Synopsis: Somewhere along the string of endless bait-and-chases, detectives and criminals alike finally figured out the fastest way of one-upping Kaitou Kid: defenestrating the closest person at hand.

Shinichi was less than impressed.

It might or might not have to do with the fact that said person was usually himself.

Note: There's animal death involved towards the end of this fic. Please be warned if this is something you will find upsetting.

By the third time Shinichi fell from a skyscraper, he supposed he was, albeit very reluctantly, flattered.

Somewhere along the string of endless bait-and-chase, detectives, criminals, and criminal detectives alike finally figured out the fastest way of one-upping Kaitou Kid: defenestrating the closest person at hand.

Kid was either uncharacteristically slow to the uptake (unlikely), or had proudly taken it in stride, much as he had with his reputation for temporary theft of property and propriety.

Shinichi took the revelation with considerably less grace. But then, that was only to be expected when you've been shrunken down to a convenient grab-to-throw size, and almost always, always in the right place at the wrong time.

Though, on most of those occasions, he might also have conveniently chosen to forget who founded the trend in the first place.

Wind lashed at his face and beat against his eardrums with a dull roar.

Karma, as Shinichi intelligently deduced later, was...not a nice lady.

If he were in the mood to be metaphorical, though, he'd have called her a kaitou in her own right. It would certainly explain the vindictive streak.

In retrospect, Kid had taken the strategy with surprisingly good humor the first time.

By the unspoken rules of noble combat, they must give nothing short of their best efforts — which meant expecting trickery, and expecting trickery to be expected, (and expecting that, too,) so on and so forth. No hard feelings.

If said trickery involved throwing yourself off a building, well, so much the better. Adrenaline junkies saw the world with very different eyes than the rest of them boring mortals.

But by the third time Shinichi fell from a skyscraper, he supposed he felt, albeit very reluctantly, flattered.

Flu season meant flu, and compulsory bed rest, and Kid unprecedentedly getting the definite upper hand for two consecutive encounters in a row. And now, the tick of exasperated irritation in the thief's face was not a sight he was planning on forgetting anytime soon. It was, quite frankly, a tick more than what anyone else had accomplished for the month.

By forcing the thief to reveal himself three hours before his appointed heist, Shinichi had laid possibly weeks of meticulous planning to waste in a matter of seconds. But he knew that was not the cause of Kid's ire – not really. Kid had nothing against winging it and enjoying the thrill. Rather, it was more for the fact that Shinichi hadn't even been trying.

If Kid was pissed about it, one could only imagine the look on Hattori's face when he found out…

...No, Hattori must never know. On the pain of some eighty-seven methods of locked room murder and thrice the count of false alibis in Shinichi's arsenal.

On the cordoned sidewalks, the crowd was moving out at snail's pace as security waved them on, shouting impatient commands over the commotion. Shinichi took in the scene before him and did the mental equivalent of a headshake.

The conclusion of tonight was plain as day.

They're not going to get him.

Again.

A cheery café styled like a Hansel and Gretel candy house sat a little ways down the street, with rainbow-colored "CLOSED" sign written in crayon on the front. Donned in a lacey black dress, complete with heels, stocking and dark lipstick, Kid was eyeing the café with unabashed longing. His expression wouldn't be out of place in a heart-wrenching high school anime full of unrequited pining.

Three minutes since their truce, Shinichi managed to deduce two things.

One: Kaitou Kid's attention span had a strong correlation with his namesake.

Two: quite possibly, that correlation extended to some other areas, too. Because Kid might actually be sulking of all things at the moment, out of the mistaken belief that he was owed an explanation for his trouble.

Shinichi had enough faith in Kid's intelligence to know he wouldn't mistake it for a repeat of the first time. Still, it didn't hurt to be prudent. At this stage in a professional relationship, he had a gut feeling that particular tactics now had the potential to downgrade from somewhat unsporting, but all in good fun to seriously, not cool.

(Not to mention that even with a nice tally of exchanged favors and "last second chance"s, there's only so many times you could owe the same person life debts for the exact same reason before it swung into the territory of embarrassing.)

A police car sped past them. Kid's hair, hanging loosely till his upper back, swayed from the gust. He brushed it back with a delicate motion, designed to irritate.

The whole thing was beginning to feel a bit surreal.

"I slipped," said Shinichi.

"Slipped," echoed Kid, without so much as glancing at him.

Shinichi looked down at the heels Kid was wearing. Four inches. Ran had never worn anything of the sort, even on formal occasions, but right now, imagining the kind of damage she could do with one of them on hand was powerfully satisfying.

"I had a hypothesis that needed proving before it rained. I got to the roof through the maintenance gate, found the actual primary crime scene, and climbed onto the railing to take a photo. That was when I heard someone coming up behind me. And…"

"And?" Kid made an abysmal effort at projecting some interest into the word.

"I panicked. Lost my grip when trying to reach for my watch. And…slipped."

"I see," Kid said, astutely, and abstained from further comments.

Shinichi thought he sounded superbly unimpressed.

