Chapter Text
The clouds are already different hues of pink and orange by the time Takagi has calmed down enough to go back to sleep, so he sighs heavily and heads to the kitchen for a morning coffee. Steam rises above the little white mug, but when he takes a sip, it’s ice cold. Takagi’s thoughts wander back to Conan, and his blood runs as cold as the coffee. Conan had loved iced coffee; he would always beg Ran-san for the stuff when they were wrapping up a case. Once or twice, Takagi had even seen an officer slip it to him when she wasn’t looking.
He doesn’t have time to go further down memory lane because in the blink of an eye, someone is there. Takagi dares not ponder who, but his detective instincts are screaming it at him as he numbly pours the coffee down the sink. He can feel the eyes boring into his back asking difficult questions and demanding attention, but he whips around to be met with an empty room. Except that it doesn’t feel empty—if Takagi turned around right now, he might accidentally make breakfast for two.
It’s nothing, Takagi tries to tell himself. Maybe his coffee maker is broken. Maybe he’s too tired to think straight. But it certainly can’t be what his gut is trying to tell him. Anything but that. It’s impossible. Utterly ridiculous. He’s a detective, for God’s sake, not a paranormal investigator.
Still, as Takagi stands in front of the door with his hand on the knob, something stops him. He’s not even sure he can explain why, but he can’t seem to open it and leave for some minutes, grappling with the little whisper in his mind that convinces him of what his instincts already know. Takagi doesn’t want to face it, but there is an undeniable fact that sits like a weight in his chest—Edogawa Conan is not quite gone. Somehow, through some miracle or nightmare, or both, he’s come back. And Takagi intends to find out why.
Swearing under his breath, Takagi kicks his shoes off and heads back into the kitchen, grabbing the corded phone from its perch off the wall. He hurriedly explains that his migraine hasn’t gone away and that he can’t come into work today. It’s a sort of half-truth, anyways. His head still feels a bit like pins and needles, buzzing with poorly repressed anxiety over the Edogawa Conan affair. He hangs up with a click, getting out a tall glass and more coffee grounds. Silently, he makes an iced coffee and sets it down in front of an empty chair at his kitchen table. He rests his palms on the table for a minute.
“A peace offering,” he says. The absurdity of talking to a seemingly empty room does not escape him, but he can’t find it in him to care. He really, really doesn’t like whatever had happened a year ago—a gory domino effect that left behind nothing more than a footnote when it should have been the front page. Takagi gets the feeling that it’s going to fall on his shoulders to fix it. After all, he’s the only one who could never quite give up on the case after it was closed, the only one who took the time to squint. With that thought, he shrugs on his coat and hesitates just a little bit in front of the door.
This time, nothing stops him, and he steps out into the dreary morning. Rain pounds against his windshield as he drives (admittedly faster than he should) towards Tropical Land, the silhouette of the Ferris wheel stark against the gray blanket draped over the sky. The brightly colored lights seem to dull in the dripping haze, unable to quite pierce it. As Takagi draws nearer, the advertisements on the road become more numerous, all plastered with huge, fake smiles that seem to ooze poison from the lips and whisper empty promises of escapism among the cotton candy and cheap teddy bears. It makes Takagi feel a little sick to the stomach, but he drives on.
When he finally arrives, almost nobody is there, of course—it’s a weekday morning and pouring to boot. The few people he passes seem in a hurry to get home and come back another day, which is fine by Takagi. It just means that he doesn’t have to worry about being disturbed.
Though Takagi has to admit, he had no idea what he’s supposed to do now. He’s not sure what he was expecting—some sort of sign or vision or something to tell where to go, he supposes—but he had no such luck. The lack of direction leaves Takagi to wander around aimlessly in the rain for half an hour. It gives him too much time to turn over the facts in his head for the millionth time, and it makes him wonder: what kind of answers is he going to find? There’s some part of him buried deep in his bones that isn’t sure he wants to know. Conan’s case is its own Pandora’s box; if Takagi were to open it, what demons might rush at him with their blood-soaked fingers already wrapped around his throat?
When it comes down to it, Takagi has to admit to himself that he doesn’t want the same thing to happen to him.
By now, the rain has completely soaked through his coat and pants, and Takagi feels a bit like a drowned rat as he presses on through the now soggy fairgrounds and the mud begins to seep into his shoes. He probably should have brought an umbrella. All he can hear is the sound of rain hitting the pavement around him, and he moves forward almost mechanically, a lone figure among the deserted rides.
