"Hey. Hey. Niichan. Wake up." The incredibly shrill, annoying voice was accompanied by a light slapping sound and a spark of pain. It took Kaito longer than it should have to connect those two sensations and even longer to realize that the owner of the voice was one Edogawa Conan.
...Who was currently slapping him lightly, apparently trying to wake him up from his impromptu nap on the floor. Because he had fainted. Because there was a dead body on the floor over there. Right. Okay. And there was also a semi-translucent copy of the body floating above it, looking around curiously.
Which.
Okay.
No.
Nope.
Very much nope.
The translucent figure opened her mouth, probably to start speaking, but Kaito's ears were ringing too loud to actually hear anything because that girl could not possibly be there due to the fact that, you know, she was dead and covered in blood on the floor .
" ...What the hell."
Kaito saw Conan try to refrain from rolling his eyes, but ultimately failing utterly. He'd probably strained something.
But hey. That was a perfectly valid reaction to what he was - definitely not seeing.
The voice he was trying to pretend didn't exist laughed softly next to him. Kaito glanced over in its direction to see if he'd finally gone completely bonkers - and, yup, there was his father dressed in full KID regalia for some reason, looking not at all like he'd been exploded ten years ago. Cool.
"I've officially lost it," he muttered numbly, just barely remembering to alter his voice. He refrained from throwing his hands weakly in the air and saying 'hooray.'
The voice, who he was apparently acknowledging was his father, said, "That's if you ever had it in the first place. I think it might be genetic."
Which. Fair.
Conan drew his attention by patting his knee awkwardly and saying, "It's going to be fine. Could you please call the police?" while simultaneously checking his pupils for signs of a concussion. He frowned slightly at the colored contact lenses that were preventing him from getting an accurate reading (ha, Kaito had remembered to do something more than put on a pair of glasses and call it a disguise).
Kaito nodded, resolutely ignoring the snickers coming from his father, who was apparently just going to float next to him and make wisecracks about his life choices.
To be honest, Kaito probably would have done the same in this situation.
He pulled out his phone under Conan's watchful eye, hands shaking slightly, and dialled 119. Satisfied, Conan turned and went to examine the body. Did he not realize how strange that was?
The call connected.
Kaito abruptly realized that he had no idea what to say. "Um, hi. There's a dead body here. I'm pretty sure it was murder."
Nailed it.
"Okay, sir, I'm going to need your location, please."
"The - um." He looked at Conan, who had a handkerchief out and had picked up the victim's wrist to get a closer look. "Do you remember the name of this café?"
"Christie's café," Conan answered absently, moving on to her - nails, possibly?
"Kurisuchizu café," Kaito relayed to the operator. There was a brief pause while she typed something into her computer, probably working on getting a police car to them. He was proved right a moment later when she said, "All right. I have Yamamura-keibu en route to your location. Please refrain from touching the body and surrounding area. Do your best to keep others from doing the same."
Kaito bit back a hysterical laugh. That wasn't going to be a problem. "I should probably tell that to the kid, then, shouldn't I."
The operator sighed. "Kid?"
Kaito absolutely did not flinch. "Yeah."
"Dark hair, oversized glasses, dressed like a miniature college professor?"
"Yup."
She sighed again. "Don't worry about it. We have a code for him." She paused to type something again. "It's practically a right of passage here to call a 4869."
"Run into a lot of murders, does he?" Kaito watched as Conan examined the victim's shoes.
"You have no idea. This is literally the third this week."
"But it's only Thursday?"
"I know."
"Wow, okay. Well, I guess I'm in good hands, then. Spicy." Oh god, why was he like this.
Luckily, the operator ignored him. "Yes - it'll be about two minutes until Yamamura-keibu arrives, so if you could try and keep everyone else away from the crime scene, that would be fantastic."
"Okay, got it. Thanks."
Kaito hung up the phone and watched in bemusement as Conan casually sniffed the victim's mouth.
He knew tangentially that Conan solved murders, but to actually see it…
Honestly, it was kind of disturbing. Six-year-olds should not have that much experience in...whatever he was doing with the dead woman's hair (because she was dead, and yet there she was floating above her body like she wasn't quietly breaking his reality).
"You know, it's been a while since I've seen him at a crime scene," his father commented absently. Kaito flicked his eyes in his direction, because apparently he was acknowledging that he had lost the last vestiges of his sanity.
Kaito assumed that Conan was too absorbed in looking for clues to pay too much attention to the one guy with an alibi, so he kissed the last dregs of his denial goodbye and muttered a response. "You've seen him before? I'm pretty sure that's impossible. He's, like, six. And you died ten years ago. So."
His father smirked secretively. "Yes. He hasn't aged a day."
Kaito blinked. "In ten years."
His dad spread his arms wordlessly, looking endlessly smug. Kaito accepted that he probably wasn't going to be getting any answers out of him any time soon, since that was the same face he'd had when Kaito had been trying to figure out how to do a magic trick. His father had enjoyed dangling hints in front of him but never actually telling him how they worked. It was incredibly annoying, but it had been better for him in the long run, he supposed.
"You're saying that he hasn't aged a day in ten years."
His father shrugged languidly. "That is what I said. He's the son of one of my former students - you remember, the one that yelled at you because you called her 'oba-san.'"
Kaito blinked again. "Dad, Yukiko-neechan only had one kid before we lost contact with them. And, you know, you died ."
His father snickered. "Are you still that scared of her?"
"Well, duh." Kaito rolled his eyes. "She was legitimately crazier than both of us. That's pretty damn insane. She was almost on the same level as Mom. " Wait, shit, the kid was still in the room. He probably shouldn't be cursing. Kaito's eyes darted towards him, and - yep, still focused on the body. So. Creepy. But, like, at least he didn't have to worry about Mouri-chan kicking his head in for colouring the kid's vocabulary. "Wait, don't try to distract me!"
