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Kaito wakes to the sound of plaintive, relentless meowing. He does not own a cat. He used to own doves, kept solely for the purposes of magic tricks (and training them to dive-bomb Hakuba on sight), but he's since surrendered responsibilities to his parents, since his apartment doesn't allow pets. He currently owns a(n illegal) goldfish he'd won at a Tanabata festival with Shinichi, more in a bid to impress Shinichi than because he wanted a new pet.
So. The meowing is a surprise, to say the least, and also a sign that he should possibly be worried about Goldie’s safety.
Kaito takes a moment to flail around in search of his boyf—the love of his—his hopefully future hus—his unlabelled friend-with-bene—in search of Shinichi, whom he recalls falling asleep beside in a serotonin-laced stupor. He finds only long-cooled sheets, which, while disappointing and slightly disheartening, doesn't come as a surprise. With a sigh, he peels himself out from beneath the duvet, trying not to feel too smug about how he’s pleasantly aching in various places, and goes to find the source of the purring. Maybe it's a cat video that his neighbor is blaring at (he squints at the digital clock winking at him from his dresser) 7:36 a.m.
As it turns out, the source of the meowing is not a cat video. It is an actual cat: an entirely black cat, squishy-looking and fluffy and regal, what Kaito imagines the Prince Charming of cats would look. It's sitting on his kitchen counter, taking up half of the counter space with its fluffy little body (which says more about the size of Kaito's kitchen than the size of the cat). It's staring fixedly at Kaito with large, luminous eyes. Its tail swishes back and forth in a regular four-four rhythm like a ropey, shedding conductor's baton.
The cat looks at Kaito. Kaito looks at the cat. After twenty seconds of this, Kaito realizes they've descended into a staring contest.
"Good morning," Kaito ventures diplomatically when he loses the staring contest fourteen seconds later, blinking his watering eyes. The cat dips its head regally and meows.
The apartment is on the fourth floor. Kaito keeps his windows locked at all times (an aside: finding creative ways to break into his apartment is pretty fun, although Shinichi had given him a concerned look when he’d found out about this hobby and offered Kaito the number of his psychiatrist for the third time in their acquaintance. Kaito felt that this reaction was slightly hypocritical, considering Shinichi was the one who was always talking about finding intellectually stimulating pastimes). The only other person who has a key to his apartment is Shinichi, and Kaito can't imagine him letting in a cat just to mess with Kaito
Well… actually, maybe he can. It still seems unlikely, though.
"Where did you come from?" he ends up asking the cat, reaching out to pet the cat behind its pointed little ears. The cat's tail sweeps over the counter, while the cat's face remains uninterpretable in a typical catlike fashion and the cat's eyes slow-blink at him. At any rate, Kaito decides, he's not going to get any answers out of it.
It's then that Kaito glances down and realizes that Shinichi's clothes are still there. Shinichi's hoodie is—embarrassingly, in retrospect—thrown halfway over the top of Kaito's fridge, a few feet from the door. His t-shirt is on the ground by the kitchen table, by now a mess of wrinkles, and his jeans are still lying in a crumpled heap in the short stretch of hall leading into Kaito's bedroom, the spot where Kaito recalls complaining about the existence of buttons before he ripped the button straight off Shinichi's jeans and then towed a resigned Shinichi into the bedroom.
For half a heartbeat, Kaito's id is greedily and smugly convinced that Shinichi stole his clothes and is now roaming the streets of Tokyo in Kaito's Clothes. But then he remembers the time that Shinichi semi-pissily made him change before they went out for breakfast (to be fair to him, Kaito had been wearing a “SUN'S OUT, GUNS OUT” tank top) and decides that no, that's probably not what happened here. Shinichi wouldn't do that. Kaito closes his eyes, trying to think of a valid explanation for the situation.
