A.N: My entry for the latest theme contest at Poirot Cafe. The theme this time around was AU, so I decided to do a wings!AU. Please note that part of this story is set in the present and part in the past; verb tense shall be thy guide but hopefully I have it marked clearly enough. Enjoy!
When Kuroba Kaito was born, his wings were balls of downy fluff like a baby bird, more like a cygnet-gray than a sparrow-brown or a duckling-yellow, but that never meant anything.
His mother's wings were mottled brown, sleek and hawk-like, with striking barred primaries. His father's wings were just as showy as he was, bright and iridescent as a blue jay's, pristinely preened at all times. Neither one knew quite how or why they had them – the theories were cursed gemstone and weird twisty family tree, respectively – but apparently it was inheritable. And Kaito had. Toichi said that's alright, they're what's supposed to be there, so it was.
Chikage worried about it – she'd always had a much rockier relationship with having wings than Toichi had – but Toichi assured her it would be fine. Jii thought it was cute.
So a few of his baby pictures feature downy fluff and feathers, and a few others feature his father's doves perching on him like they're confused about this very large, very noisy fledgeling. All of his onesies have holes in the back and they kidnap doctors for his regular checkups. It's just how it works, for a magic baby born to a magic family who just happen to all be thieves.
(Maybe that's genetic, too.)
And then, when Kaito was old enough to have playdates, they taught him how to hide them.
Kaito's memory has always been exceptional, and he knows it. He remembers his father's voice, his father's hands, his father's magic. He remembers black suits and black ties and red roses, and he remembers messy pajama bottoms and white feathers stuck to oversized shirts while taking care of the doves. He remembers the things his father said to him, and the things he left out. It's a gift, he knows, and he doesn't take it for granted, now that memories and doves are all that he has left.
However, Kaito's imagination has always been exceptional too.
He knows it wasn't real. Couldn't have been. Of course. No photos, no evidence. He knows better.
But blue jays still remind him of his father.
So do sapphires, for that matter, which is what's got him thinking about it now. He snorts and turns back to the plans for the heist. The blueprints spread out in front of him cover every surface of his desk and have started creeping up the walls like curling paper moss.
The museum's old, and solid. There's no modern ventilation or convenient hollow ceiling panels, but the wind currents around the building will make glider landings or takeoffs simple enough – not easy, for anyone but him, but possible, and Nakamori will know that. If there's any wind on the heist night it might be genuinely dangerous, especially with the high trees around the building. Small windows, a few skylights – he's going to have to check those before he sends out the note;no use showing up with a glass cutter if the things turned out to be acrylic. He goes over the distances, the open spaces and the little alcoves, and every broom closet or storage room he can find. It's going to have to be one for disguise, though if he really tries he can probably convince someone he's levitating in the central corridor. Not worth it, this time around.
It won't be his easiest heist. But he's had worse. He draws a basic plan, checks and double checks it, then heads off to the Blue Parrot to go over it with Jii. The old man isn't a magician on his own – no stage presence whatsoever – but his knowledge of magic and his ability to spot problems before they arise makes him a brilliant assistant.
Accomplice. Whatever.
He brings three of his doves, just for the sake of having them. It's a brilliant early summer day, bright and beautiful without the stifling heat or the miserable humidity they'll have later in the season, and birds are everywhere. Kaito can't help but notice them.
Larks sing over the early-season cicadas, perched in trees around him. The mud nests of swallows litter the undersides of bridges, as the birds themselves swoop and dive around the rushing traffic, more reckless than Kaito has ever been. Overhead, the dark wings of sand martins pass by, headed down towards the bay.
There are more – flycatchers, buntings, finches, waxwings – so many that it would take Kaito years to catalog them all. But he's happy with his doves – after all, none of the other birds will come home to him.
The pool hall is dark and cool and quiet, and he hears Jii yell out a hello from the back room as he enters. He swings around the bar and past the employees-only sign, letting the door swing shut on its silent hinges. One of the three doves is getting restless, and he lets the three out and sets them to perch on one of the pool cues adorning the wall. They coo and flutter and straighten ruffled feathers, side-stepping back and forth on the perch.
"Hana-chan, Shou-kun, and... Shiro-chan," Jii guesses, coming up behind him.
"Not quite," Kaito says. "Shiro-chan's getting old; she stayed home today. This one is Gina-chan."
"Ah," he says. "Pleased to meet you, Gina-chan. She's Haru's egg from last year, isn't she?"
"Right in one," Kaito answers. "She's not used to staying still, so I think they can have a break for a moment. I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all. I've missed having them around." Jii turns back towards the back-room table, sweeping it clear of papers and pushing a few loose items – chipped glasses, a cell phone charger, a cracked-down-the-middle cue ball – to the side, trapping them in a triangular billiards rack. "Show me what you've come up with."
