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He stood above the face of the clock, nimbly balancing on the curved overhang despite the wind that tugged at his cape with insistent, invisible fingers. The forest green charm with a white clover imprinted on it twirled from its attachment to his monocle, and his top hat threatened to take to the skies with the stronger gusts. His eyes roved over the streets of his hometown, taking in the children and teenagers dressed up as various monsters and celebrities, stopping by different houses for candy.
So far he had spotted no less than nine other Kaitou KIDs tonight roaming the streets, and he smiled bitterly. He sighed, feeling very overwhelmingly jaded at the moment. High up on the Ekoda Clock Tower, he could barely hear the laughter of young friends dressed up for this one night of pretend, this one night where they could make believe they were someone else. Meanwhile he, on the other hand, pretended he was someone else every day of his life—every day since the second return of Kaitou KID—since the day he discovered that his father had been murdered.
He raised his eyes to the full moon, checking the night’s conquest to see if this would be the fabled gem, Pandora. The Heart of the Adonis winked crimson in the moonlight, but it did not glow. With a dispirited sigh he lowered the ruby, tucking it safely into a pocket before he sat down on the arched overhang, feet dangling in the clock’s face. He leaned back on his hands, his expression far from Kaitou KID’s renowned impish smirk as he studied the night sky above him.
Tonight, there were people pretending to be KID.
Tonight, there were people pretending to be him—
—except he was not quite sure who he was anymore.
Was he Kuroba Kaito, the brilliant thirty-three-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon who constantly developed new procedures to reduce recovery times and increase survival rates? The man who performed small bits of magic and sleight of hand to cheer up his child patients? The man who still secretly yearned for a long-dead father and an absentee mother?
Or was he Kaitou KID, the virtuosic, ageless, and elusive phantom thief who consistently evaded any and all attempts at capture? The man who paradoxically stole gems worth billions of yen and yet returned them to their rightful owners? The man who still covertly searched for the syndicate who had murdered his predecessor in the hopes of exposing Them?
Who was the mask, and who was the man? He had lived this dual life for so long that the two personas had long begun to merge, and on most days he could make neither heads nor tails of who he really was anymore. He had been born Kuroba Kaito, son of Kuroba Touichi and Bonhuer Chikage. He had become Kaitou KID, resurrected with the goal of destroying Pandora. Kaitou KID had become an ingrained part of his identity since he had turned sixteen, and now, seventeen years later, the monocle and top hat had yet to come off. He was unsure if it was even possible to permanently take the costume off, to separate KID from Kuroba.
He pulled a foot up and leaned on his knee, burying his chin in the overlapping crooks of his elbows as he continued to watch the children and teenagers persist in their night of fantasy and make-believe. He recognized that once upon a time he had been just as carefree as they, but those days had long since faded into little more than a distant dream, inconsequential and insubstantial.
He sighed deeply once more, closing his eyes wearily. Where did I go wrong? he wondered. I lost the love of my life to some twerp she met in college, Jii’d willed the Blue Parrot to me, Kaa-san’s remarried and happy in Singapore, and I’ve no one I can talk to. Not like I can without one of them calling the police on me or having me feel like I’m disturbing the other with my personal troubles… He slowly opened indigo eyes, which gleamed with the faint sheen of unshed tears. All I wanted to was to find Oyaji’s killers and destroy Pandora. I’ve found Them—I’ve incarcerated Snake and Spider and their associates—but Pandora continues to elude me, and I feel like an abysmal failure. He snorted sardonically, the sound muffled by his sleeves. I have crowds of fans who come and cheer for Kaitou KID; I have scores of thankful patients who I have helped over the years; yet I still have no fucking friends. Pathetic.
He vaguely wondered why he had ended up here of all places, why he had not simply returned home to change out of the iconic magician’s outfit. Perhaps it was because of the full moon, which some people claimed the satellite’s gravitational effect was just strong enough to mess with hormone balances within the body—hence the word lunatic. Or maybe it had to do with the American’s practice of the holiday of All Hallows’ Eve, the reason the streets were full of dressed up youngsters asking for sweets from their neighbors. Or possibly the fact that as it was the pagan holiday Samhain, when the veil between the realms of the living and the dead was thinned for this one night, allowing passed spirits to commune with the ones they had left behind. Whatever the reason, on this night he felt particularly downtrodden, and had come here to immerse himself in gloomy solitude.
