Author's Notes: I saw some fanart, and in popped this story idea. I might continue it when I've made more progress on Loop and older fic rewrites. I just wanted to do something cute and funny for now, since Loop's next chapter is being irritating. Enjoy!

Four-Times Cursed

Kaito cursed the foul weather as he ducked into a small wooded area off a residential district, trying in vain to wipe his monocle clear with a wet glove as raindrops sluiced off his sodden top hat in small rivers. He just hoped he'd lost anyone pursuing him for now – not only was he out of tricks for the moment, his suit was currently doing a very good impression for a wet t-shirt contest. Water and white did not mix.

It had been just fine earlier! He'd flown in for his heist with a clear sky and dramatic full moon behind him, and the heist had gone fairly smoothly. But, sometime during his heist, rainclouds had blown in with a fury and by the time he was ready to make his grand escape it had turned into a veritable mini-squall outside.

This had proved a hassle, as flying in this sort of wind and rain with his glider – his original plan of escape – would be just asking for an accident. He hadn't planned for other routes, and he was also cursing his lack of foresight now as it had led to some very creative stunts trying to escape a building teeming with police officers by way of the front door. And Hakuba had been there, and he hadn't had any disguise materials on him at the time due to the nature of the heist, and it had just been a pain in the ass as he'd had to basically smoke bomb an entire city intersection and set off everything attention-grabbing in his arsenal to distract the police and crowds as he'd slithered through them. He'd found himself wishing for once that he wasn't so popular – while the crowd had lessened due to the sudden rain, there still was a sizable portion left to watch his heist, through wind and rain, and these were of course the die-hard fans who had gone crazy when they realized he was out the front door and in their midst.

As it was, he'd barely escaped with his freedom – and all his costume, there had been quite a few grabby hands – intact. Then came the running. Forced to go on foot due to the weather – and of course this would be the one heist he hadn't planned on using any umbrellas in his tricks – he'd then had to run from some very determined cop cars. This was the closest shave he ever wanted to have.

But the police sirens were wailing very far away now, their sound almost completely muffled by the wind and rain, and even his considerable senses were picking up no trace of pursuit through this weather. So, he was probably safe for now.

Not that he could go home, not in this outfit and weather. That was just asking for it. No, he'd have to wait out the rain and Nakamori's persistence and return home in the early hours of the morning. School was going to be a bitch tomorrow, the prices he paid for his art...

Sighing and mumbling unpleasantries to himself, Kaito set about examining where he was and if there was any part of it that was slightly less wet than where he was now.

He was in a tiny forest, nothing more than a grove that had been left undisturbed by the development around it. Ascending a small hill, slipping on pine needles, he found out why – a small temple sat in the center, a building with maybe one room and that was it, more of a shrine really. It was very old, although rather ill-kept by modern society, and obviously no one had been here for a long time. The words on the wooden sign before it were too weathered to make out in the intermittent flashes of lightning nor was the city light enough to read by through the trees.

Right now, though, Kaito didn't really care enough to pull out a flashlight and check. What he did care about, however, was that despite the building's age and disrepair the walls and roof were solid, and that meant there was no rain inside, which meant it was not wet. And Kaito had had quite enough of wet right now.

A quick glance to make sure he was really alone, and Kaito stepped up to the building, hopping up on the small porch and opening the doors. There was nothing inside except the small altar at the back of the room, and as Kaito slipped inside and shut the door behind him, the sounds of the rain outside were almost completely muffled and he was left in almost complete darkness, nothing but his breath and the sound of his cape and clothes dripping forlornly on the floor to accompany the drone of the rain.

It was a little bit creepy, he had to admit, but it was dry, and warmer than outside, and no one would likely find him here. With a groan he flopped onto the floor, a part of his mind dully noting that despite the disrepair of the outside, the inside seemed surprisingly well-kept and no dust was on the floor. At least that meant his suit wouldn't get any more ruined than it already was, at least. Kaito was really beyond caring at this point.

Leaning back against the door, Kaito let his head fall back and thump against the wood as he closed his eyes. He should probably do something about his wet clothes or he was going to catch a cold, as it was he was extremely uncomfortable. However, it was hard to muster the energy to care. He was just so tired. Of so many things. Tonight hadn't been Pandora either. He was a teenage boy, he was supposed to be out and enjoying the start of his weekend with Aoko rather than spending it stealing jewels and listening to her rant about his alter ego. How much was he going to give up until he finally found it...?

