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

The Shinigami's Apprentice

By Taliya

"—and that is why the murderer can only be you, Yamada Sosuke-san!" The declaration was made with a pointed stare at the accused party. As the man was led out of the mansion after a tearful confession, a pleased hum off to his side caused the accuser to grumble under his breath, "Happy now?"

'Much,' came the gratified answer along with a feathery rustle, of which only he could hear.

He sulked in a corner, shuffling a deck of cards to keep his hands busy as the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's Forensics and Homicide Units cleaned up the crime scene before beginning to vacate the premises.

"Good work, Kuroba-kun!" Inspector Megure Juuzo approached with a relieved smile at having the case solved. "We'll get your statement tomorrow, since you look a little dead on your feet."

He smiled weakly. "Thanks, Megure-keibu," he replied.

The policeman thumped him on the back once before leaving with his squadron, and the weary detective shuffled out the door of the building, making his way back to his house several blocks away.

'You did well, Kaito.' The voice was extremely content with the outcome of Kaito's deductions.

"You're the one who tells me what to look for if I've missed something, Shinichi," Kaito griped, yawning midway through his complaint as he shuddered. He hated dead bodies. He ruffled his hair as he plodded along the familiar streets of Ekoda, where he had lived all his life. "As if I need reminding that I'm the idiot between the two of us."

'Don't be like that, To-chan,' Shinichi chided gently, gliding alongside the worn-out sleuth while ruffing Kaito's hair more, and the teen growled as he ducked away from his companion's hand. Shinichi dodged the retaliatory swipe aimed at his head with a chuckle. 'You're not an idiot, and you do rather well on your own. I just make sure that you have the concrete evidence needed to procure a surefire confession."

Kaito glanced flatly at his escort. "Not helping, Shi-chan."

At seventeen years of age, Kuroba Kaito was lanky third-year high school student with an absolutely brilliant mind and a preference for pranks and magic tricks. He was an ebullient soul, full of mischief and cheer. The son of the late world-famous illusionist Kuroba Touichi, Kaito had known magic from the moment he was born. Though it had been his dream to become a magician as great as—or even better than—his father, Kaito had found that his path to becoming that magician abruptly derailed by forces beyond his control.

It was when his father died in an onstage accident that Kaito had met Shinichi. It had been Shinichi, who was in actuality a shinigami, who had rescued him from what would have otherwise been a fiery and painful death. Kaito, then eight years old and in shock, had been unable to move as he watched his father perish in the flames that had engulfed the stage. Chikage had found him shortly afterward outside the burning theater, having lost him in the panicked crowd. As his mother hugged and cried over him, Kaito's wide eyes stared steadfastly at the silent, winged specter that had saved him.

Over the years, Shinichi became a constant companion to Kaito, though invisible to the rest of the world. The shinigami took the form of a young man—perhaps twenty-two years or so—with a face extraordinarily similar to Kaito's as the human boy had grown. With dark, near-black hair neatly combed despite a rather stubborn cowlick, Shinichi possessed a fair complexion that housed beautifully azure eyes. He always wore a plain white short-sleeved tee topped with a black satin vest. Black trousers and a thin, black knit scarf completed his look, as he always went about with bare feet.

Had Shinichi been visible, strangers might have remarked upon their striking likeness. And yet despite the similarity, there was something about Shinichi's appearance that marked him as otherworldly. It was not anything Kaito could pin down with any certainty except for the pervasive sense that he was in the presence of something not quite of this earth. Perhaps it was the unnerving intensity of the color of his eyes, which were almost too bright and clear a blue to be natural. Or the almost deathly whiteness of his skin, which despite appearances was warm and dry to Kaito's touch. Or maybe it was the looming sense of impending doom—of danger, that shrouded the shinigami like an overly clingy lover.

Aside from those, the only other difference that marked Shinichi as decidedly non-human was his wings. Covered in feathers as sleek and black as a raven's, Shinichi often kept them tucked behind him. When held in that manner, the wings curved over Shinichi's head by half a meter before the joint arced them downward, the long flight feathers either fanning out on the floor around his feet as he hovered, his toes floating a few centimeters off the wood flooring, or simply disappearing into the floorboards, depending on how tangible he felt like being at the moment. Stretched out, the shinigami's wings measured just over six meters from tip to tip, and the sight always awed Kaito.

