.”

“That’s-“

“Ah, sorry, sweetie, I gotta go. I’ll be back late again tonight, so don’t wait up for me, alright?”

“Wait, dad!” The line went dead. Aoko huffed and dropped the phone back on its cradle. The loud clatter of plastic on plastic echoed through the empty room. She took a breath to compose herself. If it wasn’t Aoko disappearing all their food, and it wasn’t her father, there was one more likely suspect. Aoko marched to the door, barely stopping long enough to slip on her shoes. “I swear, if he’s been pranking me,” she muttered. (If it was him, it was sloppy and a bit out of character, but she wouldn’t put anything past him.) The house next door was quiet, the way it’d been the last several months. She refrained from pounding on the door out of courtesy for Hakuba; he had taken to napping at odd hours of the day. As it was, her knocks fell heavy, the sound cutting through the stillness. Nobody came to the door. Still muttering darkly under her breath, Aoko let herself in with her bettered spare key. Some of her anger dissipated at the lack of shoes in the entry.

Had they gone out? But they hadn’t said anything to her about it. Hakuba at least was always considerate of Aoko, making sure she knew whenever they left the house so she wouldn’t worry.

“Kaito? Hakuba?” Aoko called, stepping in further. No answer. The house was unnaturally still, all traces of the boys that occupied it missing. “Where did they go?”

“I’d like to know that, too.” Aoko let out a tiny shriek as Akako emerged from the kitchen, arms crossed. She had a threateningly stormy aura draped over her that tightened her shoulders and set her jaw. She nodded at the empty house, shifting to pop out a hip as if she’d been standing around for some time. “I’ve been attempting to call Hakuba for ages, and when I finally decide to stop by, there’s no one home.” Her disgruntled gaze shifted to Aoko, the bags under her eyes pronounced and her stance weighted. “You don’t know where they could be, either, I take it.”

“…how long have you been here?”

“Does it matter? I have a very important matter to discuss with at least one of those two imbeciles so I’d like to know where they are.”

“How did you get in?” Akako lifted an eyebrow at her incredulously and relaxed from a sharply irritated posture to a calmly simmering annoyance.

“Again, does it matter? Do you know anything about where they may have gone or not?” Aoko shrugged.

“You know about as much as I do. Hakuba usually lets me know when they go places, but he doesn’t tell me where they go.” She pointedly looked down. “You forgot to take off your shoes, by the way.” They were different from what Aoko expected to see, heels with little bows on the sides. Akako crossed her ankles and decidedly didn’t kick them off. “I didn’t know they were supposed to be going anywhere today, though. It’s unusual for Hakuba to forget to mention something like that to me.”

“Hm. It seems I was right to be concerned.” Akako tucked her chin into her hand and propped herself up against the nearest wall. Aoko tipped her head, a puzzled look creeping up her face.

“Concerned? Why would you be concerned?” Akako clicked her tongue.

“Because there’s something wrong with them, especially Hakuba.” She glanced towards Aoko, a gleam in her eye that was rarely present. “Surely you’ve noticed by now.”

“Not really. I mean, yeah, he has been sleeping a lot lately, but I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Even Kaito’s been sleeping more than usual. But I think that’s pretty reasonable, after…you know, everything.” Akako lifted a sculpted eyebrow, tilting her head in Aoko’s direction.

“Their excessive sleeping is precisely why I’m concerned. It’s difficult to explain, but something inside of Hakuba has…shifted. The connection they have is most likely the reason for it, hence why I’m here. I wished to confront them in person about it, since Hakuba seems allergic to returning my calls.”

“The…connection? You mean that weird thing everyone keeps mentioning?”

“Correct.” Akako absently twirled a strand of raven black hair around her finger, gaze fixed unseeingly on the ceiling. Dust swirled past her in the half light, creating a dreamy outline around her figure. “I foolishly ignored it, assuming it would stay an inconsequential problem that would be resolved without further interference.” Her mahogany irises glittered a faint mossy green as they glanced at Aoko. “That’s for me to discuss directly with them, though. But, since they’re absent and I’m already here, I might as well check on your own issue. Might I have a look?” Aoko shifted from foot to foot, tucking her hands behind her back.

“…oh. Uh…well…” Akako narrowed her eyes, swirling a patchwork of deep forest green and blazing red.

“Has something changed? It has been some time since I’ve looked at it, after all.”

“No, I-I think it’s still the same,” Aoko told her. She wouldn’t make eye contact, scuffing the toe of her slipper into the carpet. “It’s just that…well…it’s been so long already, and I realized I never actually got to thank you for saving me back then. Granted, there was a lot going on, but I shouldn’t have put it off for so long.” She beamed at the taller girl, a shy tilt to her smile. “Thanks, Akako. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Akako took an unintentional step deeper into the unlit area of the hall, everything from her cheeks to the tips of her ears a few shades darker than they were before. She coughed into her hand, her fist lingering over her face.

“Ah. I see. There’s no need, though. I despise unnecessary things.”

“But it’s not unnecessary.” Aoko stepped closer. “You saved me when that strange man attacked me. That’s not nothing, at least not to me.” She drew her hands out from behind her back, propping them on her hips. “If you hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would’ve done. The least I could do is thank you.”

