Scarborough Fair
Summary: Kuroba Kaito finds himself in a sticky situation when he's kidnapped by a man who's also guilty for the abduction of three others. How can even the Kaitou Kid escape drug-induced paralysis, a psychotic doctor, a blackmailed housekeeper, and a mansion filled with traps and dungeons?
Pairings: Very minor hints.
A/N: I own nothing except Dr. Hailey, Anita Hailey (though I don't own their names), Kojima Daisuke, Diana, Colin, Armagnac, Champagne, Cognac, Amaretto (though I don't own their designs) and 'A'. Okita Soshi and Nagashima Shigeo are actual DC people. Think Yaiba and Yoban Saado. Title comes from Simon and Garkunkel song. Also loosely based around Mothy's song, 'Little Garden Girl' feat. Hatsune Miku. May be called alternate name of 'Clockwork Lullaby 2'.
Prequel: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"
Side Story: "Clockwork Relations"
Kaito leaned away from the lock that prevented Kojima Daisuke from joining the rest of them in freedom. "You," he announced. "Have the worst luck. Ever."
"Yeah, yeah, tell me something I don't know," the trapped teen snarled.
For once, Kaito didn't blame Kojima from being his usual self. While he'd been trying to unlock the damn lock, Nagashima's needle had snapped. He had taken Kojima's as a replacement but the last needle had snapped before he could even pop his lock open. Cheap second grade material. Those were good for nothing.
The cranky teen really had no luck. He had been the first one to be kidnapped, the one without any special talents and now he was the one who was still stuck inside his cage while others were free. Kaito felt a bit responsible about him being in his situation. After all, he had prioritized Okita and Nagashima before Kojima. If he had freed them in a different order, he wouldn't be stuck in his cage. Sure, someone else would be the one locked up and stuck, but still.
"Can't you open that with the wires?" Nagashima asked.
Kaito shook his head. "Not on this lock. It might work on the door, though. How about trying to find something outside?"
Hopefully, they'd find a phone that could be used to call the police with. If not . . . well, a surprising number of trivial things could be a lock pick in his hands.
Okita agreed, but Nagashima didn't really like the idea of leaving someone behind even for a short while. Kaito figured it had to do with baseball being a team sport and all. Kendo and phantom thieving were more along the line of solo sports.
In the end, though, even he saw the advantages of that strategy. Metal poles in hand the three of them ran up the slope of the bunker they were trapped in. The hidden closet door of the bunker was a lock impossible to pick with the things he had, but that didn't matter because apparently the doctor had been too lazy to even close the door properly.
"Seriously?" he muttered as they just pushed the closet door open and walked through into the hallway. He stopped in front of the room he remembered to be the tearoom and opened the door.
Inside, only Anita sat there, smiling that creepy blank painted on smile. Ignoring the dressed up mannequin Kaito first checked if the girl was still hiding under the desk – she wasn't – before beginning to search the room for something that could pick the lock and let Kojima out. A needle! Oh, wait, too short. A toothpick? Nah, it would break within the lock and jar the entire thing.
A thought struck him and he ran to the sitting doll before examining its hair. Something glinted under layers of auburn hair and he snatched the hairpin out with a triumphant crow. "This is perfect!"
Kaito reached out towards the room's doorknob when an explosion went off.
". . . put me down."
Dr. Hailey continued to run. "Hm? Sorry Anita, daddy didn't hear you."
"Put me down," she ordered again, this time using a louder, firmer voice. "Now."
Blinking, the doctor stopped his sluggish running with a confused look. "Anita?"
She struggled out of his arms and scrambled to the ground. "I'm not Anita."
"W-why, of course you are!" he tried to laugh but it sounded fake to her ears. "You'll always be daddy's little girl."
"My name," she ground out. "Is Haibara Ai. Or Miyano Shiho. Not Anita Hailey and you are most definitely not my father."
She almost felt bad when she saw the devastated look on his face. Almost.
That feeling of pity disappeared when he reached into his lab coat pocket. She swore inside her head as she just noticed the bulge of the pocket, a harsh bulge in a very specific shape.
He pulled out a gun. "Good-bye," he smiled. "Anita."
Oh god no.
Kaito ran out into the hallway and dashed towards the closet they had just been in. Outside the hidden bunker entrance, it took all he had not to cry out in frustration and regret at the sight of smoke beginning to pour out of the painted door. God, there had been explosives in the room.
If the smoke was just beginning to spread, then he could still go in there, open the lock – the hairpin was a much easier tool to work with – and grab Kojima before he died of smoke inhalation.
"Kojima!" he yelled into the bunker where the teen was still locked up in. "Kojima!"
