The noncanonical for my Robokaitoverse ANGST fic. So yeah, warning that this is mostly hurt with very little comfort.
O*O*O*O*O
It starts with a stumble. Kaito is laughing and dodging Aoko's half-hearted jabs one moment and tripping over nothing the next, some part of him stuttering in a way he doesn't have words for. Aoko's fist lands lightly against his chest, most of the momentum pulled.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
It takes him a beat to respond, categorizing the odd feeling and coming up with nothing. Kaito shrugs. "Fine. Just tripped."
"On thin air?" Aoko asks, but she's already relaxing.
"Hey, I have my clumsy moments too," Kaito says. "What, think you have a monopoly on that?"
"Bakaito!" Aoko huffs, lifting a loose fist in mock threat.
Kaito laughs and skips away like the stumble never happened. He feels fine. He must have just misjudged where his feet were meant to go. (He hasn't misjudged something like that in months and months. He hasn't grown since becoming a robot at all.)
*o*o*
Kaito wakes up and feels his head in a haze, like he has a cold, but he can't get sick. When he opens his eyes he could swear that there's a delay between them opening and him seeing, but it doesn't happen when he blearily blinks at his bedside clock, so it slips from his mind.
He slept past his alarm, possibly through it. Kaito frowns at glowing numbers.
Ayato pokes his head around the door without bothering to knock. "Oh, you're awake. I thought you were going to sleep until school let out at this rate."
"I must have been tired," Kaito says. He stretches, feeling synthetic muscle and tendons move with perfect synchronicity.
"It's your own fault for staying up half the night all the time," Ayato says.
"You're up late almost as much as I am." Kaito's been on the phone to Hakuba enough times past midnight and found Ayato lurking in dark rooms to know this.
Ayato shrugs. "Kaa-san left you breakfast. You have ten minutes to get ready and eat, so…"
Kaito rolls out of bed. His head still feels foggy, but not too bad. Maybe he really does need to get more sleep or something. "Shouldn't you be going to get to your school on time?"
His original self rolls his eyes and shuts the door behind him saying, "Last time I worry about you!"
Kaito smiles to himself at how far they've come from when Ayato wanted to kill him.
He makes it to school just on time.
*o*o*
"There's a delay," Kaito says to Hakuba, "in my hands, but I can't find anything wrong with them."
Hakuba takes Kaito's hands in his own, pressing on tendons and kneading muscle with the knowledge of a man who has cut these hands open and set them back together. He's seen Kaito's bones and his blueprints and knows this body as well as a doctor knows a human one at this point. "I can scan your hands if you'd like?" Hakuba offers. "I don't feel anything wrong, but you know your body better than me."
Wrong. Hakuba knows Kaito's body better than Kaito does because Kaito can't bring himself to do more than skim the research that created him. Kaito flexes his fingers and can all but see the tiniest of pauses between thinking of an action and his body completing it. Not enough to be disastrous, but enough to be a pain.
Kaito hasn't done a heist in almost a month. He hasn't been doing as much acrobatics as he used to either because he knows it can strain his more delicate joints and that use-wear compounds. He doesn't heal exactly the same as a real human.
It's a matter of minutes for Hakuba to pull out the x-ray machine and take digital photos. Kaito holds still through the familiar process.
"… I'm not seeing anything wrong," Hakuba says after a while of studying the photos. Kaito stares with him, seeing metal bone, the gray of his synthetic skin and muscle and the wires and anchors of his tendons. Nerves and circulatory system and tiny screws. He opens and closes his hand, feeling that slight delay again and again. "The problem might not be in your hand, Kaito."
"Where would it be then?"
"Your nerves, perhaps?" Hakuba says tracing a silvery line on the screen. "If one was damaged somewhere…"
"I'm not seeing any damage," Kaito says. Hakuba hums with unhappy agreement. "Is it my head?" he asks.
Hakuba looks at him, looks him in the eye and there's something uncomfortable and worried in his eyes. Kaito doesn't look away. One of Hakuba's hands come up and curls along his cheek. "That… is a possibility," Hakuba says with a frown. "If part of your brain isn't working right…."
"Think you could do brain surgery?" Kaito says only half joking. His hand closes and opens.
"I'll run more tests," Hakuba says, thumb brushing beneath Kaito's eye gently.
Kaito leans into it. He can't help it. "If something is wrong, I'm sure you'll find it."
Hakuba smiles but it's just a slight curve of his lips, the worry never leaving his eyes.
An hour later they have no more information than when they started.
Kaito curls and opens his hand hating the delay and no closer to fixing it. He'll have to adjust.
*o*o*
He's talking to his mother in the kitchen, just about his day and ideas for a prank. Kaito's laughing one moment and the next his mother has a hand on his forehead and her worried face close to his own. "Kaa-san?"
