"Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous."

~Interesting Times by Sir Terry Pratchett

The news that Edogawa Conan, grade-school detective, was in fact Kudo Shinichi, high-school detective, was a shock to many. If it weren't for the weirdness of Conan and the fact that a large number of them had witnessed the child making an emergency transformation into his near-adult self, Division One might not have believed it.

Megure Juzo was not shocked. In fact, he was almost relieved.

He only had one miracle child to worry about.

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The Inspector had seen a fair bit of Kudo Shinichi as the boy had grown up, trailing after his father to crime scenes. Part of the police officer was reluctant to call on an amateur so often to solve difficult cases, but Yuusaku always found the truth. He was more reluctant to allow a kid onto crime scenes, but Yuusaku was insistent that bodies didn't worry his son and that it was a good learning experience for the inquisitive child. In fact, Megure got so used to seeing the growing boy shadowing his father around crime scenes that it was odd to see Yuuskau turn up alone to a crime scene. A nurse, poisoned in a hospital break room. Funny thing was, Yuusaku had already been on the scene when Megure arrived.

It wasn't until after the killer—a grieving widower who blamed the nurse's lack of attention to detail for his wife's death—had been arrested that Yuusaku had quietly confided the reason that he was at the hospital. Megure remembered, with sickening clarity, hearing the report on his CB the previous day.

Traffic collision. Driver not paying attention, on his mobile phone, hit a middle-school kid on a crosswalk. It was an accident, not a homicide, so Megure hadn't attended; he'd driven past the scene on his way somewhere else, vaguely noticing the flashing lights of the ambulance as whoever they'd scraped out of all that blood on the road was loaded in, middle-school girls in sailor uniforms clutching each other and crying.

That night, he stopped by the Kudo home on the pretence of discussing some recent cases, really asking for an update on how Shinichi was. Yukiko was sleeping at the hospital, Yuusaku explained flatly as he stepped out of his study. Before the door closed, Megure got a glimpse of books strewn across the floor; heavy, yellow-paged, covered in forms that were neither kanji nor romaji. What looked like burns scored the floor; had there been a fire?

Whatever the books were, Yuusaku didn't talk about them. Only related clinically that Shinichi's injuries were bad, very bad. He was comatose, on life support. The doctors weren't sure that the twelve-year-old would ever wake up. What was in Yuusaku's eyes, Megure had taken to be grief or fear; the flatness in the writer's voice, he'd taken for the man steeling himself against the imminent loss.

Three days later, there was another suspicious death at the hospital, a patient who'd been on the mend and about to leave suddenly pitching out of a third-floor window. Yuusaku had been there, again, still looking grim, looking shadowed, but on the way out Megure had stopped by Shinichi's room and seen that the boy was awake, chatting animatedly to his mother, complaining about the football he wasn't getting to play with his legs in casts. Doctors and nurses were talking about a miracle recovery. It seemed impossible that a boy with those injuries could survive.

A few months later, Kudo Shinichi was out of the hospital without a scratch on him, as if the accident had never happened. In that time, Megure found himself called to suspicious deaths in or around the hospital roughly twice a week.

A miracle had happened.

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The homicide rate in Beika continued to grow. Suicides rose, too, but not as noticeably as homicides. Sociologists and criminologists scrambled to explain it, but no sensible explanation presented itself. Nothing rational, nothing logical. Just death.

Kudo Yuusaku seemed to find his way to far too many crime scenes ahead of the police. Perhaps it wore him out as much as it was wearing out Division One, because after a year and a half, while watching a weeping triple-murderess be led away, Yuusaku said that he and Yukiko were moving to America. But Shinichi wanted to stay in Japan, and at fourteen he was old enough to do so.

"Please," Yuusaku said quietly, looking at Megure with shadows in his eyes that had lingered ever since the traffic accident, "look out for him, won't you?"

"Of course," Megure said, though he hadn't seen the boy since the hospital, nearly two years ago.

