Well, I promised more and I have delivered. Nothing better than trips to give one a bit of inspiration…especially trips to visit with mystery-loving relatives! Anyway, I think I'm satisfied with this chapter. I also have Chapter Two well on its way, although it's going to have to wait until part of Chapter 3 is written before I can post it (have to write a heist BEFORE I write the riddle for it, for some reason I'm having trouble getting the Kid to listen to my instructions…darned fractious characters – sighs) In any case, I hope you enjoy this one, please pardon the rampant fluff, and don't worry, I will explain Aoko's dreams…eventually ^_~
Oh, and if I got anyone's name wrong or anything like that, please let me know
NO, I DON'T OWN IT! * sighs *
Moonlight Shadow
Chapter 1:
The Night Was Heavy and the Air Was Alive
The morning of May 24th finally arrived, and Aoko somehow managed to drag herself out of bed, blast herself to wakefulness (although not alertness) under the shower, throw on her school uniform, and grab her bag and a piece of toast before running out the door. She was slightly more alert when she met up with Kaito at their usual spot, but she still kept yawning. And faintly blushing. She still couldn't get the sensation of kissing him out of her mind. It had seemed so real, that dream...
'What's she blushing about?' Kaito wondered to himself as he hurried to school along with his childhood friend. Since he hadn't done anything (yet) to rile her up, he didn't know what could have caused it. He looked around, but all the other people on the street were busily heading off to start their own day and nobody else they knew was around to cause her to blush. He shrugged. He couldn't explain it. She looked almost like she was daydreaming or something.
"Hey, you looking forward to tonight?" he teased.
Aoko turned to glare at Kaito. "You think my father won't catch the Kid? Well, this time you're wrong, this time he said the riddle was really easy, and he knows just how he can stop that stupid thief. He's keeping it totally secret, he won't even tell me!" she smirked.
"I'm sure that's what Kaitou Kid wants him to think." Kaito grinned. It was such a shame Inspector Nakamori had decided to take him so literally on that whole "crown of roses" bit instead of figuratively. Such a good riddle, too! And well worth the work to write the whole thing in English:
"I'll tip my hat to old Mrs. B. on her special day, and as the stars come out, I'll crown her with roses for her enjoyment."
Short, too-the-point, and deceptively easy, since Hakuba had picked up on the first reference right off the bat, making everyone less wary of plays on words in the rest of the riddle.
Kaito shook his head. He was too keyed up to worry about Aoko being in a bit of a funk, he'd just bait her twice as much as usual once they got to school and pull her out of it like always.
School dragged. It always did on heist days, Kaito found, and today was dragging more than most. In an attempt to relieve both his boredom and his earlier concern, he tried to pull Aoko out of her strange mood... and tried...
First he tried the old standby, flipping her skirt. She shrieked, grabbed a mop, growled and swung. He dodged with a laugh, and she chased him around the classroom once before sitting back down with one last swing for good measure. Class began, though, and she slipped right back into pensiveness.
He waited almost a whole half hour before trying his next trick. For this one, he decided to try something a little more flashy. With a subtle shrug of his shoulders he dropped a small smoke bomb into his hand. He glanced around to make sure his path was clear, then flicked it into her desk. Kaito grinned as he mentally counted three seconds. Right as he reached zero, a thin line of smoke began to trickle out of her desk. It was almost unnoticed for a moment, since Aoko was studiously taking notes, but the smoke quickly thickened. One would think she would have learned some measure of calm by now, having lived so long around Kaito, but then, with Kaito you never knew if he might have, in fact, lit something on fire. She yelped and jumped out of her desk, then began pulling papers out. Her hand soon closed around the smooth ovoid of the smoke bomb. With a roar of outrage, she threw it at Kaito. He ducked it, and it hit Hakuba right between the eyes. Hakuba let out a most undignified shriek and lunged for Kaito, who burst into gales of laughter, allowing Aoko just enough time to give him a decent whack with the mop she had almost habitually grabbed before he started running. With many a flip and hop, he made it all the way around the classroom three times this round before Aoko was settled enough to return to her seat and let Iwasaki-sensei continue with her Literature lesson. Even after this most diverting episode, though, Aoko was quickly back to her musings.
