Archive of Our Own

Waking up to a total impossibility that throws every second of one’s future out the window is an occurrence that puts an extreme damper on things, to put politely. Secluded in a bedroom, the shattering of privacy that reveals an interference from the outside – an invasion of not only the room itself, but the bed, the person, the very cells that make up the fear and rage that bubble over as a result – is manifested away from the ears of polite company by much shrieking and swearing. One morning turns out to be different from all the rest, and that’s really all it takes. That, and some cobwebbed clothes from storage, a pair of plastic, toy sunglasses, and a one-way off-peak shinkansen ticket bound for the heart of Tokyo, furtively financed by a bank account owned by a person who no longer exists.

Coming to know these unique struggles intimately probably wouldn’t have changed anything on his part, but it’s as enlightening as encountering a corpse on sunny day out; exciting and bewildering in equal measure, neatly topped off with a gut-wrenching anxiety. The floor is so close, it’s hard to imagine anything other than how quickly a bout of vomit would hit the mottled concrete and stain a pair of ten-and-a-half sized shoes. A sense of dizziness accompanies any dire need to look up, peering at the gargantuan world around from a vantage point that rivals the bottom of the sea. Chairs that wouldn’t have been given a second thought now take physical strength to scale. Tables stop an aggravating inch above the eyeline. Lingering smoke from cigarettes tastes twice as foul. Any bid to manoeuvre oneself through this unfair social jungle is frowned upon, regarded as pure juvenility, and not a desperate attempt to level the playing field between man and boy.

One former man’s journey from the homely streets of Osaka to the never-ending bustle of Tokyo consists of, and in no particular order: falling down a set of wooden stairs, falling down a set of concrete stairs, hitting his head on a plastic divider in a ferocious jump to grab a deposited train ticket, almost getting sat on by three different people, sustaining scrapes on both knees, tripping into a woman and almost pulling her skirt down, getting slapped by a separate woman for the aforementioned incident, a lecture from a policeman, being forced to hold a stranger’s hand to cross the road, getting shoelaces caught under somebody else’s feet, being threatened with a phone-call to his parents, being savaged by a stray cat, being hit in the face with a purse on seventeen separate occasions, and stepping in dog shit. Tokyo has never felt so welcoming.

And, neither is the reception of a friend Hattori Heiji struggles to describe the importance of in mere words. That’s not to say he expected any uncharacteristic behaviour from the well-established Detective of the East, Kudou Shinichi – or as he’s known these days, Edogawa Conan – but a bit of sympathy wouldn’t go amiss now that they’re facing similar circumstances. He’s come to know Kudou as quite the backbiter, but the expression that dawns on his chubby, little face the moment he opens the door to the Mouri Detective Agency is...frankly hurtful, if he were being honest.

It’s an impressive colour for a human face to turn, though. Or, at least for any human still alive. The pallid complexion that shoots across his cheeks like a pox makes him look swollen and ill, like a river corpse. His lips warp and twist, never seeming to set on a particular shape, and now that Heiji’s seeing this face eye-to-eye, he wonders how anybody could mistake this person for a real child. Clueless Ran and her unimpressive father are drawn to the stranger occupying the gap in the doorway from their positions on the far side of the room, and when the crease of confusion freakishly borders on what he fears to be recognition, a swell in the pit of his stomach spurs him to explode into the room to save himself. After all, if Kudou thinks it wise to protect his identity as Conan, then it stands to reason that Hattori should protect his identity as…

“Conan! Is that really you? Wow, it’s been such a long time!” There’s no need to overact. He just needs to keep it casual and realistic. “Guess what? I’ve moved here to Beika just like you! Ain’t that awesome? Hey, what’s that face for? Don’t you recognise me? It’s—” He jabs a thumb into his chest, and the shock of its sting leaves a crack in his confidence. A name. He needs to think of a name. Nothing fancy. Anything would do. Just a nice, simple, normal name. What would Kudou choose, if not Conan?

“Mallow!” is what Conan, himself, declares, with a bright face and dead eyes. Heiji is grateful for his quick thinking, and the sterling intelligence that has led him to recognise this strange child on his doorstep as his rival from the west. However, he is not the slightest bit appreciative of the metaphorical rope Kudou has thrown in his aid, and he simply can’t stifle the curt words that fall from his plump, little lips.

“Dude, that name fucking sucks.”

Ran’s long-legged stride stops her just shy of the door, where she peers down at Heiji with unblinking eyes, and says to Conan, “Mallow? Do you know this little boy, Conan?”

