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He’s about six, the first time, when it first appears. It’s sharp, something behind his chest that beats aggressively. It nudges and shifts, and it scares him more than anything. It’s words scrabble through his body to yell in his head that something is extremely wrong.
Wrong wrong wrong, bad bad bad
He doesn’t have any other words to process the feeling welling up inside his small form, is too focused on it to provide an explanation.
The child bolts from the kitchen, where his parents are cooking a meal together. He claws his way up the stairwell, using both hands and feet in his haste.
They’ll think he’s off playing. Something simple. The feeling poking holes through his body, centered on his toes, is not something simple like that.
Door to his mother’s craft room shut, he takes short, rapid breaths against the wooden frame. Seconds tick, tick until he’s ready to move again.
This has to be solved. Now.
He runs to the box of sewing tools and colorful paper, finding what he needs. The scissors create a zigzag pattern when used. They’re a bright green and blue along the handles. They will work.
He rips off the socks enclosing his feet and then turns them inside-out in curiosity after the feeling immediately turns positive.
Like a light switch flipped to ‘on’.
The seam, oh both sides are sewn together here. This is what feels wrong, so he takes the scissors and matter into his own small hands.
Snip, snip and snip
Less functional, sure. But now his toes are free and the writhing, scratching, grinding feeling washes through his body and out from his newly-liberated feet.
His mom yells when he makes his way back down the stairs, toes poking through the gaping hole in the fabric. He tears up at the volume. His dad seems to think it’s a bit funny.
Words and cries bubble and pop in his throat as he explains that he fixed them. Neither adult actually understands.
Since then, Kudo Shinichi roams around indoors barefoot. Always.
Graciously, socks combined with shoes make the feeling go away. House slippers are also safe as well. It doesn’t stop him from thinking of green and blue crafting scissors and delivering the rest of his socks that same fate.
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“Edogawa-kun, you look so gloomy you’ll grow mushrooms if you’re not careful.” Haibara says wistfully, glancing at his brow as if she truly wants to see them sprout. Conan supplies a deadpan ‘ha ha’ and no further comment.
He’s too occupied with the feeling that there actually is something growing along his scalp, buried beneath his dark brown hair. Whatever it is, it’s dirty and it can’t stay.
He scratches.
The feeling fades.
So throughout the school day, Conan unconsciously and sometimes very consciously claws at his head and the back of his neck. Removing whatever blemish seems to be marring him today.
When the third bell rings, his hands are in his line of sight enough to see the blood caked under blunt fingernails.
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When Shinichi is in middle school, it starts to catch on. Other kids will say, “Oh I’m so OCD, I need my manga to follow aiueo and numerical order!”. Shinichi will laugh along and say things like that too.
His best friend Ran admonishes him for pretending he has a problem such as that.
None of them understand what it’s actually like.
But Kudo Shinichi does not have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He’s simply particular about things, meticulous even. If he’s going to be a great detective, he has to be viciously in order at all times.
It’s a part of the occupation, along with polished observational skills. It’s not a disorder, this is a choice.
Shinichi repeats this thought and more in a cycle. Every day. Every year. I choose to be like this.
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Kogoro can’t be the one to turn off the lights at night. He doesn’t know exactly why, and normally, it doesn’t come up. Conan is sent to bed earlier than the adult and Ran normally settles shortly after, meaning there isn’t any further point in him staying up.
On an empty Sunday evening, Conan is laying out his futon on the floor of Ran’s father’s bedroom. The man himself enters the room in the middle of the process, noting Conan is going to sleep as well, and flicks off the light.
Click
Suddenly thoughts of a bomb going off in the agency, Ayumi getting kidnapped and stabbed, Ran falling down the stairs in the dark- these and more immediately become the effect to the cause.
Intrinsically, Conan feels like he has to control the light at the end of each day or he will lose control over everything else around him. So he stares, ramrod straight and shaking through the dim, uttering “O..cchan?”