Another explosion went off instead of the answer he had been waiting for and the amount of smoke coming out began to increase. Eyes squinted to see past the opaque gray curtain the smoke cast over his vision, Kaito looked into the bunker and saw a reddish glow. Fire.
He squinted further and saw some kind of liquid spilt on the ground. Gasoline? That would explain the fire in the empty cement bunker. Other than the crackling of the flames and his own breathing he couldn't hear anything. No screaming, no swearing and no signs of life.
They'd only been gone for five minutes or so.
"He's dead, ain't he?" Okita said quietly next to him. If there was doubt before, there wasn't any now.
Kaito nodded, mouth dry. Maybe if he had looked into the doll's hair first he could have . . . . "We need to get out of here," he choked out. Images of Jack Connery, lying there on the dirty floor of the warehouse with blood pooling around his head swam in his mind. His imagination provided pictures of Kojima's pieces flung around everywhere in his cell. Not again, not again not again not again not again . . . .
He turned around and practically fled from the scene. Okita kept up with him, looking worried but thankfully silent.
Nagashima muttered what could have been a prayer before following them. The tearoom was the last room at their end of the hallway, so their only choice was to go down the opposite direction. Their bunker wasn't the only place burning; other rooms had smoke pouring out, and his work with the struggling would have all been for nothing if they died because they inhaled too much smoke.
"Don't breathe the smoke," he warned before taking in a lungful of relatively smoke-free air. Relatively smoke-free air Kojima Daisuke would never be able to inhale again because he – Kuroba Kaito – hadn't been able to open his lock like he had with the other three and let him die trapped like an animal at the zoo. In the end it was his fault all over again for not being competent enough.
His glove slipping off his hand and Jack Connery falling with the white piece of cloth still held tightly in his hand to his death. Kojima's needle snapping in the lock because he had rushed, tried to make better time for the sake of his magician's pride. Not again. Two were more than enough. He wasn't going to lose the other two because of something he failed to do. "Ready?" he asked, using some of his air up.
The other two nodded.
He ran instead of speaking. Nagashima and Okita kept up as they dashed down the hallway. How long could they go? A minute? Two? How long with their bodies going through the sudden, unexpected running and burning up the oxygen in their lungs?
Kaito exhaled and refilled his lungs again at a relatively clean spot somewhat free of smoke and heard the sharp inhaling from behind. Good, they had the common sense to exchange air.
Now how did they get out of-
The next thing he knew he was on the ground with a dazed head and a swimming room. A voice yelled at him, but he was having a hard time making out the words. He began to feel pain in the back of his head and groaned through gritted teeth. Someone – Nagashima – grabbed under his arms and pulled him up to his feet. He winced at the movement and tried to not throw up at the disorienting feeling in his head. Okita was moving around and his head hurt just looking at him swimming in the room. Swimming like fish. He didn't like fish.
The ringing in his head lessened a bit and he made out a firefighter walking towards them with a door at his back. The door. Behind the bulky figure of the man he could see the outside world. They'd be safe. He just wished his head would stop ringing.
"You alright, son?" the man inside the suit bellowed through his protective gear. His voice came out a bit distorted because of that helmet and oxygen thing – he couldn't remember the name – or maybe that was just his head in general. He bet he could make a better distorted voice without using any equipment. "Hey, I found them!"
Three other men in the same garb ran in with heavy clunking footsteps towards them. Kaito winced at the sound. Couldn't they walk quietly?
"We'll get you out of here," the first firefighter promised. "Where's the other one? There were four of you, right?"
Four. There were . . . two? Three? What was the number? All he could remember was four and that there was one missing. Kaito grabbed onto him. "Kojima," he gasped. "He's . . . ."
Okita shoved him towards the exit and he winced again at the jarring movement to his head. "He's dead," the swordsman said instead.
The firefighter waved him out. The burning building was no place to have a questioning session and they all knew it. Outside the house. Kaito was taken to some kind of uncomfortable portable bed – a gurney? – where he had someone's gloved but cold hands prodding at his sore head. A light shone at his eyes before flicking off.
"He's got a mild concussion," the woman with the cool hands noted. An ice pack replaced her cold fingers. "Not too bad. He just needs some rest. What happened?"
While Nagashima explained that the light fixture above them had fallen onto the back of his head during their escapes, Kaito groaned in pain as his head actually began to throb.
The medic abandoned Nagashima instantly. "Hey, kid!" she called, eyes looking urgent. Her face swam in front of him and he wondered how all the Caucasians in Japan spoke Japanese perfectly. And she had called him 'kid', too. Heh. That was funny. But he couldn't share the joke. Why couldn't he share? Kojima might have liked it and even laughed for once . . . .