Cold, tired, hungry, and having just lost the last of his whittled patience, Shinichi dialed his scowl to a full-on death glare. "I had greater priorities than you tonight, you know."

"Hmm?" Kid turned his eyes skyward to observe the weather. The full moon was ridiculously bright for an urban cityscape.

"I fell forty stories tonight, because someone plotted his escape route without realizing he's standing at the crime scene of a two-day old murder. And when he saw me, instead of turning around like a sensible criminal, or confronting me like a respectable opponent, he sneaked up behind me like a homicidal cat!"

Kid finally deigned to look at him.

"Tantei-kun," he said, mildly. "Are you trying to tell me that you just scared yourself off the building this time?"

Shinichi opened his mouth to argue, before clamping it shut. Changing the person of blame in that statement sounded worse.

Unfair as it was, he decided to drop the matter. Because there was embarrassing on a personal level, and there was embarrassing on a stratosphericlevel. Apparently, he hadn't been privy to some kind of implicit agreement in Kid's invisible checkbook of balance. Something along the lines of "deliberate deception by detectives, and defenestration by criminals are both perfectly acceptable disruptions to the profession of phantom thieves", probably.

Whereas accidental slipping and falling...wasn't.

Maybe Kid did hold a greater grudge than he thought.

The universe had strange ways of restoring its balance. Weeks after the encounter, a detective-turned-criminal jumped out of a moving helicopter, and a criminal disguised as detective went diving straight after.

Shinichi settled for aiming his watch at the less detective, but not necessarily the more criminal of the duo.

(His world was complicated these days, all right.)

Aiming was as far as he went.

(It had always been complicated, really.)

It was not out of any sense of gratitude, though. Just plain old common sense.

(Most of those complications just hadn't been quite as fun as they were now.)

He really shouldn't have been surprised when the fifth time came around.

Wind lashed at his face and beat against his eardrums with a dull roar.

A hand grabbed hold of his ankle, hard enough to bruise. Arms wrapped around his midsection with a vice-like grip. They were falling at breakneck speed — and then the glider expanded with a loud swoosh.

He was alive. His throat stung, his jaw ached, his heart was hammering in his chest, and he realized with a start that his eyes were wet. But he was going to live.

Shinichi couldn't see Kid's expression in full from his angle. Though, he could imagine that the way Kid was glaring at him indicated more than a few unsavory opinions about his skills of self-preservation.

Not as if any of this was his fault.

"And thennn you got yourself thrown out of an airship," Kid groused. "Are you kidding me?"

Said airship hovered far above them, looking like nothing more than a child's toy as it bobbed on in the sky, ready to dissolve into a sea of blue and white at any moment.

Shinichi gestured wildly at it. "You get back up there right now!"

All right, so he might have sounded a tad ungrateful. But give him a break. He had been on the receiving end of unconsented skydiving for more times than anyone sane should put up with for a lifetime. Sane, coming from someone that ran into murders about as frequently as he brushed his teeth.

Kid probably had a second opinion on that, adrenaline junkie that he was. Well, screw him. Kid's a lunatic. That negated his opinion by default.

"My glider hasn't got propellers, you know." Shinichi could practically hear the epic eye roll accompanying Kid's indignant response. "What do you take me for, your personal flying squirrel?"

Shinichi resisted the childish urge to add you came up with that, not me. If his current predicament was any indication, there was a time and place to get smart with someone. And some 2,500 feet in the air, with his life still in Kid's hands...probably wasn't it.

Regardless, he didn't resist it for very long.

"…Munchkin," Kid said as his glider folded itself behind him.

"Kid." Shinichi responded with a flat look. Electricity sparked and cracked around his shoe as he strode forward. "For your own sake, I really hope you weren't just talking about me."

"A munchkin kitten," Kid bit out, deadpan, said creature tucked snugly in the crook of his elbow. "What."

The word was intoned in such a way that could just as easily be deciphered as "what the hell did I just do", as "what is wrong with this world", as "what did I ever do to deserve this – oh wait, maybe don't answer that one".

Shinichi heard quite the impressive string of unvoiced expletives laid behind the non-exclamation. He absently wondered if Kid could be provoked to voice them, but abandoned the idea quickly enough. It wasn't as if he needed to find cheap thrills out of judging people for their language, especially when said person couldn't be much older than himself.

(And if Kid didn't think Shinichi had figured that out that much by now, he was seriously in need of some rude awakenings.)

"How's the cat?" Shinichi asked in place of putting forth a challenge, not bothering to conceal how he was already reaching for his soccer ball belt. He was fond of animals, but not so fond that he would pass up the advantage, however small.

(Granted, there were times when Kid had sunk low enough in ways Shinichi didn't feel up to discussing until he's had, say, the first fifty or so free kicks to that smug chin. Nonetheless, it was a true testament to the depth of their mutual understanding, how he didn't so much as entertain the possibility of Kid holding the unfortunate feline hostage.)

Kid looked down at the small bundle of fur he was cradling.

"Dead," he sighed, setting the limp body down with surprising gentleness — and in doing so, just so happened to so-very-temptingly look away from whatever Shinichi might be doing.

Damn.