How long he sat there he had no idea, but the quietude was broken by the sound of the access door squeaking open and closed, followed by soft footsteps. He momentarily pondered whether or not to escape as he recognized the footsteps as none other than his fiercest critic, but ultimately decided to remain where he was, leaning on his bent leg with his mouth muffled in his arms. The Modern-Day Holmes came to a stop a few meters away, silently taking in the sight of the phantom thief he had dedicated more than half his life to capturing. The two remained as they were for several seconds before Kudou Shinichi approached and settled himself at the closest flat portion of the overhang, a meter away from the white-clad thief. The detective had no desire to go sliding and possibly falling off the ledge.
“I figured you might be here. What’s eating you?” the detective inquired gently, eyes turned to watch the glittering horizon of the sprawling Tokyo metropolis. “You seemed distracted at the heist tonight.”
The thief chuckled as he shifted, pulling his head away from the cradle of his arms. “What makes you think that, Meitantei?” He had been sure his Poker Face tonight had been as impenetrable as it always had.
Shinichi shrugged. “Call it a feeling,” he replied. “It just felt… off. Like you weren’t having fun the way you normally do.”
This surprised a bark of laughter from the phantom thief. “Sometimes I forget just how perceptive you are.”
The detective snorted. “The fact that I had you completely cornered might have been a small clue, so out with it, Kuroba. What’s on your mind?”
KID glanced at his companion, the clock’s illuminating floodlights glinting off his monocle. “Playing my psychotherapist tonight, Kudou?” he asked with a false air of whimsy.
“If you needed a psychotherapist I would have called in Hakuba,” the Beika native retorted.
Kaito shuddered and returned to resting his head on his knee. “Not Hakuba,” he moaned theatrically, though they both knew that Kaito had long considered the half-Briton a very tentative friend and that Saguru felt the same about the Ekoda native. The pair fell quiet, sitting in somewhat comfortable silence as they watched the trick-or-treaters at work. Shinichi waited patiently for Kaito to speak while Kaito pondered over how to verbalize his thoughts into something more coherent. At length Kaito spoke, his voice hesitant and soft—a far cry from his usual confident and boisterous tones. “Who am I, Kudou?”
Shinichi blinked, caught off guard by both Kaito’s tone and the question itself, existential as it was. “May I ask why you’re asking?” he ventured, equally hesitant but seeking clarification.
“See there, Kudou?” he asked, indicating the streets below with a small jerk of his head. The detective followed the directive, eyes taking in the costumed children below. “See how several of them are running around as Kaitou KID? They’re pretending to be me.” There was dry humor in his voice, as well as a tinge of resentment. “They’re pretending to be me,” he repeated, and he huffed into his sleeves. “Except I’m not really sure who me is anymore, so how could they pretend to be me?”
The detective remained quiet. His silence was neither demanding nor damning; rather, it was simply an open invitation to speak his mind.
“I’ve been KID for so long I don’t even know if KID is a mask anymore,” Kaito murmured, and he knew Shinichi understood he did not mean merely the top hat and monocle. “Where does he end and I begin?”
The homicide detective glanced sharply at the phantom thief, though he kept his voice a low croon. “Why do you identify Kaitou KID and Kuroba Kaito as two separate entities?”
“KID and Kuroba are different people,” the magician started, his brain struggling to express the odd dichotomy of his personas. “The way in which KID thinks and acts and reacts is different to how Kaito thinks and acts and reacts. KID is confident to the point of arrogant in his ability to escape, is one of the world’s biggest flirts, and is a master of disguise and infiltration. Kaito is a happy-go-lucky, high-functioning depressed neurosurgeon who worries he might one day accidentally kill one of his patients in surgery, is constantly tired from long days of research when not consulting or in the OR, and just wants a break from all the responsibility. And I—I’m not sure where I fall in between these two personalities anymore. I feel like I hover somewhere in between, not truly one or the other, and…”
The magician hid his face behind gloved hands, fingertips tipping his top hat back as he sighed. He slid his fingers through his hair, somehow managing to keep from dislodging his hat before curling in on himself as though in preparation for a physical lashing. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he whispered, and there was morose resignation in his voice that barely carried over the wind.
