AN: Two for the price of one today! I couldn't resist.

Content warning: Like marriage, this chapter contains brief moments of nonsexual torture and suicidal ideation.

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Mazenderan II: The First Performance

- and he'll have the good times
Doing things that you don't understand

It was time.

His return to Kaitou KID in the past few years had been triumphant, despite the rocky start. Sure, his permanently crippled leg was a hinderance, but as they say - necessity was the mother of invention. He was crafty with his tools, because at least he had had the foresight to shadow Jii's inventor friend after high school… and boy was that man a hoot. That batty old professor and Kaito were connected on some bonkers wavelength that far surpassed any sort of spiritual connection. His skills melted into Kaito's hands easily.

Travel was costly, partly because of the base cost of international travel, but also because of the extra checked bag that Kaito lugged around the world with them. This bag held his thieving supplies and miscellaneous inventions. And while, yes, it always got flagged in customs as containing Super Suspicious Items, he always fell back on the same, conveniently true excuse: "I'm a magician!"

The suitcase was crammed with smoke bombs, glitter bombs, flash bombs, and actual (albeit small and theoretically harmless) bombs, along with his favorite construction projects. His card gun, for starters, was a staple (but, then again, that was a carry-on object, not a checked-bag object). Also his jet-engine skates, which were just freaking cool. Then he had his uniform and glider, and the many blow-up dummies he used as distractions for his getaways. Kaito sorely missed having Jii as his assistant/accomplice, since he was the perfect decoy for the cops to chase, and found that replacing him was no small feat – although he was slowly finding a solution for that problem. Nothing could replace Jii but a blow-up sex doll dressed in a bright white top hat and monocle sure came close.

Tonight he was going to use one of his newest inventions. The Mazenderan heat had been brutal on his muscles, sending his leg into frequent spasms and making running incredibly difficult. He got away with walking independently just from pride, but found himself grabbing at the backs of chairs and table edges in order to get around the house. This invention was not a cane, his pride wouldn't allow him to call it that, but was rather a long baton that he happened to use as a walking stick. Sure. And the thing about the baton was that it had millions of other uses besides being a walking stick – it worked as a crowbar, it worked as a… stick to poke people with maybe, it…

Okay. Fine. It was a cane. He'd admit that just this once. But it wasn't like he needed it. It was there just in case. And it had a compartment where it housed an array of different colored sleeping gases.

Kaito's trip to the museum earlier had been informative. While yes, he did learn a lot of surprising information about Persian history that he kind of wished he didn't know, the museum trip was more than just that. It allowed him to see the layout of the museum, and more importantly it allowed him access to information regarding security around the jewels.

Mazenderan Court, he had learned, was built by a French architect under the direction of the ruling shah's mother, the khanum. This French architect was speculated to be the same one responsible for the infamous twisting, winding catacombs located deep below the streets of Paris… meaning that there was a high chance that this French architect's fascination with secret passageways and hidden corridors was likely to be apparent in this building, as well. Kaito's goal was to exploit these hidden passageways in order to slip in and slip out undetected.

The only problem he was facing now was where to find the entrance to these miles and miles of hidden passageways. He was on the outskirts of the court walls, tapping his baton (again - not cane, he refused to call it a cane) and palming around the stonework while trying his damned best to stay hidden. This was so much easier said than done.

Come on, if he were a loony French architect tasked with building a kinky murdery dungeon for a creepy Persian khanum, where would he hide the entrance to the secret passageway?

His eyes searched the stone wall for a long few moments before he finally gave up with a sigh. He was getting nowhere with this. How could he get inside the architect's head? The guy was long dead, and the information that was available online about him made him out to be as mysterious as a phantom.

Wait.

He was Kaitou KID.

A phantom thief.

He knew how phantoms operated.

He lifted his head to the sky. He always liked the sky. It was a free space, free from the confines of the rest of the world. When he was in the air, it felt…

Liberating.

Kaito scaled the wall, forcing his arms to carry as much of his weight as possible in order to avoid putting weight on his bad leg, and finally found himself perched at the top. He gazed around, searching the complex now that he had better visibility. Where was the highest point in the court? Probably the spire. He crept along the wall, balancing on the narrow ledge, before jumping across to the main building and landing softly on the other side. From there it was a short dash to the main spire.

