Mikau: Hi all! This was originally supposed to be my entry for Poirot Café's Super Short Contest 13: Mess, but it got too long, and I was unwilling to cut it. I hope you enjoy it. It's a little zany, but I'm glad I wrote it. Let me know if you'd like me to do more with Kaito and Haibara as friends or a pairing. I enjoy these two interacting. ^.^ I hope you do too.

Disclaimer: If I owned it, Haibara would get more love. She's got it rough.

…

Of Messes and Solace

"You need to clean this up right now, or Ran's going to kick me through a wall," Conan insisted with panicked vehemence as he observed the disaster zone the Mouri living room had become.

Kuroba stared up indifferently from the ocean of streamers, confetti, and dove feathers stretching as far as the eye could see into the kitchen.

Three pairs of eyes blinked innocently as Genta whined on behalf of them all, "But Kaito-niichan still has to show us how to do card tricks!"

The thief in question grinned like a cream-stealing feline. "Yeah we still have to go over Fifty-Two Pickup," he snickered, flicking his wrist and making a deck appear. "Though, I've always liked to bump it up to one-o-four." Another flick and another fan of black, red, and white.

Conan's eyes widened in pure terror. "Don't you dare."

The Kid smirk grew to epic proportions, and the three children began to laugh as a gentle shower of playing cards rained down around them.

Conan rounded on Haibara, currently curled up in the corner with a magazine and a three-foot buffer zone between her and The Mess…as if it feared her.

"Haibara! Control your lunatic!" he snapped.

She didn't bother to look up from the page. "Is he mine?"

Conan flinched, tempted to ask, "Isn't he?" but lacking the guts. He had just assumed… It was kind of obvious that something was going on between the thief and the scientist…at least…Shinichi had thought so, but…

"I hadn't realized we'd committed what with me being eleven and all," Haibara hummed.

Kaito grinned, part impish, part proud.

And Conan really wished he'd just kept his mouth shut. He whimpered, "Haibara, help. Wrangle him. Ran'll be home in fifteen minutes!"

Finally Haibara looked up at Kaito. "Do you think you could make the mess disappear before she gets home?"

"I suppose shoving it all in the closet is out?" Kaito sighed.

Haibara gave him a "Don't be cute" glare.

To which he replied with a "But I'm always cute" smile…followed by a flirtatious "Don't ya think?" wink that Conan seriously wished he could un-see.

Haibara rolled her eyes, refusing to condone this shameless behavior…but a faint smile curled across her lips regardless.

Thank God the children were too busy throwing handfuls of glitter-streamers-cards-confetti at each other to even realize what was passing between the "adults".

"Fine," Kuroba finally sighed. "I'll make it disappear—no stuffing it all into the closet," he promised before Haibara or Conan could raise an eyebrow at him.

The children stopped to watch as the magician made elaborate gestures and counted to three in English.

There was an explosion of that annoying pink smoke, applause from the children accompanied by barely stifled laughter, and…suddenly Conan couldn't see anything.

"There. It's all disappeared," Kuroba declared triumphantly, giving Conan a soft push.

"Hey!" the detective yelped as a child's pair of hands gently pushed him back the other way. "Guys!"

An even smaller set nudged him back from whence he came…at least…he thought so, but he was quickly getting dizzy and disoriented as his friends carefully passed his blindfolded form back and forth, giggling all the while like it was some great game.

He was going to get Kid for this.

"Kuroba!" he snapped.

And then the spinning stopped as two dexterous hands grabbed him, steadying him and removing the blindfold.

"Ta-daaah!" Kaito preened as he revealed a spotless living room.

Conan blinked, trying to make his eyes focus. He was seeing double, so he couldn't tell if things were really clean or if Kid had just thrown a convincingly painted tarp over everything.

But, in the end, it turned out that the living room really had been magically cleaned in the minute or two Conan had been robbed of his sight.

"How did you do that?" He stared incredulously at the magician, mouth hanging open in unconcealed awe. "I mean, the place was trashed!"

Kaito shrugged, a cocky grin hanging sideways on his lips. "It's more amusing to watch you have an aneurism, struggling to figure it out, than it would be satisfying to tell you and have you admire my skill."

Conan pursed his lips, holding in the curses in front of the kids. "…I really despise you, you know that?"

