"This will only end with your destruction or mine. However, if I could be assured of the former, then I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter."
~Sherlock Holmes
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When Aoko finally awakes, at first she is surprised to even be awake. She survived? Yes, she must have, she's lying on her bed staring at her ceiling. She wonders if it might not have been a nightmare, but no, she can feel the bruises around her neck, see a small dark spot on the wall where perhaps someone had smacked their head repeatedly until they bled.
And she can hear water. Running water, somewhere in her house.
Gingerly, she gets to her feet. She's awfully sore from being slammed into the wall and has a terrible headache, but when she reaches back she can feel no blood or clotted blood in her hair, so thankfully it's probably not bad. She wanders out of her room and into the hall.
There's a light on in the bathroom. She can see the light shining out from under the door. She gravitates towards it, scared to be alone, even though her window had been closed and somebody had moved her dresser in front of it.
Kaito. Is he safe? Is he… okay? What was that thing?
The bathroom door isn't locked. She peeks in.
She flushes violently for a moment to see the black clothes all dumped in a pile next to the toilet and Kaito sitting naked on the shower floor, curled up with his head pressed into his knees. The water pounding into his head has flattened his hair out, making him look bedraggled and forlorn, and he keeps rubbing his hands together. Even with the water lubricating this movement, they're turning red.
"Kaito…" she says softly, swallowing hard but grabbing a towel and walking towards him. He jumps and looks up at her in surprise when she turns the shower off and drops the towel around his shoulders. She's flaming red but she can't leave him now, not when he looks so broken. What was that thing? What happened to him the past six months?
"I'm… sorry, Aoko," he croaks, looking down. "Pandora… she used me to kill him… your father… I'm so sorry…"
"Pandora?" she asks, kneeling on the wet floor next to him. "Is that what that red-eyed… thing was?"
"Not just him," Kaito continues, sounding horrified, half-mad. "So many people. She killed them all. And she used me! She used me…" he trails off hoarsely, staring in horror at his shaking hands, water dripping from them, though maybe he thinks it's blood. He sounds unstable, terrified.
"Kaito…" she says, placing a hand over his. "Tell me. Tell me what happened. Please." She forces up a weak smile, trying to reassure him. She feels so weak, so scared, but he needs strength. She has to be strong for him, so that he can recover enough to be strong for her. "If I can forgive you for being Kid, I'm sure I can forgive you for being possessed by whatever that thing was."
"Pandora," Kaito says quietly. Then he sighs heavily. "Aoko… do you know the Greek myth of Prometheus?"
He talks quietly, in a soft monotone, for a long time. When he's done, tears are flowing down Aoko's cheeks, but she puts her arms around his shoulders and doesn't let go.
They stay there for a long time, summoning courage. They have to do something.
They can't let Pandora go.
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Next morning they're ready to go. Aoko is carrying her father's pistol, no arguments. Pandora will be back for her anyway, so she might as well go with Kaito and you never know, she may be able to draw Pandora back to them.
Pandora only kills at night, in shadow, Kaito knows that much. And there was another death last night, after Pandora fled into the darkness. She must have abandoned them for now, but she killed again to tell them that she's out there, waiting for another opportunity. Some lawyer named Kisaki. They didn't find her until her secretary, having been trying to phone and page her all morning, turned up at her apartment around lunchtime and found her corpse.
"I think my mother had a great-uncle named Kisaki, it might be a daughter or granddaughter or some such of his," Aoko theorizes. "She's going after her descendants, after all, so all of the victims will be distantly related…"
"Then we need to find out if she has any immediate relatives," Kaito says. "They may be next." To that end, they visit Saguru, who is beyond shocked to see them.
"Kuroba, what… how…?" the normally composed Brit gabbles in surprise as they pop through his window. A white-gloved hand quickly slaps over his mouth to shut him up, though lightly.
