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Shinichi really thought that returning to his teenage body would have marked the end of having to use a voice-changer to lie over the phone.
And yet.
He probably should have realized, though, that completely letting go of Conan simply wasn’t going to be possible. The identity was fake, but the effect Conan had on a lot of people’s lives was still very, very real. Sure, most of those people—select members of law enforcement, some family and friends, Ran—have since been clued in to the fact that Edogawa Conan was Kudo Shinichi all along, but currently, there are three notable exceptions.
“Conan-kun,” Ayumi’s voice greets him now, sounding as solemn and serious as Ayumi can ever possibly be. “We need to talk about how you’re avoiding us.”
Shinichi, stunned, as he sits in the Kudo library with a smartphone against his ear and a bowtie against his lips, can only respond, “Eh?”
“You don’t talk to us anymore!” Genta shouts, angry and so loud that Shinichi instinctively jerks the phone away from his ear.
“What are you saying?” Shinichi fires back, the bowtie making it come out as Conan’s irritated drawl. “We’re talking right now. We talk every week.”
It’s become a routine over the last several months, ever since Edogawa Conan “moved back to America” in the wake of the Black Organization’s fall. Every Saturday, the Detective Boys have a sleepover at Agasa’s, and when it’s late enough at night, they use Haibara’s phone to call Conan during what they believe to be his morning. The irony of it all hasn’t escaped Shinichi: how he’s lying about the distance when he’s actually as close as the house next door, how this entire arrangement is essentially Ran all over again.
“Yet you never tell us anything,” Mitsuhiko chimes in. “Not about America, or your new school, or how you and your parents are doing over there. Every time we ask, you give vague non-answers and change the subject.”
“And when we talk about how we’re doing, you barely listen,” Ayumi adds. “It’s like you don’t care anymore.”
Shinichi winces. It’s not that he doesn’t care, but most of the stories they tell Conan—about how his Ran-neechan is doing, or whatever case they happened to run into this week, or the most recent major events in Tokyo—are things that he’s already aware of. Apparently, he hasn’t done a great job of acting like he’s interested in old news.
“H-hold on, all of you!” Haibara sounds utterly flabbergasted by this turn of events, so she must not have known beforehand that the kids were planning an ambush. “You don’t need to go that far—”
“Ai-chan, I know you talk to Conan-kun more often than we do.” Oh, Shinichi has never heard Ayumi sound that upset with Haibara before. “You wouldn’t be so calm when we talk about him if you didn’t. And I get that you have a special relationship with him that the rest of us don’t understand, but it’s not fair of you two to cut the rest of us out!”
“That’s right,” Mitsuhiko says. “It doesn’t matter that there’s an ocean between us now. We’re all still the Detective Boys and we’re all still friends.”
“Yeah,” Genta agrees, “and friends don’t pull away from each other like this!”
“Guys, I-I’m not...” Shinichi stammers, desperately trying to gain some control over the situation. “It’s really not like that—”
“You won’t even let us see your face!” Ayumi screams, voice choked up like she’s on the verge of tears. “When you were here, we did video chats all the time, but now you only do voice calls!”
(See, this was never a problem with Ran. Ran has always used a flip phone.)
“I-I told you, my new phone doesn’t support video—”
“You’re lying!” And now Ayumi is full-on sobbing. Shit.
Shinichi’s mind races through options, trying to figure out what he should do now. He knew from the start that the Detective Boys would not easily let go of their friend; that’s why he and Haibara set up the weekly “call to America” system in the first place. And honestly, Shinichi was planning on telling them the truth eventually, since knowing Conan’s true identity isn’t really a risk to anyone anymore, but he’d been hoping to wait until the kids got a little older so that they could better understand the whole story.
Then again, for second graders, they’ve clearly become pretty good detectives in their own right. They’ve realized that Conan isn’t being honest in these phone calls, and they’re hurt because they think that means their friend is somehow rejecting them. After everything they’ve been through with Conan, they’re probably more capable of understanding than Shinichi gave them credit for.
Most importantly, they are his friends. They deserve better than to be given any reason to doubt that.
“...Haibara?” Shinichi finally voices, because this isn’t just his secret, it isn’t just his decision to make. If the kids learn the truth about Edogawa Conan, the truth about Haibara Ai won’t be far behind. “Is it okay to say?”
Haibara sighs, long-suffering and resigned. “Just come over already.”
Shinichi obeys, staying on the line while he immediately heads for the entrance, then slips his bowtie in his pocket and presses his phone between his shoulder and cheek so he can put on his shoes. Never mind that he’s wearing his nightclothes; he needs to get next door as soon as possible because the kids are already in an uproar, Genta voicing “Eh?” while Mitsuhiko cries “What do you mean, ‘come over’?!” and Ayumi just screams “AI-CHAN?!?!?!”