Kaito smirked and shrugged again, barely acknowledging Conan's loathing before turning to the Tanteidan. "Who wants ice cream?"

A great shout of rejoicing went up among the people, and the kids began a celebratory procession out the door, Ayumi in the lead and Kaito less enthusiastically bringing up the rear.

Kaito paused in the doorway to look back at Conan (still pouting) and Haibara (still reading). He smiled fondly and gently called, "Coming? Or am I going to have to eat a quadruple scoop all by my lonesome?"

Haibara shook her head but closed her book. "I'll be along in a minute. And you're only permitted a triple scoop. You're not allowed to get fat."

For Conan, it was almost worth having to hear their couple talk to see the abashed look on Kuroba's face.

"You're going to give me a complex," he grumbled.

"You'll be fine," she snorted, though it wasn't nearly as callous as all the times she had said the same thing to Conan during various antidote trials and the accompanying blood/urine/electric shock tests.

"I have a very high metabolism," Kaito whined.

"Now you do," Haibara snickered. "Go ahead. I'll be there in a minute."

As Kaito went to mope off after Genta, Mitsuhiko, and Ayumi, Conan turned to Haibara and shook his head. "This is too weird."

Haibara dignified his comment with a snort. "What?"

"You two…" He made a convoluted hand movement that was supposed to reflect the relationship between the thief and the scientist. "…dating."

"I wouldn't call it that," she chuckled, as if at some private joke, as she gathered her things. More like two broken beings finding solace in one another.

"Well, whatever you call it, it's gross," Conan lectured. "The guy's a pedophile."

Haibara leveled a dark, dangerous expression at Conan, making the hair stand up on his arms. It was what he called her "Organization Death Glare".

"He is not," she firmly informed him before her expression went back to a carefully guarded "neutral". "Our relationship is purely mental. If you have to call it anything, it's an intellectual, emotional romance."

Conan almost argued that he had seen them together, holding hands as he walked her home from school, him giving her cheeks and forehead light kisses. If that wasn't "physical", Conan needed a new dictionary.

"Besides, I'm not a child to him," she continued softly, shuffling her papers just to give herself something to do. "You've told me before that you like Kid heists so much because he looks past the glasses and sees Shinichi, treats you like an adult…. Well, it's like that with us too. And I like that he teases me about being a cradle robber because I'm two and a half years older than he is."

Conan pursed his lips, trying to reconcile all this information with the ick factor he felt in his gut when he saw his rival making eyes at an eleven year-old.

He took a deep breath. "Whatever you say, Haibara. I still don't see what you see in him, though. What's so good about that looney?"

Her eyes widened slightly, taking on a mischievous gleam as she smirked. "Oh? I should think his good points would be obvious, since he's so much like you."

Conan glared.

"He's brave and selfless to the point of idiocy, pigheadedly stubborn to the point of getting himself hurt, and he's got such an unwavering sense of justice that he gets himself shot/stabbed/bludgeoned in order to catch the bad guy." She sneered. "Sound familiar?"

Conan forced himself not to give any indication that he was vexed. It would only fuel her fire, encourage her to continue.

She continued anyway, but her features had softened into a bit of a wistful expression, and her voice was low, somber. "He's kind and understanding. And he makes me feel like it's okay to fall apart sometimes."

There was a brief silence, but before Conan could respond to his friend's rare show of vulnerability, a chorus of chipper voices shattered the moment.

"And he's handsome!" Ayumi chimed in, adding to the list of Kaito's virtues as she poked her head back through the doorway.

"And athletic!" Genta praised, actually stepping back into the apartment.

"And romantic!" Ayumi sighed, dreaming of her own Prince Charming.

"And intelligent," Mitsuhiko begrudgingly admitted. He still hadn't completely accepted his crush's choice of romantic partners.

"Guys! Focus. Ice cream." Kaito attempted to herd the bunch down the stairway as he blushed and chuckled in embarrassment, rubbing the back of his neck and smiling like a loon.

Haibara and Kaito's eyes chanced to meet, and they shared a shy smile.

Kaito and the kids filed out, leaving Haibara and Conan to follow at their leisure.

There was an awkward silence at first, but then, not looking at Haibara, Conan cleared his throat and conceded, "I guess, if he makes you happy…"

"More than that," she chuckled softly. "He makes me believe that I deserve to be happy."

And she headed for the door with a contented smile, leaving him to follow at his will.

The

End