Another old piece found while cleaning, from several years ago. Another piece set in the world of someone else's fic, too - Promenade, by Ocianne, this time.
...come to think, there might actually be more of my work in that than there is hosted on my own account...

Disclaimer: I belong to the bunnies. Clearly. It is the only possible explanation.

This involves a sharp left from the first two chapters of Promenade.
Because what if it hadn't happened quite that way...

Another Avenue

By Snickerer

··•··•··•··•··•··

Once upon a time, a phantom thief in white met a stranger in a hooded black coat on a rooftop.

Once upon a time, he dove through a hole in the air to follow that stranger and found that the universe contained much more than he'd thought.

Once upon a time, a phantom thief learned of beings called Heartless and Nobodies and of a war for the fate of countless worlds being fought almost in secret.

Once upon a time, that was only the beginning.

But that was somewhere else.

.

Here, a phantom thief met a stranger, and dove through a hole in the air, and learned of a war beyond the world he knew.

But here...

Here, his offer of assistance was rebuffed. He was assured that the war would not touch his world, returned to the rooftop where he'd started to carry on with his life as usual, and told that he would never have need of what he had just learned.

He was told wrong.

··•··

It had all happened far too quickly.

There hadn't been any warning that it wouldn't be a normal heist. In fact, he'd been about to change into his costume and make his entrance as Kid.

And then he'd heard the screaming.

That had not been part of the plan.

He'd dropped everything and taken off to see what was going on, of course. What he'd found had been chaos.

The hall where the intended heist was on display was full of people screaming and running, and Kaito froze in the doorway at the sight of the huge black monster lumbering into the room.

It had been months – uneventful months – since he'd unexpectedly met a black-cloaked man atop a skyscraper and dived into a dark hole in the air despite his better judgment, refusing to be put off despite the man's – Ansem's – exasperation and blunt refusal to let him get involved. His declaration that "You do not show up, tell me my world may be in danger, and then vanish without even telling me what I need to watch out for!" had won him enough leeway to drag a hurried but thorough briefing on the threat of the Darkness out of Ansem and his collaborator, DiZ, before the two insisted on sending him home.

Over time, he'd gradually stopped wondering if he'd ever see those creatures as anything other than images on a computer screen.

Tonight, the Heartless before him made that question moot.

They'd said that his world should be safe. That it probably would never be found by the threats lurking in the Darkness beyond.

Apparently the odds hadn't been as good as they'd thought.

A soccer ball arced over the crowd to slam into the creature's head, and Kaito blinked. He hadn't even known the little detective was going to be at this heist, but the small figure yelling for people to evacuate even as he kept the huge Heartless distracted from them was unmistakable.

But now the Heartless's attention was focused on him. And Conan was out of soccer balls. The detective kept trying to distract it anyway, leading it away from the exits – and the people fleeing toward them. And the determined little menace was fast enough to actually pull it off.

Right up until he tripped while dodging one of the thing's swipes, and the Heartless drew one huge taloned hand up and back. The boy lifted his head in time to see it coming down, desperately trying to push himself up off the floor and out of the way, but he wasn't fast enough for this –

Kaito slammed in from the side, throwing Conan bodily out of the way even as he twisted to draw his card gun, managing to empty an entire exploding deck into the Heartless at full power before the claws slammed into his own chest in the detective's place.

And oh, some of Nakamori's choicest phrases sprang to mind, because it hurt, worse than any broken limb. But he could already see that the huge Heartless was dissolving into black wisps that faded along with the smoke from his explosions, and through them the magician caught a glimpse of Conan, staring wide-eyed from where he'd been thrown halfway across the floor, shaken but unhurt. And Kaito smiled in satisfaction through the pain.

Good. He'd not only managed to save the detective, he'd ensured that, even though he'd not managed to dispatch it quite in time for his own safety, he'd still finished the job of making sure the Heartless couldn't get away to hurt anyone else and create more.

He probably could have escaped the claws himself as well if he hadn't bothered, but...even his explosive cards weren't truly designed to inflict damage. He'd known he would have to be at point-blank range for them to work, and that he almost certainly wouldn't get another chance – the thing was surprisingly fast for something of its size, and far too dangerous to allow to rampage freely.

And while he wished he'd managed to come up with a better plan in time, preferably a less painful one…better that it be him to face the Darkness than someone who didn't even have the consolation of understanding what was happening.

No, he didn't regret it at all, he thought, even as the Darkness took him.

··•··

Xaotik woke with a faint groan, took a moment to grasp the situation, and blinked flatly.

"Oh, hell no."

It wasn't difficult to figure out what had happened. Not when he was very definitely neither dead nor at the museum, and there weren't a lot of other options after weathering a Heartless attack. Add the strange, hollow not-ache inside him that he was quite certain wasn't supposed to be there, and the conclusion that he did not want to draw became a certainty.

Xaotik favored the universe in general with a displeased look before pulling himself to his feet. Somehow, he didn't think that even Nakamori's extensive vocabulary of displeasure was quite capable of doing this situation justice. But he didn't plan to stick around and wait for that organization Ansem and DiZ had sounded so unhappy about to wander by. No, he needed to find a way to fix this as soon as possible; even if his memories hadn't been quite clear on the point that this was Not A Good Thing, it was a state of existence he was already finding...distinctly less than comfortable.

He closed his hand into a fist, lowering it to his side from where it had risen unbidden to press against the nebulous, incessant discomfort it could not ease, and grimaced. Really, he couldn't understand why he – or, well, himself-as-he-had-been – had been so lacking in foresight as to fail to realize that letting himself be attacked by that Heartless in the process of taking it out would cause him to in turn produce a Nobody and a –

Xaotik froze.