No. No sharing the kid joke. He fumbled for the ice pack and held it a bit tighter against his head. The coldness of the ice numbed the pain.
The medic snapped her fingers in front of his nose, trying to get his attention back to her. "How many fingers am I holding up?" she asked with her hand held some distance above his head.
He tried to focus his eyes on the drifting fingers. "Three?"
"Good enough," she exhaled, sounding relieved. "Now you rest, alright?"
She and a man in the white clothes of a paramedic loaded his gurney into the ambulance. Nagashima and Okita hopped in after him, and they sped off to the hospital.
Chikage felt just a bit guilty as Inspector Nakamouri personally drove her to the hospital where Kaito was. Both her husband and her son were his worst enemy, his personal nemesis. So much of his time had been spent on trying to catch the elusive thief in white, the figure called 'Kid' it was a wonder he didn't outright hate Kid with a burning passion. It came pretty close to it sometimes when Kaito went overboard with the tricks, but it wasn't in the 'I-will-kill-you-slowly-and-painfully' way, it was more along the lines of 'okay-nice-one-see-you-next-time-and-that's-when-I'll-win-for-sure-you-just-wait'. He was a good sport about it all. He was a good man.
And now he was escorting her, the wife to his first nemesis and the mother of the second to the hospital where his second nemesis was with six squad cars, full sirens and lights. No one was stupid enough to get in their way and traffic lights weren't a problem thanks to his position.
Just a bit guilty. Not a tad more.
(Hey, she had been a thief as well.)
Aoko sat in the back of the cruiser, not even caring if she was sitting where criminals were supposed to be in as she jiggled her leg nervously. The boy detective – Hakuba Saguru – was tapping his finger against the plastic seat in an ever-increasing mathematical pattern she recognized as the Fibonacci Sequence with an irritated look. The last girl, Koizumi Akako, had somehow convinced the headstrong Nakamouri into letting her come along in the cruiser despite not having police connections. Out of all the three sitting in the back, she looked the calmest.
She had no idea how the girl was so calm about it all.
When the hospital came into sight, Chikage unbuckled her seatbelt. She opened the door and leapt out before the car could come to a full stop and ran through the hospital doors.
Inspector Nakamouri had to stay behind to let the three teenagers out of the back of his cruiser.
The nurse looked harassed, but when she blurted out 'Kuroba Kaito, he was kidnapped and I know he's here!' right after 'Where is my son?!' she gave him a room number. Fifth floor.
"Thank you!" she ran to the elevator. All six were wandering around the hospital and weren't down at the lobby.
Chikage did what she had done during her honeymoon when Toichi had planned his romantic dinner at the top of a tower without an elevator. She took her high heels off – all her comfortable shoes in Japan had gone through a ridiculous amount of abuse by a phantom thief who used her things to disguise himself as a member of the opposite sex – and ran up the five flights of stairs with feet clad in nothing but stockings.
The doctor met her outside of the ward. "Miss . . . ?"
"Kuroba," she said, out of breath. Back when she had been young and a thief she could have done fifty of those without breaking a sweat. Just showed what age did to even the fittest. "I'm-I'm Kaito's mother."
The man checked a few things off of a clipboard. "Well, your son has a small concussion, but he'll be fine after rest."
She nodded and then charged into the room. Kaito sat in the bed holding an ice pack to his head. "Mom?"
Chikage gave him a flying tackle hug. Then she released him to frantically fret about his head. "I didn't hurt you, did I?"
"No," he assured her. "Sorry I got myself kidnapped."
She laughed at the pun and then her Poker Face broke. She sank to her knees and buried her face in his bed sheets as she began to cry.
Kaito pulled her back up and gave her a hug. "Hey, mom, I'm alright now," he said. "It's fine. Just a concussion. Nothing permanent."
Maybe now would be a good idea. Wiping the tears off her face, she took a deep breath to stop the hysterical shaky sobs and let him go. "Kaito?"
"Yeah?"
"I need to tell you something."
The gentle smile on his face faded away a bit when he realized she was dead serious. "You're not pregnant, are you?" he said in a weak attempt at a joke.
She shook her head. "No, Kaito, it's-"
"KAITO!" Nakamouri Aoko came barrelling through the doors, followed by Kaito's cute friends.
Chikage stepped back and let her son begin to play the 'I-have-a-concussion-and-need-peace-and-quiet' card. She'd tell him later back at home.
Listened and fell into the song 'Yobanashi Deceive' by IA. And I must say, it's a perfect song for Kaito despite being a part of the Kagerou Project. Will write a fic on that someday.