I own neither Detective Conan nor Magic Kaitou. I only borrowed them, and I have to give them back after I'm done playing.
Not good.
That, oddly enough, was the first thing Kuroba Kaito (alias Kaitou Kid) thought when he was shot. It was a bit of an understatement, perhaps, but still true.
His second thought was that his suit was going to be completely ruined (Jii was going to be upset) if he wasn't careful. At least it was only his arm. If he held it away from the body of the suit, then maybe it wouldn't dirty it ... a sleeve was easily replaced, anyway.
His third thought ought to have been his first: he realized that he couldn't pilot his glider one-handed.
Kaito's fourth thought was unprintable.
Four thoughts, and they took less than two seconds altogether to think. In those two seconds Kaito had ducked away from another bullet, leapt over a rail, and deposited himself behind the air-conditioning unit that was the only cover the roof offered besides the doorway he had come through. It was a pity he hadn't been close enough to try to get back into the building, even though it would have meant the possibility of being captured by the Kaitou 1412 Taskforce, which was deployed not only inside the building but also (in the manner of a medieval army besieging a castle) the parking-lots around it.
It was also a pity that the neighboring roof, from which the bullets had come, was such a thicket of hiding-places. He hadn't even seen his assailant, and he wasn't going to try to now, much less try to get to the doorway. Even if his senses hadn't been dulled by the pain (how could such a small wound hurt so much?) it would have been risky; in his current condition he would just get shot. Again. Leaving his cover wasn't an option.
Unfortunately, neither was staying where he was. The roof on the right side was just as thick with unneccesary architechtural oopsies as the one on the left, and it wouldn't take the assassin long to figure out that all he needed to do to finish the job was call for backup to get on the other side and shoot him from there.
Well, there wasn't much he could do about that, was there? He'd been caught off-guard, cocky and careless and full of adrenaline and euphoria because of the sucess of his excursion. The heist had gone exactly as planned; Nakamori-keibu probably hadn't even realized that the jewel he was guarding so carefully was a fake.
No, Kaito thought ruefully. If he had discovered the substitution, then he would have heard from him by then. So, for that matter, would everyone within about three miles. He wondered briefly if he was ever going to hear Nakamori-keibu cursing Kid (and Kid's ancestors, all the way back to Adam) again, and then wondered, even more briefly, if it was a bad sign that he was rather hoping that he would.
Of course, he still had a backup plan (he always did) but since his backup plan involved letting himself down from the roof on a very thin wire, and was difficult to manage even when he could use both hands, he didn't think he was going to try it anytime soon. But at least he would bandage his arm so that he wouldn't bleed to death. (Why was so much blood coming from such a small wound?) He wasn't about to make their job any easier.
Kaito began ripping his bloody sleeve off with one hand. The noise of the tearing cloth was louder than he'd expected, and startled him, but the bullet that whizzed over the top of the air-conditioning unit and whanged on the concrete wall of the other building startled him more. He jumped, grimaced with the pain the movement caused him, then grinned. Apparently they were overestimating him (what was he supposed to be doing with just one sleeve?) the one time he could have used a little underestimation. There wasn't anything he could do about that, either, so he finished ripping the sleeve off and began trying to tear it into strips while two more bullets sped past.
That was why, when the door opened and Kudou Shinichi - no, Edogawa Conan - stepped out onto the rooftop, Kaito could not shout a warning. His mouth was full of blood-stained cloth. But (he didn't even have to think about it) with his injured arm he pulled his card-gun from its holster and fired it in a split-second.
The card struck the doorway not an inch away from the little detective's ear, and Conan threw himself to the side and behind the covered stairwell an instant before a bullet from the other roof ripped through the air where his head had been a moment before.
Conan froze where he knelt, his pale face shining in the darkness, and said a word that no seven-year-old boy should know.
Kaito spat out the cloth and grinned through the stabs of pain his movement had caused. "Language, tantei-kun. What would ojou-san say if she knew?"
The child directed a mildly unchildlike glare at him and suggested, with a very unchildlike frozen politeness, that what Ran would say if she knew was nothing compared to what he, Edogawa Conan, would do to him, Kaitou Kid, if he was in any way responsible for Ran's knowledge. "What's going on?" he added.
Kaito shrugged, and made a mental note not to do it again. He said: "Someone's doing a very good job of trying to assassinate me, as far as I can tell. And I wouldn't move if I were you. He's a bit trigger-happy."
"I noticed," said Conan. "How'd you get yourself shot, genius?"
"He must have been up there," Kaito nodded at the other roof, "since before I got here. I wasn't up here for thirty seconds, inspecting the spoils of war - did they notice it's gone yet? - before he let fly and winged me. And if I hadn't seen him moving out of the corner of my eye, I wouldn't just have been winged."
To his surprise, Conan grinned. "I thought you'd switched them. They haven't, and Nakamori-keibu's still down there watching the fake jewel like a hawk and palpitating because you're so late." He pulled the little bowtie he always seemed to carry with him out of his pocket and twiddled with the knot. Then he spoke. At least, his lips were moving, but the voice that was projected through the tie was Nakamori-keibu's.