The plan seems to work well enough – Jii finds a better door for the escape route – and they set a date. Jii should be able to get the few items they need by tomorrow, Saturday, but it never hurts to be safe. Sunday at ten, an hour after the museum closes. Fair enough to everyone, and it isn't even Nakamori-keibu's day off. It's after Tantei-kun's bedtime, but as far as common sense is concerned that's a good thing, even if it means the heist will be less fun.
Kaito will do a final scope of the place tomorrow afternoon. Until then, he's free.
He trusts two of the doves enough to let them ride on his shoulder without flying away, and he knows that Gina-chan will at least be able to find her way home if she does, so he doesn't put them away again. Instead he makes his way down the sidewalk with the birds on his shoulders, whistling, with the rustle of feathers in his ear.
Nothing in the world feels quite so natural.
When Kuroba Kaito learned to hide his wings, unlike everything else his father taught him, it wasn't easy.
They were still fluffy, though a bit smoother – he could pick out the primaries and the secondaries and the coverlets, even if they weren't smooth and sleek like his father's, and nowhere near big enough to fly with. Someday they would be, his father promised, and when they were he would teach him. Until they were they'd go hang-gliding instead, and wasn't that something to look forward to, but they'd only do that if he could get this right.
Kaito was very determined to get this right.
There's a space in your head, his father had told him, and it's empty now – and Kaito, years later, would realize just how tempted his father had been to make an airhead joke – but it's there for a purpose. It's there for you to put things in. Kaito had glanced at the toy in his hand, and wondered, and Toichi had realized what he was thinking and smiled. Not like that, no. You can't put magic tricks or toys in it, I've tried. No. That space is part of you. So the only things you can put in it are things that are part of you.
Like wings.
Have you ever wondered why I only have my wings sometimes?
He had. But he'd more wondered it because he wished his father would have them all the time; they were nice to look at, and his father was much more relaxed with them. And the doves would perch on them, which was funny.
It's because I put them away when I don't need them. Like we put your toys away when you're done playing. I put them away in that empty spot in my head.
Kaito had nodded, because this all made sense so far. But when he looked for the empty spot in his head, like his father told him, he couldn't find it; his head was a mess of scattered memories, and he had to clean it up before any part of it was empty enough to fit wings. Even then, it wasn't so much empty as it was filled with the idea of feathers.
That's alright, Toichi said. That's what's supposed to be there.
And it took him several days, and even more tries, and several repetitions of that promise of hang-gliding – but Kaito got it.
That's my boy, Toichi had said, and even though it didn't feel right without them, Kaito would do anything to make his father proud.
(And even when he forgot, he never forgot how.)
Kaito heads home, and gets ice cream along the way. The doves are curious about it – they're curious about everything – but it's chocolate, so he can't let them taste. He nudges Gina-chan away from it when she hops from his shoulder to his wrist to investigate.
They round the corner to the house, and the doves launch themselves off of him, headed for the dovecote on the back of the house. He lets them fly; the exercise is good for them and there's no way for them to get lost.
He doesn't bother with the front door, and instead vaults the fence into the backyard. The dovecote and attached coop are both alive with activity today; birds splash in the water bowls and spread their wings to dry in the sun. They love the summer, and so does he. He opens the dovecote for the three outside to get in, and they flutter inside. Shou-kun immediately makes for the water bowls, and Kaito notices they're getting a bit low. Understandable, when the water's getting splashed everywhere.
He finishes his ice cream, and sets the bowl aside before heading into the house through the back door. When he returns, he has a bag of pellets in one hand and a bag of seeds in the other, and every one of the birds has its attention fully fixed on him. He opens the door of the coop and steps inside.
He remembers, in a dim sense, first learning to take care of the doves. It's always been one of his chores, ever since he could first be trusted not to hurt them. He remembers trailing in after his father with handfuls of chopped apples or seeds, remembers when dove's wings were as long as his arms, stretching out over him as they descended on the food. He remembers the rush of the air and his father's laugh, and he can't help but smile when he thinks of it, because his father never laughed enough. He sets the seeds to one side and scatters handfuls of pellets, and the coop turns to chaos as they descend on it.
Four handfuls later, he hears Aoko's voice booming from the house. He yells back, "Out back, Aoko!" and she sticks her head out the back door.
"You started without me!" she accuses.
"You were late," he says with a shrug. "They were hungry."
"They're always hungry," Aoko grumbles, and goes back inside. She reappears a few minutes later with a bowl of chopped fruit and the plastic container of mealworms. Kaito mock-scowls at her for stealing their love away from him.
