For a time, the world was a black void, warm and full of static. It was the kind of deep, cavernous sleep he'd had only a few times in his life, when reality fell out underneath him and swallowed everything. All his troubles, all his doubts, all his thoughts. The kind of sleep where you forget existence entirely.
Then, the bliss evaporated in a puff of burnt coffee and the jarring sounds of dubbed Spanish telenovelas. In the span of two seconds, four days worth of trauma pierced his brain with the speed of a bullet and the precision of a back-alley lobotomy. Everything came flooding back; lying in the gutter, the burn and break of bones, the panic in the rain. Found by Ran, cradled tight, raincoat stretched over him as his ruined clothes stained her sweater. Unanswered questions and silent glances over meals. A full-blown meltdown in the streets, fleeing from figments.
"You alive or dead, kid?"
When he opened his eyes, Kogoro was in his usual spot of glaring down at him from on high. A mug of black coffee steamed in his hands, the vapors mixing with the smoke that wreathed the office.
Out of instinct or hope, Shinichi held up his hands for the coffee.
"You out of your mind? Like you need any caffeine after that stunt you pulled. You're lucky to get juice." He took a large sip of it, because he's a jackass, but he probably burnt his tongue so it all evened out. "Besides, Ran would skin me alive." Having performed his obligatory wellness check, Kogoro stomped back over to his desk and walled himself off with a newspaper.
Even without caffeine to grease the wheels, Shinichi's mind slowly rebooted. He was lying on one of the couches in the downstairs office, tightly wrapped in an old, faded blanket. Someone had placed his glasses on the coffee table. When he sat up to retrieve them, he felt an oncoming head-rush, bruises of violet color welling up behind his eyes. He fumbled for the glasses through the light show and settled their too-large frames on his face before laying back down.
He lost control today. Out in the gray city, where buildings and people stretched forever upwards, where eyes passed over him without thought, he saw something that wasn't real, a borrowed shape cloaked in nightmare. Up to this point, he believed the one thing he had been left with after limping away from that alleyway was his mind. He answered to a different name, wore borrowed clothes, and slept on the floor of an alcoholic, but at least he had his wits. A flash of black leather and blonde hair and he's suddenly lost all sense of self-preservation, throwing himself into morning traffic.
Kogoro cleared his throat once, twice. The newspaper crinkled as he flipped the pages. The woman on the TV believed her husband was having another affair, her voice not matching her lips.
"Where's Ran?" Shinichi asked.
"She left."
"What?!" He sat up too suddenly and the head-rush returned, spilling colors across his vision.
The newspaper bent backwards and Kogoro stared over the crease. "To go to the store."
"Oh." A strange feeling welled up and sputtered out within him. He laid back down and pulled the blanket tight even though the geriatric heater was running today. He could hear it snarl and groan through the vents, breathing out warm, musty air. Ran must have won the daily argument of "frostbitten toes versus empty bank account." She had a way to coax the ancient machine to life while Kogoro lamented the loss of gambling and nicotine funds.
"She was going to get groceries on the way back," said Kogoro. "That didn't happen."
"I'm sorry."
"Are you now." It wasn't phrased like a question.
The office swam around him as he shook off the vestiges of sleep. He turned his head to the side, resting on his cheek as his memory attached meaning to shapes. The lights were turned off and the shades drawn low, holding back the late afternoon; either for his benefit or to soothe Kogoro's potential hangover. Strips of sunshine splashed against the the wall and motes of dust fell from the vents, bursting into golden flame when they touched daylight.
He had only been down here a handful of times, none of them unsupervised. In some ways, it was a living diorama of a hidden war, of father and daughter battling for territory. Newspapers and magazines were lined up with geometric precision, but every pocket of order and cleanliness was ringed by empty cans and cigarette debris. The scent of industrial-strength cleansers clashed with smoke and unwashed clothing. Ran's relentless determination to make her father somewhat presentable met its match in Kogoro's vice and utter disinterest.
A fault-line of fresh plaster spiderwebbed across a wall. Someone had driven their fist through it, and he honestly didn't know who was the more likely culprit; Kogoro or Ran.
Car horns blared below in late afternoon traffic. The woman on the TV confronted her husband with a crescendo of Spanish guitars.
There had been very few quiet moments in the Mouri household and he was the fulcrum of most them. They would ask questions and he would stay silent or fill the gaps in the empty air with nonsense. The nights were quiet only on occasion, his sleep cut to ribbons by nightmares. While he may have brought justice to many victims of murder, their ghosts haunted him all the same nowadays. The skeletons in his closet had picked the lock and found their way out.
"What happened out there, kid?" Kogoro's voice was distant and mumbled into a cigarette.
He had been shaking like a leaf and didn't realize it. He turned to face the inside of the couch and counted the repaired seams in the fabric.
"This silent act is real cute, you know that?" said Kogoro. "You may have Ran wrapped around your finger but I've seen your type before."
