13Chapter Two: In which Nakamori Aoko takes action (and almost gives two people a concussion)
Kaito's body may have been sitting in class, but his mind was miles away.
Out of the corner of her eye Aoko watched him scribble madly on a stray scrap of paper, then freeze, screw the page up into a ball, and set it on fire with a distracted snap of his fingers. It flared up quick and clean, a small pile of white ashes joining the rapidly growing heap on Kaito's desk as he let out a pitiful, frustrated groan and twisted his hands into his hair.
He'd been like this for over a month now, and he refused to tell Aoko what was wrong! The whole class was getting increasingly anxious at Kaito's uncharacteristic preoccupation. Hakuba-kun was driving himself half-crazy trying to figure it out, teachers jumped at every sudden movement Kaito made, and at least six students so far had flat-out stopped going to school with Kaito in such a volatile state.
The only one unruffled by Kaito's sudden crisis was Akako-chan, who, between her constant expression of predatory amusement and her penchant for needling Kaito with weird cryptic comments about perspective and history and there being more than one truth (and also, for some reason, child abuse?) until Kaito started looking sort of wild-eyed and frayed around the edges, was unnerving people herself.
Sometimes Aoko felt like she didn't even know Kaito anymore. He'd be completely fine one day, excited about the KID heist even, and a depressive wreck the next five weeks. It wasn't even like KID had been captured (that slippery, obnoxious little weasel!), so what could possibly have happened that night? She'd tried to give him space at first after he'd made it clear that he didn't want to talk about it, but seeing her spirited, excitable friend look so miserable was just…upsetting.
No matter how incomprehensible and frustrating he could be, he was still Aoko's best friend. Aoko steeled herself. He was so lucky to have her! The end-of-class bell rang as if on cue, and she leaped to her feet before Kaito could pull his disappearing act yet again.
"Bakaito!" she barked, slamming her hands down onto his desk and sending a cloud of ashes up Kaito's nose. Kaito's whole body jerked, three doves exploding out of his sleeves in a flurry of startled squawks that were indistinguishable from his own.
Kaito, losing control of his magic? It was even worse than she'd thought.
"A—Ahoko!" Kaito sputtered, wiping ash out of his eyes. "What's wrong with you?"
"That's my line, Bakaito! You've been weird and gloomy for ages, and Aoko is sick of it! We're going to get ice cream, and you're going to tell Aoko what your problem is, or Aoko is going to tell everyone about the time she found you in your room upside down—"
"Okay, okay, you win, shut up Aoko my amazing best friend, that was one time—"
Shinichi isn't cursed. He isn't.
Day Five of Operation Friendly Ghost (for lack of a better name), and despite his search being restricted to whatever few afterschool hours he had that weren't already dedicated to helping the police out with their cases, Shinichi was currently looking down at his third corpse of the week.
His map of every KID heist since his return had showed an interesting pattern: the radius started out fairly small, concentrated mostly within the greater Tokyo area, then widened as the new KID gained confidence in his abilities. That part of the timeline was exactly as expected.
But around two years ago, the map started looking very odd. The radius narrowed again, then expanded wildly in scope, then began to creep inwards again, spiraling tighter and tighter around the Beika-Ekoda area—until about five months ago.
Whatever had changed to free KID from his leash, it seemed likely that it was related to this area. But what? Did he live here? A family emergency? A lost item? A missed connection? He had no way to know where to even start.
Shinichi had set out to the Ekoda library to comb through past newspapers for any possible leads, and only stopped in the café for a quick caffeine boost before he dived into hours of pouring over microfiche prints. And then someone had died.
He hadn't even been able to place an order first. He sighed, pulling on a pair of latex gloves with a testy snap and crouching to inspect the victim. I can't take me anywhere.
Then his mind zeroed in on the problem at hand, and the outside world fell away, all his surroundings rearranging into neat patterns and classifications of clue, source, suspect, unrelated.
Aoko took a vicious bite of her vanilla cone and glared savagely at Kaito, who was sinking in his seat under the combined force of her evil eye and the ominous crunching of her gnashing teeth.
Kaito broke, slamming his forehead onto the table. "He hates me," he whined, turning his head the bare minimum necessary to give her a pair of truly pathetic puppy eyes and shovel more chocolate fudge sundae into his mouth.
Aoko racked her brains for someone with reason to be mad at Kaito, but stopped herself after the first fifteen names that suggested themselves to her in rapid succession, because that clearly wasn't helpful. She tried thinking of people whose opinions Kaito actually cared about instead.
It was a significantly shorter list.
"…Hakuba-kun?" she tried dubiously.
"What? Why would I care what Hakuba thinks? Hakuba is the worst." Kaito paused, then amended with enough self-pity to choke a horse, "Except for me. I'm the actual worst."
Aoko watched her best friend sadly shove another heaping spoonful of ice cream and feelings into his mouth and sighed, licking the melting edges off the cone that was starting to look as droopy as Kaito himself. "How about you just start from the beginning?"
"So I have this…friend." Kaito starts. "No wait, we aren't really friends, we just run into each other a lot, but I want to be, uh, friends—"
"And he doesn't want to be, 'uh, friends,' with you?"
"Probably not? He tries to get me arrested a lot. And I don't think he'd come visit me in prison." Kaito said woefully, looking a lot more upset about the last part than the thought that the guy he wanted to be "uh, friends" with supposedly wanted to put him in jail.
Aoko thought about interrogating any of that, but even the thought of "interrogation" and "Kaito" together made her head throb in preemptive protest.
"…Okay, so he hates you?"
