A/N: I do, again, apologize for that cliffhanger.

There are gonna be a few more OCs than usual this chapter, for reasons that will soon become clear. I hope that you now trust me not to create Mary Sues, and I can actually promise this time that no one is Hakuba in disguise, so you can also trust me in that way.

There are warnings at the end if you need them, per usual. I'm going to frontload one of them because it's an unusual thing for the fic-there's an incident where something said in good faith is mistaken for casual racism.

Chapter 26

"Kudou!" Heiji's shout was loud enough to make Kaito pull the badge away from his ear.

Kaito got it, though. Kaito felt exactly the same way. After seeing what Shinichi went through, when he transformed...it was not pleasant, to think of him doing that in the middle of a street, somewhere, in a part of London that didn't seem very friendly. And then there was the risk to him if the wrong person saw.

"Take a deep breath, Hattori-kun," Kaito said. "Do you know where you are?"

"I-"

"Look for landmarks," Kaito advised, starting to get up.

He winced as a few sore muscles shifted. He'd hit the ground in a roll, but he couldn't have made the fall painless even if he'd had a trampoline waiting-he still had bruises and strains left over from that ill-advised heist, never mind the still-healing bullet wound in his back. You could spread out an impact, sure, but you couldn't get rid of it.

"Are you okay, Kuroba-kun?" Eisuke ventured.

"Just banged myself up a little," Kaito said. "Hattori-kun, those landmarks?"

"There's a kebab place," Heiji said. "And a fancy restaurant, I think."

"Okay," Kaito said slowly, trying to remember the lay of the street. Being KID gave him a lot of practice with memorizing the layouts of places on the run, but it didn't help him with remembering what the signs had said. He hadn't looked at them-he was faster at reading than speaking English, but reading on the run was still a little beyond him, so he hadn't wanted to waste the time.

"You didn't read the signs, didja?" Heiji asked.

Detectives, Kaito all but swore to himself.

"Um, okay, I'm near a big white fancy building on one side o' the street and a big-well, I think it used ta be white, now it's jus' dirty lookin'-cement box on the other." Hattori said. "Takes up most o' the block; there's a coupla storefronts in it…"

"Okay, that I remember," Kaito said. "I know where you are. You're not far from the side street Kudou-san went down. About two blocks ahead of you, there's an intersection; can you wait there for me?"

"Okay," Heiji said, an edge to his tone. "But…we need ta hurry an' look, ya know."

"I know," Kaito replied seriously. "Believe me, I understand. But panicking won't help us find him."

"I know," Hattori said sharply.

No one talked much more than necessary after that. While darting through the crowd and doing his best to keep the renewed aches in his back from getting elbowed, Kaito carefully guided Heiji to the corner where he'd told Shinichi to turn. Eisuke, hesitantly, spoke up, and said that he wasn't far from there and would meet them in the same place.

When Kaito made it to the corner, he immediately picked out Heiji-it wasn't so much by height or anything else about his appearance, but no one else there was radiating anxiety so intensely. He was drumming on his thigh again, fingers moving almost too fast for Kaito to track-almost. Kaito was the Magician Under the Moonlight, after all. Eisuke was beside him, looking ill at ease but nowhere near as horribly tense.

"He turned down this alley," Kaito said, pointing.

Heiji was off and running before he finished the sentence.

Eisuke made a disgusted noise and followed, leaving Kaito with little choice.

"Turn up here, idiot," Kaito shouted at Heiji, because he was not particularly pleased.

Heiji thanked him, but his return insult was a bit stronger than Kaito's choice. Maybe that meant something different in Kansai-ben? Kaito could hope.

"Tantei-han, stop!" Kaito shouted, as they passed the point where Shinichi should have intercepted Hansen.

Heiji stopped all right, turning on his heel and glaring murder at Kaito. Poker Face snapped into place.

"This is where he was supposed to cross paths with Hansen. Since we know he didn't, he must have at least been slowing down by here," Kaito said.

"So he's around here," Heiji said. "Or 'e was."

"Bingo," Kaito said in deliberately incomprehensible English, relishing Heiji's grimace at his horrid pronunciation. Distraction, check.

"Thank you, ma'am, I appreciate it," Eisuke said, drawing their attention. He grinned. "That woman saw a strange young Japanese boy run through here a little while ago. She doesn't remember which way he was going, but she saw him."

"Good," Kaito said. "Thanks, Spy-san!"

"Honestly, can you stop with that?" Eisuke grumbled halfheartedly.

Heiji, meanwhile, was scanning the area. "Kuroba-han, could ya look around while Eisuke and I ask people 'bout if they saw 'im or not?"