Eight-year-old Kaito had found it difficult to reconcile the fact that the black angel who had saved him was utterly invisible to everyone else—even his mother. His repeated insistences that Shinichi existed, along with the fact that murders began to occur in his immediate vicinity at least once a week, had quickly landed him in a child psychologist's office. Kaito had swiftly learned that no matter what he said despite his genius-level intelligence, no one was going to believe that his guardian angel was always with him, would watch each session. Kaito had been beyond humiliated that his savior would silently stand in a corner to observe the proceedings. He was not crazy!

The sessions had lasted for a year before Kaito stop going to see Hiiyama-sensei, simply because Chikage, unable to cope herself, had fled the household to traverse the world—fled from her grief. And so Shinichi took it upon himself to raise the still-mourning child. Kaito had hated Hiiyama-sensei's all-too-calm approach to him, the way her eyes constantly viewed him with a mixture of sympathy, wariness, and pity. With Shinichi's appearance in his life, Kaito became—if not a witness—then party to a staggering number of murder cases—cased that he ended up solving with Shinichi's help.

Initially, Kaito would run away screaming at the sight of a dead body, traumatized as he was over his father's death—and Shinichi would spend days afterwards comforting the child, all the while cursing his very existence as a harbinger of death and a culler of souls. Shinichi had the ability to become corporeal at will, allowing him to interact with objects in Kaito's plane of existence—though he was forever unseen to anyone except the one he had saved—and therefore only allowed himself to interact directly with Kaito. It took Shinichi two years to help soothe Kaito's near-phobic grief before the ten-year-old boy was finally able to bravely face the corpses he encountered with but the smallest of whimpers.

In the beginning, after Kaito had managed to control his fear of death and dead people, the shinigami would flit about the crime scene—incorporeal as he chose, he had no fear of disturbing the evidence—teaching Kaito proper police procedure and how to preserve a crime scene and what sorts of clues to look for. He would explain in detail the methods of deduction in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and taught Kaito how to coherently and cohesively present his deductions to the police. As Kaito improved with regards to how to look, how to listen, how to observe, Shinichi began to step further and further away from the crime scene, choosing instead to listen to Kaito's increasingly detailed deductions.

Kaito's dream, as far as he could remember, had always been to follow in his father's footsteps and make his debut on the world stage as a magician of unsurpassed caliber. His love for magic had never left him after all these years—the only difference was that he had picked up a reputation as one of Japan's two famous high school detectives—the other being Hattori Heiji, who hailed from Osaka. Kaito had, over the years, somehow acquired the nickname "Great Detective of the East", while Heiji had been pronounced "Great Detective of the West". It had lead to some rather interesting rivalry case solving between the two, though to be fair, the competition actually lay between Heiji and Shinichi, of whom Heiji actually had no clue existed. Kaito merely happened to be the mouthpiece for the shinigami. Between Kaito and Shinichi, the teen had also acquired the moniker "Modern-Day Holmes", upon which at that point Kaito had thrown his hands up in the air and, while he still pursued becoming a magician, resigned himself to being better known as a homicide detective for the time being.

Shinichi hummed tunelessly as they made their way through the dark streets, and Kaito, despite snorting at the being's lack of relative pitch, smiled softly to himself. Though the shinigami never said anything, Kaito knew that Shinichi was proud of him. The magician only wished his companion was not quite so… death god-ish.

Kaito and Shinichi made it to the empty Kuroba home, the human teenager stepping into the house with a muttered, "I'm back," which Shinichi repeated as he fluttered in after his charge. The magician plopped himself on the sofa in the living room with a heavy sigh.

Shinichi settled for hovering over the armchair in imitation of sitting. 'No heist planning tonight?' he inquired.

The magician-detective blinked at his constant companion. "Shi-chan, it's two in the morning, and I have class tomorrow. And I still need to shower, never mind finishing up my calculus homework that's due tomorrow. I reek of Komogata-san's perfume since she practically climbed all over me when she saw the body." He punctuated the remark with a shudder.

The shinigami shrugged. 'Not like that's stopped you before.' Kaito had certainly smelled worse when he had planned heists before. He shifted his wings, the feathery appendages disappearing into the armchair back and seat and reappearing beneath the frame only to disappear once more into the floor. 'You ready for this heist?'

"I'm tired. I'm using that excuse." Kaito heaved himself off the sofa and tossed his personal poltergeist a grin. "And have I ever not been ready?"

The winged being snorted as he stood and drifted up the stairs after Kaito. 'I can think of several instances where you were taken by surprise and nearly caught.'

"And yet I was still able to escape all of them," Kaito refuted as he grabbed his pajamas and shut the bathroom door.

'Barou,' Shinichi sighed as he settled himself, reclining on the ceiling and staring absently up at Kaito's floor rug as he contemplated the young man he had watched grow from an insecure child to the… still-immature, yet responsible young man currently singing both parts in the titular song from The Phantom of the Opera in the bathroom, seamlessly switching between Christine Daaé and the Phantom in English. Shinichi recalled how Kaito had tearfully asked Shinichi once, a week after he had been rescued, why he had been saved.

'It was not your time to die, Kaito-kun,' Shinichi replied quietly. They were in Kaito's room, having just come back from a therapy session with Hiiyama-sensei. He knelt down before the child, using his thumbs to wipe away the trails that the boy's tears had left on his cheeks. 'There are many things written in your future that you have yet to do.'

"But why couldn't you have saved Tou-san too?" Kaito snuffled, face scrunching as more tears leaked from devastated indigo eyes.

The sight broke Shinichi's heart, and he impulsively wrapped his arms around the quaking child. 'I'm sorry,' he murmured into the head of soft, wild hair, 'but there was nothing I could do to save Kuroba Touichi.'

Kaito hiccupped as he struggled to contain his sobs. Shinichi shifted, leaning backwards to drift on his back as Kaito settled on Shinichi's torso like a strange sort of hammock as he continued to cry. The shinigami had no fear of Chikage walking in, as the woman had left for the evening after dropping her son off to drink away her anguish at a local bar. Eventually the child calmed to occasional sniffles, but Shinichi continued to hold him—both to comfort the boy, but also to ensure that he did not roll off him and hit the ground. His lightly fluttering wings were slightly spread, ready to act as a makeshift safety net if Kaito somehow managed to wiggle out of his grasp. He curled a little tighter around the warm little body, his bright cerulean eyes watching his young charge with deepest sympathy.

As a shinigami, Shinichi was rather young—only several centuries old—but each death and its subsequent aftermath always affected him. This one, however, had hit him personally. He had come for Kuroba Touichi, ready to send the departed soul to the afterlife. He had done his job, but then he had noticed young Kaito, read the promise in the light of his soul, and acted. But as a shinigami, Shinichi was technically not supposed to save lives. There were rules regarding how lives were treated. And since Shinichi had violated one of the rules, his punishment was to "haunt" the soul he had saved until the day he reaped it. And since he, as a shinigami, had saved a life, he essentially doomed the soul he had saved to a life of death, of lives around the soul being snuffed out as a result of his proximity.

"Adgel-sab," Kaito whispered, his nose stuffy and his pronunciation almost unrecognizable as a result.

It took a moment for Shinichi to decipher what the child had said—angel—and he abruptly realized he had never given Kaito his name. 'I'm no angel, Kaito-kun,' he murmured, shaking his head. He watched as glittering indigo eyes shifted to stare into his. 'My name is Shinichi.'

"Shinichi-san," Kaito repeated, though with his clogged nose it sounded more like, "Shibichi-sab." "Why am I the only one who can see you?"

The shinigami sighed, having hoped against hope that Kaito would ask that particular question later rather than earlier. But, the query had been posed, and Shinichi was not going to lie to the child. 'You can see me, Kaito-kun, because I saved you when I was not supposed to.'

The boy took a moment to process his angel's answer, and when he did, his eyes widened in terror. "Was I supposed to die too?"