“…mm. Ahem. Anyway,” Akako grumbled, “as I was saying before, might I have a look? I need to be sure that it’s healing properly.” Aoko studied her for a moment before turning to flip on the kitchen light. She compliantly hefted herself up onto the dining table, swinging her legs and humming a song she’d recently heard on the radio. She lifted the edge of her shirt to expose the blackened bruise coloring the skin across her left side in the shape of an oval. Akako hovered her hand over it, frowning down at the mark, a displeased humming churning in her throat.

“Something wrong?”

“…well, it’s not getting worse, but it’s certainly not getting better.” Akako sighed. She carefully pressed her fingertips to the offending mark, the tips of her nails not even indenting the skin.

“Isn’t that bad?” Aoko blinked owlishly down at her. “I mean, it’s been months now, shouldn’t it be gone?”

“That’s why I’m worried.” Akako stared back, piercing her with an intense gaze mixing and swirling in aggravated colors. “Do you feel off in any way, per chance?”

“Off? Like how?”

“Any tingling, numbness, strange cravings?”

“No, not really. Why?”

“…I just wonder if that man might have given you something.” Aoko frowned at Akako’s contemplative scowl.

“What do you mean? He came at me with a steel pipe, what else would he have been able to do?” Even as she was speaking, Aoko’s stomach quietly growled. Thankfully, it seemed to go unnoticed by Akako. She still couldn’t help but flush in embarrassment. She hadn’t been able to make lunch yet. (She would have to go to the store as soon as Akako left.)

“Since he got away, I suppose we’ll never know for sure,” Akako grumbled under her breath. “But, based on what I can see…he left something behind.”

“What do you see?”

“…what?”

“What did he leave behind? Besides the bruise, I mean.” Aoko watched her trace nonsensical patterns on the table with a painted red nail, mesmerized by the smooth motions. Akako offset the elegant picture by grunting disagreeably.

“It’s difficult to explain. It’s physical, but…not.” She looked up, locking her swirling mismatched eyes with Aoko’s confused blue. (She looked uncomfortable…Aoko almost regretted bringing it up.) “Since I was too late to prevent the injury, you walked away with this bruise. It left a mark, yet you don’t feel any pain after all these months. But there’s something else, something very small I can see just behind the skin. It’s invisible to the naked eye, but it has left a mark behind, something so small it’s easy to miss. What I’m confused about is that it should be doing something, yet based on your demeanor, it seems to have been lying dormant, though for what purpose I am not certain.”

“You can even see things like that?” Aoko did her best to reign herself in, but she was sure her whole body had to be shaking with excitement at the prospect of learning more about her friend. Ever since the…incident…she had learned a lot about Akako, the primary bit of information being that she could see things others couldn’t. It was just so cool, Aoko couldn’t help but want to know more.

“Yes. Well. Mm. What I’m trying to say is, you should be experiencing side effects that have not manifested themselves. I believe the primary reason behind the attack was almost certainly to implant whatever this is.”

“Wait, what do you mean? That guy implanted something in me?” That was different from what she thought. When Akako had said she could see something, Aoko was prepared for it to be something else, like a part of the bruise expanding further than expected. Not…not some kind of implant. Aoko could practically feel the blood draining from her face. She really, really did not like the sound of that. What was inside her? (Her stomach rumbled again, promptly reminding her that her biggest concern should be food, and soon. She would worry about this later.) Akako let out a breath and stood, stretching out her shoulders.

“I don’t know. It’s not as if it’s something that would show up on a scan, so there’s no way for me to be able to get a better look at it. Although, I suppose if there haven’t been any problems as of yet, I have time to go home and prepare some things that would at least allow me to get a better look at the thing. It’d be wise to look at it as soon as possible, though. Just because it hasn’t done anything yet doesn’t mean it won’t in the very near future.” Akako let out another breath, heavy and long. “I can’t find those idiots anyway, and I refuse to put more energy into finding them, so it’s not as if I have anything else to do until they decide to show themselves again.” Akako turned on her heel and headed towards the door. Aoko hopped off the table to see her out, stumbling to a stop when Akako came to a sudden halt, turning fiery red eyes her way, alight with flames in the filtered light.

“If you notice anything strange,” she warned, her voice low and almost threatening, “or if you feel unwell, let me know at once. I may not know what it is, but that thing inside you is dangerous. If it hasn’t acted out yet, that means it’s waiting for something.”

“Waiting? For what?”

“I don’t know. That’s what worries me.” Akako stepped outside and disappeared down the street, the clicking of her heels following her down the sidewalk. Aoko stared after where she had last seen her for a moment, her ominous warning ringing in her ears. The silent contemplation was broken by yet another irritated stomach growl. Aoko locked the door behind her and double checked she had her purse and made her way towards the closest convenience store. She would get to the shopping soon, but for the moment, she just needed something small to keep her body quiet enough so she didn’t have to shop while drooling over everything she saw. (Did the disappearance of all the food in her house count as something strange she should mention to Akako? But it could just be Kaito pulling an annoying prank. She’d bring it up if it happened again.)

