A/N: Thank you guys for your patience! Thanks to the hiatus, I was actually able to resurrect the chapter buffer, if only a little-next week's chapter is written already, ha!

Just so you know, justjoy actually wrote the h/c scenario I suggested back in Chapter 2-it's called "on balance" and is on AO3, Tumblr and FFN; please go read it and give her all the wonderful feedback.

As always, warnings are in the end note, though I'm gonna frontload one of them again-someone other than the POV character at the time has a flashback in this chapter. The end note has more details on the specific circumstances and what section of text to avoid if that's not something you're comfortable reading. Also, as always, miladyRanger is perpetually the best beta and neither this chapter nor this fic would exist without her. To be perfectly accurate, some parts of the second section's dialogue are either hers or are things I only came up with because she poked me in the right direction. We've been working on that section for a while...

Chapter 33

KChapter 33

Kaito sat back against the leatherette seat of the cab, wincing at the plasticky squeak of the material under his shifting weight, and snapped his phone shut. Persuading a police officer to stop giving out information about a case, even a closed one, was an uphill battle, especially when they saw you as a kid and you barely spoke their language. At least he'd gotten Clarke, who was hostile but reasonable, instead of Chaudry, who seemed to hate Hakuba on principle, or Forrester, who Kaito suspected thought the lot of them were kids playing dress-up.

Hakuba had given the cab driver an address, but that honestly hadn't meant anything to Kaito. He didn't know London, and probably wouldn't get to know it anytime soon. They were pretty much fleeing London; that was going to make return trips awkward at best. Hakuba could probably come back safely-he had an excuse, what with his fabricated heritage and his adoptive extended family in the city. But Kaito would probably have to wait until he was a professional magician and could get someplace in London to book him.

Well, Kaito didn't really like London that much anyhow. Though he had to admit that he was probably basing that on the fact that his visit had been, for practical reasons, limited to a lot of the least impressive parts of the city.

Which, a glance out the window told him, was exactly where they were now.

It shouldn't have surprised him. It didn't, really. But there was some part of him that couldn't reconcile it, not with Hakuba actually here and present and acting like himself, all straight posture and careful reserve. Even though they'd guessed that Hakuba was living somewhere rough; even though Kaito had known for a while that "Hakuba" as they knew him was a facade and probably cultivated to fit with what people expected of the Inspector-General's child.

The cab squealed to a stop in front of a plain-looking apartment building. It wasn't in good repair-there was rust on the fire escape, and the paint was flaking in a few places, but it wasn't as dodgy-looking as Kaito had feared. Some of the nearby buildings, though, made Kaito glad he hadn't brought Shinichi along. They looked exactly like the kinds of places the Heisei Holmes might find a corpse.

Or, maybe they were all inhabited by older people who couldn't afford home repairs or lawn care and thought graffitti gave the exteriors a certain panache. They might not all be abandoned.

Still, Kaito didn't envy the cab driver his time waiting outside the building.

Swallowing, Kaito followed Hakuba into the building, up a few flights of stairs, and down a hallway lit by a few naked lightbulbs, until Hakuba paused at one of the doors and took out a set of keys.

"So, you're going to bother with keys?" Kaito joked uneasily, feeling nervous at the whole situation and oddly exposed in the badly-lit, strange, corridor. It was either humor, Poker Face, or starting to fiddle with playing cards, and, really, any of them would tell Hakuba how he was feeling.

"Why pick the lock when I don't have to?" Hakuba said. "Besides, we're in a rush, and this is a bit faster." He twisted the key in the lock, pushed the door open, and strode through.

The door opened into a main room, lit by sunlight filtering through crookedly-hung Venetian blinds on the only window to pool on the laminate flooring. Hakuba flicked a switch, and a few weak ceiling fixtures lit the apartment further, making it possible to see that the far side of the room opened to a small kitchen, and a door on one wall was likely to a bathroom.

The kitchen, as far as Kaito could see, had the standard appliances-a stove and a refrigerator-albeit ones that had seen better days. But the rest of the apartment was painfully bare. There was a futon, or something like one, in one corner. In another, a scratched-up computer sat on an upturned cardboard box, with a chair pulled up to it. Some papers were scattered on the floor nearby, and some clothes were stacked in neat piles around a bag below the window. And that was it.

Kaito glanced at Hakuba, and bit his lip. There were a lot of things he wanted to say, but most of them, he knew, weren't likely to be taken well.

"It's a safehouse," Hakuba said, starting across the room. "It only needed to be functional."

"When you were in America-" Kaito began.