Kaito nodded. "Sounds like a plan."

He scrambled to the top of a building and started looking, only half-paying attention to Heiji and Eisuke's efforts below.

He was so focused, in fact, that he nearly missed yet another fall from a high place when his phone rang.

Mom's timing is awful, he thought, fishing the phone out of his pocket and picking it up, not even bothering to check the caller ID. Who else would be calling? Everyone else with the number for this phone knew he was overseas.

"Hey, sorry, I can't really talk right now-" he started.

"Kaito-nii-san?" came a worryingly rough version of Conan's high-pitched voice.

"Conan?" Kaito half-shouted, forgetting the honorific in surprise. "Where are you?"

"I'm-I dunno?" he paused, then asked. "Where is this?"

There was a bit of noise, and then a new voice came onto the line. "Hello, this is Officer Forrester. You're Conan's older brother?"

Well, Kaito hadn't understood half of that.

"My English is bad," Kaito said. "Please wait."

Kaito stuffed the phone in his pocket, swung down the building's fire escape, and plowed through the crowd until he found Heiji. Then, he shoved the phone in the guy's face.

"Kuroba-san, the h***?" Heiji demanded, taking the phone. "Who is this?"

He listened for a second, then broke into a smile, and started babbling back in English that Kaito didn't bother trying to decipher. Tracking down Eisuke was more important. All three of them needed to be together to go wherever Shinichi was, after all.

After a bit of searching, he spotted a flash of dark hair and glasses across the street.

"Hondou-san!" he shouted, because the nickname might not work in this crowd.

Eisuke all but ran over just as Heiji was hanging up the phone.

"He's at the Deptford Police Station," Heiji reported, a mix of joy and relief on his face. "The local cops found him. He was passed out, and it looks like he hit 'is head a li'l, but he's up and talkin' now."

"Good," Eisuke said.

"Did you get directions?" Kaito asked.

He had, and they ran most of the way there. It was a big old brick building, more in line with the kind of thing that Kaito had expected to see out of London than a lot of New Cross had been so far.

And, it was full of police. Joy.

Probably oblivious to Kaito's discomfort, Heiji pushed open the door of the station. Kaito really didn't have any choice but to follow him in, Eisuke trailing close behind.

"Kudou!" Heiji shouted, forgetting himself completely, at the sight of a slightly battered, tiny Kudou sitting in one of the front hall's chairs, still dressed in his older self's shirt and nursing a Styrofoam cup that Kaito hoped was full of water and not coffee.

He had an already-visible bruise on his forehead, he was pale, the way his bangs sat on his forehead suggested they'd been soaked with sweat recently, and there was a tightness to his face that said he was in pain. But his eyes were open, and tracking, and that was good enough.

There were two officers with Shinichi-a bearded man whose badge identified him as Forrester, and a tall, long-haired woman whose badge said she was Clarke. They were both staring at Kaito, now, for some reason.

"Saguru?" Clarke said slowly. "When did you dye your hair?"

Beside Kaito, Eisuke startled. "Where?"

"Next to you," Clarke said, with an eyeroll.

"Me?" Kaito squeaked. It makes sense. Facial prosthetics, makeup-those cost money. So does dye, but a lot less, especially since you have to use it less often than makeup. So he probably changed his appearance gradually once he got the money to do it… Which means early on he looked exactly like me, except blonde enough to pass for half-British.

Heiji had paused in scrupulously looking Kudou over for further injuries to stare.

"I am not Saguru," Kaito managed. "I am Kaito. Conan's cousin. I...know a Saguru, though."

But...wait. How do they know Hakuba?

"Wait...do you know Saguru?" Eisuke asked.

Forrester looked at him, confused. "Well, we know a kid named Saguru, but he was adopted by Hashimoto's aunt and her husband. And if you knew him, you'd know he looks exactly like your friend."

Eisuke's mouth gained a stubborn set. "Okay, I'm really about done with the 'Asians all look the same' stuff-"

What was it like for him in America, exactly? Kaito thought, startled, even as he held up his hands and said in Japanese. "Hold on, Eisuke, he really might look like me, remember? We don't know."

Heiji seemed to be looking right through him. Shinichi's frown was belligerently skeptical. And Eisuke didn't seem particularly mollified. But no one was challenging him outright, and he'd take that as a win.

"We know him," Heiji said slowly, in English. "If the people who adopted him are named Hakuba, we know him."

"Yeah, that's the name," said a third officer, a younger man with the name "Chaudhry" on his badge. He didn't seem particularly happy about it.

"Really?" Clarke said. "That's...a pretty big coincidence." She sounded doubtful.

"Not a coincidence," Kaito said, carefully echoing her pronunciation.

