To be honest, I'm pretty unhappy with how this turned out, but we'll see, I guess. Basically this is just one of those "they fall in love so slowly that neither of them realizes it" fics, because those are really cute.

Warnings include shounen-ai, possible grammar mistakes / errors, and Shinichi and Kaito being idiots as usual.

Hope you enjoy! - Luna

Like Coming Home

Shinichi is standing in the middle of the interior decorating section of the local department store, agonizing over whether Kaito will like navy, burgundy, or cream curtains best while Kaito peruses the lamp selection several aisles away, when he realizes just how married he and Kaito are. Specifically, that they are the epitome of married.

The thought makes him drop the sky blue cotton canvas curtains he's holding, scramble for his phone, and call Ran.

She picks up right before the call goes to voicemail, sounding muzzy and irritated. It's unsurprising, considering it's nine in the morning on a Sunday. "Shinichi, what do you want?" she demands, voice still raspy, and Shinichi half-shrieks, "Ran, Kaito and I are really married."

A sales clerk skulking about the rug display, doing something particularly horrendous to a hideous orange rug the size of a small country, turns to shoot him a pointed glare. Shinichi waves her off and cradles his phone closer to his ear. He has bigger problems than an annoyed middle-aged woman who probably upholsters chairs in her spare time.

There's a silence, and then Ran says, sounding bored, "Is… that surprising?"

"Yes," Shinichi hisses. "It's – we – we're shopping for curtains and lamps right now. There is literally nothing more domestic than that."

"Uh, yeah. We've been trying to tell you this for the past ten years," Ran yawns, unimpressed at Shinichi's pain. It's one of her most common responses to Shinichi's crises (the other two are threatening violence and rolling her eyes exasperatedly).

"We?" Shinichi claws at the air, desperate for some way to stop feeling as if he's been tied up in a gunny sack and thrown into the Pacific Ocean. "Who's we?"

"You know. Me, Hattori-kun, Kazuha-chan, Aoko-chan, Hakuba-kun, Satou-san, Takagi-san, Inspector Megure, your mother, your father, my mother, my father, which is saying a lot –"

"Oh my God." Shinichi bashes his head against a truly horrifying brocade curtain-and-bedsheet set. "Did literally everyone else realize we're, like, pretty much a couple? Minus the – the sex?"

"Shinichi, you two share a bed. How is any of this news to you?" Ran yawns again, louder and more persistent this time, and then hangs up, because she's a terrible friend who doesn't care when Shinichi is three seconds from a breakdown.

Shinichi stares listlessly at the curtains and tries not to fall into the fetal position.

This all started ten or so years ago, when Shinichi was sixteen in mind and six in body and generally pretty unhappy with his life and Kaito was still angsty about the injustice of his father's murder and devoted most of his time to planning heists. They were stuck in a strange relationship founded on half-loathing and half-admiration that resulted in a lot of banter and reluctant collaborative efforts to take down terrorist groups.

Things changed, however, the night when Shinichi went to retrieve a stray transmitter from the rooftop of a gallery after a heist and found Kid crying into his cape over his recent breakup. While Shinichi initially sort of panicked, he did end up trying to cheer him up. After all, it's a scientifically proven fact that anyone with half a heart will try to comfort someone who's just gone through a breakup, regardless of who that someone is. Or at least, that's what Shinichi thinks.

Anyway, Shinichi patted him stiffly on the back through the whole ordeal, offering a variety of very mechanical comforting phrases, such as "She's not worth it" and "You deserve so much better." After about two hours of this, Kid finally stopped wallowing in his misery long enough to clasp Shinichi's hand in his own, thank him profusely, and fly him home. Predictably, Ran threw a fit about her darling little Conan-kun staying out for so long and set a curfew of about eight o'clock (but she forgot about it soon enough).

Shinichi didn't think much of it at the time. He didn't immediately notice anything different in his relationship with Kid, except that maybe it was a little less fraught than before. That is, he didn't notice anything until Kid swooped through his bedroom window after a heist and asked to borrow a t-shirt (something about losing his spare change of clothes?) and Shinichi directed him to Mouri's closet without even questioning it.

The strangeness of the situation didn't even occur to him until Kid had disappeared into Mouri's room and Shinichi had retreated back into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He spent a few minutes staring at his reflection in the mirror, internally debating whether he should be concerned or just go with it, before eventually just shrugging and reaching for his toothbrush.