"Kaito, what just happened?"
"I… don't know?"
"You froze. You just stopped, not even breathing for almost three seconds." Chikage's forehead is full of worried wrinkles, her lip missing lipstick where she's bit it.
"I feel fine," Kaito says, but he didn't even notice the pause happening. That's terrifying.
"Call Hakuba," Chikage says, stroking the hair back from his face. "Please."
Kaito pulls out his phone, hands shaking just a little bit. There's still a tiny delay there, but he's getting used to it. Chikage pulls him into a hug as the phone starts to ring. "Kaa-san?"
She shakes her head, holding him close.
Kaito feels lost and overwhelmed as the call goes to voicemail, Hakuba's recorded voice all carefully precise in requesting that the caller leave a message. "Something weird happened again," Kaito says. "Call me back."
Chikage holds him tighter. He sets down the phone and hugs his mother back.
"Kaa-san? I think something might be wrong."
She shakes ever so slightly against him. Kaito hugs her tighter and wonders what is failing him now.
*o*o*
"The technology," Hakuba says, haltingly and frowning so hard his eyebrows are almost meeting in the middle, "is very experimental. Meaning the durability isn't tested. There is nothing quite like you, Kaito, to have a comparison with. It could be a simple glitch that will fix itself in time, or this could be signs of a start of a full system failure." He stops talking, looking as troubled and lost as Kaito feels.
Kaito hugs a throw pillow off one of Hakuba's ridiculously lavish couches to his chest. "And if it's the latter?"
Hakuba doesn't answer immediately, fingers twisting a pen between them in such an un-Hakuba-like tell that Kaito feels any hope he has shrivel and die right then and there. "You're backing up your memory?" Hakuba asks.
"Daily," Kaito promises. "Hakuba… we don't know if the memory backup is actually accurate." The problem with experimental technology is that anything based off it becomes even less reliable and more experimental. "If something happens—"
"I'm working on it," Hakuba says cutting him off. "I'm working on building something that should last longer and—"
Kaito covers his mouth with two fingers. Hakuba lets him, eyes burning with emotions that Kaito feels like an electric jolt to his system. "It's okay. You're doing what you can and it's okay." It's not that he isn't scared or that he doesn't want more time. It's just that Kaito can't bear to see the despair creeping into Hakuba's expression. Can't let him shoulder the stress and the blame if he can't come up with something better than a man with ten times the knowledge and experience spent decades creating.
Hakuba hisses through his teeth, something soft and frustrated before one hand cups behind Kaito's neck and pulls him in. Hakuba's lips press against his in a kiss and Kaito's heart soars and crashes simultaneously. There are tears pricking his eyes as Hakuba pulls back, something resolute and desperate in Hakuba's grip on his shoulders, his eyes a little too wide. "I'm not giving you up," he says.
Kaito laughs, something broken. "That's not how I pictured this happening." He leans in and kisses Hakuba again before Hakuba can say anything though. Feel anything more. He loses himself in Hakuba's mouth because it's so much nicer than acknowledging the time counter looming over him.
He pretends not to notice the wet tracks down Hakuba's face when they part minutes or hours later, breathing each other's air and holding each other a bit too tight.
*o*o*
Words slip out of his mind, there one moment and gone the next just before they can tip off his tongue. His hands slow, the delay becoming visibly noticeable. Time blinks, once, twice, three times over a matter of weeks.
Kaito can't sleep, afraid to close his eyes and find that they won't work when he reopens them. Chikage frets and lingers instead of going on her trips. Ayato watches and thinks things Kaito can't even guess, maybe that he'll be glad to have his life back. Aoko looks like she'll cry whenever she notices some tiny glitch that Kaito can't control.
Hakuba looks like death warmed over, too many hours with too little sleep as he holes himself up in a lab, only leaving to check Kaito and to occasionally bounce ideas off Agasa and Ai.
This must be what it's like to be a terminally ill patient, given a death sentence by a doctor, Kaito thinks as he dutifully transfers another day's memories into the machine Hakuba built him. This must be what it's like to have death looming over you, waiting for the blade to fall at any moment.
Through it all he tries to present himself as he always does, laughing and teasing and coming up with silly pranks. Like if he tries hard enough, life will go on as usual without a problem.
He kisses Aoko, once, on the forehead as they're just walking home together. No special occasion, no build up at all. He'd wanted to do it and the pressure of time rapidly closing in toward an end finally enough to get him to act.
She didn't smile like he hoped she would.
Instead, Aoko clung to him, fingers digging tight enough into his sides to bruise.
Kaito wishes he had the courage to kiss her properly the way he kissed Hakuba, but he thinks maybe it's kinder if he doesn't. Maybe it's kinder for him to leave things as they are rather than breaking her heart even more than he inevitably will.