"Yes? No? Probably not?" A deck appeared in a cloud of white smoke to riffle through the air between Kaito's palms.
So this guy doesn't hate Kaito, but wants him imprisoned, what, on principle? For public safety? Peace and quiet? The greater good? Aoko has lost all control of this conversation.
"Then why are you so upset?"
The deck jumped spasmodically between his fingers, stray cards flipping over and under and rejoining the lot in the oddest shuffle Aoko had ever seen.
"Because I did horrible things to him and sexually harassed his girlf—his friend," Aoko watched the random assortment of flowers flicker in and out of sight, trying to figure out how Kaito was manipulating them when both hands were occupied with arcing two decks through each other in twin loop-de-loops to switch places in his hands.
"—And he remembers every single one of them and he's probably at least a little mad—not that he shouldn't be, because I'm a jerk and a monster," A tearful and unsettlingly bloodstained clown mask flashed across Kaito's face, making Aoko rear back in disgust, even while Kaito's hands shuffled and the flowers multiplied and turned into a bunch of depressed balloon onlookers mourning a mostly deflated balloon corpse. She was definitely disturbed now.
"—and just the worst and of course he can be mad at me, any normal person would be, even though he's not really what you'd call normal—"
Aoko had just managed to wrap her mind around the idea that anyone could possibly unbalance Kaito this much and was digesting the revelation that Kaito had apparently sexually harassed this guy's girlfriend because he wanted his attention (and moreover, felt guilty about it, even though he remained utterly unrepentant about every time he flipped Aoko's skirt), when Kaito let out a distressed hrk sound and his spoon fell out of his mouth, splashing melted ice cream everywhere as his cards scattered and turned into doves whose alarmed fluttering left stray chocolate-smeared feathers all over the table.
"Ugh, Bakaito! What's wrong with you now?" Aoko complained, wiping up the mess, but when she raised her head to yell at her idiot best friend some more, the words left her completely.
Kaito was staring over her shoulder, mouth slack with shock and his eyes fixed unblinking on whatever scene was happening across the street. Aoko twisted in her seat to watch two officers escorting a handcuffed suspect to a patrol car pause to speak to a slender boy with a distinctive cowlick. The hairstyle twigged something in her mind, but it was the Teitan uniform he was wearing that provided the decisive clue.
"That's…Kudo Shinichi, isn't it? The high school detective? This is my first time seeing him in person! Wow, I thought Dad was exaggerating, but he really does look just like you." She turned to Kaito to share her discovery, but Kaito was very obviously not listening. Instead his eyes were tracking Kudo's movements as he bowed to the officers and drifted away from the car, shucking his gloves with a pensive frown as he cast one last glance over the crime scene. Aoko divided her attention between watching Kudo get ambushed by an overzealous reporter angling for a statement and watching Kaito smile helplessly as he watched Kudo's fumbling attempts to politely excuse himself.
"Do you want to go talk to him?" she finally asked.
"What? No!" Kaito yelped, eyes nearly bugging out of his head. Aoko stared at him.
"But you always want to talk to famous people! What's gotten into you?"
Kaito slunk down in his seat. "Nothing. None of your business."
"Don't give me that, Bakaito! Your problems always become Aoko's problems, so either you tell Aoko what's wrong with you right now, or Aoko is going to go over there and tell Kudo Shinichi that her best friend is too chicken to—wait. Wait. No way."
Kaito opened his mouth to deny everything, then wilted at the Look Aoko sent him and plunked his head onto the table in defeat.
"Kudo Shinichi is mad at you? But Aoko heard he doesn't even get mad at serial killers!"
"Not…mad, exactly, he just thinks I'm weird and gross and a terrible menace who should be locked up forever." Kaito lamented, looking demoralized by his own words.
"Well, at least you're self-aware." Aoko sniffed, and lugged Kaito out of the café. Weird and gross and a menace, sure, but he was also brilliant and sunny and thoughtful and kind and Aoko's best friend in the whole world, and if Kudo Shinichi was anything like everyone said he was he could probably clear this mess up and bring Kaito back to his regular brand of cheery abnormality in no time.
"Ow, Aoko—let me go—"
Kaito struggled halfheartedly against Aoko's hold, his own feet betraying him to carry him closer and closer to the visual masterpiece that was Kudo Shinichi in deep thought. His hair was windswept, his eyes as dark and deep as frozen lakes.
Kaito itched to throw himself at his Tantei-kun's feet and beg for mercy, to touch him and break the spell of stillness upon him, to bring him to life with tricks and jokes and make him laugh and pout and tease back.
"Excuse me, Kudo-san?" Aoko had already reached Shinichi. His winter-lake eyes lightened, posture loosening as his right hand fell from his "thinking" pose and he lifted his gaze to regard her quizzically.
"Ah, can I help you?"
Kaito was so caught up in his slack-jawed staring that he didn't notice what Aoko was up to until it was too late. Aoko's grip latched onto his collar.
"This idiot wants to be friends with you!"
"Aoko!"
A/N: i love puns ok it is truly shameful how many times i typed and erased "enough self-pity to choke a white horse"
uploading this story has made me remember vividly why i stopped posting on FFN to begin with, the tyrannical prescriptivism and utter lack of flexibility in formatting/editing on this website is giving me hives. LET ME USE DOUBLE QUESTION MARKS FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT IF I WANT TO, QUIT PRETENDING YOU HAVE STANDARDS
anyway if you like this fic come find it on AO3 instead, where i go by wargh! it's my preferred site, and i'll always post there first and foremost and here as an afterthought if at all c: