A/N:
I wrote this a couple weeks ago in a couple hours on a plane. I was fairly sleep-deprived at the time and my thought process went along the lines of "There's a new Cardcaptor Sakura... it's the Clear Card arc... clear... Tooru... Amuro!" I was debating whether to post this and then decided you know what, why not.
Do not take this seriously.
Magical Boy
"Sign a contract with me and become a magical boy, Furuya Rei!"
Rei pauses at his dinner table, chopsticks halfway up to his mouth, and stares.
There was a pink fluffy thing floating in middle of the air in his apartment. Was it a penguin? It looked kind of like a penguin. But he didn't think penguins were so pink and fluffy and well, floaty.
He puts down his chopsticks on his plate in a single decisive motion then rubs at his forehead.
"Kazami was right," he mumbles, "I've been working too much. Right, I'm calling in sick tomorrow at Poirot."
Pointedly ignoring the fluffy monstrosity, Rei gets up from the table, only for the pastel thing to fly over and push him back onto his seat with a bonk. For something that looked and felt like a pillow, he sure seemed to have given his hallucination a lot of strength.
Wait, oh no. It wasn't just auditory and visual. He was having physical hallucinations as well.
…Was that even possible? Maybe he should see a doctor.
"Listen to me, Furuya Rei!" intones the penguin-pillow-thing.
Rei, having no intention to listen to a hallucination, tries to get up again. This time, there's a flash of pastel pink light and when he comes to, he's tied to his chair with what looks like gigantic bright red ribbons. But they must be something different, because they're much too strong for him to break.
This was getting out of hand.
"I said to listen, Furuya Rei!" cries the irritable creature again, and honestly, having his full name shouted so many times was getting annoying.
Rei sighs and asks, voice defeated, "Yes?"
"Good. My name is Icianacle, a Fae of the Antarc. You can call me Icchan, if my name's too hard to say," says the fluffball. "That's what everyone else did."
"I'm not calling you Icchan," Rei says dully.
"I'm here because your country is threatened by our mortal enemy, the Lost," the 'Fae' continues, ignoring Rei's commentary. "The Lost feed on the lifeforce of humans-"
"- Right, and you need someone to take care of them because you can't for whatever reason, and that involves forming a contract with some human," Rei cuts the self-dubbed Icianacle off. "I am vaguely familiar with the magical girl genre." He closes his eyes and wonders why he's in this situation. "One thing. I am neither female nor a child."
"I am aware," Icianacle replies. It twirls in the air and says no more. Rei glares at it.
"…Then why form a contract with me?" Rei finally demands, hating himself a bit for actually taking what this thing was saying semi-seriously.
"We did initially form contracts with young girls," the penguin admits, "But well, they kinda all died. Then we tried young boys, and they died even faster. So we decided to go with someone with some kind of experience this time and decided on you."
"This is ridiculous," Rei complains. He lets out a groan and snaps, "Don't be ridiculous. I'm not signing a contract, especially if everyone else who's signed it has died."
"If you don't sign the contract, we'll give that Organization you're infiltrating a tip that you're a spy," Icianacle says, voice terribly bright and cheerful considering the blackmail it was resorting to.
Rei glares at the creature and says, "What do I need to sign?"
This is utterly humiliating.
Rei can take having even less sleep than he already had. He can take flying around Tokyo, chasing after the mass of purple wool and fluff that was apparently a Lost. He can even take the idiotic catchphrase he needs to say in order to get the powers to defeat these things.
What he can't take is the outfit. It's a frilly monstrosity and its palette is white and pastel pink. There are even ribbons, bright red ones, all tied into neat bows down his legs and up his back. The worst part is the bell attached to the one large ribbon at his chest. Every time he moves, he tinkles.
It doesn't help that he detests red.
Rei can't get the outfit off unless he uses the de-transformation catchphrase, and if he does that, the wand he was given shrinks to the size of a keychain – utterly useless for fighting.
He comforts himself with how at least he's wearing pants. Even if they're puffy.
Rei's sitting at a desk trawling through some paperwork at work, his actual work, when he notices that there's been a lot of whispers ever since he came in. More notably, they still haven't died down.
Whispers weren't exactly unusual when he came to the PSB – he came in rarely enough his existence was still something of a legend, and his colouring stood out. But his direct subordinates at least should've been more than used to him by now.
"Kazami," he says, addressing the man working beside him.
"Yes!" Kazami replies immediately, straightening up in his seat to face him.
"Is there something on my face?" Rei asks.
Kazami grimaces a bit and lets out an awkward cough. "There's nothing on your face, Furuya-san."
"What is it, then?" asks Rei, making a vague gesture towards his subordinates. Some of the sharper-eyed ones notice the gesture and quickly avert their gaze, quieting down.
"It's just…" Kazami says haltingly, "Your hair."
"My hair?" Rei repeats, somewhat confused. He knew his hair stood out, but shouldn't be anything new. He runs a hand through his hair and Kazami winces at the gesture. Rei stares, even more confused.
"There's – there's glitter. In your hair," Kazami finally admits, and Rei swallows back a groan.
Damn the Lost. Couldn't they explode into blood and guts like any decent creature instead of glitter and sugar and puffs of purple dust? It got everywhere. Rei could deal with blood. He couldn't deal with thrice-damned glitter.
For now though, he needs an explanation, so Rei puts on his best Amuro Tooru smile and says, voice dead serious, "Kazami. Thank you for telling me. The Organization… doesn't always choose the cleanest methods."
"Glitter, sir?" says Kazami, sounding dubious.
"Glitter." Rei nods firmly, looking Kazami straight in his eyes. Lying was all a matter of perspective, really. He was sure the Lost had some kind of organization, and he was equally certain that their irritable death throes were a last-ditch attempt to kill him.
"I see," Kazami says finally, sounding less uncertain now. "If you say so, it must be true, Furuya-san."
Rei feels just a little bit bad.
It's early morning at Café Poirot when Azusa peers at him and says worriedly, "You've been looking really tired lately, Amuro-san."
"Has it affected my work?" Rei asks. He wears a mask of anxious worry despite knowing perfectly that it hadn't.
"No, but still…" says Azusa hesitantly.
"Don't worry about it, Azusa-san," Rei says, smiling brightly because her worry is wasted on someone like him. "I've just had a lot of casework lately, that's all. I'm fine."
Azusa looks like she wants to say something more, but the bell at the door rings and they need to go greet their first customers for the day.
Later, he hears some of them gossiping about another strange woman spotted in the skies above Tokyo, this time usually near Beika. Thinking back, he can recall hearing such rumours before – presumably about his predecessors – but he had never paid much attention to them in the past.
Now, Rei has to hold back his embarrassment.
Rei's fighting against a Lost that just keeps on dancing out of his reach when he loses his temper and starts shooting at it with his gun. His main anti-Lost weapon is sadly close-range only.
(He refuses to call his weapon the 'Fluffy-Wuffy Icy Icicle Wand'. He may have been forced into this ridiculous attire and he may be fighting against puffy monsters that burst into clouds of glitter when they died, but he still had some pride.)
He's chasing the monster around the rooftops of skyscrapers somewhere near Beika. Luckily for him, magic messes with cameras and sensors, and not too many people are around in the middle of the night.
The bullets sink into its puffy purple hide, but seem to do nothing. It just flies back up into the air out of Rei's reach. Honestly, for something that looks like an overgrown sheep that ran through a candy factory producing grape gummies, it's annoyingly agile.
It is rather satisfying shooting it though, despite the lack of effect.
"No no no," Icianacle cries from next to him, voice as annoying as always. "Like I said before, human weapons will do nothing unless they're blessed."
Rei whips his head around to glare at Icianacle and demands, "I can get my gun blessed and have it work!? You never mentioned that before!"
"It's traditional for you to use the Fluffy-Wuffy Icy Icicle Wand..." Icianacle mumbles, avoiding his gaze by making a slow loop in the air.
"It's traditional for you to get a preteen girl to do this nonsense," Rei snaps, shoving the gun towards Icianacle. "Bless it so I can shoot that thing down."
Rei is half-worried that Icianacle will say that he's not capable of blessing it or will complain more about the 'tradition' he's already thrown out the window, but he just grumbles a little and begins mumbling some presumably magical words.
(And really, what tradition? He distinctly remembers Icianacle saying that the Lost only started appearing in the last five years.)
Icianacle finishes his mumbling and claps his flippers together. There's a flash of pastel light, and a now garishly pink pistol falls into Rei's outstretched hand.
Rei takes the new colour in stride. He half-expected something like this anyways. He raises the gun, shoots, and doesn't even sigh when every bullet is accompanied by a burst of shiny glitter.
(He considers whether it would be worth emboldening the black market by getting a new gun through the Organization instead of through the PSB. He's not quite sure what to put on the requisition forms to explain how he lost his last gun.)
His aim is true, and the monster falters, its movement slowing. So his shooting skills may pale in comparison to Akai - they were still head and shoulders above most people. He wouldn't miss so easily.
"Even with a blessed weapon, you'll need to make the final blow with the Fluffy-Wuffy Icy Icicle Wand to properly seal it," Icianacle warns, and so Rei flies closer to the Lost to slam the wand against its hide.
It bursts into glitter and purple dust as always. It covers Rei head to toe despite his best attempts to get out of the blast zone in time.
He just sighs and makes his way home.
A few weeks after he was conscripted into service as a magical boy or man or whatever, Rei decides to really press Icianacle for information.
He learns that Icianacle's race live in Antarctica, that he has exactly six predecessors, all Japanese, and that it's very likely that the Lost were some kind of corrupted form of Icianacle's race.
Rei does serve the law and his country, and he would like to see some kind of justice for his poor predecessors who all died ignobly fighting the Lost. Especially considering that they were doubtless forcibly conscripted by Icianacle into the fight like he was. But he's not quite sure what to do.
Icianacle has made it exceedingly clear that he can wipe his memory at any moment and Rei suspects that he could kill him just as easily if need be.
So for now, he's collecting information, and maybe someday he can see what he can do with it.
One thing that bothers him though is that according to Icianacle, an extremely strong Lost appears without fail within the first year of a new contractor. And that extremely strong Lost had killed four of his six predecessors. The other two had apparently been skilled enough to get it to back off, but not kill it entirely.
Icianacle says that he thinks that it's impossible to kill. He says that he thinks it's the progenitor of all the Lost, that all they can do is temporarily drive it back.
Rei says that he's heard a lot of people claim things were impossible when they really weren't.
If he wants to live to see the Organization die, he needs to fend off this Lost.
One night, tired after a particularly difficult fight against a pair of Lost, without thinking he takes the short way home. The flight path that takes him past the Mouri Detective Agency and Café Poirot.
He doesn't tend to fly too high off the ground when heading home, because it's the middle of winter and freezing. Rei thinks he might get hypothermia if he flies too high.
Because the universe hates him, naturally Conan happens to be looking out the window when he passes.
He's not so stupid to stop and give Conan a good look, but the boy is always very observant. Sadly, the next day, Conan visits Poirot and gives Rei an odd look as he sips at his orange juice.
"Is something the matter, Conan-kun?" Rei asks finally, because it would be stranger if he didn't comment on it. "You've been staring at me for a while now."
"Amuro-san, you aren't - you don't," Conan hesitates, looking unsure, and well, Rei wouldn't really know what to ask in his situation either.
He just smiles at Conan. "Yes?"
"Do you do cosplay?" Conan decides finally. Rei holds back a look of derision - really, that was the best Conan could think of? - and instead increases the brightness of his smile.
"No, why?" he asks.
"Last night, I saw..." Conan starts, then trails off as Rei brightens his smile another notch. He stares, face looking a little uneasy.
"You saw?" Rei prompts. He brightens his smile just a little bit more.
"Nothing!" Conan exclaims, as brightly as the smile on Rei's face. "I didn't see anything, I just had a strange dream."
"Oh, I see," says Rei. He turns his smile back down to normal levels and sees Conan relax. "Dreams are often strange. Nothing to worry about, Conan-kun."
"Right," replies Conan. He gulps down the rest of his orange juice in a single move and says, "I was going to play with my friends so bye-bye, Amuro-no-niichan!"
Rei waves as Conan leaves.
The most frustrating thing about working as a magical contractor is that there seems to be no way to actually get better.
(No wonder his predecessors all died.)
No matter how many Lost he kills, the power of his wand doesn't increase. No matter how much he fights, he never gets any special abilities aside from flying and jabbing at things with the wand. And he wouldn't really call the latter thing a special ability, to be honest.
Sure, he gets a bit better at flying and fighting, but there's only so far he can get on that alone. It doesn't appear as though he can get any faster at flying through training either, though Rei does try.
Icianacle seems to have no idea about power-ups either. Rei starts to get him to bless everything from pillowcases to rice cookers, just to see if anything is more useful than the wand or a gun.
(Icianacle insists that Rei can't learn how to bless things and refuses to try to teach him. So naturally, Rei memorizes what he does when he blesses items and copies it perfectly, but nothing ever happens. He reluctantly accepts that Icianacle must have been telling the truth for once.)