As he passes the Mystery Coaster, his ears stop working, the rain fading away to be replaced with the cawing of the crows. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, but puts one foot in front of the other. He knows that he must be getting close to where Conan wants him. Everything in him screams at him to turn back, go back home and crawl in bed and wake up tomorrow to a world where none of this ever happened. Conan swoops in on a crime scene, again, much to the chagrin of everyone involved with that irritating overly-childish tone of voice. In that world, Takagi would watch Conan and slowly try to fit the puzzle together like he always does, the pieces always just out of reach.
Except that a year has come and gone, and with it it’s taken Conan, and nothing can ever change that.
So, Takagi grits his teeth and continues, getting closer to the pieces than he had ever imagined. Perhaps getting closer than he had ever wanted.
A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision catches his eye, and he looks over to see the shadow of a little boy standing in the middle of the paved pathway. The shadow lifts his hand and points behind him towards a gap between two maintenance buildings before running around the corner and out of sight. Takagi doesn’t have to be a detective to know what that means.
He practically sprints after Conan, skidding to a halt in front of an unassuming space made up of nothing but overgrown grass and some forgotten pieces of trash. The shadow is gone, but Conan’s not; the chill Takagi feels now is more than just the rain and wind. It extends deep into his heart, into his very soul even. It’s the chill of death.
“Here I am,” Takagi shouts over the crows. “Show me the answers.”
Without warning, the crows grow louder and Takagi is too nauseous to stand. He distantly feels himself fall over and get a mouthful of mud. He barely has time even register what’s happening before he falls unconscious.
When he opens his eyes, it’s silent and the pain is gone, replaced with a feeling of dread as he stares once again into the overwhelming display of absolutely nothing. The darkness is total, a velvety black that takes and takes and never lets go. No sun in the universe could have pierced the inky veil. It’s all this that makes Takagi tremble, but more than anything? This darkness is familiar. But how could it not be? It seems saturated with Conan’s presence.
“You came,” comes Conan’s voice from behind him. Takagi jumps and whips around to see the shadow standing there, almost blending in with the surrounding darkness. But when he blinks, Conan looks just the same as the night before.
“Of course I did,” says Takagi. “I’d suspected something was off about you for months. You’re awfully intelligent for a kid your age, but what that means is when you speak, I’ll listen. It’s probably important.”
Conan nods. “If I had to be stuck with someone that day at Tokyo Tower…I’m glad it was you. But I digress; you came for answers.” His gray irises rise to meet Takagi’s blue ones, and Takagi has to suppress a shudder at the unnatural glow. “I have a better connection to you here; it’s why I asked you to come. This, Officer Takagi, is where I died.” An odd half-grimace half-smirk decorates his face for a second. “According to me, at any rate.”
Takagi furrows his eyebrows. “Here? But your body was found in a sewer tunnel.” He supposes it’s possible that Conan had been killed here and then moved somewhere else, but there had been no signs of such a thing. And he’s completely sure of that; that crime scene was not one that Takagi can easily forget. He can imagine it all vividly even now: the pool of blood around the tiny, broken form, the nightmarish red splatters on the wall, and the bullet shell lodged in the wall where Conan’s head must have been. Everything had been as messy as if the crime had taken place right there.
“While it is true that I was killed in a sewer tunnel, that was just a…‘formality,’ if you will. If you ask anyone else, I died at gunpoint in 1997. But if you ask me, I would tell you that I died in ‘96. Let me ask you something, Officer Takagi: who do you think Edogawa Conan was? What kind of monster do you imagine was crawling underneath his skin after the elevator?”
Takagi’s head spins with more questions than ever, but he opens his mouth and replies in a manner that seems eerily calm even to his own ears. “Monster?” Conan tilts his head expectantly. “No, but imagine watching yourself from my perspective—here I am, some police dog stuck in a hopeless situation, and then there’s you. You, the spider spinning webs in the shadows until your target is too ensnared to get out. You, the brain with nothing at your disposal but the world at your fingertips. You, the eye of the storm. Sometimes, I was curious about you, and other times, I could hardly stand to look at you because I couldn’t even imagine what you could be capable of. You’re no monster, but there came a point where I wondered if you were even human.”
“I often wondered the same thing. I watched people die in the crossfire of my mission to take down my killers, and it always shook me, but never broke me.” Inhaling deeply, Conan shoves his hands into his pockets. The unspoken question does not escape Takagi’s keen senses: But I wonder if maybe it should have?