When he returned to his room, Kid was waiting for him, perched on the windowsill beside Shinichi's bed. He looked ridiculous, wearing one of Mouri's older Okino Yoko shirts, his monocle, and crisply pressed dress pants with the rest of his uniform tucked under one arm. It was weirdly endearing.

"Thanks for the shirt, tantei-kun," Kid chirped with Shinichi paused in the doorway to stare at him. Shinichi rolled his eyes and turned off the lights.

"Go away. It's past my bedtime," he sniped, and Kid laughed before dropping silently out the window. Shinichi spent the rest of the night lying awake and wondering how Kid had survived the drop without his hang glider.

A few weeks passed uneventfully, filled with the usual amount of murder, extortion, bus hijackings, etc., until Shinichi walked into Poirot one morning with Ran and found Kaitou Kid sitting in a corner booth, drinking oversugared coffee and preening across the restaurant at Shinichi.

Despite Ran's confusion, Shinichi excused himself to half-run across the café to demand an explanation. "What are you doing here?" he half-shrieked, flailing a bit, and Kid stretched out languorously, looking like someone who belonged on the front cover of a magazine or a photoshoot of some kind.

"I just wanted to see how my darling little tantei-kun was doing. Is that so wrong?" he cooed, clasping his hands in front of his chest, and Shinichi huffed in a transparent attempt to distract from how he flushed.

"That's a reason, not an excuse," he grunted, inspecting Kid's coffee mug with more concentration than necessary. "What if I turned you in?"

Kid laughed uproariously, as if he doubted Shinichi would ever do that. (Which was, actually, true, because Shinichi had no intention of turning Kid in anymore, but that wasn't the point. It was the principle of the thing.) "Oh, tantei-kun, you crack me up," he sighed once he'd stopped laughing, and Shinichi pouted until Ran called him over.

It wasn't till later, right before he got into the bath, that Shinichi found the card Kid had slipped into the pocket of his jeans. Tantei-kun, it read, followed by a truly terrifying string of lopsided hearts, call me so we can hang out~! xxx Kuroba Kaito. Underneath the messy print was a phone number and a doodle of either a hydrogen atom or a smiley face (it was hard to tell).

Shinichi scoffed at it, but he made sure to put it in a safe place. It wasn't as if he was going to actually call Kid, but who knew. Maybe it would come in handy someday.

It did, in fact, come in handy after a particularly challenging case in which Shinichi had been unable to stop the culprit from driving off a cliff and dying horribly. Shinichi sat on his bed and stared at the walls until his vision blurred. He found the card on his bedside table, read call me so we can hang out over about eight times, and, before he could stop himself, texted Kid Can you come over?

Kid arrived twenty minutes later, dressed in a pair of worn jeans and smelling like a mixture of night air and mint shampoo. He clambered through the window, took one look at Shinichi curled in on himself, and sat down heavily at the foot of Shinichi's bed. He didn't speak, just sat.

They sat like that for an hour. Two hours. Three hours.

Eventually, Shinichi sighed. His throat was dry from disuse. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Kid reached out to ruffle Shinichi's hair, which, under any other circumstances, would've annoyed Shinichi to no end. "Anything for you." And then he smiled, heartfelt and genuine and strangely comforting, and vaulted back out the window. He never brought up Shinichi's moment of weakness, not even when he in uniform and taunting Shinichi from the top of the clock tower a few days later.

Shinichi called him a lot more often, after that.

He'd never admit it, and certainly not to Kid, but Shinichi actually rather enjoyed having a friend who was so far removed from his usual circles. It made him more open, almost, since there were no repercussions to his everyday life. He told Kid about how hard it was to be Conan and see how heartbroken Ran was, how he hated how nobody took him seriously, how he'd miss all the friends he'd made when he got his body back.

Conversely, Kid told him about his quest to find Pandora, about his father who had been murdered and his ex-girlfriend who was also his childhood friend and his sort-of friend who claimed to be a witch. It was both bemusing and oddly satisfying to see that Kid was a person, not just an enigma in a cape and monocle, but a person who had hopes and fears (although Shinichi privately thought his ichthyophobia was ridiculous).

