Day 3

35. Hold My Hand

3318 words

Rating: K

The very first time she stuck her hand (pudgy little fingers, pink and wriggling) at him, he hadn't quite known what to do. At the age of seven his parents had prepared him for almost anything-where to kick if someone bigger than him was going to beat him up, how to talk to teachers when asking for help, what to do if a stranger wants to make conversation-but not this. They hadn't taught him what to do when a girl-a friend-was scrunching up her face in fear, shaking a little in the moonlight, shoving her hand at him like her life depended on it.

Good thing Shinichi had always been good at playing by ear.

He had reached out hesitantly, wrapping his fingers around hers, not entirely sure if this was what she wanted. Others at school had been worried about cooties. He'd known they didn't exist, but did Ran?

Shinichi snuck a glance at Ran. She was clutching tight at his hand, firmly looking ahead, small frame held rigid as she trembled. He realized he was probably overthinking this. She was afraid-like the average 7 year old would be if they'd been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to confront a "ghost" in the library of their school.

Inwardly he sighed. If she was going to be like this every time, he'd have to stop taking her on his cases. After all, he needed both hands to solve mysteries. She couldn't expect to occupy one hand every time she got scared.

She told him, biting her lip and holding back tears one night, that her parents fought nearly every day now. Shinichi had deduced as much from the frequency with which she'd snuck into his second floor bedroom. His parents were rarely home now, traveling around the world doing whatever it is they did, so he was left alone, capable to do nearly anything at his own leisure. Almost every other night she would come to his window, and when he let her in she'd look at him with wary, red-rimmed eyes, and too often it would be noon of the next day before her parents would notice she'd been gone.

He didn't ask her about it, because it seemed like everyone else did. Pointed questions from teachers and students alike drove Ran to tears. For a while it seemed like nobody was above making a fifth grader cry just to get the gist of what was going on.

He took to walking her to class, to walking her home, to standing behind her and glaring at anyone who so much breathed her parents' names. Shinichi decided he could protect her from pointed words.

But he couldn't protect her from careless ones.

They were walking into the classroom one morning, like usual. She was telling him something not particularly interesting about the field trip scheduled for the day, and he had been half listening, making humming noises and nodding where appropriate, hands in his pockets, when suddenly her breath caught in her chest and her voice died in her throat.

The silence jarred him from his thoughts and he looked up to find three guilty faces looking back at them, and Ran beside him，holding her breath and trying not to cry again.

Before he even knew what he was doing, Shinichi was grabbing her hand and tearing her away, dragging her into a run that ripped the breath from their lungs. When they finally stopped, they were on a street neither recognized, but neither exactly cared. Breathing hard, faces red, the two of them slowed to a walk, hands still joined.

"You know," he said, as the thought occurred to him. "You really are a watering pot."

"I know." She admitted, pointedly looking anywhere but him.

Shinichi rolled his eyes. Ran turned away. But neither let go of the other's hand. In this strange city they knew so well, and yet so little of, two frightened, lonely, and just a little broken ten year olds wandered, connected to the world and to each other only through the space between their fingers.

The sun was setting when they finally managed to find their way home. "Home." Funny really. There was no dispute about whose house they were going to, and in the end neither of them bothered. The room they ended up in could have been the living room in the Kudo Mansion. It could've been the one in the Mouri residence. It didn't matter, because it was theirs. There was no doubt that her parents wouldn't come for her tonight. There was no doubt that his parents wouldn't call.

Unbeknownst to the two of them, the world had constricted, until there was nothing but his hand in hers, sitting in silence, doing homework and eating junk food, Ran Mouri and Shinichi Kudo against the world as the sun set in the far east, as the day was done and all they had was each other to come home to.

(Later, when she reached out hesitantly, he looked her in the eye and smiled. And he didn't say it out loud, but he made a promise to himself, with the kind of unbendable conviction he reserved only for truths.)

The serial murder case was particularly tough, and secretly, he'd been trying to solve it for about a week, resulting in his disappearance from school for that same amount of time, and he would have kept going at it, too, if Inspector Megure hadn't insisted someone take him home after he had passed out on top of the evidence.

Shinichi should've known, really. Who else was there to call?

He came to on the ground. They didn't have anything to lay him down on, on site, so they'd left him spread out on the sidewalk beyond the yellow caution tape. When he startled awake, still grumbling the last half-baked deduction his sleep deprived and dehydrated brain had been trying to make, Ran was sitting on the gravelly road beside him, her jacket folded into a pillow, tucked under his head.

When his vision had focused on her, glaring at him, tapping her foot with her arms folded, just beyond the police tape, he'd offered her a sheepish smile, and sluggishly slid his hand toward her. She rolled her eyes, and threaded her fingers between his, tugging him up and under the tape.

"You," She dragged him toward her car, grounding her teeth, and he felt a little bit bad about making her come all the way out here just to pick him up. "Are going to take a shower, eat dinner, and sleep like a normal human being for once."

