Archive of Our Own ^beta

It never really occurred to Shinichi that people would remember him after they’d been carted to jail. Both the insane murderers and the ones who’d fallen to their knees crying as the realization of what they’d done finally hit them. Nor did it really occur to him that people outside of crime scenes would remember the tiny child that helped the Sleeping Kogoro or led the band of misfit children through their self-created mysteries.

It never really crossed his mind that people would thank him when praying before one shrine or another, thankful he’d shown up and helped bring a criminal to justice for them or saved someone they held dear.

That is, he didn’t know about them until he started hearing whispers in his head.

It was little things, like, “Detective, thank you so much,” and “I hope you’re well, Conan-kun”. Once, a child had spoken to him and asked him to make it snow. He was confused but tried to respond and tell him he can’t do that but it would snow in a few days, seeing as it was late November. He heard a chipper “Thank you!” but didn’t respond. Instead, he was staring at his phone blankly as realization finally hit him.

He was hearing voices.

That responded to him when he spoke to them.

…He’s not quite sure what that meant, so he held off telling Haibara and Agasa for the time being. He ruled out being crazy only because he didn’t think voices in his head would actually respond to him.

So…he either was genuinely crazy and in denial, hearing fictional things (similar to being crazy but still different enough to factor in as a possibility), or the poison had mutated him or something and he was hearing real people.

He wasn’t quite sure which was worse.

He was hanging out with the Shounen Tantei, like usual, when he felt someone staring at them. Shinichi froze and looked around, causing the other kids to glance at him. “Conan-kun? What are you looking for?” Mitsuhiko asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “It feels like someone is watching us.” The other kids jumped to attention at that and started scanning the area themselves, eager to find an adventure.

“I don’t see anyone Conan,” Genta complained after a full minute of looking, the other two voicing their doubt.

“Hm,” Shinichi hummed back, and briefly lifted his eyes to the branches of the tree nearest them before flinching.

A crow was staring at him from the branches, eyes trained to him and body language relaxed. Upon landing eyes on it Shinichi heard a voice, louder than any before, sobbing and begging and pleading for someone to help her and growing louder the longer he looked at the crow. He didn’t know how long time passed as he stared at the bird, the woman’s cries entrapping him as she told her story over and over again. “I didn’t do it,” she said. “I’d never do that love, please, you have to believe me. I wasn’t having an affair.”

And so, when the bird opened its wings and took off, Shinichi barely even noticed his legs moving as he took off after it, chasing the voice that begged him to follow and help her, help her please.

As this strange haze descended around him Shinichi could barely hear his friends cry out as he started to chase after a crow, nor could he hear their footsteps as they in turn chased after him. “Conan-kun! What’s going on?” Ayumi called out, voicing all of the children’s confusion for them in that one shout.

“I,” he struggled with the words he wanted to say, the words the woman kept repeating, what he should actually say, before settling on, “don’t lose sight of that crow!”

Confused as they were they obeyed his instructions, and only a few minutes passed before it landed on the ground and started pecking near a tarp. When they all caught up the voice abruptly vanished, and Shinichi stared at the bird, stared at the tarp, and sighed, placing his palm over his face as he seriously contemplated how this could be his life. “Call the police,” he told Haibara, who looked grimly amused even as she withdrew her phone and started dialing a well-known number.

When he turned back around the crow had fluttered to a nearby wall and watched as the children all spread out and started searching for clues, none of them touching the tarp to mess with the scene of the crime.

Once the police arrived it was an easy report to make, the tarp being tested for DNA outside of the victim’s and cameras being checked to see if they had footage of the body drop off. As the kids all waited for police to dismiss them, Shinichi looked up to see the crow still watching them. Waiting like they were. Shinichi walked over to the wall the crow was on and, when it didn’t move, sat down at the base of it. Haibara soon joined him.

“So?” She asked him, and he glanced over at her.

“What?” He asked back, keeping most of his attention on her even as he stayed aware of the procedures taking place around them.

“Care to explain what all of this is? Now animals lead you to murder scenes?” Haibara gestured at the crow above them and Shinichi shrugged.

“I guess? I’m not sure.” He frowned for a moment. What could he possibly tell her that would make her believe him? That he heard a woman’s voice begging for help coming from the crow? He settled on a modified truth. “When it started flying, I just suddenly felt like I had to follow it. I could barely think about anything else. It was…unnerving.” He struggled with how else to put it, but Haibara seemed to understand. Or rather, she understood enough to be amused.