Okay, he tells himself, one hand absently rubbing at the curve of the cat's neck. Become Shinichi. When that just makes him wonder about what it would be like to swap bodies with Shinichi—most of him is convinced that it would be pretty hot—he revises, Become an extremely intelligent detective who is not Shinichi. Become--become Hakuba. That puts a damper on things pretty quickly.
The facts are as follows:
1) There is an inexplicable cat in his apartment.
2) The only way it could've gotten in is with help, because the windows and doors are locked.
3) Someone must have smuggled the cat in, then (it’s likely not a resident's cat, since everyone in the building is convinced that the landlady used to run a yakuza family and is too scared to violate her no-pets rule).
4) The only people who have easy access to Kaito's apartment are Kaito and Shinichi.
5) Kaito did not let the cat in.
6) Shinichi must have let the cat in.
7) Judging from the fact that his clothes are still present in the apartment, Shinichi hasn't left the apartment to go smuggle in a cat, unless he did so naked.
8) Naked Shinichi is... a thought.
The cat has begun to purr loudly enough to break Kaito's concentration (well, more than Naked Shinichi already had). Kaito looks down at it to see it pressing itself into his hand, making silky, rumbly sounds as if there's a motor lodged in his throat. Somehow, it still manages to exude self-confidence and regality. It's devastatingly cute.
"I don't know what to tell you," Kaito informs the cat sadly. "I don't know how you got in here. And I don't know where my boyfriend went." The cat blinks big eyes up at him, and Kaito winces. "Yeah, I know. He's not actually my boyfriend. We haven't had that conversation. I can't make that assumption. You're right. I'm being stupid."
Kaito has never seen a cat look judgmental. Today is a day of firsts.
The cat stands up and twists all of a sudden—and, wow, that was an unceremonious gender/biological sex reveal party, but it's a male cat—and leaps gracefully off the counter. He pads across the room, tail swishing, and Kaito follows him all the way into the bedroom, where he finds the cat sitting pointedly on Kaito's phone and giving him a significant look. Kaito blinks, nudging the cat aside to pick up his phone, and wonders how and why he ended up taking orders from a magic cat this early in the morning.
"What did you want me to do with this?" he asks blankly. The cat levels him with a look communicating extreme displeasure, which is unhelpful and somehow makes him miss Shinichi. It's embarrassing enough that Kaito is as in love with Shinichi as he is; somewhere, his self-respect is dying over the fact that he's getting kind of emotional over a cat that reminds him of Shinichi. If only there was a way he could talk to Shinichi right now and assuage his neediness.
With a burst of neurons firing, Kaito realizes that maybe he should call Shinichi, and maybe that's what the cat was telling him to do.
"Oh," he says, glancing at the cat, who shakes his head at him and licks delicately at a paw, which he then uses to smooth back his fur. Kaito watches for a moment. It kind of reminds him of Shinichi’s attempts to be suave.
Kaito digs around for Shinichi's contact—who's he kidding; Shinichi is his second-most-frequently called, narrowly losing to Aoko—and hits the call button. It takes a minute before the call goes through, at which point he suddenly hears something, muffled and faint, coming from the hall. When he follows it, he finds Shinichi's cell phone in the pocket of his abandoned jeans, and that. That is a sign.
The cat looks smug.
Throughout the course of Kaito's life, there have been several watershed moments—the moment he thought his father had died, for one; the moment he decided to become Kid, for another. The moment he realized he was in love with Shinichi, too.
They were stuck in a museum with a serial killer who had a bodycount in the double digits and a vendetta against Shinichi, because that was how Shinichi's life went and thereby how Kaito's tended to go by proximity. Fragments of Kaito occasionally wished that Touto University’s general education requirements hadn't deigned to place Shinichi and him in the same stats class in freshman year and that fate and their personalities hadn’t pushed them into best friendship, because innocent parts of Kaito's life (like the very innocuous heist the night had started with) kept ended up getting contaminated by Shinichi's death god powers. But mostly Kaito was resigned to it.
