Kat's Notes: I have only one thing to say here. To the "annoyed reader" last chapter on March 21st: You're a dick. To everyone else: You are awesome and win and I love you.
If you just clicked on this chapter from an alert, I suggest rereading Chapter 13. I've been doing some editing – mostly for formatting glitches – and decided to expand that chapter. About the last half of it is new stuff.
On with the show!
.: Chapter 14 - Weird Science :.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
~ Isaac Asimov ~
.oOo.
The pervasive scent of plastic and antiseptic centered around the far side of the room near the waiting hospital bed. Kaito followed Shinichi towards it, idly snatching things as they walked and fidgeting with them until the fidgeting resolved into absent minded juggling – a plastic cup, a box of latex gloves, a forgotten bit of a blunted syringe, and a pink rubber ball Shinichi recognized as Ayumi's.
Kaito's mother reached out and snatched the box of gloves from his juggling pattern, disrupting it enough to catch his attention, if not stop its movement completely. The other objects shifted out of sight or to other surfaces as he touched them. When they were gone, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth instead until his mother wrapped an arm around him, giving him a brief hug. Kaito took a breath and let himself lean into the silently-offered comfort before straightening.
A pale blue plastic box concealing a capped needle and loops of clear, thin tubing lay coiled on a wheeling table that had been moved to wait beside the elevated bed. Shinichi ignored it and clambered up onto the mattress, pulling the extra length of the hospital gown straight before settling back. His aunt unfolded a thin blanket from the bottom of the bed and pulled it up around Shinichi's waist. Shinichi picked at the ends of the blanket, tensing and then taking a deliberate breath as Kaito moved forward to help wrap padded straps loosely across Shinichi's waist, legs, and chest.
"Oba-san?" Shinichi hazarded, sounding only slightly concerned with the restraints, "why are you strapping me to the bed?"
"Largely so you don't roll off it and damage yourself or the equipment," his aunt answered, continuing her prep work and glancing to the side as Ai stepped up to the bedside with a brisk, businesslike air. "The procedure is likely to be quite painful."
Shinichi swallowed, fighting with a frisson of nervous anticipation. "Worse than the temporary cure?" He caught Kaito's sudden questioning look and shrugged in forced nonchalance. "Every time I've been shrunk or grown because of this has hurt like I'm dying."
"Likely because it was trying to kill you," Ai said dryly. "Death is rarely painless."
"You'll be unconscious for most of it," his aunt added with a slight frown directed at Ai as she adjusted an IV bag next to his bed, and connecting it to the waiting tubing that sat on the bedside table. "Though I'm afraid the parts you aren't will be uncomfortable. We don't know enough of Pandora's reactions with typical painkillers to chance mixing them."
"High level painkillers are also monitored more closely than common medical supplies like saline solution for an intravenous drip." She pulled on her own set of gloves before picking up the waiting needle, and pulling off the cap.
Chikage picked up Shinichi's hand and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm, inflating it before clamping the tube so the cuff could not deflate and checking her nephew's pulse. Within a few seconds, she located a vein and disinfected the area with a dark yellow swab of iodine. Shinichi winced as the slender needle slid through his skin and into the vein.
"We're using a regular saline solution to ease the strain on your body during the change and provide extra fluids. The less your body needs to reconstruct after the antidote is administered, the easier it will be on him. The full antidote will be injected with Kaito's bone marrow through your IV immediately after you return to your larger self. Your circulatory system will take care of depositing it where it needs to go. The entire aim of this is to give the modified bone marrow the best chance to grow and replace the bone marrow before the apotoxin is able to force your cells to revert to a state of apoptic necrosis. We will also be giving you a few pints of Kaito's blood once you're back to normal to help everything along. Normally, it would take a week or two for your blood supply to fully replace itself. But, this poison is tenacious and highly adaptable. We'll know if we succeeded or failed within twenty-four hours."
"I designed an excellent poison," Ai said, her face inscrutable, but avoiding eye contact with the others in the room.
"You did," a man's voice agreed, as the door opened to reveal Shinichi's mother and father. "It's the most spectacularly useful failure the Organization has ever used. But you've also designed an excellent antidote."