"Yeah, not really," Eisuke said. "We didn't come here on purpose, but we're in New Cross because we think he's here."

"Didn't you say you knew him from Japan?" Chaudhry said. "Why would you think he was here?" He paused, then leaned through a nearby doorway into another room. "Hashimoto, is your aunt's family visiting?"

"God, no, they're busy with family stuff," Hashimoto said, walking into the room. He wasn't quite tall and he looked...not old, but like his thirties hadn't been kind to him.

"So they told the extended family," Shinichi said quietly.

Hashimoto paled.

Clarke looked puzzled. "Told them what?"

"Saguru ran away from home about two months ago," Eisuke said plainly. "We're here looking for him."

Chaudhry blinked. "You're a bunch of teenagers."

"Not this again," Heiji sighed.

"Hattori," Kaito asked, feeling weird as he left off the honorific, "how's Conan?"

"The bruise is worse than it looks, but he's very dehydrated," Heiji said. "And he says he bruised his hip, too. Also, he's got real clothes in his backpack; why hasn't anyone let him go change?"

"He hasn't been here that long," Forrester said. "And we were wondering how he ended up in those clothes, anyhow."

Heiji shrugged. "Guess he decided to play dressup? I dunno. He needs more water. And we need information about Saguru."

"I'll say it again, you're teenagers," Chaudhry said.

"Saguru is one teenager, and I know he has a pretty well-deserved reputation," Eisuke said.

"His solve record's still better than yours," Shinichi sing-songed, poking Heiji in the leg with his foot.

"Shut up!" Heiji snapped. "And keep drinking that water, you little idiot. When we're done getting information for the case I'm gonna yell at you for an hour."

Shinichi ducked his head just slightly.

"So you're a detective too?" Forrester asked.

Heiji nodded, scratching the back of his neck. "Yeah. Conan here wants to be one when he grows up too."

"And the rest of you?" Clarke asked sharply.

"Kaito goes to Saguru's school; he knows Saguru best out of all of us," Heiji said. "Eisuke...is an expert at some useful things."

Eisuke grinned in a deceptively innocent way, considering his expertise was actually "how to fool intelligent people into misinterpreting your agenda."

"So you're just...investigating?" Forrester asked. "By yourselves?'"

"When were you going to tell us he'd gone missing?" Clarke demanded, turning to Hashimoto.

Hashimoto grimaced. "I think you can understand why I didn't want to. Especially when I didn't think he was in the country, let alone London. It would just be bad news you couldn't do anything about."

"But now you're saying he's here!" Clarke said. "How do you know that?"

"I don't want to get anyone in trouble," Eisuke said, before Heiji could speak.

Clarke raised an eyebrow.

"We have good information," Conan said firmly. "But you could help."

"Of course we could, we're the police," Chaudhry said. "You should have reported it the moment you knew there was a missing person in our jurisdiction."

"It's more complicated than that," Eisuke said. "This is...really, really complicated, actually. And the time it would take for us to explain all of it to you, well, we just don't have it. It's better if we're the ones who look for him."

And I'm officially starting to lose the thread of the conversation, Kaito thought, despairing. Too many clauses, ugh...

"Saguru was always telling us to leave his problems alone, too, and look how that turned out," Forrester said, regret plain on his face.

"Really?" Kaito asked. He had caught at least the general direction of that statement, and it was not comforting.

Forrester blinked. "Was he not like that, in Japan?"

"In Japan he was...ice," Kaito said, the struggle for words no longer only due to the language barrier. "Not much showed." And then, half a world away from home, something that should have been obvious from the start finally clicked. "A Poker Face."

"He was weird about corpses," Heiji said. "Didn't like seeing them. But other than that, he was always... distant, about things."

Forrester looked faintly horrified.

"Well, no wonder he ran!" Clarke snarled. "It was da-" she broke off, glanced at Conan, and amended, "really obvious that he had some issues, and if that's how he was dealing, it's no wonder he snapped! Hashimoto, what were your aunt and uncle doing?"

"Trying not to spook him into doing a runner!" Hashimoto snapped. "Which obviously failed, but can you fault them for trying?"

"Okay, go back to the part where Hakuba having issues was known," Heiji said. "Because back home, we did not know that."

"It wasn't exactly known here, either," Clarke said. "I thought the captain or Forrester or one of the other senior officers had noticed, but apparently not."

"But you did?" Eisuke prompted.

"Jumpy, closed posture, quiet...and he did not react well if you touched him without warning," Clarke said. "He didn't look like he slept well, I think he lost weight over the time he worked with us, and his clothes never fit. How was it not obvious to everyone that he was in a bad situation?"