There wasn’t any reason to get Akako involved in something stupid like that. Her stomach growled again, hurrying her footsteps down the sidewalk.

(She didn’t care what it was - a rice ball, a bowl of soup, anything.) The visit with Akako faded quickly. Aoko glided past people moving slower than she was, consumed by the singular desire to reach her destination. She was unusually famished. (It must have had something to do with knowing there wasn’t any food at home. It all had to be psychological. Aoko never got this hungry.) Different smells drifted past, all the restaurants and vendors calling to her to stop there. Aoko finally spotted a sign for the usual store and ducked inside, scouring the shelves. She ultimately decided on a pack of rice balls, enough to keep her satiated.

By the time she stepped back outside with her purchase, her hands had begun shaking with tremors and she was almost breathless. (She dismissed the unusual sensations quickly. After all, she never got this hungry, so who was to say it wasn’t normal for her?) All three rice balls were consumed right outside the shop. Aoko breathed out a sigh of relief and turned to continue on towards the bigger stores and markets for the rest of her shopping. Only a few steps in, her stomach growled again. She ignored it. The sound followed her down the road, past several street lights and down multiple blocks.

(The rice hadn’t even made a dent. She couldn’t tell she’d eaten anything.)

Aoko picked up her pace, the other people around her fading away entirely. She was fixated on arriving at the next store, needing something else to eat. Maybe she simply needed something with more protein. That would explain it. The world around her seemed to disappear into a hazy red fog, noise fading as she hurried towards the store. The familiar chime above the door as she stepped inside barely registered in her mind. In a rare moment of impulsiveness and desperation, Aoko grabbed a handful of items off the shelf, irregardless of what they were, and marched them to the counter. Nobody was there to man the register. Aoko tapped her foot impatiently, the weight of the items heavy in her hands and growing heavier.

(She couldn’t take the smell anymore-)

In a fit of exasperation she tore off the wrapper of one of the items and shoved it in her mouth. She didn’t know what it was, and she honestly didn’t care. She dropped the wrapper onto the counter, intending to pay for it regardless. Her stomach was still growling, her legs beginning to shake as well. It hadn’t been enough. She opened another, and another, devouring everything she was carrying. She left the pile of shredded wrappers on the counter and sought out more. Aoko picked things off shelves and dragged things out of fridges, consuming all of it. Cartons of milk, boxes of candy, every premade meal there was. It wasn’t enough. She made a decision, delirious with hunger. She sought out the meat counter.

It wasn’t as off putting to stuff the raw meat in her mouth as she was afraid it might be. The beef especially was better than she expected, juicy and fresh and filling her up the most out of everything she’d tried. She cleared out the entire stock, not even bothering to bring the wrappers up to the counter. She sat back, finally satisfied. (For all of three minutes.) Her stomach growled, louder than before, empty of any previous food it had digested. She needed more. Aoko scurried through the shop, digging for more food. There was nothing left.

She’d eaten it all.

The pang of guilt and fear at observing an entire store she had eaten through was small and overridden by hunger and a need to find more. Aoko dragged herself outside, heaving breath, unable to fill her lungs with enough air. Streetlights flickered to life, illuminating darkened crimson streets though Aoko could’ve sworn it was only two in the afternoon. The streets were empty, devoid of cars and pedestrians and, more importantly, food. Not even a whiff of something grilling from the restaurants nearby caught her nose. She took off running, puffing for air and stumbling over her own unsteady feet. (She needed something to eat or she was going to faint.)

On and on and on she ran, eventually falling to her hands and loping along on all fours. She couldn’t trust herself to stay upright while running anymore. It was much easier to travel this way, anyway. Limbs trembling and lungs rattling, she finally spotted something on the horizon that looked an awful lot like something she could eat. Excited, she licked her lips and picked up the pace. She had to catch it before it got too far away. There were several of them, though. That could be a problem. Aoko didn’t want to have to fight off the bigger ones. (She would take the smallest one. It would be easier to carry and make her getaway faster.) Plan in mind, she bounded closer, keeping to the sand and staying off the dried grass that could alert them to her presence.

(Aoko just needed a quick bite. They wouldn’t mind, right? She just needed enough to keep from getting sick.) She leapt onto the hind leg of the deer, scrambling up it before it had the chance to react. She had to dig her nails in for a firmer hold, deep enough to draw blood, redder than any she’d ever seen. (She wanted a taste - she was so thirsty.) But she needed to hurry. They would flee if she was noticed too soon. She closed her teeth around the neck of the tiny one, the warm coppery spurt oozing down her throat soothing in a way she had never before experienced. She tossed it off the deer, leaping down to catch it before it broke its neck on the hard ground below.

(It was so good, warm and fresh and juicier than anything she’d eaten today-)

Noises erupted around her, high pitched and frantic. It was time to go. She knew she would lose the fight if she had to stay and defend her catch. It was hers. She found it. She caught it. It belonged to her. She hurried away down the sandy beach, leaping into the trees beyond. She ran and ran and ran, her four legged position so natural and efficient. She slowed as the noises behind her quieted. Aoko triumphantly dropped her catch in a deep indent in the mossy red ground, grinning at the possibility of tasting more. It was unconscious now; she would make sure its death was painless. She fully knocked off the askew glasses sitting in its hair and opened her mouth.