Kaito sighed. He could tell that although she was quite willing to get goaded into chasing him around the class with a mop, and might have seemed normal to most of the other students, she was still distracted somewhat. Strangely, it worried him more than he might have expected it to. His Aoko shouldn't be this out-of-it, especially on a day when she had even said she was confident of her father finally catching the Kid! Not that that would ever actually happen, but still...
Aoko sighed. She just couldn't get those strange dreams out of her mind, and it was horribly disturbing. Why had she dreamed the Kaitou Kid was Kaito? What bizarre mental twist could come up with that one? There was no way it was true, of course; her father had been chasing the Kid for more than ten years now, and he was an adult then too... And she had known Kaito then, and he had been her age, far too young to be gallivanting around as some kind of master-thief! It was patently ridiculous... Unless there were more than one 1412 somehow. Aoko frowned and shook her head. She was letting her imagination run away with her again. Kaito was Kaito, Kid was Kid, and that was that! She glanced surreptitiously over at the object of her thoughts. He appeared to be studiously employed for the moment, taking notes on Hirata-sensei's lecture about the importance of the shinobi in later-Tokugawa-era government. Something about their use in humiliating political opponents. He glanced up and winked at her suddenly, and she immediately started scanning the room to see what he might have rigged, triggered, or otherwise caused to behave in a way it was not meant to.
And the day dragged on.
Nakamori Ginzo nervously checked his watch. Kid's riddle had specified the stars would be coming out when he took the Victoria Emerald, and if sunset was at eight thirty, then astronomical twilight should be around nine fifteen. It was ten after nine now, and the whole Kaitou 1412 taskforce was assembled in the display hall in the home of the British Consul to Japan. Getting them there had been a nightmare of paperwork, since, technically, they had no jurisdiction on "British soil", but with a lot of fast talking, and a pretty major favor or three called in from DCI Hakuba (which had involved phone calls made at an absolutely appalling hour of the morning), Nakamori had convinced the Consul that his precious jewel would be better protected by a force more familiar with the Kid's methods. From the riddle, Nakamori had deduced that the Kid would be making his exit through the mansion's ballroom, a lovely nineteenth-century creation featuring a frescoed ceiling depicting a rose arbor, and thus had placed most of the force in position to block that door. So now they waited, with that nervous anticipation which none of them ever completely lost in the face of Kid's off-the-wall antics, and hardly dared to breathe for fear they might not hear him coming.
As astronomical twilight finally fell, the infamous Kaitou Kid was sliding silently through the ducting in the mansion attached to the British Consulate. As he made yet another right-angle turn, he thanked whichever kami might be nearby that the system had been recently cleaned, and that he was both extremely flexible and not inclined to claustrophobia. He also sent out a little prayer of thanks to his father, wherever he was, for designing a costume out of silk and satin, which were much less likely to catch on things like the sharp edges of the insides of air-conditioning systems. Reaching his destination at last, he took careful note of the position of each of the police officers assigned to this particular room through the vent grille. When the one closest to the display case of his target turned to the man next to him, Kid made his move. Dropping to land lightly on top of the display case, he made a deep bow, briefly sweeping his top hat off to the side.
"Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen!" he announced in English, "And now, some roses for the greatest Queen England has ever known!"
With a wave of his hand and a sharp "crack" of an explosion, rose petals and rose-scented smoke drifted down from the ceiling onto the momentarily-stunned police force. They were only stunned very momentarily though, just long enough for him to grab the Victoria Emerald and run, laughing, over their shoulders and heads to the next display case.
"So nice to see you could make it, Inspector, I was a little worried they might not let you into the county!" he said politely as he did a handspring off the floor in between two completely flummoxed officers.
"It doesn't matter where you go, I'll always be there to catch you." Nakamori replied vehemently, adding in a few words not repeatable in polite company to describe his opponent.