"So what did you do?" Heiji asked.

"I thought the captain knew, and was handling it," she spat. "Otherwise, why would we be letting a kid who looked like he needed Child Services on crime scenes?"

"But I guess the captain didn't know…" Eisuke said slowly.

"Saguru wouldn't answer questions about himself," Forrester said. "He just...wouldn't. He was getting such good results on cases...we decided not to push."

"Uncle Tsuyoshi chewed us out for that, later," Hashimoto said. "He couldn't believe that we didn't even know Saguru's surname, or where he lived."

"Did you ever figure any of that out?" Shinichi asked.

"Well, we figured out that he came to crime scenes near New Cross Gate a bit faster than others," Clarke said. "There were a few terrible flats in that area back then; he was probably renting one of them."

"That could really help, thank you," Heiji said.

"What, you think he's around there again?" Chaudhry asked.

"What's it to you?" Forrester asked. "You never liked the kid."

"He was creepy!" Chaudhry said.

"He was better than you, and you got jealous instead of improving," Clarke said, hands on her hips.

"Yeah, so, I didn't like him," Chaudhry said. "You weren't the only one to notice something off, Clarke. But all of you were so convinced he must be the good and innocent one in this situation. Weird kid who's good at murders shows up out of nowhere and no one questions it? It's just not natural."

Heiji shrugged. "I thought like that too, at first," he said. "I thought he was going to kill someone someday. Kaito disagrees."

"Yes I do!" Kaito practically shouted. Hakuba was technically him, and no matter how different they were, just...no.

"He's got that feeling, though, hasn't he?" Chaudhry said. "Maybe it is jealousy. But maybe we shouldn't have let a kid who wasn't always all there onto crime scenes at all. You'd look over sometimes and his eyes would just be-blank." He shuddered. "And then he'd come back and everyone would hang on his every word like he wasn't a few seconds off of some sort of episode."

Kaito didn't get all of that, because Chaudhry talked fast, but he caught "eyes" and "blank" just fine, and...there were a few heists Kaito remembered, when Saguru's eyes had been that way.

"They probably didn't notice," Forrester said, softly. "I didn't notice."

"How?" Chaudhry asked. "Like, at least, all that time-announcing, you have to have realized that wasn't just some sort of funny eccentric thing he was doing."

Kaito scrambled to put the words together. "Time-announcing"... "wasn't just"... "funny"... "thing"...does he think the time-announcing was more than a weird quirk?

Kaito blinked. "What?"

"The first time he did it, I don't even think he realized he did it out loud," Chaudhry said, impatient. "He was talking to himself. I mean, he played it off afterward, but, seriously, are you all that gullible?"

"Hattori," Shinichi said in Japanese, "remember when you said the pocketwatch sounded like a comfort object?"

Heiji stared back at him for a few seconds, fingers drumming on his thigh, and then swore in Japanese.

"Excuse me?" Forrester said, annoyed.

"That's...that's a grounding technique," Heiji said haltingly. "For flashbacks, and that kind of thing, to remind yourself of when it is, so you know it isn't whenever your brain is remembering." He winced. "There are older police officers in Osaka who have problems like that."

Sure, and that's the only place he knows about that from, Kaito thought sarcastically. If Heiji had never had to remind Shinichi of when and where he was, Kaito would eat KID's hat with wasabi and mayonnaise on top.

Which was a nice, funny mental image and conveniently distracted him from the fact that Hakuba had apparently been having flashbacks and no one had noticed. Possibly, Kaito had been one of those people who didn't notice, if Hakuba had still been having them in Japan. And then he had turned something he'd done to deal with the flashbacks into a weird personality quirk. Which, okay, that much sounded like something Kaito would do.

That was a whole other can of worms. What, exactly, had happened in that other timeline to scar Kaito-who-became-Hakuba so badly?

Kaito would be the first to admit he was not a picture of mental stability, and, okay, yeah, there were a few things he was a little screwed up over, but...generally, if he steered clear of Akako in small spaces, people with guns, and fish, he was okay.

"Okay" did not seem to be a word that described Hakuba at all during his early career with the British police force.

"Everything we knew up to now said he might have some problems," Eisuke said, in a calming tone. "It's not really that surprising, is it?"

Shinichi looked as doubtful as Kaito felt.

"But, you said near New Cross Gate," Heiji said. "That's good. That's a place to start."

Kaito had a thought. "The last time you saw him was when?" he asked.

"It's been a while," Forrester said. He glanced at Hashimoto. "How long ago was it that he actually left for Japan?"

Kaito blinked. "No visits?"

"I mean, they came and visited once, but I don't think he came by the precinct that time," Hashimoto said.