Sharp pain in her cheek and a flash of movement startled her into snapping her head up to scan her surroundings. One of the bigger ones was standing not far away, leaning against a dying tree and heaving for breath, holding one hand to its side and holding out a weapon in the other. It was injured. Aoko could take it down. It would be easy to bury it out here for later. She snarled in warning, eagerly clambering up on two legs again to stand taller. She sprinted forward, ignoring the flashes and pops as the weapon discharged in her direction, knowing it wouldn’t hurt her despite the stings of pain cutting through her clothes and ripping into her skin. She tackled the wide eyed creature, giddy at the thought of more food practically throwing itself at her.

She knocked the stinging weapon out of its hand, pinning both arms to the soft earthy dirt. She scanned its face and exposed neck for the best spot to take a bite - she wanted to knock it out, not kill it. That way it’d stay fresh for later in case she had to abandon this spot temporarily. She swallowed back drool, deciding to go for the spot right above the collarbone. She ripped off the fabric covering it with her teeth and dug in. The scream was a bit unsettling at first, but it just tasted so good she couldn’t be bothered to care. She dug in deeper, hunger driving her to bite off more than she anticipated. She was busily chewing around the bone to get at the muscle behind it when the words the creature mumbled caught her attention.

“…A…Aoko…?” Aoko sat back, not letting up her grip on its wrists. The word was familiar. Aoko. It had a pleasant ring to it. She liked the way it sounded, the way her prey said it. The snap of a twig deeper in the trees reminded her she needed to go. She retreated to her tiny catch, snatching it up by the neck in her teeth, pausing to ponder if she had time to bury the bigger one before she left. Another snap sounded. Whatever it was was coming closer. Oh well. She was sure after having the little one, she wouldn’t need any more. Aoko abandoned her bigger catch and darted off into the trees, the scent of blood nearly driving her mad with hunger. She bit down harder as she ran, the fresh blood rolling down her throat nearly making the red woods around her cease to exist.

Aoko was incredibly proud of herself.

Such a successful grocery run, and she hadn’t spent a cent.

Chapter Text

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Conan grumbled for probably the hundredth time now. He could put up with moving slowly, he could be patient, but honestly, did the deer have any higher speed than ‘meandering slug’?

“Don’t say that,” Amuro gasped indignantly. “What if he hears you?”

“Does it matter when it can’t even understand me?”

“He understands plenty! Don’t you, Barry?” The sides of the deer expanded and deflated underneath them as it puffed out a hefty snort, blowing clouds of red mist away from its body. It almost sounded like it had agreed. Amuro tossed a smug grin over his shoulder and laid on the base of the animal’s neck, reaching down to scratch its throat. Conan rolled his eyes and turned back to stare disinterestedly out at the unchanging landscape. They had been ‘walking’ for approximately forty minutes, (if time even existed where they were,) and while the deer took long strides that covered close to a half a kilometer every step, it lumbered along so slowly that Conan was certain he could outpace it on foot at a casual walk.

Not that he really wanted to get down. The fog had grown slightly thicker, swirling up to the deer’s knees. Goosebumps prickled along his arms. The fog seemed like it wanted something. Like it was trying to stop them from leaving - stop them and take something from them. It warped and swirled along the ground, so dense Conan could barely make out the rocky countryside sprawling out underfoot. He didn’t know what it would want - (it couldn’t want anything, fog wasn’t sentient) - but if it could want something, what would it be? An offering of some kind? What would a non corporeal object do with an offering?

Maybe this place was getting to him.

Conan glanced behind him. While Amuro was happily stationed at the deer’s head as lookout to spot an exit, Conan had distanced himself and settled in the dip of the deer’s back. Much closer to him than Amuro and with little room left sat Hakuba and Kaito, silent and still. They hadn’t exchanged a single word since climbing aboard.

It occurred to Conan that they hadn’t talked since their fight at Agasa’s. It felt like ages ago already. (How long had they been gone?) From the look of things, it didn’t seem that either of them were planning to chat anytime soon. Hakuba was following Conan’s lead and staring out at the crimson dyed landscape, blurry with fog, eyes lidded and gaze empty. Kaito was stretched out on his back, one arm draped over his eyes and very likely sleeping. Or, trying to, anyway. Conan could feel the awkward tension in the air from where he sat and doubted it was something that anyone could ignore, not even that idiot. Probably sensing Conan staring, Hakuba looked his way, a faint curiosity sparking in his gaze.

Conan pointedly nodded to his silent companion. ‘You should talk,’ he tried to convey. Hakuba looked away, fidgeting with his hands. Conan scooted closer to sit beside him. He was used to swinging his feet since he was now too short to reach the ground, primarily from benches and chairs. Still, despite his annoyance with the deer, he didn’t want to hurt it, so he refrained. He didn’t say anything. Hakuba would talk when he felt like it. He didn’t have to wait long. After only a couple minutes of anxious fidgeting Hakuba caved.