*o*o*
Kaito sighs, rubbing his neck where it aches faintly. He has a lot of small aches and pains, things that have accumulated, but he thinks this one is from stress. Between his first semester in college and having everyone he loves watching him like a time bomb, he can't say he's had a restful last few months. He sets his bag down by his bed, listening to his mother and Ayato bicker over what dinner should be down the hall. He should help. He doesn't move, staring out his window at the old tree there and the way the leaves shift back and forth in a breeze.
He should move, clean up, something. He's so very tired though.
Kaito sighs again.
"We're having hot pot!" Ayato calls to him. "What do you want in it?"
"Mushrooms and meat!" he calls back.
"He wants cabbage!" Ayato says because he's a brat.
Fondness curls in Kaito's chest. It's a little weird to care about someone that used to be you—or more that Kaito used to be him. But he does care. Can't help but care even as Ayato is like the worst teenage version of Kaito more often than not. Kaito's grown to like being a brat right back, the antagonism long lost its teeth by this point.
He gets his bag, pulling out books from his college courses. Art and drama, two things he enjoys but not, in the end, what he thinks the actual Kaito will choose. He can see him becoming an engineer or a scientist of some sort, but always prioritizing magician work in the end.
Kaito likes the courses he's taking. He thinks he likes them even more because he chose them for himself, not some concept of Kaito that he's tried to live up to. Whether his choices count as the 'real' choices Kaito-the-human would have taken in the same circumstances hardly matter anymore. What is or isn't a thing 'Kaito' would do is a complex thing that Ayato tells him he's needlessly over thinking. The books line up on his desk with his course notes for later. He just needs one book from his shelf.
Kaito reaches up for a thick art history volume he leaves home rather than carting to and from class. It slides from his fingers as they suddenly fail to grip. Kaito sees his other hand move, too slow, as the book falls toward his face.
It hits.
His vision goes black with a strange ringing in his ears.
Something pops, tiny and terrible, and Kaito falls.
*o*o*
There's a crash from Kaito's room and Ayato is moving before he can consciously decide to do so.
"Kaito?" he calls. There is no answer. Behind him, he hears his mother follow with slower, more cautious steps. "Kaito?" Ayato pushes open Kaito's door. On the floor beside the desk, Kaito is crumpled like a broken doll, loose-limbed and splayed. A book is nearby, maybe something he'd been holding, maybe something he'd dropped, but what catches Ayato's attention is how Kaito's eyes are still open and looking blankly at nothing.
He looks dead and Ayato almost doesn't want to take another step in the room. But he's seen a lot of dead bodies lately since Edogawa started becoming a fixture in his life and he pushes past the discomfort.
In the doorway, Chikage makes a choked, horrified sound.
"Call Hakuba," Ayato says, approaching Kaito's body. Closer, there seems to be something pulsing at his neck. Not a heartbeat, but a light, faint but present as it blinked through a layer of artificial skin. An error light? Something else? Ayato doesn't know. He didn't ever look at Kaito's body's plans, never wanted to know how his double had been made.
He glances up, seeing Chikage still frozen, pale. "Kaa-san," Kaito says sharply. "Call. He'll know what to do more than we do. In the meantime I'll…" He waves at the body, not really sure what he'll be able to do.
"Right," Chikage says. "Right." She turns away, running for her phone.
Ayato touches Kaito hesitantly. He's as warm as ever, fake body feeling too real. There's a tiny trickle of synthetic blood from his nose. From the fall or whatever the problem was? He tilts Kaito's head, but there's no life in those eyes, no focus or recognition. He could be a real corpse or a very life-like doll. When he checks for a pulse, there's still a heartbeat, so the body isn't dead at least. Or… whatever the robot equivalent is. Which means it had to be the equivalent of a hardware or software error crashing him.
"C'mon," he mutters, trying to pull Kaito into some sort of dignity. "C'mon, you can't do this. You have no idea how worried Kaa-san is. You're giving her flashbacks to seeing me." Great. Now they've both technically found each other mostly dead. Shared trauma. Yay. "I already told you you're not allowed to just die. I don't want my life back that much."
Nothing. There is barely a rise and fall to his chest, but then Ayato isn't actually sure Kaito needs to breathe. Digest, sure, but eh.
"Blink," he says. "It's freaking me out."
Kaito doesn't blink.
Chikage comes back with her cell phone at her ear in a white-knuckled grip. "No, he's still unresponsive. Is he still having biological functions?" she asks Ayato.
"Breathing and heart beating. No blinking. Or moving or anything."
"He still has vital signs, but no reaction to stimuli." Chikage nods at something being said on the other end of the phone. "We'll get him to Agasa's lab and meet you there. Thank you, Hakuba-kun."
Ayato waits as she hangs up the phone.
"He needs to do scans, but he seems pretty sure it's a brain problem," Chikage says.
