Timeline: Kaito Age 9 - "Return of the Phantom Thief"

They're nine years old and their entire world is burning away right in front of them. Fimal scatters in a mist of golden dust right before them so there is no doubt his father has died too. There is screaming and panic and if he closes his eyes the trick will be over. If he closes his eyes, his dad will come striding out, Fimal flitting proudly around him, smiling and saying, "What did I say about that Poker Face, Kaito?"

Aares shifts into something large, predatory and snarling as firefighters try to tug him away. She's practically smothering him in her fur and he hates shapes like this, hates how scared they tell everyone he is, but Aoko and Kiiva are huddled in a firefighter's arms and both are so, so scared, and it's probably alright that he is too.

Dad will come out of that. He's the greatest magician in the world. He will come out.

He will.

"Kaito!" Aares rumbles his name, teeth still bared at everyone pressing in on them, at the fire blazing in front of them. "We need to leave!"

"No." He can't raise his voice past the whisper, but he shakes his head and steps towards the fire, where no one is standing.

"Kaito! Please! We have to go!" Aoko is starting to struggle, Kiiva shifting into a bird and flying off in a panic. "Please, come with us!"

"No." Aares hisses, a lion's mane furling around her head as she shakes in time to Kaito. "We aren't staying."

Kaito wants to put up more of a fight because he knows that if he leaves, if he goes away, the trick won't ever finish. His dad won't come out. No audience means no magic. Aares slinks in front of him, golden in the firelight, and nudges at his chest with her nose.

"Go, Kaito." The lion pushes again, harder. Aoko grabs his hand and pulls him. The firefighters and their daemons close around them, sheltering them as the small party slowly, reluctantly, moves forward.

"Aoko!"

Nakamori is there, shouldering people out of his way, Kiiva leading the man's mastiff determinedly. Aoko releases his hand as Nakamori picks her up and then grabs him too, lifting him up and over his shoulder before he can protest. Aares shrinks into a sparrow and huddles under his shirt collar, sharp talons digging in hard enough to bleed.

His entire world vanishes.

-X-

He's eleven and he's never once solved something with his fists. Hands are magician's tools, just as much as his brain is, so he has to keep them ready. He has to keep them nimble and trained and clever.

But someone pushed Aares.

They pressed their hands on her fur, shoved her into him, and called them freaks.

She hisses, caught halfway in a change, and the other children and daemons scramble away in terror. Their bully, this little boy he's never seen before in his life, he's never spoken to ever, holds his ground as his daemon shrinks and curls under him.

Aares is caught halfway in a change, fur from her cat form meeting harshly into scales. Her tail ends in a rattle, her ears are pined down, her fangs are long and drip saliva.

She is caught halfway and he's so scared she's going to stay that way, that he doesn't even realize he's hit the boy until he feels the pain.

The boy screams, face bloody from where Kaito hit his nose, and Aares loses the scales as fast as they'd arrived. She's a kitten squirming into his arms with pitiful cries.

Kaito doesn't realize he's crying too.

Their teachers come, and Kaito and the boy are both taken to the nurse.

He hears the teachers talk about his father, about his mother who couldn't get to the school when they called, about Aares and her unnatural forms.

He hears the boy in the next bed over tell everyone how scared they all were of Aares. When she turned into a monster.

He never hears the teachers disagree.

-X-

He's thirteen and his mother needs to leave. She doesn't want to; he hears her arguing on the phone with her publicist.

But she's going to leave.

He pulls Aares into his lap and hides his face in her fur. She's a spaniel, silky white only at her ears and black everywhere else.

"What are we going to do?" he whispers, feeling her shake with him.

"I don't know," she whispers back, cold nose at his temple. "What we always do."

His mother sighs heavily in the other room, voice dropped to resignation, and he knows she's going to come looking for them.

She'll want to explain and placate and he'll have to smile and nod and agree.

And she'll leave.

When he hears her steps, he forces himself upright and carries Aares into their room. She hops onto the bed, shifting into a lemur as she goes and scrambling at his math book. He scrubs at his face and takes the book from her.