The spire was tall, blooming into a pointed, steep dome. From where he crouched, he could see into the spire's internal structure – probably used as a scenic outlook back when the Mazenderan Court was fully operational. If he peered in closer, he could see a simple ladder leading down into the rest of the building.

But – no. This was just a regular part of the building. No secret entrance here. He grabbed onto the roof line and pulled himself up, trying to balance himself on the spire's curved roof as he kept his eyes peeled for anything – anything at all – that might resemble the entrance to a secret passageway.

After a small amount of time, hardly a minute or two at all, he found it. A small knob, sequestered within the ridges of the roof. He twisted the knob and found a square slab opening itself for him, allowing him access into the roof itself. He climbed in, darkness engulfing him, and shut the roof latch behind him. He didn't need nosy watchers spotting his entrance. It was bad enough he spent this amount of time on the roof, as it was!

The only way to go was down. He felt his body press against musty stone as he squirmed through a narrow chute – and, oh, now he realized why those pillars around the spire were so large! – and then found his heart soaring as he lost his grip on the stone and began to freefall for a half second before landing on a cold patch of stone a good ten feet or so below, the force from the fall sending ricochets of pain through his bad leg for a few blinding hot seconds.

The walls around him were still narrow. He must still be inside the walls, he realized. He felt around the wall and – oh shit, this wasn't going to be an easy exit for him, was it? He could barely see where he was going, let alone see where he was currently. It was going to be a pain in the ass to find his way back here. Better to just find a different exit route entirely, he decided as he skirted through the wall before finding himself in a larger space and realizing he was finally fully in the Mazenderan Court's catacombs.

Being in the catacombs was somehow far more disorienting than being in the wall, Kaito realized as he found himself tripping over his shoes for the umpteenth time. He half-wanted to use his watch light to see better but decided against it in fear that someone on the other side of the wall would perhaps see the light shining through a gap and ultimately foil his plans. Eventually, he sacrificed a shred of dignity and pulled out the baton once more, just to tap in front of him as he walked through the pitch-black catacombs. How the hell the catacombs were designed was a question he couldn't help but wonder about – after all, catacombs typically were built as underground labyrinths, and yet this one seemed to wind through every level of the expansive palace. It was a design only a madman could conceive! Sometimes it felt like the path was sloping but he couldn't tell if it was up or down, other times it felt like the whole room was turning and he'd walk straight into a wall. He had a compass on his watch, which turned out to be very handy in helping him navigate to exactly where he wanted.

The throne room was directly below him now, according to his internal compass and hazy recollection of the complex map that he had studied in the museum just hours earlier. Crouching down, he found a glass tile in the floor that seemed to be a window into the room. Peering through it confirmed his location further by giving him a bird's eye view of the throne room.

What luck! He'd been nervous that he was going to get lost in the twisting catacombs and end up somewhere else entirely. Now, all that was left was to get into the throne room. It would make sense for there to be some sort of hidden entrance, wouldn't it? Feeling around the floor near the tile, he found a nail poking out. Aha! What was a tiny nail like this doing in a passageway made of stone?

It clearly was some sort of trapdoor lever. And if he pressed it – if his thinking was correct, as it usually was - it should drop him straight down into…

His body crashed rather ungracefully onto the unexpectedly soft ground below. Dazedly, he laid there for a minute, staring back up at the ceiling from whence he came and watching the trapdoor seal itself back up seamlessly.

After a moment, the stars dancing around his vision seemed to fade and he sat himself up. This… clearly wasn't the throne room – the catacombs had tricked him, then – it was a trick of the darkness, and the image of the throne room he saw in the glass tile must have been a trick of the light. But what was this? Where was this? It was a beautiful landscape, a forest of chilly bare trees surrounding him on every side. The trees seemed to sway around him, pushed by some breeze he couldn't feel. Their movements seemed synchronous, dazzling him with some incomprehensible sense of beauty and wonder. Perhaps he had gone a little too far away from the Mazenderan Court and had dropped into some other location. Wasn't there a forest that kind of looked like this just outside the walls? Perhaps he just needed to brush himself off, creep back to the front gate, and start over…

His path was interrupted by nothing. He walked straight into mid-air, crashed into it, and was thrown back a few steps. Focusing on the spot in the air that had stopped him, he realized he was staring at himself… then broadened his eyes to see he was surrounded by a million copies of himself. Did he hit his head when he fell? Was this a concussion? But his head didn't seem to hurt like that…