"Kid has escaped to the roof of the adjacent building!" bellowed Nakamori-keibu's voice. "After him, quick!"
Kaito almost gaped at the boy as an increase in the noise below indicated that the confused Taskforce in the parking-lot was dividing and making its way into both adjacent buildings. As Conan had no doubt planned, to solve the problem of a second assassin before it was even brought up.
"I don't want to die either," said Conan in his proper voice, answering Kaito's unspoken question. He returned the tie to his pocket and turned his head to one side, presumably to look at the source of the clatters and scrambling sounds that indicated that the assassin was making a strategic retreat. "And I owe you one. I'd have been dead if you hadn't ..." He trailed off, frowning at Kaito's bloodied arm, then stood up and crossed the space between them. "Here, let me fix that for you."
Poker Face, Kaito reminded himself sternly, and his jaw stayed where it belonged while Conan's small sure hands bandaged his arm.
"Thanks."
Conan gave him a sideways-upwards glance as he tightened a knot. "No problem."
Conversely, Kaito thought there was a problem. "I'm your enemy," he pointed out, helpfully. "Why are you helping me?"
The sideways look sharpened to a searching gaze. "We may not be as much enemies as we think we are," said the boy.
"What do you mean?" asked Kaito.
"Let's get inside first," said Conan firmly, glancing at the neighboring buildings.
Kaito allowed himself to be maneuvered onto the stairs, and none too soon. He caught a glimpse of the first flashlight-beams sweeping across the neighboring roofs just before Conan shut the door behind them: the Taskforce preparing to make their usual thorough (and completely ineffective) search for Kid. Also, Nakamori-keibu appeared to be upset about something; his voice could be heard there, two flights above the room where the jewel had been. The words were hard to make out, but he was almost certainly making use of his fluency in the profane. As Kaito paused, a fragment of a sentence floated up to them:
" ... and then I'm going to cut off his light-fingered hands and make him eat them, that little ... "
They'd discovered that the jewel they were guarding was a fake, then. Grinning, Kaito listened to Nakamori describing the rest of the various things he was going to do to Kid when he caught him. They were surprising, to say the least, and the sample he'd heard first was love and kisses in comparison. Conan was listening too, a faintly disgusted look on his small face. Well, no wonder.
"Weren't you going to tell me something, tantei-kun?"
The boy looked up from his wide-eyed contempation of the stairway and straightened, wiping one bloodied hand on his shorts and pushing his glasses up with the other. "Yes," he said. "I was going to say that, much as I dislike your method of going about it, we may have a common goal.""'May'?" queried Kaito, interested.
"'May'," repeated Conan. "You haven't actually told me anything, so everything is a guess; but an educated guess, a logical argument based on the facts I have. I am a detective, after all. I figure things out." He held up his slightly-less-bloody hand and began ticking off points on the grubby fingers. "First, Kaitou Kid disappeared nine - almost ten - years ago, and reappeared about a year ago."
Kaito nodded.
"Second, every jewel Kid has stolen since his reappearance, and many stolen before he disappeared, have a number of characteristics common to them." He listed them, and Kaito's eyebrows went up.
"Correct."
"Third, since his reappearance, Kaitou Kid has been shot at on numerous occasions, always right after the jewel has been taken. Always by persons unknown, only one of whom has ever been apprehended. And," said Edogawa Conan, blandly, "the one who was caught died in his sleep that very night. Of heart failure. Heart failure," he said, "that was caused by a bubble of air that had somehow made its way into a major artery. They never found the needle, but they did find the needle-mark on his arm."
"My God," said Kaito.
"Language, kaitou-kun."
"I was praying."
"That's probably a good idea. I would if I were you, because - fourthly - I caught a glimpse of the man who shot you as he left," Conan continued. "His clothing was black."
That wasn't completely unexpected, but the fact that Conan had seen and known that black clothing was significant did surprise him. "How did you see - " began Kaito.
"Night vision," said Conan, removing his glasses, indicating an almost invisible button on the frame, and replacing them.
"Oh."
The childish face with its unchildish expression turned to him and Kaito found himself pinned by another sharp, searching gaze. "I've been thinking," said Conan.
"Why doesn't that surprise me?"
"And I've come to several conclusions. First, that you're looking for something specific. Second, that the people chasing after you want the same thing. Third, that you're not the same Kid who disappeared so many years ago."
"All true," said Kaito, lightly. "I'm not. Nor are you the same Kudou-kun who used to spar with Kaitou Kid so many years ago."
Behind the glasses Conan's eyes went wide in a look of comprehension. "Ah."
"Anything else, tantei-kun?"
"That the Organization seems desperate to kill you, so you must be working against them, and that they know it. And one other thing."
Kaito raised an eyebrow.