Hakuba cut him off. "I told Hondou-san my apartment was so empty because I was still moving in. He believed me."

"Are you telling me you bought the furniture in your apartment for Eisuke?" Kaito pressed, not sure if he found that endearing or worrying.

Hakuba, who was gathering the papers from near the upturned box, either didn't hear him, or was ignoring him. Kaito suspected the latter.

When he did finally speak to Kaito, it was to say, "Go through the fridge and the cupboards. Gather anything perishable."

"I'm not your maid, Hakuba-san," Kaito snapped, out of pure reflex.

"You act as if I won't be helping," Hakuba said, raising an eyebrow, as he set the papers down on the stovetop and pulled a trashbag out of a cupboard beneath the sink. He didn't wait for Kaito to respond before starting to go through the contents of his cupboards.

Kaito sighed and opened the fridge. There were a few bruised apples and a container of some sort of casserole on the shelves, and some deli meat and cheese in one of the drawers. Kaito got all of them out, and Hakuba swept them into the bag, then set it aside.

Hakuba glanced at the papers on the stove, took a breath, and then ducked back into the living room. He returned a second later with a slightly worn messenger bag over his shoulder.

"I can't leave the computer here, or dispose of it safely," Hakuba said. "I'll have to bring it."

"But not the clothes?" Kaito asked.

"There's no point in bringing them," Hakuba said, reaching up into one of the cupboards and getting down a frying pan and a box of matches.

Kaito stared.

"It's a gas stove," Hakuba said.

"Yes, but what are you cooking?" Kaito said.

Hakuba looked at him as though he'd just said something stupid, then started folding the papers up, accordion-style, and setting them upright in the frying pan.

Oh, Kaito thought.

Hakuba inhaled, struck a match, and then ran it along the tops of the papers, setting them alight. The top edges of the papers curled up and turned black within the flames almost instantly, soon flaking into ashes, but it took a while for the flames to move downward. There was almost no smoke, but Kaito could still smell burning.

Hakuba still had the smoking match in one hand, the other arm covering his mouth and nose, and his eyes were locked on the burning papers with an intensity that made Kaito a little uncomfortable.

When the papers were finally ashes in the pan, Kaito ventured, "Okay, let's get going."

Hakuba didn't react.

"Hakuba?" Kaito asked, a bit more loudly.

Hakuba's eyes were still on the pan. Kaito was really sure that wasn't what he was seeing, anymore, though. Kaito could hear his breathing, though, and it was too loud, and gasping, and it just...didn't sound right.

Kaito did not know how to deal with this. He didn't know anything about...okay, so maybe he had once or twice in the past suddenly remembered dropping Nightmare without quite realizing that he was remembering it. But that didn't qualify him for getting someone else out of a flashback.

Even when the person was, in fact, in some senses, him.

"Okay, Hakuba-san, I don't know where you think are, or what you think is happening, but it's definitely not-" Kaito broke off, and remembered the detectives speculating about Hakuba and coping mechanisms. Careful not to make too much noise, he took out his phone, and checked the time, then rattled off the date, from the year down to the minute.

"You're in your apartment, Hakuba-san, in London, and we're getting ready to leave," Kaito continued.

"Oh," Hakuba said softly, and finally moved, the arm that had been covering his mouth falling slightly so that his hand now rested a bit to the side of his breastbone. He rubbed at his chest with the edge of his thumb, just a bit, eyes still far away, before flicking the now-blackened match into the pan and dumping its contents into the garbage bag.

He tied off the garbage bag, his eyes never meeting Kaito's. "We'll need to take this to the dumpsters around back."

"Are you okay?" Kaito asked.

"Follow me," Hakuba said, which was clearly his way of saying he didn't want to talk about it.

Kaito didn't like it, but now clearly wasn't the time to test Hakuba's boundaries. If they got him home, he could talk to the Inspector-General, or maybe even an actual therapist, about whatever it was.

Unless it was trauma from being KID, in which case he'd still probably end up talking to Kaito, but maybe he could do it of his own volition instead of because Kaito had seen him have a flashback and he felt like he owed an explanation.

That sounded better for everyone, really, so Kaito decided to let the subject lie. He still had other questions, though.

"Where'd you get a computer, anyhow?" he asked, as they left the apartment.

"International students at universities tend to leave behind a lot of very usable items because they can't fit them in their luggage," Hakuba said. "I took advantage. As far as I can tell, this laptop was mostly discarded because it was a bit scratched and it had gotten an easy-to-remove virus."

"Huh," Kaito said. "Are you sure it's all you want to take with you?"