"How are you feeling, sweetie?" Yukiko asked, focusing on her son, where he was nearly swallowed up by the white sheets of the bed. She smoothed his hair away from his face and kissed Shinichi's forehead. Shinichi fidgeted and blushed at the attention, shooting a glare at Kaito, who was smiling even if he wasn't saying anything at the mothering Shinichi was enduring.
"I have a needle in my arm, mom," Shinichi answered, lifting it slightly off the bed and jostling the clear tube running from his elbow as he did. "And this might kill me. I didn't expect you and dad until after all this was over."
"Well, of course we're going to be here with you, Shinichi!" Yukiko said, placing her hips. "Chikage-chan and Ai-chan don't mind so long as we keep out of the way. And it's not supposed to take very long in any case."
"Not the initial treatment, anyway," Chikage agreed. "And you don't have a needle in your arm. It's a flexible tube that will move with you, and is less likely to be pulled out when your body changes size. Arm, please - the one without the drip line." Shinichi obediently lifted his hand up, watching as she set her finger across his wrist to check his pulse against the watch on her other wrist. "Ai, you can administer the injection whenever you're ready. Yukiko, you can stay next to Shinichi if you'd like. You won't be in the way where you are."
Kaito retreated to the edge of the room and claimed a waiting chair. He twisted it around, turning it so the back faced the center of the room and dropped into it, propping his arms across the back and leaning against it to wait.
Shinichi twisted to the side to watch as Ai slid a syringe with a cylinder of pale red liquid into a branch of his IV line.
Shinichi screwed his eyes shut as wave of dizziness and a sudden pain seared its way down his spine from the base of his skull down to the ends of his toes. An acidic burning joined the pain, and Shinichi felt his heart start to race. Two hands hovered just over his shoulders and another smoothed his hair away from his face. He let a whimper escape as the dizziness returned.
"The change should start soon," Ai's voice said, and Shinichi forced his eyes open in time to see her turn away, used needle in hand. She deposited it into a thick plastic box with biohazard markings adorning the outside. "This part is unpleasant."
Shinichi lost the last part of Ai's words as the burning in his veins flared and began to spread. The sensation crept through his system until every bit of him felt peculiarly hot and bitingly cold by turns. His hands clenched at the bedclothes, his lungs dragging in deep breaths as fine tremors started running down his muscles as the drug took effect. Kaito fidgeted in his chair, clenching long-fingered hands around the plastic seat, holding himself back from pacing and distracting the mad scientists from their waiting game.
Shinichi felt his mother smooth his hair away from his face, her hands shifting over his skin as darkness started encroaching on the edges of his vision. She stood over him, saying something that he couldn't hear over the roaring blood filling his ears. It took a small eternity for before the spasms clenching at his muscles and the frantic pounding of his heart snapped his consciousness, sending him into a dark spiral as white mist rose from his skin.
.oOo.
The white glow of the computer screen lit Saguru's face periodically as he clicked through screens, providing bare illumination for the notebook placed beside his right hand, and more frustration than answers. Across the top of the screen, the user name information on the database named the Metropolitan Chief of Police, his father. A niggling voice at the back of his mind - that sounded disturbingly like Kuroba - was making pointed observations about the clandestine appropriating of his father's computer and access for a personal project. However, Kaitou Kid's newfound tendency to be shot at, and Kuroba's continued absence from class were leaving the detective with precious few avenues of inquiry to follow. And this was not a mystery Hakuba intended to walk away from.
The heist a week before had been a bust; worse than any of the other times some poor sod had got it into his head to impersonate Kid. This time it hadn't been just to cover up a petty theft or murder, but an outright attempt on Kid's life. At least, that's when the shooting had started, and the result … he sighed … dead or missing witnesses.
There had been no rhyme or reason to the sudden violence – other than, perhaps, a connection to Kuroba and Kid's increasingly bizarre behavior – and then it had evaporated, vanished into the night like one of Kid's parlor tricks. The evidence he had managed to collect from the scene and the survivors wasn't making much sense. Saguru dragged his fingers across his eyes and mentally amended the thought: the information was making even less sense than Kid's brand of methodical insanity ever made. Over the week since Kid's last appearance, Saguru hadn't come any closer to untangling the morass that had started with Kuroba's abrupt vanishing act, and culminated with the botched heist.
