Chapter Text
He senses a disturbance in the air behind him. There’s also a sense of foreboding as if something were about to happen; it’s this feeling that keeps him from turning around. If this Kaitō Kid has just landed on the roof behind him, he’ll know soon enough regardless of whether he turns around.
“Thanks,” he says, quietly, to Agasa. “I’ll call you back later.”
With that, Conan pockets his phone. He takes one deep breath to steel himself; he isn’t quite sure what it is that he’s preparing himself for, but he doesn’t get much time to think on this when the silence is broken and he freezes in response.
“Yo, kid,” lilts a voice—an achingly familiar voice, one that he listened to via voicemail for far longer than he would like to admit after things went awry. He’s committed that voice to memory, so there is almost no mistaking it. “What are you doing at a place like this?”
It can’t be—can it? Is it… is this Kaito? Something keeps his feet planted firmly in place, afraid to turn around and be faced with a truth he won’t know how to handle. A million thoughts rush through his head—is it really him? Is this why he broke up with him? Why is he doing this? What happened? How long has this been going on?
“You must be pretty smart if you’ve figured out my riddle,” says the voice, sounding amused and impressed. “That’s what happened, isn’t it? Why else would you be up on this rooftop at this hour? You’re like a little detective!”
“Maybe,” he replies, dumbly, still unable to turn around.
“You can turn around, chibi tantei. I don’t bite~” The voice sounds far too amused. The singsong quality in that last word is much too reminiscent of Kaito’s for his comfort. “Alas, it seems I still managed to fool you, didn’t I? I thought I made it pretty clear at the top of my note. April Fool. A joke!”
Yeah, right, this is a joke. And an unnecessarily cruel one at that. Why else would the thief sound just like Kaito? Kaito isn’t a criminal—right? The Kaito he knows—knew—whatever!
“Tell you what, because you’re just a little guy, I’ll leave you a token of goodwill. Pass this along to the good inspector, won’t you?”
There’s a flash so bright that Conan has to shield his eyes despite being turned away from the source. When the light dies down and he’s able to see again, he turns around to find a rooftop devoid of life and a single rose on the ground, a paper fluttering around on a ribbon tied tight around it. The rose is painfully reminiscent of Kaito. Slowly, he steps towards it, partly afraid that it might disappear and partly afraid just because. When he picks it up, the paper contains another notice, this time dated for April 19th on the Queens Elizabeth.
He holds the rose close, sniffing its snow white petals.
Conan finds himself in the Detective Agency later that night. He’d sat through Ran’s lecture about going out at this late hour and sent him off to bed. Little did she know, he laid there restlessly until an hour had passed and he deemed it safe to sneak downstairs to utilize the computer. From there, Conan went down a rabbit hole of articles and blog posts about the infamous Kaitō Kid.
The pictures are all mediocre at best, grainy close-ups that were far too pixelated and far away silhouettes. He would need to look the thief in the face in-person before he can say with full confidence that the man under the hat truly is Kaito.
“Why do people like him so much?” Conan murmurs, skimming through a fangirl’s blog post debating whether the shade of blue of Kaitō Kid’s button-up was azure or cobalt and why would anyone care about that?
Going off of all the information he has gathered, Conan thinks that he’s pieced one thing together: Kaito’s father was the original Kaitō Kid. At this revelation, he can’t help but chuckle at the other’s late father’s sense of humor. It begs the question, however, of why Kaito’s father originally became the Phantom Thief and why Kaito saw fit to continue on. As he switches over to another blog that apparently lists every single known Kaitō Kid heist, Conan feels another piece of the puzzle slide into place.
Dated not too long before the break up is a heist dubbed The Clocktower Heist.
Shinichi recognizes the details very clearly, having heard about the true nature of the incident afterwards—the threat of losing the Clocktower, the stolen diamonds, the fake clock face, and…
His mouth goes dry as he recalls being the one in the helicopter, stealing Megure’s gun, and aiming it at the tower.
He had only meant to use the bullets as a means of removing the fake clock face. At the time, it was supposed to be a fun helicopter ride until all police units were asked to report—he had even asked Kaito if he’d wanted to come along, initially, but was met with a resounding no on the basis that Kaito was helping out a classmate with a project. He hadn’t even known what was going on or who was trying to steal the clock’s hands.
“Did he think I was shooting at him?” he whispers. He shakes his head. Kaito’s smarter than that; it should have been obvious that he was aiming at the corners to reveal that the missing hands were actually still firmly in their place, hidden behind a hyper-realistic tapestry made to look as though the clock face were empty. With his almost perfect shot, he had set the tapestry loose, breaking the illusion. Shinichi hadn’t even thought to bring this up to Kaito at the time.
Or, perhaps, did Kaito think Shinichi was getting too close to Kaitō Kid for his comfort?