Disclaimer: I do not own Detective Conan/Case Closed.

Pairing: KaitoxShinichi

Chapter Rating: T

Warning: None

Collection Summary: No matter where or what they are, their lives are always entwined. KaiShin stories in fantasy settings.

Chapter Summary: Shinichi has never had a birthday quite like this one. He's pretty sure that a certain guardian spirit is responsible. The problem is that, at the rate things are going, some other people might start making the connection too.


Of Spring Flowers and Showers: Daytime

[Spirit Verse]

Shinichi woke that morning to the sound of a chorus of birds singing outside his window. Technically speaking, there should not have been anything at all strange or remarkable about this. His home was on the outskirts of Beika, a village which itself had always been very entwined with the natural world, and the renowned Clover Forest was only a leisurely walk away. Besides, there were trees outside his house and at least one family of birds who returned to roost there every year.

The bird song this morning, however, was different for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that there were at least a hundred birds singing at the same time. Together and in sweet, chirruping harmony. Stranger still, if you listened closely, you could begin to pick out a very familiar tune, albeit being presented in a vastly more complex form than was typical.

As it was, Shinichi lay in bed that morning staring up at his ceiling and listening in mixed wonder and fond exasperation to a hundred wild birds singing a vastly advanced version of the happy birthday song to him from right outside his bedroom window. He wondered how long it had taken Kaito to round up all these birds and train them to sing the birthday song and whether this was really a productive way for a forest guardian to be spending his time. After all, these were real, everyday birds from the forest, not illusions or spirit animals. Kaito would have had to track down and talk each of them into participating in his plan and going through training and rehearsals before it all culminated in this morning's admittedly incredible recital.

It was a good ten minutes before the birds finished singing. Once they had, they chirped a few congratulations of their own (or at least they sounded like congratulations to Shinichi. He couldn't speak bird, although Kaito had told him that he would eventually learn), shook out their wings, and flew away in a storm of colorful feathers.

Shinichi was left once again a the clear, blissful tranquility of the early morning. Only this time the birds had reminded him.

He was turning twenty today. That also meant today was his second anniversary with Kuroba Kaito, the spirit guardian of Clover Forest. Anniversary of what though, well, Shinichi would say it was the anniversary of their first official, face to face meeting (because, strictly speaking, he hadn't actually agreed to a proper relationship until a little after that when he'd stopped trying to convince himself that the encounter had been a figment of his imagination). But he suspected that Kaito would call it the anniversary of their engagement. The thought made Shinichi blush, and he rolled over to bury his face in his pillow.

He was close to drifting off to sleep again when there was a series of loud knocks at his door. He considered ignoring it, but a peek at the clock told him that he would have to get up soon to go to his job at the bookstore anyway. A bout of renewed knocking solidified his decision, and he sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bed. Covering a yawn, he shuffled to the closet for a change of clothes.

The knocking came again.

"I'm coming!" he yelled in the direction of the door. Honestly, some people had no patience. Hastily, he stripped out of his pajamas and put on his day clothes. Then he headed for the door and opened it just in time to see Suzuki Sonoko raising her fist to begin pounding on the door again. Somehow, he wasn't surprised. Mouri Ran, who was standing behind her petit friend, gave him an apologetic look, silently conveying that yes, she had tried to tell her impatient friend to, well, be a bit more patient.

"It's about time," Sonoko exclaimed before he could say anything. "We've been standing here all day!"

"It's barely morning," Shinichi replied dryly. "So I fail to see how you could have been standing here anywhere near that long."

Sonoko wrinkled her nose, but Ran cut in before she could say anything. "We came to see if you wanted to have breakfast with us."

"All right. Just give me a moment to get changed." Leaving the door open so that the girls could decide for themselves whether they wanted to come in or not, Shinichi retreated to his bedroom and threw on the first set of clean clothes he grabbed. Then he ran a comb through his hair, glad that his hair had always been naturally neat but for that rebellious little cowlick that nothing could make lie flat, and headed back out to find Ran and Sonoko watching the trees around his house with curiously befuddled expressions.

"Hey, are there always this many birds in your trees?" Sonoko asked, gesturing at the colorful assortment of feathered bodies climbing about amidst the leaves, chirping greetings to one another and all around socializing like people at a party. Apparently half the chorus had stayed behind for some gossip. "I mean whoa, that's a lot of birds."

"And I thought I heard them all singing together when we were walking over," Ran put in, though she sounded more nervous than amazed. "I thought it was my imagination because it kind of sounded like they were actually coordinating and everything. But, well… Did you hear them, Shinichi?"

"I did," he said because it was the truth before he hastily changed the subject. "So where did you want to have breakfast?"