The very odd heist, with conflicting reports for nearly everyone that had been there. By now, the police department rumor mill was churning into overdrive, saying that Kid's heists had gained a level of real danger on top of their normal mind-bending weirdness. The excitement was infecting the entire task Force as stranger and stranger things bubbled to the surface, creating a self-confirming prophecy that the events surrounding Kakunoshin's unreturned Rudra Sapphire were the oddest of all the Kaitou Kid heists.
Someone even claimed to have seen Hattori Heiji at the scene. Hakuba wanted to dismiss that rumor out of hand, as the brash Osakan would never have made the trek to attend the heist without at least checking in with Inspector Nakamori. Even so-called detective prodigies gave lip-service to procedure.
The thought of detective prodigies sparked a snippet of remembered conversation with Aoko flashed from his memory. A day that she had affectionately complained about tripping over detectives in Ekoda that were known to live in Beika. She claimed to have seen, and spoken to, Kudou Shinichi and Edogawa Conan. It seemed that Edogawa was friends not only with the Osakan Hattori Heiji, but related to Kudou. It made Saguru suspect that if any teenage detective had been on scene, it wasn't Hattori Heiji at all, but Kudou Shinichi, and the officer in question had simply gotten the two mixed up somehow. After all, if Hattori had been there, why had Kudou – who presumably lived in the area – missed it?
Saguru idly pulled up a web search and typed in Kudou's name to see what came up. He knew all too well that Kudou had been missing on some complicated foreign case no one was willing to talk about, and Saguru hadn't been truly interested enough to dig into. He had, however, been pulled in enough times as a substitute for the elusive teen to wonder.
Unsurprisingly, most of the hits returned past newspaper articles, archived videos to a handful of interviews, book reviews and excerpts by Kudou Yuusaku, and fansites – a few still maintained and updated by dogged fangirls, and others that had jumped ship for another celebrity and sometimes Kid.
Conspiracy sites also lurked in the list, showing on the stark glow of his computer screen, which Saguru dismissed. Kudou had minor celebrity in Japan, and some were all too eager to link a long absence to something more sinister than undercover work with Interpol. Like … Saguru squinted slightly, willing the characters to alter themselves into something rational and failing miserably … Kudou Shinichi's disappearance being the result of kidnapping by the Illuminati. Or aliens. Or a secret alliance of young geniuses being developed overseas in the United States to destroy hidden threats to society.
Some of them were nearly as ridiculous as the theories he had seen floating around that Kaitou Kid was searching for the key to the fountain of youth … or a way to release his demonic overlords into the world of men. It really depended on whether the theorist was a Kid fan or not and whether any of them believed that Kid's seemingly-miraculous abilities were the result of smoke and mirrors, or selling his soul to nefarious powers.
Dismissing crazy theories about eternal youth and shadowy organizations, Saguru scrolled back to the top of the page and clicked on one of the interview videos out of idle curiosity. There weren't any mentions of Kudou being back in Japan in his cursory look, and all of the interviews were fairly old. Saguru had never actually met or even seen Kudou, but a small part of him wondered about the so-called Heisei Holmes. He let his mind wander, fitting bits of the night's events together and trying to shake out sensible truth from the insane illusions Kid seemed so partial to and let the interviewer's light tones introduce her guest.
It was always possible the imposter Kid had incurred the wrath of some criminal faction, one savvy enough to follow him to the heist, and the gunfight that had broken out was only crossfire in a private dispute not related to Kaitou Kid at all. That would mean Kid was either embroiled in something considerably dodgy – which fit with his sudden disappearance and reappearance only when the imposter stepped onto the scene – or Kid was just being his usual infuriating self to keep them guessing.
The voices on the video changed and a familiar young man's voice spoke – his tone polite but underscored with a current of confidence bordering on outright arrogance, and carrying a distinct Tokyo accent. Hakuba's attention snapped forward and he cursed as the video blanked out and flashed a buffering message at him, its swirling arrow mocking him for several breathless seconds before the image returned. A crawl of cold horror settled into his stomach as a photo of Kudou Shinichi de-pixilated on the screen along with the familiar voice.
Tamed brown hair that had encountered a comb and hair gel in the recent past, keen eyes taking in the surroundings not captured by the camera, and smiling confidently, the teenager on the screen was Kuroba Kaito. It sounded like him, looked like him, and – while it didn't lounge like him – the young man in the video clip had the same wiry readiness that Kuroba had, useful for split second mop-dodging or making infuriatingly impossible things appear out of midair.