'No! No, no, you weren't!" Shinichi hastened to say, trying to quell the rising tide of fear in his charge, carefully letting go of the boy to delicately cup his face. 'You weren't supposed to, which was why I saved you. But I… I was punished for it.'

Kaito's indigo eyes, no longer full of trepidation, were now full of sympathetic curiosity. "Why?"

Shinichi blew out a frustrated breath as he contemplated how to explain. 'Kaito-kun, I am a shinigami—a death god, if you will. I visit people when their time to leave comes, and I guide their spirits to the afterworld. I happened to be there that evening and saw you. There were things I saw in you that you had yet to do, but… you weren't moving. You were just there, on the ground, watching and ignorant of the beams falling down around you. So I got you out. I purposely touched you without the intention of reaping your soul to kill you. And this is the price I—and as a consequence, you as well—must pay.' The shinigami's blue eyes fell and his arms retreated to gently clasp the boy's waist to keep him from rolling off, sorrowful at the last of what he was to tell the child. 'My punishment is to follow you and protect you until you die, and since I am with you, people around you are going to die because of me.'

There was another long moment of silence in which Shinichi was too ashamed to look the child in his arms, and Kaito too lost in thought to reply. Eventually the warm body in Shinichi's arms wriggled upwards, and the winged being huffed in surprise as the small body lunged forwards and small arms wrapped around his neck. "Thank you," he whispered, his voice muffled by the thin, black knit scarf that Shinichi always wore around his neck. Kaito shuddered, and Shinichi immediately hugged the boy tighter. "I didn't want to die either," he confessed softly, and the shinigami pressed a kiss into the head of soft hair, grateful that he had saved this bright, young soul with so much potential.

"Ready for lights out?" Kaito asked, padding back into the bedroom with damp hair and a yawn.

Shinichi rolled his eyes. 'As if I actually need to sleep,' he answered with a grumble. Shinichi never slept, per se—more like drifted into deep meditative state whenever he got bored, and hence, he "slept."

Kaito shrugged as he climbed into bed and curled up under his comforter. "Whatever, Shi-chan. Night night."

'Good night, To-chan.' From his position on the ceiling, Shinichi watched the teen drift into sleep, a soft smile curving the shinigami's lips as he settled in for his own version of slumber.

The next day found Shinichi perched on the window next to Kaito's desk at his high school, simultaneously listening to Kaito's Japanese literature instructor, keeping an eye on his mischief-making charge's antics, watching the clouds outside drift by, contemplating what exactly went on inside the heads of Hakuba Saguru and Nakamori Aoko, and monitoring the movements of one Koizumi Akako. Originally the shinigami did not attend Kaito's classes, instead preferring to while away the magician's classroom hours soaring through the skies above—both to stretch his wings as well as to distance himself from people who tended to die in his immediate vicinity. Indeed, Shinichi particularly enjoyed it whenever it stormed heavily, as he liked to see if he could catch the lightning as the jagged threads of electricity arced from cloud to cloud.

He had only begun to seriously attend Kaito's classes when, after one particular Kaitou KID heist a year ago, Kaito had found himself unable to move while feeling as though he had been speared through the chest before another stab of agony had torn through his skull. Shinichi had been tagging alongside Kaito as KID, providing all sorts of snarky running commentary, as was his wont. For Kaito, it was an effort not to burst out laughing for no apparent reason—though as KID, it was certainly easier to explain away. Shinichi had kept to his policy of not interacting with the wider world in general, and had decided to implement a strict no-interaction policy regarding KID heists. This made heists all the more exhilarating for Kaito—'Adrenaline junky,' Shinichi had grumbled on more than one occasion—because he was, for once, staunchly denied divine intervention and had to rely solely on his own skills in trickery, acrobatics, and ninjutsu, as well as help from his assistant, Jii Konosuke.

Shinichi had known the identity of the original Kaitou KID—how could he have not, when he had been the one to reap Kuroba Touichi's soul?—but had allowed Kaito to discover that fact on his own. Needless to say, Kaito had been rather indignantly vocal, as well as honestly upset, about the failure of knowledge sharing. But after Shinichi had given Kaito time to cool down and explain his reasons why he could not have divulged such information, the teen had sulkily forgiven his companion for the apparent "oversight." The shinigami had snorted at his charge's "graciousness."