The homicide detective studied his friend for a long moment before he sighed through his nose. “Come here, Kuroba,” he murmured, scooting over enough for the magician to sit next to him. The costumed man scooted until he slid down the curve of the overhang, coming to a gentle stop beside Shinichi. Yet even then he still hunched away, furling inward like an abused animal though he refrained from hiding his face. Shinichi huffed in mild exasperation. “Please sit up and look at me properly like a normal human being and not like some whipped puppy, barou.”
Kaito resignedly straightened and stared at his friend, awaiting his response. “Ow!” he yelped as Shinichi punched his arm, though it was more due to being startled than being in any actual pain. He pouted at the detective, rubbing the injured appendage. “What was that for?”
“For being an idiot,” Shinichi stated bluntly. “You’re overthinking yourself.”
“Oh, really?” Kaito retorted disagreeably, crossing his arms in the universal gesture of defiance even as he turned away to give the detective the metaphorical cold shoulder.
There was a long moment of quiet before Shinichi asked, “Why can you not be both?”
Kaito started and blurted, “What?” as he peered at the detective from over his shoulder, wanting to ignore him but curious enough to want to follow the other man’s train of thought.
Shinichi’s gaze was out somewhere on the distant horizon, his expression contemplative. “You shouldn’t need to have to separate the two, since both of them are you. You are Kuroba Kaito. You are also Kaitou KID. You are also so much more than just the two of them separately, so why are the two mutually exclusive?”
“Because they don’t intersect at any point other than the fact that I am the one bouncing between the two of them!” he snapped, and inwardly winced at how the quickness of his response betrayed the anxiety that had been eating away inside of him. It was futile to hope that the Modern Day Holmes had somehow managed to miss that slip up.
The detective blinked at the white-clad man and frowned. “What makes you think being either KID or Kuroba is a cut and dry thing?”
Kaito rolled his eyes, and his tone plainly communicating the idea that he thought Shinichi was the idiot. “One is an actual felon wanted in multiple countries, Kudou. The other is a doctor who has a criminally clean record.”
“So?” he said, clearly still missing the point.
“What do you mean, so?” Kaito asked with a snort. “Really, Kudou, how is this idea so difficult to grasp?”
Shinichi shrugged somewhat helplessly. “Why can’t you be both, Kuroba?”
Kaito’s response was quick and filled with irritation. “They are complete opposites of each other!”
The policeman frowned pensively before he murmured, “Not really.”
“You are blind,” the phantom thief growled as he levered himself onto his feet and away from the ledge. Shinichi’s persistent, continued stupidity grated on Kaito’s nerves, and he wanted to leave before he said something he would assuredly regret later.
“I’m offended,” Shinichi huffed, though his tone clearly indicated that he was not. “I happen to have two perfectly functioning eyeballs and twenty-twenty vision, thank you very much.”
The magician slanted a fierce glower at his companion. “Oh yeah? Then how come you didn’t see that I did not want any company?”
Shinichi shrugged nonchalantly. “My intuition told me you needed someone to talk to,” he said loftily.
Kaito seemed to visibly bristle with annoyance. “I don’t if all you do is irritate me.”
“That had never been my intention,” the detective admitted with a sniff.
“Well, you’re doing a piss-poor job of following through on that intention,” the phantom thief snapped. “And you know what they say.”
Shinichi sent him a sideways glance. “Who does what say?”
Baring his teeth in a rather unpleasant smile, Kaito answered, “‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’”
The detective replied with a chuckle and said, “Well then, at least I’ll know I tried.”
“Go.” The thief was at his wits’ end with the idiot he was unfortunate enough to call a friend—whenever his sanity took a longer extended vacation than usual, at any rate. “Away.”
“Now you sound like a sulking teenager, Kuroba,” Shinichi observed, crossing his arms over his chest as he studied the white-clad man.
“Fuck off, Kudou.” Why was he friends with this moron again? If he committed murder this very instant, would he be able to get away with it?
Shinichi raised an eyebrow. “Very mature.”
I am going to kill him. “I hate you.”
“I’m sure you do,” the detective hummed, very clearly humoring him.
Kaito stomped back and forth in growing agitation, KID’s white cloak swirling dramatically behind him whenever he spun to retrace his steps. “Gods, I wish I had the gumption to shove you off the edge right now,” he snarled.
Shinichi hoisted himself up and away from the ledge as well and brushed himself off with a pointed casualness that had the phantom thief grinding his teeth until they audibly squeaked. “Then I am extremely grateful to know that you aren’t a murderer.”
