Summary: What if Shinichi hadn't been found by the police directly after shrinking? What if he hadn't made it to Agasa's, and therefore, not been taken in by the Mouri's? What if his injuries were slightly more realistic? Follow the plot in the DC manga and some of MK from this new perspective. I've also taken the liberty of modernizing the setting.
Warning: Characters Die.
Beta Reader: Lured by the Song of Sirens
Chapter 1 – Detective Game
"Your detective games are over!"
The lead pipe made a dull, greasy thump when it struck the back of the teen detective's head. Kudou Shinichi stumbled forward a few steps before face-planting into the ground.
The big guy dressed in black spun around, shocked. "B-Bro!" he stuttered, gaping at the limp teenager whose head was leaking blood onto the grass. The skin was split open, showing the bone beneath.
The CEO turned tail and ran in terror.
Satisfied with his work, the skinny one tossed aside his improvised weapon – a metal pole pulled from a rusty guard rail.
"The kid's famous, right?" the big guy said. "Isn't there going to be a huge fuss over his death?"
The skinny one cracked a smile. "Help me riffle through his pockets. They'll think it was a robbery."
"That's brilliant, broheme!"
Kudou Shinichi, meanwhile, was trying his best to play unconscious and dying. He didn't react to the hands probing his pockets, taking even the five yen coin that had probably been in his jeans' pocket through several wash cycles. Then the big one roughly kicked him in the side to roll him over, forcing a small, faint groan from his lips.
"He's coming around," the big one said, turning his attention to the front pockets. "Can we shoot him?"
The skinny one abandoned his search, reaching into one of his own inner jacket pockets. "No guns. The police are still hanging around because of that shitstorm earlier." He pulled out a case of carefully packaged pills and a water-bottle. Shinichi watched from his barely open eyes, as the man put on a surgical glove before taking out the pill. "This is a perfect opportunity to try out the organization's new untraceable poison. Sherry's been having trouble finding human test subjects, and we can see if the police can detect the poison when they autopsy him. Then she can nab the body for dissection."
This the teen reacted to, trying to squirm away from them. The big guy was on him right away, pinning the teen's legs with his own body-weight and immobilizing the arms with his mitt-like hands, squeezing so hard that it hurt. The skinny one grabbed a fistful of the teen's bloody hair to keep him from turning away. Not about to make it any easier for them, Shinichi clamped his mouth shut. Unfortunately, it seemed that the skinny man knew enough about anatomy, or perhaps, enough about forcing people to take poison, that he was able to push the pill into the boy's mouth behind his molars. As its encasing dissolved, his mouth began to burn, and he gave little fight to the bottled water that the man poured into his mouth through his clenched teeth. The skinny man pinched the teen's nose shut, and waited. It was either drown now or die of poisoning moments later, and he knew what his victims always ended up choosing.
Shinichi could feel the poison burning his esophagus on its way to his stomach. He retched and thrashed, but the pain told him in exquisite detail that it was too late. As though from a great distance, he heard the skinny one joke about rats squealing. The men flipped him back onto his front, shoving his face into the ground, giving him a gag of dirt and grass. Their hands left him. He convulsed and screamed into the gag, but it did little good, as his body was quickly becoming paralyzed. The burning of the poison was traveling along his major arteries, his bones... He realized then that he was dying. Really, truly dying. Mercifully, he lost consciousness at that point.
He was cold. That was probably what woke him up. Reluctantly he opened his eyes. He blinked, confused. This wasn't his bed. It wasn't covered in cold, damp grass. He was outside, but why? He gingerly lifted his aching head, scanning his surroundings. There was a strange taste in his mouth, and it felt like sand between his teeth. The rollercoaster was a dark outline against rainclouds glowing from the city-lights below. He might have found the sight beautiful, if he hadn't in that moment recalled the terror-filled minutes before he'd lost consciousness.
Frantic, he reached back to feel his head, but his hand was caught in his sleeve. He looked down at his sleeve, intending to roll it up better so he could use his arm, but there was something very, very wrong with it. His his hand wasn't caught in the sleeve, it was caught in the shoulder. Had someone changed his clothes? His eyes ran over the soggy jacket and the worn, fake-fur collar. This was his jacket, these were his clothes. Somehow, he was smaller.
But that's impossible, isn't it? As far as he knew, no one had actually invented a shrink ray. He stuck his hand through the now gigantic collar and stared at it. It was small, fragile, and chubby, like a little kid's hand. The poison though, that horrible burning sensation... it had to have been the poison. He carefully ran his hand over the back of his head, but instantly regretted it as his battered flesh gave him a sharply punctuated update on the fact that indeed, someone had split his head open with a metal pipe a few hours prior. His hand came back bloody.
He needed a doctor. He also needed to get out of these soggy, over-sized clothes. For that, he needed to get home. But, they had taken his wallet. In it was his student ID, with his home address. They might have someone watching his house in case he returned, especially if no body showed up. They had taken his phone too, so there was no way he could call anyone. That also meant that they had a list of all his friends and family members. He didn't have any money either, recalling the discovery of the five yen coin earlier.
Withdrawing his hand, he fumbled around underneath the soggy clothes, measuring his body shape to see if he was child-like or just small. To his relief, and dismay, his body was lacking the characteristics it had gained during puberty. He checked his teeth too, and found that he had a jaw full of baby teeth. He could pass as a child. Slowly, a plan formed. He could get medical treatment for his head pretty easily as a child. Everyone goes crazy when they see a hurt kid. But first, he'd have to make all traces of Kudou Shinichi disappear. That shouldn't be to hard. All he had to do was stuff his clothes in a dumpster. No one would be looking for them if there was no corpse of Kudou Shinichi to make them look, and the trash would be gone by the time anyone knew to look for him. Once he was healthy, he could find himself an abandoned building – there were plenty of empty buildings around thanks to the depressed economy – and make himself a base of operations to find and expose those two men, and whatever "organization" they'd mentioned that made poisons that killed or shrank people and that "Sheri" person who dissected corpses of teenagers they'd murdered...
