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It was an unusually cold morning for that time of the year. Hattori Heiji, famous high school detective, kept checking his phone for updates.
A call, a text, even the news would be good.
He expected to be asked to help with the Black Organization’s takedown, or at the very least some type of heads up. Instead, he got a shaky (panicked) phone call at midnight made by little Nee-san, telling him she’d gotten an off feeling about Kudo the whole day.
“Well, you know how Kudo is,” he’d reasoned, not really believing the reassuring words himself, “We know he’s with Nee-chan, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“For a detective of his level, you are so damn dumb,” she retorted, clearly annoyed and on the verge of yelling at him, “Ran-san called to ask how he was doing, the damn idiot told her he was having a sleepover here and neither of us know where he went, the professor had to lie to cover for his stupid, selfish ass!”
She did yell after that, and Heiji had to spend the next thirty minutes or so calming her down. According to what she told him, all the antidotes were accounted for but there’d been a suspicious amount of activity in their neighborhood, especially in the Kudo residence, though Agasa had been very adamant in not allowing her to check properly. Most notably, Okiya Subaru, the grad student that resided in the Kudo residence was not home and had not been there for at least a couple of hours.
And so, Heiji hadn’t been able to get any shut eye after he got off the phone. He’d been hoping, somewhat foolishly, that Kudo would call him at some point, ask him for help, for some cover, at least.
“Heiji, did you even listen to I said?” Kazuha pulled him out of his thoughts and the annoyance in her voice told him she’d been trying to get his attention for a while.
“Sorry, Otaki-han called me about a case before bed and I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” half-truths came easier to him after the year and a half that had passed while Kudo was still shrunken.
“Really? He should know better than that with the entrance exams coming up,” she huffed.
“Not his fault, I told him to do it to get more practice in before the academy,” he defended.
While it wasn’t exactly a lie, he hoped it was good enough so that his best friend wouldn’t do something rash. Like going to the station to give a talk to Otaki-han and blowing his alibi completely out of the water.
The day passed by without any news, aside from little Nee-san texting him.
As it turned out, Kudo hadn’t shown up to class and Okiya’s car still was nowhere to be found. She’d also told him that the professor had been unusually jumpy when asked if he knew where they were and had offered for the young girl to stay home if she wanted.
“Why didn’t you?” he’d asked, no judgement, just curiosity.
“I needed to confirm something,” she told him, “If you hear from him…?”
He nodded, knowing exactly what she was about to ask him.
“Don’t worry, nee-san, I’ll give you a call after I nail him to the ground,” he wondered if the joke was sensible, Kudo may well be in danger and he was joking. Little Nee-chan’s laugh was enough to ease his anxiety, if only for a bit.
“Don’t let him off easy,” she whispered and the line was cut.
He didn’t hear about Kudo for the rest of the week.
From Wednesday to Saturday he did everything imaginable: he texted, he called, he skipped class to take a bullet train to Tokyo, checked up on Ran (who was devastated by Conan’s disappearance, rightfully so), checked up on little Nee-san (“Simply call me Haibara, someone will hear your ridiculous nickname and be very confused, eventually,” she’d said, irritated, but had a small smile on her face, so that was a win), asked around in the police precinct (some of the detectives had been awfully shifty when he’d asked about Conan’s whereabouts), gone to the Poirot Café, and to Kudo’s house. He was out of options.
Inspector Megure had assured him that there was an active missing person’s case for Conan and not to worry too much about it.
“I’ll call your father’s office, Hattori-kun, if we find anything,” was his assurance, “You know Conan-kun, if there’s any kid who’d be able to hold out, it would be him, wouldn’t he?”
Another strangely compelling disappearance had been Poirot Café’s very own barista-not-technically-a-Black Org member, Amuro Tooru.
“He left a text,” Azusa-san had told him, thoughtfully, “Said he was going to ask the boss to accept his resignation and apologizing for leaving me the work influx to me.”
“That’s all he said?”
The woman nodded.
“Yes. I’m a bit worried about it but I can’t do much more than this,” her brow furrowed, “He won’t return my calls.”
The Kudo residence had been oddly desolate and unnaturally clean.
Heiji was already preparing for bad news. How could he not, when his best friend, the guy he’d give just about anything for, had sidelined him. Distantly, he registered that what he was feeling ran deeper than the sense of betrayal at being kept in the dark after everything they’d been through, but he chose to not examine the feeling too closely.
As such, when Saturday finally arrived, he’d already prepared himself for the possibility of Kudo never returning.
He really wished he’d asked nee-chan about the detective girl he’d met back in Tokyo. Or the phone number of that supposed grad student. He was half tempted to call Tokyo University and ask for their student records but decided that there would be too much to explain with little leeway. It was another jurisdiction, after all, and it would be very difficult to explain why he wanted them to Otaki-han, let alone his father.
As he was thinking over what else he could do to track down Kudo, preferably something that didn’t involve him having to cover things up from his father, he received a phone call. Caller ID unknown.
His heart sped up at the possibility of who it could be (one boy specifically, but he had to remind himself it could be anyone).
When he picked up, however, a familiar yet irritating voice made itself known.
“Hattori-kun?”
Groaning, Heiji answered the smug British detective.
“Yeah, how did you even get this number?”
“Ah, jolly good, I believe we have a common acquaintance,” Hakuba Saguru ignored him in favor of getting to the point of his call, “He has reached out to me and assured me that your friend is on his way to meet you and the… ah, apologies, what was it? Little big lady, I believe was the phrase he used, in his own house, as I understood it. I must admit that this ‘little big lady’ is someone I don’t know, so I have to rely on you to pass on the message as well.”
How much did the pompous ass know? It was clear he was talking about Little Neesan, no, Haibara-tan, though he appeared to not know who that was. Then was it possible that their mutual acquaintance was…
“How did you…?” There was only one person who knew anything about Haibara-tan and it was…
“Ah, I believe that is not information I am at liberty to give,” the smug bastard let out the tinniest of laughs, “I’m sure you understand that not everything can be freely shared between us, don’t you agree, Hattori-kun.”
There was something in Hakuba’s tone that suggested there was no space for discussion, it still had its usual cadence, at least the one he used when talking to Heiji, but it turned out to be suggestive. Dangerous.
It reminded Heiji of a certain Phantom Thief and how, even when he sounded relaxed, there were more layers to his voice just below the surface, making it clear when he was playing. And when he wasn’t.
“Alright, uh, thanks, I guess,” Heiji couldn’t get passed the fact, the possibility most likely, that those two knew each other more intimately. His heart ached at the thought.
“I will be off then. Best of luck.”
With that, the call ended, and Heiji was off to the station to catch a bullet train. On such short notice, he was sure it would be pricey but that wasn’t what was occupying his thoughts.
Kudo.
Kudo.
Wait for me, Kudo?
The young detective had half a mind to call the strawberry blonde girl, explaining to her what the British detective told him.
She huffed.
“That idiot. There wasn’t any of the drug missing, but if he wants to see us both…” she trailed off.
He tapped his foot on the platform, waiting for the bullet train to arrive.
“Do you think he went after them on his own, Haibara-tan?”
She grumbled something under her breath, but Heiji couldn’t make it out. In the end she responded with, “He’s that type of idiot, I suppose. Though I doubt he was alone, and I certainly didn’t think he’d be so stupid as to go after them without his adult body.”
She continued to curse his name until Heiji’s train arrived. She promised to keep an eye out on the Kudo residence in case the vane of their existence decided to appear before Heiji could arrive.
“I’m sure he won’t do something so stupid like trying to dodge you, but I’ll do my best to keep him while we wait for you.”
After nodding into the phone, they ended the call.
The trip to Tokyo felt longer than the two and a half hours it usually took from the Shin-Osaka Station. It took another whole hour to get to Beika and five minutes to sprint the rest of the way from where the cab had left him.
The door was left half closed and he could hear both of his shrunken friends yelling. That sounded promising.
“I told you, I didn’t ask for the antidote because I didn’t need it!” The high-pitched voice that belonged to Conan, not Kudo, could be heard outside.
“I know you didn’t ask because you didn’t want to me to know what you were doing, what were you thinking? They could’ve killed you!” Interestingly enough, little Neesan’s voice felt older. He wondered if the girl had taken the antidote specifically for that conversation. It seemed a little overkill.
As he rounded the corner to the living room, he saw an older version of the older girl with her arms crossed over her chest and an annoyed expression hardening by the second; his best friend’s face was flustered from all the screaming match they were locked in and he had a hard drive clutched in his hand.
“Haibara-han…”
The girl gave him a sideways look, huffed and swiftly took the drive from Kudo’s hand, who seemed surprised by his appearance. She passed him swiftly, her lab coat floating behind her from the suddenness of her movements.
“He’s all yours,” she gritted out, “I’ll go check this out so we can finally put an end to this.”
And just like that, Heiji and Kudo were left alone.
“You went after them.” It was a statement; there was no doubt about it now that Haibara-han implied that the hard drive held the solution to their year and a half long predicament.
“I told them not to air the news until I got my affairs in order.” That was a non-answer, and both of them knew it. Kudo was deflecting and that only made Heiji’s anger rise. This idiot.
“That makes it sound like you were expecting to die!”
“I wasn’t even in the field; I stayed in the van!”
“Bullshit! You would never just hang back!”
Kudo shut his mouth at that, clearly caught in an inescapable truth.
“I’ll ask for a favor with the FBI and the PSB, they’re obligated to a certain level of transparency, if you’ll trust their words over mine,” he sounded defeated which only served to make Heiji see red.
“You know I wouldn’t, even if they did ask you to hold back…”
“We had some help from the MI6,” Kudo confessed, like it was meant to mean something. Maybe it did and Heiji just wasn’t getting it, “One of the Apotoxin victims was an MI6 agent and she assured me that if I stood ground support, behind the monitor, she’d do everything that needed to be done to recover Haibara’s research. They had a crypto analyst in their team. To crack the encryption.”
It hit Heiji then that Kudo had done something similar when helping his FBI buddy, who he didn’t know about until a bit later. That gave him the resolve to not back down from the discussion.
“Did you ever consider what that would do to us?! You disappeared without telling anyone!” He yelled, frustration seeping in yet again.
“I left you a message…” Had he? He couldn’t recall. He was so angry.
“Don’t give me that crap, Kudo! Little Nee-san was a mess!”
Kudo had the audacity to look confused.
“Since when did you two start talking to each other so casually?”
Heiji huffed. “Since someone decided that it was smarted to go behind everyone else’s backs, who else knew were you were?”
Kudo paused. He looked sheepish as he decided to take a seat, “The Tokyo police wasn’t made aware of the operation, neither were other departments across the nation,” he started, “Megure-keibu was informed of a law enforcement raid on some key places though the country that required foreign law enforcement agents to freely assist the PSB in an effort to take down an International Crime Syndicate. Kaitou KID was also there; apparently, he had been taunting them for a while now, looking for something they wanted, keeping their attention focused on him,” He bit his lip. “Sera was also there-”
“Onna-tantei?”
Kudo nodded.
There was an awkward silence between them.
“I was trying to protect you guys! Haibara can’t go anywhere near them without having a panic attack, and you were already deep enough without me dragging you to a place you shouldn’t even be because of me, why would you even want to-?”
“I like ya, you dumbass!” Heiji exploded, face flushed and heavy breaths escaping him, “Can’t you get that through your big, clever brain of yours?!”
Kudo looked stunned. To his credit, he recovered quickly. “Don’t do this to me right now,” he whispered, sounding pained.
Heiji was, to say the least, thoroughly confused by that request: “Huh?”
“Wait for me a bit longer,” he pleaded, the glare of the glases making it hard to make out his expression, “Haibara will make the antidote, we will give it to Mary-san, I’ll take it when the news get out about the Black Organization’s many crimes and then… then we can actually relax and, well, go on a real date.”
Oh, Heiji was not expecting that.
That night, they cuddled together on the sofa, rocked to sleep by the sound of the other’s breathing.
The next day, Ran would break into the Kudo Residence, demanding an explanation. Apparently, Kazuha had ratted Heiji out and told Ran that he’d gone to Tokyo to see Kudo, so Conan was left with no other choice but to confess to the whole thing, leaving out some of the more gnarly details. That earned him a few yelled words and some weeks of Nee-chan avoiding them both like the plague. Kazuha even went so far as to shot him dirty looks.
“They broke up,” she told him the day before the news about a mysterious, shadowy organization being brought down by the PSB with the consent of the multiple police jurisdictions, with minor aid from foreign agents.
“There will be trials,” Kudo explained to him, “And because the Black Organization operated on the global stage it would be a disservice to victims to not allow their international crimes to be punished, most of the testimonies that are being used will remain anonymous with a few exceptions.”
Heiji hummed, “Witness protection?”
Kudo nodded. “Yeah, Jodie-sensei will testify to her father’s killing and Akai-san will testify to the murder of Hirota Masami, her real name will be lost to protect Haibara’s identity.”
The smoke did not clear until later that year, when Kudo finally got that permanent cure. Haibara-han said she didn’t need it, so she didn’t take it. The trials seemed to have her on edge, but she refused the FBI’s witness protection, so there wasn’t much to do on that front. It was her decision and Heiji couldn’t help but admire her for it.
Once they were sure the antidote took and, in insistence on the part of Haibara-tan, after Kudo got a full round of tests to make sure he was healthy, he and Kudo finally, finally, went on that date.
That night’s goodbye kiss might just have made it all worth it. And that was enough for Heiji.
Having Kudo back was enough.