“S-sure, I do!” Conan grits, forcing a toothy smile. “We’re friends! We were friends before I moved schools. Look, Uncle Kogorou, my friend has come to visit!” This is met with negative interest from the Sleeping Kogorou, who snorts like a dragon around the cigarette in his mouth, and switches the channel on the television to horse-racing. For an added emphasis, and one that Heiji is curiously impressed by, Conan tugs at the hem of Ran’s skirt, and chirps, “Can I go out to play? We don’t have any plans, right?”

“W-well, sure,” Ran chitters, popping a squat to meet Heiji at an eye-level he finds alarming. “But, how did he know where to find you? Are your parents with you, Mallow? When did you arrive?”

Kudou is quick, but Heiji is quicker to prevent getting saddled with a backstory as embarrassing as the name he’s been given, and channelling as much six year-old excitement as he can, he declares, “I learnt it from the teacher at school! The new school I’m goin’ to. Conan, I’m goin’ to be in your class from now on, ain’t that great? My folks are back at the house sortin’ all the boxes out from the move, but they said I could come and see Conan since it weren’t that far!” He throws a careless finger out in a random direction in the hopes of selling the lie a little better. “Don’t worry, I’m okay on my own! So, can Conan come out and play? Please?”

Ran looks positively endeared by the two boys in a manner Heiji can’t quite wrap his head around, seeing as Conan looks ready to vomit onto her shoes. “I don’t see why not. If you like, I can make some lunch for you in a little while, too. Only if that’s alright with your parents.” It feels like the longer she stares into his eyes, the closer she’s inching towards the realisation, and Heiji is stricken by a white-hot jolt of panic when she asks, “Mallow; is that a foreign name? I only wonder seeing as that’s quite the Osakan accent you’ve got there. Is that where you moved from? If that’s the case, how did you and Conan end up sharing a class?”

“He’s...from the Philippines,” is what Conan suddenly decides, as if that clears anything up. “T-that’s why his name is so strange! And, he used to move around a lot as kid. Isn’t that right? We were only in class together for a little while, but we became super good friends anyway!”

“M-my pops is Osakan, so…” (technically not a lie) “...I get my accent from him. A-anyway, let’s go, Conan! We can come back for lunch later. See you later, Mouri!”

“Huh? How did you know my name…?”

A small disaster disguised as a scuffle; Heiji runs headlong into the wall, trips, then drags Conan behind him hard enough that they clash, and Conan, for good measure, decides to stamp on Heiji’s foot with a force he suspects to be entirely malicious. Under the guise of checking if he’s okay, Conan twists the knife by grabbing a handful of his chubby, tan cheek and yanking it.

“Yeah, Mallow, how did you know that? What are you, some kind of psychic?” he taunts, his glare magnified tenfold by the lenses of his glasses.

“I-I read it! On the window out front!” Heiji yelps in an attempt to pry Conan away, dusting the grit from his battered knees. “If you live here, then you...must be Mouri, right? O-or, did I get that wrong? Is that the old guy yellin’ at the horses on TV?”

“It sure is,” Ran grumbles, throwing a stern eye over her shoulder at her layabout father, who tears up the betting ticket in his hands to toss a furious cloud of confetti at his loss. “But, I’m impressed. You can read the kanji of our name without help? You must be very clever. It’s no wonder you made such fast friends with Conan.”

“Sure, I can!” he blusters, flashing a wide, wicked grin at the prospect of putting a bit life into this character that has given him nothing but misfortune thus far. It’s a dumb kind of optimism. “I’m actually a prodigy when it comes to kanji, don’t you know? I’m already at grade six! That’s all one-thousand and twenty-three gakushu kanji.” He spares a moment to posture, which Conan finds an unthinkable waste of time as he snatches Heiji’s wrist, and begins to tow him in the direction of the stairs. Ran, chuckling to herself at the presence of a precocious child equal in character to Conan, waves them off, calling a rough estimate for lunchtime as they’re tearing out of the building, and out onto the street.

Conan doesn’t stop there, though. Maintaining a vice-like grip on his unexpected visitor, he pulls Heiji along like he might be coaxing an incredibly recalcitrant dog towards the nearby park. Heiji scrabbles against the pull, and the faint tang of wearing rubber seems to be coming from the soles of his shoes, scraping at a rate of knots against the concrete. These are uncertain circumstances, but the heaviness of Conan’s footsteps is fuelling the embers of anxiety that have been simmering in Heiji’s gut from the very moment he got – or, fell, to be more precise – out of bed this morning. In a bid to preserve his admittedly fragile sense of self, he begins to chortle.