Saguru leaned forward, his chair squeaking as it rolled back and he slid to the front attentively and opened another search, this time for images. Having no previous interesting in his vanished rival, he had never bothered to look up past newspaper reports, or articles that featured Kudou's photo. He preferred to consult with case files when needed, but now he wished he had. Cached webpages and more newspaper clips produced a quick array of Kudou Shinichi's face and confirmed that the detective shared an uncanny resemblance with Kuroba Kaito
Saguru propped his his chin on his thumbs as he considered it, trying to pull the niggling sense of a missing piece from the back of his mind into clarity. He was a detective, adept at slotting information and evidence together to form an accurate picture of activities certain parties didn't want illuminated, and Kaitou Kid, for all his adrenaline-junkie and show-offish tactics, was notoriously difficult to illuminate. And Kuroba didn't want to be illuminated or found right then. And that meant Kuroba was in serious trouble.
His instincts told him Kuroba hadn't left Japan – probably hadn't even left the Tokyo area – but he was hiding, and his mother's absence at the same time made the finer hairs on the back of Saguru's neck prickle. Also, Aoko knew something more than she was letting on to. He was sure of it in the same way he was sure that Kuroba Kaito was also the Kaitou Kid, and crippled by the same lack of evidence.
After the storm of indignant fury passed in the wake of her kidnapping, she had relaxed, some of the irritation-veiled worry he'd known was over Kuroba's absence and infrequent contact draining out of her. She cooperated with her father and with him, answering their questions, but staunchly asserting she didn't remember much. And then she would vanish, usually excusing herself by saying she needed to check up on Kuroba's coup of doves or water his mother's plants, or some other minor chore she'd been fulfilling ever since the impromptu "vacation" was announced.
Saguru toyed with the idea that Kuroba was holed up in his own house. If he was in as serious of trouble as all the evidence pointed, there were worse ideas than hiding in plain sight. The obvious answer was to somehow corner Aoko-san and ask her several pointed questions, but he knew exactly how far he wouldn't get with that if Kuroba had somehow managed to swear her to secrecy.
Still, he felt like he had to try. The mystery he could see lurking in the clues taunted him. In fact, the case carried the same thrill of the hunt as difficult cases with the police, but with a personal tang because it embroiled those he considered friends. And some part of him had to admit, teeth-clenched and reluctant as a cat herded towards water, that Kuroba was a friend.
Saguru laid out his facts alongside his hunches, hoping the organization would tease out the final bit of information that connected the parts.
Fact: Kid hadn't returned his last stolen gem. It was getting unlikely he planned to return it at all. This meant that jewel was somehow special, dangerous, or both.
Hunch: it was the Agni Ruby at the core of the thief's current elusiveness.
Fact: Kudou Shinichi and Edogawa Conan were both in the Beika area, but had been absent from the last heist. It broke Edogawa's pattern of attending any heist close enough that he could.
Fact: Kudou hadn't been in the papers recently, indicating the case he had been absent on wasn't completed. There hadn't even been any gossip about Kudou's return floating around the police station, which, Saguru realized, was odd.
Hunch: Kuroba hadn't left Japan.
Saguru stilled and his hands fell to the desk as his eyes sought out one of the pictures of Kudou still sitting on his screen. There was a possibility that Kuroba was impersonating Kudou. It was a simple disguise, admittedly, and Kuroba had spent enough time around the police to impersonate any of them, probably down to actually solving the odd case if he had to. He was possibly good enough to sneak the disguise past even Edogawa, if the little prodigy wasn't looking for it.
Hakuba's hands descended on the keyboard and sent another query into the police database, this time for an address. Kudou's house and contact information should be on considering his past history working with the police. A sharp, triumphant smile crept across Saguru's face as the information flashed up onto the screen, and his left hand drifted towards the pair of handcuffs he had dropped on the desk earlier. It was, he decided, time to pay a visit to a fellow detective.
.oOo.
Shinichi twitched as his mind cleared from the fog of unconsciousness. His bones ached, and his muscles felt over-stretched – weak in a peculiar way that had nothing to do with the overlaying feeling of a nasty cold and everything to do with suddenly reorganizing every organ and bone in his body.