The first few heists had been touch and go for Kaito, as he was very much new to the phantom thief business. But with Shinichi there to warn him in the beginning, the teen managed to evade capture. As his skill had grown, the winged being had gradually withdrawn his support to where he now only remarked on things that caught his attention, uncaring of whether or not they distracted Kaito. It was, after all, Kaito's job alone to avoid being apprehended.

The heist that changed the death god's weekday school-hour habits involved the introduction of a new player with skills beyond that of a normal human being. And to this day, Shinichi kept a careful eye open, watchful for any sense of foul play.

His happy-go-lucky charge had managed to set off a knockout gas trap set by the police in his attempt to snatch the Rose's Bud, an intensely pink, marquis-cut morganite. Kaito had reactively tossed down a smoke bomb before using some rather complicated leaps to make his escape. While the Task Force began to search for KID after he had disappeared in flash and a bang, Shinichi had turned his eyes upwards to find the phantom thief wedged into one of the rectangular concave patterns the ceiling. An eyebrow cranked upwards in sardonic amusement as he lightly flapped his wings to drift upwards as he asked, 'Comfy?'

Kaito shot him a cheeky grin punctuated with a yawn. "Unfortunately I managed to get a face-full of the stuff, so I—" he yawned widely once more, his body relaxing just enough to send him into a rather painful-looking faceplant on the floor. Shinichi winced as Kaito made contact with the tiles, fluttering his wings as the police hauled the phantom thief to his feet. Luckily the ceiling was not terribly high, so the thief had not suffered any broken bones.

Inspector Nakamori was ecstatic. He crowed at his success, though it was cut short as KID suddenly bent nearly in half despite being restrained by the police, a strangled groan squeezing past his clenched jaw.

Shinichi was at once by his charge's side, attentive and worried as he landed on the cool floor. His eyes caught a sliver of glittery red that darted into the thief's forehead, and KID yowled as he clutched the upper half of his face. The shinigami bared his teeth, immediately understanding that magic—sorcery—was in play. His fury ignited further when the magician's white gloves came away red.

KID tossed down a smoke bomb as another streak of red shot through his chest, and Shinichi broke his rule of never helping KID as he scooped Kaito into his arms and winged his way outside. Once they had exited the building, he carefully set the human on his feet, and Kaito tossed his companion a weary grin of thanks as he stumbled along the outside of the building, using the wall for support. A policeman met them outside, but quickly revealed himself to be Jii.

The two exchanged words briefly, and Shinichi took the time to stretch his senses out in an attempt to seek out the source of Kaito's pain. His search was disrupted when Kaito released a panicked shout, and Shinichi watched as the magician thief lifted off the ground. A thin line of that same crimson magic seemed to reel Kaito in, pulling him further into the sky.

Shinichi, enraged by the idea that his charge was under attack, took to the skies in order to chase Kaito. The fiery, glittering line that connected the magician to whoever it was harming him was now glaringly obvious to the death god. Shinichi easily kept up with Kaito as he was unwillingly pulled along, and the shinigami's lips parted in a fanged snarl. He had heard of the "Red String of Fate" myth that was prevalent throughout Chinese and Japanese lore before, and knew that it was simply a widely liked superstition. But he was positive that what he was seeing now was most certainly not it.

The shinigami usually took the form of a human whenever he hung around Kaito, simply because it simply would not do to frighten the boy with his true form when Kaito had been a child. That and maintaining a completely human exterior—minus the wings—forced him to practice his control over his appearance. Angered as he was, however, his discipline wavered ever so slightly, allowing his canines to lengthen and his irises to fade into an eerie white. Talons replaced nails, and the tips of his ears lengthened to long points.