“Well, it weren’t all a lie, now, was it? The most convincin’ lies I think are always at least half-truths.”

“If you passing your grade six kanji aptitude test is a half-truth, that’s a hell of a lot more than I was expecting from you.”

“H-huh? What the hell’s that s’posed to mean? Of course, I passed grade six! Y’think I’m some sort of idiot?”

“Anyone who actually passed their grade six would know there are one-thousand and twenty-six kanji in total. Not whatever it was you said.”

The park – a large, dusty clearing shrouded by trees, and home to some of Beika’s most thriving bacterial playground equipment colonies – is thankfully empty, so it draws no keen eye when Conan tugs Heiji to a stop, and digs his claws into his shoulders. His eyes are impossibly hard, and seeing them up this close and personal is unfamiliar, but so is the burgeoning fear that swims in his irises and tugs at the corners of his lips. His anger is still very much there. It’s a rage Heiji can’t quite work out is directed towards him or not, but it’s taking a comfortable backseat to something very tricky to pick out as an emotion. More than anything, he looks dull and lifeless, and the way he searches the foreign face in front of him makes his visitor balk. Heiji bites his lip hard enough to draw blood when Conan – no, Kudou – speaks to him a very soft voice.

“H...Hattori? Heiji, is that...you?”

The moment he feels a small, silky hand running under his chin and over his cheek, he crumbles. Like Kudou, he’s furious. He’s so angry that he can’t even process it correctly. It comes in waves of burning ire when he periodically remembers that none of this is a half-baked nightmare. This tiny body he’s trapped in is real, and no amount of pinching, scratching or biting the fresh, supple skin will make it anything else. He feels the edge of his sleeve being pushed up over the dim, searing sensation that’s been crawling over his forearms since early that morning, and sighs.

He wants to cry, but not because of this devastating turn of events. If he were alone in this mess, forced to find a way out without anybody’s help, he thinks he’d have already toughened up and risen to the challenge; the hot-blooded Detective of the West does not allow himself to be trampled over so easily. No. The fact Kudou has beaten him to it, and that they can stand and bask in this misery together, is the thing that really snaps his nerves. He won’t say he’s stronger alone, but he’s sure as hell sturdier without distraction, and Kudou is, and always has been, one great, big distraction.

“W-what’s going on, Kudou?” he sniffs, drawing in a wobbly breath to calm himself. It helps nobody to fall apart here, and he won’t be made useless to his rival. His partner. “This is it, ain’t it? This is the work of the drug that made you the way you are now. I know you’ve been tryin’ to keep yourself hidden from the bastards who did this to you, but—”

“T-this shouldn’t...be happening,” Kudou squeaks, a little too late to stifle the helpless noise into his palm. His lips are quivering. “Not you. There’s no reason. You’re just a high-school detective, there’s no reason for the likes of that organisation to have targeted you. H-hang on, let’s...think about this. Let’s be rational. Are you alright, first of all? When did this happen?”

Kudou always jumps straight into business no matter how gritty it is, and that’s something Heiji likes about him, so he doesn’t hesitate to explain, “This mornin’. I woke up and this...this is what I found. Ain’t much else I can tell you. Trust me, I turned my whole damn room upside-down for some sort of clue as to why, how an’ who, but I got nothin’. I was totally fine last night. Can’t say I ate anythin’ I shouldn’t have. Didn’t run into anyone unexpected, either.”

“I see,” Kudou murmurs, thumbing his bottom lip. “My greatest worry is that if you’ve become another victim of this drug, then either you’ve stumbled into their crosshairs somehow, or...they’ve managed to link you back to me. But, that would mean they’d know I’m still...alive.”

“I ain’t said anythin’ of the sort!” Heiji suddenly bellows, pulling Kudou close by the front of his jacket in a total lapse of composure. “An’ you can count me on that! If they’ve made a link like that, it’s pure luck on their part! But, I s’pose that don’t help us here much, does it? So, now what? It’s all well and good for you to play dress-up detective as Conan seein’ as your folks are away all the time. How am I s’posed to explain this to everyone back home? I...I don’t want to put any of ‘em in danger, if that’s what it’s come to.”

Kudou just smiles, and it’s a small, sad sort of smile. “You get it now, don’t you?” he says with a humourless laugh. “It’s rough, huh? But, don’t count us out just yet. We’ll find a way to make this work. What did you say before you left this morning? Does everyone back in Osaka know you’re in Tokyo?”