"I don't really want to take it," Hakuba said. "But there's too much that could be retrieved from it if it's found by the wrong people. And I don't want anything else, really."

Hakuba lead them down a different staircase, to a metal door that opened onto an alley. He opened the door, tossed the bag outside, and headed back up the stairs.

"Shouldn't you have put it in the trashcan?" Kaito asked.

"That would positively identify it as belonging to someone from the building," Hakuba said, opening a door in the stairwell to what Kaito hoped was the first floor. "The squatters from the nearby buildings sometimes leave garbage here; I'm hoping it gets mistaken for theirs if anyone comes searching."

"You've really thought this through," Kaito said.

"The ability to think these things through is what's kept me safe," Hakuba replied. "We should return to the cab. I think we've kept the driver waiting long enough."

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Yamato Kansuke wouldn't trade being a police officer for anything, but there were days when he was pretty glad to get off at the end of the day, and this was one of them. He didn't like admitting it, even to himself, but he eventually started feeling it when he had to be on his leg too long—and a whole shift spent canvassing the mountains for robbery suspects counted as too long, twice over again. At least he'd gotten to stick to the foot of the mountain, instead of trying to do the nature hike up to the summit—he did not envy the rookie officers who had to search up there.

If there was anything lucky at all about that avalanche, it was that it had happened after he'd been promoted far enough that he was no longer one of the officers who got sent out in every search party. Because then he either would've ended up doing a lot more crap that his physical therapist would yell at him for than he already did, or some well-meaning superior would've tried to cut him a break. Unfortunately, the latter scenario would've almost certainly resulted in some jerk implying he couldn't do his job anymore—and then he would've ended up punching them, and getting probation, since Morofushi and Uehara hadn't been around to hold him back in those days.

So, really, it was all for the best that he'd had some rank at the time.

Still, rank or not, it had been a long day, his leg was aching, and he was really, really glad to be off-duty.

He was at home, now, recliner tilted back, his cane propped up against the arm of the chair. The fabric was worn but the cushioning was still as soft as ever, and he could feel himself falling asleep. He didn't try to fight it. He could wake himself up and go through all the effort to get into his proper bed, but what was the point? If he was tired now, he might as well sleep now.

Well, maybe setting an alarm would be good, but his alarm was in his bedroom…

The next thing he was aware of was sharp, insistent knocking. Kansuke sat straight up, glancing toward the nearest window. It was not quite pitch black, but close enough-there was a faint suggestion of moonlight, and a few visible stars, but nothing that even looked like dawn.

What the h***, he thought, getting to his feet and grabbing his cane, hoping it didn't come down to using the thing as a bludgeon again. Generally, people who came pounding on doors in the small hours of the morning were not good news, but he really didn't want a fight right now.

He'd put a lot of effort into being able to move quietly again after his injury, but he wasn't perfect at it. His bad leg was still a bit unreliable about how heavily it fell, sometimes, and the rubber tip on the cane had the audacity to squeak. Still, he was apparently having a good night, because he made it to the door without a sound, and he was able to hear what was happening outside of it.

"...knock again…"

"...shut up…"

"...sleeping…"

Multiple voices, hushed, but weirdest of all, they sounded like kids. But on the bright side, there weren't edges of threat to their tones, and if they had weapons, they were keeping them quiet.

Again, what the h***, he thought. And then, decided to do the thing Yui would probably yell at him for, and find out what was actually going on.

He opened the door, flicking on the porch light at the same time, just in case. If they were hostile, blinding them for a few seconds would give him an advantage.

Superintendent-General Hattori's son stood there, blinking and grimacing, holding one hand up to shield his eyes. The other hand was wrapped around Edogawa Conan, who was sickly-pale and asleep on his shoulder. There were a few other people with him-all kids, so far as Kansuke could tell-but the porch light wasn't bright enough to show them all.

"What the h***!" he demanded. Saying it out loud felt good.

"Uh, hi," Hattori said, still blinking. "So, we were, uh, working on the case-uh, your case, that is-and, um, it got a little complicated, and I remembered that you wanted updates, and-"

"Get to the point, Hattori-san," said one of the kids Kansuke didn't know, with an air of exasperated fondness.

"How much do you want updates, is the point?" asked another unfamiliar kid. There was something that reminded Kansuke of Morofushi right before he pounced on a suspect in his smile, and he looked uncannily like an older Conan. Or, come to think of it, Kudou with his hair styled differently, based on the news articles Kansuke had dug up after that talk with Heiji a few weeks back. He squinted at the kid a little, wondering if he was in fact Kudou in a very haphazard disguise.