“I sometimes wish I was—like right now, for example.”
“No, you don’t.”
The easy confidence in Shinichi’s answer made Kaito want to break something. “And how would you know?”
“Because both KID and Kuroba are good people—rather, they’re a good person as a whole, I should say. One of the best I’ve met, in fact.”
Kaito stared. What could the detective have possibly meant by that?
“I do mean it,” Shinichi added, his voice and expression eerily earnest. “Though you might see KID and Kuroba as endmembers of a spectrum, I see them as opposite sides of the same coin. Sure, whatever is minted on each side is different, but both sides are still made of the same metal—and that metal is you, whoever and whatever you are at the core of your being. You are the person with a good heart and infectious laughter, the person who heals others’ hurts and hides his own pain. You are the person that I hold the utmost respect for and who I consider one of my best friends beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“You are someone that isn’t squarely defined by the labels ‘Kuroba Kaito’ and ‘Kaitou KID’, but are both of them and everything in between.” Shinichi ended his little speech with a somewhat embarrassed blush that reddened his ears and curved a self-satisfied grin on his face that Kaito wanted to smack off, but the urge quickly died away.
Instead, he sighed, disguising the fact that he was wiping the pooling tears from his eyes by massaging the bridge of his nose. “Do you always say embarrassing shit like that, Kudou?”
“No. I only say it to those who need to hear me say it to believe it. And you needed to hear it,” the detective stated, placidly tucking his hands in his pockets even as his blush crept down the back of his neck. He flicked his gaze towards Kaito with soft, understanding eyes and asked, “Feel a little better, I hope?”
“Yeah,” he grunted, somewhat petulant at having his sulky mood destroyed. “Thanks, Kudou.”
Shinichi grinned. “Anytime, Kuroba.”
The magician huffed. “I still hate you.”
“I know you do,” the detective said with a pleased grin. “Now come on, let’s get off this clocktower. I’m a little chilled from the breeze.”
“Wuss.”
Shinichi shrugged. “Can’t help it if my body’s been a little wonky ever since I returned.”
Kaito nonchalantly brushed by him and made for the access door, surreptitiously blocking the wind for him in the process. “Excuses, excuses.”
“I just so happen to know where I can get my hands on some Apoptoxin…” the detective singsonged as he followed the thief into the stairwell.
“Ooh,” Kaito deadpanned, “I’m so scared.”
Shinichi grinned at the back of Kaito’s head. “Don’t tempt me.”
The phantom thief sniffed. “I live to push your buttons.”
“Unfortunate how I cannot seem to fix that particular problem,” the detective lamented, and used the fact that Kaito was ahead of him to swipe the iconic white top hat and place it on his own head.
Kaito spun with a glower and snatched it back. “I’m not a problem,” he grumbled, stuffing the hat back on his head.
Shinichi leered widely. “No, you’re a pest,” he corrected.
“Oi!” Kaito objected with a frown, “I resent that.”
The detective scoffed. “Good.”
Sulking, the magician crossed his arms as he continued to stalk forwards. “Hate you.”
“And yet you continue to tolerate my presence,” Shinichi cooed, shoving his hands in his pockets as he strode alongside the phantom thief.
Kaito sighed heavily, tilting his gaze heavenward. “Why did I ever consider you a friend of mine again?”
Throwing a casual arm around Kaito’s shoulders, Shinichi breezily replied, “Because you secretly love me.”
The glare sent towards the detective was dark and hid reluctant fondness underneath. “Hate you. So. Much.”
Shinichi hummed in easy acceptance. “And Kuroba?”
“Yeah?”
The detective pulled the magician to a halt and turned a serious gaze at him. “You always wore the masks. The masks never—ever—wore you.” He clapped his hand once on Kaito’s shoulder and released him, taking a step back to give them both space. “Dinner tomorrow at my place? Ran’s been asking after you.”
The magician heaved a heavy sigh, finally giving in to Shinichi’s well-meant cajoling. “… fine.”
Shinichi grinned. “Good. Just bring yourself. We’ve got the food and alcohol covered, and you can sob all you like over her if you need to.”
An irritated eye twitched at the sobbing comment. “Kudou.”
“Yes?”
Kaito glared at the smug detective. “Please just shut the fuck up.”
Shinichi’s answering grin was positively contagious.