"Hakuba-kun, there's no time," Aoko begs him as he falls silent and Kaito steps back again. "We have to know. The Kisaki murder case last night. Did she have any immediate relatives?"
"The… let me think… yes, actually, now that I think of it she does," Hakuba says, a little confused. "I was looking into that case but I didn't want to get too involved. Kudo-kun was there, and investigating with a passion. Seems that the victim is the mother of his girlfriend, Mori Ran."
"Her daughter?" Aoko gasps in horror. "Oh no, she'll be next!"
"Mori… also the daughter of Mori Kogoro?" Kaito says softly, remembering the girl that he's seen on a few heists. A karate champ, as he recalls, but Pandora mentioned "augmenting" his body. She'll be stronger and faster than any human, he's sure. They won't beat her in hand-to-hand. That pistol is necessary.
"Yes," Hakuba says quietly. "He's investigating too, and is even angrier than Kudo-kun. I didn't feel I had any right to be there. They might be at Mori-san's agency in Beika, but if they're not I'm sure you'll find them at her condo in Beika…" he gives them the address. Kaito nods, committing it to memory.
"Thank you, Hakuba-kun," Aoko says as Kaito turns to leave.
"Wait!" Hakuba calls quickly, grabbing Kaito on the white-clad shoulder. White now. The frightened cops had described a Kid in black. Is it an imposter? "What are you two trying to do? What's going on?"
"It's all my fault that that thing's out there," Kaito says quietly, enigmatically. "I'm going to make sure it doesn't hurt anyone else. And it's not touching Aoko again." He gently intertwines his hand with hers. "You have my word. I will destroy it."
With that, they're gone, leaving Hakuba with more questions than answers, lost in the dark.
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Shinichi can't bear to see Ran in this much pain.
She's never cried so much. He's looked everywhere, all over the apartment complex, but there's no trace of the burglar in the window which has been opened, only an indication that whoever broke in was very good.
Given that the handprints on Kisaki Eri's neck match the ones on Nakamori Ginzo's neck, maybe that's not surprising. After all, the witness report there was that it was the Kid who killed him, dressed in black.
At first Shinichi completely disbelieved it, that it was somebody else hijacking and altering Kid's outfit. Kid did not kill. Not ever. But something has been odd ever since that heist six months ago where Kid and the jewel had disappeared in a flash of red light. At first Shinichi had thought that maybe Kid had used the light as a distraction to sneak away, but he couldn't have used it as a distraction to just roll over and sneak off- he fell thirty stories! And he couldn't have flown away, either. The flash had appeared when he was approximately six feet from the ground- too low for the hanglider. Somehow he vanished, and then not long after that the mysterious deaths began, deaths matching the style in which Nakamori Ginzo and Kisaki Eri died. Perhaps the light was used to hide Kid's body being spirited away and an imposter has taken his place. Or maybe Kid was somehow rescued behind the light and his MO has drastically changed. Shinichi doesn't know.
"Come on," he says softly, putting his arm around his red-eyed girlfriend's shoulders and steering her away from the apartment, the crime scene. She doesn't need to see her mother's body, the traces of her life any more. He still wants to poke around, but he also doesn't want Ran around here anymore and rationally he knows that there's nothing to be found. Kid or imitator, nothing has been found before. In any case, if there's anything that can be found, Occhan will find it. Shinichi's never seen the PI this driven in his life. It's not really surprising. He's grieving as much as Ran is, but more than that there was so much unsaid between Occhan and his estranged wife, so much that can never be said. Unsaid words are eating at his soul, and always will, now.
As he takes Ran into the lift, chatting lightly to her the whole time, filling the air with comforting chatter, part of him is still thinking. Kid doesn't kill, not ever, but the slick and evidenceless style are very much Kid. But why the sudden switch to death colours? And the subtlety? Kid has always prided himself on being the antithesis of conventional criminals. So why the switch? And if it's an imposter trying to pin the blame on Kid, why would he work so hard to avoid being seen before now? And what is the motive? Almost nothing links the families. Some have criminal records among them, some don't. Some are single people, some are whole families from grandparents to babies. In many cases one or two people have been left alive in a household, one of a couple or a pair of grandparents. Why? And Nakamori-keibu and Kisaki-bengoshi…
So many questions, no answers. That, at least, fits the Kid's MO, if in a far more morbid fashion.
