Mikau: Pleased to meet you! I'm Mikau. This is my first dcmk fanfic, but I'm no stranger to writing. That's not to say that I'm a good writer, but I try hard. If you enjoy it, that's good enough for me. Please let me know what you think, 'cause I'm always looking to improve.

Disclaimer: If I owned it, Kaito would have found Pandora by now. Well, at least Aoyama-sensei is working on it again, right?

…...

Of Kaitous and Coffee

"Come to taunt me, have you?" the shrunken detective sighed, sipping his coffee.

"No. Just to talk." The kaitou smirked, hiding behind the mask of a high school girl.

They were sitting in a booth by the window of Poirot, the café below the Mori Detective Agency, drinking coffee—black—and hot chocolate respectively.

After that night's heist, the phantom thief had dropped by the Moris', making sure that the mini sleuth caught sight of him before disappearing like…well, a phantom.

Conan had flown out the door to give chase, only to find a mysterious young girl in a sailor uniform hanging around the entrance to the stairs leading up to the apartment.

She had smiled and said, "Care to join me for a cup of coffee, Tantei-kun?"

The bespectacled boy had taken the bait, and thus, they were sitting across from one another, drinking their beverages of choice.

The small detective sighed, tired from his night of epic failure. "And what did you want to talk about? The weather?"

Kid ignored the quip and stared at that the boy—through him—with those electric green eyes—probably contacts. "What happened tonight? I've never seen you so off your game before."

"Can't I just have an off night every once in a while?" Conan gave up on mentally picking apart the elements of Kid's disguise and instead focused on the design on his mug.

Kid snorted, the sound rather unattractive coming from the lady he appeared to be. "'Off night?' You fell for every one of my tricks and traps. That's fine for the taskforce, but I expect more from my detectives. So spill. What's on your mind?"

Conan was silent for a long time, just staring into his cup at the quickly cooling liquid.

The thief waited and was finally rewarded for his patience.

"I messed up the other day," the older boy whispered. "I hesitated because the suspect took Ran hostage, and he got away. I hesitated, and he got away and killed himself."

"That's not your fault, you know." Kid had come assuming that the other boy had had some quarrel with his girlfriend over his true identity. Unfortunately, it seemed the situation was far worse than expected.

"It's my job—dammit—to put people like that behind bars. He should be in a jail cell, not in a coffin. If I hadn't hesitated, I could have done something to stop him," the young gumshoe seethed. "There's no point if the criminal dies."

"You really shouldn't blame yourself for other people's actions, Tantei-kun," the phantom replied quietly after some thought. "I know it's hard seeing someone die in front of you, and I know it's difficult not to think 'I could have done something,' but, really, your psychological anguish over the matter doesn't do anyone any good. You should move on and focus on the good you can do. Better to face forward than to keep looking back."

Conan blinked. He hadn't expected to be given a pep-talk by the Kaitou Kid of all people. "Un." He nodded.

"Good. So next heist, I expect a challenge from you." And then the man was gone. Simply gone having left two thousand-yen notes on the table to foot the bill.

Conan scowled, knitting his eyebrows together.

Something was wrong with the world.

The Kaitou freaking Kid had just given him a pep talk and treated him to coffee.

…

)("8")(

Mikau: It was supposed to be a fish, but my brother says that it looks like the robot from the Jetsons. Please let me know what you think (not about the fish robot. Well, you can, but I care more about what you think about the chapter); I'm going to go work on my emot fish. Thanks for reading.