"Hey," he whispered, poking the back of Shinichi's leg. They were crouched behind a statue of two nymphs in a passionate embrace. Kaito was having a hard time not looking at any—parts. Shinichi twisted to glare at him.
"You're being kind of loud, considering the situation," he said, squinty and judgmental. Kaito sighed.
"She's nowhere near us," he pointed out. "Didn't you hear her going into the gallery with all the weird modern art? Her shoes are pretty loud." Five-inch heels with actual stilettos for heels, while fashionable and suitable for a mass murderer, were not the quietest of footwear, especially on marble floors. Shinichi hummed, probably because he knew that Kaito was right and just didn't want to admit it. He had this thing about pride. Not that Kaito was much better.
"So what's the plan?" Kaito asked eventually. "Are you going to jump out and take her down with nothing but your bare hands and your psychologically repressed rage? That might be fun to watch." He'd seen Shinichi do that before, though that had been with the stalker he'd had during their third year at Touto. Kaito had almost felt bad for the guy, until he remembered that the guy had had an entire cloud full of non-consensual candids of Shinichi and then he’d just felt mad.
"First of all, I have regular meetings with a licensed psychiatrist, which means that my rage is fully unrepressed. Second of all, she has a shotgun that she’s proven to be very skilled at using, which leads me to think that you actually want me to die," Shinichi said, conversational. Kaito had to turn away to hide the smile he felt creeping across his face. "No, I'm going to distract her using the card gun that I stole from you twenty minutes ago when we were in the impressionist room."
"You did not—" Kaito began, incredulous, but his hand met empty air when he reached for his waistband. Shinichi arched an eyebrow at him, hoisting the card gun up. Apparently, he'd just been holding it for the last three exhibitions they'd crept through. Kaito blinked. He hadn't even noticed. "I'm impressed."
"Thank you," Shinichi said demurely. "So, I'm going to be bait. I'll lead her through the rest of the museum, and you're going to go for help while I do that." Kaito stared.
"You know, I think you actually want you to die more than I do."
"Kaito," Shinichi started patiently, "you're a civilian—"
"—um, last I checked, so were you, Mr. Civilian Consultant Man," Kaito said, incredulous.
"—and this is my case, and it's my fault that she's after us, so I'm going to take responsibility. You don't have any smoke bombs or sleeping gas leftover from the heist, right? You're unarmed, basically." Shinichi looked so serious, blinking at him in the dim lighting. "You have to defer to me because I'm the detective here." Kaito squinted.
"Sorry, I must have missed the ‘civilian amateur detectives must always be deferred to’ law being passed."
"It's still in the drafting stage," said Shinichi, waving the card gun. "Anyway, we're going to do that." He swallowed, uncharacteristically telling. "I don't know what I'd do if I saw you get hurt."
Kaito just looked at him. He looked kind of stupid, holding Kaito's bulky card gun, glitter and shiny bits of paper stuck in his hair from one of the confetti bombs Kaito had lovingly included in the heist. But his face was earnest and stoic, determined. Kaito had known for a long time that Shinichi was kind of insanely hot, because anyone with functioning eyes and an active sex drive knew that, but this was—something else. There were plenty of hot people in the world, many of them in Kaito's friend group, even, but none of them made him feel like this. A hot feeling bloomed in his chest, suffusing the space within his ribcage with warmth. He was in love with Shinichi. Probably.
"Are you okay? Your face is doing something weird." Shinichi narrowed his eyes. He looked as though he were studying Kaito for visible injury.
"I'm having an emotion," Kaito said, waving him off.
The feeling in his chest stayed with him for the rest of the night, after Shinichi succeeded in luring the killer away from Kaito and Kaito succeeded in ignoring the demands of Shinichi's martyr complex and bashed her over the head with a bust of Athena. It stayed with him for the rest of the week, the rest of the month, the rest of the year. After it stayed with him for four more years, Kaito came to the conclusion that it would stay with him until he died, probably.