All the time, he is chatting to Ran, squeezing her shoulders. You need someone, and I'm here. I'm not leaving you. Never again.
"Shinichi…" she finally says quietly as the lift dings, the doors opening to the ground floor. Her hand rises to her shoulder, squeezing his, and he drops his hand down to twine his fingers in hers, squeezing back, before tugging her towards the doors.
"Let's grab something to eat," he says. "It's late, you must be hungry." She probably hasn't eaten since breakfast. She got pulled out of school not long before lunch to be told the terrible news. And despite the death not being a member of his family, Shinichi left with Ran anyway. His teacher knew he'd just stare out of the window or sleep on his desk if she didn't let him go. It took him very little time to catch up to his curriculum after returning to himself. Ironically, that was a result of that last bizarre Kid heist. The men who had attempted to kill Kid had had contacts in the Black Organization, and with a little assistance from Hakuba Saguru and Hattori Heiji, they had busted that case wide open. The shadows had been brought to light.
Only one shadow is left from that case. One big, black question mark.
It's while they're waiting to cross the street when it happens. Cars are racing past, as they do, and they've fallen into their own introspective silences as they stand by the roadside. The street is fairly empty- just a few cop cars parked by the roadside, their drivers swarming the apartment. Then Shinichi senses someone behind him, his detective instincts kicking in a moment too late. Before he can turn, what feels like a steel bar cracks into his left arm. He screams in agony and automatically takes his hand from Ran's to grasp the broken appendage, now full of the chill, fiery pain of shattered bones. The moment he lets Ran go, a shadow moves between them. Ran begins to kick but the shadow is faster, parrying her with one arm while thrusting Shinichi away with the other, so hard that he is flung off of his feet and crashes back into the ground twenty feet away, wrenching another agonized scream from him as he lands on his damaged arm, shattering more bones and what feels like a couple of ribs. The shadow turns back to Ran, kicking out and knocking her backwards, not onto the pavement but into the street, straight into the path of an oncoming car.
It all takes perhaps three seconds at most.
Shinichi immediately forgets the pain in his mutilated arm as everything, moving so fast a moment ago, suddenly seems to slow down. Ignoring the burn of his lungs- he's endured fire in his very bones, it's nothing- he screams again, a scream of even deeper pain than the destruction of his arm, a scream that makes a sick harmony with the squeals of the car's breaks and Ran's scream of pain, abruptly cut off a moment after she vanishes under the car.
He doesn't know how he crossed that distance, doesn't care, but a moment later he's passed the car which has skidded to a stop at an awkward angle, following the tracks of blood towards the limp, ragged form it has left behind. The driver stumbles out of his car, gaping in horror at what he has done, perhaps pulling out his mobile to call an ambulance. Shinichi feels tears rising as he drops to his knees, nothing to do with the pain the jolting movement has caused in his fractured (broken? He doesn't care to really check or think about it now) ribs. He reaches out the shaking hand on the end of his good arm to touch her, bile rising with the tears at the slick, warm feel of blood. But the blood is still flowing, he can feel a fluttering pulse pumping the precious fluid towards dozens of exit wounds. She is alive. For now.
Crouched over the near-corpse of the girl he loves, Shinichi looks up to finally see the shadow that has done this. He vaguely takes in the tear-blurred, black-and-red form of the Kid. A distorted image, especially when he smiles coldly. It's nothing like the playful grin of the Kid in mid-heist. Somehow, he can't believe that this is the same jester that has eluded him so often.