His final conclusions are that everything seems to do the same amount of damage to the Lost and that rice cooked from a blessed rice cooker tastes absolutely horrid.
(Rei tries out using a blessed sniper rifle, but it's not much use to him alone since he needs to get up close to deal the final blow.)
(He isn't quite desperate enough to ask someone for help just yet.)
It's almost a year into his career as a magical contractor and Rei is getting desperate.
He's tried everything he can, he's learnt everything there is to learn, but from Icianacle's description of the progenitor Lost, he just doesn't think he can win.
He knows general weak points of a Lost, but the progenitor is apparently so large and has so many little tricks that Rei isn't sure he'll get the chance to apply any of his knowledge before getting curb-stomped.
Rei needs backup, proper backup, and Icianacle just doesn't cut it. He needs someone to slow down the Lost for enough time for him to slam that stupid wand on its face.
"I'm bringing in the PSB," says Rei one night in his apartment.
"You can't," Icianacle insists, making an anxious loop in the air in front of him. "The existence of Fae is a closely kept secret. You can't reveal it so easily."
"I can and I will," says Rei. He reaches in his pocket for his cellphone.
"No you aren't," Icianacle replies, voice suddenly cold. Rei blinks and Icianacle's pointing a gun at him. His gun, in fact. Rei can feel it missing at his waist.
...He's somehow managing to hold the handle with a flipper, but nothing's touching the trigger. Icianacle doesn't have fingers. Rei isn't quite sure if he's supposed to be threatened by a pastel pink penguin pointing a gun at him with a fluffy flipper.
Some of amusement must've leaked on his face, because Icianacle tries to make a warning shot only to fumble and drop the gun to the ground.
Rei looks down at the gun, then looks back up at Icianacle with a sardonic expression.
"I can still wipe your memory!" Icianacle snaps, holding up a flipper. A soft white light forms at the end of it.
"Alright, alright." Rei gives him a disarming smile and says, "What about a compromise instead?"
"A compromise?" Icianacle asks hesitantly.
"One person," suggests Rei, holding up a single finger with his right hand. "I bring in one person."
"I suppose that's better than an entire organization," Icianacle mumbles, and Rei carefully makes sure none of the smugness he feels appears on his face. Icianacle continues, voice louder, "Very well. I will permit you to bring in one person, Furuya Rei!"
So terribly easy to manipulate. It was a bit sad, actually, that someone like this had so much power.
Rei knocks on the door to the Kudo mansion. 'Okiya Subaru' opens the door not too long after.
"Oh, Amuro-san," he greets, just the right amount of surprise in his voice. Rei is reluctantly impressed. "It's been a while, hasn't it? What brings you here?"
"It's been two weeks, as you very well know," Rei says bluntly.
He had been roped into helping Akai and Conan with an incident a couple weeks ago. To be fair, cleaning up the incident was something he would've wanted to either way, but that didn't mean he wanted to work with Akai. Just because he knew the truth behind Scotch's death now didn't make them friends.
But desperate times called for desperate measures.
"We can talk out here, or you can invite me inside," Rei continues, crossing his arms.
"...Come inside," Akai said finally, like Rei knew he would. He follows him inside irritably to a sitting room.
They sit across from each other, then Akai looks at him expectantly.
Rei opens his mouth, but nothing comes out at first. Forcing himself slowly, haltingly, through gritted teeth, he finally bites out, "I need a favour."
"Oh?" Akai says, and while the voice is still Okiya, the tone is all Akai. Rei glares.
"Yes," Rei snaps despite himself, then does his best to soften his tone because he was trying to get Akai to want to help him. "I'm not saying for free. There has to be something you would want from me."
"I'll have to hear what you want first," Akai says, and well, at least that wasn't a no.
"It's going to take a while to explain," Rei warns.
Akai taps his fingers against his neck, and when he next speaks, it's in that infuriating voice Rei knows so well. "I have time."
Rei lets out a humph then barks, "You can come out, Icianacle!"
Icianacle bursts into view in a flash of pastel pink light in front of them both.
"Hi, I'm Icchan!" he says brightly.
Akai is staring blankly, which for him might as well be an expression of shell-shock. He turns to Rei, ignoring Icianacle.
"Furuya-kun? What's this?" he asks.
"I said it would take a while to explain, didn't I?" Rei says, and smirks.
Akai ends up believing him fairly easily. Rei supposes the man who came to the conclusion that someone must've shrunk without the knowledge that it was even possible must be fairly open to outlandish ideas.