Ran doesn't look pleased to have been awakened at eight in the morning. Kaito suspects she's wearing nothing underneath her bathrobe, and she also has some really obvious sex hair going on, which means Sera is somewhere in the recesses of her apartment, impatiently awaiting her return. Kaito feels kind of guilty about interrupting what was clearly shaping up to be an amazing morning, but he's having a crisis.
"Do you know if Shinichi was working any cases with a mob? Or the mafia? The yakuza, maybe?" he demands the second she has the door all the way open. Ran blinks at him, mouth partway open and frown partway in place, before she sighs. They've known each other since Kaito and Shinichi met in their real identities a few years back, which means that she's somewhat accustomed to this kind of behavior from him.
"Don't you think that you would know better than I would, considering the amount of time you two spend together and the fact that you're his boyfriend?"
"I'm not his boyfriend," Kaito hisses, glancing around, but there's nobody else in the hallway. Well, except for the cat, which Ran seems to notice in that second. She crouches to run a hand down his spine, eliciting a soft purr from him.
"What's with the cat, Kuroba-kun? He’s cute." Ran wrinkles her nose as she pokes at a sprig of fur at the back of the cat’s head. "His fur’s kind of sticking up in weird places, though."
"Wow, excuse you," says Kaito, disproportionately affronted, and scoops the cat up, away from Ran's prejudiced, apple lotion-scented hands. The cat doesn't seem to mind; he just hangs from Kaito's hold, upper body hooked over Kaito's forearm as his tail flicks serenely against Kaito's leg. "This is serious business, okay? I woke up this morning and there was a cat in my apartment and no Shinichi.” When Ran opens her mouth, he adds, “And he left his clothes."
"Okay," Ran answers after a second, slow and unsure. "So... Shinichi went on an uncharacteristic streaking spree and left a cat in your apartment." Kaito is somehow both saddened and not surprised by the fact that she didn't pause to consider Shinichi going out in Kaito's clothes.
"Yeah, that was what I was thinking," Kaito agrees before he pulls Shinichi's phone out of his pocket with a flourish. Ran's eyes lock on the screen and widen in understanding. "But he left his phone, Mouri-san. His phone. His connection to his murder booty calls."
"First of all, I don't think you should refer to Inspector Megure asking for help like that," Ran says, because she's beautiful and sweet and fun but also classy and lacking the desire to indulge him the way Shinichi generally does. Kaito shrugs—he thinks it's an apt description, what with how Megure and Takagi and the rest of the first division call Shinichi up the second they get stuck on a case. "Second of all, yeah, he's probably been kidnapped, then. I'd guess it's the Black Organization, but Shinichi dismantled them pretty thoroughly, and leaving behind a cat seems kind of unlike them, so." Her gaze slides to the cat still dangling from Kaito's arms, and Kaito instinctively tightens his grip on him. "Third of all, why did you bring the cat with you?"
"I didn't mean to," Kaito insists, looking down at the cat's furry little head. The cat tilts the aforementioned head back to meow at him, swinging his legs so his feet pat-pat-pat against Kaito. It's very cute. "He followed me out the door. I didn't realize he was with me until I was halfway over here." The cat has proven himself to be surprisingly slippery. Kaito hadn't even noticed until he'd brushed up against Kaito's leg and purred up at him, looking like the proverbial canary-eater.
Ran's face takes on a thoughtful expression. She glances down at the cat, who mews at her, before she abruptly looks amused. Not in a "Well, this is an interesting situation we've found ourselves in," way, but an "I am going enjoy laughing at you for years to come," way. Kaito, being friends with both Aoko and Hakuba, is intimately familiar with that expression.
"Ohhh, I see how it is," she says, leaning against the doorframe. "I take it back." Kaito squints at her.
"Take what back?"
"The second thing. Shinichi hasn't been kidnapped," answers Ran. Kaito waits. When nothing else seems to be forthcoming and Ran continues to be beautiful and unhelpful, he groans and rubs a hand through his hair, which—hey, he might have some leftover sex hair too.
