CW: This chapter includes brief depiction of a panic attack.

Thanks, as always, to Ellen Brand, Waywren Truesong, Joisbishmyoga, Cherry, and Cloudy for beta work and cheer-reading.

Recovery (is not a straight line)

And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
~East Coker, V.24-25. T.S. Eliot.

When Kaito woke again, Saguru was already up and out of the room.

Suspicious; I'm usually the first one up because of MY nightmares.

He dragged himself out of bed, planning to hunt Saguru down to find out if the other teen had made it back to sleep at all. There hadn't even been the first hint of dawn when Kaito'd dropped off again, which didn't bode well. The only positive note was that the unexpected waking had interrupted Kaito's own brain from delving back into nightmares afterward.

When he made it downstairs, Riku was gone to school and his dad to work, but his mother promised Kaito breakfast when he was ready to eat. Saguru had apparently already had breakfast, helped with dishes, and left the house for a walk around the town.

Definitely suspicious.

It would keep, though, so Kaito started with what he could do for the moment: re-establish some modicum of physical activity regimen to rebuild the muscle mass he'd somehow lost. (If 'somehow' meant massive, repeated energy expenditure.) Hopefully the exertion increase would have positive trends on actually sleeping through the night.

...Okay, so the last part was definitely wishful thinking, but a guy could dream.

His shoes were by the front door. Pulling the first one onto his foot aggravated a blister on his heel he hadn't noticed yesterday. Why weren't his shoes broken in?

His breath caught, and Oh not good floated distantly through his mind, muffled like through cotton.

His shoes were new. The same shoes as his original pair, the older Hakuba had quietly made sure of that, but only a few weeks old.

He'd gotten his cards back but she'd still stolen his damn shoes and she'd laughed about that and a hundred other things in this life and Kurou's life and she was still out there back home—

His couldn't catch his breath and his head was full of gray static and his vision was blurry; all he could do was curl around his knees and wait until he could remember how to breathe properly again.

When he resurfaced some unknowable time span later, his chest hurt and his muscles ached.

Riku's mother was on the other side of the house still, talking—phone call, maybe—so she hadn't even known Kaito was sitting in her front entryway like an idiot.

:Like one who has been hurt,: Méraud murmured in his head. :Can you hear me now? You were not responding for some time.:

"...Yeah. You noticed?" His throat was scratchy, but at least it didn't actually hurt to talk. He just had to concentrate to force the words out.

:Not as soon as I might have. My attention was elsewhere as I thought you safe and with friends.:

"I am safe. Now my brain freaks out about the not-safe bits. It's normal."

:Hmm.:

Ignoring her skepticism, Kaito forced his limbs to move and get the other shoe on. A band-aid would be easy to find later, right now he just needed to get outside. Sun would help. Maybe the roof, the porch was low enough to grab and flip over and the tiles would be hot but not enough to burn this early in the morning—

"Kuroba?"

Kaito looked up. He hadn't processed the door opening because he'd been overfocused on tightening his laces in slow succession. Saguru stepped inside and crouched in the entry, concern visible in the purse of his mouth and the tightness around his eyes.

His gloves were off. That was easy to see because he was waving a hand in front of Kaito's face and talking. He must have said more already, because his tone didn't sound like the first time asking, "Did something happen? Are you all right?"

...Right, that was to me. Again.

"Never mind, the answer is obvious. Can you hear me, Kuroba? Nod if you can hear me."

Kaito's brain had apparently become molasses, but he could nod.

He nodded.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

"...If we go outside," Kaito managed. Riku's mom shouldn't overhear, and who needed tied laces if he wasn't going running? He couldn't trip at the speed of shuffle.

Probably.

"Outside it is, then." Saguru tied Kaito's shoes himself in a few deft movements, which Kaito wasn't sure if he was grateful for or annoyed by, then stood and offered a hand, waiting.

"No gloves." Kaito suspiciously eyed the top of Saguru's head, but the new angle was bad to see if the sunglasses were there. He wasn't going to repeat last night so soon.

Never would be best.