They're just starting their problem set homework when his mother taps on the door.

"Kaito?"

"Yeah, mom?" He pitches his voice bright and engaging, glancing up at her and Agrippa. His parents were the only ones he knew who had daemons of the same gender. But they fit together well. Fimal had a trickster's heart and Agrippa was devious to the core, and he could never think of them any other way.

"I need to talk to you about something important," she says, sitting on his bed and patting the space next to her.

He slouches next to her, Agrippa leaning over to curl her tail over his cheek. His skin tingles and warms where her scales touch.

"My publicist called. They need me to cover a story. I can't say no." She pauses and wraps an arm around his shoulders. "But they can let me bring someone with me. So we need to get a passport together for you and sort out your schoolwork."

He's staring at her, mouth slightly open, but Aares acts for the both of them.

"Where are we going?" she asks, climbing onto his shoulders.

"There's a magic castle in Vegas looking to get some good press." She squeezes him tighter. "Want to go learn some new tricks?"

"Yes!"

-X-

He's fifteen and they're different from everyone else around them. His mother wants to have him speak with a specialist, with anyone other than Aoko, but he can't. They want what's different about them to be wrong, for it to be some kind of illness. He knows. Kaito has read about it to Aares after they figure out how to hack into the daemon registration database.

Aares should have settled by now. And only if they're late bloomers. She changes too much, too fast and too different. She's been a snake, a hyena, a squirrel, a tortoise, all in a single afternoon. She has no preference for predator or prey, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects or arachnids. But she's never been something imaginary or extraordinary.

They have that at least.

"What are we going to do? They'll put us on the registry like this. We won't ever be able to make them accept us." Aares is a rabbit right now, white and black like most shapes she takes are, the only thing she's shown preference towards.

"We trick them into thinking nothing's wrong. Dad told us about Poker Face, told us about not giving anything away. Fimal never gave away any of his tells, did he?"

"Fimal was a magpie, Kaito. I still do this." She changes again, now a miserable looking sheep. "Even when we're in public."

"So, we're going to practice." Kaito closes out of the registry, turns away from the list of children whose daemons settled as monsters, as chimera, who never settled at all. They won't be on that list. Won't be pitied even more. Looked down on. Son of the magician who failed his final trick.

"How?"

"Mom said she's going to mention it at our next session. We have two weeks before they decide if we need a specialist instead of these general issue people. My emotions trigger yours right? So this isn't just keeping a blank face. We need to try harder than that."

Aares nods, shifting once more into the rabbit and hopping over to his lap. She calms as he brushes his hands over her fur, the knot in his chest going slack, just a little bit, as he relaxes under her.

They need to figure this out. Whatever else they need to do, they need to try.

-X-

Aoko's father watches him sometimes, especially when Aoko's daemon settles. Kiiva's a chatty ocelot, tan and gold and creamy white and black. His markings are a particular fascination, serpentine lines around the face and an eye on the chest like a hooded cobra.

Aoko's overjoyed, and as a way to celebrate, her father takes a rare weekend off and invites Kaito with them to Osaka.

They spend the day touring and eating at whatever place they find.

And Aoko's father and daemon watch them.

It's unnerving and makes Kaito feel especially self-conscious. Aoko and Kiiva don't notice, but Aares changes less and less, spending the final day as a docile fennec fox and mostly huddled under Kiiva.

"Do you think she'll stay like that?" Nakamori asks Kaito, voice just loud enough to be heard over the other people waiting in line for takoyaki.

"No," Kaito admits, and he waits for Nakamori to say something like his teachers, about how it's unnatural for a boy his age to have a daemon that changes.

How strange a boy like him must be with such a defensive daemon and an absent mother and a dead father and the closest thing to a parental figure he has is his neighbor.

"Ryuujin didn't settle until I was out of high school. She stuck to mostly dogs and a wolf once, but she wasn't settled until I knew what I was going to do in my future. Sometimes, just knowing yourself isn't enough. You have to know what you'll become."

