Detective Conan and Magic Kaito characters, settings, and ideas do not belong to me but to Aoyama Gōshō.

Guardian Angel

By Taliya

I: Destruction

By themselves they were little, innocuous things that he noticed. But cumulatively, these little things were dangerous, particularly in the line of work in which one thirty-five-year-old Kudou Shinichi worked. As a homicide detective, it was an extremely important asset for him to have an eidetic memory, as well as one of the quickest minds he had ever had the pleasure of matching wits against. It was what made heists with his particular participation so much fun. And yet as of late, heists with his participation worried him more often than not.

There would be the taunts, and then there would be the chases. As Tantei-kun, his intellect was on par, though physically he sometimes needed a little help. As Meitantei-san, he should have been in all respects, an equal of Kaitou KID. And yet now it was his intellect that was failing him. Midway through chases it would leave him stumbling, wondering why he was at that particular location or what exactly was he searching for. Because Snake and his men had been put behind bars, as well as Kudou's own Black Organization, KID felt little worry about the detective's physical safety at his heists, apart from his own daredevil stunts to capture him.

They were few and far in between at first, but they progressively happened more frequently during his continuing search for Pandora—which after nearly twenty years of searching, he was beginning to think the damn stone did not actually exist. And after hanging around the Task Force masquerading as one of their own on multiple occasions, he had discovered that Kudou's apparent memory lapses extended to his work as a professional private investigator and Inspector for Division One's Homicide Unit. It was, frankly, worrying.

The detective himself seemed to brush off the incidents with his usual aplomb, though KID was not a master of Poker Face for nothing. He had seen the glint of anxiety in the man's eyes after a blank out, the momentary disorientation that came with suddenly realizing you were in a different time and place than what you had last remembered. Whenever one of these lapses in memory occurred in KID's presence, he mentally catalogued the situation, the day, the time, and the duration. There was no pattern to them, nothing discernable to someone of even his intelligence with an affinity for riddles and tricks. The only thing he knew with absolute certainty was the fact that these episodes were increasing in frequency and duration.

The phantom thief feared he knew exactly what was happening to the detective, but he wanted a second opinion to ensure he was not jumping to conclusions. And yet something had to be done, or the Kudou Shinichi that Kaitou KID had come to regard as a rival, ally, and friend, would lose his mind—literally.

"Good evening, ojou-san." The voice came from behind her and she jumped off the couch, eyes wide and heart pounding at the intruder into the otherwise quiet home of Haibara Ai. It was now one in the morning and the twenty-six-year-old scientist sat alone in the living room, typing away on her laptop. As it was, she had barely refrained from screaming and reflexively throwing her laptop in the air.

The ghostly white outfit of Kaitou KID stood out in the shadowed gloom of her living room, illuminated only by the dim lamp on the end table and the luminescence of the full moon. "Pardon my intrusion," he murmured with a tip of his head, and only then did she realize that he had slipped out of his normal white leather shoes and exchanged them for a pair of guest house slippers. He stood in the empty space between the front door and where she sat on the couch, hands tucked into his pockets and head tilted casually with a small smirk on his lips. The brim of his top hat concealed the upper half of his face in shadows from the moonlight while the glint off his monocle from her lamp further sent his features into darkness.

"KID-san," she greeted once her heart had resettled itself in her chest from where it had lodged itself to her throat. Her usual cool demeanor reasserted itself as she eyed the infamous Magician Under the Moonlight after setting her laptop on the coffee table. "What brings you to the… inside of my door?" In all honesty she was not surprised that he had found her here, for had he not disguised as her adult self and faked her death on the train almost two decades ago? Likely he kept additional tabs on people close to those who pursued him—for instance, Kudou Shinichi.

