Disclaimer: I do not own either Detective Conan or Magic Kaito. Have fun with this final installment!

I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.

~Robert Benigni

The End of the Madness

It had been a mad scramble for safety, she reflected, their getting there. When he'd finally come back, she'd proceeded to drag him into the house, made him pack a bag full of his things – she'd been careful to make him sort out any electronic devices, they could be bugged, after all – and gotten him out of the house and into the car in record time, she thought.

Then she'd taken the weirdest route towards their destination, all the while glancing through the rearview mirror to make sure that they hadn't been followed. Upon arriving at the small hut, she'd herded him into the house, and closed the door. Locked it, twice. She was jumpy, paranoid all through the first evening there. Kaito'd had the presence of mind to leave her alone then.

Every night since arriving there, she'd had nightmares – one after the other, about Kaitô Kid taking away her son, about her son being shot, about them being found: it was a toss-up between the bad and the worst-case events that could happen. She'd woken up almost screaming more than once. But she uttered no word to her son about those. Chikage just kept applying make-up to cover up most of the night's troubles.

On the fifth day, though, she stumbled upon the letter of her friend – the one that she'd so carelessly thrown into the front pocket of one of her bags. Chikage decided to sit down and read it. Thoroughly. Thus, she made her way into the lounge and sat down on one of the inviting couches there. She pulled the letter out of the envelope and, putting that onto the table, she began to read.

"Dear Chikage," it read,

"I hope this letter finds you well, my dear friend." Her eyes grew teary at the way her deceased friend had addressed her. "If I am not with you, sitting right beside you, while reading this, then that must mean that I am dead. In case I am still alive and kicking, please do stop reading this letter for it is quite a sad one, seeing as it is written for the case that I am not in any way alive any more.

As it is, I hope to be sitting there, on that couch, with you, but I know we don't always get what we want, ne? And I do know you read on despite me telling you not to. I do know you, Madame Curious! So please tell my husband and my dear daughter that I love both of them – and that I continue watching over them, be it in person or from the heavens above." By then Chikage had tears running down her cheeks at the precious letter that was resting in her hands just then. She decided on the spot that she would call her neighbors immediately upon finishing it.

"The reason why I am actually writing this letter right now concerns your dear husband. Tell him that he's lost our bet, by the way, should you still need to read this letter in order to find out what he should have told you eons ago. (Do that only if I didn't already do it for you)

His punishment is to hang off the wall of your house, all naked except for a small triangular loincloth and with I'm a most magic magician written in bold letters all around him. Please do carry it out for me in case I can't do that myself!" Chikage had to let out an unladylike snort at the image. That could have only been thought up by her dear friend, Nami, she thought. Nami, her neighbor's dead wife and only about two years her junior, had grown close to her after the Kuroba family had moved to Ekoda following that catastrophe that had happened at Kaito's previous school.

"Anyways. What I wanted to tell you – it concerns your husband (for the nth time, he should have told you about that himself already, that chicken!) and the Kaitô Kid. For – and there isn't any good or nice way to go about telling you, is there? If so, I haven't discovered it yet, and this is already the twentieth letter that I'm drafting here. (Chikage smiled at that; she could readily imagine her friend sitting at the desk, half-way through a draft and discarding it because ONE word – one single word – didn't sit right with her) – Toichi Kuroba is the same person as Kaitô Kid." Chikage felt her breath catch. That wasn't at all what she had been thinking! It cannot be right, it simply cannot be true! But if that was true, then… she had been wrong all along!

She re-read that one line "Toichi Kuroba is the same person as Kaitô Kid" about ten more times. And then ten more times. And ten more. She couldn't believe it. It refused to enter her mind. She literally drilled it into her head by repeating that one line over and over. Feeling numb and quite decidedly in shock, Chikage lost track of how many times she had read that when she finally deemed herself well enough to read on and finish the letter. Nami, her dear and old-time friend had just managed to turn her world upside down and inside out with a letter only.

"It was his night job, you see. I do believe he actually had quite a silly reason to start it, but it became serious quite quickly. There are people after him, people of the deadly sort. He has saved me from them more than once, but as consequence of that last saving act of his, I had to give up my own night job that I had originally started with reasons similar to his, I believe. I so naively believed that I could make a difference in the world, that I could stop one bad organization all by myself.