“Hm?” The man grunts in acknowledgement.
“Don’t…” His voice shifts from fear to deathly serious. “Do not turn off the light before me.”
Kogoro flicks it back on because at this point he needs to see this brat’s face to properly give him a piece of his mind, that tone-
Conan shakes with wide eyes, like a woodland deer.
Kogoro’s hand hangs limp, barely on the switch any more. “What?” What in the world is wrong?
Conan takes in his confusion and looks away abashedly, body still showing signs of duress. “Please don’t ever do that again.” He stresses.
Kogoro steps away from the light switch.
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Shinichi starts to claim he has OCD to his peers by the time high school comes. It’s to get people to listen to what he wants, it’s arrogance, and it’s how he chose to be.
Holmes was neurotic in many ways, this is just another way that he can be like his idol.
He arranges the pencils on his desk for the third time until they’re right.
Sometimes he thinks maybe it’s more than just a choice. The need to control his environment and the anxious pangs when he can’t. That does sound like canonical…
No. liar That’s not the truth. He’s acting, like his mother. It’s just a quirk picked up and nothing more.
You who search for the truth, would lie to yourself?
Shinichi is not a liar. He doesn’t want to be. He stops saying he has OCD and instead, accepts his choice.
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The night of a Kaitou KID heist, things are unsettlingly calm at first.
Of course, the time on the calling card rings in with theatrics and havoc orchestrated by the phantom thief. It’s a single night in a museum that ends once more with an air of calm; fog dissipating into nothing with the thief successfully vanished.
Conan easily follows his trail. He’s at the Shinjuku government building referred to in KID’s notice well before the thief apparates there himself. Roof-top silent even as the man drops to it born off of the wings of a white hang glider.
“Glad to see you could make the show, Detective.” He greets in a haughty over-tone. Conan scoffs.
The man balances on the perch of the guardrail, interestingly turning his back to Conan. Hand propping his head contemplatively, he remarks, “Thought you’d been a bit off your game lately. Seems you don’t change, though.” Whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.
Conan wants to knock him out, let him fall off the ledge.
He bodily jolts at the jarring thought, mainly because it was not passing or trivial. His watch is removed from the aim but his index finger was millimeters away from- Click
Curtains for KID.
The noise from his stumble has KID tilt his head back in innocent confusion at him. The monocle catches light far too bright for the evening.
Don’t look at me. I’m sorry. I could hurt you. I didn’t, I’m sorry.
Another beat of silence and then Edogawa Conan runs away from the first heist.
More come along with a change of seasons and the KID Killer is notably absent. Any mention of the phantom on the news makes Conan twitch. Calling card riddles, showcases for jewels, elaborate failures by the task force.
Nothing distracts from the righteous feeling of DELETE that he felt directed at KID that night.
It rings in and out from the back to the forefront of his mind. That he’s dangerous. Evil, or even a monster for wishing to end KID’s life. In split seconds he was so ready to do it. It scares him immensely.
He wants to hit the backspace on his mind, for once.
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It’s part of why he just can’t leave things alone, why he always needs to know everything that he can.
What he wants out of life is always a clean, properly-packaged answer.
Living is intrinsically chaotic and messy, though, and this is how Kudo Shinichi bites off a bit more than he can chew on his own.
He knew something had to be up with the egregiously shady men in dark coats. They certainly weren’t the culprits behind the gruesome rollercoaster murder from the day, but as dusk falls Shinichi can’t let go of the bad feeling he had about them. Bad, bad bad. Something there that needs to be fixed.
The opportunity metaphorically jumps him in a back alley when he sees one of the shifty figures making haste to the back of a building in the park. He is all too quick to ditch Ran.
It pans out that something illegal is afoot with these men, but Shinichi’s tunnel-vision focus on the developing case prevents him from contemplating the partner.
A brutal swing of the lead pipe and Shinichi hits the dirt and grass. The ground undulates beneath him so much that he can barely feel the sensation of his head being lifted by the hair.