“You know,” he said quietly, “we fight a lot. But…well, we’ve never actually resolved a conflict before. The routine is mostly to act as if nothing happened and move on. I am still a little bit new to this whole…friendship thing, and it feels as if we are both woefully inadequate to maintain it.” He glanced down, the spark of curiosity in his eyes melted down to cooling glass. “If you have any advice, I’m open to listen. I’m…a bit worried that he’s about to give up on me.” Conan hummed, the vibration melding with the shuddering animal beneath him.

“If you want my opinion - don’t do anything except hold your ground. There’s usually something going on when he gets like this.” He glanced up at the taller boy. “Also, maybe stop hiding things from him. Trust goes both ways, you know.” Hakuba looked down guiltily, picking at a hangnail. “I understand that there’s always going to be things you can’t share, but if something’s causing problems, it makes sense to bring it up before it gets worse.”

“I know everyone’s been worried about me,” Hakuba murmured. “And I know why. But…I can’t stop now. I’m in the middle of something.”

“An investigation?”

“Yes. And I think I’ve discovered a few things from it.” He swept an arm out, gesturing to the rolling landscape, muted by the fog. “For instance, do you know where we are?”

“Uh…” Conan frowned. “I assumed that somehow we got mixed into the connection that let you into Kaito’s dreams. Am I wrong?”

“No, that’s fairly accurate, to be honest. However, that’s not entirely right, either. From what I understand, this connection, however it was formed, is much like a two way street. I feel what he feels, and vice versa, as Akako explained before. But you can still block off one side of the road to make it nearly impossible to reach the other side. He’s managed to do that for much of what we share. I can still feel some things, but he’s essentially kicked me out. I thought he had full control and would be able to cut the connection entirely himself, so I put off taking the cure and planned to wait until he was ready. Except, it never happened, and for some reason, the dream sharing was never affected, even though I’m certain that’s what he’d prefer I stay away from the most. Over time, it was less like I was looking at the dreams from the outside and more that I was becoming a part of them. I gained a whole body instead of just a part, and I could move independently from him. I decided to explore while I could. From what I can tell, this whole place, while it does closely resemble a real location, it’s more of an imitation at best.

“I don’t know how it’s happened, but Kaito has created this closed space. It extends quite far, as far as I’m sure his memory allows, but when his memories of the real world version of this town ends, it stops at walls in every direction. I understand why Mr. Amuro was so keen to try touching one, but it’s not a good idea. It seems to have been designed with the intention of keeping things in and not letting anything out. My guess as to why this deer appeared is probably to delay us from reaching the border. I also discovered that while you’re here, your physical body stays asleep. It’s as if your consciousness has been dragged here and will return once this world resets.”

“Resets? What do you mean?” Hakuba sighed. It was heavy and exhausted and perfectly encapsulated the weight of the deep rings under his eyes.

“I discovered that the world ‘resets’ sometimes. Like a tape being rewound. You either ‘wake up’ or ‘start over’. I don’t know all the triggers, but I do know that one of the ways it resets is if Kaito moves too far away from the boathouse.”

“How far?”

“I’ve never measured. Not terribly far.” Hakuba chewed his lip while he took a moment to think. “Honestly, we’re pretty close to the limit already. Though, I’m willing to bet our ride will be angling us back any moment now. I doubt he’ll actually get us anywhere near those walls. I honestly don’t know what this place is - it’s gone far beyond simple dreams.”

(‘I don’t feel human anymore’…was that what Kaito meant? That he was able to create worlds inside his mind that he could drag others into, intentionally or not? Were there more?)

“So, we’re trapped here?” Conan squinted into the fog, trying to spot one of these mysterious walls emerging in the distance. Nothing. Only trees and fog and the occasional abandoned house on a lonely hill. “How do we get out?” Hakuba rubbed his arms, warding off a chill despite the relatively temperate conditions.

“I don’t have any definite conclusions - that’s what I was working on finalizing when we had our…disagreement.” He ducked his head, hiding the beginnings of a flush that blended into the mist. “I was simply pretending to clean the house while looking for a place to ‘fall asleep’ without Kaito finding me, but…anyway. I’ve only run a few brief tests, and the outcomes are inconsistent at best. The only one I really know works for certain is that he has to…well…fulfill certain scenarios to get out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” grumbled a tired voice behind them, “that you’re both way too nosey.” Kaito peeked a disgruntled blue eye out from under his elbow. “You two are awful at this.”

“You heard all that?”

“Obviously.” He rolled into a sitting position, stretching his arms up over his head. “You couldn’t have been more conspicuous if you’d tried.”

“We thought you were asleep.”

“You can’t actually sleep here.” He briefly scowled at Hakuba without any real heat before turning to stare out at the foggy red landscape. He let out a short breath, one hand disappearing under his sweater cuff to scratch at his wrist. “Saguru’s right, though. There’s really only one surefire way to get out of here.” Conan leaned around Hakuba.

“And that’s this ‘resetting’ thing?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Uh-huh. So, resetting would involve, what, exactly?”

“…”

“Hey, do you hear that?” All three heads snapped to look at Amuro. He was half turned to his left, frowning at the foggy crimson treeline.

“Hear what?” Conan called back.