I was wrong, of course. Your husband helped me get away from them about two years before his own "official" debut as a phantom thief. "Unofficially", he made his debut when he was studying theatre at university – as the consequence of a silly bet it was, I believe. He was so innocent back then, still." Chikage couldn't believe she'd read that. She couldn't believe her friend had written that. She felt like she'd just entered another dimension and found out that people walked on their heads instead of their legs. Aghast, she continued staring at the letter, thoroughly lost in her thoughts.

That was how her son had found her.

Next she knew he had his arms all around her in an encasing embrace, having to comfort her, as all of a sudden huge sobs racked her body. She wasn't sure what to believe any more. Whom could she trust? Why had her friend written such things? Were all her worries only one big lie that she'd told herself? Was this newly-found-out truth even better than hers? Her mind was going in circles, always coming back to the two words "Tell him". So she did.

~TheEndOfTheMadness~

And her son, her dear, dear son, listened attentively, just as he'd done all those years ago, at the funeral. "I am so sorry, Kaito! I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry!" those words were the first to come out of her mouth when she'd finally calmed down some. "I hadn't known – and how could I? – that stupid magician! I was so wrong about – everything was directly under my nose! Right there! – how couldn't I have seen what was right in front of me? – all this time – he put everything right in front of me! – all those little things, all those hints and clues – and I was so wrong all this time! – all this time I've tormented myself with that question – how could I have been so arrogant to think that I knew what he had been trying to tell me all along?" It was a jumble of words that descended on the poor boy just like an avalanche. The mountain of words that she'd obviously not said to anybody else threatened to follow.

He let her say all of these words and more. It didn't mean that he could make heads and tails of what she was trying to tell him – or was she talking to herself, then? – but he let her get rid of whatever was so obviously eating at her. Kaito would get his answers soon enough, he knew.

When she had calmed down and stopped for breath after having let off yet another torrent of words, he saw his chance and butted in. "What exactly do you mean? What didn't you see? What is this all about?" The young amateur magician didn't think she'd be able to cope with more than three questions right then, so he forcefully cut himself off, even though he knew those questions were quite far-reaching, too.

Teary-eyed, she glanced up into his eyes again. "I am so sorry." She said with a clarity that belied her previous confusion. "I had thought – your father. He was Kaitô Kid, wasn't he?" Staring straight into his eyes, she asked him. His eyebrows threatened to disappear into his hairline at that moment. He'd thought she had already known about this!

Naturally, he didn't lie to her; she was his mother, for god's sake! "Y-Yes. – Yes. Otou-san was Kaitô Kid." Her shoulders went down all of a sudden. It seemed almost as though she was relieved about this confirmation. As though she had thought something far direr had happened. His eyes couldn't open any wider if he tried. "What - … No, why would you ask that now of all times?"

"This letter, I think you should read this, too. He really was a phantom thief, was he? And now you're following in his footsteps, aren't you?"

"…" His mouth was opening and closing of its own accord, without any noises escaping him. He didn't know anymore just what questions he'd been about to ask before. What had happened? What had she thought her husband had been doing, all those years ago?

"Yes."

The young magician's mind felt like mush and he didn't think he could think straight at that moment in time. However, he got some of his questions out, still.

"What did you think he'd been doing? What did you think I was doing? And why in god's name did you act this paranoid when you didn't know that I was Kid?" Finally, something started to make sense, once he spoke it out loud. In the silence of his mother, his mind worked to move into gear. He could already feel it working, starting to pick up the puzzle pieces and connect them to form one grand image. Kaito didn't like what he saw, at all.

Slowly, he started.

"You thought the Kaitô Kid would do something. To me. And you thought that Kid had already been doing something – to my father. That's why you acted like you did. Now, the most important question left is: What did you think he'd been doing to us?"

Chikage's mouth was open like a fish gasping for water for a few more moments, before she finally said something. "I was young, very inexperienced – and jumping to conclusions." She looked at her son imploringly. "I know that now. I didn't have to think what I did. And the world would have probably been better off without me thinking those thoughts. But at the time, it only made sense. And it scared me. I mean, what if it had been true?" She got teary-eyed again. But she couldn't help it. It had been a frightening moment when she had found out that her dear husband – might not be hers alone any more.

~TheEndOfTheMadness~

Incredulous and with the hint of relief and laughter at the absurdity of her story in his eyes, Kaito had listened to her story – all the while struggling to remain quiet in the face of what he was presented with.