Fruit and mealworms are treats, not regular food, so Aoko lets Kaito finish with the pellets and start on the seeds before she starts distributing the good stuff. In the mean time, she picks up Shiro-chan, strokes her feathers and checks her wings, before helping her to get some of the pellets before the younger birds can snatch them. The doves coo and Aoko coos right back, talking to them in the soft, familiar baby talk that she's always used with them, and Kaito can't keep the smile off his face. Then she picks up the bowl of fruit – apples today, looks like – and is promptly mobbed.
While Aoko distracts the doves, Kaito checks the nests. No eggs, so nobody needs the special food or the calcium supplements. Looks like part of Shou and Hana's nest is starting to break apart on one side – he'll leave some straw in the coop tomorrow so they can fix it. But for once he doesn't see any other problems, and he turns back to Aoko.
She's covered in white, doves perched on her arms and shoulders and head, nesting in her messy hair, cooing and flapping and trying to get her attention to get a piece of apple. She's laughing and talking to them, with none of the worry or pretense that's occupied her lately, more Aoko than he ever sees her elsewhere.
He knows nothing in his life can last, least of all something good.
But this – this, he wants for as long as he can have it.
When Kuroba Kaito first went to school, both of his parents took him aside to remind him that he absolutely cannot show his wings in class. He couldn't tell anyone he had them, either; it was a secret like magic was. His mother added the point that his school clothes, unlike his house clothes, didn't have holes in the backs for his wings, and if he let his wings out in class he would ruin his nice new outfit. Which he didn't want.
He never understood why it was important, but he agreed, and that was good enough.
But he didn't like it.
Keeping his wings in for too long made his back hurt, the sort of stiff, achey feeling that he got from sitting still too long. He couldn't feel his wings when they were gone, but he could feel where they should be. Stretching made it feel better, and he was allowed to do that, when the teacher wasn't talking, so he did. He stretched a lot, as far as he could, and soon he'd mastered the boneless, cat-like stretches that he'd eventually become known for. Because if he was moving, it wasn't stiff. It didn't ache.
As long as he could move, he could keep them in all day without trouble. So it wasn't that bad, really.
Except he really wanted to show them to Aoko.
They weren't blue like his father's – not yet, but he hoped they would be someday. He'd seen the way that chicks became doves, and he knew the feathers he had now wouldn't be the feathers he'd have forever. But he'd finally gotten rid of most of the downy fluff, and his father had taught him how to preen them, and he liked to think he looked dignified and mature and magic, like his dad, even if he still was boring cygnet-gray.
But he couldn't, because his father made him promise not to.
Because it was a secret, like magic.
(So maybe she could figure it out on her own.)
Once Aoko is gone again, Kaito turns his attention back to the upcoming heist. The note shouldn't be too bad this time. The gem is a star sapphire, brilliant, vivid blue, and he spends a long few moments thinking up metaphors that will confuse Hakuba specifically, phrases that imply different things in English than they do in Japanese. He wants Hakuba gone for this heist, because sometimes against all common sense Hakuba brings Watson.
And she – and yes, she's a girl, and the detective hadn't known the difference in plumage until Kaito pointed it out – is dangerous. Not to Kaito, but to his birds, and so if he had a heist where he needs birds he has to keep Hakuba out of it. He'd lost one to the hawk a few months back, and her mate had been inconsolable. It'd taken weeks to get him eating with the others again.
So with any luck, this note would send Hakuba to Tokyo Station, after a gem display there. It probably wouldn't fool Nakamori and Tantei-kun, but neither of them had a dang hawk, so he could deal with them.
Note finished, he signs it, checks it over for fingerprints, and seals it, before walking it calmly to Nakamori's house. Normally, he'd send it to the papers instead of just the police, but he doesn't need a crowd this time. And Nakamori-keibu always turns such a lovely shade of purple when he finds it.
The rest of the night is spent on rebuilding his stash of smoke pellets, and stretching. His back has been more sore than usual lately, and he isn't sure why – he must have landed wrong, at some point. It's hard to keep track.
Kaito sleeps, and dreams of flying.
When Kuroba Kaito was eight, he thought his wings might be big enough to fly with. True, they weren't anything like his father's, still, but his mother's seemed small and she got on fine with those. And he did love hang-gliding, but if that was good, using his wings had to be better. He could picture himself with huge blue wings, soaring alongside his father, flying amid their flock of doves. It was perfect, in his head, and he made his father promise – pinky promise, double promise, extra special magic promise – to teach him as soon as he could.
And then his father died.