Kaito shook his head. "No...meaning...by himself.." He broke off, and switched to Japanese. "Hakuba went on trips to Europe, alone, at least four or five times when we were in school together. I assumed he came here at least once. What was he doing?"

Eisuke quickly translated, leaving the officers gaping.

"No, he was never here," Chaudhry said. He glanced at Hashimoto, who seemed to be fiddling with his phone. "How rich is your uncle, to pay for that?"

"Really, really, rich, mate, he's got a mansion," Hashimoto said. "Two of them, actually. The one here's small, compared to the one in Japan. I've seen pictures."

"Mom said it was big," Kaito said with a nod.

"Didn't you say you were friends with him?" Hashimoto said, suspicious.

Kaito shook his head. "Not friends, in same class. Big difference."

"Then why are you here?" Chaudhry asked. "It's a bit much to come halfway across the world for someone who isn't even a friend."

Kaito glanced at Heiji, who just met his eyes, levelly. Next to him, Eisuke shrugged, practically saying, It's your decision, without words.

"He might be in trouble," Kaito said.

"He's been on his own before," Forrester said. "I don't think it's ideal, and I'd like to get him back to Hashimoto's uncle if I could-"

"Not just that," Shinichi said. His eyes weren't completely open, but they were focused on Kaito, and there was something almost like trust in them. "There's a case. A relative of mine's mixed up in it, and now he is, too, and it's dangerous."

"And you think you can help?" Clarke asked.

"We think he's better off investigating it from somewhere he has a steady roof over his head and backup he can call on," Heiji said.

"Backup is good," Shinichi agreed quietly, and there was a layer of meaning there the London police clearly weren't meant to grasp.

If Shinichi hadn't been alone at Tropical Land...well, we'd still be able to call him Shinichi in front of people right now, wouldn't we? Kaito thought, rueful.

"So we need you to tell us anything that could be important," Eisuke said. "Please."

Clarke frowned, concentrating. "The only places that we went for cases that he seemed to know about were pubs, unless you count New Cross Learning."

"New Cross Learning was also the only place where anyone recognized him," Forrester said. "Well, later on, of course, from the papers, but we never ran into any of his neighbors or a store clerk he'd spoken to, or anything like that. And he never tried to speak to anyone, either, even when he knew about them."

"Kept to himself, ne?" Heiji said, quietly. And then, "The pubs thing is weird."

Kaito had to cut that false lead off fast. "Not really," he said, in Japanese. "They're good places to find criminal activity. If I were trying to find trouble, that's where I'd start."

"Do you still have case files, maybe, from the cases when he recognized a person or a place?" Eisuke asked. "We think he's probably starting in familiar locations, so it couldn't hurt to have some to hand."

"We can't just give those to you!" Clarke said. "Those are case files, they have names and addresses and-"

"Then, just the addresses?" Heiji pressed.

Forrester looked at Clarke. "What harm could it do, really?"

Clarke scowled. "Fine. Chaudhry, go get them-"

"What are you doing trying to order me around?" Chaudhry snapped. "You've only been here a half-dozen months longer than me, and we're the same bloody rank."

Clarke scowled, and opened her mouth to reply, but Hashimoto spoke first.

"Actually, I'll take them to the filing room with me and get the addresses," Hashimoto said. "I'd like to speak with them a bit more before we send them off."

Heiji glanced at Shinichi. "You up to coming?"

Kaito gave Heiji an incredulous look. "You're asking him?"

"Good point," Heiji said. "Conan, we're gonna go talk with Officer Hashimoto. You stay with the nice officers for just a little bit, and then we'll go back to the hotel so you can rest."

"See if I call you next time we get a serial killer in Tokyo," Shinichi spat after them in Japanese.

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A/N: Warnings for discussion, albeit not always in technical terms, of dissociation, flashbacks, grounding techniques, and PTSD. As mentioned in the opening note, also a statement that gets misconstrued as casual racism. Also, significant injury to a seeming child.

I took advantage of the characters' experiences and limited knowledge to arrange Eisuke's misconception about why Forrester says Kaito and Saguru look alike, because it is somewhat important to the plot that the boys not figure quite everything about the connection between Kaito and Saguru out at this point. That said, I'm sorry if anyone finds my choice of how Eisuke misinterprets it offensive-I think it' makes sense, given the kind of experiences he would have had in a relatively suburban-to-rural part of Virginia, but I'm aware that some people are wary and/or outright disapproving of writers portraying discrimination they don't experience (and I am not Asian).

If you left me a review last time, I'm planning to catch up on replies over the next week! Stupid cold last week got me behind schedule...