He mumbled something about the case, punctuated with a yawn. The hand in his twitched and flexed, and she stopped and turned to regard him with dark, serious eyes.

"Shinichi," She said, very simply.

He knew what she meant. He stared at her anyway. His half-awake brain couldn't quite decide if it was in defiance or if it was because she was really very pretty.

Wait. Had he really just thought that? Shinichi sighed and deflated. Privately, he'd decided that he was probably so tired he'd begun to hallucinate.

He let Ran lead him away, tuck him into the back seat with a blanket and a bottle of water. She plucked his glasses off his nose too, before settling down behind the wheel, still grumbling about his health habits as she started the car and pulled onto the road.

Ran had only just gotten her license, but she was already a more reliable driver than Shinichi, or, god forbid, her father. He watched her through already drooping eyelids, comprehending her fierce tirade only vaguely as he drifted off and came to and drifted off again.

He caught something in between one of these drifts, however, and at this piece of new information, he sat up, eyes widening nearly instantaneously. "Ran," he said, trying to clear his already locked up throat, "What did you say?"

"That you're going to land yourself in the hospital one day?" She looked up, startled, at him, through the center rearview mirror.

"No, idiot, before that."

"Oi! Watch who you're calling an idiot!"

"You were saying something about it being summer?"

"Huh? Oh yeah...I was telling you that the news station said the heat waves started yesterday, and you need to stay hydrated so you don't-"

"That's it-" He cut her off, leaping out of the blanket pile, "I know who the murderer is! We have to go back!"

"Shinichi-?" She let out a surprised yell as he climbed from the black seat and turned the wheel so that the car, screeching and swerving on the empty road, turned the other direction.

"Ran," he said softly in the silence, fingers covering hers. Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

And then Ran bit down hard on her lip, and slammed down on the gas pedal. The car shot forward, the other direction, and Shinichi, shedding the blankets completely, climbed into the front.

"You're too old to be doing that, you know." She said, not looking at him in favor of keeping an eye on the road.

"I know," he said, looking straight ahead as well, eyes already darkening as he settled into the passenger seat.

His hand still covered hers on the steering wheel.

He didn't get a chance to reevaluate. There wasn't time. Shinichi Kudo disappeared into hurried, distant phone calls, and Edogawa Conan melded seamlessly into Ran's life.

Sometimes when he missed speaking to her and being spoken to like himself, he hid himself away and called. It was surprisingly easy to pretend, though, on most days. He learned to replace the idea of himself even in his most private thoughts with Conan's identity.

Lies blended into truth, and he lost a piece of Shinichi Kudo each day he remained a four foot tall squirt. Not everything had changed. He still solved cases. It seemed that crime was waiting for him at every turn. So he was a first grader with a genius intellect. What else was new? His identity hadn't changed. It was just a matter of trying to contain it this time, to pretend he knew less than he did. Which, even as an adult, he had already had a habit of doing.

There came a day he thought he could be Edogawa Conan forever. Escape from the black organization and his impending doom breathing down his back. Start anew. Wipe the slate clean and redo it all. Maybe become a different person. He could do the things he didn't get to do the first time, fix things that he didn't get to fix.

But then she called.

She always called when he was least expecting it, when the days had run together and he could never be quite sure if it was Shinichi that was living a lie or if it was Conan.

His voice, his words came from a thousand miles away, but he was physically sitting, back to the wall, where, if he turned his head he could see her bowed over the phone, looking out the window, and he could imagine tears in her eyes even as he heard the barely audible wavering in her voice.

Ran told him stories. The cases they'd been on while he'd been "away." She told him about school, about the soccer team, about her father finding the neighbor's missing cat and how that seemed to be the only case where her father didn't have to fall asleep to figure it out.

When she spoke to him it was like nothing was wrong with the world, even though everything was.

"When are you coming home?" She always asked, at the end of every call, pulling him back to reality.

"Soon," He promised, like he always promised, because he realized now that somewhere along the way home became much less about physical location and much more about the fact that they were together. And whether he was Shinichi Kudo or Edogawa Conan he'd made a promise, years and years ago, to himself and her.

He would always hold her hand.

Maybe he was Edogawa Conan. Maybe he would be Edogawa Conan for a long time. But for her, always for her, he was Shinichi Kudo.

A month after he took down the black organization, he showed up on her doorstep. He would have come earlier, had he not been in the hospital, but physical therapy had been hell and he'd only recently reclaimed the ability to use his legs, after an entire building collapsed on him due to some well placed bombs and Gin's inability to go down without taking someone with him.

They told him Ran had come to keep vigil by his bedside almost every day when he was in his coma, but disappeared the moment he woke up. Shinichi figured he probably deserved it. He had been lying to her for over a year and a half. He imagined he wasn't high on the list of people she wanted to see. So he'd asked everyone. He didn't have to see her, just yet, but he wanted to know she was alright.