They both look at Kaito who looks a little less like a broken doll now that he's not crumpled in an awkward position, but just barely. "Think Hakuba's up for brain surgery?" Ayato asks weakly.
Chikage doesn't answer. Instead she kneels down next to Kaito and touches his face with a trembling hand. She bites her lip, fingers curling into a loose fist. "Get the doors. I'll carry him."
"Can you carry him?" Ayato asks, already moving to help.
"He doesn't weigh that much more than you did as a teen." Chikage hauls Kaito into a fireman carry. He's limp in her grasp, still staring with sightless eyes. Ayato has to look away, swallowing hard. "The car keys are hanging in their usual place," Chikage says. She walks through the doorway like Kaito doesn't weigh more than she does.
Ayato runs. He will always have some complicated feelings about Kaito, but he doesn't want him to die like this.
*o*o*
Saguru can't think. Kaito's body is spread out on one of Agasa-hakase's lab tables before him, a wire leading from his neck to a computer where Saguru had rigged a connection to the port the doctor had used before completing Kaito's body. The computer holds the diagnostic program Saguru'd dug from the depths of the doctor's files. The program is a long shot. It was made for the initial testing phases of this technology, is written in a coding language Saguru is only just starting to parse, and he has no idea what some of the results even mean. He's tried, oh has he tried, but it's impossible to become an expert on someone's life work in a year and a half.
The program runs on, and Saguru stares at the results of their other tests and x-rays like they'll suddenly tell him what he's missing. Surely there's something he can fix.
He isn't a brain surgeon. He's not even a robotics expert. He's out of his depth as he has tried so desperately not to be since that first night replacing Kaito's leg bones. There has to be something he can do, he won't accept any other option. Saguru can't picture a world without Kaito's grin in it. That was why they'd created the memory bank. That was why they had been in the process of building a contingency plan.
They'd moved too slowly though.
Saguru makes a soft growl of frustration as staring at the scan images give him no more than the last time he looked.
Haibara, at her work station across the room, says, "Take a break."
"I can't take a break. The program needs monitoring if something comes up."
"It's a program. It will run and finish on its own."
"It's piecemeal coding at best for a prototype that probably doesn't exist anymore." Maybe there was another diagnostic file he'd missed? But no, he'd gone over the files painstakingly. He hadn't missed one.
"You're getting frustrated and not thinking clearly," Haibara says. "Take a break."
"I'm thinking perfectly fine." He couldn't stop thinking and theorizing and picturing worse case scenarios.
"Hakuba," Haibara says, finally looking up from her work. "You've been here for almost ten hours and in that time you only ate a granola bar and used the bathroom once. Take a break."
Saguru grimaced. "I wouldn't be able to rest."
"I can watch the diagnostic in the meantime. I'm capable of handling it if it gets buggy. I'm familiar with coding."
"He uses a coding language he invented," Saguru groans. "It's not so simple as to—"
"Hakuba."
Saguru feels like he's going to cry. Has felt it since he got there three days ago to see Kaito looking so much life when he'd seen Ayato in the glass box. Perhaps looking worse with the smear of blood on his upper lip and the open, vacant eyes. Saguru is used to corpses. He'd never had to confront one that belonged to someone he loved. He hasn't slept in almost forty hours. He feels like he is failing Kaito.
"This isn't time sensitive," Haibara says. "We already know from the scans that he's offline in there. It isn't going to make a difference to him if you pause to take care of yourself. What will hurt him is if he wakes up and finds you half-dead from neglecting your own health."
She's right and Saguru hates her a little bit for it. "It will matter to me though," he says feeling every minute of those forty hours weighing down on him.
Haibara sighs. "Much longer and you'll actively be making mistakes and that could set you back. Or you'll miss something that could help."
Dammit. Saguru scrubs at his eyes and they ache with a dull throb. "Fine. But I'm only napping for an hour."
"Two hours."
"An hour and a half."
"Three, then."
Saguru frowns at her. Haibara looks back, dispassionate. There is no winning when she is like this. "Fine. Two hours. I'll set an alarm."
Haibara nods, satisfied. "And after that, you'll eat something."
He doesn't have time for this. But she isn't giving him a choice. Saguru lets her shoo him out of the lab. He moves to the living room and collapses face down on the couch after setting a cell phone alarm. Saguru is so tired he should fall asleep immediately, but there's a hundred worries floating around in his head. Most glaringly is the fear that he can't do this. The fear that he won't be able to fix this and he'll lose Kaito even with all the precautions they tried to take. His heart aches and his eyes burn but the tears don't come.
Saguru buries his face in a pillow. Sleep does not come easily.
He wakes an indeterminable amount of time later, not by his alarm, but by the smell of food coming from the kitchen. It's five hours past when he intended to sleep, and the sun is just rising.