"My glasses are on, and you're too out of it to project anything past them. Come on."

Kaito reached up and let Saguru pull him to his feet. They didn't stop at the porch—Saguru'd probably heard the phone call too, then—but Saguru led the way across the road and the short path to the cliffs above the beach, where wood benches had been placed.

The combination of movement, daylight, and sea-salt tinged humidity was already helping; the mental fog was fading by the time Kaito dropped heavily onto the bench and tilted his face toward the sun. What it left behind wasn't much better, because he could talk without having to pull out each individual word but his brain-to-mouth filter wasn't back online and he was So. Damn. Tired of this.

"I just had a panic attack over my shoes," Kaito said with the distant tranquility that came from feeling emptied out and so far through incandescent rage it had become cold fury instead, as opposed to actually calm. "And unless Vermouth is dead or in the custody of someone unbribable within a week of us getting home, I think I'm going to do several violences or find a way to drop her into the Shadows."

Saguru digested the statement in silence, while Kaito watched the tiny white-caps on the waves below.

"I'd inquire as to how much of that statement is from Kurou-san's memories' influence as opposed to our other encounters, but I don't believe it matters except in how they're compounding."

"What?"

"You traditionally eschew violence, excluding bruises or property damage."

"Oh. ...Right." Kurou'd stewed for literal years; it was too easy to sink back into it when Kaito'd mirrored that impotent rage for the interminable hours before Saguru and the others had showed up to get him out of that damn building.

He breathed deeply, deliberately releasing the simmering anger into the ocean breeze on each exhale. Mom had taught him the trick back when Dad's memory summoned more anger than anything else, but it had been years since he'd had to put so much deliberation in the doing. And his verbal filters were still out of whack and he itched to fidget, cards or juggling or anything at all.

"My hindbrain processing the dreams just seems to have made it harder to separate what was memory upload and what's me," he admitted, leaning sideways to press his shoulder against Saguru's. This friendship was his, not Kurou's, and the reminder did help.

Saguru leaned back enough to be a silent acknowledgement. "More deliberate processing while awake might aid in keeping a proper delineation. I bought another notebook this morning, but you could use it instead—perhaps one page side for the contents of Kurou's memories, and the other for refutation from your own knowledge."

"You sound like a psychology journal, but that's not bad and at this point I'll try anything. How about you show me where you got yours and I can get my own? I've also got a long explanation for Aoko to draft and rewrite about three hundred times, so I should probably make an investment in two dedicated ones."

"I've spent a fair amount of time studying how the mind works, yes." Saguru's tone was neutral in a way Kaito didn't feel up to poking for the moment, so he let it go as Saguru continued, "As for Vermouth, I presumed we would approach Kudou-kun as soon as possible after our return home, and if necessary, you would locate her for his allies to obtain custody. Without risking your agency, health, or sanity to do so, for once, please."

Kaito considered his track record over the past month, and had to concede the point. "All right. This is the first time I'll have proper time to plot it, and you get veto power if I veer into the irrational. ...When I veer that way, honestly, I lost track of rational and Vermouth a while ago."

"Did you? I hadn't noticed," came Saguru's perfect deadpan, and Kaito dissolved into helpless snickers against Saguru's shoulder. If they went on a bit longer, or higher pitched, or slightly more hysterical than Kaito preferred, Saguru was kind enough not to comment.

When Kaito regained his equilibrium, he felt more settled and less like an exposed nerve in an electrical socket. Saguru seemed to notice the improvement, because he said gently as if no interruption had happened, "For the notebooks, the main shops are down by the docks, if you wish to walk that far right now."

"I meant to go on a run, but my lungs think I already did a marathon today. A walk should help reduce the feeling of wanting to vibrate out of my skin without pushing too far." Kaito reluctantly broke contact to stand and stretch. Saguru followed suit and seemed content to retrace his steps immediately, so they started walking before Kaito asked, "Did you manage currency conversion, or did you get some 'pirate treasure' yesterday?"

"The latter, when Sora-san had joined you back in the treehouse. Kairi-san and I finished our spar and talked for a while."