Also, somewhere along the line, Kid became Kuroba and Kuroba became Kaito, and Kaito was suddenly there for every important milestone in Shinichi's life, including when Shinichi finally got the majority of the Black Organization's operatives behind bars and recovered his body and was rejected by Ran. And Shinichi was there for Kaito, too, was there when Kaito finally took down Snake and his gang and destroyed Pandora and avenged his father.

It got to the point that when college entrance exam results came back and both Shinichi and Kaito got into Touto University, Shinichi didn't hesitate to demand they room together. Even though Hattori had also gotten into Touto.

This earned him a lot of angry shouting from Hattori, who wanted to fight Kaito for the title of best friend and went so far as to purchase a pitchfork to go wave at Kaito. Shinichi eventually managed to placate him, but Hattori was still less than pleased.

"He just came out of nowhere," he complained one afternoon, when they were investigating a series of vampire theme murders in Nagoya. "I was here before he was." He kicked at the corpse a little, to Shinichi's horror.

"Kaito is different," Shinichi responded, ignoring Hattori when he mouthed "Kaito" with a just-ate-a-lemon face. "He's a really good guy, Hattori."

"Yeah," Hattori grumbled, rubbing at his neck, "but you, like, never shut up about him." He scowled, crossing his arms over his chest indifferently. "You're obsessed, Kudou."

"Because he's – look, Hattori, it's not a competition between who I like more. Kaito is just different," Shinichi said, trying and failing to find a way to explain his relationship with Kaito. "I'm not saying he's better than you, but he's…"

"Just better," Hattori had finished sourly, but he was regarding Shinichi very carefully. Something had changed behind his eyes, and he nodded slowly as comprehension dawned. Shinichi didn't know what he was comprehending. "Oooh, wait. I get it. Never mind."

"What?" Shinichi felt he was missing something, but Hattori just shook his head and refused to bring it up again.

Even though Hattori was weird about it, the roommate situation turned out fine. Shinichi and Kaito moved into a dorm equidistant from the criminal justice lectures halls (Shinichi) and the performing arts buildings (Kaito) and spent an inordinate amount of time arguing over who kept leaving their socks on the floor (it was always Kaito, Shinichi swore), but for the most part, they coexisted peacefully. Kaito was a much better cook than Shinichi, who had survived on a diet of take-out and instant ramen ever since he'd started to live alone, and Shinichi was one of those weird people who actively enjoyed cleaning things (it was calming, okay), so they didn't starve to death and/or contract a fatal virus from radioactive mold.

Although Shinichi did notice something strange about the way the other undergrads seemed to view Kaito and him. There was one distinct time he was skimming through an assigned reading in the common room when a girl from one of his criminal psychology lectures asked him, "Where's your boyfriend, Kudou-kun?"

Blinking, Shinichi squinted at her. "Who?"

"You know," she said, rolling her eyes as if he was kidding, "that cute guy you're always with. Your roommate. What's his name, Kuroda?"

"Kuroba," Shinichi automatically corrected before he frowned at her. "He's not my boyfriend."

"Oh!" Eyebrows lifting, the girl slanted her head at him before her eyes took on a considering gleam. "Is he single, then?"

Feeling a prick of irritation, Shinichi stuffed his packet into his bag and stood up. "I don't know. Why don't you ask him yourself?" He stomped out of the room with probably more anger than the situation warranted, but he was feeling unexpectedly annoyed.

Later, when he told Kaito what had happened as they washed dishes side by side at the kitchen sink, Kaito just laughed. "Aw, did you defend my honor, Shinichi-kun?" he sing-songed, batting his eyelashes as he clutched demurely at Shinichi's bicep with a sudsy hand, and Shinichi rolled his eyes and shook him free.

"Not at all," he answered, and Kaito sighed dramatically and gave a speech about how friends were supposed to stick up for friends and wasn't Shinichi the worst. The situation devolved into a splash fight, and Shinichi forgot about the whole debacle within a week.

The rest of university passed without much fanfare. Kaito continued to leave socks in every conceivable place and Shinichi got asked about his "boyfriend" about eight more times, but nothing of else particular note happened. There was one time Shinichi set the dorm kitchen on fire while trying to bake a birthday cake for Kaito, but to this day, he likes to pretend it didn't happen and there wasn't a huge building-wide evacuation that cost him his dignity and everyone's respect.

And after they graduated and secured jobs (Shinichi signed on as a detective for the Tokyo metropolitan police and Kaito landed a contract with a local theater to perform biweekly magic shows), neither of them saw anything wrong with continuing to live together. Why fix what wasn't broken, right?