Saguru grips his phone with a feeling of betrayal swirling in his gut even as his head pounds with sleep deprivation. He'd lost so much time.
"Don't give me that look," Haibara says when he staggers into the kitchen. She's standing on a chair to reach the stove, frying eggs.
Saguru keeps glaring. "Really."
"You needed the sleep. And you still look like death warmed over." She clicks off the gas flame and waves a spatula at him. "Get a plate. You're eating at least two eggs and some toast before you go back to work."
Saguru scowls. His stomach, on the other hand, is all for this plan as it growls loudly. He gets the plates from the cupboard while contemplating tossing one at her. He doesn't actually want to hurt her, especially not when she looks like a child, but the impulse is there, and it's how he knows that she's annoyingly in the right for making him get more sleep. He's always much shorter tempered when he's low on rest.
Haibara slides three eggs onto his plate and takes one for herself before popping bread in the toaster. The electric kettle reaches a boil and she pulls down mugs and teabags full of strong black tea. "Being stubborn won't help anyone. Take it from someone who has been trying for almost two years to hurry scientific results along. If I kept up the pace I started working at, I'd be dead by now." She stabs a piece of egg with her fork. "Or Kudo would be because he took an unfinished antidote prototype." Haibara chews, looking at him with eyes that see too much. "Of course Kudo isn't my lover so, what do I know about pressure?"
Saguru grips his fork tight enough to make his fingers go white at the edges. "Even if we were merely friends, I would still be like this."
"Oh, I'm sure. And for me, guilt and repentance is my motivator even if I never got to know Kudo. But it's different when it's this deeply personal."
Saguru is starving but he can't bring a bite to his mouth. He glares down at fried eggs with their sunny golden yolks. The toast pops and Haibara tosses a slice onto his plate. It cracks a yolk, sending runny yellow across the white.
"I don't," he starts. "I don't have many friends." He doesn't. Never has. The boy with odd interests and strange habits who got into everything. Too nosey, too serious, too rich or stuck up—there was always something, some reason people didn't get along with him. He didn't get along with Kuroba at first either, but Kuroba was different from everyone because when Saguru'd actually made an effort to get closer, he didn't tell him to fuck off. He has Aoko now, and perhaps Haibara and Edogawa and Agasa as well among people he can call some sort of friends in Japan. But Kuroba was the first person Saguru tried to be friends with who reached back and that means… everything. Everything.
His heart aches.
If he fails…
"Eat," Haibara says, but it's in a gentler tone. "It's not a lost cause yet."
Saguru grimaces, but he dips the corner of his toast in runny yolk and takes a bite. It's flavorless on his tongue, like cardboard, but he chews and swallows because no one can function long without fuel.
He'll make things right.
Saguru finishes his food and tea under Haibara's watchful eye before throwing himself back into working.
*o*o*
"You should wake up," Ayato says to Kaito, poking a cheek. Kaito's face remains slack, like he's just sleeping, eyes thankfully shut. It was really creepy when they were open. "You have no idea how much you're missed."
Kaito is on a cot, moved from the lab tables when it became clear that this wasn't going to be some quick fix. If it could be fixed. Hakuba still has hope, but Hakuba's also dating Kaito so Ayato gets why he isn't giving up.
A month is a long time though.
(Okay, not as long as Ayato was basically on ice, but still.)
Chikage is already taking more frequent trips again—it's a grief thing, Kaito thinks—alternating between being an extra attentive parent and familiar absence. Aoko's… Aoko's doing better than Hakuba, but that's probably only because she has Ayato to turn to. She believes in Hakuba's ability to fix Kaito eventually, but she's more realistic in her expectations. There hasn't been a Kid heist since Kaito started glitching, and there likely won't be one for a while. Ayato might have to work with Chikage or Jii to put one on just to keep people from thinking Kid's pulled another vanishing act.
"You know when I said I wanted to be an only child again, I didn't actually mean it." Ayato tucks his knees up to his chin. "You're really not a bad 'brother'. And I was okay with you taking my life mostly. Yeah, okay, we know that's a lie, I'm never going to actually be completely okay with that, but you were supposed to live that life dammit, not bluescreen."
Is it better or worse, this sort of death? It's not a body that will decompose. It can run missing its main processor because—as it turns out—there's two separate 'brains' going on; one for bodily functions and one dictating learning and personality and memories. Of course it was the one that makes Kaito Kaito that malfunctioned, and of course it's not any kind of tech that's even remotely related to the rest of the robotics field, some creepy bio-mechanical hybrid that shouldn't have been created in the first place. But it had been created and now they're stuck with not knowing how to fix it. If it can be fixed. If they could even recreate the brain and transfer memories. Hell, they don't even know if the memories properly stored. It's all a mess of untested science.