"Thank you for your clarity."
"You're welcome," Ran replies without a hint of apology. "Also, you should talk to the cat about Shinichi. Specifically, how he makes you feel." Kaito stares.
"You're suggesting I talk about my feelings with the magical cat that showed up in my apartment at 7:30 this morning, instead of finding out if my—my—if your best friend has been kidnapped?"
"Yes," Ran agrees. She looks serious, and also a little proud of herself, as though she's somehow contributed to solving the problem rather than just cranked up Kaito's cortisol levels. Kaito is bamboozled by her and everything she stands for.
"O... kay?" he tries after a pause.
"I'm glad we understand each other," she says, and then looks over her shoulder into her apartment, not at all subtly. Kaito sighs.
"Fine, okay, go back to sexing up your girlfriend," he grumbles. Ran smiles, only twenty-six percent bashful, and waves as she shuts the door.
Kaito sets the cat down. The cat circles for a second, a lazy tornado of black fur and cuteness, before sitting on his haunches and looking up at Kaito, solemn, before he gives a single meow.
"Same," says Kaito, and checks the time on his phone. 8:41. He glances at the cat, considering. "Want breakfast?"
The cat purrs in delight and gets up to rub along Kaito’s ankle before he starts down the hall, tail held aloft.
The first time Shinichi kissed Kaito was a Saturday. Kaito remembers because it had been right before Kaito's first official stage show, and Kaito wasn't nervous, obviously, because he was Kid, after all, which meant that he was well-practiced in tricking crowds into loving him, and it was somewhat difficult doing it as Kid, since Kid was an internationally-wanted jewel thief, which meant it had to be easier doing it as his civilian, charming, no-warrants-out-for-his-arrest self, so clearly he wasn't, like, panicking—
"You're panicking," said Shinichi, without looking up from his phone. Kaito gave him a look of betrayal (which Shinichi didn't even notice, because he was still staring into the depths of his phone with his Intense Murder Solving Face in place) and clutched tighter at his suit jacket. It was starting to wrinkle underneath his gloves. In the distance, he could hear the stage manager yelling about how there were three minutes left till showtime, and was the lighting technician positive that the spotlights were set up properly. It was becoming less and less clear which would come first: curtains up or his impending heart attack.
Shinichi finally looked up from his phone and immediately deigned Kaito’s situation important enough to warrant sliding his phone into his back pocket. Kaito was both flattered and dismayed.
"Look." Shinichi took a half-step forward, until they were close enough that even in the dim backstage lighting they could look into each other's eyes. "I know you're worried because this is important to you. Because this is something that's yours, and this is going to be your legacy, not one you inherited from your father. I get why you'd be nervous." Kaito could feel Shinichi's breath rushing over his lips. The tempo of Kaito's heartbeat went from the pace of a waltz to that of a salsa, which perhaps had not been Shinichi's intention.
"But," continued Shinichi, "I also know that you are absolutely amazing at what you do. You are an incredible magician and an incredible performer, and I have never seen a crowd that wasn’t charmed by everything you do. Or, for that matter, a person who wasn’t.” He was wearing his earnest face, the one he used when he wanted suspects to believe that he trusted them and had absolutely no intention of pumping them for information.
Kaito eyed him, suspicious.
“You can say all of that, but you don’t seem all that charmed by me,” he pointed out, trying not to sound as uncertain as he felt. Shinichi’s eyebrows lifted.
“I don’t?” he said, deceptively mild.
“Nope,” Kaito answered with heightening confidence. He was pretty sure he was all alone in the Being Charmed department. “So I guess that means your argument is untrue, since you yourself are a counterexample of it.” Which means that there’s a high probability that I’m not going to charm everyone and I’m going to fail and I’ll have to change my name and shave my head and become a solitary traveling monk, he didn’t say, but he did think it, and from the look on his face, Shinichi could hear it anyway.