Various officers made attempts to grab him as he dashed and dodged toward the stairs leading to the roof, but he slipped through their hands like a cat through tall grass, laughing as he went. Some of the officers, having realized his destination, had created a human barricade in front of those stairs. For a brief second he paused, as though to plan an alternative route, at which point a number of the police decided to try a nice traditional dogpile-on-the-bandit. With another wave of his hand, more explosions began around the floor, sending the rose petals back up into the air. Making a mad dash for the stairs while they were blinded, and laughing all the way, Kaitou Kid made his escape... from the room, at least.
Inspector Nakamori swore vociferously and tried to run for the staircase, but unfortunately, quite a few of the officers had that exact same idea, not to mention most of the "human barricade" were still there, and there was a major bottleneck of shoving, swearing bodies, all covered in pale pink rose petals.
As a delaying tactic, it worked pretty well. Well enough, since they hadn't been expecting him to make his escape in this direction, that Kid had a minute or two to himself up on the roof before he was noticed to check his haul. The Victoria Emerald was a beautiful stone, reasonably flawless for its size of four inches long, and the deep green colour only found in the finest of stones. It was not, however, the particular stone he was looking for. He sighed. It never was the Pandora, was it? A spotlight swept over him and back, then stilled, outlining his white-clad form, and he could hear pounding feet on the stairs behind him and the cheering of the crowds below. No time for long soliloquies then, time to get going. Just as the first officer burst through the door onto the roof he jumped off, deploying his hanglider and waving to the crowd.
"Thanks for the exercise!" he called back over his shoulder, "See you next time!"
He grinned to himself as he looked down at the throngs of his fans... and one not-fan. He could see Aoko down there, looking almost as furious as her father undoubtedly was, and even from up here he imagined he could see the fire in her eyes and the flush of her cheeks which had, for the past few years, been the main reason he had for teasing her. To see such passion in her, even if it was the only safe kind he could hope to inspire in her, was both pleasure and pain. He could never, of course, be with her in the way he truly wanted to, so he kept her at bay, and assuaged as much of his thirst for her as he could with the passion of her anger. After all, if she ever did learn the truth about the face behind the monocle she would hate him anyway. So he kept her close without seeming to, and watched over her, and in his mind, at least, she was his.
Aoko wanted to scream as she watched the Kaitou Kid soar overhead. Once again he had gotten away! Once again he had made the whole Kaitou 1412 taskforce look completely ineffectual! Once again he had made her father look like a fool! How many more times was this going to have to happen? How many more days and nights feeling like an orphan at home alone while her father worked late, or even through the night? How long until it was all finally over? She didn't know, unfortunately. Suddenly exhausted, she started trudging home. Even the prospect of more strange dreams like that one last night seemed welcoming, since dreaming would mean she was in her bed, asleep.
Blocks away from the consulate now, Kaitou Kid landed his glider on a low roof and quickly stowed it away, then pulled out his backpack with his street clothes from its hiding place in the back of the fan service shed and changed. With a yawn he carefully folded and rolled up his alternate persona and packed it away. He had learned early on that silk wrinkled most alarmingly when shoved into a backpack in a hurry, and once it was wrinkled, it took an awful lot of ironing to get his tux, not to mention the cape, back to the pristine crispness Kid expected of it. Kaito was less than fond of ironing, although he did do a fair bit of it anyway. After all, it wasn't like he could just throw his "evening apparel" in with the rest of the clean laundry for his mother to iron! That would raise a few more questions than he felt quite ready to answer. Although he was sure his mother had her suspicions, she was far from unintelligent, after all, he wasn't yet comfortable beginning that particular conversation and all its possible ramifications. He still held out a vain hope that he might be able to deal with things and end Kid's career before it became an issue. Maybe then he could be all he wanted to be for Aoko. He heaved a deep sigh. He just couldn't seem to get her off his mind tonight. Maybe he'd better check in on her before he headed to his own bed. Hefting his pack higher on his shoulders he started down from the roof, heading off on the familiar path to her house.
When she reached home, Aoko barely paused to check whether the answering machine light was blinking, which it wasn't, before heading for her room and shucking her school uniform in favor of a light nightgown. She was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow, and dreaming not long after.
This time the dream started at school. It was late at night, but somehow she and Kaito were sitting in their closed-up classroom.