"Is there an afterlife if you are dead?" Ayato muses. "Do you have a soul?" Kaito once said something about a witch in his class, and magic that didn't affect him except for that one time it had. Had that been because he was a robot? Or was it a Kaito thing? If they made a new brain and transferred memories, were they creating yet another person instead of actually bringing back Kaito? There were so many unanswered questions.
Ayato sighs and pats his double's cheek again. "It would be funny if this were like those comas you see in movies and you can hear what we're all saying in there. Not holding my breath though."
He hops down from the cot. "Edogawa's missing you, so I've got to be extra distracting for him. If you wake up I won't even say we're not friends. …Hakuba hasn't smiled in a month and I'm not the right Kaito to pull one from him. Just a thought. If you're in there."
Of course there isn't a response. Ayato sighs again. He isn't sure why he's bothering. The scans all say there's not any brain activity in the parts that make up consciousness.
It's surprisingly lonely being the only Kaito again. Ayato doesn't like it. He doesn't like it at all.
*o*o*
"It's one thing knowing you don't change," Aoko says running a hand through Kaito's synthetic—mostly synthetic—hair. "It's another actually seeing it." Kaito's face is the same at it was at sixteen. Aoko's has gotten sharper with age, and so has Saguru's, but Kaito hasn't changed at all. Not a centimeter taller, not the slightest change in his face shape. And he might never change in the slightest as he is now, looking like he's sleeping. Only the slight growth in synthetic hair and the progression of bodily functions show that time has any effect on this body at all.
Aoko's life has been very quiet since Kaito broke. Not even Ayato-Kaito can make up for the silent space this Kaito left.
In a second cot, Saguru sleeps like someone constantly on the edge of waking, a tiny frown between his brows and tension in his body that never goes away anymore. He looks half as alive as he used to and it breaks Aoko's heart just as much to see him like this as it does to see Kaito unresponsive. Because Hakuba Saguru is just as bright as Kaito in his own ways, just as brilliant and driven with a presence that can fill a room.
He's hollow, driven to the point of almost breaking and Aoko can't bring herself to stop him because she understands how he feels too much. If she had the knowledge to help, she'd be right there with Saguru, sleepless nights and all.
But Aoko doesn't know about robots. She doesn't know how to read the data Saguru pores over. She can't use a scalpel and fix the intricate bits that make up Kaito's whole. She isn't stupid, but she isn't terrifyingly brilliant the way the most important people in her life are. If she studied, she could fix the technical bits, joints and ligaments and tendons for Kaito, but it would take years and years to be where Saguru is in understanding the doctor's research after just a year and a half of obsessive study. She resents him a little for it because she feels so useless. So far away from being able to help.
Saguru shifts on the cot, frown growing deeper, the dark circles under his eyes standing out.
He's not sleeping enough, not eating enough either. He's doing the bare minimum to keep afloat in his university courses, every spare moment poured into trying to revive Kaito. He hasn't taken a case on since this whole mess started.
Aoko smooths her hand through Kaito's hair again. She's tired.
Kaito doesn't change at all, just breathes in tiny breaths and exhales them out again, chest barely rising and falling.
Aoko can't help in any of the big ways. So all she can do is help in little ways. She helps wash Kaito's body every few days. She makes food, brings it to Saguru, to Ayato-Kaito, to Chikage, to Haibara and Agasa and even Edogawa when he's here. She brews teapot after teapot of strong black tea to keep the edge of exhaustion at bay while the others work. She keeps vigil while the others rest.
Aoko misses running around a high school classroom with a mop. She misses Kaito cracking jokes in her living room and curling up on the sofa for movies with cups of hot chocolate. She wishes she'd dared to kiss Kaito properly instead of the few barely-there brushes of lips on platonic places they'd shared.
She might never have that chance.
Tears prick at her eyes, but she's done enough crying lately. Aoko breathes through it and gives Kaito's head one last pat. She'll go cook something with noodles and use half the vegetables in Agasa's kitchen to make a meal big enough to last a few days. Then she'll brew another pot of black tea and wake Saguru up like she promised and pretend like he isn't slowly falling to pieces.
Kaito was always so flippant about how they'd get on fine if anything happened to him. He'd be surprised at how quickly things start to fall apart without him.
*o*o*
"What," Ayato says as he watches Hakuba work on the framework for a new brain, "do we do if he never wakes up. You know there's a chance he isn't fixable."
"The data is all backed up," Saguru says.
"The memories, yeah, but they're all on a piece of hardware that isn't tested, and we still don't know where exactly things went wrong in his brain." Ayato turns a piece of metal casing around in his hands. It's a bit that will go into forming the skull. Clean and smooth curves compared to the 3D printed mass that the brain is going to be. He's grossed out at the samples Hakuba's been experimenting with. They resemble human tissue a bit too closely. "We don't know how storing them in a purely mechanical frame changes things. Remember the killer robot? Because I remember the killer robot, and Kaito'd hate ending up like that."