His hands reached out, quivering. Was this Akako's magic? Her costume had always seemed more Egyptian than Persian, but magic knew no bounds. His fingertips made contact with the other Kaito, but instead of the warm feeling of skin and flesh, he felt a cool hard surface, before he placed his entire palm down and followed the surface to…

His eyes finally focused on a seam. A small seam, barely perceptible, in the midst of the mesmerizing forest landscape. He spun and spotted at least three other seams. The picture was coming together now, and just like that, the illusion shattered… this was not a forest at all but instead a small chamber of mirrors! Just like a carnival – a nice, little hall of mirrors! It was hard to see – the chamber was masterfully made. And – oh, look! There were drums hidden beneath the mirrors, spinning them on an axis and making a disorienting illusion as the millions of reflections of himself spun into and out of focus. But if he kept his eye on the seams, if he kept his mind straight and realized there was only ever one tree at all – one cold, iron tree in the center of it all - then it all fit into place.

It was a hall of mirrors, certainly. A hexagonal hall of disorientatingly beautiful mirrors in the middle of a palace dedicated to pain and suffering. A hall of mirrors designed as one particular thing:

A torture chamber.

Sick fucking medieval shit, he thought, flicking his eyes away from the iron tree in the center of the room. There was a vent in the ceiling, if he looked close, that looked like a heat duct. He could imagine going crazy in this room, especially if it was about thirty degrees warmer. He could imagine chasing after his reflection in a heat-crazed delirium, burning his hand as it clutched at the conductive tree or scraped against the burning faces of the mirrored walls. Yes, that's definitely what this room was for – physical torture of the most psychological design.

But the torture chamber didn't have an operator. It wouldn't torture him. Whoever it was built for – hell, whoever knew about it, buried as it was in the catacombs of the court - was long dead. So that meant he could keep a cool head while looking for an exit. He wouldn't panic.

He didn't have a fear of small spaces. This was fine.

(The elevator)

Fuck.

No, stop. No. This was all just getting in his head. Everything was fine, he just had to focus -

"Botchama, be careful."

Kaito whirled around, the blood drained completely out of his face. His eyes darted around. There was no way he just heard that voice. No way… but it had sounded so real... "Who's there?"

He was imagining it. He had to be. He was alone in that forest full of trees – fuck, not a forest, not a fucking forest, it was just one tree, right? And everything else was a reflection. He grabbed onto its branch. Cool to the touch. Cool. Not the desert. Cold like metal. Cold like –

The gurney was ice under his hands. It'd been sitting in the freezer for at least six hours.

The medical examiner pulled the sheet back. "Do you recognize this man?"

Kaito stared at the body lying on the metal slab in front of him. The face was scraped off from the impact with Nakamori's police car, and the chest was bare but ridden with larger holes than Kaito ever imagined bullets could leave. The body was completely unrecognizable, bar one thing…

Kaito bit his lip and pulled down the sheet further to check his right hand. He ran his fingers across the waxy, wrinkled skin to find a callus, right on the inner side of the thumb.

The callus of an experienced billiards player.

Definitive proof.

As if he needed the confirmation. As if he didn't already know. As if he didn't watch it happen -

Kaito blinked his eyes, and in a moment the real world came back to him. A shiver ran down his spine. He'd only been in the chamber for a few minutes, hadn't he? It wasn't even functional anymore, was it? He pulled at his tie to loosen his collar. The air was starting to feel awfully warm.

He was down on his hands and knees, fingers splayed through the sand as he searched for any sort of lever device that would open up the exit. To hell with his white pants – if they got dirty, so be it. That's what dry cleaning was for. He'd gotten worse stains out before.

Stains like…

"Fuck, Kaito, is that blood?"

No! He pressed his hands into fists and let the nails dig in, sand flowing out of his clenched grips. He needed to stay focused. He needed to breathe. He needed to get out of here.

He set to work again.

His hands brushed against a solid surface once more. His head shot up to find a wild-eyed man looking back at him. He jumped back in reflex, as did the other man, and his heart was beating out of his body as he remembered the other man to be himself.

Right, the mirrors.

He had to stay on task. He craned his neck around to find a million other heads peering in all different directions, peering around the forest's trees to stare at each other like a bunch of tiny animals. There seemed to be an infinite amount of trees, stretching as far as his eyes could see with no end in sight. His tracks in the sand, which he had momentarily thought would help him differentiate the illusion from the real, seemed to swirl into each other to the point that he couldn't tell where the tracks began and ended. And, shit, it was really starting to get warm in here. Warm like –

Flames were blazing.

