The day is a Friday; the time, eleven o'clock at night. The Hattori house-hold is otherwise completely silent as the family of three prepare for bed, day clothes being exchange for pajamas and last minute showers being taken as the bathroom becomes free for the night. Well, this goes for the two parents, anyway; their only son had been asleep since eight o'clock that evening, beyond tired from a night-long case and hours upon hours of school work to catch up on due to it. Shizuka leans in between the door frame and the door itself, creating just enough of a gap to view her child, checking quickly to be certain that the boy was still asleep (and breathing for that matter; it wasn't uncommon for him to fall in to such a deep sleep that he appeared almost as dead as the poor victims of the cases he would investigate so many times).
With the reassurance of her son's safety, the boy curled up beneath his blanket in a way that she hadn't seen in so many years, Shizuka made her way toward her bedroom, deciding that sleep was much needed. She was nearly asleep hardly a minute later when she had been stirred by a phone ringing in the other room. It rang four times, she counted, before it was answered, a mumbled 'hello' let her know that had in fact been her son's cell phone. She would have merely brushed off the call and gone back to bed had the hushed mumbling not become a few octaves louder before becoming frantic.
In the other room, seventeen year old Heiji Hattori was awoke by the ring of his cell phone. He never did like his ringtone very much for this specific reason; it was loud enough to wake him from even the soundest sleep. Slightly discombobulated from his abrupt nap, Heiji looked about the darkened room, eyes falling onto the digital clock beside his bed, slightly fuzzy, red numbers reading 11:14 pm. With the ringing continuing somewhere beneath his sheets, Heiji sank back beneath them, pulling the blanket over his eyes before opening them back up, finding it much easier to see the glow of his cell phone that way. It was on his left, somewhere near his knee (he wondered out loud just how it wound up there in the first place). He reached for it, though it took a few tries due to minimal effort on his part, glancing quickly at the caller I.D. The light of the newly unlocked device burned his eyes, causing him to slam them shut again. Despite this, he had still managed to see the name, a small smirk already spreading across his tired face. Having done it so many times before, Heiji answered the phone without opening his eyes, allowing himself to relax into a pillow behind his head,
"Hey, Kudo." He tried to sound as awake and cheerful as possible, always hating the idea that if the shrunken detective could see him now, he would reprimand him for being lazy. Not that the Osaka detective could help it; he was tired, damn it!
"H-hey..." Was the boy's only response, causing Heiji to actually open his eyes. In the back of his mind, he had already begun rummaging through reasons as to why the response was so...odd.
That was the thing about talking with Kudo; knowing him as both Kudo and Conan, Heiji often found himself replacing the child's voice with the adult's voice. Everything Conan ever said or did, the dark skinned male automatically translated as Kudo's actions. When the boy would call him, he'd picture Shinichi's stupid face as he rambled on about some case he had solved recently. It never ceased to entertain the older boy though, usually resulting in an hour long dispute that ended with one of the two visiting for the weekend or hanging up, only to call back an hour later.
However, that was not the case today.
It was Conan who had called and it was Conan who was speaking. Whatever it was he needed to talk about, Heiji knew he better be wide awake for. Sitting up slowly in bed and adjusting the phone between his ear and shoulder, Heiji used his now free hands to push the covers off of his body, getting up to pace the room in a pathetic effort to wake himself up enough to pay attention.
The irritating silence on the other end was enough to convince him that Conan may have hung up already, which he was prepared to check at the boy not suddenly cleared his throat, "Did I wake you u-"
"No, no. I've been sleepin' all afternoon, don't worry about it!" The Osaka teen waves his hand, despite the other boy's inability to actually see the gesture. The initial lie is followed by silence, causing the dreadful feeling that Heiji just couldn't seem to shake to grow, "So...solve any good cases lately?"
"Yeah..." Conan replies in a dejected tone, the sound of creaking bed springs sounding over the phone. Guessing that the boy had been sitting, rather than laying on the bed up until this point, Heiji listened a bit more carefully for any other background noises. There was no TV on it seemed, or if it was on, it was too quiet to be heard. Same went for any other person who may have been at the home, if they were there. The boy cleared his throat yet again, breaking off any other thought that the other detective's tired mind had been formulating, "That's not why I called..."
Had it been said in any other voice than the one currently coming through the receiver, Heiji would have retorted with something snappy, maybe even a tad perverted, but he knew now was not the time (which was pretty shocking, even for him).
"Uh...is everythin' alright Kudo?" Heiji had slowed his pacing to a stop, reaching around in the dark for his office chair, finding that even the mere act of walking was too distracting for him. Every second of silence seemed like an eternity as he waited for any response for his friend. The one he got hardly settled his nerves,
"I just called...to make sure..."
"Make sure what? Kudo, you aren't makin' any sense." The older male found himself picking frantically at his own blanket that laid haphazardly on his bed, needing something to keep his temper from flaring.
He was never sure why he did that; retort to anger when in situations that really didn't call for it.
"I'm about to crack...I know it. I can't keep living this way..." The chilling part of this phrase isn't what the child said, but how he said it.
In all his time of knowing Conan, he had never sounded so purely childish up until this point, "Kudo, don't be thinkin' like that. You just gotta try and remembe-"
"I'm calling to make sure you'll be there when I do. When I tell Ran...I need you to do something for me then-"
"No! Whatever it is yer about ta say, no!" Heiji is suddenly standing, his chair crashing to the floor as he now searches his room for a pair of shoes to throw on, putting his hat on with his only free hand.
"Heiji...If I can't do it...if I can't tell her-"
"Kudo, listen ta me, you aren't gonna tell her." Heiji relaxed his tone a bit in an attempt to fain control over the situation, though the boy on the other end of the line was far from convinced.
"I can't take living like Conan anymore...I keep getting so close to coming back...to telling her how I feel...just to have it ripped away again...it's like living a nightmare over and over again...I don't want to do it anymore..."
Heiji stops in his tracks, having one arm in the sleeve of his jacket by the time he processed what his friend had just said, "Kudo...where's Ran?"
"Not home. No one is home, actually. That's why I called you."
"Alright, well, I'll be there in a few hours. Stay where you are and don't hang up this phone." Heiji stumbled down the darkened hallway, despite knowing it so well in daylight hours. He grabbed his motorcycle helmet off the table beside the front door, opening it just enough to let him out, but not let the cold night air in.
Shizuka had since risen from her bed, making her way to the door just in time to see her only son disappear behind it, leaving yet again without a proper explanation as to where he was going and why.
Today, he didn't have the time to do so.
A/N: AH, it feels great to be back! This two-parter is inspired by Finger Eleven's 'Good Times'. I should have a few more Detective Conan fics up soon, so look out for those!
Disclaimers: I own nothing.