Wire in the Blood

A Fullmetal Alchemist and Magic Kaito fanfiction

AN: Set anime-verse well after the movie. Set ten years before the 'Children' OVA.

Chapter One – It Runs In The Family

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It was a generally known thing that Hakuba Saguru could find no way with which t understand either the Kaitou Kid – the main reason he was even in Japan in the first place – or Kuroba Kaito, his classmate. For those people who had never been to or seen a Kid heist at all or even interacted with Kaito, the assumption could be made that the shared ability to give the detective identical headaches was all that made him think that the two were the same person. It was, in fact, only a part of the whole truth, but it was one instance when the generally known thing had its source in truth.

What most people did not know, however, was that Kuroba Kaito was often just as confused by the logical detective as the other was by him.

He couldn't say that it was the blonde's looks – if you ignored the unnaturally golden colour of his eyes, the detective looked just like any other half-English gaijin you could pass on the street on any given day.

Kaito wasn't concerned with the way Hakuba was obsessed with catching him, Kid. He didn't have any room to complain even if he was – he himself was obsessed finding and destroying the Pandora gem. . . and, if possible, taking down the organisation that had taken his father from him so long ago. Maybe neither thing was healthy, but without their goals, the two wouldn't be who they were, so Kaito didn't concern himself with it.

He couldn't really say that he cared for the cold attitude the other boy seemed to have built into him, but that. . . that he was working on. Bit by bit, he had been chiselling away at the stoic. . . Britishness, in order to someday see the stick that had been shoved up his backside grow even a slight bit smaller. The guy seriously needed to relax.

There had been things before that time, but they had been little things. That only struck him as odd for a moment or two before he forgot about them, thinking that they weren't that important. He was a Kaitou. If he took out or forgot something non-crucial about a person's mannerisms, then it wouldn't be too bad. Especially if said mannerism was more likely to get him noticed than not. He wasn't a detective, even if he could imitate one. More than one. He left the deducting mysteries that weren't his business or that didn't catch his interest to those who were bothered.

That had all changed on one seemingly ordinary school day. Hakuba was still in Ekoda from the Kid heist that had gone off without a hitch just over a week ago, sitting in his usual seat just a few desks away from Kaito and Aoko when the two were sitting down, further to the front than Koizumi.

The half-Brit had come just in time for a series of science revision classes, and the day's happened to be the last until the test actually occurred the following Monday. They were having a whole lesson dedicated to chemistry, and the periodic table. Easy enough for Kaito, who had not only memorised the damn thing but had also had to learn how to use just about each of the elements to work his flash and smoke bombs precisely, so that nothing went wrong on a heist.

Not that Kaito would actually say any of that to anyone if they asked him why he was so good at the science. He'd just say that he studied hard. . . which was true, in a way.

He hadn't been able to catch sight of Hakuba before getting into his seat, but now even with his famed skills at being as energetically hyper and slippery as a . . . well, a very slippery thing, he couldn't seem to catch the other's face. Dirty gold hair, maybe. An expression, not a chance. When Aoko shoved at him and told him to grow up and pay attention for once, he only stuck his tongue out, only listening enough to sensei that he could answer the next question thrown at him.

He got it right, as always, but unlike him, the next person to be asked wasn't a thief or possessed of an eidetic memory, and got it wrong. The teacher, annoyed that the class wasn't taking the severity of the test seriously, caught them all out by asking them whether any single one of them apart from Kuroba-kun, who was still mucking about – and here Kaito started, guilty yet irritated, as he hadn't still been mucking about at that point – and perhaps a couple of others seemed ready for their big test. Could any one of them recite the entire periodic table, he asked? He doubted that they could.

Of course, Kaito knew that he could have. But apart from drawing attention to himself that he didn't want and giving Hakuba more data on him, he didn't feel like showing off such boring things that he knew. He knew he was smart. So did the rest of the class. So he didn't need to show off. . .

The whole class fell silent in curiosity, when a single hand rose. Kaito, sitting where he was, could only tell that it was a boy's hand, and that it was in the same direction as the place where Hakuba was sitting.