A black fist is raised into the air, the cold smile never wavering. Shinichi knows he's in no shape to fight him. All he can do is curl protectively over Ran, desperate to preserve whatever life is left in her.
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They're still at the crime scene. He should have known. He turns and runs towards the second address, the home of Kisaki Eri. Aoko is hot on his heels. He no longer cares about subtlety in his urgency. Night is falling. Perhaps people notice the Kaitou Kid streaking through the streets in a blaze of white, but he has vanished into the thick Tokyo foot-traffic too fast to be sure.
"Can you do this?" Aoko calls to him as they run, clutching her father's gun. She doesn't have spare bullets and there are only a couple of shots in it. She has to make them count. "Can you really kill it?" That's the question, isn't it? He's never willingly hurt a living creature, not even the men who killed his father, not until that last terrible night. Even knowing what this thing has done, how many people it has killed… can he do it? Can the Kid kill?
"I have to, Aoko," he replies wearily. A shadow of his silly grin cracks his face for the briefest moment. "There's already so much innocent blood on my hands… some guilty blood won't make a difference. Anyway, she stole that form from me, so it's more like self-mutilation, right? Or suicide…" he falls silent after that, all breath reserved for running. She wants to comfort him, to drive him from his depression and tell him that it's not his fault, but she knows that such deep-set guilt cannot be shifted easily, and anyway there's no time.
She clutches the gun again. Two shots. She doesn't know how good of a shot she is, she's never held a gun before, but she'll do anything to keep another drop of blood from staining Kaito's soul.
They're close to the condo, but the traffic's stopped, something's wrong up ahead. Aoko feels her heart freeze, sees Kaito's face shut down. Are they too late?
Then they see it, in a bloody tableau ringed by horrified yet grotesquely fascinated rubberneckers. In the epicentre are two prone forms in a sea of blood, and a menacing black form standing over them, one fist raised. Aoko remembers its freakish strength and knows that if that blow lands, it will kill. Barely knowing what she's doing, she raises the gun and fires.
It howls as the bullet cracks into its hand, but either the shot wasn't very precise or whatever the hell that body's made out of that makes it so freakishly strong has also made it very resistant, because there isn't much blood or the breaking of bones. The voice is no longer Kaito's- the scream is distinctly female, and more angry than pained. Still, it steps back from the bodies on the ground, turning to face its attackers.
"Pandora!" Kaito yells furiously, tackling his dark twin, who either wasn't expecting this or had been expecting to parry it. They both go flying, tumbling into the road past the bodies, whom Aoko crouches protectively next to. One is indiscernible due to the massive injuries and blood, but the other is male, and when he raises his head Aoko is startled to notice how much he resembles Kaito. He too is injured, and has a look of abject horror on his face as he clutches the other body with one arm, whether dead or not Aoko can't tell.
"So it is an imposter," he murmurs, staring at the fight going on between the Kids. It's dirty ground-fighting, but maybe it's better that way since it makes it more difficult for the imposter to take advantage of its freakish strength. A man standing by a car is yelling that he's called an ambulance, and there are police cars nearby so surely there are police not far away, but there are none in sight as Kaito and his imposter finally break apart and scurry to their feet, facing off across a blood-streaked stretch of road. Kaito stands between Aoko and the imposter, laser-blue eyes not breaking from the blazing red. White and black, light and dark, shine and shadow.
"Prometheus," it says softly. "Don't you dare try and stop me. I don't have to kill you, but I have much still to do."
"You lived in my head for six months," Kaito responds airily. "You must realize what my response is to being told I can't do something." He strikes out, kicking at Pandora's head, but it parries, lightning fast, and his leg makes a horrible snapping side that causes Aoko to cry out in fear. Kaito merely grunts in pain, Poker Face solidly in place, but it is Pandora who screams in pain. Aoko doesn't realize why; red is spreading down Kaito's white leg, but he doesn't appear to have landed a blow on Pandora. Yet its right leg too is buckling at a bizarre angle, as if it received precisely the same injury as Kaito.
