A/N: A lot of details in this oneshot are left ambiguous because while I love speculating about the ending of Detective Conan, it's not really the focus of the fic.
Beta'ed by miladyRanger, who I have dragged into the neverending trap that is DC/MK fandom with me. We're both doomed, but we're having so much fun.
Possible trigger warningfor a short description of a character feeling uncomfortable in their body.
Adjustment
"How did a case make you clumsy?" Ran demands, after the third thing he breaks (one of Kogoro's beer bottles, good riddance) while visiting her.
Shinichi shrugs and checks his hand for glass shards again. The small ones are easy to miss visually and might not hurt as much, so double-checking is always a good idea.
It's not like he can explain it to her. He's back in his body, but it doesn't feel like his, anymore. It's disorienting, being this tall, and he's lost that intuitive sense of how far his hands and legs extend that he's almost completely sure a person is supposed to have naturally. He has to watch his hands to be entirely certain of their spatial position, because his mental map of the space his body takes up is still the shape and size of an elementary school student.
She scowls at him and gets the broom. "Honestly, you need to be more careful!" she says as she walks back in.
Shinichi nods and says, "Okay."
Ran stares, concerned, and Shinichi remembers that before, he would've argued with her at this point. He can't quite break the habit of deferring to everyone older than him, or at least him-as-Conan, and especially to Ran. She was his guardian for months; he's too used to taking her word as law. When he was Conan, he didn't stop being a smart-aleck entirely, but he did pick his battles, and almost none of those battles were smarting off aloud to Ran's face—because that would've given him away.
He swallows, and tries to inject the proper amount of vitriol (because she is his friend, not his nee-chan) into, "Well, your dad shouldn't be leaving his empty beer bottles sitting around the house!"
"The last two things your broke weren't beer bottles, and leave Dad alone!" Ran snaps back, clearly relieved at (what she sees as) normal behavior. "While you were off solving your big important case, he was the one solving all the crimes in Tokyo!"
Oh, that's just too easy, Shinichi thinks, and then says, "And now that I'm back, I'll be solving everything again."
The anger is already eclipsing the relief—he's pushed too hard again, hasn't he? Screw it all, he doesn't know how to deal with Ran anymore.
It's easy to bicker with her like normal when the topics are things that are clearly subjects that Ran and Shinichi might discuss but Ran-nee-chan and Conan-kun never would, but when her tone turns scolding, he falls into old patterns and she's left blinking and confused.
He's not sure how to fix their relationship, but for her, he'll keep trying until he figures it out.
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"Kudou-san?"
He blinks, and remembers that he's allowed to answer to that name now. Glancing around the crime scene and seeing all the police officers staring in various degrees of curiosity and concern, he can tell he's already done something wrong, but he can't tell what.
"You okay?" Megure-keibu asks. "I've called your name a couple of times."
"Mm-hmm, I'm fine," he says, nodding. He's fine, just a bit too used to answering to "Conan" or "Edogawa" and avoiding mentions of his real name as though they were—no, because they were potentially fatal.
"So, do you have any thoughts?" Megure prompts.
Again, Shinichi's response is a little slow. Division One's going to start thinking he's an idiot at this rate. But it's been less than a week since he's stopped being Conan and it hasn't quite sunk in. He takes a few seconds to remember that being Shinichi means he's in a position to contribute without a tranquilized mouthpiece to hide behind.
Once the realization dawns, he grins, wide and no doubt terrifying.
Some rookie mutters, "Have some respect, we're at a crime scene."
Shinichi is aware. Shinichi's about to bring a murderer to justice with his own d*** voice and it's the best thing he could possibly be doing short of preventing the murder in the first place.
It's the simple things in life, he thinks, as he starts explaining the murder.
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"Kudou-san, what can you tell us about the murder that you just assisted the police with?"
"Kudou-san, can you tell us about the case you recently solved?"
"Kudou-san, why did you really leave Tokyo?"
Freaking reporters. If he finds out who gave them the tip, Takagi and Satou will be solving that person's murder shortly.
"No comment," he snaps, pushing past them.
He used to love this sort of attention, but look where that got him. If the price of fame is the potential to be recognized by Gin and his like, Shinichi would like to give obscurity a good, long trial run.
One particularly gutsy reporter isn't quite ready to take "no" for an answer. "Kudou-san—"
"I don't wanna talk to you, got it?" he bites out, noticing the slip into a more childish register even as the words leave his mouth. He hopes none of them were recording—that's the last thing he needs.
The little-kid-speaking-style is a problem, an ongoing one. Conan was unusually sophisticated for a child his age, but he spent a lot of time around elementary schoolers and he picked up idioms here and there—and now some of them have wormed their way into Shinichi's speech. He's been writing in hiragana like a little child without realizing it, too, after all of that kiddie homework.
At least he can pass off the writing as a harmless eccentricity. With parents as crazy as his, he can pass off a lot as harmless eccentricity.
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"Geez , Kudou-san, what happened to your face?" Shiratori-keiji asks, aghast, when he walks into the police station to drop off some of the case files he's been working on.
"What?" Shinichi asks, completely lost.
"You look like you lost a fight," Satou-keiji says, brushing a hand across her temple.