“Shh!” Amuro held up a hand, listening intently for something. Conan followed his gaze and strained his ears. Besides the faint rustling of grass in nonexistent wind and the slow, rumbling clip-clop of the deer’s hooves, he couldn’t hear anything. (It was entirely possible Amuro was hearing things. He didn’t feel like bringing it up. Not right away, anyway.) The deer lumbered to a halt for the first time, turning its head in the same direction to stare down at the trees. Whether it understood them or really was hearing something was difficult to tell. Conan leaned forward, doing his best to pick up on any kind of additional noise.

‘Shff-shff-shff.’

There. The sound of fabric rapidly shifting and air being displaced. But what was it? (More of those children from the cliffs? Others that might’ve been dragged in accidentally?) A ghoulishly white face popped up inches from his own. It blinked once at him, round red eyes hollow, and opened a drooling maw full of sharp teeth that closed around him. He was dragged off by his neck, the thing’s long claws carving bleeding gashes in the deer’s flank. It slipped on a patch of mud as it landed, giving Conan a brief second to catch a familiar glint of silver followed rapidly by bursts of black and white. One of the cards grazed the thing’s cheek, though it hardly seemed to care. It shot into the woods, ricocheting off tree trunks and gleefully biting down harder.

Its teeth were dangerously close to major arteries. No matter how much pulling or pushing he tried, Conan couldn’t get them to budge. Whatever this thing was, it had a seemingly immovable jaw. It was salivating by the time it finally stopped, ice cold saliva dribbling down his shirt collar. (Could he even die in this place? Apparently he could bleed. He was supposed to be here as a kind of manifestation of consciousness, right? Wouldn’t he just wake up or something?)

(He wasn’t excited to test that.)

‘Fwip.’

‘Fwip, fwip.’

Multicolored cards flew overhead and stuck fast in the bark of surrounding trees. Conan held his breath. Maybe if he played dead, the thing would drop him and leave. It didn’t seem particularly scared by the burst of playing cards shot in its direction. By some miracle, the teeth released from his neck, dropping him like a toy. It knocked his glasses into the dirt, warm air breathing in his face. Conan didn’t dare move. He wasn’t about to risk it wanting to kill him to keep him still. (He couldn’t help his curiosity and cracked his eyes open a sliver.) It was his first time getting a good look at what had taken him.

It…looked human, wearing a tattered cardigan and a long skirt. The skin was completely bloodless, with fingers too long and teeth too sharp. It had matted brown hair, tousled from the wind, and grinned with a mouth that was split wider than strictly humanly possible. It almost looked like a shapeshifter trying its best to resemble a girl.

More cards discharged in her direction, a few drawing greyish colored blood as they shallowly cut her skin. Kaito was apparently trying to scare her off and failing. He was slow to push through the brush, stumbling into view clutching his side, training his weapon on her. (If this was a place that Kaito created, did that mean he’d created her, too?) They stared at each other for a moment, locked in a standstill, quiet rustling grass filling the silence between them.

The thing charged.

‘Fwip, fwip, fwip.’

Kaito fired in rapid succession, aiming for her face, her legs, anything to slow her down. She wasn’t deterred. Her grin grew several millimeters before she pounced and they quickly became an incoherent mangle of arms and legs on the red mossy floor. Conan sat up. He had to go help. The woods swam in his vision, the ground shifting under him. He shook his head. (He was dizzy? How? Blood loss? But it wasn’t his real body, that shouldn’t be possible.) High pitched ringing filled his ears, everything tilting at a nauseating speed, red swirling around and around and around. Sharp teeth slotted back into the new piercings in the back of his neck and lifted him like a rag doll.

(Did that mean she’d won?)

The thing dragged him off into the weeds, bounding through the maze of trees like it had the forest memorized. Conan struggled to keep track of their path. The foggy world was already hazy at best; it was nearly impossible to make out where they were or where they were going. He squinted at the blurry objects whizzing past. Twigs snagged his clothes and scraped his arms which were slowly growing heavy. He had to come up with a way to escape. While this place wasn’t reality, the stinging pain in his neck told him he didn’t want to be this thing’s dinner in order to leave. They jolted to a stop. It was so sudden that the creature bit down even harder to not fling him in the air. He had to blink a few times to see why they had stopped. A kind of slow grogginess was creeping over him. It made it hard to focus.

They were in a tight clearing, some of the trees lacking detail. The thing holding him growled lowly, turning its head to scan the area around them. There was nothing to see. Just a few trees crowding them in on every side and an unnaturally silent atmosphere. No birds, no squirrels, no crickets. It gave the woods a distinctly fake feeling. Like everything was a prop. The missing patches of bark and rubbery looking leaves only added to the surreal feeling.

Blink.

A pair of white eyes flickered into existence. The body they belonged to was hidden in shadow.

A second pair of slightly smaller eyes opened below the first.

A dozen eyes blinked.

White, unmoving, unblinking, watching. The thing holding him growled in warning, shifting back and forth on all fours. The pack of eyes didn’t move. Apparently satisfied they weren’t about to charge, the creature stalked her way backwards, easing into the treeline.

Crack.