He remembered – and it felt like a dream, like a nightmare – his mother holding him, wrapping him in mottled brown wings, as light filtered through the primaries. It was a tent of feathers, only half familiar, open on one side and missing its other (blue) half.
There were blue feathers at the funeral, and no one else understood why.
Kaito never learned to fly.
And as the years passed, and his mother never showed her wings, and Kaito never showed his wings, he forgot in pieces. Forgot his father's wings, forgot his mother's wings, forgot his own.
Until all that was left was that spot in his mind, filled to the brim with the idea of them.
The final scope goes well - he removes one of the skylights and replaces it with something much easier to knock out, jams some locks, disables a few alarms – and the heist is ready to go. Jii gets the equipment in and in place in plenty of time, and Hakuba is haring off to Tokyo Station as the task force settles in to the museum. The museum closes, Sunday night, without a single news station knowing about the heist. Kaito, as one of the extra security guards the museum brought in against the recommendation of the task force, keeps watch on the sky. He can get out without good weather, but his doves probably can't, and he needs them this time.
Unfortunately for his plans, Tantei-kun convinced his girlfriend/adoptive sister to let him come, despite the hour. The boy is watching the hired guards, and Kaito keeps himself from flinching with the steel gaze sweeps over him. If he'd known Tantei-kun would be here, he would've planted stuff on the displays and doors, low down where the others would miss it, so the miniature detective would assume he'd outsmarted Kid before Kid even got started. Next time, maybe, and until then he'll just have to be ready to duck.
He gets in as a guard, but he has no intention of staying that way. Akiyama-keiji, Nakamori's assistant, is kind (of stupid) enough to enter the bathrooms alone, and promptly finds himself unconscious, tied up, and missing his uniform, and Kid-as-Akiyama dashes out with the man's usual nervous energy. Nakamori's checking the hired museum guards, and Kid takes the opportunity to rattle off a list of places they've found evidence of tampering – the less essential locks, a few alarms, a door he purposefully took off its hinges as a distraction – as Nakamori curses his approval.
"We're going to get him this time," Nakamori says, grinning with gritted teeth.
"Yessir!" Kid-as-Akiyama chirps with a salute.
Akiyama's post is always across the room from Nakamori, watching for anything Nakamori doesn't see. Unfortunately, that'll mean Nakamori will have a full view of whatever Kid-as-Akiyama does. Which is fine, because Kid doesn't intend to blow his cover. The gem gleams in the center of the room, right beneath the tampered-with skylight, and when he looks up he can see Tantei-kun lurking on the roof, waiting for Kid to pop out the skylight.
Good to know that even without Conan-specific preparations, he's still managed to mislead the kid.
Ten strikes, and Jii, right on time, hits the breaker. The lights die, and Kid lunges forwards, because he has ten seconds to set this up. The police hear an echoing laugh, and Kaito hits a button, and there's a faint, thin hiss and a rustle of feathers. The lights snap back on.
Kid's white figure stands atop the display case, something blue shining in his hand. Nakamori growls and swears and barks fast orders, and Akiyama is closest to carry them out. He lunges forwards. In the same instant, the figure raises one arm and fires off a grappling hook. The skylight pops out without fanfare, and the caped figure swoops upwards, laughing wildly as doves burst out from all around and spiral upwards in a rush of wings and air and laughter. They're gorgeous in flight, impossible to look away from, and nobody does.
Meanwhile, on the ground, Akiyama picks the lock.
And seconds later, when the laughing Kid dummy, hands glued to a grappling hook and a plastic costume gem, pops out of the skylight, Tantei-kun hits it with a soccer ball and it tumbles realistically enough to buy him a moment where everyone thinks he's genuinely up there. Kid slips the sapphire into his pocket and starts running.
"Conan-kun's up there on his own!" he shouts, and Nakamori curses behind him. The task force never puts much effort into tracking Conan, because the kid will spend more time trying to slip his watch than he spends trying to catch the thief if they do, and he's more effective left alone. But that doesn't mean they'd leave him alone with a wanted criminal, oh no. Akiyama/Kid heads straight for the stairs, followed by a herd of officers. He accidentally (or not) sets off a trap that keeps anyone else from following him up.
"Don't worry!" he shouts, as the officers below slip and slide on ten kilos of greased ball bearings. "I'll take care of him!"
Conan can take care of himself.
Kid bursts through the door to the roof, shedding his disguise the whole way to free his cape. Tantei-kun never has more than one soccer ball, and he can't hit a moving target with the darts, so Kid just has to keep moving. He hears the dart zip past his head, and he laughs as he launches himself off the edge.
Between the sharp snap of the glider opening and the rush of the wind, he almost misses Conan's panicked yell of "Kid, look out!"