"Mom? Dad?" He croaked, wincing as he shifted over to his side, and felt the tube taped to his arm pull against the skin. "Kaito?"
"Ah, so the patient is awake!" an unfamiliar voice cackled. Shinichi gasped and pushed his hands underneath him, twisting to find … Kaito looming over the back of the hospital bed, nearly nose to nose with him and grinning behind a set of shiny goggles strapped over his eyes. At some point, Kaito had exchanged his scruffy clothing for a fitted red lab coat, and he reached towards the bed's rolling table with one gloved hand, the heavy, black rubber squeaking as his long fingers flexed. Kaito slid around the bed, straightening as he reached the table and hefted a beaker filled to nearly the top with a pale liquid that spilled white smoky mist from the mouth and down the glass sides.
"Please tell me Agasa didn't make that for you … Gyah! Your hands are cold!" Shinichi jerked away as one of Kaito's gloved hands caught his chin and shoved a straw in his mouth. He found it smelled strongly of vanilla and a dusty sort of powder. Shinichi spit the straw out and pressed himself against the mattress, his free arm clamping protectively over the tube in his other arm.
"Don't you trust me, Detective?" Kaito asked, still in a high, grating voice with more than a hint of madness lurking in its shrillness. "Or have you had enough science experiments for one day?"
"Definitely had enough of the ones foisted on me by crazy people," Shinichi grumbled, still pressing his back into the mattress and pillows. "What is that, and why are you trying to force it down my throat?"
"Oh, this?" Kaito raised the beaker up to eyelevel, shaking it slightly and making the straw spin around the lip. "Mom says you need to drink it. It'll help your body recover from the strain you just put it through." He swirled it around in the beaker once more before shoving it into Shinichi's chest, waiting until Shinichi fumbled his way into a solid grip before releasing it and flinging himself along the bottom of the bed. "How do you feel, anyway? Oh, and watch out for the dry ice I dropped in it. Last thing you need is a frozen tongue."
Shinichi sniffed at the beaker before taking a cautious sip of the contents through the straw. "You never said what this is."
"Protein shake of some sort, I think. Mom and Haibara-san say it's good for you," Kaito told him, prodding at Shinichi's foot until Shinichi pulled his legs up and out of the way. Kaito reached up and pushed the goggles off his eyes, forcing his already wild hair to spike up crazily over and around them. "Think they wanted you to get something other than my blood in you for the next few hours." He waved a hand lazily towards the half-full bag of viscous red liquid that hung next to Shinichi's hospital bed and the drip line running from the base of it into Shinichi's arm. "Though that's what happens when your total blood volume jumps from three liters to five."
Shinichi took another swallow of the drink, wondering idly if Ai and his aunt had really given Kaito the mixture in a beaker, of if Kaito had stashed the original glass somewhere and conjured up the beaker just for show. Probably just for show, he decided.
Silence descended while Shinichi drained the beaker in careful swallows and Kaito pulled a set of brightly-colored rubber balls from … somewhere … and started juggling them while hanging upside-down off one side of the bed. Shinichi watched for a moment before he stretched out a leg and nudged Kaito through the blanket. Kaito sat up enough to look at Shinichi questioningly, who pushed at him again. "You're hogging my bed."
Kaito grinned, and sat up, the balls switching into a dizzying orbit as he did so. "It's nice that you're taking up so much of it, huh?"
"Mm," Shinichi said, noncommittally, but twitching when Kaito freed up a hand to poke at the inside of his foot. "Gah! Hands to yourself, or get off!"
Kaito laughed and dodged the foot trying to lodge itself in his ribs before rolling to his feet, and making the spinning balls vanish in a puff of smoke and a fall of glitter. Shinichi glared at him, brushing shiny specks out of his hair. "So, what's next?"
"Next?" Shinichi echoed. "Next we have twenty-four hours until we know if this," he held up the arm with the intravenous drip attached to it, "worked. How many of these have they pumped into me?" Shinichi asked, pointing at the nearly drained bag of viscous blood hanging suspended above him.
"That's your second one," Kaito answered, eyes flickering momentarily to follow Shinichi's gesture. "You were out for a while after mom and Haibara-chan injected you. Your mom and dad went to get dinner for everyone a bit ago, and I can't really go wandering around outside … well, I could throw on a disguise easily enough, but it's not the same. I volunteered to stay back and keep an eye on you and make sure you didn't roll off the bed."