Ran gave him a look that suggested she had noticed his hasty changing of subjects, but she made no comment, and Sonoko was already herding them away from his door and towards the heart of the village.

They ended up dining at the Beika Village Inn, which, though small and not very prosperous on the inn front, boasted the best chef in the village. It was his cooking that pretty much singlehandedly kept the inn in business seeing as the village saw travelers only once or twice a month. That amazing chef's name was Hattori Heiji, and he and his wife Kazuha had only moved to Beika a year ago from a larger, more prosperous town west of Beika.

Beika being the small settlement it was, Shinichi, Ran, and Sonoko had all gotten to know the couple quite well since they had arrived. Ran and Kazuha had been fast friends ever since Ran had offered to show the new girl around the village in the first week of her arrival. Since then, Ran often offered her help in the inn's kitchen whenever they were particularly busy. Shinichi himself had discovered by chance when Heiji had come into the bookstore where he worked in search of mystery novels that they shared literary interests. It wasn't often that Shinichi met someone who liked mysteries as much as he did.

In fact, that first day they had really talked to each other in the bookstore, they had been so caught up in their discussion of the various mysteries they had read that Shinichi had been nearly an hour late to his meeting with Kaito. Understandably, his beau had taken an instant dislike to the village's new resident. Worried that the rather possessive spirit might do something unpleasant to Heiji, Shinichi had remedied the situation by bringing Kaito some of the inn's scrumptious deluxe brownies.

Said brownies now made a regular appearance in the baskets of assorted foods Shinichi regularly brought into the forest with him, and Heiji was under the misconception that Shinichi was a huge chocolate fanatic. Shinichi let him keep this delusion because it was easier than explaining that all the chocolate treats he bought were for a certain spirit who had developed a taste for the sweet which, sadly, could not be made from any plant native to Clover Forest.

With that thought in mind, Shinichi asked Hattori for an order of brownies to-go as he did every time he dined at the inn. Today, however, Heiji shook his head.

"Got a new creation here you get ta try out for me instead," Heiji declared, setting an enormous pastry box down on the table next to Shinichi. "It's a triple layer chocolate and coffee cream cake. On the house."

"You can't just give me this," Shinichi protested. "It's way too big to be a free sample."

"It would be if it was just for you," Hattori agreed with a broad grin. "Share it around. You're gonna help me get some second opinions. Aim for, let's see, twenty at the least. And make sure you tell 'em where they can find more. How about it?"

"You mean you're making us deliver sample cakes for you?" Sonoko asked, looking most unimpressed. "Forget on the house. You should be paying us."

"That's why you get the first slices."

So it was that Hattori cut three large slices out of his new cake and passed them around, grin broadening at every expression of delighted surprise that appeared on his friends' faces when they tasted the cake. Clearly, this one was going to be a winner.

"I'll share some with the people at the store," Shinichi promised. "I'm sure everyone's going to love it."

Was it just him or had the girls and Heiji traded a conspiratorial look just now?

"Well, I guess we should be going," Ran said, glancing at the clock on the inn's common room wall. "Shinichi's shift starts soon."

Heiji nodded. "Right, well, have a good day then. I'll probably see you later."

So Heiji was giving him a rather oversized cake, and the girls were concerned with when his shift at the bookstore was supposed to start. Then there was that conspiratorial look.

Thanks to Kaito's birds and their early morning performance, Shinichi strongly suspected that he knew what was coming. For a fleeting moment, he considered calling his friends out on it, but he reconsidered. After all, there was no point ruining their fun.

Upon stepping out of the inn, Shinichi, Ran, and even Sonoko all had to stop and gawk in unanimous surprise as a stream of small, furry shapes bounded down from the surrounding rooftops. They were squirrels, all three humans realized at almost exactly the same time, but they weren't behaving like any squirrel any of them had ever seen. Squirrels were well known for running off with fruits and nuts, but these squirrels were carrying roses.

One after the next, the squirrels ran up to Shinichi, dropped a rose at his feet, then darted off again just as fast as it had come. Twenty times the bizarre spectacle repeated itself until there was an entire bouquet of twenty red roses lined up on the ground before Shinichi's feet.

Sonoko's mouth was hanging open.

Shinichi realized that his was too and snapped it shut with an almost audible click.

Ran stared from the flowers to Shinichi then back to the flowers before turning to stare off in the direction in which the stampede of squirrels had run. "Did…that really just happen?"

"It must have if we all saw it," Sonoko said a bit dubiously. "I mean, you guys did see a bunch of squirrels deliver these roses just now too, right?"

"That is what I think I saw," Ran said slowly before her gaze turned to Shinichi.