"The data," Hakuba says calmly, "is backed up. We won't know how it will transfer until we do it."
"And if it's another conscienceless nightmare?"
"We take care of it," Hakuba says like he really thinks he could kill something with Kaito's face if it came down to it.
Ayato knows better. It'd crush Hakuba. Hell, it'd fuck Ayato up to do it. Especially if it had Kaito's memories since becoming a robot.
"Ok," he says because what else can he say? "Don't burn out with this though ok? He… He wouldn't want you to."
Hakuba hums, hearing and dismissing him all in one sound.
Ayato didn't think he'd listen. After all, it's not like they're friends. They're sideways friends. Friends of friends or friends of a brother and that's not nearly enough to check Hakuba drowning himself in research and misplaced guilt. Ayato wants to pluck the tools from his hands, but that'd end badly. "Have you considered brain surgery on Kaito? Instead of a whole new brain?"
"I don't know where it went wrong," Hakuba says. Lost. Young. He's too young to be trying to revive a kind-of dead android. Unstated is that it could kill Kaito the rest of the way to attempt brain surgery blind. Any data that didn't get backed up would potentially be wiped.
"Ok," Ayato says again.
He hops to the ground and Hakuba looks too tall from this perspective. Distant and self-contained with his desperation. Ayato misses Kaito too, but it's never going to be the same way that Hakuba does. Or Aoko or Chikage or Jii do. He's never quite going to know what to think when it comes to Kaito being his offshoot brain clone.
Hakuba keys something into his laptop, already tuning Ayato out again.
Across the room, Kaito breathes and breathes and breathes, for all the world like he's asleep.
*o*o*
The first brain fails. The transfer seems to work, and the computer interacts with it, but when they try to stimulate activity, nothing happens and Saguru doesn't know where he went wrong. Clearly he had to have gone wrong or it would work. It's not because it's not connected to a full nervous system and body. It just. Failed. He failed. And it's back to step one. Were the notes incomplete? Was it an error on his part? He doesn't know and he's going to stress himself into poor health if he continues at this rate.
Saguru sits with the failed brain and looks at the lab wall for a long time. Kaito's body is still here but it's not been Kaito in a while. Kaito is energy and mischief, petty selfishness and surprising amounts of care. Kaito is trading theories back and forth or reading curled squished together in an armchair meant to sit one adult or hands always moving in some sort of active fidget.
The body on the table is not Kaito as he should be and Saguru's not giving up but he is starting to wonder if Kaito will forgive him if it takes years instead of months to bring him back. If Saguru can even do that. Perhaps the memory bank will fail next and he will be left with nothing but his own memories and a body that only resembles the man he had come to love.
Death comes for everyone eventually. Saguru knows this better than most. He's seen violent death and self-inflicted death and death from illness or time or accident so many times in his short life. It isn't right that Kaito got less than four years. It isn't right that his body failed him as surely as any chronically ill person's body would.
Technology is supposed to outlast humanity. In all the novels and science fiction themes, that is always the case. The doctor had been trying for something to surpass humanity. To transcend it. Perhaps, if he hadn't been killed, he would have reached it, but Kaito had been one step in that grandiose, foolish ideal.
He'd been a step that was never meant to last or be settled on, only improved. And Saguru doesn't know how to improve on something he still doesn't understand in its entirety.
On the whole, he's been in a state of denial; so long as he can fix Kaito, he isn't dead.
If he can't fix Kaito, he has to admit that he is dead and deal with that. Saguru isn't sure he can do that. Not now, and not in the future either. He's never backed down from a challenge no matter how much the stakes were stacked against him. Saguru doesn't love easily or trust. He doesn't let people in very often at all, but Kaito managed to creep past his walls and make a home there and Saguru's not going to outgrow that. He's not going to forget or feel less about it, he's sure. And so he knows he'll keep trying for the rest of his life if need be until Kaito is awake again and Saguru can look him in the eye and tell him how he feels with no misunderstandings between them. He'll do it even if it makes Kaito hate him at the years lost, even if it makes him bitter the way Ayato is bitter, because a world with Kaito is better than without. And Ayato will never be his Kaito no matter how similar they are or were.
It's not the healthy path to take. It's the only one he will consider though.
The failed brain gets pushed to one side after minutes or hours have passed. Saguru pulls up a new document. The road to success is paved with failures. Saguru will have to just try again and hope that this one will be better.
*o*o*
Time passes. Progress is made, progress is lost, and Kaito breathes. Aoko finishes her first year of college and Saguru takes his classes online, splitting time between the lab and school work, only ever leaving his self-imposed routine if Aoko asks him to or Haibara kicks him out. Kaito breathes. Haibara makes an antidote that lasts weeks at a time instead of hours. Ayato picks up Kid's mantle and terrorizes the police for the first time since he died. It's only possible because Haibara is just a breath away from a true cure.