“Sure. Left a note sayin’ I’d been called here by you, but I don’t know how long that excuse can hold out for. I spent the whole journey on the train wonderin’ that very thing. It got so bad,” he pauses to scratch the back of his head, “I really considered fakin’ my own death, but...I couldn’t do that to Kazuha. Jeez, Kudou, how’d you do it? Not only that, you’re livin’ with her!”

“Ran?” Kudou seems surprised to hear the name come out of his own mouth. “Well, if I’ve learnt anything from this whole experience, it’s...that people adjust to the strangest of circumstances.”

For a reason he can’t quite grapple with, the frantic words that tumble out of his mouth wind up asking, “Is that you, then? Have...have you adjusted?” He’s not quite sure how else to elaborate, nor the kind of answer he’s hoping to receive, which is a nice coincidence because Kudou doesn’t seem willing to give him one. He simply checks his watch, and frowns into the middle distance.

“For now, we should be alright. We’re not getting desperate just yet, and with Haibara’s help, we can make your presence at home spotty but real. We just can’t get too reliant on it, so we’ll have to be clever. I’d like to say I’ve become a bit of an expert about that…”

Here, Kudou laughs, and though it’s small and withered, it’s genuine. But somehow, it’s the last thing Heiji feels like hearing, and he hangs his head solemnly, raking a hand through his hair. This body is bizarre. Everything is just so soft. Nothing has been scarred or calloused, matted or worn with age. It’s all so fresh and new. It’s like everything that made his body familiar has been erased in the span of a single night, replaced by a blank slate. He’s certain his motivation hasn’t suffered for this change – rather the opposite, he’s fierier than ever and with a vital goal ahead of him – but it’s the little things that are starting to wear his attention down. One in particular is the lack of hair on his arms that he’s only just noticed is gone, where he rubs at the squishy skin in the hopes of restoring some sort of feeling to the numbness.

“You’ll get used to it,” Kudou tells him, but it’s too empty to sound reassuring. “And, who knows? Perhaps with the both of us investigating, we might make a bit more headway. C’mon, aren’t we supposed to be the detectives of the east and west? Don’t pull that face, it’s,” he coughs into his sleeve, “it’s…not like you.”

The faintest flutter of Heiji’s heart is stubbed out like an ashen cigarette butt, and into Kudou’s round, innocent face he spits, “Y’sure it’s not more like Mallow, instead? Seriously, what the hell kind of name is that? Explain it to me!”

“Oh, that?” Kudou laughs. “Don’t you know? Agatha Christie was the name she took from her first husband. The name she took from her second was Agatha Mallowan!”

“Are you seriously tellin’ me that in the face of this—” he gestures in a wide circle to his regressed visage, “—the very first thing you thought to do was pull a name for me out of the world’s most useless bit of detective trivia?! You really are somethin’ else, Kudou.”

“H-hey, I thought you’d like it! Don’t you think it’s fitting?”

“I’ll fit my foot up your ass! C’mere, don’t run away from me, you little brat!”

“Me?! You’re a brat now, too! Idiot! H-hey, stop chasing me! Heiji, I’m serious!”

It would be nice to say that being a child has its perks, but Heiji has never been a fan of being fawned over or condescended to. A specific frustration is brewed by the patronising praise he’s given by strangers for knowing how to tie his shoes; he doesn’t get this kind of praise when he solves a murder, and he decides the people of Beika have entirely the wrong priorities. However, it’s not just his interactions with people. His sense of taste has changed as well, and things that were once delicious are now bitter and hard to stomach. A civilised lunch with the Mouri family had been spent sullenly staring at Kudou, who shovels green peppers into his mouth without so much as a twitch, as if boasting his ability to stifle his juvenile, underdeveloped senses. The unbroken eye contact is suffocating. His own green peppers are tentatively eaten around, and spread out over his plate to instil the illusion of a mostly-eaten meal, to which Ran tuts as she’s collecting the dishes.

“Are you a picky eater? It won’t do you any good to avoid them,” is her light-hearted lecture, rounding the table in her apron. “If you mix them in with the rest of the food, it’ll taste a lot better.”

“Hey, I can eat whatever I—” Heiji goes to complain loudly before he’s kicked square in the shins. Judging by the flickering of disciplinary threat on Mouri’s face – he sneers so hard, the cigarette almost falls from his lips – he thinks he’s about to start a fight with a grown man, but the sharp ache that shoots up his knee tells him that Kudou’s just belted him one with those stupid, overpowered shoes. He winces into the table as Conan’s sunny voice trills to Ran’s pleasure.