The soccer ball gave a half-hearted bounce against the concrete.

"I didn't mean to, mind you," Kid rambled unprompted. "I thought it swallowed the gem, or…something." Yeah right, and conveniently forgot everything you knew about gemstone preservation. "I swear they just keep getting more ridiculous with how they try to hide those things –" As if you have any ground to complain, really. "…Anyway. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. Honest."

"Okay."

"Wait, that sounded terrible, didn't it? That totally sounded terrible. Uh. I didn't do it. In case you were wondering."

Shinichi walked up to examine the body, more out of force of habit than any actual need to investigate. "So you tried to catch the cat only because you thought it swallowed the gem. Or something."

"It died," Kid added unnecessarily.

"And it died," Shinichi dutifully agreed.

Perhaps being agreeable was the wrong option.

"Was it when I grabbed it – was it dead in the first place? Sick? The shock? Cats are supposed to survive over twenty stories, they can't get shock, can they, why am I even asking you, do you know cat anatomy – what the hell, you probably do. I – I can't believe this. I can't believe they thought this would work."

Yes, well, I can't believe it actually did.

Even having spent the formative years of his life dealing with the scum of humanity, Shinichi was inclined to agree that defenestrating a cat on the slim chance of foiling a thief was low. To be fair, though, anyone that could possibly believe something this inane could work against the Kaitou Kid was clearly a few fruits short of a picnic basket.

...Even if it had definitely proven true.

The task force was the first eliminated candidate. Nakamori-keibu might have his moments of…creativity, to choose the kindest term for it…but the man was not one for tossing cats. Or tolerating subordinates whom did. None of the foreign investigators at the gallery seemed the type fond of pulling such a thing, either, if only in love for their reputation. It really took the shine off an accomplishment if you had to confess to animal abuse when recounting it to a ring of starry-eyed colleagues.

Then again, perhaps he had been too hasty in that generalization. There had definitely been a growing number of eccentrics in the profession of Kid-napping recently. Which was actually kind of Kid's fault, coming to think of it. Clearly, that saying about fighting monsters held a little more merit than he thought, seeing as it certainly applied well enough for the bonkers. Every time Kid put on a grandiose show or pulled off yet another improbable escapade, his rivals came up with progressively weirder ideas for their next clash — which, in turn, only forced Kid to up his ante if he wished to stay free to antagonize them further.

It's a horrid, vicious cycle, like an ouroboros too oxygen-deprived to realize it's strangling itself.

Though, it didn't take a teen genius to realize it was unwise to point that out to Kid right now.

"Inspector Simmons?" He asked. It was more intuition than deduction, but that woman had only herself to blame for making a bad impression before the wrong person. If she couldn't care less about begrudging an apparent child, he was definitely under no obligation to fake magnanimity like an actual adult.

"Very well and alive," Kid said, plainly not in reply to what Shinichi was asking at all. And then he added, with ominous levity, "for now."

Yeah. Definitely unwise.

By their seventh encounter, Shinichi realised that a special tier of insanity should be reserved for Kid, and Kid alone; there's every likelihood that it's evolving into something contagious. Now there's a dead kitten lying at their feet, and Kid was making death threats, and Shinichi had the sudden, horrible urge to laugh — which moral implications notwithstanding was probably an all-round terrible idea in front of any criminal when they're trying to be threatening.

Even Kid.

Especially Kid.

"How is she?" Shinichi asked. More than a hundred and thirty meters above the ground, the pedestrians were almost indistinguishable amidst the piercing red and blue of flashing lights. The wail of sirens was a sound only too familiar by now, but there was a strangely mocking quality to it tonight.

If he sounded more morbidly curious than actually concerned, well – it wasn't as if anyone present would judge him for it.

"Alive – ah, not doing so well now," Kid replied. "Not on purpose, nothing personal, she said. Just wanted a chance to get rid of the stupid cat. Well, she's got her wish."

"I see." There wasn't much else to say to that.

"Though, now that she's experienced it for herself, I have high hopes for the good investigator. I trust that she has received a much-needed second opinion on the merits of defenestration."

"I don't think second opinions mean what you think they mean," said Shinichi. "But that's irrelevant. Bungee? Really, Kid?"

Kid raised an eyebrow. "Okay. So I bet you're gonna want to hear that it was an absolutely reckless, irresponsible and extravagant overreaction on my part to inflict that kind of trauma on a person over an animal — except I don't really regret it, so shoot me — and yeah, I should see that I never repeat the like, but only within my reason, so no promises —"

"Good one."

He could sense surprise, not the unpleasant kind, in the glance Kid shot him.

Don't get him wrong. Fighting for justice was great and all — but as long as certain lines weren't crossed, he was far too aware that some days, sweet vengeance was pretty much the only thing keeping all the parties of justice sane and functional.

(Mostly sane, anyway, in some of their cases.)

(Some days, Shinichi wasn't so sure about himself.)

(But it wasn't uncertainty of the unpleasant kind, either.)

Whatever had shown in his expression, Kid seemed impressed by it.

A/N:

this was supposed to be a joke how did it end up with ten times the intended length

should I just do a series for them