"She gave you some of their stash just for a notebook?"

"No, I…" Saguru sighed. "I thought it might be easier to obtain reading glasses with frames and a chain made from bronze here, rather than waiting until we returned home."

"Because of no past medical records to contradict?"

"And Baaya would insist on taking me to her optometrist, who might then insist on looking deeper if they thought I was downplaying more than a simple change in eyesight." Saguru shuddered despite the warm sun, so subtle Kaito wouldn't have seen if he weren't looking over at the right time. "I prefer to have more time before facing a medical examination of any stripe back home."

"I would too." Kaito bumped their shoulders carefully as they went, relieved to see some of the tension in Saguru's posture ease. He stayed close enough to let it happen naturally as they went down the hill toward the shops. "So did it work? Did you find something even in this small of a town?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact. You can critique my fashion sense on Friday."

"Sounds like fun." Kaito waited for Saguru to add anything more, then switched to the other lingering question. "...Did you get back to sleep last night?"

The pause was a hair too long; Kaito could practically feel Saguru weighing up his options to dissemble, deflect, or tell the truth. And he was still too damn tired for this.

"If you say anything but No," Kaito interrupted with false cheer when Saguru opened his mouth, "do you think at this point I'll actually believe you?"

Saguru huffed, more frustrated than sour at least. "No. Which was why I was going to say I hadn't, despite your tendency to worry about more than you ought to."

"Good, I'd hate to have to tell Riku we deserve to be yelled at again."

"Agreed. I… would prefer to not discuss the details, however. If that is acceptable to you?"

Kaito firmly squashed the instinct to keep pushing; Saguru'd given him that much for his nightmares, and the least he could do was return in kind. And try to not worry to such a degree that he justified why Saguru had been tempted to deny the trouble in the first place. Straight through memory to flashback had bad implications for if Saguru started going into detail.

"Yeah. I… yeah."

Because Saguru came from the kind of family that knew discount stores existed only in theory, he led Kaito to the bookstore, which had bound journals and notepads of the high quality Kaito only used when he was recording the complete ins and outs of a new magic trick. (The greatest magician in the world—or, well, notorious gentleman thief and international criminal if things went bad—was going to have posterity interested in his notes someday and they should look good.)

On the one hand Kaito was tempted to tease Saguru about the prices; on the other, several notebooks had professional looking covers except for titles like 'Plans for World Domination' and 'I Regret Nothing'.

"Tell me you bought one of these instead of your usual, these are amazing and yours are professional but boring."

Saguru cleared his throat. "I prefer the familiarity for myself, but I agree these are fitting." He picked up 'The Creative Ramblings of a Restless Mind' and offered it with an amused smile.

Kaito accepted it with a grin. "You know me well." After a brief internal debate between 'Analog Memory Backup' and 'Schemes', he picked up both and waved the latter at Saguru. "If you have enough leftover, I'm going to take class notes in this next term just to see Ms. Konno's face."

"Must you?" The amused smile hadn't disappeared, though.

"Yeah, it'll be great." Ms. Konno had an exquisitely expressive face that made benign classroom disruptions all the more hilarious, and being back in classes again actually sounded good for once. Kurou hadn't attended school once his identity had been stripped...

"I do have enough," Saguru interrupted Kaito's thoughts, and there was a look on his face that suggested he'd guessed the topic of them, but he didn't comment. "So, I suppose let's find out."

"If you write it down, it'll practically be science," Kaito said with deliberate humor as they went to pay.

"And if I don't, it will simply be you screwing around?" Saguru countered with a smirk.

Kaito grinned again at the confirmation that Saguru had enough familiarity with Mythbusters to recognize and reference the iconic line. "Don't you know? I'm always screwing around."

"I am, unfortunately, well aware of this."

"You get used to it. So, you gonna write it down for me?"

Saguru's put-upon sigh was probably only sixty percent genuine. "For science."

With the interlude at the bookshop, the walk back to Riku's house was more relaxed. Saguru was content to walk in silence the majority of the way, but as they approached the house he volunteered that he'd planned to practice with his staff down at the beach when he'd been distracted by Kaito's being in the entryway.