“What he meant to say was that he can eat whatever he’s given when he’s real hungry! But, I think he had some food before he came over, so he ate what he could. Isn’t that right?”

“S-sure,” Heiji mutters, fondling the pain in his leg.

“Uh-oh, did eating too much give you a tummy-ache?” Conan coos sympathetically, hopping out of his chair to tend to an ailment mercilessly delivered by him. Heiji thinks about grabbing him by the bow-tie and bouncing his head off the table, but it’s his own slick mouth that got him into this situation. He’s sensible enough to admit that much, and appreciates his suggestion of, “Let’s go for a walk. That helps digestion. Right, Ran?”

Ran looks briefly worried, backing into the door with armfuls of dirty plates, and replies, “Well, you could, but I thought you were going out with your friends this afternoon. That little girl Ayumi phoned me whilst you two were out to make sure you were still available; did you switch your phone off?”

“U-uh, I...might’ve,” Conan chuckles bashfully, feeling for the lump of his phone in his pocket. “Sorry. I guess I should call her and tell her I can’t come out. I don’t think they’d miss me, seeing as Haibara will—”

“Huh? Don’t just flake on us like that, Conan! You promised you’d come with us!”

A thin whine peels through the room to wriggle under the skin of anyone unfortunate enough to have ears, and Mouri slinks away from the table with his hands over his temples, muttering something under his breath about his office not being a playground. Kudou’s acting can’t be understated when Conan exudes such charisma in his sheepishness, meeting the four frowning pairs of eyes that bore down on him from the open doorway. In the middle, a little girl in a pink headband wibbles, and balls her fists petulantly.

“We were meant to go flower picking today! It’s my birthday, after all! You really aren’t going to miss out, are you? I was so excited for this!”

Conan jumps suddenly with the spike in tension, all eyes on him, angling between the poor girl he’s about to disappoint, and the other three; two boys stand in protectively for her, and the fourth is a girl who is staring through Conan’s head and...straight into Heiji’s eyes. Heiji balks, and stumbles out of his chair, hoping to diffuse the situation before it becomes too difficult for Kudou to style out on his own. It figures Conan has his own social life to take care of – it’s all a part of the disguise – but he can’t risk getting caught up in that. He doesn’t want to jeopardise Kudou’s already-precarious situation.

“S-sorry, Ayumi, it’s not like that,” Conan reasons, hands braced defensively against the other two; Heiji roughly remembers their names being Genta and Mitsuhiko, but he’s forgotten which way round they go. “I wasn’t trying to skip out on your birthday, but I had a surprise guest today that I wasn’t expecting, and, I, erm…”

“This kid?” Genta grumbles, leaning in to size him up. He looks a lot bigger from the height of an average six year-old, and exudes a scarily palpable lack of forethought, but Heiji decides with the mind of a child that he likes the cut of this boy’s jib. He steps out from behind Conan to give them all a friendly wave.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” he chirps. “How d’you do? I’m an old friend of his from before he moved school. I was in the area, so I thought I’d come visit. Don’t mind me, Ku….onan. G-go enjoy this kid’s birthday! You did promise, after all.”

The sweet and forgiving Ayumi doesn’t seem the least bit slighted, and instead brightens and replies, “You’re an old friend of Conan’s? Wow, it’s nice to meet you!” Thus occurs a great introduction to a fake bit of Conan’s past which is being sold quicker than discount fish, and strengthens the temporary identities of them both. In asking for this new boy’s name, Heiji is witness to a bizarre little interaction, the entirety of which he spends watching Haibara, who is inspecting every inch of him, top to toe. Her face is growing greyer and greyer by the second, and she begins to shuffle around her coat pockets.

“His name is...Mallow? That’s unusual.”

“Is it a foreign name?”

“It sure is.”

“Oh, I just thought it was kind of dumb.”

“Y-yeah, that too.”

“Well, I don’t see why we can’t all go flower picking!” It’s a delightful situation, but Ayumi is quick to hang her head, flicking her fingers outwards. “Oh, but there was a group limit, now that I think about it, as the professor had to book it for us. It’s at a big garden where they do loads of research into plants! The professor said they’d have every kind of flower you could imagine! Won’t that be pretty? But, if there are too many of us…” She begins to count on her fingers, and lines of worry appear one by one over her pale forehead. “There’s one, two, three...four…”

“I think I’ll give it a miss today,” Haibara announces, and slings her coat further over her shoulders as she makes a bid for the door; the reach for the handle sitting just above her forehead doesn’t make her look any less distinguished, however distinguished a girl her age is able to look. Her face is youthful and pretty, but her eyes say nothing. “Sorry, Ayumi, but I think I’m starting to feel a little sick. It’s probably those expired eggs I ate yesterday. Mallow can take my place if he likes.”