"So, let me get this straight." He got out with a slightly shaking voice – was it from laughter? Was it because of the desperate irony that was noticeable in her account? You couldn't tell – when she had finally finished telling him everything about all those years and what had been going on in her head.

"You thought that Kaitô Kid was a woman trying to seduce dad. And when Kid came up again in the chats we had, you thought Kid was seducing me, too." At her nod, he wearily closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, all the while having a ridiculously out-of-place grin tugging at his face.

When he opened his eyes again, she only noticed an almost mischievous sparkle in them for one very short moment before it burst out. "Kid's male, woman! Both dad and I are straight!" he almost shouted at her.

She calmly responded to his outburst with the words "That's why I thought that phantom thief Kid couldn't be male. At the time, that tidbit about Kid being male or female wasn't known yet, you have to consider. He could have been a she, just as well. It was far more bearable for me, to think of Kid as a woman, you have to see. If your father had been gay – I wouldn't have been able to stand the embarrassment."

Kaito blamed it on the late hour and the five days of pandemonium that living with his mum simply presented that had mucked around with his head too much, because everything she was saying sounded absolutely sane and logical to him, not to mention perfectly reasonable, too. Something made him frown, though. "And what role did you think Kid had in killing dad?"

"I had thought that your father had gotten too close to something that Kid and he were trying to find out. I didn't know how close I was to the real truth. Though I knew immediately upon receiving the message that your father was dead that it couldn't possibly have been an accident that killed him. I know my husband. He wouldn't have been clumsy or anything but a perfectionist. He was immaculate when it came to the maintenance of his magic props and things." Chikage said the last thing rather more vehemently than she had intended to. But she didn't take back what she'd said. It was the truth.

"Yet you still thought that dad would abandon us that easily. And you thought he was in love with Kid, on top of that." It was like a switch had been flipped within her mind, when he started defending both him and his father in front of her. It was a very welcome relief, really, for Chikage, to see just with how much fervor her son tore apart her carefully built-up construct of reality. He tore it to pieces, quite literally, and she could see them fall down right in front of her eyes. What a calming and relaxing effect that had on her! Naturally, her son could see that a tiny bit of her – hidden within the very veeery deep confines of her mind – still held onto the theory with all its might. But he slowly made that part of her, too, see reason.

It made her smile, even, just how much of a fool she'd been and let herself be. Willingly, even, she had run into her conclusions that had been proved oh-so-wrong in the end. Finally, she could find the peace she had wanted to find all those years ago, when she had been standing at the grave and hadn't been sure whom to blame. She realized, with fresh tears glistening in her relieved smiling eyes, that almost all the blame lay with her. All this time, it had been right there, with her. She should have just loved her husband unconditionally and accepted his death. Life wasn't easy, she could now really relate to that saying. And sometimes it liked throwing you loops that you had to find your way out of while being tied up, deaf, blind and mute. Somehow, with the help of other people (she glanced gratefully at her son at that thought), you were able to make the jump through the doorstep that led to hell. She'd been able to make it. In the now-peaceful quietness of her heart and mind, all Chikage did then was fervently hope that she'd never ever make such idiotic mistakes again.

~TheEndOfTheMadness~

Days later found mother and son at the dinner table, the magician-to-be making animated gestures at her that went with what he had told her just previously about a giant octopus making an appearance at his school last year. (He wouldn't tell her just what had happened after someone had announced himself to be from mars right in front of his teacher and the class, but, knowing her son, she could very well figure that out by herself.)

It wasn't the perfect family idyll, she couldn't help thinking, her gaze slowly sliding over to rest on a picture of the three of them together in a moment of inattention on Kaito's side. But they were getting there. With time, everything would be resolved, she knew. Smiling, she moved her attention back to the subject at hand and made all the appropriate noises of surprise and anticipation at all the right moments, a growing smirk on her face and a mischievous glint in her eyes.

In the end, Kaito didn't know what hit him when all of a sudden a pillow hit him in the back of his head. The fight was on.

AN: "Otou-san" is Japanese and means "father"

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.

~Ben Hecht

Love is the magician that pulls woman out of her own tiny little cavern at the end of the world that she has dug up with her own hands and hidden herself in, in the hopes that the reality she has thought up for herself will never be the truth, but fearing the worst.

~Leuny's very own, changed version of that quote.