In spite of the shadows that blanketed his face, she knew the exact moment when his focus sharpened solely on her, and it sent chills down her spine. It was different from the sensation that came from being watched by a member of the Black Organization. KID's gaze was equally intense, true, but without the murderous intent that she could easily feel in her bones, and she had never once felt threatened by the magician. "Haibara Ai," he announced, and there was no trace of the phantom thief's normal joviality in his voice. "Miyano Shiho. Sherry." She violently flinched at the mention of her former Organization codename. Nix that last thought.

"What do you want?" she asked warily, fervently wishing for once that she did not live by herself and still lived with Professor Agasa. Despite the Black Organization's demise, Miyano Shiho had opted to remain as Haibara Ai, while Edogawa Conan had disappeared and Kudou Shinichi had returned to the public eye. And yet despite the freedom her younger form's anonymity provided, she felt completely cornered in her own home by a nonviolent thief.

"Your help," he replied simply.

It took a moment for her brain to process the two words. "My… help?" she repeated, confusion evident in her tone. "My help on what?"

KID folded his arms across his chest, a frown curving his lips as he studied the once-shrunken scientist. Haibara Ai had made a name for herself in the world of biochemistry, neurology, pharmacology, and genetics, having opted to skip multiple grades after the fall of the Black Organization. She had been accepted into Touto University at age twelve, graduated with multiple doctorate degrees at age seventeen, and currently worked as a tenured professor at her alma mater. "There's something wrong with Meitantei-san," he said baldly, and Ai's heart skipped a beat in fear at the statement.

Is Kudou-kun suffering from some latent side effect of the apoptoxin I don't know about? she wondered worriedly.

"Has he said anything to you about this?" the phantom thief asked.

Ai shook her head negatively. "No, he has not," she answered, and she felt her anxiety ratchet up by a few notches. "What are his symptoms?"

"Mental lapses with disorientation afterwards in regard to time and place, difficulty solving cases, extreme irritability, forgetfulness regarding where he's placed individual items… independently, those could be written off as due to exhaustion, but the increasing frequency and duration of these mental blanks of his has me… worried. He'll even blank out halfway through a chase during my heists, then come to only to blink and wonder why he was where he was, much less attempt to catch me while I'm standing nearby while he's trying to keep his panic down. I have not observed or heard of any indication of trauma to that noggin of his, so I believe cranial injury is not the cause. I can't even begin to imagine what he must be like when he blanks on one of his cases."

The scientist felt her heart sink as she added up the indicators even as he confirmed her suspicion of the thief keeping an eye on all of them. She was willing to bet that KID also kept tabs on the other members of the disbanded Shounen Tantei-dan, as well as the Mouris. "You know what those symptoms mean, don't you?"

KID sighed deeply. "Yes," he admitted reluctantly, "I do."

"Early-onset Alzheimer's disease," they both said, verbalizing and confirming their suspicions to the other.

Ai clenched her fists. It truly was not fair, she reflected, for Shinichi to suffer in this way. His intellect was his most prized asset, and to have that taken away was simply unfathomable. And yet here she stood, facing an internationally wanted criminal who had come to her with concerns over their mutual friend, hoping she had some idea of how to help him. "I'll run some sequencing tests on his DNA to see if I can pinpoint which genes are responsible. From what I know, early-onset Alzheimer's does not seem to run in his family."

The thief was silent, mulling over thoughts in the privacy of his mind. His lips tightened into a straight line, and Ai knew he had just thought of something. "Do you think," he began hesitantly, "that his repeated age changes had something to do with it?"

The question hung in the moonlit silence between them, and Ai felt her chest squeeze tightly with guilt. Is this to be another repercussion Kudou-kun must suffer from that I am responsible for? Will I ever be able to atone for it and for once help the man who I owe my life to instead of simply piling on burden after burden?! She clenched her jaw and willed herself not to cry, even as she felt the telltale burning in her sinuses that indicated otherwise. Why can't I do anything right by Kudou-kun?!

"Considering," the magician continued, unaware of the scientist's silent self-flagellation, "that he has had to age and de-age roughly ten years in the span of two minutes, don't you think the possibility of genetic mutation to be incredibly high? I don't think the shrinking is the problem; I think it is the growing that is the problem. When he ages that rapidly, his cells have to perform mitosis at an exponential rate, thereby significantly increasing the chances of his DNA replicating incorrectly. And since this is somewhat of an age-related disease, do you think it's possible to 'reset the clock', so to speak—for Meitantei-san?"

Ai snapped out of her mental lashing at the gentleman thief's latter question. "You mean…" she murmured, catching onto his train of thought, "give Kudou-kun the apoptoxin to de-age him again?"

The phantom thief nodded solemnly, once. "Yes."

"But I don't—" she stuttered in sudden anxiousness, "—I don't remember the original formula anymore!" Once the antidote had been made, she had burned and destroyed all the data she had compiled regarding APTX 4869. "And I've destroyed all the data pertaining to that poison."

KID regarded her contemplatively. "Could you back it out of the antidote?"

The young professor clenched her fists. She could do it; she knew she could. But did she want to recreate the very same drug that had ruined Shinichi's life once already?

"Even if you make it, it's his decision if he wants to take it," the thief murmured as if reading her thoughts. "All you'd be doing is giving him a choice."

Ai let out a shaky breath. "It seems," she said resignedly, scornfully, "that I am to be forever tied to that fucking drug."

"There's no need to make it if it upsets you that much, ojou-san," KID said in a low, soothing croon. "Your mental health needs to be taken into consideration as well."

KID was wrong there. Her mental health took a backseat when it came to her friend—it always had. She had caused him enough suffering, and she was determined not to add to it. She would recreate the drug, to give him a shot at halting the disease in its tracks. The researcher performed some calculations in her head. Giving Kudou the same dosage as before would likely throw him back ten years in age, turning him twenty five; however there was the added problem of the antidote that she knew for a fact still roamed in his bloodstream. As it stood, the poison and antitoxin balanced each other out. Giving him another dose equal to the original probably would not last him as long, as his body would replicate the antidote and therefore force his re-aging much more quickly. By her estimate, it would give her maybe five years' time to determine what genes had changed through his back and forth age shifts. There was new research on Alzheimer's being published all the time, though the bulk of the work was performed chiefly by the Americans. She had skimmed a recent article in Nature on a possible cure for Alzheimer's that had been tested on rats, which seemed to reverse the effects of the disease if caught early enough—before damage became permanent to the neural pathways of the brain.

"I might need to make a few trips to America in the coming years while I reformulate the apoptoxin," she murmured thoughtfully.

KID swiveled on his heel to face the window, tilting his head back to regard the moon, and Ai caught his illuminated profile silhouetted against the darkness. From what she could tell, he looked remarkably similar to the detective, provided he was not wearing a disguise. "Do you think it's a viable solution?" he asked sotto voce, his somber expression a far cry from his usual cheerful smirk as his eyes watched the celestial orb.

Maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe it was the gravity of the situation they found themselves in, but for a moment Ai saw Kaitou KID not as the phantom thief he presented himself to the world as, but a protective being who soared through the skies on wings of white, and she could not help but think, Guardian angel. "It's a possibility," she conceded. "I'll need to call in Kudou-kun and run a few tests on him." She glanced at the second bedroom of her three-bedroom house, which she had renovated into a fully-functioning, state-of-the-art laboratory. The perks of being an internationally acclaimed and tenured research scientist—she got a lot of research funding. "I'll call him at a more reasonable hour to begin the initial bloodwork," she said. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, KID-san."

"No, ojou-san," replied the thief as he melted into the shadows. "Thank you for listening to my concerns."

Kudou Shinichi slunk into the home of Haibara Ai at a quarter past nine on a Friday morning following a summons via a mobile call that had woken him at eight. Her message had been terse and concise. "Come by my house as soon as you can. Call in sick if you must. No caffeine until I have your blood." It left him feeling anxious in a vague but looming sort of manner even as he humorously pondered what would happen if anyone other than him had received such a message. No doubt Division One would have been called thinking this was likely a premeditated murder between close friends or something. Definitely friends, but the murder part might be accidental.

Lately, he had been having problems recalling details that before he had not issues doing. Not only that, but whenever he was scouring a crime scene, sometimes he felt as though pieces that normally snapped almost instinctively together for him seemed to no longer fit, like trying to fit a hendecagonal peg into a dodecagonal hole—almost, but not quite right.

The mental blanks were the worst. He would be going about his day, cataloguing details of a crime scene, then blink and realize that not only had ten minutes passed, but that he had no idea what he had done during those ten minutes. It was terrifying in a way that he could not describe, and though he had covered it well, he was now almost always in a constant state of unease that left him tired and irritable.

Then there were the budding but equally worrying spatial issues. Kudou Shinichi lived by himself in the Western-style mansion his parents had bought. His childhood sweetheart, Mouri Ran, was now happily married to Hondou Eisuke. Every day he would navigate his way from his house to TMPD headquarters, the streets and back roads he used as familiar to him as the back of his hand. It normally took him twenty minutes at a brisk walk; lately it was taking anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, for oddly enough he would inevitably, inexplicably, find himself lost.

He kept his worries to himself for the most part, simply because he did not want to let other people down—not Megure, not Takagi or Satou, and most definitely not the loved ones of a murder victim. To the wider world, Kudou Shinichi was the brilliant, unflappable detective comparable to the fictional Holmes, but to those that truly knew him, Kudou Shinichi was a sensitive, compassionate individual who took each death personally.

"Ojama shimasu," the detective announced sleepily, swapping his work leathers for house slippers in the genkan.

"In the lab," replied Haibara's voice, and Shinichi dutifully shuffled into the second bedroom, now filled with expensive laboratory equipment and compounds. The lab was internally connected to the third bedroom, which was where Shinichi generally stayed if there was some overnight test the scientist required him to stay for. "Blood work," she said curtly from her position on the step stool as she hovered over a light microscope, and the detective huffed as he sat on the chair next to a table and rolled up his sleeve.

"So what are we testing for this time, Haibara?" he asked with a yawn as the scientist gathered up the necessary instruments to draw blood and set them on a tray.

"Syphilis," she answered sedately, setting the tray on table he rested his exposed arm on.

Shinichi blanched, suddenly fully awake. "Sy—syphilis?!" he squeaked.

Ai watched him squirm for a moment or two before she said flatly, "Joke, Kudou-kun, joke."

"Damn it, Haibara," the detective swore, and Ai cracked a tiny smirk in his direction as she pulled on latex gloves and attached the first of three Vacutainers to the tubing of a butterfly needle. "Not funny." She tied the rubber tourniquet tightly around his upper arm before prodding the inside of his elbow with her fingertips, checking for the blood vessel she normally used to collect blood samples from. She wiped the area with an alcohol pad before expertly sliding the needle under the skin and catching the vessel on the first attempt. The pair waited quietly for the container to fill with the dark crimson fluid before Ai detached the filled tube and replaced it, repeating the process once more before she extracted the butterfly needle.

A minute later Shinichi had a small patch bandage adhered over the prick mark, the newest of many he had acquired over his years of acquaintanceship with the researcher as her pet guinea pig. Honestly, if anyone did not know him better, they would have thought he was a recreational cocaine or heroin user. He rolled down his sleeve with a sigh, buttoning the cuff of his sleeve. "So what are you really checking for?" he asked his longtime friend.

She gave him an appraising, reproachful stare before she answered, "A little bird told me about your recent memory lapses, Kudou-kun."

Shinichi stiffened. He had been careful not to let on to anyone about those gaps in his memory. "Who told you?" he inquired seriously.

Ai ran his blood through a centrifuge to separate out the plasma from the blood cells, replying cryptically, "A mutual friend of ours with your best interests at heart."

No amount of wheedling, pleading, threatening, or annoying could make the professor reveal who her source was, and so Shinichi gave up trying to pry the answer out of her, though she managed to extract a promise out of him to report every incident to her immediately. Instead, he had sulkily bid her good day and had gone to police headquarters to review older cold cases. He settled himself at his desk amidst the others used by Division One's Homicide Unit, and there Shinichi spent the rest of his morning, munching on two anpan buns and drinking the terrible break room coffee. The detective took note of how long it took for him to resolve a case and noticed that it took longer than before. He felt more uneasy after this observation, for was he losing his mind?

He was in the midst of an absentminded staring contest with a case from five years back when there was an explosion of noise from the floor below, though it was muffled by a meter of concrete that separated the floors. "KAITOU KID, YOU BASTARD! I WILL GET YOU THIS TIME!" The detective blinked, recognizing the voice as Superintendent Nakamori Ginzo's and belatedly realizing that a new heist notice had likely been sent out. Deciding he could use a break from the cold cases, Shinichi stood, stretched his back, and ambled towards the stairwell after informing Senior Superintendent Megure Juuzo of his future whereabouts.

"—dou-san? Kudou-san?"

Shinichi blinked, jerking back as Inspector Satou Miwako waved a hand before his face. "Yes…?" he asked uncertainly, wondering with dread curling in his stomach if he had just had another "episode." He, Satou, and her partner Takagi Wataru were standing on the landing between floors in the stairwell.

"Um… Kudou-san," the assistant inspector said worriedly, "you were staring at the wall in here for the past fifteen minutes."

Fifteen minutes… Shinichi processed, I was out for fifteen minutes?! Outwardly, he remained calm. "Sorry," he apologized with a chuckle, "just got caught up thinking about something." At least I wasn't actually doing anything, I think… but where was I going?

He quickly mentally backtracked and recalled that he had been on his way downstairs to Inspector Nakamori's office to see the newest KID heist notice. "Ah, I was going to take a look at Kaitou KID's latest heist note," he explained, walking down the stairs to the next floor with the other two officers. "See you." He shot a quick text message to Haibara and exited the stairwell to the floor housing the Kaitou KID Task Force. The Division Two Kaitou KID Unit was in total chaos. Most of the men were conducting various internet searches on computers, while others were pouring over maps with the highlighted location of museums, galleries, and hotels. Nakamori himself was glaring at the notice, a vein visibly pulsing in his temple. "Damn you, KID," he snarled.

"Nakamori-keishi," Shinichi greeted the growling man, "Mind if I take a look?"

"Ah, Kudou-keibu," Nakamori acknowledged grudgingly, "Maybe you'll have better luck than us." The superintendent slid the note across his desk, and Shinichi flipped it so that he could read it properly:

When Coyoxauhqui's rounded blush fully flees,

I will come for the Eye of Mictlantecuhtli

On wings opposing Tlalocayotl and Vitzlampaehecatl.

-Kaitou KID

The focus was on… something to do with Mesoamerican civilizations. Mayan, Aztec, Olmec, or perhaps even Toltec, considering the spelling and pronunciation of the names of these deities… Something about Mictlantecuhtli and cannibalism stirred in his mind… why could he not think straight? He had studied Bronze Age civilizations for fun upon regaining his body and enrolling at Touto University, so why could he not recall details like these? Shinichi shook his head distractedly, ruffling his hair in agitation.

"Something wrong, Kudou-keibu?" asked Nakamore with a hint of concern in his voice.

Shinichi blinked rapidly, the sense of unease building beneath his sternum. Haibara, he thought with rising panic, Haibara would have an idea of what's happening. "Just thought of something," Shinichi answered distractedly. "Excuse me," the inspector said before fairly fleeing from the puzzled superintendent. Shinichi ran, hoping his increasingly-wayward sense of direction would lead him to the scientist's home, and not some random street. His luck seemed to hold for once, for he pounded on her front door frantically. The thought that she might be at the university teaching never once occurred to him.

The door suddenly opened, and he barely refrained from accidentally pummeling his friend in the face. "What is it, Kudou?" she snapped curtly, dropping the honorific in her irritation, though with one look at the wildness in his eyes she quickly and wordlessly ushered him inside and into the lab. "Symptoms?" she asked, all business as she sat him in the same chair he had inhabited that morning and grabbed her stethoscope while wheeling over a sphygmomanometer.

With ease she rolled his shirtsleeve up and wrapped the Velcro cuff around his bicep, popping the earpieces of her stethoscope into her ears and sliding the diaphragm beneath the sleeve before inflating it. The scientist took note of his beats per minute, as well as his blood pressure as he murmured, "I texted you about the mental lapse in the stairwell, but while I was reading KID's latest heist notice, I—I panicked." The inspector squeezed his eyes shut as he replayed the scene in his mind. "I recognized the names he used in his note, but I could not remember the details. It's like having a word at the tip of your tongue; I knew but did not know. It's like trying to grab smoke—you know it's there because you can see it, smell it, but you can't touch it—you can't tangibly confirm that it exists." His lashes slowly parted and his gaze rose to meet hers. "Haibara," he pleaded with quiet fear and worry and a hundred other nameless emotions shining in his eyes, "What is wrong with me?"

She studied her patient critically before sighing deeply and Shinichi inexplicably felt as though a giant weight had settled on his friend's shoulders. "Let's get into the car and head to campus so that I can run some tests; I'll explain along the way." She released him from the sphygmomanometer cuff and set her stethoscope on the countertop, disappearing into her house to gather her keys and purse before returning to grab a tray of samples—likely his blood—she had tucked into a travel-safe container. The pair hopped into her car and braved the lunchtime traffic.

"Kudou-kun," she began, eyes focused on the road, "What do you honestly think is happening to you?"

Shinichi sighed, ruffling his hair in his apprehensiveness. "If I were trying to be funny, I'd say aliens are slowly taking over my brain, but…" He pinched the bridge of his nose, and in the sunlight it was plain to see that this was taking a toll on the detective's health: there was a bruised smudge under the eye she could see, and his complexion had taken on a waxy pallor. "I'd guess Alzheimer's, early onset, but my family has no history of the disease."

Ai blew a sigh through her nose. "I didn't think you had it either, but that was what the blood work this morning was for: to check for the specific genes that trigger early onset. I have a preliminary analysis done, but I'd like to take a look at the inside of your head before I assume anything." She flicked on her right turn signal as she waited at a light. "The running theory right now is that all the times you've had to grow back to your true age have led to faulty replication of your DNA during accelerated mitosis, which might be why you're showing symptoms now." Her breath caught, as if she wanted to say more but held back.

The detective blinked, waiting for her to continue, but she remained quiet for the remainder of the trip. Shinichi grew decidedly unhappy with the silence. "Haibara…" he verbally nudged with a growl as they approached Touto University's campus.

"He's suspected for a while when you first began to manifest symptoms," she admitted at last as they eased their way through throngs of students. "That's why he came to me last night."

"Who?" the inspector asked, still immensely curious from this morning.

The scientist slowed as she pulled into the faculty parking lot near the building her office was located in. She unbuckled herself before catching Shinichi's eye and replying, "Kaitou KID." Shinichi sat, poleaxed, as Ai retrieved her samples from the back seat. "Come along, Kudou-kun," she called, and he mechanically exited the car and followed her along as his brain tried to process the fact that KID had snitched on him. To Haibara.

… The bastard.

The professor easily navigated her way through hallways, unlocking a nondescript door and ushering him inside the empty room. The interior was that of a large laboratory sectioned off by sturdy walls, and filled with various types of medical machinery. Shinichi recognized none of them. She sat him on one of the cushioned tables normally found in doctor's offices and hurried over to a stainless steel refrigerator marked with a bright radioactive warning sticker, removing a small steel tube. "I want to conduct a brain scan on you, Kudou-kun," she explained as she set up as though she were going to take a blood sample. But instead of a Vacutainer and butterfly needle, she attached the steel tube to a needle and inserted a plunger to form a syringe. "This is florbetaben, a radioactive Fluorine-18 isotope commonly used to diagnose Alzheimer's. It helps with the imaging of beta amyloid plaques that form along the neural pathways in the brain. Florbetaben has a 110-minute half-life, so you should read clean on a Geiger counter after twelve hours or so." She quirked an amused eyebrow at him and Shinichi chuckled at the idea of having the device pointed at him and clicking so fast the sounds merged into a single, solid beep.

She located the usual vein and inserted the needle, depressing the plunger to release the florbetaben. Shinichi watched the crook of his arm carefully, and Ai rolled her eyes. "You're not going to start glowing or some nonsense like that," she chided. "Now sit still for an hour to let it circulate before we begin the scans. Here's a laptop for you to read cases or browse the internet with." She handed him an older, heavy fifteen-inch laptop and wandered into one of the rooms to the side. Periodic beeping could be heard, as well as various frequencies of humming from whatever instrument was being warmed up. The professor swept in and out of the room, preparing it for his use as he typed emails and read case files from the TMPD's secured web user interface while sipping on cups of water.

After the hour was up, she had him change into a set of clean men's cotton sweats and guided him over to a giant machine that appeared similar in appearance to a standard MRI machine in its own enclosed room and had him sit on flatbed. "This is a positron emission tomography-magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or PET-MRI. The PET will scan for the florbetaben to create an image, while the MRI will scan using a generated magnetic field and pulses of radio wave energy to create an image. You don't have any metal implants or anything metal on you, do you?" When he answered negatively, she bade him lie down with his head closest to the circular portal. "This will take about two hours to do, since I want a full-brain scan. Try not to move too much while the machine is on and humming; the images will come out blurry otherwise. If you want, you can sleep during the procedure." She handed him a pair of foam ear plugs to dampen the volume of the humming that would commence once she began the procedure.

The next two hours passed with Shinichi dozing on the machine and Ai scrutinizing the top-to-bottom slices of deductive genius-brain images that slowly trickled onto her screen. What she found was worrying, though she needed to do some follow up work on his blood samples before she said anything more. And she had given Kaitou KID's suggestion some serious thought. Considering that he believed the apoptoxin was a possible cause of Shinichi's current mental deterioration, it was probably safe to assume that the phantom thief had given the inspector's plight some considerable contemplation. She was not sure exactly how far the magician's knowledge extended into medicine, but seeing as the gentleman thief made his own special mix of sleeping gas, he had to have a pretty decent grasp on biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and anatomy and physiology at a minimum. And creative genius that he was, it was possible that he might see another solution that she as a born and bred scientist would either outright dismiss or fail to see.

So now that she had decided to meet the thief in order see what could come out of a brainstorming session, how in god's name was she supposed to contact him? Then she realized, If he's keeping tabs as closely as I think he is, he'll show up at my house soon enough. Her eyes flicked to the observation window, where beyond Kudou Shinichi lay on the flatbed of the PET-MRI. And I'll make sure that idiot on the machine is part of the conversation.

Author's Note: I am terrible… I still can't believe I wrote this. Not quite sure where this one was going to take me when I began writing it. Apparently I like screwing over Shinichi as much as I do to Kaito. I'm on a medical kick, too. And holy shit this was long! Coyoxauhqui, Mictlantecuhtli, Tlalocayotl, and Vitzlampaehecatl are Aztec deities. All medical-related stuffs were thoroughly researched (scientist, remember?)—it's amazing what you can find on the internet. I've decided to split it in two for more manageable reading. I hope you enjoyed it.

Completed: 20.07.2015