“Oh no, really? Are you should we shouldn’t take you to the doctor, Ai? W-what about the professor, is he going to get sick as well?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll still be able to take you. I made him something else for dinner last night seeing as he’s on a diet,” Haibara tells her with a weak smile, inching the door closed. But, before she shuts herself out completely, her eyes flit above Ayumi’s shoulder to where the two boys – the two she knows as Kudou and Hattori – are standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and says darkly, “I think...I’d better go home and get some rest. I’ve just remembered I’ve got some homework to catch up on, so...don’t turn your phone off, Conan. I might need your help on some difficult questions.”

Conan says nothing, but flashes an expression that’s as obliging as it is pained. Whatever the other children start to natter about goes unheard when Heiji is transfixed on the little details he’s allowed to see from this close up. He’d never noticed it before, not with several feet of height putting the two at a distance, but the gentle scrunching of his nose, the faint squint consequent of his glasses, the barely perceptible rolling of his jaw where he’s chewing the inside of his cheek…

“Sorry to pile the pressure on,” is all Heiji can think to say, unsettled by the comfort he’s starting to feel in such close proximity, but Kudou is nothing if not professional, so his apprehension is perfectly concealed. He treats this scenario, and Heiji by extension, as he would do any other client. Heiji won’t demand to be treated with such respect – these pleasantries are beyond what he cares for – but it’s strangely nice to experience the work he does from the other side of the fence. Of course, he won’t be outdone, so he swallows down the painful lump in his throat and digs an elbow into Conan’s ribs. “You were right, by the way. With the two of us, we’ll nail this whole case, alright? Ain’t nobody goin’ to see us comin’ – the detectives of the east and west!”

“Huh? What’re you two whispering about? Were you even listening?” Mitsuhiko chides, hands planted on his hips as he leans into the conversation. “Come on, if we don’t make a move now, we’ll be late!” His sensible ways are good-natured, and not without a smile. “How about it, Mallow? Do you want to come with us?”

“Sure! Sounds good to me. You ain’t goin’ to be put out much, are you, Conan?”

Conan laughs half-heartedly, and shoves his buzzing phone deeper into his pocket. “No, I don’t suppose I will be. Let’s get going, shall we?”

The botanical garden is a wonderful experience in all the ways it is, and harrowing in all the ways it isn’t. For little Ayumi’s birthday, it was nearly perfect. An entertaining drive with Professor Agasa at the wheel had taken them out to the edge of Tokyo, where Conan’s trusty band of mystery-solving friends spared no hesitation in making Heiji feel extremely welcome with games and snacks. What awaited them at the end of their drive was an imperious glass palace of a garden, teeming with flowers and foliage of all shapes, sizes and colours...and what awaited them after that was a good, old homicide.

The screams of haunted civilians are shrill to younger ears, and Ayumi’s is the most piercing by far. Heiji is accustomed to finding any manner of crime lurking around the corner, the thrill of it sets his blood alight, but seeing the pale faces of Conan’s friends up close and personal reminds him that this is still very much unpleasant for a child. It’s been so long since that shock had grown numb to his go-getter, detective nerves – steeled over years of sticking a foot in the door of crime scenes, and nosing his way through case files – that he’d almost forgotten that this is not a normal sight. However, as far as homicides go, this scene is certifiably weird. So weird that even Kudou doesn’t seem to know what to say.

“I-I...I just found him like that!” a woman on the scene cries, pressing herself firmly against the wall. She throws a finger out to the lifeless body sprawled over the floorboards, curled in on itself like a dying spider. “Someone has gone to phone the police. T-they should be here any minute.”

Having already spotted their restless legs and curious eyes, Agasa attempts to settle the shuddering room to allow the two junior-turned-juvenile detectives a quick moment to sweep the room. It’s a third-floor office tucked away on the far side of the gardens’ central complex reserved for botanists and their equipment. What had started as a thrilling tour of the research going on behind the scenes had taken a nosedive of astronomical proportions, leaving the Detective Boys and the three other scientists involved with the tour reeling in the presence of a corpse with a mouth fit to bursting with plants. Naturally, it’s the very first detail that Conan are Heiji are drawn to.

