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Shinichi wasn’t sure what scared him more: the fact that he was trapped in a body that wasn’t supposed to be his own, or the fact that he was starting to get used to it.
The first few days after he’d initially been shrunken had been the worst, by far. Every morning he would wake up and panic at the sight of a world that was twice the size it was supposed to be, before calming down as memories of That Night washed over him like a cold sickness. Then he would lay there in bed for a few moments, to emotionally prepare himself for the definitely-not-traumatic hassle of navigating a reality that had expanded so monumentally out of reach that even mere doorknobs towered over him.
In his defense, it was entirely reasonable to be at least a little off-put by such a bizarre turn of events. After all, even his own childhood friend, whom he had just days prior been teasingly using as an armrest and holding things above her reach, now stood before him as an unsightly monolith, her kneecaps being the only part of her left at eye-level. The world he thought he knew and understood had become foreign. Distorted. Bloated outward at an inconceivable scale.
It didn’t help that he was, somehow, the shortest in his new class. Children, first-graders, little kids who used to literally and figuratively look up to him, now measured on average at least a few centimeters above. Ayumi was the closest to his height, and even she had a good half-inch over him.
His hands were too soft and young, and his face was too round, and his voice was too high-pitched, and he had consistently struggled to reconcile that those strange features were now his own. For the first month he would suffer a miniature heart attack (emphasis on ‘miniature’) every time he saw his reflection, and would clear his throat instinctively every time he spoke as if that would somehow readjust his voice to the pitch it was meant to be. Every waking minute was spent steeped in painful awareness that this was not his skin, this was not his face, this was not his voice, these were not his hands and feet and eyes and -
On good days, it was humiliating. Shinichi would bluster over to Agasa’s place after a horrible day at kiddie school, reigning in every instinct that told him to go to next door and lay down on his real bed, and he would whine and complain about how undignified it was to be so small.
(Though neither of them spoke about it, they both knew why Shinichi was so desperate to complain: if he spent all his energy getting frustrated over something relatively superficial - humiliation - then he would never have time to think about what really upset him.)
Cold, unfeeling eyes drilling holes into his brain more effectively than the retractable stick Gin had hit him with.
“Farwell, detective.”
A body on fire. Bones cracking. Organs sizzling. Blood boiling. Flesh evaporating between the threads in his shirt, infecting the air with a stench of molten rot, and oh god oh god he’s going to die, he’s going to die alone , why can’t he call out for help, why can’t he get up, why can’t he scream, someone help, please, Ran -
On bad days, though. Bad days were...well, they were bad. Bad days usually involved Kogoro pounding on the bathroom door because Shinichi - Conan - had spent too long dallying in there, and the pounding would snap him out of his dysphoric trance, and he would look down at himself to find skin under his fingernails and red marks scratching up his arms.
Because maybe, maybe if he burned, maybe if he peeled away enough of this fake skin, maybe if he ripped off this mask and revealed the real face trapped underneath it, then maybe he’d be himself again, maybe his real self would explode out of this tiny, tiny, tiny prison, and maybe Ran would walk in and she’d hug him and her arms wouldn’t envelop his entire body and maybe he’d get to wrap himself around her for a change, and the world wouldn’t be so big and scary, and maybe he’d get to walk home and sleep in his own bed and -
“Farewell, detective.”
He usually wore long sleeves for a while after those bad days. No one questioned it, not even in the summertime, because Edogawa Conan was an enigma wrapped inside a mystery and everyone except maybe Takagi gave up trying to understand him ages ago. Haibara and Agasa knew, though. They were the ones who usually end up treating his wounds, exchanging wordless yet impossibly loud glances over his head as they dabbed disinfectant wipes on his forearms.
He used to hate bad days, and rightly so. But now, he almost longed for them. Bad days meant that he hadn’t given up, that this horrible false body wasn’t the status quo, that he had a real life and a real body and a real face to go back to, that he had something to fight for. Bad days were terrible, but they kept him motivated.
He would give anything to have another bad day. He would give anything to rid himself of this - well, it wasn’t comfort , because it would take years to ever be comfortable in this body (and by that point he'd probably have re-aged naturally to 17 again). But...complacency, he supposed, was a word for it. He’d give anything to rid himself of this complacency. This static neutrality that had settled into his tiny, not-quite-hollow-but-sure-as-hell-felt-like-it bones and breathed a stale breeze into his lungs.
Nowadays he woke up in the morning and he looked in the mirror and he didn’t think, “This isn’t my face” but rather, “Hey, my bedhead isn’t so bad today”. He no longer took ten minutes lacing his sneakers because eight of those minutes were spent staving off a panic attack caused by the sight and sensation of his baby hands. Now he just tied his shoes, checked the force-enhancement dial to ensure it was operational, and waved goodbye to Ran-neechan.
Agasa would often commend his steadily improving acting skills, and Hattori always commented on how “you seem a lot more comfortable in your own skin” whenever he came to visit, both of them attempting to comfort him yet blissfully unaware of just how much their words made bile crawl up his - up Conan’s - throat.
It scared him, when he thought about it for too long. Because he didn’t want to be good at acting, he didn’t want to be comfortable in this skin, he didn’t want to be used to answering to ‘Conan’ instead of ‘Shinichi’, he didn’t want to acknowledge that going to kiddie school and playing at the park with grade-schoolers had become the new mundane. Because with every aspect of Conan that became a habit, a tiny spark of Shinichi died. And after two years, he couldn’t help but wonder how much of Shinichi was even left.
That is to say, not much was left of him at all. That brave, arrogant teenager who held his head high, life full of innocent laughter and days spent bantering with Ran...well, he was dead by now. He died that night at Tropical Land, scared and alone and face-down on the ground, in too much pain to even cry for help.
The person he was now, the one who had walked away from that wretched tragedy while bound in foreign flesh, was just a ghost. A vestigial phantom of who he had once been.
In his darker moments, Shinichi couldn't help but think that maybe the real reason Shinichi so desperately begged Ran to wait for him was because...well, because Ran was always so hopeful and resilient. Ran never gave up on anyone. She had always been stronger than him like that. Even Shinichi sometimes found himself giving up, found himself forgetting what his own face looked like. Found himself getting so used to his false identity that his true self became more and more estranged as time went on. But Ran never forgot. She always had a firm image in her mind of what and who Kudo Shinichi was supposed to be, and she never allowed that image to waver. So long as she held onto that, then things would be okay. But if Ran gave up, if she of all people moved on and forgot about him...
If that happened, Kudo Shinichi really would be dead.
“Farewell, detective.”