It hurts, everything hurts, and then that baseline is amplified up to 100%.
Shinichi is likely dying. The two men drugged him, slipping a poison pill down his throat. He writhes in the grass, clawing and gripping at mud in a faint lucidity. Consciousness is barely there but still present enough for him to feel the overwhelming pain.
Nerve synapses are filled to the brim, bones sensitive as they melt and every organ he has is likely going to atrophy with apoptotic shock or simply burst at this point. Shinichi blindly screams as his body crunches in on itself.
And then, blessedly, there is nothing.
His first fully formed, but detached thought is- dead. I’m dead.
This time, the victim’s body is that of the detective. Turns out, he’s wrong about many things tonight as his mind fully clicks back into place, born on the shock of light entering his eyes.
If he were dead he shouldn't have sense or vision or still hurt from the hit on the head. Soreness is awash throughout him as he is bodily picked up by someone who turns out to be a security guard.
Shinichi’s voice is garbled and mind in even more turmoil when they call him ‘little boy’ and ask after his guardian. The hell? He’s practically an adult now, what do they mean?
What is meant stares back at him in the reflection of a storefront window. Damn, he is very short.
Shinichi turns his head back and forth in both denial and assessment. A child? That’s an entirely impossible result from something that was supposed to kill him. There’s no other explanation forthcoming, though, so he continues his flight home.
If those men find out Kudo Shinichi somehow survived tonight, everything around him will unravel into gorey hell.
Play dead, you nosy crime-chaser His new, or old, voice mocks internally.
So he becomes a liar this time out of necessity, survival.
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Writing a book review on some mundane, childish drivel he pretended to follow along with in class is harrowing at best. At most, it is agony.
Shinichi would rather learn something useful, functional, and dissect it with a well-thought-out analysis. As Conan, he is limited if not outright barred from such pursuits.
Ran putters around the Agency office while he fills out gridded paper with a phony essay.
She’s dusting and re-organizing the bookshelves. He’s grateful since the colors were making his head spin as they were. Occhan would knock him on the head again if he tried to enact his own organizational schema.
He smudges out a kanji character he’s allegedly too young to know and chooses a different word.
When he was last writing something like this, at the highschool level, it was for that eminent English novel by J. D. Salinger. Picking apart the words beneath the words through translation was a gripping enough distraction for him to focus on writing well over the word count minimum.
Ran catches in his peripheral again as she stretches, balanced on the tip of one foot to reach the top level of the shelves. She reaches for each book and removes it from its post in a careful manner.
His eyes track the movement of her shirt riding up; the small of her back visible under light purple fabric.
What if he were her age again?
What would he want to do with her?
What would he do to her-
Conan clicks the pen in his right hand rapidly. His left hand’s fingers pick at the skin of a hangnail.
Pick, click, pick, click, repetitive motions. This will surely calm him down and push those thoughts away.
But what if it’s not something he does to Ran, but something someone does to him?
He shivers as icicle-cold dread takes over. He feels the ghost of a too-large hand trail delicately down his spine. It caresses at his tailbone and he feels like he’s on fire. No, no, please stop, I don’t-
Jamming the pen through his hand would end this train-wreck of thought.
It almost comes to that, until a very real, still too big hand cups his left where the skin is picked raw. “Conan-kun…” Ran says somberly. “You made yourself bleed like that.” Her frown is heavy with worry and Conan sweats and panics even more under her touch.
He retracts the hand, flings the pen away to a safe distance, and cradles both hands against his chest. Maybe the spiky solid thing behind his ribcage will stop poking bone and muscle now.
Ran respectfully gives him distance but continues in a worried tone, “I’ve noticed a few things about you… after these months. You see, a friend of mine used to say that he has OCD. Do you know what that is?”
He nods. That’s you, dumbass. He thinks about himself.