The professor’s gate is unlocked, and the front door swings open before Shinichi even reaches it. Haibara stands in the entryway, hounded from behind by three very loud and very confused elementary schoolers, and though she shoots a glare at Shinichi as he approaches, there’s scarcely any heat behind it. More reluctant acceptance than anything.
“Shinichi-san?” Mitsuhiko, upon seeing who their visitor is, deeply furrows his brow. Gears are clearly turning inside his head, but they don’t seem to be leading him to any sort of definitive conclusion just yet. Shinichi squeezes his way past the kids and into the house, and as Haibara closes and locks the door behind him, Mitsuhiko continues mumbling to himself, “What...how...why would...?”
Genta, meanwhile, seems to have completely drawn a blank, and Ayumi looks as if she’s a half-second away from bursting into sobs again. Before it comes to that, Shinichi swiftly yanks out the bowtie from his pocket, brings it to his lips, and says into his phone, in Conan’s voice, “Hey guys. It’s me.”
The words are echoed almost immediately by the smartphone in Haibara’s hand, and that promptly sends the gears turning in all three of their heads.
“That’s Conan’s voice-changing bowtie!” Genta proclaims first, pointing at Shinichi accusingly.
Mitsuhiko follows up with, “You’re the Conan-kun we’ve been talking to?!”
“What happened to the real Conan-kun?!” Ayumi shrieks, on the knife’s edge of righteously infuriated and absolutely devastated, her hands clenching into fists as fresh tears brim in her eyes.
“Ayumi-chan,” Haibara cuts in, placing a placating hand on Ayumi’s shoulder. “He is the real Edogawa-kun.”
Ayumi whirls the full force of her teary-angry stare onto Haibara, skeptically scrunching up her nose as if she expects Haibara to chime, “Just kidding!” any second now. Which, fair, Haibara would, but she’s really not joking this time, and the longer Haibara maintains her earnest expression, the more tension drains from Ayumi’s small form.
“You’re telling the truth,” Ayumi eventually realizes, and then she and both boys turn their heads up towards Shinichi in terrifyingly perfect sync. “She’s telling the truth.”
“She is,” Shinichi says, this time in his own voice. He lowers the bowtie from his mouth and hangs up the phone.
“Explain,” all three children command, at the exact same time and with the exact same demanding looks on their faces.
Shinichi does so. He doubts they have the patience for all the details right now, so he just tells them the basics: that he ran afoul of dangerous criminals, and those criminals poisoned him to keep him quiet, but the poison miraculously didn’t kill him and instead regressed his physical body. A shrunken Kudo Shinichi went into hiding as Edogawa Conan, and he kept his true identity a secret from the Detective Boys—and many adults as well—because if he didn’t, the bad guys might track him down. The kids, who up until now have been listening keenly without interruption, all suddenly raise a fuss at this part.
“So why does Haibara know?!” Genta yells, the loudest of them all, though Ayumi and Mitsuhiko are giving similar protests. “Why’d you tell her but not the rest of us?!”
Shinichi eyes Haibara warily. That’s really her story to tell, but she seems reluctant to actually tell it, wincing and shutting her eyes as if in pain. Eventually, though, she manages to force out, “Because I’m the same. I took the poison too.” Opening her eyes again, she glances between all three kids with a sad smile. “I’m actually nineteen years old.”
The kids all take a minute to process that.
“Actually,” Mitsuhiko murmurs, eyes wide with awe, “that explains so much.”
“But if Conan-kun is actually Shinichi-oniisan,” Ayumi utters slowly, “then why is Ai-chan still Ai-chan?”
“Yeah, and how did he grow big again anyway?” Genta narrows his eyes. “Can you guys just switch between forms whenever you want?”
“No, it doesn’t work like that.” Haibara’s tone there is familiar, the same tone she falls into whenever she’s ready to go into a full-on lecture about biochemistry, and Shinichi opts to step back and leave this whole part of the explanation to her. “The poison kept us constantly in our childhood forms unless we took an antidote. For a long time, the antidotes available to us only restored our adult bodies temporarily, but after the criminal organization behind creating that poison was dismantled, we found a permanent antidote. Kudo-kun took it a few months ago.”
“So Shinichi-san couldn’t be Conan-kun anymore,” Mitsuhiko concludes, comprehension dawning on his face. “That’s why Conan-kun moved away, and that’s why there were never any video calls.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Ayumi says, insistently moving closer to Haibara whilst staring her straight in the face. “Why are you still Ai-chan? Why didn’t you take the antidote?”
“...Because I didn’t want to,” Haibara answers, attempting to sound casual even as darkness swims in her eyes. “Because Haibara Ai has friends and a family and a life, and the woman I was before was a lonely and sad and horrible person who didn’t have and didn’t deserve any of that.”