“Why are you here?” asks Takagi abruptly, eager not to go down that rabbit hole. “Why come back now, after a year? It’s too late now, Conan-kun. Your case was closed as fast as the higher-ups could manage, and everyone you knew has disappeared in one way or another. Maybe I could have done something back then. Kept the case open longer, presented some kind of evidence of your killer’s identity, something like that. But it’s all over and done with now.”
Conan’s head snaps upwards, his irises seem to swirl with a storm and darken. “You think I asked for this? You think I want to come back and see the trail of death I’ve left behind me? Be stuck always watching and unable to lift a finger to do anything? I don’t know why I’m here, but I would sure like not to be. Maybe then, I could have died with a little scrap of hope that they would leave everyone alone.” He sighs and rubs his temples, lowering his voice back to normal volume. “If I’m here for a reason, I don’t know what it is and I sure as hell don’t care. All that matters to me is that it’s an opportunity to pass on what I knew. And you’re the only one I can trust.”
“Tell me what happened,” Takagi urges as he gingerly takes a step towards Conan. “Fulfill your promise. Who are you, really?”
Conan looks away. “I’m sorry about this,” he starts slowly, guiltily, “but in order for you to understand, to really understand, I have to show you. I only hope you won’t think too ill of me.”
Takagi opens his mouth to respond, but doesn’t have the chance to before the world starts turning all around him, a mish-mash of colors and people and buildings and voices that makes his eyes sore and makes him feel like that migraine is resurfacing. He squeezes his eyes shut in response, only daring to open them when the unbearable tangle of voices becomes a steady murmur all around him. He’s standing in the middle of a crowd of people leaving Tropical Land, not even a hint of a raincloud in sight. He catches sight of some scattered police officers, and looks back at the brightly lit Mystery Coaster, which has come to a halt.
“Are you okay?” asks a very familiar feminine voice, and Takagi jerks his head to side to be met face-to-face with Ran-san. She looks a little younger than he remembers her, like all of her worries have been lifted from her shoulders.
“I’m uh…fine,” Takagi hesitates, his eyes darting all over the place. His eyes nearly bulge out of his head when he notices what looks very much like himself talking to Inspector Megure. The Mystery Coaster…this isn’t related to the homicide on the rollercoaster two years ago, is it?
He freezes as he spots a man in all black hurry around the same corner on the path that Takagi had just taken. He feels like two people at once, still Takagi Wataru but not; his brain splits between two commands at the same time, and he has the impression that he’s only watching a movie. The feeling is too alien.
“Go home without me, Ran.” The words tumble out of his mouth without his permission. “I’ll catch up with you later!” He waves with a cheery smile that drops the instant he’s turned away from her.
He starts running towards the corner, and Takagi catches a glimpse of someone that he used to know in the window of a shop as he runs after the man in black. At first, Takagi thinks that he must be mistaken, but he’s certainly seen enough of his face in the papers or on a case to know exactly who he’s looking at: Kudo Shinichi.
Immediately, the gears start turning.
His own mind seems to be suppressed, and it’s dragged underneath the surface. Takagi has trouble remembering who he is, his mind crowded with the past and the future melted together. His heart races as he instinctively lightens his step and peeks around the wall to witness an illegal transaction. Some feeling of triumph wells up in Shinichi’s chest. And why not? After all, these criminals have barely started and have already been caught by The Heisei Holmes—
His thoughts are cut off with a splitting pain in his head, knocking him to the ground with an explosion of stars in his vision. Blood trickles down his forehead, and a grunt escapes his lips as a drop splashes onto the grass. The triumph is instantly shattered and replaced with panic, a blind panic that shuts him down and screams at him to get up, move, do something. He can’t make his limbs move. All he can do is lay there and die. They’re going to kill him, aren’t they? He can’t die. He’s only sixteen, he has a whole future ahead of him, he doesn’t want to die.
“Damn kid,” a second figure with long silver hair mutters. A metal pipe drops onto the ground next to Shinichi’s head. “How’d you not notice him?”
“Sorry.”
“We’re going to have the cops on our backs in a second over this.” The long-haired man produces a sleek black briefcase. “Lucky for you, I have a solution. This is as good an opportunity as any to give this poison a test run. It’s supposed to be untraceable.”
The briefcase is opened and the man removes the red and white pill, his partner handing him a water bottle. He crouches down and grabs Shinichi’s bangs to raise his head, sliding the pill inside his mouth and forcing it down with the water.