Shinichi mimics the motion and finds the skin tender—then remembers his shower the previous evening. He still isn't used to his restored height being nearly the same as the height of the shower head, and when he'd turned around too quickly…
The bruise had probably developed overnight and through the morning, which he'd spent in the house going over case files until he went into the precinct. He still wasn't sure how he'd missed it in the mirror—though he had a tendency, nowadays, to do a cursory check of his features, just long enough to reassure himself that he's still an adult, and then go back to reviewing cases in his head. As for the pain…at the time, yeah, hitting his head had hurt, but compared to his recent memory of his final return to his adult form, and the level of pain that accompanied it, it seemed kind of minor. Certainly not serious enough to bruise.
His pain threshold should normalize soon, at least, especially after he stops running into furniture every few hours. He could swear that some of his muscle memory is gone, but he knows that's not possible...he supposes it's more like it's been reformatted too many times, because now that he'd finally adapted it to his tiny elementary school student form, he needs it to be adult-sized again. On an intellectual level, he understands. On an emotional level, it's bizarre and unsettling to suddenly feel like the house he'd lived in for years is no more familiar than the hotel he solved a murder in yesterday.
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He walks home down sidewalks lined in trees, half-expecting to see a figure in every shifting, leafy shadow, and flinching at every unexpected barking dog or car horn.
He doesn't expect the paranoia to go away. In fact, he thinks it's worse, now that he has an excuse (the mysterious case) for its existence. He doesn't have to hide it, so it's free too show up everywhere. But from a practical standpoint, he's pretty sure he won't be able to function in the long-term if it stays this overwhelming.
Once he can move around his house without causing himself injury or breaking things, once he starts sounding like himself again, right after that, the hypervigilance is definitely the next item on the list.
Wasn't going back to being Shinichi supposed to be easier?
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"I'm putting you on a low-cholesterol diet," Ai announces.
"Letting you check me over is one thing, but you're not my doctor—you're not even a doctor, period," Shinichi protests immediately, drawing back. "I know you can't have a medical degree."
It's a hilarious tableau, one he only sometimes dared imagine—a terrified, full-sized Kudou Shinichi scrambling backwards and nearly tipping over a wooden kitchen chair in order to escape a still-quite-petite Haibara Ai, who now holds a stethoscope to air.
They had enough of the antidote for both of them, but Haibara had elected to wait to use it until she was sure that Shinichi wasn't experiencing complications. He'd never asked, but he suspected she was also deciding whether she wanted to use it on herself at all. Haibara had reasons of her own and he wouldn't judge them, either way.
"The initial APTX 4869 dosage, as well as the accidental antidotes, frequently caused symptoms similar to cardiac distress," Ai said. "You ended up in those situations more often than I did, and possibly often enough to have long-term consequences. Until we're certain that your heart hasn't been affected, you're on a low-cholesterol diet."
"But—" Even as he protests, Shinichi is thinking how stupid it would be to die from complications due to an antidote. What a dumb reason to make Ran cry. "Fine," he says. "I'll go on the diet."
"And, you'll go see an actual doctor in a few months," Haibara says. "We don't want it too close to your 'return'—"
That would be suspicious, Shinichi fills in mentally.
"—but someone who does have a medical degree ought to check you out," she finished.
Predictably, she doesn't meet his eyes. Caring about people makes Ai uncomfortable, and if dodging eye contact makes her feel slightly less so, that's fine with him. She's been through enough already, without him imposing standards she doesn't want to meet on her.
A slightly awkward silence falls, until Ai asks, "What are you planning to tell the kids?"
"I'm not sure yet," he says. He doesn't know what to tell Division One, either. Or Ran. Conan may have been a lie, but…that saying, about how a person is as real as the lives they affect? It was inspirational until it became an actual practical problem because there are people that he cares about who in turn care about some elementary-aged brat who doesn't even exist.
"Figure it out," she advises flatly.
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"And you were…on a case?" the guidance counselor asks, a note of doubt in her tone.
Shinichi nods. "It was a long-term thing, and because of the way things happened, I couldn't call off of school before leaving."
"You know that our school doesn't consider that a valid excuse for missing class," she says, frowning down at him over thin, square-shaped glasses.
"Not even when I have an excuse note from the FBI?" Shinichi asks hopefully.
Her eyes widen, and he thinks he might have made some headway.
Once he gets back into this place, he's got months of schoolwork—real schoolwork, not elementary-level time-wasting paperwork—waiting for him. But he's not really that worried. He's a genius, after all. He'll just have to make sure he remembers to write in kanji and doesn't pull any all-nighters that result in Conan-level work, which shouldn't be that hard.
What scares him is realizing that this counsellor isn't the last person he'll have this discussion with. That gap in his high school transcript…he'll eventually have to explain it to admissions personnel at every single college he applies to. If he wants to actually attend a decent school, he might have to get a non-disclosure agreement from Akai or James Black for his admissions officer to sign.
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Being Shinichi again is going to be an adjustment, and it's exhausting just to think about all the work he's got ahead of him. But at the same time, after months of not being sure he'd ever be able to use this name above a whisper, of dreading the prospect of surviving middle school for a second time, this is fine.