Kaito breathes.
Chikage leaves for a month, comes back for two, is away again for a week, torn between knowing how it hurts Kaito-Ayato when she's gone too long, but unable to make herself stay either.
Kaito breathes.
Saguru makes a brain that reacts in tests the way it's supposed to. It fails to upload the memories from the storage mainframe and now Saguru has another problem to solve. Around and around again, one found flaw in design leading to another, to another, to another. He thinks he might just get things right from sheer trial and error at the rate he's going.
Kaito breathes.
Kaito breathes. Kaito breathes. Kaito breathes—
His breathing hitches in fits and starts. Whatever part of his brain let his body keep working is failing too.
Saguru shuts himself in Kaito's dovecote for hours after that discovery, wanting to shout at the universe to stop ripping his hope apart. If he'd stayed and tried to tackle the problem immediately, he would have gotten frustrated quickly and probably break something in an ill-timed fit of anger. The doves help. They are as tame and friendly as ever, settling on him with their tiny clawed feet and warm, soft bodies.
He wonders if they miss Kaito too. Or maybe they're fine with Ayato instead. Maybe they're more attached to whoever feeds them than one man with a mischievous smile.
*o*o*
The body fails; it was inevitable, but Saguru has learned from it, taken dozens of scans and knows now where it went wrong on the physical aspect at least. Kaito's brain, what is left functioning of it, it still being powered in a way not unlike the pod Ayato had spent so much time in.
The parallels of it are painful, but in their own way, hopeful. Ayato came back from an impossible situation. Perhaps Kaito will too.
Saguru hopes and hopes and hopes as he pours himself into making a new brain and patching Kaito's body—parts won't be the same, but he's managed to get most of it exactly how it should be. He's finally fixed the bad shoulder of his properly too. No more nerve roulette on any given day. Kaito just needs to have his brain fixed and wake up and then everything will be fine. (Until he fails again but Saguru's trying so hard not to think of that because this is bad enough, he doesn't want to think of future years of this and what might end up a pattern.)
*o*o*
It's sound that he notices first. A soft-ticking clock, the hum of machines and fluorescent lights. His own breathing a moment or two later, like having a body is a revelation. There's a soft tap-tap-tap like a nervous tick or someone pecking at a keyboard.
There is sound and the heavy press of gravity on his body and the strange feeling that everything feels a bit too much and too little at the same time. Every thread of the sheet over him, every stitch of clothing is a sensation against his nerves and yet it feels like he should be feeling more. He tilts his head to the side, chasing the feeling of hair tickling his cheek and the soft-woven cotton of a pillowcase that smells faintly like a mix of fabric softener and hot metal. An odd combination.
The tapping stops.
It's a struggle to cling to waking, like getting up too early on a cold, wet winter day. It would be so much easier to let go of the thread of consciousness and dip back under, but the too-much sensations won't let him.
It takes a moment to remember he has eyes and can open them at all. A moment after that to actually do it, each eyelid like trying to lift a car. The world is a blur of white until it consolidates into a recognizable lab. There's one sharp moment of panic before his eyes land on a still figure nearby.
"H'kuba?" His voice sounds rusty like he hasn't used it in ages.
Hakuba looks like he's going to cry—no, is crying—standing at a computer station and gripping the counter like it's the only thing holding him up. "Kuroba," Hakuba says so quietly it almost isn't a sound.
Alarm shoots through Kaito. "…What…?"
He doesn't remember how he got there. He isn't sure what he was last doing or what day it is or even where he is, though he's pretty sure this is Agasa's basement lab. Kaito has no idea what is happening, but Hakuba is crying and Kaito can't seem to get up to get him to stop.
"You remember who I am?" Hakuba asks, all choked with tears and Kaito stares.
"Of course." How could he not know Hakuba Saguru, one of his best friends and person he was kind of sort of dating?
Hakuba covers his face with a hand. "Thank god."
Kaito is missing something very important. He can make a guess considering he's on a table, mostly naked under a sheet, and is having memory issues about how he got there. Kaito forces his body to lever itself up onto one arm. "Hakuba…"
In three big strides, Hakuba crosses the space and drags him against his chest. He's warm and every electronic nerve in Kaito's body sings, still weirdly sensitive. Kaito hugs back. Hakuba's shaking so hard that Kaito's afraid to find out how long it's been. To find out if he really died or if it was just…another repair. To know if they'd really needed that memory backup after all. Questions worries and fears swirl through him, but he has Hakuba in his arms right now and present, so he focuses on that.
There will be time for questions he doesn't want answers to later.
For now, Kaito holds Hakuba and knows without a doubt that he is loved.