“So the crow dragged you to the body? I imagine you won’t be going a day without finding a body now, corpse magnet.”

She wasn’t taking this seriously. Which, if Shinichi were to be honest with himself, was completely reasonable. It’d happened to him and he’d barely understood it.

Another hour passed before they’d found the murderer and started the hunt. Shinichi managed to knock him out from aboard his skateboard with a jump and hitting him with the end of it. As he was ziptying the man’s hands together he heard wings flapping closer, and finished what he was doing before looking up. The crow was there, staring at him, and as he watched a shimmering light seemed to leave it, dissipating into the air. Shinichi felt…lighter, almost. As if the near chronic pain he received from taking the temporary antidotes wasn’t as bad. As if he actually fit in his body and wasn’t about to burst at the seams.

The police took the man away and the kids celebrated with ice cream. Shinichi stared at his cone and tried to not think about the final, whispered, “thank you” that had brushed his ears as the shimmering light disappeared.

Shinichi spent the next day taking a walk by himself and ran into three more bodies, finding one on his own and having crows guide him to the other two. With each case that he closed, each murderer he brought to justice, he saw a shimmering light leave the crows that were following him, and felt as if he’d gotten a full night’s sleep that was slowly mending the aches and pains he’d accumulated.

The whispers grew easier to ignore, the voices simply thanking him or apologizing or, on the rare occurrence, threatening him. Occasionally a new one would surface and he would listen for a few minutes before ignoring them as well. Sometimes the new voice was a soul asking for help, who’d vanish once he’d solved the mystery of their death. Other times it was just a new voice to the chorus he barely heard anymore. And others still would appear to ask him questions, and Shinichi would answer them back.

He’d been asked questions ranging from the weather for the next week, to the answer to a calculus question, to where Kaitou KID’s next heist would take place. While he could only give vague predictions for items like the first he found that he genuinely enjoyed answering questions like the latter two, once the appropriate information (the question itself and KID’s latest heist note respectively) was given to him.

Months passed like this, shimmering lights on crows leaving when he solved crimes and voices talking to him and asking questions about things he may or may not know.

Maybe he was going crazy, he contemplated as Ran and Sonoko walked in front of him in their enthusiasm for shopping. But would a crazy person have such an active ecosystem in their mind? Would it have voices that come and go, and never attempt to influence his thoughts or actions outside of asking for help? Would they have information so detailed and accurate that, when researching them, they find actual people they’d never met before? Shinichi has no idea.

There was a book shop next to the clothing store Ran and Sonoko were interested in for the day, and Shinichi excused himself to browse through their wares. The old man at the front of the store, Gozaru Shisuke, smiled at him, and he smiled back even as he took in the faint shimmer of light on his torso. He was about to have a heart attack, Shinichi suspected. The child detective looked through the books before picking out one on plants sorted by region and a book on psychology. And, more for pleasure and amusement, he also picked up “A Study in Green” to see how such literary universes meshed.

As he went to pay for the books, he looked at Gozaru and felt a rush of…resignation, perhaps. Whatever this was, this strange thing that was happening to him, he didn’t want to see that a familiar face would die whether he warned him or not. He just…wanted to keep as many people alive as possible.

As he thought this, he accepted his change from the old man and their hands briefly brushed. When he made contact with Gozaru there was hush from the voices in his head (unusual when he wasn’t in the middle of an investigation) and he felt as if energy was being siphoned out of him through his hand.

He flinched back, and watched with wide eyes as Gozaru coughed, just as surprised as him. The two stared at each other, and it took Shinichi a moment to realize.

The shimmer on Gozaru’s chest was gone.

Shinichi walked out in a daze as Gozaru called out a confused but stronger goodbye than he had his greeting, and sat down outside of the clothing store to wait for Ran and Sonoko.

He didn’t touch any of his books in his confusion and growing panic.

When they got home Shinichi called out that he was visiting Haibara and went tearing down the street to the professor’s house. “Haibara!” He called out, bursting through the door to see the entrance way empty. “Haibara!”

As he was calling out for her Haibara appeared, scowling fiercely at him with her arms crossed over her lab coat. “Jeez, Kudo, what is it?” She snapped, tapping one finger on the opposite arm impatiently.