Shinichi responded by pulling his blanket away from his leg, moving cautiously as he shifted his feet off the side of the mattress and set them on the polished wood floor beneath him. Kaito tensed as Shinichi continued working himself out of bed, grabbing a firm hold of the IV stand. He rested some of his weight on it as he stood, using the other hand to reach back and keep the gown closed.
Kaito slid off the bed as well, hands extending, but hesitating – not certain if Shinichi would want help, or if this was something the other boy was determined to do on his own.
"Um … Shinichi?"
"What?" Shinichi grunted, taking his first few, unsteady steps. "I'm not hooked up to any monitors, so no one's too worried about me moving around. And I'm mostly just … getting used to the ground being a lot further away than I'm used to. It's going to take a bit for my brain to catch up my motor control with the rest of my body."
Kaito watched Shinichi stagger around his bed for a moment before speaking again. "So, what's next? How long do you think we can stay off their radar?"
"Long enough," Shinichi answered simply, pushing himself back to his feet with more stability to his movements. "There's at least one woman in the Organization that knew about Conan, but she's ... odd. I think she trained with your dad, and she could have outed me before now. She probably keeps tabs on my movements."
"That's both reassuring ... I think ... and completely terrifying," Kaito said. "Think she'll say anything now that the chibi-tantei's gone missing? If she does, we're going to need an escape plan in place."
"We'll think of something," Shinichi said. "Where are my clothes? They don't expect me to drag this thing up the stairs in search of them, do they?" Shinichi gave the IV stand a light shake.
Kaito started towards the screen that Conan had changed behind hours before, and dragged the folding chair from behind it. A set of clothes sat on the chair, which Kaito pushed forward. "Yours or mine?" Shinichi asked, walking towards the chair and dragging his IV stand along with him, scraping the metal casters across the floorboards.
"They were in your closet," Kaito answered.
The room they stood in had previously been used for any number of things, from a tea ceremony room - when his mother had been practicing for a part in one of her last movies, and had the entire room mocked up in an elaborately traditional form – to a spare library filled with boxes of books after a series of unfortunate events in the upstairs library had resulted in a complete renovation of the room and filled the house with paint fumes for two weeks. Shinichi still vividly remembered taking refuge anywhere but indoors during that stretch of time.
He also recalled that most of the mystery novels in his father's collection had ended up in a box at the far corner, and under several other boxes ... which eventually resulted in a five year old Shinichi burrowing into peril in an attempt to get at them.
Shinichi grabbed the chair with his free hand and dragged both it and his IV stand behind the curtain. Shinichi got underwear and a pair of comfortably worn jeans on before holding up the shirt and zippered sweatshirt up in his free hand and staring at the remaining clothing in mild annoyance. There was no way he'd manage to get the shirt without taking the tube out of his arm ... and Shinichi momentarily shuddered at what his two doctors would say if he did that.
Kaito's footsteps approached and his messy-haired head popped around the edge of the screen in curiosity. "You just going to hang out back here or ... oh," he trailed off, seeing Shinichi holding the shirt up and the tube still connecting his arm to the nearly-empty blood bag above. Kaito stepped the rest of the way around the screen and grinned as Shinichi's annoyed expression transformed into a wary one. "Relax, I'm a little better at this than you are."
"Better at what ..." Shinichi started jumping back and tripping over the chair beside him as a puff of localized pink smoke puffed up from his feet. Kaito yelped and reached out a hand, catching Shinichi's free wrist and dragging him back upright, his hand bunching up the long sleeves of the zippered sweatshirt now pulled neatly over the unmarked arm. The other half of the sweatshirt was hung comfortably over Shinichi's other shoulder, where it couldn't interfere with anything. Inexplicably, the t-shirt was on completely, somehow bypassing the need to upset the IV still inserted neatly into Shinichi's left arm.
Shinichi stood speechless for a moment before shaking his head. "That's one use for your more aggravating talents."
"You're welcome," Kaito smirked. "Now, come on, back to bed for you while I go hunt down one of the mad scientists to pull that thing out of your arm."