He jerks in the glider's harness, trying to see what he's looking out for. The motion makes the bullet miss his head, at least. It buries itself into the left leading edge tube instead.
Which, honestly, is not much better.
The tube splinters and falls apart, and half his lift disappears. What's left of the glider drops into a wild spiral. His heart leaps into his throat and keeps him from screaming.
Time slows.
He's noticed it does that, in life-or-death situations. Falling out of Tokyo tower, shot down into the Osaka harbor, pitted against whatever ridiculous thing his life throws at him this time. Time slows, and his senses sharpen, and parts of his mind fall away to leave behind things that are sometimes helpful and sometimes not.
But it's fitting, he thinks. He's going to die as his father's ghost, with memories of his father in his head.
His father's smile, his father's hands, his father in crisp black suits and his father in cut up t-shirts, his father with iridescent blue feathers and doves perched all over him.
...Wait.
He'd normally dismiss that as a dream, but he's falling to his death right now and for some reason that's not an option. All he can see in front of him is the rapidly approaching pavement, but all he can see behind his eyes is huge blue wings.
And another memory bubbles to the surface, of his father patiently explaining about an empty spot, and something meant to fill it, and a place in his head full to the brim with the idea of feathers.
His own feathers.
Kaito is twenty meters from the pavement, two seconds from death, and ten years from the present when the back of his shirt explodes into wings.
And it looks like an explosion, too, as what must be a thousand loose feathers suddenly appear from thin air, eight years of molts at once. They range from downy gray to snowy white to blue, and the blue is what gets him, what pulls him into the present, and what makes him snap wings out to the side like huge umbrellas, catching himself at the literal last second.
Part of his mind is thinking something like holy what I have wings since when do I have wings?! with varying degrees of emphasis and number of exclamation points, but since most of him is going I'm not dead, hurrah! he manages to push back the questions for the moment in favor of trying to stabilize himself in the air. He's still shedding feathers like mad, clouds of them coming off with every downstroke, but more importantly he's not falling anymore. The cape, still half a hang-glider, is in the way, and he hits the quick-release and lets it fall.
He never learned how to fly, how to steer, and just beating his wings to keep him in the air or holding them steady to glide is exhausting and near impossible – he isn't staying up but he doesn't know how to land. He throws his weight to turn like he does with his hang glider, and it doesn't quite work, and he bangs into a wall before dropping – more slowly this time, thankfully – the rest of the way to the ground. He tries to roll when he hits, but the wings catch and tangle and trip him up, and he ends up upside-down in an alley, still trailing feathers. Memories still swim in his head, but he has to go now because there's no way either Tantei-kun or the gunman missed that.
He's trying to run, wings dragging behind him, when Jii pulls his car up. Because Jii didn't miss that either. Kaito dives into the back seat, and they set off towards the house.
"Your mother told me you forgot," Jii says quietly at a stop light. "Looking at the state of those, I believe it."
"I have wings," Kaito says quietly, running a hand through his own enormous feathers.
"You always have," says Jii.
They pull up in front of the house, and Jii helps Kaito up the front walk. The doves they used earlier have beaten them home, and they swarm Kaito as he approaches, part curious, part confused, part afraid. He reaches out and three perch on his arm. Shiro-chan, who was around when his father was alive, perches on his wing instead.
Inside, the doves scatter to sit on shelves and cabinets, and Jii helps Kaito out of the shredded remains of his uniform. He sits on the couch shirtless for a moment until Jii returns with one of Toichi's old house-shirts that he remembers, one with slits cut in the back. It's slightly too big and it smells like dust, and Kaito wants to cry.
He pulls himself up, still off balance, and examines himself in a mirror. His wings aren't any bird he recognizes, dove-white coverlets and sapphire primaries, feathers sticking out in every direction like he's been pulled backwards through a hedge. Properly groomed, they might be beautiful, but they're...
"I know you must have questions," Jii starts. "We don't know where they came from – your mother thinks..."
"They're not like his," Kaito says softly, cutting Jii off.
Jii pauses. "...No," he says. "They're not."
"I thought..." He can't voice the thought. He doesn't need to, not with Jii.
"Kaito," Jii says quietly. "You are not your father."
"I know," he says.
"You don't have to be."
"...I know."
He's at the edge of tears – forget poker face, forget it, this is too much – and his feathers are trembling, and Jii stands behind him unsure of what to say. He isn't his father, and his father is gone, and not even his wings hold the memory. His wings are Kaito's and they should be Toichi's.
That's alright, Toichi says, in his memories. That's what's supposed to be there.
Kaito breaks down and cries.