Shinichi—no, not Shinichi, his name is Takagi—lets out a barely audible whimper as the pair in black walks away, not even sparing a glance as they disappear from his line of sight. His breathing accelerates, and stops as his heart starts to burn. Every heartbeat is agony, and he feels like is chest is being torn apart. His muscles spasm violently all at once as he curls up in a ball. His bones feel like they’re shifting, breaking, melting, and molding themselves into something else entirely. He distantly hears a savage scream, and wonders if it’s not his own.
“Hey, wake up, kid.” A light is shined directly in his face, and Takagi groggily opens his eyes to be met with a small herd of concerned police officers. There are no more colored lights.
“What is a child even doing passed out here?” someone in the back queries.
Takagi really doesn’t need more than that, but he slowly looks down at himself anyway. He’s swamped in ridiculously big clothes, and something catches in his throat as he stares at the expectant officer.
The officer’s eyes suddenly become gray and everything around him becomes a blurry smear, like the world has been put on pause. The soft sound of footsteps crunching on dry grass approaches, and Takagi sees the red before he sees Conan. Sprung up all around his feet are red snapdragons, which rapidly expand outwards and engulf the space, drowning Takagi in a sea of dewy crimson.
“You’re Kudo Shinichi,” Takagi breathes. His mind is a tornado, violently whipping around and around a thousand words exchanged, all the little hints that now made sense. He can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like. For him, this is just a nightmare, but for Conan? For Kudo? This had been the end of the world for him. He had been forced to live every day like that with no solution in sight.
“I was.” Conan glances down at his hands, much too small for him. “But Kudo Shinichi ceased to be that day at Tropical Land. We never managed to make an antidote. We tried. We really tried.” He breaks off and collects himself. “There is an entire underground criminal syndicate with eyes and ears everywhere. And that makes this sort of secret is hard to keep, Officer Takagi. You’re bound to make mistakes, and when you do it around the wrong witnesses…”
Conan doesn’t have to finish that sentence.
“And so that was the end of Edogawa Conan,” Takagi says softly. It’s hard to wrap his mind around, that someone who burned so bright could be snuffed out in an instant just like that. No justice, no clues, no nothing; only a swift bullet and that was that.
“And thus, I have a very important question for you.” Conan sits down in front of Takagi, sinking a little bit into the petals. “Can I count on you?”
Takagi’s mouth goes dry. “Count on me for what?”
“You saw what happened to me. To everyone around me. Can I trust you to finish what I started?” He leans forward and rests his chin on the back of his clasped hands.
It’s a tall order, and certainly more than Takagi can handle. These people are cunning and ruthless—how could he, some random homicide detective, even begin to undertake something like that? He only has state resources (no doubt tainted given the sheer effort everyone had gone through to shut Conan’s case), and he’s no genius. He’s extremely ill-equipped for such a task, and it’s largely a bad idea in all respects.
But.
How many victims has this organization taken? How many lives ruined?
Kudo Shinichi had been such a promising young detective, his future completely destroyed by these people. What could Ran-san have become? Everyone else connected to this monstrosity?
And did Takagi not swear an oath to protect innocent people at his police academy graduation ceremony?
Takagi slowly nods, hardly able to breathe under the weight of what he’s about to do. “How could I refuse?”
Conan closes his eyes and smiles, like he’s letting out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Thank you, Officer Takagi. Thank you…I know it’s more than you want to handle, but I can see the desire for justice in you. It’s too late to do anything for me, this is true—but they’re still out there hurting other people. Succeed where I failed. Protect them.” Solemnly, Conan bows his head.
Takagi opens his mouth, but doesn’t have a chance to respond before he feels wet grass underneath him. As he slowly cracks his eyes open, sunlight shines directly into them, making him shut them again and roll over on the soggy earth. The rain has stopped and the sky is mostly clear. He picks himself up off the ground and makes a half-hearted attempt to get some of the grime off his clothes, quickly giving up on that.
He leans against the wall of the maintenance building for support as a flood of memories breaks the dam of his mind and rushes in to mingle with his own. Heart aching, he clenches his jaw like he’s bracing himself for impact. They’re not just memories, Takagi soon realizes; Kudo is giving him information. Everything he’d learned about this organization, all his experiences, everything is now his.
“Thank you, Kudo-kun,” whispers Takagi.
The chill doesn’t leave him, but he almost doesn’t mind. Kudo’s presence doesn’t seem so foreboding anymore. Even in death, Takagi supposes, Kudo is Kudo. When he can find it in him to face the day, he brushes his sopping wet bangs out of his eyes and steps into the sunlight, one eye on the approaching rain clouds.
This isn’t over, but he’ll be damned if he won’t see it through.