"You're in a hurry all of a sudden?" Shinichi said, a touch of suspicion coloring his voice and stopping in the middle of the room. "What are you up to?"
"Getting you out of the house!" Kaito said brightly. "You have a date to prepare for. And unless you want your mom to turn it into the social event of the year – while publicity is something we really can't afford just now – you have ring shopping to do."
"A ring?" Shinichi echoed, stilling completely. Ah, right, he thought. A ring. And a date. He was going to ask Ran to marry him. And hopefully she was going to say yes. He needed a ring. Part of him, for the briefest of instants, considered just telling Kaito that his mom kept a jewelry box in her room upstairs, and letting the jewel thief do a bit of thieving, as there was a better than average chance Yukiko wouldn't be able to catch Kaito doing it. The rest of him scolded that small part for the temptation and moved on to bigger problems. "Right. A ring. Kaito, I can't exactly just walk into a jewelry store, pick one out, and have it engraved on the Kudou credit card."
"Right, right," Kaito said slipping around Shinichi and pushing him lightly back towards the bed. "I already asked Jii for a few places he'd suggest that are discrete. And we're not going to get out of here at all if you don't act like a good patient for a bit longer."
"You asked Jii?" Shinichi echoed.
"Do you think I put on my dad's suit and spontaneously knew where to get everything I needed to use as Kid?" Kaito asked, rolling his eyes. "I make most of it myself, yeah, but I still need to get the raw materials from somewhere, and I have to be careful that it can't be traced back to me."
"You've been using the black market?!" Shinichi demanded, twisting away and turning on his cousin.
Kaito held up his hands. "If you'd thought about what I've been doing to bring Them in, you'd have already figured out that I do. And it's not something I'm going to apologize for, Shinichi. Not everyone has the same 'let's play fair' ethic that you do. You didn't try and track down my civilian persona, and you know plenty enough chemistry that you could have traced me that way if you'd wanted to and if I had left enough evidence of it lying around. You didn't look for purchases of chemicals I'd need for smoke bombs, or fireworks, or even the steel I use on the cards in my gun."
"Jii has a network," Shinichi concluded, and Kaito confirmed it with a nod.
"One he swears is on the side of the angels – more or less – but that's how I get most of the stuff for my gear," Kaito confirmed dryly with a nod. "Can't just special order razor-edged playing cards, so I make them and retrieve as many as I can whenever I can."
"I can't tell Ran I bought her an engagement ring from a fence!"
Kaito shrugged. "Then don't." He slipped through the door and out of sight before Shinichi gathered his wits to respond. Shinichi glared after Kaito and sank down to sit on the edge of the bed, eventually pulling his feet back up onto the blankets and resigned himself to wait.
.oOo.
Kat's Notes: Okay, now I can apologize for the long wait. I finally just used last NaNoWriMo (if you don't know what this is, I highly recommend you google it, because it is awesome and fun) to write nearly all the rest of this story. Going in I thought "oh hey, I'm almost done with the outline, I'll just power through it for NaNo, and do something else with the other half of the month!" Yeeah. 50,000 words came …50,000 words went … still not finished … BUT, I got a huge chunk of it written. It's still going to be a bit of work to get this story finished off, but I'm close, and I have motivation. And an outline. I love outlines.
I also have a month-long break from the writing group I'm part of, and buffer beyond that. Much as I love fanfic, I also love original writing and that tends to take more effort on my part to write.
I'm kind of sad to say this, but the original estimate of fifteen chapters was off. Everyone should just start laughing when I estimate chapters, because stories have this tendency to grow on me. The last time I said "oh, it'll be ten, maybe fifteen chapters long" I found myself passing chapter 30 and wondering if I had missed a left turn at Albuquerque, because this was not part of the plan… I'm not going to swear this story will not reach the 30 chapter mark. But I do not think it will.
I also have to give credit where it's due: Midoriko-sama has been the marvelous (and super quick!) beta for this monstrosity of a talky chapter. She helped me trim the insanity of a NaNo draft into a working chapter. She also was hugely instrumental in coming up with that mess of explanation for apoptic necrosis, and what the Apotoxin was actually doing on a cellular level. Everyone give her lots of love for not keeling over dead when I actually sent her a chapter for beta.
Chapter Next: Hakuba puts some things together! And the boys go shopping for a ring in the weird part of town.