The line traced its way into the sky, where a murder of crows had gathered. Kaito closed in on the gathering of birds, still clearly in pain and too discombobulated to notice Shinichi's altered appearance. With a low rumbling growl, Shinichi broke through the cloud of black birds, large wings flapping yet spread intimidatingly as he glared murderously at the young, barely-clad woman in dark, snake-themed clothing as he hovered protectively between her and his charge. Her burgundy eyes were wide with shock and terror, and within her hand was a Kaitou KID voodoo doll. The sight sent Shinichi's blood boiling.

'Give me one reason why I should not kill you right now,' he hissed, drifting closer to the quaking mortal female. He could tell she was a user of the ancient magics, and therefore possessed the Sight—the ability to see beyond the mortal realm. It was only way that she, a mortal he could tell had been untouched by a shinigami, had been able to see him. The young woman jerked back as he neared her, holding out the doll as if to ward him off.

"Demon!" she hissed, bravado the only thing keeping her from fainting on the spot, "I have not summoned you!"

'Of course not, mortal,' Shinichi purred with malice. 'You've not the strength to summon one such as I.'

The woman straightened her back, affronted. "I am more powerful than you think, demon," she declared.

The shinigami raised a skeptical brow. 'Oh?' he asked patronizingly. 'Are you powerful enough to tell exactly what I am then?'

She clenched her jaw and tightened her hands into fists, unintentionally squeezing the Kaitou KID voodoo doll. Behind Shinichi, Kaito choked out a cry of pain. She gasped and immediately loosened her grasp, and Kaito's ragged pants echoed in Shinichi's ears. 'The doll, if you will,' he said, and though his voice was soft, the request was anything but. Shinichi extended a hand expectantly.

The sorceress clutched it to her chest. "How do I know you will not harm him?" she demanded. "I refuse to give such power over another to a being such as you!"

Shinichi bared his fangs as he snarled at her. 'I, mortal, can protect him better than you ever could.' When she refused to relinquish the doll, the shinigami's expression tightened into one of distinct displeasure. He folded his arms across his chest as he regarded her. 'So have you determined what I am?'

The female pursed her lips before she stared hard at Shinichi for several seconds, then her eyes widened and her complexion paled dramatically. "Shinigami," she whispered fearfully. Her hand tightened around KID's doll, and Shinichi once again heard Kaito sob in agony as his ribs pressed inwards with crushing pressure. She loosened her grip once more, but she shouted, "You can't have him! You'll kill him!"

'And yet was that not your plan, should he fail to become yours?' When she did not reply, the winged being scowled darkly. 'I tire of your insolence, mortal. The one behind me is under my protection until the day he dies,' Shinichi explained warningly. He once again held out his hand. 'I will not repeat myself. Give me the doll.' He paused, then asked, 'Or should I just take it by force and prematurely end your life?'

She stood, staring in terror at the harbinger of death before her. When Shinichi snapped his teeth impatiently and floated closer, she twitched and jerkily extended the hand holding the KID doll and dropped it into Shinichi's awaiting palm.

The moment the doll transferred into the shinigami's possession, Kaito sucked in a shuddering breath as the pain he had been in fled his body, leaving him suspended in a boneless torpor. Shinichi tossed a backwards glance at his charge, pleased to see that Kaito was no longer in agony, and that in turn allowed him to reign in his anger and resume his almost entirely-human appearance. Shinichi's azure eyes locked coldly with the female's red ones. 'Attempt to end his life before his time comes, and I will personally come for yours.' He did not wait for any sort of agreement on her part before he turned his attention to his now insentient charge.

Shinichi maneuvered the unconscious KID into his arms, his hand carefully grasping the doll as he began a gentle descent to the earth. As the death god performed lazy spirals that brought them closer to the ground, a light sprinkling of snow began to fall upon them. Shinichi took in the scene, the tranquility of it further dousing the fires of his outrage. He glanced at the teen in his arms, rolling his eyes at the lengthening trail of drool that crept out of a corner of Kaito's mouth. "Hopeless," he muttered as he arced towards the Kuroba household.

A soft snicker caught his attention, and Shinichi turned his head from outside to inside to find Kaito sneakily preparing to create utter pandemonium in the classroom, if the ever-so-slight, utterly devious curl of his lips was any indication. He shook his head as he leaned against one of the vertical edges of the window frame despite the fact that the glass panes were shut and quite literally bisected him—but as he was intangible, a closed window ledge to rest on was not something he was overly concerned about. The thickness of the glass momentarily distorted his vision as he swiveled his gaze, but it was a fleeting sensation.