Heiji and Kazuha knew nothing. Sonoko hadn't seen her. He was so desperate he'd gone to the junior detective league, and even sought out the newly recovered Ai Haibara-well, it was Shiho Miyano now-but no one had seen Ran since she'd disappeared from the hospital. She wasn't at the Mouri Detective Agency either.

Admittedly, Shinichi was worried. If she needed her space, that was fine. But what if the black organization wasn't destroyed as they thought? What if he'd missed a few key members, and they were the ones who had Ran? What if-

He would've gone to Inspector Megure and filed a missing person's report if Kogoro Mouri hadn't taken pity on him and told him that Ran had hidden herself away with her mother, Eri.

He had visibly deflated, breathing out a sigh of relief, and Kogoro Mouri had patted him on the back almost sympathetically and told him that he screwed up.

Really stating the obvious there. Shinichi knew Ran better than anyone. They'd grown up joined at the hip after all. When Ran got angry, really angry, the kind of angry that left her used up and empty, she didn't speak to anyone. She locked herself away. Sometimes it lasted for a few hours. Other times several weeks in a row.

He kept his distance.

That is, until Eri called.

He picked up the phone one night, expecting it to be anyone else-but it was Ran's mother.

"Shinichi," She sounded haggard and gave no preamble. "You have to come talk to Ran."

"Is she alright?" He'd demanded into the phone.

"She hasn't left the house since she came back from the hospital. She doesn't speak much either. I thought she's just having one of her fits-the ones she used to have as a child-but a month is too long, especially in the light of these events."

"...do you think talking will help?"

"If I didn't, I wouldn't have called."

He hung up and was at Eri's apartment within the hour, at a loss as to what to do. Shinichi finally settled for ringing the doorbell. Surprisingly enough, the door opened, and Ran's face appeared in the doorframe.

For a moment, neither spoke.

"You." Ran managed to get out.

"Me," He agreed, gravely. "May I come in?" Wordlessly, she stepped aside.

He followed her as she led the way to the kitchen, sat down and watched as she made tea. They both drew back as if shocked when their fingers brushed as she handed him a mug.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a long silence.

Now that the silence was broken, he didn't have a plan. Shinichi was flying by the seat of his pants and it was terrifying, more terrifying than all the times he'd rushed headlong into danger without a second thought, because Ran is here and Ran is real and for the first time in months and months and months she sees straight through him and he straight through her.

She looked at him. He explained it. All of it. And after he was done he sat, silent, waiting.

It was like a tennis court. He'd served the ball to her. It was her turn to hit it back.

She looked up at him with tired eyes. "You let me think you were gone for a year and a half."

Love, fifteen.

"I had to make sure you were safe."

"You could have trusted me."

Love, thirty.

"I did. I do. I didn't want to risk it."

"How hard would it have been, Shinichi? I waited and I waited and I waited and I broke my own heart waiting...you were always there..." Tears were glistening in her eyes.

Love, forty. He expected yelling and karate, but not her angry tears.

"I'm sorry." He was right back where he started. Back to the wall, no right choice out of the multitude. No choice at all. Tell her, get her killed. Don't tell her, kill her inside anyway.

0-1. Love is zero.

He let out a soft gasp of shock when she reached across the table to cover his hand with hers.

"Some part of me always knew. But I didn't want to know." Her voice was soft, and she looked anywhere but at him. "I thought you'd tell me some day. I wanted to hear it from you." A wavering chuckle. "But they were the ones who told me who you were. The nurses at the hospital. Edogawa Conan. Shinichi Kudo. And when I got there...when I got there..." Ran cut herself off with a fierce swipe at her own eyes, "you're always running off on your own. Always, always on your own. Didn't it occur to you….? Wasn't that first time enough?"

"I made a promise."

"To keep me safe. You think I didn't make that same promise to myself?" She raised their linked hands. "I promised….I promised I would always hold your hand."

"You did. You do."

"You sat outside the door while I was dismantling a bomb. I wasn't within a ten mile radius when a building came down on your head."

Shinichi stood up with a strange, determined look in his eye. She watched him almost lethargically as he lifted her hand slowly, pressing a kiss to her wrist.

"You come with me even if you're afraid." He said decidedly. He pressed a kiss to her hair. "You stick by me when no one else does."

Ran's body shook with the force of the sob that tore from her throat as she pulled him toward her, their hands still entwined. "Shinichi, I'm so-" she managed to get out as she curled her free hand into the material of his suit jacket.

He kissed her forehead, and then her tearstained cheek. "You tell me when enough is enough. You find me when I lose my way."

Tucked into him, Ran was murmuring "baka" again and again into his shirt collar.

"And," he added quietly, like it was a miracle, voice barely above a whisper as he leaned in to press his lips against hers. "You love me."

They make each other, and themselves, a new promise, and, being both of them quite vocal, nobody's really surprised when the detective and the black belt walked into the police station hand in hand the next time a mysterious body showed up.

Although it did lead Inspector Megure to wonder.

Was there a fraternization policy for consultants?