Shinichi goes home (home being the Kudo house; no way he could show his catty face anywhere else without question, to say the least) on melded feet, feeling pretty pathetic as his human body disintegrates in an aching ebb. Thankfully, constant stretching helps the realigned bones pop into place. Unpleasant as it sounds, it is much better than anything he could be doing.

It also helped that the gleaming eyes are there to keep his company, however useless his "cat gang" (he refused to call it that out loud) was at tracking anything; he had somewhat underestimated them given their (seeming) ability of speech to him, they were still of animal intelligence, with animal needs. Still, they provided greatly comforting purrs now; who didn't love cats, especially ones snuggling in times of need?

Sitting with a cat or two draped across his chest took a little bit of the bitter pill of slipping humanity away.

"Your paws are wet," one observed, rough tongue experimentally scraping across his hand (though admittedly, not much of a hand at this point).

Shinichi just shrugged, not sure how to explain the compulsion to scrub all of the blood from her off; getting it out of his fur was tough, enough that he almost resorted to just scratching it off. He resisted from going that far.

He'd wondered if he was overly desensitized to death. This assured him he wasn't, though the storm of guilt was enough to make him wish he was, to just screw the notion of guilt and equivalency to humanity and not feel anything.

xXx

At some point, despite the pain, Shinichi slept. He awoke blearily, swaddled comfortably in what once served as his clothes.

Ugh, he groaned, dejectedly peeling himself out of the little nest. Other cats slept around him, but at his movements, a few awoke and fixed him with their bright eyes.

"What shall we do today?" a pair of blue eyes murmured. Shinichi almost huffed a laugh; they always looked to him for initiative outside of their own animalistic processes of hunting, territory disputing, and the like; still, they clearly found any of his teachings and processes… interesting? Useful?

But he didn't exactly feel like leading today, so he flopped down back on top of the clothes, extracted from that comfortable but suffocating nest.

What followed next was surprising- initiative, from one of them. Ordinarily, after all, they felt out of their depths (were out of their depths), relying on Shinichi to show them around these higher levels of the human world with logic skills and problem solving they simply didn't have the capacity for. "It's been long since we've rescued," the blue eyed cat said, shifting through the darkness that Shinichi could easily see through.

Rescue was their terminology of setting fellow cats free of cages; they saw that as a place of entrapment and pain, after all. Shinichi normally tried to aim them towards low end shelters, considering he wasn't exactly against the idea of shelters as a concept.

Surprised enough at the initiative, he found himself nodding before he could really have a second thought. (And that second thought was immediate regret, and the third was just a deep, mental sigh).

xXx

Shinichi found himself taking a backseat as the white cat with blue eyes lead his hoard of cats (when had it grown so big? Maybe he shouldn't've told them "recruit any cat willing" because it turned out a lot of cats would take the offer of food and new skills for a miniscule service of watching).

It was a nice little distraction to see that training pay off as the cats worked together to find a slightly jaggedly open window, and slid their paws under the crack to efficiently break in. Immediately it was followed by the normal regretful and baffled thought of I've taught a bunch of uncontrollable cats how to break in.

The rank alley and the dark of the night was traded for slick white tile and steel cages. Shinichi greatly preferred the alley in terms of smell, considering this shelter reeked of animal's presence.

The cats covertly slid around in the darkness they could see in (Shinichi was still getting used to it; his brain kept telling him he should be blind by this level of darkness, but instead everything was just greyed out).

Shinichi shrugged, joining them in the darkness, just a mass of shadow himself with his black fur. He headed towards the steel cages closer to the back, not feeling like sticking near the ordinary group.

Through the door, to the vet headquarters; animals held in examination to be sure they weren't overly feral or rabid or whatnot before being placed into more spacious (though still cramped) steel cages to await their own adoption (or death).

Just one resided here. Shinichi could only see vague shapes from his angle and the cat's distance, but it was a rather small cat, and apparently asleep— weird, most would've been awake at their break in's noise due to their sensitive ears, not to mention their habit of sleeping and being awake with little schedule.

Oh. Spoke too soon. Bright eyes flashed momentarily; not directed at him, just an awakening.

That wasn't the interesting part.

As Shinichi was pondering pushing something over to have a stable surface to claw at the lock from, or whether dangling was more valid, or whether he could just explain to the cat within how to pick the lock (unlikely on that last one), there was a faint clicking.

Kudo blinked himself out of his thoughts to see paws wrapping their way around the bars of the cage. Claws click click clicked against the lock mechanism, pushing at the two parts that needed to be squeezed.

Pop. Before Shinichi could think about how to free the cat, the door has swung open.

Ordinarily a cat's jump would be lithe and smooth, the landing looking almost effortless. This one stumbled wrong-footed out of the cage in what barely could be called a jump, and it nearly didn't get its feet underneath it for a landing (let alone the fact that calling what it did a proper landing was equally as generous as calling its fall a jump).