You've seen nothing like me.
"I barely know Ran." Shinichi's voice was smothered by couch cushions. "I barely know you."
"And we know nothing about you, and it's not for lack of trying, sunshine." A chair screeched against the ground and Shinichi heard a giant's footfalls approaching.
This is the moment.
He had finally exceeded the patience of Mouri Kogoro. He could almost taste the sidewalk, the mix of cold air and exhaust fumes.
The footfalls moved past him. A door creaked open, and a mix of shuffling cardboard and distant, murmuring curses breathed out from it. He jumped out of his skin when something impacted the coffee table with a sound like a diluted frag grenade. Scattered pieces of plastic shrapnel impaled the back of his head. He reached a hand back without looking and studied its shape with his fingertips.
"A puzzle?" He held the jagged piece in his hand, deep green and faded with fingerprints. Either this was a convoluted torture mechanism he couldn't see the other end of, or a distraction. Ran had tried the latter the first night, dragging out old toys from a dusty sarcophagus buried deep in her closet. He pantomimed interest but it was a poor performance and Ran saw through it. Don't worry, we'll find something you'll like. I promise.
If it was a play at distraction, it was a two-player game. Kogoro sighed explosively, collapsing onto the couch with a symphony of popping joints. He hunched over the table, squinting at pieces while pushing them around with his finger.
"You expect me to do this by myself?"
The sheer improbability of this scenario jammed the gears in Shinichi's head, but his hands moved mechanically, responding to years of dopamine conditioning. Shinichi liked puzzles in both childhoods.
"Sort out the edges first, brat."
"I know how to do a puzzle."
"Congratu-fucking-lations, I now know a single thing about you." His tone was steel wool but there was something like mirth clinging to the edges.
Within minutes, they had built a framework, some nameless wilderness or discount national park. The packaging was little help in their efforts, torn to pieces by a preschool Ran. Shinichi's tiny fingers flicked away fields of blue sky as he searched for fragments of tree lines. The telenovela reached its climax, beginning with the couple physically fighting and then ending with passionate kissing. The credits rolled to a medley of latin tunes. Kogoro grabbed the remote without looking and flicked it over to a crime drama.
"This used to help calm Ran down when she threw herself on the floor screaming." Kogoro was falling behind, his jumble of gray stone pieces not quite becoming a mountain.
"I didn't do that."
"You sure as shit came close, or worse."
"I'm fine now."
"Bullshit you are. You forget that little show you pulled out on the street already? Or did that fall knock some sense loose from your head?"
It's amazing that Ran turned out the way she did if this was how her father spoke to children.
"It won't happen again."
"Uh-huh. Sure it won't. Pardon me for wanting to make sure I don't have a ticking time bomb sharing a room with me. And would it kill you to lengthen your sentences a bit? You didn't shut up when that rich asshole's daughter was kidnapped, but now you can't speak words more than one syllable? Flex some of that first-grade vocabulary, would ya?"
Shinichi had the makings of a sunset in his hands, gold fading to purple and then black.
Kogoro steamrolled on as he tried to jam two pieces that clearly didn't fit together. "I'll ask again, because I'm great and patient and all that jazz. What happened today? Any minute now I'm gonna get a call from the inspector and he's gonna tell me that a young, handsome private eye and his daughter were seen abducting a small child off the street in broad daylight. What do I tell him?"
"You could tell him that's what Ran did four nights ago?" The words came out dry and bloodless from a place he couldn't name.
The fist's impact against the table rattled through Shinichi's elbows into his teeth. The puzzle took flight for half a second. Kogoro opened his mouth once, twice, then snarled and took a long, lung-popping drag from his cigarette before drowning it in an overfilled ash tray. Over the span of a full half-minute, he massaged his face with his hands. The heat faded from him like the glow from the ashes.
"Someone messed you up bad, kid, didn't they?"
Kogoro's words found doors inside Shinichi that he clearly wanted to stay closed. He tore his attention into two halves, one focused on matching the tree line to the skeletal husk of Kogoro's mountain peak, while the other half-listened to the crime drama in the background. He sutured wood to stone while a man screeched his innocence at his sister's murder.
"You're scared. I get it." Kogoro's voice was quiet dust. Shinichi fumbled a piece the color of jade and lost it amongst the piles. "You seem to like facts, so let's speak a common language. There are no missing children with your name in the area. We're still making turns in the other precincts, but nothing's coming up. So either your name is fake or your parents aren't looking for you."
Both statements were true. One had been true for much longer than the other.
"Edogawa Conan is my name."
"Sure. Let's go with that for now." Kogoro had abandoned the puzzle completely. "You said something the other day to Ran, about not speaking with your parents for some time. That true?"
Shinichi felt the reflexive need to wall himself off again. He returned to the jigsaw sunset, untangling fragments of purple night. He could almost connect it to the outer frame.