He shuddered. Before he could do any of that, he needed to escape the dark, empty theme park. He climbed out of the cold, wet clothing through the neck hole, onto the frigid, muddy grass. A light breeze full of tiny droplets of drizzle on his tender, wet skin felt like he'd stumbled into a blizzard. He'd have to wear some clothing.
His T-shirt was too thin; his jacket was water-logged and far too recognizable, same with the yellow sweater. His dark-blue hoodie though, it didn't have any logos on it, and its hood would be really nice in the slowly increasing rain. After fishing it out and putting it on (it fit like a robe, the hem brushing the ground) he folded his clothes and gathered them up mournfully. He was throwing away the last pieces of his identity. Couldn't he just hide them away someplace safe? No, that was too risky. This had to be done.
There was a kouban, or police box, a block away from the themepark. Between there and here, there were at least two large dumpsters. Trash pick-up for the park was probably in the early morning hours, and daily, because of the massive amount of waste it produced.
No more time to waste. He stood up, took a moment to steady himself, as his apparent concussion was making his legs wobbly. Or maybe it was an after affect of the poison? He slowly picked his way across the themepark towards a small hole in the fence that he and Ran used to use to get in for free when they were little kids. He couldn't risk being caught on camera at the gate. The detour he took for tossing his clothing was brief, but he took care to open up a partially full trashbag that was leaning against the dumpster and stuff his clothes into it before retying it.
The rain started coming down in sheets. The hoodie hadn't been that badly soaked when he began, but now, the little protection it had to offer was against the wind alone. To make matters worse, the ground by the gap in the fence was more water than earth, forcing him to almost swim across to the fence. When he came out the other side, he was covered in mud, from head to toe, and scratches from the brambles that grew along the fence and had been submerged, invisible and waiting to cut into his tiny feet. It was a relief to make it to the concrete, even though it made his feet numb and someone had smashed a glass bottle on the ground here, he could see little shards of glass glittering in the streetlights. He tried to step around them, but he couldn't tell if he'd missed a few, because his feet were too numb to notice any new injuries.
Only a few meters more to the kouban. It was like running a long distance. Only a few more. You can make it. He could see two policemen working the night-shift. They had cups of coffee. Hot liquids would be really, really nice right now. One more step!
He leaned against the fiberglass door. The handle looked so high up, so far away. Instead, he banged his fist on the door, leaving muddy smears, then rested against the door, the child's hand – no, his hand pressed against the glass. The policemen's heads jerked up, and they spotted him right away, their faces twisting with shock. He must have been quite a sight: mud from head to toe, no shoes, wearing nothing but an adult-sized hoodie. They opened the door for him, their faces showed that they were assuming the worst.
"Boy, can you tell us your name?" asked one, doing his best impression of a preschool teacher. "Can you tell us what happened to you?"
He opened his mouth, then stopped. He hadn't come up with a backstory, he realized. He was too tired and sore to think of anything creative or plausible. As he pondered this, he realized that he hadn't responded to their questions, for about a minute. Maybe he could just not answer. That sounded like something that a traumatized little kid would do, right? That'd give him time to come up with something, once he'd had a little rest.
The one trying to question him suddenly grabbed for his chin and exclaimed, "There's even mud in his mouth! See? There's some grass caught in his teeth!" Shinichi jerked his head back, startled, as though the man has tried to strike him. The hood slipped off his head, revealing the bloody mire that was his hair.
The man's face went white. "Call an ambulance!"
They cut the hoodie off of him and wrapped him in warm blankets, grabbed towels and pressed them to his injured head, to make the injury bleed less. Out of the cold, finally warming up, he could relax. The exhaustion and pain of the ordeal, with the promise of safety, pushed him under. He slumped limp in the policeman's arms in a dead faint.
Author's Note: Hello everyone!
What I wanted to explore with this fanfic is what if the DC universe was slightly more realistic? I also wanted to modernize the setting, and cut out a lot of the filler. So, it'll be a lot darker the original, and hopefully have fewer plot holes.
For example – ever notice that the way they make Shinichi swallow the poison makes no sense? It's really hard to swallow in that position, and Shinichi would be able to spit it back out immediately, even only half conscious, and Gin wouldn't have been able to see because Shinichi was facedown in the grass.
And, his head is bloody and needs to be bandaged. That means that crack over his head split his scalp, and judging from his behavior right afterwards, he's probably concussed. When the police find him – they should have rushed him to the hospital to get stitches and scans to make sure there's no other serious damage to the child's brain.
So, to get Shinichi out of the amusement park, I had the police not find him (the scene investigation was over when Shinichi and Ran leave, and it was in the tunnel) and I borrowed the hole in the fence from the anime. In the anime, you see the Detective Boys sneak into the park that way. Then I had Shinichi go to the Kouban, and had them react the way they should have.
Another thing that is changing because of the modernization is how Shinichi initially reacts to it. Shinichi is now a Millennial. He's computer and internet savvy. He knows how fluid information is, and just how much access to someone's life a cellphone gives you. Therefore, when Gin takes his phone (which he would in all likelihood do, because Shinichi would have been using his phone to snap the pictures of the blackmail deal) Shinichi knows that he has no choice but to leave everything he knew behind.
What do you think of these changes? Is there anything that you would change? What bothers you about the DC universe?