Disclaimer: I don't own Detective Conan or Magic Kaito. I just play around with crossovers and AUs.
This may be continued some day. No promises though. As it is, a oneshot for your perusal.
His ship cries a warning at him, incessant beeping informing him of his imminent demise. There is more fire coming in from the right, so he dodges left. The controls are slow to respond however, and a hail of laser blasts cuts across the body of his small fighter. The beeping becomes even more obnoxious, and he starts listing sideways. His ship is toast; his only option now is a forced landing in enemy territory. If he can't make it back behind the front lines, he will undoubtedly be captured and tortured for information.
Well fuck that. He quickly checks the instruments that are still working, and turns his nose towards the base that is the target of their raid. She turns slowly due to damage, but as long as he's going in a straight line she'll be fine. Not only that, he has gravity on his side now. By the time he reaches the base, he'll probably be going so fast his ship'll start falling apart. Big kaboom, coming up.
He thinks back on her, and the last time they saw each other. They had curled up on the couch to watch a movie that she insisted upon. One of the lines, edited for the situation, comes to the forefront of his mind.
"My name is Kuroba Kaito. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
He slams down on that throttle as hard as he can.
It's his own damn fault he's in this mess, and he knows it. He was perfectly safe back where he was, running patrols. But he decided it wasn't enough, and put in a request for a transfer. Now he's on the front lines, piloting a small fighter, shooting down enemies as his allies fall around him.
It's his own damn fault he's here. And he kicks himself about it every night. Every time one of his squadmates die, he kicks himself. Every time he hears the cries of the dead and dying as he passes the infirmary, he kicks himself. Every time he meets a new recruit who just can't take it anymore, he kicks himself.
Every time he shoots an enemy out of the sky, he is glad that there is one less of them to shoot down his squadmates. Every time he makes it back to the base still alive, he considers it a victory. Space is cold, and he knows he is lucky for mostly staying out of it. If you leave your ship in space, you will die. If you leave your ship over a planet, you may not die. You may be captured and tortured, but you may not die.
He's rescued a few of those people. After capturing a base, he's always the first to look for their own men. If they're found still alive, they're sent behind the front lines for immediate medical treatment. All of them are broken. If they're too broken, then they can never be truly fixed, and spend the rest of their lives tucked away somewhere safe. But if they can be fixed, then they almost always come back with an even greater determination to destroy the enemy, a vengeful drive that leads them to doing great things in the short time they have left in this life. Always short. Vengeance always is.
Yes, he's doing more good here than he was before. But he is still horrified by all around him, making him even more glad that he left darling England behind.
He is hotblooded. He knows they all call him that behind his back. But there is method to his madness, truly. He may always be the first to rush into a dangerous situation, but there's a reason for it.
A woman. It's always a woman, isn't it? Because if he's the first one in a dangerous situation, then she isn't. He doesn't know what he'd do without her. So he can't let her get shot down, not again. She's always aching for a fight, but he won't let her. Not alone.
She won't talk about it. She doesn't ever mention it, not even to him. But sometimes she gets this look in her eyes, and he knows she's thinking about it. Those few short days she spent in captivity, those few short days where he wandered around like a ghost, wondering when it all fell apart. He knows she's thinking about it when she gets this pained, hurt look in her eyes, and then she looks to space and her fingers start to twitch exactly like they would if they were on a trigger.
He knows he is racing against the clock. He knows she will die in some blazing glory, taking out fifty of them in her defeat. When she's flying like a madwoman, he knows she wants vengeance for what they did to her. And he knows he can't let her have that vengeance. Not without him.
So, while she rushes forward, he rushes forward even faster, and they call him hotblooded. None of them call her that, because they've seen the pattern before. But it hasn't happened to him, he doesn't know the horror. So they call him hotblooded.
He doesn't care. When she goes down in a flaming inferno, he's planning on being right there next to her. Together they'll take down a hundred enemy fighters, and he'll be happy as long as they die side by side.
He doesn't know anything. He couldn't give you the time of day if you asked. He couldn't even give you the day, or the month. He has no idea how long he's been there, in that foul hole, waiting for release.
If you told him the date, he might still be able to work out how long he'd been there. He still knows the day he was shot down on: May 4th. He knows because she had called him that morning to remind him that it was his birthday. They had chatted happily before he had to go off to fight, and she had wished him good luck. But then he had been too hurt in the crash to get far, and they had found him easily.
They don't come to hurt him very much anymore. Perhaps they thought that they had gotten everything relevant from him already. Perhaps they had forgotten about him. Perhaps one day the slop they called food would stop coming, and he would slowly starve in this pit.
He still remembered the beginning, barely. When there was no time for food or sleep, when they were too busy trying to get information from him for either of those things. He doesn't remember if he told them anything. He might've, but he just doesn't know.
Every waking moment, he begs for release. They really must have decided that he doesn't know anything, something now very true, because sometimes their bored grunts come down to have their own fun with him. They can do whatever they want as long as he's still alive when it's over. So he eggs them on, because death is the only acceptable end to this now. He doesn't want to go back, because he's broken now and he still knows that it can never be the same. Sometimes he remembers her face and tries to imagine what smiling for her again would be like. But he can't smile, not anymore.