Two rough hands were scooping him up, lifting him away from the fire.

His father's body was still visible on stage, being consumed slowly by the flames. Why wasn't he moving? Wasn't he going to escape like they were? Didn't he know that the fire was going to –

Kaito slammed his palms against the mirror, causing the pane to shake violently in its setting.

He had to get ahold of himself, dammit! He had to stay focused. He had to… he had to… what was it he had to do again? Why was he in the middle of the forest? He sat back on the ground, breathing heavily, sweat trailing down his forehead and sticking his hair to his face. It was hot out here, wasn't it?

Stay in control, a voice that sounded suspiciously like his mother's whispered to him from the back of his mind. At least that one he knew had come from his own head.

"I just need to think," Kaito gritted out, rising from the ground. He grabbed the tree for support, for a moment, not thinking much of it at all, but then turning back quickly to stare at it with all the focus in the world.

The tree was cold as ice. Cold like the morgue slab. Cold like Jii's body. Cold like the milk he spilled in Aoko's kitchen. Cold like ice cream. "Cold…"

And therein lied the answer to it all.

Because if he couldn't find the exit, he'd make his own.

A single, unshaking finger looped itself under his tie and tugged it loose. In a few quick movements he had it knotted it in a loop. He flung it over the iron branch overhead and tied it sharply, before sticking his neck out and wrapping it around.

(The dull clatter of commotion could be heard just behind the mirror.)

(Good, he almost smiled. They're right where I want them…)

A tug of the tie lifted him up so that his feet rose above the ground, the toes of his shoes scraping against the sand to try to secure him to no avail. His hands were clawing at the tie - just as if he suddenly regretted it –

The mirror to his right sprang open and an army of officers stormed in, reaching to untie him from his self-made gallows.

And then a burst of smoke came, and the officers collapsed in a coughing fit as they struggled to stay awake amongst the sleeping gas…

Kaito unlooped his neck from the tie, surveying the damage. Five officers' bodies, napping as peacefully as Shinju in her infant days. He stepped past the officers' bodies and crept along the corridor until he reached its end, and rather quickly found a switch that opened the way to the throne room (and to think, he'd been that close!). The wall swung out and revealed the shah's throne room in all of its expansive glory.

A single man in a crisp blue uniform stood in the middle of the room, placing himself between Kaito and the rosary. The final obstacle.

"We finally meet, face to face," the man said in English, words accented heavily with a strong foreign and militaristic command, "Kuroba Kaito."

Kaito stood steady in place, returning the English dialogue. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I am not that person."

"Rather presumptive of me, I suppose," the man said easily. "The Tokyo Police made a compelling argument, but I guess I shall have to prove it myself once I have seen you safely behind bars."

Kaito cast a glance around, calling attention to the notable lack of reinforcements. "You might want to try a little harder next time."

"I have no intention in trying to catch you right now. Tonight was just for introductions. I will catch you… in time."

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"I have my resources."

"Which are…?"

The man stared at Kaito with the strength of twenty men. "Interpol."

God dammit. That was a name he didn't need right now. "I've dealt with Interpol before."

"You speak of Connery, correct?" The man laughed. "He was a blight on our stellar force. Believe me, you shall not be so lucky as to deal with his kind in me."

Lucky? He was supposed to have been lucky to deal with Connery?! "What's your move?"

"Just watching today," the Inspector said. "You put on a nice show back there."

The torture chamber. The fake suicide attempt. If the Interpol agent had watched, that meant Kaito was right – it was all a trap from the beginning. A trap he had outsmarted. That gave him leverage over the agent. For now. If using a 150-year-old torture chamber as a means of capturing him was a show of the lengths the agent would go, he would have to be on his toes from now on. "It's my duty."

"And it's my duty to catch you. A duty which I take very seriously. I have read every case file about you, both official and non-official."

"I'm sure you have." Kaito crept closer to the jewel case, testing the waters as he moved around the agent in a sort of deformed half-circle. The Interpol agent remained in place, hardly even seeming to pivot to watch Kaito's movements. Was he really not going to stop Kaito?

"You are a flashy criminal with a code of honor. You shy away from the brutalistic methods that your more… savage contemporaries may use."