He requests an open favour from Rei in exchange for his help, and Rei reluctantly complies. The only thing he really worries about an open favour is if Akai asks something that helps the FBI at the expense of the PSB, but Rei isn't too powerful in the PSB. There's only so much Akai could ask that he could actually do.
Akai does demand to see Rei's transformation costume, and again, Rei reluctantly complies. If they were going to be working together, he would be seeing it sooner than later anyways.
He laughs, actually laughs when he sees Rei in costume, though he shuts up at a deathly glare from Rei. His eyes are still laughing though.
Out of spite, he doesn't tell him that blessings are irreversible when Akai agrees to get his sniper rifle blessed.
Unfortunately, his spite is for naught because when he mentions it when it's too late to go back, Akai just shrugs and says he assumed it would be unusable for normal things.
Damn Akai Shuuichi.
They end up working rather well together. Of course they do. Even with a gaping hole missing in their team, they had years of experience carrying out missions together.
Dealing with the Lost really isn't that much different than their joint missions in the Organization, really. At least the broad strokes. Rei distracts the target and gets them to a good spot, Akai shoots. The main difference is that Rei now needs to make the final blow after Akai's pinpoint shot incapacitates the Lost for a minute or two.
(And that Scotch isn't there to coordinate and mediate, but they're both more mature and no longer concerned about maintaining their image in the Organization. They manage.)
Akai's almost always available to help out and Rei slips so easily back into old habits of relying on him.
(Though it doesn't seem like Rei is the only one slipping back into old habits, because Akai starts to call him up at times to ask about investigating together about something or another.)
It makes Rei's expression sour whenever Akai somehow gets his hands on information that he, an actual Organization operative, didn't know, but he comforts himself by making connections in the info twice as fast as Akai ever could.
Still, it's clear that Akai has a lot more free time than he does, so one night after they've dealt with a Lost and returned to the Kudo mansion to discuss, Rei flops himself down on a couch and grumbles at Icianacle, "Why couldn't you force Akai instead of me into this fight?"
"We actually did consider Akai Shuuichi," is Icianacle's unexpected reply, and both Rei and Akai turn to stare at Icianacle at those words.
Icianacle makes a couple lazy loops in the air, looking self-conscious.
"What disqualified me?" Akai asks curiously, sitting himself down next to Rei.
"We couldn't make an outfit that really suited him," Icianacle explains. Rei chokes.
"You disqualified him because of aesthetics!?" Rei hisses.
"Aesthetics are important, Furuya-kun," Akai says. He's trying at serious, but Rei can hear the suppressed laughter in his voice. Rei punches his shoulder in irritation then ignores him.
"More importantly, in what universe does that terrible outfit suit me!?" Rei demands, sending his best glare towards the fluffy penguin that he just might hate more than Akai.
"Well," Akai says, and Rei can tell from the half-amused tone that he isn't going to like what Akai's about to say. "It doesn't not suit you."
"See, Furuya Rei!" Icianacle says defensively, "Akai Shuuichi agrees!"
"Do you think that's a real endorsement?" Rei snaps, "I saw you laugh at the costume, Akai!"
"It can suit you and also be incredibly amusing that you, of all people, would wear it, Furuya-kun."
Rei buries his face in his hands and lets out a silent scream.
"Do you think we could direct a Lost to feed on Vermouth?" Akai wonders one night after they've dealt with a particularly explosive Lost. They're sitting on some building's rooftop over a hundred metres in air, covered in purple glitter.
Rei may be a little irritated that Akai Shuuichi can look calm and composed even when his clothes look bright purple.
"It would probably die of overeating," Rei says sardonically.
"What if instead all her years caught up with her and she became an old hag?" Akai suggests.
"Hm..." Rei puts a hand on his chin, considering the idea because at this point, why not. "Maybe? It would take too much effort though. These things are a pain to direct to places."
"I suppose you're right," Akai says, actually sounding a little disappointed.
Rei rolls his eyes.
It's been almost a year and a half since he was conscripted, and the progenitor Lost still hasn't made an appearance. He's beginning to wonder if his most recent predecessor had managed to land a killing blow.
He would never be that lucky though. But well, when it does come… he's not feeling so desperate anymore.
(Rei sourly hopes that Akai and Icianacle both die under the progenitor's fluffy hooves. Or just Icianacle, at the very least.
…Maybe just Icianacle, hopefully.)