He doesn't want her to see him like this. So he lies there, unable to move, waiting for release.
She remembers very clearly the day he went off to fight. He told her that he'll win the war singlehandedly and be back before she knew it. She waved him off, both of them knowing it was a lie. And a week later she decided that life was boring without him and to join him. So she went to enlist, proud that she was going to do her part.
Her application was denied. Not due to any malfunction on her part, oh no. Her father the ever powerful captain had banned her from enlisting, because he knew her all too well and wanted her far away from the front lines.
She sent him an angry mail. He sent one back telling her sorry, but he was still denying her request to enlist. She sulked, refusing to talk to him. He accepted her sulk and still refused to let her enlist.
And so, still in a foul mood, she stormed around, until one day she ran into someone in her storming. This person looked rather a lot like her, and they started up a conversation. It turned out that her boyfriend was also in the fleet, running raids just like Kaito. They struck up a friendship, and after Ran learned why she was in such a foul mood, they came up with a plan.
So she grew her hair out. And then she went to the recruitment office, using Ran's ID, and was accepted. She felt like punching the air. It had worked.
Before she left, she thanked Ran. Ran waved it off, only requesting that if she ever met Shinichi, to chew him out for not calling her. She promised she would, and set out for space.
She spends her days in her lab, working diligently on finding ways to win the war. Not too diligently though. She has already discovered how to win the war. She merely worries as to the repercussions. So she continues to work, looking for a less violent way.
Because, you see, she has developed plans for a bomb. A bomb that can destroy whole planets at once, wasting life away to nothing in seconds. And she knows that under only the direst of circumstances should that bomb be used. The bomb will create more chaos than it destroyed easily, a power too great for one person to hold in the palm of their hand.
She is tempted to throw away the plans, but she knows that there may still be a need for them. If the war is won without them, she will destroy them. But if things become too hopeless, they will come to light. As it is, they are currently locked away in a double wall safe, with two number combinations and a secret third passcode that only she knows.
No one will be finding the plans. No one will be learning of her treachery. And Akako will continue to look for a way to win that does not involve total annihilation. Because she knows that once that power comes to light, it will be all too tempting to use it on a whim, to become all-powerful with the curse of destruction in the palm of one's hand. Under pain of death or defeat will she open the safe, but no other pain will ever be able to make her.
She is hollow inside. She knows, and he knows, and she knows that it hurts him, but she cannot bring herself to know or feel anything else.
She knows where she is. She knows that she is in an infirmary in a base somewhere. She knows that she has just been rescued from Hell itself. She doesn't know how long she was there because it all just blurs into one large bubbling pit of pain, but she knows that she was, at least, there.
He acts overjoyed to see her, and she knows that he is overjoyed to see her. She also knows that his heart is broken, and that somehow she has done it, albeit through no fault of her own. She knows that what he has gone through is nothing compared to what she has gone through, and yet she can't help but feel pity for his poor, pathetic person. He is clueless. He doesn't know the truth.
Her whole body still aches, and as he caresses her hand and tells her short little anecdotes, she knows that he doesn't know the simple truth. That he doesn't know the true nature of things, how they are, and how they are meant to be.
They are evil. They did unspeakable things to her. They will pay for it. And she knows that that is the only world view she will ever need again.
She worries oh so much. She worries for her friends, out on the front lines. She wonders if perhaps she should join them. It's too late now, officially she already has. And she knows that Aoko is a much better soldier than she ever would be. But sometimes she wonders. And worries.
She's worried for Shinichi, ever wonderful Shinichi. She called him last on his birthday. She hasn't heard from him since. She's tried calling him again, but she's always told that he's out on assignment. And he doesn't call her. So she worries, because there are rumors. It's against military policy to specifically state who has been captured, but supposedly the family of those who have been captured are informed. But there are rumors that they aren't informed, and she hasn't been told anything, so she worries. She worries that he may be hidden away somewhere, starving, tortured. She worries that he'll become like Kazuha.
She remembers clearly the day Shinichi called her, choking slightly. Kazuha's been shot down, he said. Hattori's wandering around in a daze, he said. I can hear him crying in his sleep, he said, the only time he'll show any emotion at all, he said. A few impossibly long days later he called her again, telling her that they'd found Kazuha, that she might be all right. Later Kazuha herself had called her. The conversation had been awkward, Kazuha nearly silent. When she asked Kazuha if she was going to be all right, the other girl had hung up without answering. And Ran suddenly knew that she was probably never going to see her friend alive again. And somehow, instinctively, she knows Heiji will be going with her.
And last but not least she worries for Aoko. She worries that her newfound friend will be discovered, and she wonders how much trouble the both of them will get into. She worries that perhaps it will be Shinichi himself that accidentally gives the game away. Because she didn't get the chance to tell him before he vanished on her.
She worries for all of her friends. And, sometimes, she wonders if any of them at all will ever come back on their own two feet.
EVERYBODY'S DEAD DAVE.