He nodded and tried to look confused instead of exasperated. "They do say that the animals around Clover Forest can be a bit…unusual."

Sonoko crouched down and picked up a rose. She held it up to the sunlight, studying it carefully. "That might be true, but I've never heard of any Clover Forest squirrels bringing people flowers. And look, these roses don't have thorns."

"Maybe the squirrels grabbed them from the flower shop and just happened to drop them here," Ran suggested, though she didn't sound like she believed the explanation was that simple.

"That's not what I meant," Sonoko said, waving the rose at the other girl. "These roses look like they never had thorns. Like they just grew without them."

Ran picked up one rose then another for a closer look. "You're right." She frowned. "Maybe they're not roses, just some kind of flower that looks similar. I mean, it's not like someone can just make a rose grow without thorns…" She trailed off.

The girls traded wide-eyed glances before both their gazes turned in the direction of Clover Forest.

"No way, that doesn't make any sense," Sonoko said. "Why would the guardian be sending roses to anyone, let alone this bookworm? Even if he does somehow know it's Shinichi's b—" She cut herself off as she realized what she was about to say.

Pretending he hadn't heard any of their conversation, Shinichi bent to gather the rest of the roses. "It doesn't matter. Come on, I need to get to the bookstore."

The girls trailed after him, Ran mouthing the word 'twenty' to herself and shaking her head.

"Someone in the village must be learning to train animals," Sonoko muttered. "That's got to be it."

Preoccupied by the peculiar behavior of the squirrels, neither girl paid much attention to their surroundings as they made their way towards Beika Village's only bookstore. Shinichi was very grateful for this because he had just noticed that the flowerbeds before the Hattori Inn were in bloom. This by itself would not have been strange though. No. What was odd was how all the blooming flowers were arranged so that they spelled out the words "Happy Birthday!"

Once he had seen the words though, more blossoms bloomed right there before his eyes, filling in the gaps between the letters until they had all but been erased. He had no idea how he would have explained that to the girls if they had seen it. They might believe someone was training squirrels, but no human could train plants.

As they continued through the village, Shinichi saw more such similar sights in other flowerbeds. He counted at least a dozen different renditions of the number "20" by the time they reached the bookstore. These did not disappear—or at least not while he was watching them, but, hopefully, no one would connect them to him. Seriously though, he thought with fond exasperation, what was Kaito thinking? What if someone noticed?

On the other hand, Shinichi mused, would it really matter if someone noticed? Most of the village believed in the existence of the spirit guardian of Clover Forest, and everyone knew he spent a lot of time in said forest. Why couldn't the forest guardian wish him a happy birthday?

Now that he thought about it, the only person likely to react badly to the idea was Ran since she had never grown out of her irrational fear of spirits and ghosts.

Mulling over this new thought, Shinichi pushed open the bookstore door and did not have to pretend at all to jump in surprise as people jumped up all around the store and shouted, "Happy birthday!"

It wasn't until much later, with all the party guests finally departed for their own homes, that the topic of odd occurrences came up again. Shinichi was helping the bookstore owner, old Agasa, tidy up despite the man's protests that he didn't need to when his gaze fell on the glass vase full of naturally thorn-less roses sitting on the counter. The sight of them brought a smile to his lips.

Pausing on his way past, Agasa too looked at the blossoms and chuckled.

"We've had a lot of flowers in and around the village this year," he remarked. "I don't remember ever seeing so many blooming for so long in just one spring before. The guardian must be happy with us."

Shinichi laughed, feeling warm and giddy and impossibly, deeply content. "I'm sure you're right."

-0-

The sky had deepened to the gray blue shades of evening when Shinichi finally left the village behind and headed into the forest. Despite the deepening shadows, he moved without fear or hesitation.

He saw the pale shadow of a tall, young man dressed in white waiting beneath the shadows of the forest fringe long before he reached it. Shinichi's steps quickened at the sight, though he was careful not to jostle the picnic basket he was carrying too much. Then he was stepping under the trees' outstretched branches, and the man was taking the basket from his unresisting hand. Said basket vanished, sent off somewhere for when they would need it, and a pair of strong arms pulled Shinichi into a warm embrace. Shinichi returned the hug with just as much enthusiasm.

"Did you have a good day?" Kaito asked, pulling away just far enough so that he could smile down into Shinichi's face.

"Well," Shinichi said slowly. "It was certainly an interesting day."

"Is that so?" Chuckling, Kaito moved to drop a kiss on the tip of Shinichi's nose before releasing him and taking his hand. "You'll have to tell me all about it over dinner."


-End of Chapter-

Note: Stay tuned for the Nighttime companion piece.