“Well, I feel like you might actually have it. Would you be willing to talk to the counselor at school?” Conan nods numbly, letting her carry on blind to the turmoil behind his eyes.
His tiny hands press tighter against his chest.
Right. He was a liar, then, like he is now. It’s something Shinichi made up, right? Ran never believed him and there’s no logical reason for it to be a side-effect of the APTX. If he doesn’t have a problem, then there’s nothing to worry about.
Right?
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Kudo Shinichi stares at the train. Its beacon-like lights grow fuller by each passing millisecond.
Tick tick
The pocket of wind brought on by its movement messes up his tie and tousles his hair.
The train is on time. It often is; in Tokyo a delay would have to be due to something rather extreme.
The rail guards sweep away to the open doors of the train compartment.
Shinichi stares.
Something extreme like…
He stares and stares and stares. The station chime plays. Train doors shutter closed, promptly cutting him off from entry.
Shinichi misses the next two trains to Osaka like that, in a trance.
With the announcement for the fourth shinkansen of the day, Shinichi feels overcome with foreboding similar to Heiji’s superstitious streak. Four is pronounced as either ‘yon’ or ‘shi’, depending on context and modernity of usage. Shi… is the root syllable of ‘death’. Shinichi’s own name uses the character for ‘new’ at the shi part, like in shinkansen.
But it’s all said the same way, after all.
His mind takes the leap in front of the oncoming train. His feet, though, remain firmly grounded to the concrete platform.
This is exhausting, and today it seems like he isn’t compatible with public transit. He elects to walk the hour minimum it will take to get him back to his neighborhood. He texts Heiji that he won’t be arriving in Osaka, ten minutes before the time he theoretically would have been there.
[Something came up that i have to look into]
[case?]
[Yeah]
[np, send me the deets later~!]
Heiji would absolutely understand if he explained, and he would also absolutely worry, which is what Shinichi is looking to avoid.
Surfacing from Tokyo Station without being touched by crowds of passersby is the next hurdle. He’s feeling incredibly off, so the streets he meanders home along are not the main ones.
It takes almost a full two hours to return to Kudo Manor, travel duffle for an abandoned weekend weighing down his shoulders. Shinichi is entirely worn out.
He slips out of his shoes, unfeeling, and then immediately stumbles to the ground on the next step. Everything in him is suddenly highlighted in sharp, pointed clarity. Sirens go off.
He forgot to remove his socks.
He can’t, he can’t feel this way. It’s too awful; every nerve in his sensory network fires off double what is normal. The buzzing sound in his ears, the flaring ache in his right knee cap, his feet, eyes taking in illogical levels of light in the dim hall. Stop. Make it stop. It’s so wrong.
There’s not enough air on planet Earth to support his body as he crawls blindly to something, anything solid in the entryway. How does breathing work again? What was he supposed to do?
Whatever rapid breaths he’s taking in over and over and over again are certainly not doing their job.
Something clicks in the back of his mind and it says with disgust, Ah, panic attack.
And he thinks, hearing Conan’s voice detachedly in his head,
Why are you doing this? You’re so full of shit. What problems could you possibly have right now that are bad enough to merit this? Are you kidding? Grow up. You’ve already done it twice, but where did that get you?
His face is hot and wet and itches but he can’t remove his arms that crisscross over his abdomen, claws digging into his sides to remain fastened. If he lets go his organs will spill out from where they’re currently barely held back. If he lets go the fourth train will crash and Heiji might be on the platform. If he lets go then he’ll feel even less safe than he already does, and at that,
Shinichi derails.
Hours, months, who cares, some time later Agasa opens the front door to find Shinichi cradling himself, breathing still heavy.
The noise and street light shock him and Shinichi curls further against the entryway steps.
With a shout of his name, the professor rushes to kneel down next to him, arms at the ready to hold until the older man processes Shinichi’s flinching and panicked eyes, glinting sharply in the light even while obscured by dampened bangs.