The conviction that’d filled Shinichi left him as he moved to speak. Would she believe him? She hadn’t before. But he couldn’t keep this a secret anymore if it was going to possibly lead to his death. Or, whatever it meant for him to lose energy and stop Gozaru from having a heart attack (was that what happened? He didn’t know anymore, if he’d ever known at all). So he took a fortifying breath and locked eyes with her. “Something’s happening to me,” he told her. “It’s been getting worse since that crow led me to that corpse.”

Haibara made a sound, clearly remembering that day as well and sounding skeptical of the correlation. “To the lab with us, then,” she said, and together the two went down to the basement.

When they got there she gestured at the table and started grabbing various examination devices as Shinichi obeyed the command and perched on the edge of the table. “Elaborate,” she commanded as she checked within some cabinets and withdrew a stethoscope. “When did…whatever this is…start occurring?”

Shinichi kicked idly at the air from on top the table as he thought. “A few months ago,” he decided. “I started hearing voices, little things like thanks and apologies and questions that I would answer and they would thank me for answering.” He frowned as he thought more on the phenomenon. “The number of voices occasionally grows whenever I solve a case. That’s the only correlation I’ve figured out so far.”

There was a beat of silence as Shinichi thought more on the instances when the voices would increase, trying to see if there was anything else he could derive from the information, before it’s broken by the ominous clink of metal items on a different table. Shinichi looked at the noise to see Haibara pinching the bridge of her nose and looking utterly done with the entire situation despite having only been privy to the information for less than a minute. “Haibara?” He queried, and the look she turned on him was enough to make him cringe back in surprise.

“And you’re only telling me about it now?” She hissed, furious with the other false child as he kept a wary eye on her. “I thought you were going to say just before the incident with the crow, but that was barely a month ago! Kudo, you can’t hide stuff like this! What if it’s a side effect from the poison? What if it’s from one of the prototype cures? I need to know this information!” With every sentence her voice was getting louder and until she was near-yelling at the boy.

Said boy only glared back at her, sullen. “I didn’t think it was important! Besides, a reaction to medication wouldn’t explain why crows have started showing up in increasing numbers around me and leading me to corpses.” He then paused and stared into the middle distance as a thought caught up with him. “Though it could explain the shimmering lights on the crows that only disappear when I solve a case, and it could explain how I feel healthier whenever the light disappears, if you think the drug or temporary cures have been affecting my mind.” A loud sigh went off next to him and he turned to see Haibara in front of him, the equipment she’d been gathering placed next to him on the table.

“And you didn’t tell me any of this before now?” She growled, flashing a light in his eyes to check sensitivity and dilation speed before glaring at him until he took off his shirt, and placing the stethoscope near his lungs to monitor his breathing. “Breathe.”

He did so, holding off on his recounting until she’d checked from both his front and back and took away the metal to hook him up to a heartbeat monitor. “I didn’t have any reason to presume it was antidote related, it didn’t start directly after taking the antidote and then turning back into a child. Again, it only started a few months ago, and I haven’t had a reason to turn into Shinichi in half a year.”

She took his temperature and blood pressure with a hum of acknowledgement, recording all of the data she’d collected thus far into her computer before turning back to him. “It all looks standard so far,” she assured him, adding his average heartrate to the data and disconnecting the monitor. “Have you had any more instances of being dragged to corpses by crows?”

He wobbled his hand in a so-so manner. “Not like the first time, I can control the desire to follow them now, but they do still guide me to bodies if they have that shimmer on them.”

“And the…shimmer…disappears when you find their murderer?” She asked, tying a tourniquet on his left arm and swabbing the crux of his elbow.

“The moment they’re arrested it’s gone,” he confirmed, not bothering to flinch as she started to draw blood. “It diffuses like smoke in the air.”

“Hmm.” After drawing three vials worth of blood she removed the needle and tourniquet and threw a bandage at him on her way to the storage unit. Shinichi rolled him eyes as he started tending to the still bleeding spot. “And you said you felt “healthier” after the shimmer would disappear. Elaborate on that.”

“Scars that were bothering me before are barely an ache now, though the scar itself remains. The chronic pain from the prototype antidotes has been abating, and I feel a lot more comfortable in my skin.” Whatever response he was expecting from Haibara at that, mostly snark and more skepticism, it wasn’t for her to freeze as she was facing the storage cabinet, the door to it still open and her hand resting on the handle to close it. He frowned. “Haibara?”

