Disclaimer: I do not own Magic Kaito.

Oneshot Nineteen

Even Giants Must Awake

The black bound fast his limbs. It kept secrets from his vision and was a pressure that weighed him down.

His heart gave a mighty beat and began to flutter, a butterfly in harried flight. It resounded in his ears like the swelling of the ocean and the tattoo of a wardrum, his veins painfully pounded wide as if with hammers.

Suffocation set in, cotton stuffed down his throat.

Air, need air!

He was drowning.

Which way was the surface?

Abrupt motion, falling into an upwards swoop not of his willing.

He broke through the surface with a gasp.

"Kaito!"

He jolted upright and drew in a breath until his lungs could not take any more. The air shuddered down his trachea like a desert wind, arid and scouring with the grit it bore. Collapsing in upon himself, coughs wracked Kaito's body for several moments before becoming tolerable. He straightened out, panting from the exertion before.

"Aoko?" he rasped as he looked to and from her and Hakuba. Both were in front of him, kneeling to be at his level. Their eyes, round as full moons, did not quite meet his, and their complexions possessed a pallor he had never seen of a living person. Hakuba's jaw was uncharacteristically dropped, and the look of undisguised shock brought a smile to Kaito's face.

It was shaky. He was missing something here.

"You," Hakuba's voice incredulously trembled, "you were shot."

Walking with Aoko and Hakuba after school.

Brows furrowing – something was on his face, and it itched – as he looked down to see civilian clothes. Not a heist.

A glimpse of black, flitting around a corner.

He wasn't getting much more than flashes of recollection. He made to scratch his nose, paused as he encountered something encrusted upon it.

They neared the end of the street, and there was a flash of light with a blur.

With a fingernail he flaked some off, raised it to his line of vision to find that it was dried blood. He returned his attention to his friends, comprehension starting to dawn and mirrored by eyes widening.

A loud noise. Pain bloomed, a fire leaping forth.

Aoko rummaged through her bag, withdrew a compact mirror. She pried it open, held it up for Kaito to look at.

A scream, a shout, and then many screams.

Dead center of his forehead was a hole, the flesh around it deformed. Blood was smeared around the wound and had flowed down his face some, like ghastly war-paint applied by the crude hands of a child.

Red. Time was nothing to anything.

"You were dead," Hakuba continued to insist, his words echoing their predecessors over and again seemingly without end.

Breathing hurts.

"I don't know."

Sirens sounded in the distance, rapidly becoming louder.

A/N: Had this idea at two in the morning, so I wrote it. Not quite my usual writing style; I'm not sure how I feel about it.