"Not enough to wake up this early," he answered warily.

"Sorry," Hattori said, looking decidedly sheepish. "We were going to come here in the morning and talk to you, after we at least slept a little at the hotel, but the taxi ride was...rough, and after we struck out at, like, four hotels…"

"Seriously?" Kansuke asked.

"They were all full of foreign tourists and business conventions," said the kid who definitely wasn't Kudou. The only resemblance this one bore to Conan was the glasses. "Also, the third one apparently recognized his," he glanced toward maybe-Kudou, "mom's credit card and refused to let us in."

"I'm not surprised," Hattori huffed.

"She performed up here, who says it was her fault-maybe the crowd got rowdy or-" maybe-Kudou protested.

"Okay, what about tryin' to search for a hotel online or somethin'?" Kansuke asked. "There's sites for for that, Uehara used one when we went to Tokyo."

Hattori blinked. "Oh, yeah, that woulda been a good idea, huh?"

"I can't believe none of us thought of that," maybe-Kudou said, physically hitting himself in the forehead.

"Well, we are kind of jet-lagged," glasses-kid said. "But still…"

"Okay, so you came to Nagano, forgot the internet existed, and ended up on my front porch in the middle of the night," Kansuke said. "Great."

"We didn't forget it existed!" Hattori exclaimed, indignant. "We..jus'...forgot that one specific thing ya could do wit' it, that's all."

"I mean, we remembered to use it to call taxis!" maybe-Kudou pointed out.

"Is that supposed to impress him?" a fifth voice asked sardonically.

Come to think, Kansuke could just make out the edges of a tall figure behind maybe-Kudou, in the combination of the light from his porchlight and the streetlight some distance away. He couldn't make out features, though, but the voice…

Kansuke didn't know Superintendent-General Hakuba's kid all that well, was the thing. He could count the number of times they'd met on one hand, and most of those times, Saguru hadn't been that talkative. While Kansuke had wanted to get to know the kid Tsuyoshi was so over the moon about a bit better, he'd also known enough not to push. But the kid had still made an impression.

Kansuke didn't know that many British-Japanese in the first place, and the ones he did know had been born and raised in Japan. So Saguru's accent-standard Japanese, slowly coloring with Tokyo dialect as Saguru lived there longer, but always just slightly marked by patterns of emphasis and pronunciation that belonged to the kind of English used in those foreign period dramas Yui occasionally watched-stuck in his mind, just because it was so distinctive.

So it went without saying that he recognized Saguru's voice almost immediately.

"Saguru?" he asked. "What the-" He broke off, then, because eventually after repeating the same phrase so many times, a person just started feeling silly.

"Hakuba-san!" maybe-Kudou snapped, wheeling around to glare at him. "You could have at least announced yourself-or-or-something!"

"At the very least, startling the man who Hattori and Kudou warned us uses his cane as a weapon might not have been your best move yet," glasses-kid put in.

Edogawa stirred slightly on Hattori's shoulder and made a soft moaning sound, and Hattori glared over his shoulder at the other three. "Shut it! You'll wake 'im up!" he hissed.

Glasses-kid's expression turned wide-eyed and guilty, and his mouth snapped shut. Hakuba, still largely covered in shadow, flinched and backed up, slightly.

"Doubt that's happening," maybe-Kudou murmured, looking decidedly worried.

Case update's one thing, but they solved the case, Kansuke thought. In the middle of the night, and I have no idea how, or why they decided to come here, and the ones I can actually see look like h***.

He stepped back from the doorway. "Get inside."

A/N: Warnings: in the first half, further discussion of poor self-care and general mental health issues, also, depiction of someone having a flashback (depiction starts at "Hakuba still had" and ends at "into the garbage bag.") Nothing much of note in the second half.

If you're wondering what set off that flashback of Hakuba's, you as a reader do technically have enough information to guess. Go back and read that tiny bit of Hakuba POV at the end of Riddle in Reverse, and it should be pretty obvious why he doesn't react well to the smell of smoke. Also, since Kansuke's point of view makes it impossible to explain in-text, no, I didn't do anything that serious to Shinichi, but a massive physical transformation on top of two days of poor sleep is going to have some physical repercussions.

ETA: I feel this should be obvious, but just in case it isn't, I am not a mental health professional, and given that Kaito flat-out says he doesn't know what he's doing, I am not making any sort of recommendation about "what you should do if someone is having a flashback."

I'm sorry if I haven't replied to your review yet; I'm a bit behind. It doesn't mean I appreciate them one bit less, though.