Then Aoko realizes. It has. She saw it herself; Pandora split from Kaito's body. She remembers his story- Pandora's power filled Kaito's body, protecting and repairing it, and when Kaito cast Pandora out, she took the power with her, forming a new body… one based on Kaito's. Somehow, there's still a link.
"What the…" The guy behind Aoko is muttering in shock. Perhaps he's Kudo. Pandora's target was Kudo's girlfriend, after all.
"It's still linked to him," Aoko whispers with glee. "It can't hurt him!"
"You can't hurt me," Kaito crows, echoing her. "You stole that form from me! That body still contains some essence of mine, so if you want to kill me you'll destroy it!"
Pandora looks frightened for a moment. Clearly it didn't anticipate this. And perhaps it's remembered, as Aoko has, that Kaito cracked it across the head with a chair in Aoko's room, and Kaito received no damage. The connection is one-way, and now puts Kaito at a distinct advantage.
Then a horrible, frightening smile spreads across Pandora's sick copy of Kaito's face.
"Oh, I can still hurt you, Prometheus," it says softly. "I can hurt you very much. I lived in your head, like you said. I know how." Then, instead of striking at Kaito, she whips around, arms moving at snakespeed as she makes a huge hop.
The last exchange moved their positions so that Pandora is closer to Aoko than Kaito is. For the second time, Aoko feels Pandora's iron grip lock around her throat.
But this time she has a gun…
"AOKO!"
"This time for sure."
CRACK
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"Traffic's backed up, Bocchama," Baaya says worriedly. "Oh dear, I do hope something hasn't happened…"
That alone sends chills down Saguru's spine. Aoko and Kuroba's abrupt appearance and disappearance threw him, but it took all of ten seconds after they'd left for him to realize that he shouldn't have let them go. Something was going on, something bad, and they were running into it alone. It had taken him a while to locate Baaya and cajole her into giving him a lift to the Mori Detective Agency, on the other side of town, only to be told by a waitress at the café below that a girl matching Aoko's description had been and gone to the Kisaki murder scene, on the other other side of town.
Now he feels he'll be too late.
He gets out, ignoring Baaya's protests and questions, and starts running, soon abandoning the crowded sidewalk in favour of simply running down the middle of the road, through the standstill cars. He ignores yells and complaints, praying that he'll be in time, that he'll be able to do- something, he doesn't know what.
Anything.
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"AOKO!" Kaito screams as Pandora, balancing on one leg, wraps her hands around Aoko's throat and lifts her right off her feet. The guy, probably Kudo, is trying to get to his feet, but he's battered and mutilated and Aoko is choking…
"This time for sure," Pandora says dangerously as Aoko raises the gun and Kaito lunges. He can't make the whole distance in one hop like Pandora, but if he ignores the pain in his leg…
CRACK
Kaito slams into Pandora, causing her to drop Aoko. Both black and white figures yelp in pain as they slam into the ground, jolting their broken legs, monocles following the hats lost in the first tackle to the ground with a crack; now both bright blue eyes are free to clash with both of the red. Then the blue shift, locking onto Aoko's curiously still form, which Kudo is examining closely, though the only hand which seems to be working is still resting on the mangled body next to him, most likely Mori Ran. His look changes from distant and calculating (Kaito gets the distinct impression that parts of the guy's brain are shutting down entirely by this point) to simple, glazed horror.
Kaito does not like that look.
He shifts himself to Aoko's side, croaking her name. Kudo looks up at him, something terrible written across his face.
"She's-" he begins, but Kaito doesn't want to hear what he can see in the other teen's eyes. Ignoring his leg, burning even more in pain now, he kneels next to Aoko, trying to lift and cradle her.
"Aoko," he calls croakily. "Ao-" he cuts off sharply as he lifts her, suddenly realizing that she cannot hear him.