Since Shinichi didn't want to continue living off his parents' wealth and move back to the old Kudou estate, the two of them chose a tiny apartment next to a happy little park where preschoolers liked to play and the occasional passerby walked their dog. The apartment was cramped, the kitchen barely big enough to fit a refrigerator and the single bedroom bleeding into the living room, but it was also peaceful and cheerful and (most importantly) in their price range, so it was good enough.

The single bedroom, though, meant Shinichi and Kaito had to share a bed, which was. Well. An interesting experience.

Because more often than not, Shinichi woke up with Kaito wrapped around him like a particularly cuddly octopus. It was kind of strange, but also surprisingly comfortable, so Shinichi allowed it. He found himself staying in bed as long as possible just to feel Kaito's slow, even breaths against his neck and Kaito's steady heartbeat thumping against his back. Which was weird, but when had Shinichi's relationship with Katio ever been not weird?

The first time she came to visit them, Ran did a double take as she stared. "Wow," she said, blinking at the kotatsu Shinichi had parked in the living room and the large futon set up in the bedroom. "This is… cozy."

Shinichi sighed. "We've just recently graduated from being starving college students. It was the best we could do."

"I know," Ran agreed, staring at the futon with raised eyebrows. "But you guys are… sleeping together?"

"Don't say it like that." Feeling self-conscious, Shinichi looked away. "It's not like there's enough room for two futons," he mumbled. Ran opened her mouth to say something, but that was the moment Kaito emerged from the bathroom (which was the size of a small fruit crate).

"Oh, hey, Mouri-san," he greeted, smiling widely as he dried his hands off on his handkerchief and loped across the room to sling an arm around Shinichi's neck. Shinichi tried not to blush underneath Ran's scrutiny. "We're living like kings, aren't we?"

"Exactly," Ran nodded, and seemed to drop the subject. She did, however, keep sending Shinichi knowing looks, which was as annoying as it was confusing.

Work, on the other hand, was good. Shinichi, who already knew a few of the senior officers, fit in well in division one. The fact that he was already excellent at solving cases also contributed to his smooth transition and earned him recognition among his colleagues.

He didn't understand why so many of his fellow officers seemed to think he was dating Kaito, though. The few (okay, many) times Kaito dropped off his lunch at the station or stopped by for a visit were apparently enough to cement the idea that Shinichi and Kaito were dating.

Shinichi was unfortunate enough to discover this when the division was buzzing with the news of Takagi and Satou's wedding, which, in Shinichi's opinion, had been a long, long time coming.

"So who are you taking as your plus one, Kudou-kun?" one of Shinichi's coworkers asked as Shinichi thumbed through a case file.

Stopping to consider (it wasn't as if he knew many people who weren't in relationships, so…), Shinichi began, "Uh –" but Shiratori, who had been listening from his own desk instead of actually working, jumped in.

"Who do you think, Tanaka?" he sighed, shaking his head in disgust as if Tanaka had just tried to deny the existence of gravity. "He's going with Kuroba-kun. Anything else would be cheating."

"Wait, what –" Shinichi frowned, but Tanaka and Shiratori were nodding knowingly at him.

"Oh, right," Tanaka nodded, sounding chastised. "I totally forgot. Sorry, Kudou-kun, I totally forgot you're practically married. When are you going to pop the question, anyway? Maybe you should do it at Takagi-kun and Satou-san's wedding."

"We're really not like that," Shinichi tried to tell him, but Tanaka just continued nodding as he returned to his desk, Shiratori clicking his tongue meaningfully.

Incidentally, Shinichi did take Kaito to the wedding as his plus one (but as a friend) and when Kaito happened to catch the bouquet Satou threw after the ceremony, there was a collective chanting for Shinichi to propose, but that was neither here nor there. Kaito found it amusing, at least.

A few more years passed. Shinichi was promoted to assistant inspector and Kaito started getting hired for splashy shows at birthday parties, but nothing changed at home, at least. Kaito showed Shinichi all his new tricks, even when they hadn't been perfected yet, Shinichi burned water a total of twelve times and had to throw out an unsalvageable pan, and they shared a bed every night except the four nights Shinichi spent in the hospital after chasing down a serial killer and getting shot for his trouble. (Kaito stayed at his bedside through the whole ordeal, even when the nurses politely and then not-so-politely told him to leave.)