“Plants?” Conan murmurs, hovering over the corpse’s face. “Not the first thing I’d think to murder somebody with. Does this mean the victim has ingested these? We’ll have to wait for the autopsy.”

“Ain’t no shortage of poisonous plants around the place, so it ain’t as odd as you’d think,” Heiji offers, running a finger under his chin. “But, to stuff ‘em in the poor fellas mouth? That’s a bit overkill. From here, it’s hard to tell if he’s been choked or poisoned. Can you smell anythin’ funny there?”

“Nope. Just smells like...plant. They’re all different types as well, so I can’t pick anything out. If one of these plants in particular killed him, it’ll be hard to discern until we get some more post-mortem details. I thought the police would’ve turned up by now.”

“They should be,” Agasa agrees, materialising behind them to whisper, “but it seems there’s a pile-up on the outbound road we took to get here, so it seems there’s going to be a delay. That’s why—”

“Hey, what are you kids up to?” A shrieking accusation comes from the other side of the room from a blonde, buxom woman with a drawling accent. Her stance would read as confident if she were able to pry herself away from the wall she’s clinging to. “This poor man has died, can’t you see that? This is no place for you to be playing! Y-you need to leave, right now!”

“T-that’s why—” Agasa repeats louder, feigning authority so poorly Heiji thinks it’s a wonder anyone listens to him at all. “—I will be heading up this investigation! These two are actually my assistants, if you can believe it. So, I hereby request that nobody in this room leave the scene! Seeing as we’re treating this as a murder, it’s imperative we all remain...put.”

He’s undermined with a shocking, petty immediacy from the remaining children huddled in the corner of the room, who all yell, “Five! There are five of us! We’re helping out, too!”

“H-huh?! A murder?! You can’t be serious! On what grounds?”

“Take a look at ‘im!” Heiji barks, stamping a foot so hard it brews dust. “You ever seen a man die from accidentally shovin’ leaves into his mouth? This whole incident is suspicious! Y’all got to wait right here until the police show up! In the meantime, we’ll just—”

“Who does this little brat think he is?” another woman with an even stronger accent huffs, folding herself into the corner to distance herself from the corpse. “You say they’re your assistants, but who’s going to trust that with this kind of behaviour? This is deranged. Unprofessional.”

It feels good to be able to pout so barefacedly again, and with puffed, reddened cheeks, Heiji looks primed to explode until a small hand claps him hard on the shoulder. Conan pulls him close, and the feeling of the boy’s cool face against the crook of his clammy neck makes him quiver. He swallows thickly.

“Cool it. You can’t go drawing attention to yourself like this. If not because it’ll make our work harder, then to prevent getting found out by anyone undercover. Don’t forget we’re meant to blend in. You and I are just normal kids right now, got it? So...just calm down a little.”

He wants to bluster and rage, and demand Kudou explain just how he gets through his investigations being impeded at every turn by the clueless public, but all that feebly comes out is, “I-I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

“I know,” Kudou smiles, imbued with a touch of mischief. “You’ll get used to it. Think of it as a challenge. You want to be the best, right? Let’s see who can get to the answer first, you or me.”

He always seems to know just what to say. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Of course, Kudou would know exactly how he feels, but it’s not often he’s in a position to take the dominant role here, so it strikes Heiji as rather attentive of him to offer his sympathies. He can’t get discouraged. If he wants to stand toe-to-toe with the likes of Kudou, then there’s no space to complain. He’s got to prove he can do just as well under these strained and uncanny circumstances. With a fresh, cool head, he goes to turn the brim of his cap to really get into the mindset of things, but…

“Ah. I didn’t...bring it with me.”

“Your hat? I guess it would be too big right now.” Kudou begins to glance around in the hopes of spying a suitable replacement, but dejectedly mutters, “It’s not something we have any right to steal from a crime scene, and none of us wear hats. The best I could do you is Ayumi’s hairband, or…” Then, with a sly sort of smile, he extends an arm to place the flat of his hand directly onto Heiji’s head, and with a twist of his wrist, that familiar, warm feeling of flowing blood begins to seep from his scalp. It’s a small gesture, but full to the brim of something unidentifiable. The same kind of unidentifiable that Heiji can recognise from their conversation in the park. A certain something that had lingered like a weight in his chest; how can such a small body feel so heavy?

“S’that meant to help?”

“Desperate times,” he grins.