Behind the stillness of Poker Face mentally spat something that would have made Snake blush –

And abruptly whirled, directing a hard blue glare at air that promptly smoked and bloomed forth an oval portal of darkness.

He snatched Kid's white top hat out of thin air mid-stride, pulling it down into place as he strode through the portal in a swirl of white cape, and emerged into the by-now-thankfully-evacuated museum hall just in time to catch the drop-kicked Heartless in midair.

··•··

Conan could not help but feel that this entire evening had been really, really bizarre, even for a Kid heist.

Starting with the huge black monster that could have come out of one of the Shonen Tantei's favorite action shows.

Even for Kid, that was not standard modus operandi.

And the way the thing had moved, once he'd engaged it...even given his decidedly broader than average experience, he didn't know of any technology or trick that could have explained it. Physics could only be obfuscated so far.

And whether any sort of trick was involved or not, the thing had definitely been solid and about to skewer him when he'd suddenly been thrown out of the way.

Momentarily disoriented and facing the wrong side of the hall, he hadn't been able to see exactly what had happened. By the time he'd gotten his bearings precious seconds later there had been nothing to see but black mist and magenta smoke.

But he knew that color of smoke, and the sound of those compact detonations, and had gotten a momentary glimpse through wisps of shifting black of determined eyes and a slight smile.

And then all fog had dissipated, leaving neither giant monster nor rescuer.

But another shape had remained half-sprawled on the ground. It had remained inert for a moment, then lifted a black head to reveal luminous yellow eyes, and Conan had warily risen to his feet, pausing only to activate his shoes.

If his rescue from the enormous monster had come by the hand he suspected, then perhaps it wasn't so strange for the source of that help to have vanished in smoke. But that didn't explain how the huge creature had disappeared – that thing had been no inflatable, and conservation of mass alone demanded that it would have to leave some sort of remains no matter how it had been stopped. He didn't know whether the smaller black thing was what was left of the first or just a similar creature, but either way the similarity had put him on his guard.

He'd watched as the creature had looked around the room and then climbed to its feet. It had in a way actually been more disturbing than the large one. That one had obviously been a monster. This one...had been almost humanoid, though twisted and distorted and completely of the wrong proportions. A crest of black spikes sat above those unblinking glowing eyes, and while bipedal, it stood almost hunched over, as though its spine wasn't shaped to be straight. Its limbs, too, unnaturally long for its body, seemed to bend in ways no normal anatomy could have managed.

Then the lamp-yellow eyes had fallen on him, the black head cocked to the side slightly, and suddenly the creature had been bounding toward him on all fours, tendrils of darkness trailing from its featureless black form. Conan had barely had time to register fast! and agile! – and he had already run out of soccer balls, but while the thing was larger than he was, maybe nearly shoulder height to a normal person if fully stretched out, most of that was from the long limbs currently folded close to its thin body, so it probably didn't have as much substance – then it had been nearly upon him, and out of sheer instinctual desperation he'd taken a running step of his own to meet it midleap, sending a charged shoe into what had looked like its center of mass.

The black thing had folded around the impact and gone sailing toward the other side of the room, apparently even lighter than he'd assumed it to be.

And then the Kaitou Kid had stepped out of a sudden black smoking hole in the air and caught it.

Conan had still been frowning at that – black smoke had never been Kid's style, and even disregarding color, no smoke he'd ever seen before appeared from nowhere, twisting into shapes like that and writhing as it disappeared; he'd never encountered anything even remotely like it, unless you counted the mist the first huge monster had disappeared into – when Kid had proceeded to hold the black creature up by the scruff of the neck, its black limbs and tendrils dangling, and informed it sternly, white-gloved index finger raised, "No! Bad!"

Conan had stared.

And then Kid had turned his head, gaze masked by hat and monocle and dark hair, and for no reason Conan could name a shiver had gone down his spine.

"Thank you, detective," Kid had stated politely. "Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I need to go fix something."

There had been no threat in the statement, the voice and mannerisms were all Kid's, and yet...something in the back of his head had hissed uneasiness. That something wasn't quite right, that there was something in the angle of that tilt or that particular inflection that was somehow...off.

But then another black hole had bloomed in the air, and Kid had disappeared through it as though into the surface of ink, still holding the creature, the impossible doorway vanishing after them as though it had never been.

Leaving Conan alone in a deserted museum hall, jewel forgotten in its case and equipment abandoned, with no trace of monsters or thief and far, far more questions than answers.

··•··

A dark oval bloomed on the wall in a little-frequented area of the world in between Dark and Light, and the white-caped figure who stepped through spared a brief glance to verify correct destination.

"DiZ, if you have a moment? I seem to have a slight problem..."

··•··

Fin

Well. Attempting to start cleaning out my massive and terrifying backlog might as well be good for something, I suppose.

See, the thing is? This...was actually written in the summer of 2007. I never posted it because while it was serviceable enough for a flash-shortfic, I thought the concept deserved a longer, more thoughtful treatment.

And then, while that was still only partially sketched out, the sewage processing plant hit the wind farm and EVERYTHING proceeded to spend several years scrambled and in limbo.

So when I ran across this again I figured I might as well post it.
...also, holy crap there's actually a proper SECTION for Magic Kaito now. Wow. Still putting this in DC thanks to Conan, though he'd probably be just as happy not to be involved at all.

In case anyone's actually interested, I'll probably also post my notes and fragments for the incomplete longer version on my livejournal once I get the chance to clean them up a bit.
Including, by the way, for any interested readers of Promenade? The draft fragments from back when this used to be one of the alterniverses planned to be visited in The Way Home...