The thing moved, its collection of eyes rotating at a sharp angle. The eyes blinked out of sync. Conan squinted at it. It didn’t help. He couldn’t see anything past the trees. No shape, no shadow. Whatever it was, it had eyes. Lots of eyes. A few blinked into view on the left. A handful flickered on the right. By now there were dozens, probably close to fifty in total. Conan had the sinking feeling as the thing shifted again that they all belonged to the same entity. The creature squeezed his neck again, dancing side to side as she apparently pondered her options. The teeth slipped out of his neck and the girl bounded off into the dark. Conan clamped a hand to the spot to hopefully stop the bleeding.

He was alone.

A shiver raced up his spine. Having the girl, whoever or whatever she was, there with him, had been some sort of advantage if this eyeball thing attacked. She was practically feral and had a good chance of holding her own. Now she was gone and he was alone. (She’d clearly prioritized her own life and abandoned him to the scarier being. He couldn’t blame her - his own instincts were ripping through his veins in desperate warning signals that he needed to get away. Right now.) Conan patted himself down, not turning his head an inch. He didn’t want to know what would happen if he looked away from that thing for even a second.

Nothing. No belt, no watch, just sandals and no sneakers. It never hurt to double check. They could’ve materialized on him at some point - this wasn’t reality, after all.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” he still murmured in frustration. (Had his first dream about this place been a kind of premonition? Warning him that he could only come here unarmed?) He got his feet under him, rocking onto his tiptoes. He had to be ready to move, just in case. The creature hadn’t made any further moves towards him. It just…stared. “H-hey, buddy,” Conan chirped softly, stretching out a hand in its direction. “What are you, huh? I’m not gonna hurt you, it’s okay.” The eyes angled to the left, tipping a bit too far. Conan repressed a shiver. He kept a smile plastered on his face. His only hope was that he could get it to leave, either finding him too weak to be a threat or too small to be worth bothering with. The eyes blinked as one. They squinted at him, almost like they were looking at a dead animal.

The rustling of the grass kicked up. Leaves overhead flipped upside down, their rubbery, not-quite-real texture darkening. Conan blinked. The fog vanished. No more color. No more woods. It was him, the dark, and several dozen eyes glaring at him in disgust. He jumped to his feet, taking his eyes off the creature to try and see anything at all in the suffocating darkness.

Rat-rattle.

Something slashed at him from his periphery. Conan dodged, a rush of air barely missing his ear. The eyes blinked and stayed closed. There was nothing left to see. He could still hear it, a wooden, creaky rattling circling him. It resembled a tree creaking in the wind, but there was an underlying bio noise, something rough and gravely and slobbery that he was struggling to identify. He instinctively jumped forward. A sharp pain tore through the skin on his back before he had the chance to fully evade it. The thing had apparently deemed him a threat. (Why? He was tiny in this form, and he didn’t have a single defense on hand.) Warm blood pooled to the surface and soaked through his shirt, the creaky rumbling sloshing its way around and around in staggered circles.

He eased his way around towards where he remembered there being a fallen tree. If he could find it in the dark, he could at least strip a branch or some bark to counter with. His foot snagged a protruding root. Conan tripped. The split second he was off his feet was all the thing needed. Sandpapery tendrils like fingers (there were too many-) clamped over his face. It forcefully knocked him flat on his back. It was about as strong as Conan suspected. He clawed at the - hand? - pinning him to the ground, punching at the appendage it was attached to. At some point he even bit it, earning a mouthful of rotted wood.

A sudden pain near his stomach made him freeze. He couldn’t see what it was. Something had pierced into his abdomen. Conan kicked at it. A second sharp pain tore through his side. (That was dangerously close to his lungs. He couldn’t die here. He couldn’t, right? It wasn’t real. He would wake up just fine in his own body. …right?) The front of his shirt was ripped open by something he couldn’t see. He sucked in sharply though clenched teeth as skin began peeling. He didn’t know if it would be better or worse if he could see. Rotted wood tendrils peeled away the skin on his abdomen strip after strip like wet paper.

Several things…fingers?…branches?…slowly pushed their way into muscle and organs. The hand clamped over his face wouldn’t let him scream. (It wasn’t real it couldn’t be it wasn’t real-) It shifted around, poking and prodding every little thing inside his exposed body. It was fascinated by what was still hidden inside his ribcage. It continuously dragged a claw up and down his chest, pushing down enough to split the skin but holding back from breaking open the bones to get in deeper. If it was at all human he’d swear it would be trembling with excitement. (He had to think - he was barely conscious, he needed to escape before he was pulled apart piece by piece.)

It was disturbingly content with what it could already see. It picked at his intestines, carefully swirling a jagged finger in any little gaps it could find. It hooked a claw around something. Lost in the barrage of overwhelmingly hostile, stabbing pain, it was almost impossible to distinguish what it was. Based on where it was located, though, Conan could make a guess. That was his large intestine, wasn’t it? (It wouldn’t dare it couldn’t stop stop stopstopstop-) It lifted its hand, bringing the gooey vital organ with it. (He was really going to die here wasn’t there anything he could do to get away get it to stop make it stop get it off get it off-) Conan squeezed his eyes shut against the nauseating darkness swimming in his vision. Everything he couldn’t see was spinning and he couldn’t take it anymore.