She closed the storage door slowly, and the click that resounded from it felt almost ominous to Shinichi. “Kudo,” she started slowly, and whatever that note was in her voice Shinichi had no interest in finding out. He started to leverage himself off of the table when she turned around and pinned him with a glare so furious that it froze him in place out of sheer survival instinct. “What chronic pain from the antidotes.”

Oh.

Right.

He’d forgotten to tell her about that.

Shinichi kicked his feet idly as he resettled onto the table, resigned to his fate. “All of the antidote attempts I’ve taken work in putting me back in my teenaged body,” he admitted, starting with something she’d obviously know, “but they’ve all left this ache throughout my body that build on top of each other. It just happened so gradually I didn’t really notice after the spikes from the initial part of the transformation until I started seeing those shimmers and their disappearances began to relieve some of the pain.”

“And you never thought to tell me?” The anger and tiny note of hurt hit him squarely in the chest, and his shoulders hunched defensively.

“I thought it was a given,” he admitted. “That transforming like was simply meant to hurt. And if that was the case, I didn’t want you to waste your time looking for ways to dull it instead of finding the antidote itself. And I still need them.” At this point Shinichi was staring firmly at the ground, not willing to look up and see the face Haibara was likely pulling.

Finally he heard a sigh and footsteps move closer. “Kudo, look at me.” He did so with a good deal of hesitance, and didn’t argue as she smacked him on the head before resting her hands on her hips. “No more of that,” she told him firmly. “You have to tell me what the antidotes are doing to you, I need all of that data to continue tweaking it. Who knows,” she shrugged shallowly, “maybe whatever is causing the pain is the roadblock in my research. We’ll figure this out.” Then her eyes sharpened. “But you have to talk to me, or else it’ll never get done.” She sighed, tired. “If you hide something this crucial from me again, I’ll cut off your access to the prototypes.”

Shinichi flinched, but nodded. He honestly wasn’t surprised; Haibara, for all her prickly outer layer, would never forgive herself for harming a friend, intentionally or not, and while they both denied it at times he knew they were friends.

Despite them not finishing their conversation, he knew she needed some time to herself after all of this new information, so he threw his shirt back on, put a hand on her shoulder for a moment, and saw himself out.

The days he spent waiting for Haibara to come to terms with everything he’d told her were spent trying to figure out what exactly he’d done to Gozaru (confirmed his death? Healed his heart? Simply made the shimmer disappear?) and, naturally, the best way to do that was by experimenting.

The next day Shinichi looked up at one of the crows that had taken to following him and said, “Lead me to an animal that is going to die.”

And the crow nodded and took off, Shinichi following its path.

It didn’t go far before it’d perched itself in front of an alleyway, waiting for him to make it to the mouth before fluttering down the ground and pecking at a cardboard box that was semi-hidden in the shadows. A weak, barely heard mewling rose from the box at the movement of the box, and Shinichi quickly made his way over and knelt down to better see what was inside.

A tiny kitten was curled up in the box, its chest shallowly moving as it struggled to breathe. There was a flicker of light on its chest and Shinichi knew, from the light and the rasping way it was panting, that the kitten was going to die from fluid in its lungs in a matter of hours.

With a careful glance around, the child rested his hand on the kitten and brought forth the resignation he’d felt before, the wistful longing to maybe save even one more life, never mind the species. As he did so he felt another thing rise within him, a strange heat that leeched warmth from him as it passed through his veins. It travelled to his hand before jumping from him to the kitten.

Once more the voices that were little more than background noise went silent, and Shinichi shuddered as he finally registered the loss in energy from the heat leaving his body before looking up as he felt movement under his palm. The kitten started to cough, taking larger breaths as it expelled the liquid in its lungs, and moved to push more into his palm. When it opened its eyes they connected with his, and the kitten blinked before letting out a weak purr and licking his hand.

He took it home with him and watched Goro-chan fuss over the new addition. When Haibara asked him to come over two days later, he brought the kitten along with him, and savored the way she stared at him, torn between reprimanding him and taking the kitten into her own arms.

“I can prevent things from dying,” he told her, and she made a sound between a sigh and a groan and gestured him to move more into Agasa’s house.