"Is your foot hurt?" Shinichi wondered, pawing across the smooth and cold tile, body postured to appear friendly and somewhat submissive; head bowed a bit, ears forward, tail half-up.

The cat didn't have the intended reaction, jumping into the air and thumping down with much more grace, albeit seemingly unintentionally. It blinked at what it did, stunned as it stared down at the ground it had just left.

"You wouldn't've been good on that jump if you'd hurt your foot," Shinichi mused aloud, used to nobody of consequence understanding his vocalizations. "Did the humans give you something that makes you feel, ah, sleepy?"

The cat— some kind of tabby, he could see the greyed out pattern in the dark— squinted at him, eyes bright with some kind of curiosity and something else burning. Shinichi internally squirmed at the combination, feeling as though he was placed under a magnifying glass. Being surrounded by steel cages much larger than he normally perceived them and harsh floors didn't help the feeling, either. It was weird for someone smaller— or well, about the same height, just far less lanky than he— to make him feel jittery, but something in her gaze penetrated beyond ordinary interest.

"You talk," she— judging by the voice— mused, slowly and contemplatively. As though she were a human, she put a paw to her chin thoughtfully.

Must've been kept only in a house, Shinichi considered in relation to the awkwardness of speech and of movement, though that didn't exactly explain the mannerism. He brushed the latter off as unimportant; a start of a lick-down, a scratch, anything but the thinking pose that his human mind picked up on.

Out loud, he hummed, "there's many of us. I can give you food and shelter, teach you to live in the world," he phrased, thinking of a lone pet wandering about the city and dying idiotically.

The cat's eyes narrowed, but she nodded.

Awkwardly, she stepped after him, legs stiff.

xXx

"She reminds me of you," one of the cats chuckled to him, nudging shoulders and twining around him in a way Shinichi had yet to get used to; awkwardly, he returned it with a short shoulder rub of his own as the sentence settled in for him. "In the beginning," the cat elaborated, paws delicately tapping the murky alley as the entourage traveled homewards.

"She probably just hasn't seen many other cats," Shinichi huffed, contemplating the new cat being tapped away from any others, perhaps in a small cage, small enough to stunt movements.

He shook his head and laughed at the thought of another like him; it was absurd enough he alone survived in this unconventional manner. Shinichi imagined that the (newly named, at a cost) Organization didn't know much about the poison's possible effects (to say the least) because surely, it wouldn't've been used.

The other cat shrugged, too animal to use logic to deduce the same; no, creatures like that looked only to their own experience rather than taking any form of likelihood into account. "I wonder if she also has what she likes to be called."

A name. Indeed, cats had little preference for names, Shinichi learned; only ones who were very clearly pets cared at all about names, and even then they did not to the same degree as humans. Any sort of name not given by a human was just a very simple observation about the cat. A color, something they resembled, something they smelled like. Most importantly… they didn't much care about the name.

He hung back. It was still polite to ask, after all, even if it was a rather human tradition.

In the illumination from dimmed street and house lights, Shinichi could tell she was a deep burnt ginger with a creamier stomach and paws.

Granted, to him she didn't appear orange, rather a muted and darker yellow-green. Shinichi had diligently memorized the subtle shade differences in his vision with provided plaques of colors (mostly for cases).

She was staring contemplatively at the ground, at her white tipped feet.

He sidled next to her, keeping respectable distance as he fell into a parallel stride.

"Do you have a name?" he asked, slow.

The cat frowned down her short muzzle at him. "Names," she said slowly.

"You know, something you like to be called—" Shinichi began.

He was interrupted with a short snap of, "I know what a name is." She paused, as though considering how to justify it. Ultimately, she just looked at him with disdain (Kudo couldn't help but feel she was looking down at him, at the rest, as if they were not but insects; perhaps insects she considered fascinating, but insects nonetheless).

Shinichi wasn't all that thrown by her closed offness; many cats were closed off, considering many could both be both social and solitary*. What he was thrown off by was the looks that held so many emotions, so many more than the typically simple, one note creatures that surrounded him.

"You didn't answer," he finally broke the silence.

She sent him a bland, yet calculating look. "I do have a name," the cat relented. She paused, as though preparing for a greeting, one where she eyed him with dark eyes gleaming in the dim glow of street lights and stepped forward, half threatening and half formal, and said, "it's Ai. Ai Haibara."

xXx

i'm beginning to think my senior class has the worst goddamn luck

got out of a gotdamb surgery last year and then the school got shot up (obviously the worst ending to a year)

Now all this crap and ive lost a lot of money bc i planned to go on a senior trip but the company the school planned it with was hot garbage that sucks too

im never going to get to go to prom. It aches to have tried so hard to be better and normal and this one year it was working out ends this way

...anyways, hello again! I hope everyone is doing well with the quarantine. Everything is kind of vaguely sucky, but we'll all get through it. At the least, it gives me more time for all this, so yay?