"I am a gentleman at heart."

"Tonight's method of escape was uncharacteristic of you, though. In a thousand case files on you, I have not read a single passage that would make me think you would ever resort to an escape method such as the one you used tonight." The agent watched Kaito's hand as it swiped up the rosary, beads of scarlet trickling below his grasp. "I have only ever seen such a brand of horror from one other thief."

Don't bite – aw, hell. He stuffed the rosary in his pocket. "And who might that be?"

"The one the French call la Femme Fantôme. Tell me, what relationship do you have with that thief of one thousand faces?"

La Femme Fantôme?

Wait, if it was French then…

The Phantom Lady?! Fuck. This was not a connection he needed Interpol to figure out. His mom was going to be pissed. Kaito tried not to let his thoughts show on his face. "Isn't that for you to figure out, Agent Interpol?"

"I vow to do so, Kuroba Kaito."

"They call me Kaitou KID," Kaito insisted.

"And I am called Galambos," the agent replied, watching Kaito still. "Do not forget me, Kuroba Kaito."

Kaito stalked out of the throne room, leaving the room from the entrance door opposite from where he had entered – and opposite of where the Agent was still standing. He felt the Agent's eyes on him still, burning like a brand in his back as he tried to walk away as confidently as possible. Don't look back, he commanded himself, even as he heard the tell-tale signs of the officers in the torture chamber waking up.

For all the effort he put into making his entrance as stealthy as possible, he supposed it was rather laughable that he ended up making his exit by crashing through the front doors of the building with five freshly awake and angry police officers hot on his tail. He scampered up the outside wall of the Mazenderan Court, hoping to just get away, and hopped over the top as soon as he was high enough. He prayed the landing would be soft as he closed his eyes and began to fall twenty, thirty, forty feet –

- and the landing was indeed soft, if soft meant a cold, deep splash in a large body of water.

Oh. The Mazenderan Court overlooked the Caspian Sea. He had… forgotten about that. He was splashing around in the Caspian Sea. The museum looked so far away now, sitting as it was on a tall, unsurmountable cliff edge fifty feet above him.

This was fine, though. He escaped and he was safe. He waded a little further down, gripping along the rocks that lined the cliff edge to stay close to land until he reached a small inlet. He shrugged off his dripping white coat and wrung it out as best as he could before beginning the long trek back to the hotel - walking, of course, because he sure as hell couldn't hail a taxi looking as suspiciously soaked as he did.

All in all – it was a good heist. Any heist he walked away from with his freedom still intact was a good heist in his book. Add to that the adrenaline rush of outsmarting some know-it-all agent from Interpol, plus making off with the prize jewel -

His hand went to his pocket.

Then the other pocket. And another.

All empty.

Fuck. The rosary must have slipped out when he was in the water.

He turned around to look back where he came from. He could hear the soft sound of the Caspian Sea, its waves playfully throwing themselves against the shore. It was still dark – he could go back and search the shore, see if the rosary was somewhere close to the inlet, or he could swim back to the place he fell into in the first place. But the Caspian Sea was very big. The chances of finding it were next to nothing. He'd have to face the fact that this would be the first jewel he wouldn't return.

His first actual theft.

He could only laugh, as the moonlight lit the rest of his tired way home.

A good heist, indeed.

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AN: The title of the previous chapter should have been enough of a giveaway for what I was referencing in this chapter, but in case you're unfamiliar with the Phantom of the Opera... in the book, a character cheekily describes the Phantom's time in Persia as "those rosy hours of the Mazenderan" - quite cheeky, of course, as this period of time is when the Phantom worked as the personal architect, magician, and assassin for the shah. The Phantom ends up building a large torture palace along with a mirrored torture chamber. Victims of the torture chamber typically met their ends by hanging themselves from the iron tree after being driven mad by the refractory illusions. Said torture palace and torture chamber are featured in this chapter, but if the torture chamber is too hard to picture I have found a page from a webcomic that portrays it fairly well: en/challenge/the-phantom-of-the-opera-a-graphic-novel/pages-140-through-145/viewer?title_no=255747&episode_no=47

I want to clarify that NO knowledge of The Phantom of the Opera is needed for this story. Yes I am currently obsessed with it, but vague references are ALL that will be made - and most of them were right here in this chapter. Mostly just using it as a backdrop, to be quite honest.