"You're welcome to join me, if you'd like to stay outside longer."

"I'm definitely sticking to outside," Kaito admitted without shame, "but these notebooks are nice enough I'll skip the sand. I should also have breakfast…"

"You didn't eat?" Saguru's brow furrowed in a way that was becoming far too familiar.

Kaito swung around to walk backwards up the sidewalk just to be sure Saguru had a perfect view of his unimpressed expression. "I was going running. It's not that late yet, you were just up ridiculously early."

Saguru smiled wryly. "All right, I'll grant you that."

In the end, Saguru headed back out to the beach on his own, slathered in sunscreen and with his gloves still tucked away. Kaito made a good effort at consuming half a horse's worth of calories, then settled on the front porch with the notebook titled 'Analog Memory Backup'—if he was going to make pointed commentary at his own brain it might as well be labeled with suitable humor.

He worked through the morning, methodically outlining Kurou-knowledge versus his own knowledge, with plenty of breaks to exercise when he got too antsy from thinking directly about topics better left in abstract. The porch roof had the perfect underside beam thickness for one-handed pull-ups, which were a better energy redirection than, say, punching the support pillars when a false memory recall was too upsetting.

After a few hours, Kaito had started wondering if Saguru had done the improbable and lost track of time before the other teen returned, impeccably punctual for lunch. He looked exhausted, but it was hard to tell if it was from exertion or the lack of sleep, and it didn't stop him from using his camera-interview-charm on Riku's mother during the mealtime small talk and helping clean up.

Kaito didn't call him out on the deliberate pleasantries because Kaito was falling back on similar showman's charm—they wanted Riku's parents to approve of his friends, after all. And Saguru at least had the sense to excuse himself for a nap after the food, so he wasn't pushing himself to a point of needing a fuss made over it.

So far.

The younger teens returned when Kaito was out on the porch again, this time with a book filched from Riku's bookcase. He'd run out of energy for physical distraction from the journal work, and he had enough sense left to not push his last dregs of mental fortitude past their limits by trying to do all of it in a day.

Méraud had approved, which weirdly helped.

Not that it wasn't still tempting to try, so Kaito'd opted for distractions, and Riku had offered his bookshelves for their entertainment during school hours. A world where plant-growing and spinning and metalwork could all be an expression of magical talent was an interesting one, especially when Kaito could applaud the unorthodox applications the protagonists pulled, like a drop spindle unraveling to disperse a waterspout.

(It didn't quite give him ideas of the sort that would make Saguru drop his head in his hands, but there was plenty of time for that to percolate.)

Saguru had wandered out to the other side of the porch as well by then, alternating between writing a long list of bullet points in his new notebook and gazing out at the ocean horizon with no movement at all. The silence was comfortably similar to when Kaito had accidentally fallen asleep during the beach trip back home, until the bright chatter of Sora, Kairi, and Riku arguing about what they would do for the rest of the afternoon drifted into earshot.

It turned out Riku's mother insisted on the following: a snack, everyone going outside again to get out the accumulated energy and stress of a day of test-taking—a game of round-robin catch with various throwable things was gentle enough on Riku's recovering injury—and then another two hours of intermittent studying, concluding when Riku's father returned home from work just in time for dinner. Sora and Kairi stayed for the meal and then conspired to get the trio on the couch cushions with Riku in the middle, and Saguru and Kaito lounging on the well-padded couch arms, just in time for the airing of a favorite TV show rerun.

Kaito hadn't been sure what to expect from the description of "four ex-criminals and an ex-insurance investigator stop criminals who can escape traditional justice", but the end result was Sheer Awesome.

No nightmares catapulted Kaito awake that night, which was a welcome reprieve even if the tradeoff was twitching awake through the ebb of every sleep cycle. Saguru seemed to be in a similar situation, but at least he didn't startle Kaito out of his sleep again either. Although the detective was out of the room already when Kaito gave up on sleeping in, it was admittedly at a much more reasonable time to be up. Investigating downstairs confirmed that Saguru had gone down to the beach again with his staff and promised to return for lunch.