And then one dreary Tuesday morning, Kaito slapped a real estate magazine on their beat-up kitchen table during a breakfast of miso soup and rice and said, "Let's look through this."

Shinichi paused, chopsticks halfway to his mouth, before a feeling of complete and utter despair settled in his stomach like a barbell. He swallowed. Looked away. "You – you want to move out?" The words tasted wrong, so wrong, on his tongue. "Okay, I guess, I mean, I'll be fine, you can… do whatever."

Kaito stared at him for a full two seconds, mouth falling open, before he burst out laughing. "You – oh my God, no. This place is too small, and we can afford better. We're moving together, Shinichi." He said it like a fact, like it was an unchangeable truth of the universe that they would live together until the end of time, and that relieved Shinichi enough to roll his eyes and flip through the magazine until they found a house in Beika that suited both their needs.

The first night they moved into their new three-bedroom, two-bath house, Shinichi tried to sleep alone. He really did. But the bed was too big or the windows were too wide or something was wrong, and he ended up staring at the ceiling until six in the morning.

After that, he demanded to sleep with Kaito. Kaito teased him for it, but from the bruised-looking shadows underneath his own eyes, Shinichi doubted he minded at all.

There came a point when Shinichi realized that the decorations they'd brought from their old apartment were not nearly enough to fill their new house, and thus he had dragged Kaito out to do some shopping for curtains and lamps and maybe a coffee table for the living room.

Which leads up to now.

Shinichi is zoning out at a set of silk drapes when Kaito rounds the corner, holding two incredibly ugly lamps made of what looks like dried cornhusks. "Hey, Shinichi, I found these two, but I wanted to…" He draws to a stop when Shinichi doesn't do anything but turn to look at him with dead eyes. "Um, Shinichi? Are you okay?"

"No," Shinichi wails. He grabs at Kaito's shoulders, making crazy eyes. "Kaito, we're married."

Predictably, Kaito laughs and pats Shinichi on the head. How he manages it with the two lamps in his hands, Shinichi will never know. "Sure, Shinichi. Whatever you say."

"No, wait, think about it," Shinichi hisses, clawing at Kaito's collar. "We've been living together for, what, the past eight years?"

"Yeah, because we're, like, best friends –"

"Neither of us has dated anyone since we moved in together," Shinichi cuts in, yanking Kaito closer until they're eye to eye and a lampshade is digging into Shinichi's ribcage. "Neither of us has even had a one-night stand."

"That's not true," Kaito says, but his eyes are going wide. Because Shinichi is right.

"You bring me lunch at work. We share a bed. We're literally shopping for lamps and curtains together," Shinichi continues, feeling simultaneously validated and horrified as Kaito's face goes slack. He jabs his index finger into Kaito's chest. "We are so married."

"Oh," Kaito breathes. "Oh. We – oh."

"Exactly." Shinichi exhales hard, dropping his forehead against Kaito's shoulder. "What are we going to do?"

There's a short pause, and then Kaito says, "Uh, I guess one of us should propose?"

Shinichi's head snaps back up. "What, you want to actually get married?"

Kaito shrugs. "Why not? It's not as if I can imagine living without you, anymore."

"O-Oh." Shinichi's still a bit goggle-eyed, but he sort of understands what Kaito's saying. Their lives are so shaped around each other, so perfectly intertwined, that he can't imagine a life in which he doesn't wake up with Kaito curled around his back and find socks in the living room and bump hips with Kaito while they wash dishes. Kaito has been his constant for the past ten years, and Shinichi – Shinichi never even considered that Kaito wouldn't be there for ten, twenty, thirty more years.

"So, Shinichi," Kaito grins, and it's nine in the morning on a Sunday and he's holding extremely dreadful lamps and there's a sales clerk glaring at them but Shinichi wouldn't change anything, "will you marry me?"

"I think I already did," Shinichi says dryly, and Kaito laughs and sets down the lamps and reaches out to kiss Shinichi, gentle and careful. And it doesn't feel like fireworks or dynamite or explosions like a first kiss is supposed to; if anything, it's soft and warm and comforting, like coming home, and Shinichi finds he rather likes it.

If you're not dead from fluff I have failed in my mission.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this (if you did, please consider leaving me a review!) and I'll see you all soon! - Luna