Shinichi narrowed his eyes at him, and Kaito had a moment to remember that Shinichi was the most competitive person alive when it came to winning arguments and/or being right, barring maybe Hakuba, before Shinichi swayed forward and kissed him on the mouth, hands tugging Kaito’s away from his jacket.
It wasn’t a nice kiss, but it was a good one. Shinichi didn’t kiss him the way you kissed a first date on their doorstep with their parents chaperoning from the front window; Shinichi kissed him the way you kissed someone in the middle of an argument, the way they did in movies, with a lot of passion and skillful tongue, as if there was a point to be made. Which there was, Kaito supposed when they pulled apart and his brain had gone through several stages of shock. Shinichi’s eyes were glazed, and his breathing was fast, and there was color in his face that Kaito couldn’t help but stare at and think I put that there.
“I think it’s been made abundantly clear that I’m charmed by you, Kaito. Possibly the most charmed person there is,” he said. Kaito blinked at him, having forgotten the whole discussion, before he bent back in to kiss Shinichi again, softer and shorter this time. When he pulled back, Shinichi was smiling at him, and Kaito felt his heart swell ten sizes in his chest, in a way unrelated to the heart attack he’d been expecting. He couldn’t help but think, I’m pretty sure I’m going to die in love with him.
And then it was showtime, and there was nothing but stupid happiness and the feeling of Shinichi’s mouth against his when he stepped onto the stage and welcomed the crowd. Afterward, Shinichi had worn his I Told You So face for two insufferable, amazing hours of socializing with Aoko and Hakuba and Hattori and Ran and every other wellwishing friend of theirs before Kaito had managed to drag him away and topple him into bed, and the rest was history, or at least close enough to history to make it into Kaito’s future memoirs.
Azusa has a documented weakness for cats. She once ignored Kaito trying to get a refill on his coffee in favor of crouching out on the sidewalk, tripping a man who was shouting into his phone about shareholders, to feed a diseased-looking stray cat who ate the fish she offered and then clawed her in thanks. Kaito suspects that her apartment is populated entirely by cats and cat-fur-covered turtlenecks. The second Kaito and the cat come through the door, the cat padding in alongside Kaito with un-feline poise, she's on them in half a second, customers abandoned at the counter.
"Uh, were you... sorry, can I get the check?" one of the customers says. He has three piercings in one ear and bright red hair.
"Aren't you a cute boy? Aren't you the cutest boy?" Azusa coos, cupping the cat's face in her hands. The cat weathers it with dignity, shooting Kaito a longsuffering look. He's a very expressive cat, Kaito is coming to understand. He shrugs at the cat over Azusa's shoulder.
"Uh, Azusa-san," Kaito begins after a minute of watching the cat looking more and more uneasy. "Could we get something to eat? Both of us, of course."
"Of course!" Azusa chirps and doesn't move, squishing the cat's face in her hands. The cat exhales, snuffly. The customer at the counter sighs, sets down a thousand-yen bill on the counter, and slinks out.
It takes fifteen minutes for Azusa to get their food to them—a stack of pancakes for Kaito, a plate of tuna for the cat—and then an additional five minutes for Azusa to stop petting the cat and go serve the matronly woman who's waiting impatiently at a table in the corner. Kaito wonders if she's planning on washing her hands before she serves the woman.
They eat in silence for a good few moments. Kaito watches the cat delicately pick off a flake of tuna with the tip of one claw.
"So I'm supposed to talk about my feelings for Shinichi with you," he says eventually, setting down his fork. He stares down at his pancakes. They're getting soggy. "I don't know why. But I guess I can try?"
The cat blinks at him, slow and measured. Kaito hesitates. Honestly, he doesn't know why Ran would suggest this, but a) she seems to know something he doesn't, and b) he's always down for spilling his Shinichi Feelings all over people. Non-Shinichi people, at least. There's at least two bartenders who have heard him composing poetry to Shinichi's various assets.