Kaito stares at him.

He's not close to Nakamori. They rarely see each other now, when once they had family dinners together. That hadn't lasted long past his father's death, and it had felt right at the time.

It would have been tempting to substitute another father figure in his low points, but Nakamori never grew closer.

To hear him now, it was comforting, really.

Probably Nakamori's intention.

"Don't get disheartened about it. Understand, Kaito-kun?"

"Yeah." He smiles, despite his confusion, and Aares shifts into the biggest deer he's ever seen, scooping Kiiva onto her back and startling the entire line of people and daemons waiting with them.

Nakamori and Ryuujin laugh, despite the shouting and general mayhem of startled daemons.

It's the best day he's had in a while.

-X-

They're spending a holiday with his aunt Faye, who takes one look at him and decides that she needs to teach him the Mine family heritage.

It involves an outrageous number of Vegas standard poker decks, craps dice, and authentic betting chips which culminates in throwing knives, forging signatures, and shooting a pistol. The Mine family came from the courtesans and geiko, living art hanging on the arms of the wealthy and powerful. Like the Yakuza.

She's dismissed some muscle-type with a tiger daemon from the shooting range with barely a word. Knowing his mother's family has power isn't strange. His parents made friends with the strangest people in their lives, but not a one of them has ever had anything bad to say about his father.

They don't look at Aares like she's broken, either. Not a one.

And the tiger who'd just left had one eye scarred and milky, not a common sight to see daemons with injuries.

It's strange to have Aoko and her father on one side of his life, and his mother's criminal family on the other. But neither group makes him feel ostracized or weird or damaged. It's dissonance, but Kaito's making a life on balancing the impossible.

"C'mon kid, just hold steady here," she says, her hands covering his and adjusting his grip on the gun. "There we go. How does that feel?"

"Better," he says, "Faye-chan, how did you get so good at this?"

"Gotta learn sometime," she says, pushing his ear protection back in place and stepping back.

He empties the clip just as she instructed, each one hitting just slightly off center of the target.

It's not a bad effort for his third attempt.

"Much better," she says, grinning at him. "It's just practice from there. Gotta learn to hold that stance. You'll be shooting fans off poles and lights out of theaters before you know it."

"Will Jet-jii teach me then?" He asks, glancing through the safety glass to see Aares and Yanmei both pressing noses to the glass. The colugo bobs his head, encouraging, and Aares fluffs her feathers, feigning boredom.

"Jet'll be more than happy to teach you then," she says, lips tilting in a smirk. "I think your mother will bully him into it if you ask her."

"But I've got you to bully him," Kaito says, smiling at her with all the charm he can.

It makes her laugh, high and a little crazed, but it's still genuine. She wraps an arm around him, dragging her fingernails through his scalp and tugging at his hair.

"Let's go see Ed and Ein, okay? She can bully him for the both of us," Faye says, leading him back to the door to their daemons.

They'll be here for another week, or until his mother gets a new assignment and they need to go again. Somehow, they always find friends or family in the cities they visit.

It's nice not to be alone.

-X-

They're sixteen and they've pulled off the greatest magic trick that no one can ever know about. Aares spends most of her time as an Eurasian magpie, her registered form, but the shape changing never stops. They just get better at it.

So much so that they can become entirely new people.

Kaito learns how to disguise himself, slip into another form just as easily as Aares does. He starts with his mother, with Jii, with Aoko, the people he knows best. Aares takes on the shapes of their daemons.

They can't show this trick in public.

The next anniversary feels less.

Less everything.

He can't put any genuine feeling into the smile he wears for his mother. And even while they clean off the stone marker, he doesn't feel closer to his father or like the last sight he'd had wasn't of fire.

There's so much grief, he thinks, that it's filled both of them to the brim and now they can't tell it apart from anything else.

It's an apathy that he doesn't want to feel.

Aares becomes a ferret and wraps around his neck as they kneel next to their mother in front of the grave site marker.

They breathe together and as one, they push everything into the bond between them, where it floats away from them.

And the next breath doesn't hurt.