His name is repeated quieter this time, coupled with Agasa settling onto the doormat.
“What happened.” Are the first low words Shinichi processes in his native tongue.
His jaw works through stiffness and he goes to speak, but a throat too raw for syllables and a mind too wrecked from all this block the way to an articulate sentence. Shinichi fumbles, repeats, tries again but it doesn’t work.
He starts crying miserably and silently, unsure how he could possibly find an answer.
It barely registers that Agasa had opened his phone and asked Haibara to come over until she materializes in the doorway. The small girl lets herself in to sit a safe distance from Shinichi, perched on the two steps.
Shinichi lifts his head to look at her in some semblance of ‘hi’.
“Heiji asked me to ‘check out whatever you stuck your head into’, but you never answered me. The professor was coming over anyway to give you your mail. It’s still being forwarded, as you know.”
Shinichi nods his head meekly. One hand is picking at hangnails on the other.
She continues on neutrally, “I’m not making a slight. You know when I am. What I’m trying to stress is that you just got out of living as a fugitive. It’s a relief, but that doesn’t mean all of the pieces of your life jostled by the Organization are simply put back together. So if you don’t t-”
“Haibara.” Shinichi’s voice creaks like the elderly stairs of his childhood home. “It’s… more than that. Older… than Conan. It just got worse.” His hands fiddle with themselves where nails dig at skin.
It’s the first thing the teen has been able to utter; Agasa and Haibara exchange a look of skeptic concern. Simultaneously they ask, “the murders?” “PTSD?”
“No, no.” Shinichi responds, defeated. “I don’t know. I’m not a clinician.” His skin is picked at until the fingers bleed.
You’re lying. Stop faking it. You’re no longer a child. Conan taunts from his mind’s eye.
Shinichi’s companions allow the pause to settle before Professor Agasa clears his throat and delicately says, “We think you should see one. A professional, that is.”
“Yeah.” Shinichi slowly uncurls from himself. “I accepted that this was simply how I was a lifetime ago. I let it get so bad because I didn’t want to change what made me… me.” He flexes his toes, belatedly realizing he had ripped his socks off during his episode. His hands continue to fiddle.
Agasa sighs as Haibara says, “Medication or talk therapy don’t alter who you are as a person. They allow being human to become bearable.”
Another stretch on the ground and finally Shinichi is able to raise himself to full height. “Thank you, both.” He says. “I’m going to read for a while, but I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Shinichi,” Agasa joins him in standing and slowly reaches his arms to Shinichi’s shoulders, allowing him time to avoid the touch. Shinichi lets him, body drained and tired. Agasa grabs him further to encase him in a gentle hug. “I love you, boy. We’re here for you.”
Shinichi laughs weakly and nods in acknowledgement of the affection.
With that, they pull apart and Agasa and Haibara leave to return to the home next door.
Shinichi finally makes his way back to his room.
He pulls out his phone from a jacket pocket, passing a glance at Conan’s phone on top of one of his bookshelves. He sighs, flops onto the bed backwards and holds the device above his head contemplatively.
Eventually, he opens the messaging app.
[Ran] [i’m so sorry]
…
[And what brings this on?]
[you know how you thought i had- He deletes ‘i’ and replaces it with ‘conan’
[you know how you thought conan had OCD]
[Yes. I remember the habits getting a lot worse for you then.]
[i… yeah]
[I thought you were making it up, when we were both younger.] [Honestly, I’m sorry for not understanding then]
[im actually going to do something about it this time]
[That’s… a relief. Good for you.]
[and i will make up for everything i’ve put you through, if it takes the remainder of my life i don’t mind. i am sorry. i have to keep being selfish for now, but this time i can guarantee that i will not disappear]
When minutes tick by after Shinichi’s last response, he eventually flips the phone over on the bedspread with resignation. He said what he could. That’s the limit of how hard he’s willing to push. An hour later, Ran says:
[Thanks. I can wait.]
