Boxes

Kaito had a box.

It wasn't much, a small, rectangular piece of cardboard, probably a shoe box his mother had discarded years ago that the boy had rescued, but he treasures it above all else. Not for what it is, but what it holds.

There's a white feather in the box, discarded from the first dove his father gave him. The dove had long since passed on, but it's feather remained, as pristine and pure as the moment it was shed. There's also a ring. A cheap, gaudy plastic thing that Aoko had given him when they were six. She won it in a raffle and made him wear it for a whole day before he could remove it. He had thought he had lost it, but it turned out to have been saved by his mother.

Report cards, ribbons, for some reason an empty chap stick container that he could never remember why he was saving, but knew it was important, one of Saguru's deerstalker hats (of which the boy had too damn many), Akako's voodoo doll of himself, and beneath it all, his father's wedding ring, kept safe in a velvet pouch.

Occasionally he'd take it all out and spread it across his bed, examining each important piece of his life, turning them over in his hands as he let his memories wander across the past.

--

Saguru had a box.

It was an ornate wooden thing his grandmother had picked up in Africa on a safari. The intricate carved animals created a lock when turned just right. It's value was worth more then the contents inside, but Saguru didn't mind, the box was made to be looked at, not as a safe.

Inside were small things, his grandfather's pocket watch that had started walking hours instead of seconds until it finally stopped shortly before the Lavender Mansion case. Two strands of hair from one, Kuroba Kaito that were missing root tags, and thus worthless to him. A deerstalker cap, college applications, his cellphone, for some reason a pair of glasses lenses that had been left behind the last time Edogowa Conan tripped at a Kaitou Kid heist, and a leash for Watson.

Sometimes, he'd sit in his study and take out the objects, turning them over and examining them, putting them together as a representation of who he was, and where he was in life. He'd occasionally remove things as they no longer fit into his present.

--

Aoko had a trunk.

It was one of the few things her mother had left her, before the woman had died, and Aoko treasured it above everything. Her father told her that Westerner's called it a 'hope chest', and that it held things they may need one day.

Inside, her mother had placed the good new years china, a few special linens her own mother had given her, and left the rest for Aoko to fill.

So Aoko slowly filled it. She put her mother's wedding kimono in the trunk, carefully wrapped and secured for the day she would wear it. She put in some of her old baby clothes, figuring that they would come in handy for her own children.

She added to it slowly, year by year, silver place cards for dinner parties, a particularly fine pair of chopsticks she had received when she was fourteen, an empty golden frame for her wedding photo, a colorful rug she wanted to put in the first home she lived in away from her father. Bits and pieces of hopes and dreams that both she and her mother had.

Every once in a while, Aoko would kneel before the large wooden trunk and carefully empty it, studying each item she had squirled away, smiling softly as she re-folded everything, her future laid out in that trunk, each piece carefully arranged.