-X-

They're sixteen and they see more and more of his mother's family. His mother leaves him alone more, but there's always someone who stops by to check in on him.

He sees Carmen and her brilliant red Macaw, and they leave him with more knowledge about the world outside Japan.

He sees Nami and her night monkey, and they leave him with more knowledge of forgery and paper-craft.

He sees Isaac and Miria and their pair-bonded mongoose and cobra, and they leave him with more knowledge of bomb-making and disguises.

He sees Yuffie and her horned sea snake, and they leave him with more knowledge of throwing knives and sneaking through shadows.

He sees Clara and her morning lark, and they leave him with more knowledge about deceit and subterfuge.

He sees Budoukiba and her European mink, and they leave him with more knowledge of benzodiazepines and how to ply them like a pro.

There's a revolving door of people in his life, all of them a crook, a criminal, a grifter, a thief, and each one smiles at his daemon and shares a story about his parents.

He's a little lighter after each visit. He's a little less empty.

He also has more skills to apply to his magic craft and it makes both of them dangerous. Aares learns how to be the distraction, the accessory, the dumb animal, and it makes them both terrors.

-X-

He doesn't see his father's family.

They never attended his wake or his funeral or visited his grave marker during the anniversary.

He doesn't even have memories of them, to be honest.

He knows they're alive. He know his paternal grandparents are living near Kyoto, owners of some international shipping business, and content with the daughter and son they have. An aunt and uncle who have written off their eldest brother and live their own lives without ever intersecting with his.

He's probably better off.

He's gotta be better off without them.

-X-

They're seventeen and their father was murdered.

Their father was Kaitou KID.

He was the greatest magician in the world and he didn't fail that last trick.

He had been killed.

"We're going to stop them. Whoever killed him, we're going to make them pay." Kaito is in his father's private room. The hideout for Kaitou KID.

"Do you think we can do this, Kaito?" Aares had been nervous about their earlier performance, evading the police and helping Jii escape. Kaito had been too.

But now–

"We can. Dad was smart. No one knew who he was except for his killers and Jii. But maybe they made a mistake. Maybe Dad wasn't dead. Maybe they failed to make sure and he's been waiting, waiting to see what would happen if they think he's gone."

"You want them to think you're really him. That we're them." Aares flits into Fimal's dove shape and only the tips of her wings are black.

"No one knows about your shape changing. I look a lot like him. I can't do anything to hide how young we are, compared to them, but we can do it. Dad left all of this here, just waiting to be found. We can take it and get revenge for him."

"We expose them." Aares is warming up to the idea now.

"Who would believe us, otherwise? Hi, officer, my dad was Kaitou KID and I think someone killed him, oh, I'm Kuroba Kaito, son on Kuroba Touichi, yes, the magician, no, this isn't a trick." Kaito huffed and waved an arm around at the room. "Even if we brought them here, all we would be doing is unmasking Dad. They ruled it an accident then. They won't change their minds just because the son of a thief says it wasn't."

"Nakamori might believe us. He was the one investigating Kaitou KID, and he helped in the investigation of the fire. He didn't want it ruled an accident."

"He might." Kaito sighs and sinks to the floor, staring at the KID tools scattered around the room. "He didn't have any choice at the end, though. There wasn't any evidence for why it would be an arson, let alone murder. Dad didn't have any enemies, no rivals. If it comes out that he was KID, they'll think he did it on purpose to get away from them and it messed up. KID had enemies and the police might not want to help KID."

"If we do this, they won't help you." Aares shifts again, a shaggy-haired wolfhound carefully picking her way over to him around the cape. She settles against his back, warmth he can't help but sink into. "No one can find out about us. KID's enemies become ours and they've already killed. We can't become like them."

"No one can find out," Kaito agrees and pulls his determination and fear around him, shoves it out until it fades. Aares breathes in and out, exhaling their shared emotions until they can both settle. Maybe the others, the ones on the registry lists who had monsters or shape-shifters as daemons, learned how to stretch that bond between them so fear and pain and happiness could be forced into it instead of them. Maybe they didn't.