"We all have our reasons, you know." he was saying, "I just... All I really wanted was my father back, but since that was impossible, I decided to expose his killers and bring them to justice. Maybe it wasn't the smartest course to take, but it's the one I chose, and, truthfully, once I knew what had really happened I didn't have much other choice, you know. My only regret is that you've been pulled into this. I never wanted you in the line of fire."
"So you would have continued to keep the truth from me? To blithely go along with my efforts to prove you innocent? All the while laughing at my ignorance behind my back?" she railed at him, "I was 'in the line of fire' as you put it, in any case. You didn't think I wouldn't be hurt just as much if I found out when it was all over?"
"But you'd be alive. I didn't mind so much that you would hate me, so long as I knew you would be hating me alive and in one piece." His voice cracked slightly with some emotion she couldn't identify, although it sounded like pain and guilt.
It was that pain, and the sentiment it expressed, that decided her. She reached over to lay one of her hands over his where they were nervously clenched in his lap.
"I would never hate you, Kaito. I'm more than a bit hurt that you didn't feel you could confide in me, but I don't hate you." she reassured him.
He looked at her hand on top of his, then looked up and met her gaze...
And she was falling again. Falling toward him, and he was falling below her, only he was wearing the Kaitou Kid outfit again, and bleeding from the gunshot wounds she had seen inflicted in her dream the night before. He held the edges of his cape in his hands to catch the wind and slow his descent, allowing her to catch up with him. He caught her midair and held her tightly.
"I'm sorry, I never meant for you to take the fall with me." he said with a shaky grin. His face was almost as pale as the outfit he wore.
"Better we're together." she said, "I couldn't stand to be without you."
"Not long now." he whispered.
"Kaito..."
"Shh..." he silenced her with a kiss.
She closed her eyes and the sensation of falling was gone, although she was still being kissed. She could feel that she was sitting on the couch at Kaito's house, the fabric of its cushions as familiar as her own.
"Don't worry, Ao-chan," she heard Kaito say gently, "everything'll be fine, I promise."
On a convenient tree near Aoko's window, Kaito hid his pack, then proceeded to her roof. From there it was child's play to lower himself enough to peer in her window, which was even open a crack in the heat. He could tell almost immediately that she was not sleeping peacefully. She was tossing and turning, and making small whimpering sounds as unconscious tears leaked from her eyes.
"Kaito..." she murmured with a sad tremor in her voice.
Almost before he knew it he was through the window and inside her room. Hoping fervently that she wouldn't wake up, he knelt beside her bed.
"Don't worry Ao-chan, everything'll be fine, I promise." he whispered, gently brushing her sweat-dampened bangs from her forehead.
"Mmm... Kaito..." she mumbled happily as she seemed to calm from her nightmare. She reached out one hand, blindly groping toward him, but he was out the window again in a flash.
Perched up on the peak of her roof, Kaito laid back and waited for his heart to slow down.
"What was that all about?" he wondered out loud, "Why would she be calling out for me in her sleep?" He took a deep breath and gazed up at the stars. He knew he couldn't stay there all night, and yet, there was a part of him that wanted to, that said he should stay nearby in case she needed him... but he knew better. His presence, welcome though it seemed at the moment, would be questioned once morning came, and Aoko would be less-than-pleased to see his face hovering over her when she woke up. Besides, he'd had a busy last few days, and he needed his sleep in his own bed. He decided to take one last look into her room before he left, just to reassure himself she was still sleeping peacefully. He lowered himself carefully over the edge of the roof again, and smiled at the sight that met his eyes. Aoko was now curled up on her side hugging her pillow, her hair fanned over her pillow, and appeared to be fast asleep. In the pale moonlight, it almost looked like she was glowing.
Well, I hope you all liked that little bit of nothing, and I hope it wasn't too angsty and fluffy. Prises to anyone who got the references in the riddle, and if anyone knows Hakuba's father's actual rank let me know, I just assigned him one arbitrarily from what I could remember of Scotland Yard ranking (from watching way too many Brit crime dramas)
Hopefully I should have Chapter Two out sometime soon. You all should like it, since the mystery of Aoko's interrupted sleep is explained, mostly…and the thief and the inspector unexpectedly find they have some common ground…and common enemies!