"Shinichi and I are... I don't know what to call us." Kaito thinks about that first kiss, and the months after it. "We haven't had that talk. But we are sleeping together. Like, that's a thing that's happened many times. So at least there's that." The cat makes an uninterpretable sound. His face does this scrunchy thing that looks like a frown, and Kaito sighs. "I know, I know. I, for one, would love to have that conversation. Since, you know, I'm willing to take whatever Shinichi's willing to give. In both a sexual and emotional sense."
"Meow," says the cat. Kaito nods at him.
"I agree," he replies solemnly, and also a little sadly. "Ideally, we would end up boyfriends, but that seems like a lot to ask. I don't know how Shinichi feels about me in terms of a future co-baby adopter."
"Meow," says the cat, this time more emphatically. He seems to be glaring at Kaito now.
"Yeah," Kaito says, not sure how else to response to that. "You're exactly right. You're very smart for a magical cat." It hits him then that he's trying to have a heart-to-heart with a cat who showed up in his apartment after his not-boyfriend disappeared, on the advice of his not-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, at a restaurant underneath his not-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's dad's place of work, with a plate of pancakes slowly turning to sludge in front of him. It is intensely surreal. He puts his face in his hands, wondering if anyone would notice if he cried for a few minutes. Maybe not if he leaned farther forward.
Aoko calls him a few minutes later, when he's given up on public crying (Azusa keeps looking over, probably more for the cat than for him) and the cat is licking the plate clean.
"Sooooo a little bird told me that you've picked up a little friend," is how she prefaces her call. Kaito scowls.
"I would've thought Mouri-san was in the middle of her sextravaganza," he says.
"Yeah, she probably is. But she sent a text to the group chat before she went back to it," Aoko tells him.
"Oh." Kaito frowns. "Wait, what group chat? Who else is in the group chat?"
"It's the 'Kaito is an idiot, let's laugh at him' group chat," Aoko informs him. "Well, okay, technically it's called 'HAHAHAHAHA' in all caps. Me, Ran-chan, Akako-chan, Kazuha-chan, and Saguru are in it."
"Thank you for that," Kaito says faintly. "Also, why is Hakuba in it? Why would you do that to me?" The cat's ears are pricked up. He's abandoned trying to lick the glaze off the plate in favor of staring at Kaito with his piercing eyes.
"He's good at making fun of you." Aoko sighs, dreamy, as if her boyfriend's ability to make fun of her childhood best friend is a quality indicating marriageability. Kaito is mildly disgusted. Do they have Tinder for finding new friends instead of for awkward conversations with bots? He really needs to find a new best friend. "But anyway! The group sent me to check on the situation.. Did you listen to Ran-chan? Did you talk to Ku—to the cat about your feelings?"
"Yeah," Kaito says, dragging out the syllable. Something is Not Right. "I did admit to the magical animal that I want to marry Shinichi and have his logic-adoring, fun-hating genius children." The cat seems to choke, and Kaito gives it a worried stroke down the spine. He hopes there weren't any stray bones in the tuna. "Why?"
"Glad to hear it," Aoko sing-songs. She sounds—the word sadistic comes to mind, which alarms Kaito, but not as much as her next words do. "Because that cat is Kudou-kun."
Kaito pauses, if “pauses” can be construed to mean "feels his respiratory system take a brief leave of functionality."
"What," he wheezes. The cat looks... uncomfortable.
"Yeah, don't you remember? That time we went out with Akako-chan, with the flaming shots and the male strippers and stuff?" Aoko says. Kaito groans, loudly.
"That's every time we go out with Akako, Aoko."
"Fair," Aoko agrees. "But no, the time where you sang karaoke to 'Umbrella' and dedicated it to Kudou-kun and then cried about his ass for twenty minutes."
The cat and Kaito make identical weird noises. They lock eyes over Kaito's plate.
"And then Akako-chan said she was going to do something drastic like turn Shinichi into a cat if you didn't sort things out with him in the next month," Aoko continues, "and you said he would make, and I quote, 'the most beautiful and perfect and funny and hot cat'? And then you sang 'Crazy in Love,' but then you changed all the words to be about Shinichi, and then I had to ban you from touching the karaoke machine."