The clawed finger lowered the blood soaked organ, carefully stuffing it back in the cavity where it belonged. Conan screamed into the palm of something that wouldn’t let him open his mouth. Bile was steadily climbing the back of his throat, the cloying iron taste of blood coming with it. He weakly beat at the wood-like hand trapping him. He wondered if it did anything at all. The other hand patted his abdomen with a satisfied sickening squelch. Its fingers crawled up to the marred skin on his chest. Conan tried to bite it again. A splinter stabbed the roof of his mouth. (He wanted to leave to wake up to go away he didn’t want to die he didn’t want to be here he wanted to leave-)

All the air left his body in a rush.

The bloodied hand pushed down on his chest like it was crushing a pumpkin and cracked several of his ribs at once. (It was going for his heart it was going to rip out his heart-)

Thwack!

The pressure on his chest disappeared along with the heavy hands pinning him down. Conan hardly dared to breathe in. The slightest twitch shot searing pain through every last nerve, his abdomen on fire. Could he touch it? Wrap it? Would his organs all fall out if he moved? Even behind closed eyelids the world was spinning around and around and he could hardly tell what was up and what was down. How much longer did he have? Five minutes? Ten? One? Seconds? The distant sound of wood hitting wood drummed in his skull. He couldn’t move. He didn’t want to. He wanted to wake up. To get out of this awful place.

(Why did Kaito bring me here what’s wrong with him why me why now it hurts it hurts it hurts-)

“…ey, ‘kay, just - …ey, look - me. …out…hold - hurt. …sorry. Here- .” Reality…fake reality…whatever it was, it faded for a blissful moment. Maybe his consciousness had retreated to his subconscious. He was wrapped in a comforting dark. A dark without the relentless pain and pounding, hammering of wood. The claws were gone. They hadn’t taken anything away from him. He would wake up any moment now. Everything would be fine when he woke up. He would wake up in his own body and not have a scratch on him. He would. (He had to believe he would. The alternative…he didn’t want to consider.)

Conan blinked. When had he opened his eyes? Red fog rolled over his face, gently caressing him in a cool mist. Leaves swayed overhead soft and slow in a windless breeze. (I woke up I did it but I’m still here why am I still here - ack!) Conan flopped back. Attempting to sit up had injected blinding pain straight into his veins, his shallow breathing constricted by something wrapped around his abdomen that dug into his lungs. (Claws fingers digging pinning unraveling pulling licking-) He turned his head to the side and spit out the bit of blood and stomach acid sitting in the back of his throat.

“You with me? Conan?” It took more effort than he cared to admit to roll his head back to look up. The unfocused silhouette of a familiar tan skinned man blocked half his barely functioning vision. A flash of white lit up his face as he presumably smiled. “There you are. I drove off that thing you ran into. Even patched you up all nice and neat. You were a pretty nasty mess. You’ll be alright, okay? You’re doing great. We need to get going before it comes back, so I have to move you. I’ll be as careful as I can. Is that alright?” If he’d had any energy left, Consn would’ve shuddered at the prospect of the creature returning to dig out his still beating heart to clutch in its mold infested body. He nodded as emphatically as he was able to. Amuro slid one arm under his knees and one behind his back and lifted him easily.

Conan swallowed. Moving made everything worse. Nausea roiled in his stomach. He buried his face in Amuro’s chest, trying to block out the world that refused to sit still. Amuro rumbled a concerned hum and began walking. His muscles as he moved made Conan twitch. (Fingers digging and digging his insides were wrecked what was he going to do now-)

“Sorry,” Amuro apologized again. “I wish I could put you down and let you rest up, but we don’t have much time left.” Under his breath, he added, “this world’s about to rewind.” Rewind…reset? Like what Hakuba was talking about earlier? (Amuro shouldn’t have been able to hear them talking earlier. He’d claimed he didn’t have access to information about the situation as a whole. How much did he really know?) Conan groaned into the windbreaker his face was currently smashed into. His head was throbbing. He couldn’t even think without pain. He wanted to ask where they were going. What Amuro knew. Where the others were. What resetting actually meant. What his mangled insides looked like. How he would wake up.

He didn’t think he’d be able to get the words out. His lungs burned. Breathing had become a laboring chore. Nonexistent wind brushed past him. It cooled his heated skin, (what was left of it - how much was still there-) a mild relief after all…that. (How much skin and muscle was keeping his body intact?)

“I know you have questions,” Amuro rumbled above him. His smile was gone. “I can see it in your face. I don’t know if I can answer them. You’d be disappointed in me.” He sighed. “I know I am.” He plodded on in silence for a minute, fallen leaves crunching underfoot. (It almost felt normal.) Conan wheezed out a short breath in lieu of actual words. Amuro rumbled with a chuckle. “Optimistic little detective, aren’t you. I guess I’ve already dug myself into this pit…what’s a little deeper, huh?” He stepped over a fallen branch, fog swirling around his shoulders. “Get some rest. You may not be able to sleep here, but you can still let your mind drift. It basically lets you do the same thing.” Conan didn’t need any further prompting.

He closed his eyes and let his hazy fading thoughts fizzle out.