A week later, he took a fall while chasing a suspect and broke several ribs. At his age and weight, he spent a long time in hospital before he got back on the Force, and then spent a long while on desk work. He occasionally heard officers complaining about a nosy, know-it-all kid butting into their cases, but didn't think much of it; lots of kids were nosy know-it-alls.

His first field assignment, once he was cleared to go back out, was pretty straightforward; fly to the US, pick up a criminal who'd been apprehended there, escort him back. Bring the rookie Takagi, who didn't have a new partner yet after his last one had died in a traffic accident. Simple, easy work for both of them.

Then a corpse was found in the toilet, and Kudo Shinichi was standing over it.

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Megure told his superiors that he so often invited an amateur teenager onto crime scenes because Kudo Shinichi, like his father, was always right. 100% of cases solved. No case obstructed, or interfered with, or unsolved because of the kid's involvement. They eventually let him get on with it.

Megure was as happy as any cop to see homicides closed neatly rather than left to go cold. But the real truth was that he invited Kudo Shinichi onto murder scenes because he was afraid not to. Because if Kudo Shinichi wasn't invited to see death, it would go looking for him.

Sometimes Megure wondered if he wasn't being ridiculous and would try to get on with his cases without the teenager's involvement. But always, within a few days, he'd go to a crime scene and the boy would already be there, having been doing something innocuous. Playing football on the field next to the public toilets where the body was found. Just buying breakfast and morning coffee in the café when somebody dropped dead. In his trigonometry class when screams rang out because there was a body in the school pool. The kid couldn't even go on a date to the aquarium without a man being stabbed.

So Megure invited Kudo Shinichi along to all the crime scenes he could, not just to see the case closed but because so long as he did, the boy seemed to get along in his normal life corpse-free.

Then one day, after resolving the matter of a man beheaded on a rollercoaster (left it too long, Megure thought to himself, should've invited him to the site of that stabbing in Haido the other day, it was a straightforward case that a rookie could crack but maybe if I had—), Kudo Shinichi disappeared. Didn't answer his phone, wasn't already there at any murder scenes… Megure would've been afraid for him if Mouri's daughter hadn't mentioned that Shinichi had called her, said he was away on an unusually tricky case.

He was seeing a lot more of Mouri, much more than he'd seen since the man had left the force ten years before. It was a little sad to see how a decent cop and a decent man had turned into a loudmouthed drunken lout who could only seem to solve a case while in some kind of trance. The trances and sleep-talking were strange and unsettling, but Megure couldn't bring himself to pursue them. He'd already decided that there were things in this world that he just didn't want to know.

He didn't want to notice the little boy trailing around crime scenes with Mouri, and at first, he didn't; Mouri Kogoro himself and his steady rise to prominence as a private detective was fairly big news, especially because of his unique deduction style, but slowly they crept into the memory, the a-le-les and the little comments and accidents that sparked off real deductions, more and more noticeable when the kid started turning up at murder scenes without Nemuri no Kogoro: with Ran instead, maybe her classmates; with his own classmates, children just as tiny as him crawling all over major crime scenes; with the brat from Osaka; with FBI agents on holiday…

It wasn't every time, but far too often, whenever there was a death, that pair of startling blue eyes was watching, assessing... deducing. Familiar blue eyes, seeing death far too often for the course of the daily life of a grade-schooler.

Megure had never met Edogawa Conan's parents (so he thought), but he wondered if they, like Kudo Yuusaku, had ever been bent over heavy old books full of strange runes, wondered if Edogawa Conan had ever been scraped out of a pool of blood on the street and then, miraculously…

Miracle, n. An extraordinary event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.

That Kudo Shinichi survived a drug that had killed dozens of others without a trace, in the end, didn't surprise Megure at all. The boy had survived by a miracle once before, after all, and the miracle had just kept going.

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This happened as a result of a discussion on tumblr about "The Beika Shinigami" and whether or not Shinichi is legitimately cursed, which started out joking and then I had to make awful. There is a follow-up to this in the works that's more from Shinichi's POV.