"This little act of yours is starting to get on my nerves. There's a pattern to abuse and you don't fit it. You got the bruises and the trigger reflexes, but normal kids slip up and say something. Now you," He jabbed his finger at Shinichi. "You've said almost nothing since you got here. You're editing your story. You're trying so hard to not give up anything that you're lighting signal flares without even realizing it."
At this point, lying was taking too much energy. "I haven't spoken with my parents for a long time."
"So they abandoned you."
Something sharp and red throbbed in Shinichi's chest and all sensations were suddenly too much. Acrid smoke crawled into his nostrils, and the strips of sunlight on the walls burned bright and hot. His eyelids fluttered and he began coughing. It was a miserable sound.
Kogoro noticed the change but kept up the pressure. "This isn't an interrogation, kid. It's a conversation."
"Then why did you wait until Ran was gone?" He couldn't get enough air. Kogoro got up and clattered the shades aside as he tried to open a window, mumbling about the wasted heat. A cool wind circumnavigated in the room, sucking out the smoke and vent dust.
Kogoro sighed and headed back to his desk. "If you're gonna be a drama queen about it, we're done for today. Go upstairs and wash up before dinner."
"I'm sorry."
Kogoro craned his neck back, watching with hooded eyes.
"I'm sorry." Something cracked inside of him. The dam had been broken but what was pouring out wasn't what either of them expected. "I didn't mean that about Ran. Or you. About abducting me. I know the difference. I just-" He felt the same as he did on the street; a panic, nerves soaked in lye, the red-lining of his autonomics. A loss of control. But this tasted different.
Guilt.
"I haven't been fair," said Shinichi. "I don't want to be here but…" He trailed off, the statement floundering for an ending he couldn't fish up. Ran scooped him from the gutter and her father gave him a roof, some meals, and a place to sleep. Things could have been so much worse.
I want to go home.
He was angry. Beneath the exhaustion and confusion and bone-deep survival instinct was a white-flamed anger that everything, everything had been taken away from him. Only now did he realize that he had no control of that flame and it was burning the very bridges he was hanging from. He was angry with Kogoro. He was even angry with Ran. Every kindness they gave revealed more of what he had lost.
The breeze from the window made ghostly patterns of the smoke. His eyes stung. Kogoro leaned down on one knee, his voice quiet.
"What happened to you, kid?"
Shinichi drew the old blanket around himself. There was a tag on it that said Ran in lopsided letters. "I can't tell you right now." He expected screaming. He expected being cursed out. Instead, the man rose to standing.
"You're ten-thousand red flags wearing the skin of a small boy, you know that?" His voice was tired and gutted.
"I know it doesn't make sense-"
"The only thing that's made sense this last week is you having a nuclear meltdown in the middle of the street. That tracks with everything. That's in the handbook. The rest of what you're serving up, I can't make heads or tails of. The way you talk, the way you move."
That line of questioning was going to places he definitely couldn't give answers for so Shinichi switched railways.
"You could have kicked me out as soon as Ran brought me back with her. You didn't." His eyes watched the carpet because it was too much to look elsewhere. "Thank you."
"City's full of strays and the system here is kept together with tape, rubber bands, and too little charity money. I'm doing you a favor. You want to leave? Door's right there."
"Ran locks it at night."
"See, you wouldn't know that if you hadn't tried to leave."
"I was just testing it."
"You failed. And before this little pow-wow ends and you go back to acting like a prisoner of war who refuses to give up state secrets, just do one more thing for me. Something for Ran and I as we give you the infinite kindness of letting you live here and take food from our mouths.
"Let your guard down a little. Say something every once in a while. Doesn't need to be about your past, but stop acting like a damn ghost haunting the apartment. You're worrying Ran and annoying me."
Shinichi correctly assumed that staying silent now was the wrong move. "Okay," he replied.
"Now, go and wash up before Ran gets home. She gets wind that I was smoking around you, she'll be shoving my head into the oven tonight. Get."
The cold breeze and the heater battled for supremacy. Shinichi decided to take the blanket with him. As his feet made contact with the floor, a hand settled on his shoulder. It was astonishingly gentle and reminded him of Ran.
"Was it him?"
"What?"
"Whoever you saw on the street? Was it him? The one who did this to you?" The words were detached and clinical, pulled from life experiences that didn't involve booze or TV.
"…No. It wasn't him."
"Good. Now vacate."
Shinichi made it three steps to the door before turning back.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"I've opened Pandora's fucking box now by giving you permission to speak, haven't I?"
In years past, Shinichi questioned others with the authority of an investigator, dressed in suit and tie. Now, he was barefoot on a dirty carpet, drowning in a sweatshirt while clinging to a borrowed blanket. "You said the city was full of strays." The blanket twisted under his fingers. "So why me?"
Kogoro heaved his feet onto his desk and tilted his head back to catch the fresh air from the window. His eyes were closed. "Because you're the stray my daughter brought home."