"Your heists - they're such a production. You're skillful enough that you could steal the jewels without any fuss at all, and return them even before anyone knew they were missing, but you deliberately make such a noise about each and every one that the Organization would have to be blind, deaf, and senile to miss it. And you weren't at all surprised when I said that they were after you. So you're doing it on purpose, to draw them out into the open where someone who can do something will see them and stop them."
Kaito nodded pleasantly. "Brilliant, tantei-kun. I knew you were a genius the moment I laid eyes on you. And, speaking of laying eyes - I need to go and tease Nakamori-keibu." He flexed the hand of his injured arm. It hurt, but he could manage. "It's been a pleasure."
But Conan said: "Wait!" and grabbed Kaito's arm, his searching look back. "I need to ask you something."
Uh-oh.
"You can't borrow my hat or my glider, if that's what you mean. I need them."
"Har har." Conan levelled a piercing glare at him. "Why are you a kaitou?"
I knew it.
"I had a tragic childhood and it caused me to contract a rare and incurable form of kleptomania."
"No you didn't."
"Okay, I'm a masochist and I like the excitement."
Another glare. (Would he never grow used to seeing a man's emotions on a child's face?) "The excitement of having the most dangerous gang in the world out for your blood? Or that of having to protect not only yourself but an entire police department from them without either of them knowing?"
"I can't believe you didn't buy that."
"I can't believe you thought I would."
"Isn't my debonaire charm convincing enough?" Kaito winced as Conan's grip tightened. "Go easy there. I'm not exactly made of wood, you know."
"Obviously not. You're made of bull."
Ouch.
"Look, tantei-kun," said Kaito kindly, working a simple trick that removed him from Conan's clutches and got him to the safety of the bottom of the staircase, "I'm not telling you any lies, I'm just witholding a juducious amount of the truth. You're a detective. Figure it out for yourself. I am going to go give Nakamori-keibu his precious jewel back and then go home and sleep. I'm tired, my arm hurts, I want my mother, and I want Ao- no, I don't. She's going to be very upset about this, and I'm no condition to dodge mops. I'm in no condition to spell things out for detectives, either, and it wasn't in my contract so I'm not going to."
He was already in the hallway; he was turning the corner to the next flight of stairs when Conan spoke.
"Is it for revenge?"
Revenge ...
Turning the word over in his mind, Kaito wondered (not for the first time) if it was for revenge, and was afraid (not for the first time) that it was. Poker Face was only for the outside; it could neither disguise nor dull the anger and sorrow that he felt when he remembered his father - or when he saw his mother's quiet acceptance of her widowhood - or when he saw Jii watching him and knew that the old man was looking through him to his dead father.
Was it for revenge? It hadn't been at first, of course; he'd done it to find out why his father was dead, and because it comforted him to follow in his father's footsteps. And the rage he felt now was nothing to what he had felt when he had first found out that his father had been murdered. Had that anger been pushing him all this time? Had he been avoiding the truth since he had seen the face of his father's murderer?
No, that rage had gone long ago. He was still angry, but as his knowledge about the Organization had grown, his anger had become less and less a personal matter, and more and more a matter of - a matter of what?
"Justice," he said, turning to face the boy at the top of the stairs; the boy who was giving him that searching look again. "I wanted revenge, but that's not why I'm a kaitou. I'm Kid because as Kid I can help bring them to justice. I don't know," - he hesitated for a moment - "I don't know if I'm any better than them, even though I return everything I steal, but I think my father would have wanted me to do this."
His words hung in the air between them. Conan's - no, Kudou's face was as inscrutiable as he knew his own to be at that moment; there was no absolution in that look, nothing but consideration. Well, there was nothing he could do about that, either.
He turned the corner, and he didn't look back, but before he had gone two steps he heard what he had wanted to hear:
"We're closer to being colleagues than to being enemies, you know." A pause. "Good luck with Nakamori-keibu. Er ... don't let him catch you."
Kaito laughed. "I won't."
A/N: This fic is dedicated to my friend Camo, because she won't tell me what she wants for her birthday. So she gets a DC fanfic dedication. Happy birthday!
On a more authorial note, I'm not sure where I got the idea for this. It was probably one of the fics I read where Kaito gets shot (that's certainly where the beginning came from) but I think it was because in most of the fics I've been reading, Conan's attitude toward Kid has been rather aggressive. That is, more aggressive that I remember it being in the manga. (Let's please ignore the facts that a) I haven't read the manga in a long time and b) my memory isn't the greatest to begin with.)
I've always thought of Conan's relationship with Kaitou being more friendly competition than aggressive competition; that Conan tries to catch Kaito more for the fun of being matched against someone whose intelligence is just about the same as his, only in a different way, and who recognises that he isn't just some irritating kid, than because he actually thinks that Kaito needs to be caught and imprisioned. But as I said, my memory's not the best.
On a linguistical note, "chuukoujingi" means "loyalty, filial piety, humanity, and justice", according to my handy-dandy-online-translator.
Ja ne!