"By the way, I'd thought you had figured this out already - we didn't 'lose contact' with them, you know."
"Really? Because I could've sworn that that was exactly what happened, seeing as we didn't ever talk to Yukiko-neechan after the funeral - your funeral."
"And it never occurred to you that that was by design?"
"No, why would - huh." That actually made a lot of sense. Only Yukiko-neechan had made an appearance at the funeral, and she had been wearing a large hat and sunglasses - which had basically functioned the same way his top hat and monocle did. He'd hardly recognized her, and she'd been his father's apprentice for nearly a year. Also, her face had been seared into his memory after that one terrifying incident.
Since that traumatic day, he had never once called anyone oba-san or any derivative thereof unless they were quite clearly over the age of sixty.
...She had been really scary to a six-year-old, okay.
So she'd come to the funeral in disguise, and the rest of her family (who were either pretty terrible at disguises or just not interested in learning, if he remembered correctly) hadn't shown up at all. There wouldn't have been any particular reason to do that - well, other than as an homage to her teacher, which she probably could have gotten away with if anyone had realized - except for the fact that he was mostly certain that her husband wrote mystery novels for a living and helped the police out every so often.
They were probably familiar enough with the mechanics behind covered-up murders that they could recognize one on sight.
"Huh," he repeated. "So that means Mom must have - huh."
His father smirked, expression making it clear that he was laughing at Kaito for not figuring it out before.
"But there's still no way that that kid could possibly be this kid! That's not how time works !"
His dad was full on laughing now, bent over double and clutching his ribs and everything. If he weren't already, you know, dead (which Kaito was still low-key freaking out about, by the way) and therefore didn't need to breathe, Kaito would've been worried he might laugh himself to death.
His dad managed to pull himself together eventually, though he had to resort to slipping on his Poker Face to actually stop snickering for any period of time.
Kaito rolled his eyes, feeling very much like a teenager in that moment.
"Kaito," his father began. "Who is the one person you can disguise yourself as in two seconds? A disguise that doesn't look like it took two seconds, by the way, unlike the one you're wearing now."
Kaito blinked, blatantly ignoring the dig. He...had not been expecting that abrupt change of topic - oh, wait. "Um. Yukiko-neechan's kid."
"Bingo." A few fireworks erupted around his dad and Kaito got sidetracked for a moment wondering if they, like, respawned or something every time he used them or if he only had as many as he'd had on him the night he'd died. "Now. I believe - ah, yes, here we go."
An old, faded, mostly translucent photograph poofed into existence in a small puff of smoke and Kaito's father positioned it in the air so that it and Conan were about the same height, floating side-by-side.
The picture was of Kaito and his father at his last magic show, taken just before it started. Kaito had wondered what had happened to it, but then he realized that it must have gone up in smoke with his father.
Kaito looked at the picture. Then at Conan. Then back. "Okay, so he looks like a straight-laced mini-me. A mini-me with control issues. That doesn't mean that Yukiko-neechan didn't just have another kid or something. Or, like, one of their close relatives just happened to get the right combination of genes."
"Neither Yukiko nor Yuusaku have any siblings. And, to be perfectly honest, they could hardly handle one kid, let alone more. They were so restless while Shinichi-kun was in school… I do believe that they took off flying around the world again just as soon as he could legally be left alone for long periods of time." His dad frowned slightly, brow creasing, before muttering to himself. "I would have asked Chikage if we could have taken him in if I'd still been alive, but we did have to cut contact with them for a reason."
"But that doesn't mean - "
"Kaito, think."
So he thought.
And he came to the same conclusion. "But that's impossible! People don't just - "
Kaito's dad smirked. "And yet here you are, talking to your dead father's ghost."
Kaito's mouth clicked closed. Well. He had him there.
He took a careful breath. "Okay, I'm still half convinced that I'm hallucinating all this, but okay. So you're saying, what, that he's stayed six this entire time? Because that's a little far-fetched, and I don't mean the Pokemon."
Kaito's dad shook his head, smirk back in place. "No, I'm saying that he got himself shrunk. Or de-aged, I suppose."
Kaito took a moment to process that. "That...actually sounds plausible."
His father's face fell, oddly enough. "I wasn't expecting you to come around that quickly. I had a whole finale planned."
Kaito shrugged. "Dad, I have a witch in my class. Shrinking seems more likely than him just staying that age this whole time, especially since I've disguised as the teenage him and no one seemed to bat an eye… Except for him, of course - he always knows exactly when it's me in disguise - oh. Suddenly a lot of things make a lot more sense. Actually, the most confusing part of this is why you know about it."
His dad shrugged. "It gets boring when you sleep, and I felt that I should probably check in on my godson from time to time."
"...What." Kaito blinked, unsure how to respond because what even.
"Yes, I just happened to be there when he was shrunk, so I actually know the whole story. The next chance you get, you should ask him how he chose his new alias because that story is hilarious."
"You know, that's awfully convenient of you to know…"
His dad shrugged. "I was under the impression that you thought I was a hallucination."
Kaito wanted to rip his hair out. And, since his impulse control had never been great, he was tugging on his hair as if he were preparing to tear it out when Yamamura-keibu appeared rather dramatically in the doorway. Kaito, unfortunately, did not notice this until Yamamura-keibu cleared his throat, which was after he started talking to his father again - "What the hell , dad - !"
"Ahem."
Both the inspector and Conan were staring at him, eyes wide.
Kaito grinned sheepishly. "Um. Hi. Sorry, don't mind me. I'm just...yelling at a ghost."
Why, why, did he say these things.
. . . Notes: I was supposed to be writing tmq but this happened instead so...whoops, my finger slipped?