Maybe it was better that they couldn't.

Kaito couldn't feel anything.

-X-

His father dressed himself in white and announced to the world what and when he was going to steal.

Sometimes, he even said how he was going to do it.

Article after article demonizing, worshiping, criticizing, praising.

The world is half in love with the gentleman thief who steals your heart with your jewels. And it's obvious that he loves them back.

Every picture is a practiced pose, deliberately framed so he looks his best in every direction.

Kaito dresses himself in full regalia, and he mimics every pose until the way he tilts his hand matches his father's right down to the slightly skewed tip of his pointer finger.

There's a mirror down in the hideout room.

His father must have stood here and did the exact same thing.

Kaito wants to feel what he must have felt doing those same poses, but there's a haze between himself and those bright emotions. Like fog before the sun.

It takes a long time to dissipate, but by then he only feels pain.

-X-

He pushes everything into the bond again, later that year, when his mother comes home and they visit his father's grave.

He's numb to everything.

His mother's hand is tight in his, and he can feel her trembling through that connection.

Agrippa and Aares curl together in front of them, Aares as a white rat snake.

"Do you have any roses?" his mother asks.

"Yeah," Kaito says, and he pulls out red as blood long-thorn roses. He sets them by the offerings and wishes he had something better to give her than a handful of roses and hand to hold.

It's harder than it should be to pull the pain and grief from the space between him and Aares. And when he does, it's overwhelming.

-X-

Kaitou KID makes his debut and he's exhilarated. Aares takes the shape of a Verreaux's eagle, which took several hours of discussion and many compromises to decide on. Aares can hold specific shapes for a long time unless it's the daemon of another person. KID needed a daemon that could be seen, something that can be identifiable.

Dad never let Fimal be seen. Nothing was ever reported in the news, and after he hacks police servers and spends an afternoon impersonating a junior officer, there is nothing about KID's daemon in the police reports. However, there is speculation that KID's daemon, whatever it is, needs to be able to fly. Handwritten speculation in Nakamori's files has many theories about why KID has a tendency to escape by air, the daemon one being most prominent.

Kaito doesn't know if whoever killed his father knew about his daemon. His father registered Fimal as a dove, not as a magpie with a color-variant of all white, which made sense if he hacked the registry after becoming Kaitou KID to protect his identity. All of his father's doves were even cross-breeds to lend a little more credence to his image.

Fimal had simply been a magpie, though. Kaito knew and he was sure Jii and his mother knew. Everyone else believed Fimal was a dove and when Aares had settled, everyone believed he was trying to be closer to his father through his daemon. Their grief counselor wrote a very convincing report about how delaying his acceptance and grief had kept his daemon from settling into a shape that would only make him feel worse.

If Kaito was going to be KID, they needed a daemon that would make people notice them. If Dad's killers knew about Fimal, they could manipulate that. Let them think Dad had purposefully misguided their actions to trick them, to go into hiding as he waited for them to make their move. Aares' eagle shape was big, distinct, and, most important of all, fearless. She was a black and white shadow, moving silently in the air around him.

If KID was a phantom, a specter of white, then Aares was his reverse. They needed a predator, something that Aares could hold for any length of time, something that could fly. She settled as the eagle and Kaito was sure to let them see her, let her come swooping down and take the jewel from his hand. Her talons had locked around it and they'd vanished into the night.

They had made their choices and now they couldn't back down. Even if he hung up his cape after they found his father's killers, Kaito wasn't sure he could lose this.

He'd never surpass his father if he didn't master everything that had made his father great.

-X-

His life fills quickly after he dons the cape and hat.

He sees the distance that starts to build between him and Aoko. He sees it, but there's nothing he can do. Maybe he can figure out some way to balance both identities in the future.

He misses her as a person misses a lung. She's vital and life and anything he does without her is automatic and supported by computers and wires and artificial air.

"I'll go some other time, okay?"

"Okay," she says, but her hope is a gutted thing, and even Kiiva doesn't believe him.