Her neck flops backwards at an absurd angle, too loose, too limp. That's what Pandora meant when she said "For sure". That's what the crack was. It wasn't a gunshot.
The gun falls from her limp hand.
He can't feel the pain in his leg anymore. He can't feel anything anymore. Everything stopped when Aoko did.
"Now go, Prometheus," Pandora says coldly. "Curl up and die again, for all I care. Just get out of my way. Let me finish my work."
Kaito carefully lies Aoko down, closing her black, glassy eyes. As he does so, he picks up the gun.
Kudo's talking. There are sirens in the distance. These noises are unimportant. All that Kaito hears is the click as he opens the revolver to check the shots.
There's only one left. Aoko must have been saving it until she could be certain of hitting Pandora. After all, a karate champ like Mori Ran can dodge a bullet; Pandora, with her insanely ramped-up reflexes, definitely can. So really, there's only one way to be sure.
Only one.
He stands up, proud and tall, only a touch wobbly on the leg that he can no longer feel. He raises the gun. Pandora spots it and smirks, and an instant later is holding a shrieking hostage, one of the horrorstruck gawkers who have been unable to bring themselves nearer. Kaito realizes that this protection is less against himself than the cops who have moved to the front of the hubbub; with a hostage at stake, they can do nothing.
"Will you shoot me now?" Pandora snarks. She probably feels that Kaito will not risk another life. Kaito gives her a glassy smile.
"It is a shame that your movements follow mine rather than anticipating them," he murmurs, remembering defeating a similar foe in a similar fashion.
He wonders if Pandora has ever seen those memories. Perhaps she will realize. It will still be too late to stop him.
Kudo has realized. He's trying to get to his feet, yelling "Kid, wait!" but Kaito ignores him, moving the gun.
Under his chin.
"Kuroba, NO!" Hakuba howls, the blond barrelling down the pavement towards them at high speed. Pandora's expression changes to one of horror as she realizes, tossing the hostage aside as she begins to move.
Too late.
Kaito closes his eyes and, thinking of Aoko, jerks his finger, fire wiping the world away.
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The response is slightly delayed. As the white thief hits the ground, a moment after his brains, the black fake howls in agony, stumbling to a halt in mid-leap and falling to the ground as his leg gives way.
Then the back of his head explodes.
Saguru has been running so fast that when he tries to stop he almost facevaults into the blood now liberally sprayed across the ground in a wide radius, the focus of the evening's brutalities. Stopped cars are moving onto the pavement to let the ambulances through, police trying to control the screaming and horrified crowd. Saguru drops to his knees beside Kudo, ignoring the dark liquid soaking into his pristine trousers.
He can barely take in what he's seeing. He doesn't want to look at the wrecked body in Kudo's shaking grasp, who he doesn't know, or the red-soaked form of the former white thief, or what is spilling out of his mop of once messy and now soaked hair. He focuses his gaze on Aoko, who alone seems undamaged, aside from the vivid black bruises around a neck which is at entirely the wrong angle. Kami, no. He should've stopped them…
"I should have stopped them," he gasps aloud. Breath has frozen in his throat, just another pair of lungs which have stopped working. Ambulance medics are around him now, some lifting Kudo onto a stretcher next to the torn body that he seems incapable of letting go of, one asking Saguru if he has any injuries as others check Aoko's corpse. Kaito's needs no checking.
"What… the hell?"
At Kudo's pained and confused query, Saguru glances over the scene again. And notices something odd.
The black Kid is gone. In his place lies a woman, a beautiful woman with long brown-black hair and olive skin and toga-robes of white and gold…
And then she dissolves into red light, and there is nothing. Only the thief shattered by fire and the broken form of his one hope, both washed away by a sea of blood and evil.
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And thus is the third movement. Yay for quadruple certain character death and ambiguous character fate!
… I don't know where this came from. I think Koorii may be controlling me through all the soul I gave her in exchange for Seduction and Mayonaka. Happy Hallowe'en, folks! :D