He must have dozed off, because his thoughts disconnected somewhere and the next thing he knew he was blinking his eyes open to the darkness of the shrine, a niggling feeling of being watched setting all his nerves on edge. The sound of rain was gone, and his clothes felt drier as well, how long had he been out?

He looked around for the source of the feeling, but the darkness made it impossible to see. Hoping he wouldn't be illuminating Nakamori and the rest of the Task Force – as his top hat had slid off sometime during his impromptu nap and he couldn't seem to find it in the darkness – Kaito slid a small flashlight out of a hidden pocket and flicked it on.

A sweep of the shrine revealed it as still empty, but the feeling didn't go away. If anything it increased. Feeling considerably more nervous now, Kaito rose to his feet, wincing as pangs shot through his body. Screw only turning nineteen a few months back, he was getting too old for this shit. Well, he would just collect his top hat and be on his way, creepy abandoned shrines be damned. Kaito flicked his flashlight down to find it.

His top hat was missing.

Feeling his mouth dry, Kaito shone the flashlight on every possible crack and crevice in the small room, but no top hat was in sight. He had been leaning on the firmly-closed door, there was no way it had fallen outside. He was too light a sleeper, he would have woken up if the doors had moved as much as a centimeter. But the truth was that his top hat was gone, and absolutely not anywhere on the floor of the room.

Kaito froze, swallowed, hoped he wasn't making a really stupid mistake, and slowly raised the flashlight towards the ceiling of the shrine.

The next few events happened so fast that Kaito would be hard-pressed to remember them in the future as anything but a blur, even with his perfect memory. All he really knew was that something suddenly flew at him as soon as he illuminated the ceiling with his light, something with lots of pointy things that disturbingly looked like teeth and a huge body that didn't seem to be made of anything but shadow and a howl that went through his bones. Kaito vaguely remembered screaming – a very manly scream, and certainly not a high-pitched shriek – and throwing the last bit of his Kid arsenal, a flash bomb, at the Thing on instinct even as he dived and prayed.

There had been a high-pitched yelp of surprise at the flash, and Kaito hit the wall with his own yelp, finding himself on the floor with what would undoubtedly be a new nasty bruise on his shoulder. That wasn't what he was concerned at the moment however. Scrabbling the flashlight back up from where he'd dropped it when he'd ran into the wall, Kaito swung it around wildly at the direction he'd last seen the Thing coming from. His light landed in the middle of the room and he froze.

There, right in the middle of the floor, was a small child, a boy, maybe around six or seven. He was sitting on the floor, dressed in a rather tasteless little suit-jacket-with-bowtie-and-shorts combo and rubbing at his eyes as he proceeded to say some very unchildish things in his young voice. It was so incongruous with what had just happened that Kaito had had to stare for a moment, but what really caught his attention wasn't really the fact that the boy was there.

No, what really caught his attention and was causing him to gape rather like the scaly horrors he so detested, was the long, black, bushy tail poking out from behind the kid. And the ears. Two long pointed ears sat on the kid's head, covered with the same black fur, and pulled back in the universal symbol for animal annoyance. And, being a master of costumes and disguises of sorts, Kaito could say with a great deal of befuddled certainty that the tail and ears were quite real.

What.

The boy finally seemed to recover his sight and senses, as he blinked rapidly in the light of Kaito's flashlight. He wore a befuddled look for a moment, before his gaze fell on Kaito, who was still laying where he'd fallen, rooted to the spot by sheer dumbfoundment. Poker Face had been cracked by the weather, and had just packed up its bags and left when the shadow too-many-teeth Thing had attacked, and was loathe to return when faced with a little boy that had apparently stepped out of some anime and Kaito would have thought he'd gotten lost going to the nearest convention if everything weren't so horrifyingly real.

The kid's eyes widened slightly when he saw Kaito, before they narrowed in anger – and oh man, were those slit pupils? – and the growl that came from the boy's throat did not sound in the least human. Kaito had a very distant realization that he may indeed be experiencing some sort of panic attack and would probably be hyperventilating if he happened to be breathing. Which he wasn't. He should probably look into fixing that when he could think again.

"You!" The boy snarled – literally! – at Kaito. "Have you no respect? Barging into my home and dirtying it, blinding me, I'll curse you for this!"

Kaito stared for a moment at the snarling, spitting little kid who had just called him human which meant that the kid probably wasn't and really, Kaito liked to consider himself open-minded what with having had a witch in his high school classes and looking for a gem that granted immortality, but this was just way too much.

So, with that thought, Kaito's head thumped to the ground as he fainted.

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