"I don't remember that at all," Kaito says, horrified. Aoko hums, ruthless.
"Well, it's been a month since then. So Akako-chan decided to go ahead with it, since clearly you haven't fixed anything with Kudou-kun. She said in the group chat that the spell will wear off by tomorrow, so don't worry about changing Kudou-kun back or anything."
"Oh," says Kaito in a small voice. He turns a hesitant gaze on Shinichi the cat, who's looking at him with—all right, fine—an eerily similar expression to the one Shinichi wears when Kaito does something stupid like mix green hair dye into Hakuba's pretentious lavender shampoo when Kaito's over at Aoko's place. Shinichi being the cat would at least solve the question of how the cat ended up in his apartment and how Shinichi's clothes were left. He swallows. "Shinichi?"
The cat meows, very pointedly. If he had eyebrows, he’d be raising them.
"Oh," repeats Kaito, in an even smaller voice.
The first time Kaito met Shinichi out of context—outside the context of a heist and a six-year-old body, that is—Shinichi was sitting in Kaito's spot in his stats lecture, the first semester of freshman year at Touto. Kaito didn't even notice that it was Shinichi, at first; mostly, he'd just been wondering what asshole suddenly decided the spot five seats in from the aisle, three rows from the podium, was free real estate when it had been Kaito’s informally designated seat all semester.
"Hey," Kaito began, sidling up to the spot, but then the guy looked up and he'd been Kudou Shinichi. Kudou Shinichi in his real body, with his real arms and his real legs and his real, stupid, pretty face. Kaito stared. He could feel that his mouth was partway open. His throat had gone bone dry.
Shinichi, for his part, looked surprised to see him, blinking at him with an air of tentative nervousness, as if he'd found himself facing a pit of quicksand when he’d been expecting a pond. His eyebrows did something complicated before they settled at a neutral position over his eyes. He had long eyelashes, which Kaito hadn’t noticed when he’d been Conan.
"Hey," said Shinichi after a long, long moment. His voice was measured when he added, "Kid," in this very "I am trying to act nonchalant and smooth" voice that Kaito recognized as bullshit because it was a voice he himself employed fairly often. Kaito was surprised into a wry smile.
"So it's that obvious?" he asked, lowering his voice. Nobody was paying attention to them, but he didn’t want to risk it. "I should've expected that from you, tantei-kun." Shinichi rolled his eyes.
"It's not that obvious," he said, without any further explanation, and then class had begun and Kaito had dropped into the seat beside him, just to avoid having to fumble around for another open seat. To this day, Kaito still wonders what he meant by that.
"When we first met, it was only obvious to me that you were Kid because I'd been looking at you for so long," Shinichi says when Kaito wakes up the next morning, having fallen asleep last night with Shinichi the cat sitting on the spare pillow beside him. He's lying mostly under the sheets beside Kaito, vocal cords reestablished (fairly recently, judging from the way his voice rasps), hair as fluffy as his fur had been. "Even before I met you."
Kaito blinks blurry eyes at him, dumbly, before Shinichi shakes his head at him and rolls closer.
"This whole time we've been together, I thought we were dating," he says. "I thought we were boyfriends. I didn't kiss you because I only wanted…” He waves a hand. “I don’t just want some of you, you know. I wasn’t lying when I said I was charmed by everything about you. I thought you knew that."
"Oh, um," Kaito says, his voice weak and papery, before he clears his throat and continues, more strongly, when Shinichi raises his eyebrows at him, "You make the most beautiful and perfect and funny and hot cat, but you make an even more beautiful and perfect and funny and hot boyfriend, and I'm sorry I didn't realize that before."
"I'm sorry too," Shinichi agrees, snarky, and slow-blinks at him. The sheets are warm when Kaito presses Shinichi into them.