Silently counting down five seconds, Shinichi observed with exasperated fondness as the room interior exploded in a cloud of white, blue, and silver confetti that glittered and drifted down like magical snow. The students of Ekoda High School's Class 2-B gasped in wonderment at the sight, and even their teacher paused the lesson to appreciate in the imagery evoked. Nakamori had risen from her seat and was currently spinning about with her hands held out to collect the confetti; Hakuba had taken a pinch that had deposited in his hair and was rubbing it to determine its composition, and Koizumi—Koizumi appeared as though she was trying too hard to feign disinterest, which instead translated to a pinched look similar to the expression one had when sucking on a lemon.

His gaze remained on the witch, and keen as she was to attention on herself, she soon found her red eyes locked with those of the death god. Shinichi curled his lips in the slightest of snarls as a silent reminder before his blue orbs returned to observing his now delightedly laughing charge.

There was a scream, followed by shouts and panicked cries.

"Seriously, Shi-chan?" Kaito sighed in exasperated resignation, slapping a hand on his forehead and dragging it down his face. "While I love you to pieces, could you not go one day without causing a death in my immediate vicinity?"

'Well, excuse me,' Shinichi snipped back with a not-entirely faked, indignant huff, flapping his wings so that one of them lightly cuffed the human on the back of his head. 'Forgive me for being what I am—a god of death!'

Kaito shot the shinigami a scowl as he rubbed the back of his head. "That's not what I meant and you know it," he murmured as he turned and sprinted over to where a crowd had begun to gather around the woman lying on the ground.

It was an argument that they had engaged in countless times before. Kaito, despite harboring a deep affection for his guardian, could not help but wish that people did not die quite so frequently around him. His familiarity with the members of the Homicide Unit of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's Division One was proof enough. Kaito had heard the whispers behind his back from those very members claiming that he was a shinigami disguised as a human—to which he rolled his eyes, snorted to himself, and sent Shinichi a bland, exasperated stare.

The magician-detective pushed his way through the crowd, eyes taking in the slashed crimson clothing on the victim's stomach and the growing pool of blood around her. She was still alive. "Someone, call an ambulance!" Kaito snapped out as he rushed forwards, pulling on a pair of latex gloves before pressing down on the wound as he informed the woman that he was a certified first-emergency responder who was there to help. The victim moaned and struggled weakly against the pressure and did not respond to his words, but Kaito did his best to calm the wounded female down as he continued to apply pressure to the injury. "How many minutes until help gets here?" he barked.

Someone in the crowd answered, "Ten minutes!"

"What happened?" Kaito demanded, and various people described how an armed thief had approached and stabbed the woman before tearing away her purse and making a run for it. No one had chased him, too afraid of being knifed themselves to attempt. Kaito muttered something distinctly unflattering about people in general but let the topic drop, choosing instead to focus all of his attention on keeping the woman alive.

Movement caught Kaito's eye, and he flicked his eyes in the direction of the female's head. From above, Shinichi slowly descended into the space between the victim and the spectators, solemn and silent as he hovered at the victim's head. Kaito's brows furrowed as he realized what was about to happen, and he clenched his teeth as he bowed his head and swallowed thickly. He knew that Shinichi was about to perform the job he had always been meant to do, but that did not mean Kaito had to like it.

The shinigami watched the woman struggle to breathe with grave eyes, waiting for the right time. He spread his wings to their fullest, the intangible appendages knifing through the unwitting members of the crowd closest to him as he rose above the ground. He flapped, several black feathers drifting away as he inverted himself so that he was suspended face down. The death god floated closer to the woman until he was half a meter above his target's face. He reached a hand out and, with a graceful twist of his wrist that rippled through both his arm and fingers, he repeated the gesture as he first loosened, then summoned the soul to him.

Kaito watched as an iridescent orb of white emerged from the woman's mouth, a long rainbow tail trailing elegantly behind. When the orb fully escaped, Kaito's victim ceased to breathe. And yet, despite the fact that Shinichi now drifted with the female's soul bobbing gently above his extended hand with the tail trailing from the woman's mouth, the teenager instead whipped out a pocket CPR mask and began breathing and performing chest compressions after snarling at someone to continue applying pressure to her wound. Kaito carried a mask and latex gloves with him everywhere he went—just in case. There had been a few times that Kaito's actions had allowed the soul to re-enter the body and thus snatched the soul out of Death's literal grip, and each time afterwards Shinichi had smiled warmly at his charge and hugged him.

The detective's eyes were glued to the victim's face, the pearlescent tail wafting through the clear plastic of the CPR mask as he counted chest compressions. After several exhausting minutes of breathing and chest compressions, a grin curved Kaito's lips as the soul slid from Shinichi's hand and returned into the body. The woman coughed, and Kaito plucked the used mask off her face and resumed the application of pressure to her abdomen as she wheezed and moaned. The arrival of sirens was the sweetest sound Kaito had ever heard.

Once the woman had been whisked into an ambulance and carried to a hospital for treatment, Kaito corralled his witnesses and helped Inspector Megure and Sergeant Takagi interrogate them before being questioned himself. It was a shattered Kaito who stumbled home after several hours of dealing with the police—the teenager had only been able to make it back to his house with Shinichi's aid. Despite his weariness, Kaito staggered into the shower to rinse himself of sweat and the residual feeling of dirtiness that came with dealing with other people's blood.

Shinichi watched his charge disappear into the bathroom and sighed tiredly himself. He was proud of Kaito for saving lives—it was a difficult task to accomplish, especially when the teen knew that Death literally hovered over his victims. While Shinichi himself felt neutral to perhaps apathetic with regards to the process of collecting souls, he knew that the concept at its absolute foundations disturbed his human charge. He would never understand it, considering he was far from human, but he was empathetic enough to recognize that his job—his purpose—was a process beyond what human minds were capable of understanding. And despite that, multiple times he had tried his best to explain the process to Kaito, to paint him a picture that framed the purpose of death gods within the larger scope of life and death and the flow of energies within the universe. But every time Kaito would merely sigh, ruffle his hair, and smile ruefully with a frustrated shake of his head.

Kaito soon returned, feet dragging in his knackered state, and he flopped face down onto his bed. Shinichi clicked his tongue and manhandled the teen under the covers despite the fact that the sun was just barely starting to set and that Kaito had skipped dinner.

"Th'nks, Shi-ch'n," Kaito mumbled as he snuggled into his pillow. He was out in two seconds, his breathing evening out into the long, slow pattern of the unconscious.

Shinichi affectionately brushed a strand of hair out of his charge's face. "Sleep well, To-chan," he murmured, then lifted himself onto the ceiling, settling in for a quiet evening watching over and protecting this human boy he had grown to love and respect.

Author's Note: Not quite sure where this idea came from, but whatever. Probably inspired by Death Note. It was interesting to write. My apologies if the ending sucked, but I've had this sitting on my drive for months and got tired of it just being there, all sad and incomplete. As far as their nicknames for each other go, I purposely picked something a little more unconventional but with meaning. Shinichi's "Shi-chan" is Kaito's way of poking fun at Shinichi's job: 'shi' meaning 'death'. Kaito's "To-chan" describes how Shinichi views his relationship with Kaito: he views Kaito as his 'otouto', or younger brother. I know I haven't painted Chikage in the best light in this fic, but her negligence was what allowed Kaito and Shinichi's relationship to develop. The gesture Shinichi does to summon the soul is essentially the summon gesture used in ballet, which, if you would like to know what it looks like, can be found by searching "Pantomime SF Ballet". The gesture is tied into the "let's dance" meaning (the 'you' and 'you' part), and if you want an idea of what I imagine a soul to look like, then look up "Pyrefly" from Final Fantasy X. There are such things as CPR masks—I have one myself. It keeps the rescuer free of the potential of infecting or being infected with transferable diseases while performing the breathing aspect of CPR. Anyway… I hope you enjoyed it.

Completed: 30.04.2016