Wait. . . Hakuba? He'd thought the detective was good at electronics, not chemistry. Besides, Kaito knew that the half-Brit didn't need to prove himself either, so why put his hand up? He'd say that it was to calm down the teacher at least a little, but his cold attitude usually disallowed that. It was almost as if it clashed with his nature, if Kaito didn't know better.

Then Hakuba started reciting, and everything else in the magician's mind froze, allowing him to stare slack-jawed at the detective who had stood at his table, chair scraped back, recited the boring old table of elements not as though it was something learned by rote, but rather as if it were some kind of treasured memory. The part of him that watched peoples' expressions and dissected their feelings from how they said things caught this, turned it into one of his own memories, threw it back at him.

It was over nine years ago, and he was bragging to someone about what he could do. He hadn't cared at the time what they had thought of him, only that they hear it, only that they were there while he spoke, and it didn't even matter if they were listening or not.

People were listening to Hakuba right now all right. How could they not? It was like this was the most animated that the class had seen him in nearly all of his time with them, except when he was trying to catch Kid, of course. As if – insane as that might sound, to anyone other than Kaito, in this room – each element had a memory attached to it.

When he was finished and sat down, the class was silent for less than half a minute before the incessant and inescapable chatter started up again, causing the teacher to have to shout to calm them down. Kaito joined in mostly for the point of fitting in and not being seen as someone who, quietly, was contemplating the meaning of what had just happened from a magician's perspective. The fact that it involved implied Hakuba and Aoko baiting was purely coincidental, and was an added bonus.

An added bonus that, while distracting, did nothing to make him forget his curiosity. A dozen incidents bounced around in his head that he had put to one side before, but now were asking for attention.

The way that, that one time when they had been allowed out to some laboratory or other that was researching weird things, Hakuba had been approached by one of the lab techs, who then proceeded to take the seventeen year old away from the group and started to talk complicated chemistry with him, when he had known ever since the detective had first appeared, that electrics was his speciality. He had thought at the time that chemistry might simply be a hobby, but that hadn't explained how they knew him on sight like that.

The way that, every so often, there would come to the detective's eyes a sort of polite affection when Kaito spoke of his magic or when Aoko spoke of her father's lifelong dedication towards catching the Kaitou Kid. It spoke of having something that he treasured, but not something that he liked to let people know of.

Unbidden, his mind thought of those odd doodles that the detective drew in the margins of his investigation notes sometimes. He had actually asked for them back rather forcefully when he had realised Kaito had 'accidentally' picked them up as well as his own class notes once.

On the way out of the classroom some time later, Kaito stopped the golden-eyed detective before the next class.

"I wanted to know. . ." Kaito started, unsure of where to begin or what to say.

"Wanted to know what?" Hakuba asked irritably, having been bombarded by questions already and wanting to get to his next class.

Kaito hesitated. He didn't want to seem like any of the others who had interrogated Hakuba, because he didn't want to interrogate. He simply wanted to know, to understand, to sate his curiosity. The words slid out of his mouth before he had had a chance to think them over.

"How was it that you did that?"

Hakuba instantly froze in place, startled at having had a variant of his own catchphrase words thrown right back at him. He reconsidered his thoughts of simply telling Kuroba that it wasn't his business or testing him by saying something childish such as 'wouldn't you like to know' or imitate the Kid by saying that if Kuroba truly wanted to know, then he could find out for himself. . . knowing that none of these would tell the other boy anything at all.

In the end, he opted for the truth, if a vague one.

"It runs in the family," he said, before walking out.

Kaito stared, but soon followed after. He hadn't been told much, but it was at least a place to start.

Little did he know that over the rest of that day and the next, he would neither see nor hear much more than a word from the blonde, even if he was sitting in the same room or eating in the same area.

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AN: Originally a oneshot in my mind, this fic spawned itself into a full-blown Plot Bunny. And Plot Bunny (I'll name him Wib) wanted an actual, chaptered story. So Wib got one. And Lo and Behold, there is now one more in the DC/FMA category, one that has both plot and includes more from the Magic Kaito side than the DC side.

Actually, I think that this may be my first Magic Kaito fic with little to nothing of the Detective Conan characters. That's different.