“Ai-chan!” Ayumi chides, promptly pulling her friend into a tight hug, and while Haibara doesn’t outright reject the embrace, she doesn’t reciprocate it either. “Don’t say that. You’re not a horrible person.”
Haibara scoffs lightly. “Would you still say that if you knew that I was the one who created the poison?”
Shinichi fails to stifle a gasp. Okay, revealing to the kids that Conan and Haibara were actually teenagers was one thing, but he didn’t think they were also gonna go into the whole Haibara used to be part of the Black Organization thing tonight.
Ayumi goes still for a while, then pulls back from the hug just enough to meet Haibara’s eyes. “You ‘created it’,” she quotes, “but did you actually use it on anyone?”
Haibara blinks. “W-well, no, but it still killed people—”
“That’s not your fault, though,” Genta cuts in, flanking Haibara from behind on her left side. “That’s the fault of whoever was giving people the poison.”
“They wouldn’t have been able to give people the poison if I hadn’t made it in the first place!”
“Shinichi-san was poisoned, and he forgave you,” Mitsuhiko points out, approaching from the right so as to enclose Haibara entirely between all three kids. “So we can forgive you too. Whatever happened before, you’re our friend now, and that’s what matters.”
“That’s an overly simplistic way of looking at it!” And yet Haibara’s lips are quivering like she’s fighting back a smile, and though liquid pools in her eyes, the tears are not of sadness but of relief. “You are all such fools.”
But Ayumi hugs her again, and this time Haibara hugs back, and when Genta and Mitsuhiko join in by wrapping their arms around Haibara as well, she doesn’t protest at all. Then both boys stare pointedly up at Shinichi, and he rolls his eyes but obliges, bending so that his knees hit the floor and he can more or less enclose all four of the other Detective Boys into his arms.
“...So,” Ayumi says a minute later, after the five-way embrace finally disperses. “This means we are all still friends. Right, Conan-kun?”
“Yes, of course,” Shinichi affirms. Honestly, despite the age difference, he genuinely feels closer to these guys than he does to most of his current high school friends.
“And you’re still a member of the Detective Boys?” Mitsuhiko asks.
“I...to be honest, I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to directly participate.” Kudo Shinichi has plenty of work to do these days. “But I’ll remain a member for as long as you’ll have me.” If they all ever run into a case together, he certainly wouldn’t mind continuing to help guide the kids through investigations.
“That means you’re sleeping over with us!” Genta proclaims. “The Detective Boys are fully reunited! We’re gonna celebrate by staying up all night!”
“You all are going to bed no later than midnight,” Haibara counters, instantly shutting that down with a glare that indicates she will not be hearing arguments. She was already scarily persuasive to the kids before, but the knowledge that she’s actually over a decade older than them must give her words extra weight, because they all nod in immediate acquiescence. “I’m sure Kudo-kun would be glad to stay, though.”
Shinichi grins, looking down at himself. “I mean, I am already in my pajamas.”
“Yay!” the three kids chime in excited chorus, and then they all take off, running further into the professor’s house. Shinichi, still kneeling on the ground, is left behind in the entryway with Haibara standing beside him.
“Those kids are really amazing,” Haibara murmurs, fists rubbing at her eyes. Shinichi decides not to remark on the fact that she’s still crying a little.
“Yeah, they took all of that rather well,” Shinichi notes. “Makes me wonder if we should have just told them sooner.”
Haibara hums in agreement. “I suppose we should have realized the phone calls wouldn’t keep them satisfied for long.” She meets his gaze and quirks an eyebrow. “Though, with how quickly they saw through your mediocre acting, I’m amazed you managed to keep Ran-san at bay for so long.”
“Shut it,” Shinichi grumbles. Taking full advantage of his height over her, he plants his hand atop her head and vengefully musses up her hair.
Haibara lets out a little squeal, squirming and pounding her fists against his wrist in a futile attempt to fight him off. Shinichi is so busy tormenting her and quietly chuckling to himself that he doesn’t notice the oncoming attack until it’s too late, until three children simultaneously barrel into him and send him sprawling to the floor.
“Pillow fight!” Ayumi shrieks, shoving one of Agasa’s throw pillows into his face, and then the boys are assaulting Shinichi with plush weaponry from all sides.
“This is for making us think you were in America for so long!” Mitsuhiko cries, delivering a wallop to his chest.
“Yeah!” Genta hoots, alternating strikes against his stomach with a pillow in each hand. “Punishment!”
“Ack!” Shinichi wheezes, voice muffled by the cushion still whacking at his face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Haibara, help!”
“Sure, Kudo-kun.” And one more pillow joins the fray, this one hitting his legs.
“Bastard!” he calls. “I’ll get you for this!”
And yet, throughout the entire one-sided pillow fight, Shinichi can’t stop laughing.