Rather than follow when he wasn't sure he'd be welcome, Kaito finally made it out on a run—without another panic attack, thank you—and repeated his previous morning's workflow with the second blank notebook to outline his list of topics he owed Aoko an explanation for. It was a long list, and almost every single sub-point made him put the notebook down to work out the nervous energy summoned by his imagination working overtime on how Aoko might react.

(There were a LOT of reasons for her to hate him.

This was why he hadn't come clean before, dammit.

If she already knew, he was steadily making it worse.

….Damn it.)

He had, briefly, considered making a similar summary for Mom, but nipped that thought in the bud. She knew a decent amount about Riku and his situation already, and if nothing else, she deserved to never know what had happened to an alternate version of her son.

When he ran out of wherewithal for planning, he switched back to the book series he'd found the day before and soaked in the summer weather. Saguru spent the day alternating between vanishing altogether and settling in the chair across the porch with such a gravity of intent that a tsunami of Heartless would be hard-pressed to shift him. Kaito still felt made of too many sharp edges to try interacting beyond mutually quiet company, but despite radiating genteel determination, proximity seemed to be the limit of Saguru's comfort for the day as well.

Not quite a minefield, more like walking through a kitchen barefoot when someone else couldn't sweep up all the broken glass from a dropped bowl.

Luckily, before the quiet morphed into uncomfortable disquiet, the other trio returned and brought a relieved levity to the general atmosphere. The rest of the day played out similar to the previous one, complete with more episodes of the TV show Kaito now wanted to watch in its entirety.

"I need this in my life. I'm going to have to figure out how to get copies of these episodes for myself later; I'm invested." And the satisfaction of the success for each heist-con-game was addictive.

"Tokyo needs this to not be in your life," Saguru countered with a blandness that belied his lopsided smirk.

Riku's parents were safely out of earshot, so Kaito let himself grin with a hint of Kid's sharpness. "I need something to do for fun when I'm retired!"

Designing acts that could win the Grand Prix of the next FISM competition only went so far, considering the hard limit of a five to ten minute performance for either category. Though now that he knew he pulled on the Shadows for some of his impossibilities, building an act that deliberately avoided doing that would be a worthy challenge...

While the other teenagers snickered from their mutual dogpile on the couch cushions, Saguru focused into unseen distance. "I would respond to that, but it would only give you Ideas."

"I have plenty of ideas already, meitantei-san," Kaito deliberately purred.

"I'm certain you do," was the dry response. "Hence my terror at the thought of you having more."

"Don't worry—I'll find a way to get the box set and you can pay me back or something," Riku offered with a mischievous grin, and ducked Saguru's hand when it tried to flick the side of his head.

"It's a deal," Kaito declared, and then settled back to watch the opening hook of the next episode.

Sora and Kairi finally headed home after an accidental bank heist, a fashion show con, and a diamond counterfeiting—the last of which Kaito had ample fun providing critique on. The whirlwind of character banter and clever planning payoffs created a comforting blanket of normality that lingered through prepping for bed. Even Saguru seemed in a better mood as they said goodnight, and Kaito curled up under the blankets with a faint sense of equanimity.

Of course it couldn't last.

Endnote:Notebook titles were partially borrowed from mincingmockingbird, a dot com website. I have 0 affiliation with the shop, I just want half their notebooks.

When Kaito quoted Mythbusters, Saguru countered with XKCD. Kaito is also methodically plowing his way through Tamora Pierce's excellent novels, specifically The Circle of Magic quartet. The TV show he and Saguru are introduced to is Leverage, because everyone should have a chance to watch Leverage.

FISM is Le Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques, which runs the world championships of magic every 3 years. Contestants can perform an act for the various subcategories in Stage Magic or Close-up Magic. The winners of the individual subcategories are then judged for one Grand Prix winner each for the two categories.

Credit also to Joisbishmyoga for help with the banter around watching Leverage.

Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment!