Mikau: Hello and welcome! Thanks so much for taking a look at this. Like I said in the summary, we had a prompt exchange event on the Poirot Café forum. Twenty prompts (including my own) were sent in asking for all kinds of situations and pairings and AUs and all kinds of goodness, and I've done all twenty. There's a lot of KaiShin and some HakuKai, and the genres range from angst to pure silliness, so… This first one is pre-HakuKai and kind of silly in places, serious in others. I hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: DCMK is the intellectual property of Aoyama Gosho, and the prompt for this chapter was sent in by Shihominn on Poirot Café.

…

Shihominn: The edge of a tattoo is always peeking out from under your shirt and I am obsessed with seeing the whole thing.How do I ask you to take your shirt off in a non creepy way?

He'd never noticed it before because, at school, Hakuba always wore the gakuran during the colder months and, during the summer months, always had his button-down done up to the collar. When they changed for gym, Kaito made a point of never letting himself look at anyone else lest they start to suspect his sexual preferences.

So it wasn't until Kaito and Hakuba actually started hanging out as friends after the whole Nightmare fiasco that Kaito got the chance to see Hakuba in street clothes (other than his work suits), and that was when he first saw the tattoo peeking out from under Hakuba's shirt.

The Brit leaned forward to move his knight to take Kaito's bishop, and Kaito just happened to be looking at the right spot to see a flash of some kind of swirly Edwardian design.

Kaito was struck so absolutely dumb that he was unable to recover his sensibilities sufficiently to put up a good fight. Hakuba completely clobbered him in the two games that followed.

Hakuba Saguru—Mr. Straight-Laced and Goody-Two-Shoes himself—had a tattoo!

And Kaito was absolutely obsessed with it. He had to figure out what it was. It looked big and prominent, stamped over his heart on the left side of his chest. It had to be something important. Hakuba wasn't the kind of person to just get a tattoo on a whim.

Unless he'd been a completely different person while living in London! What if the English Hakuba was a total bad boy who went clubbing and had crazy orgies with BDSM types?! What if he had piercings?! Were there other tattoos cleverly hidden under Hakuba's copious layers of clothing? There was one way to find out.

But how was Kaito supposed to ask Hakuba to take off his shirt in a non-creepy way?

He mentally cringed. Yeah. No. There was no way to keep this from being awkward. But it was better to ask politely than to tackle the Brit, pin him to the ground, and forcibly rip his shirt off. That could be misconstrued, especially if Baaya just happened to walk in with tea and crumpets at that very second and took incriminating photographs. Kaito was well aware that she shipped them, so that could get very bad very quickly.

So as Saguru was attempting to make Kaito into a civilized human being by introducing him to the Lord of the Rings series, Kaito casually inquired, "So…sorry to interrupt in the middle of the Elvish grammar lesson, but…would you mind taking off your shirt?"

Saguru looked absolutely floored as his cheeks turned burgundy. He nearly fell off of the couch as he yelped, "Yes! As a matter of fact, I would mind! What in the world has gotten into you, Kuroba?!"

"Nothing," Kaito tried to assure his friend, inching closer. "Nothing creepy or perverted or anything, but I just really need to see your tattoo, so if you could just lose the shirt…"

"No! M-My what?! Stop it, Kuroba! This isn't funny!" Saguru scrambled back away from the approaching magician until he actually did fall flat on the floor.

Kaito pounced, pinning the blonde down with his body weight and trapping Saguru's arms with one hand while the other worked to tear off the shirt.

"Stop!" Saguru screamed in honest to goodness terror as he struggled to free himself. "S-Stop!" he begged, tears falling freely as he openly sobbed.

But it was too late because Kaito already had the shirt off, revealing, not a tattoo, but a brand mark that had been long ago seared into the skin. It was accompanied by other, smaller burns and various remnants of past tortures.

Kaito's face quickly lost all of its color as he frantically climbed off of his friend and helped him up to sitting. "Oh my God, Hakuba, I am so sorry. I didn't mean—I didn't know that—I just thought you had a tattoo, and I was dying to see it, 'cause I thought that it was so unlike you, and I just wanted…I didn't…"

He stopped talking and grabbed the decorative blanket off of the back of the couch to wrap around the still trembling, crying Hakuba.

"I'm sorry," Kaito whispered. "I'm really, really sorry, and I swear never to do anything like that again. I…" He bit his lip, freaking out on the inside, anxious to help his friend. "What should I do? Do you need anything?"

"W-Water," Saguru stammered, pulling the blanket closer around him.

Kaito quickly fetched the requested beverage.

"I'm sorry," he repeated as he handed the bottle over.

Saguru shook his head, beginning to calm down as he drank. "It's okay. I'm okay." He gave a small shiver.

"I'm sorry," Kaito repeated again, feeling incredibly guilty. He felt lower than sea sludge.

"It's okay," Saguru insisted, taking deep breaths and seeming to get everything back under control. "You couldn't have had any idea I would have a panic attack over something like that."

"Yeah, but…" Kaito settled back down beside the Brit, his shoulder pressed to Saguru's. He sank into silent brooding.

Saguru sighed, letting himself lean slightly against Kaito. "You thought I had a tattoo, huh?"

"…Yeah," Kaito begrudgingly admitted, feeling absolutely idiotic at this point.

Saguru gave a tired laugh. "Unfortunately, no. I wish it were something simple like that, but… You know that both of my parents are very influential people? Well, because of that, I got kidnapped to be used as leverage a lot when I was little," he reported matter-of-factly, having long ago become desensitized to the horrible atrocity it had been.

Kaito simply gaped at him, too stunned to comment on how inappropriately stoic his friend was about the whole matter.

"One of my kidnappers was a pedophile with a sadistic streak, so…" Saguru screwed his eyes closed at the memories and shuddered again.

Kaito wrapped an arm around Saguru and squeezed him reassuringly.

"He's dead. He can't hurt me anymore," Saguru whispered under his breath, and at first Kaito thought that Saguru was telling this to him, but then the detective repeated it twice more, and it was then that Kaito understood that Hakuba was trying to reassure himself of that fact.

Kaito squeezed Hakuba a little tighter, resting his head against the blonde's. "Shh. It's okay, Hakuba. I'm here. I won't let anybody hurt you, okay?"

Saguru nodded, but he kept his eyes shut as he continued to tremble, trying to escape from the memories of his past.

Kaito tried to distract him. "Hey. Enough of that. Weren't you going to teach me how verb conjugation in Elvish works as opposed to Klingon? Which I know nothing about either, by the way, so you'll have to nerd vomit all over me about that too, okay? But can you introduce me to Doctor Who first? I think I'll actually enjoy that. And just so you know, I stopped reading Harry Potter after the fourth book, so you'll have to correct that as well. You've got a lot of work to do, Hakuba, so why don't you focus on that right now, okay?" he encouraged, hoping that at least one of those things might pull the Brit out of his nightmarish past and back to the present.

Saguru blinked and stared Kaito right in the eye, tears drying up instantly. "My God," he snorted. "You're worse than I thought. Absolutely un-dateable," the Brit reported with unintendedly painful honesty.

Kaito struggled between feeling insulted, mortified, and worried. Finally he settled on indignant. "Well…fix me then."

Saguru laughed, a bright grin lighting up his face and returning the color to his cheeks.

Kaito felt his stomach flip as he realized that the blonde was actually kind of cute under that prickly exterior he put on.

He kind of wanted to tackle the Brit again, but now he knew what a bad idea that was. He never wanted to see Saguru like that again…so he'd just have to be patient and wait and learn about all sorts of nerdy things until the day came that Saguru took his shirt off in front of Kaito of his own free will.

Kaito was kind of hoping that that ended up being soon. Because Saguru's smile was amazingly beautiful.

…

Mikau: So what did you think? I hope you liked it. If not, maybe next time. Speaking of next time, next chapter will be some Sonoko x Makoto in which Sonoko thinks Makoto is cheating on her, and her girls (plus honorary girl Kaito) attempt to reassure her. Look forward to it!