It’s good enough for him. He’s switched on now, and he shakes himself of the long-term worry to align his focus with the immediate problem, which is still slumped on the floor; a literal man made plant pot. The police will likely make their appearance shortly, so time spent with the body is precious. Whilst Agasa is keeping the potential suspects busy, a hushed discussion between the two boy detectives is underway.

“He’s a hefty guy, so I find it hard to imagine someone bein’ able to choke him out with a handful of grass. Do we think it’s a safe bet they were shoved in after the fact?”

“It’s got to be, which only leads me to suspect it’s to hide something. That, or it’s a distraction from something else. I can’t see any signs of struggle. No marks, no wounds, no nothing. Whatever killed this man must be internal.”

“Remote, like. I can see that, especially since the guy has his phone in his hand.”

In the man’s right hand is a smartphone, poised within his fingers like he’d dropped dead using it. The overcast light beaming through the window sends a sheen over the screen that highlights the oil of his fingerprints, arranged in a variety of swipes and clusters. There’s nothing to go on without unlocking the phone, and Conan is able to carefully pry it from the corpse’s post-mortem grip with steady nerves and a clean handkerchief.

“If the cops catch us doin’ this—”

“I’ll put it back when I’m done. I just want to turn it on and see what he might’ve been looking at.”

The ambience of an investigation is a thrill unlike any other, so it takes Heiji by some surprise when the smouldering atmosphere is interrupted by Ayumi’s curious voice coming from over Conan’s shoulder. It seems whilst Genta and Mitsuhiko are investigating the potted plant beds taking up a good two thirds of the room, Ayumi has drifted over to join in the fun. She’s remarkably sturdy in the presence of a corpse for a girl who’s just had her birthday ruined by a murder.

“Oh, what a messy man,” she frowns. “I’d get told off if I did that.”

Conan jumps a touch at the feeling of Ayumi’s breath on his ear, and turns his head a fraction of an inch to grit, “A-ah, is that so? If you did...what, exactly?”

“That,” she exclaims, pointing not at the phone, but at the other hand, empty and resting beside the man’s head. “Look, he’s got crumbs all over his fingers. I’m not allowed to use my phone or the computer whilst I’m eating. My parents say I’ll make a mess, and all the crumbs will get everywhere.”

The left hand of the corpse does indeed have crumbs stuck to it, but only across the thumb, forefinger and middle finger. From this positioning, Conan is lead to deduce, “It does look like he’s been eating. Eating with his left, and using his phone with his right, but...that doesn’t feel quite right.”

“I’ll say. If he’d been using his phone, there would be crumbs on the phone, too,” Heiji frowns, folding over to peer into the hollow formed by the pale, clasped fingers. “S’hard to type on a smartphone with just the one hand. That would mean he’d eaten something only after using his phone for the last time.”

“You mean the plants?” Ayumi offers, but a touch unhelpfully.

“If plants had crumbs, sure.” Conan imitates Heiji, but instead inspects the corpse’s left hand, and brings the tip of his nose dangerously close to its fingers. “No, it’s safe to say the plants were put there after, and these crumbs are...a snack of some kind? It smells almost like barbecue…”

“It’s got to be these!” Genta erupts with a triumphant smile, pointing at the edge of the computer desk next to the plant beds, where the twinkle of a snack wrapper catches the light. “I’d recognise that smell anywhere! They’re the Kamen Yaiba limited edition barbecue-flavoured snacks! He must’ve been eating them at his desk!”

“They were so popular, they decided to extend the time they’d be in shops,” Mitsuhiko adds. “They’re pretty tasty, so it’s no surprise even an adult would like them. And, look, this man must’ve been super messy because he spilled them all down the hall.”

The office belonging to the victim sits behind the single door at the end of a short, cramped hallway with two doors on either side, leading to four similarly sized rooms. From a distance, it’s hard to make out small details against the light, pine-coloured floorboards, but upon closer look, there are crumbled, starchy fragments forming a thin line towards the front door. Some of them have been squashed underfoot, which is no surprise given there’s nine people in this miniscule complex, but the mysterious nature of the mess has thankfully been preserved.

“That is odd,” Heiji grins. “Bit too much mess for someone who’s just dropped a couple of bites. It’s like he’s eaten the lot, and then poured all the tiny, leftover crumbs straight out of the packet onto the floor. And, that line looks way too straight.”

“The question is, what reason would anyone have to purposely spill crumbs onto their own floor? Whilst this place isn’t exactly sterile, I’d wager any researcher worth their salt would keep their workspace tidy.”

It’s a reasonable deduction, but stifled by the poor timing of the police making their appearance on the scene. Conan is able to return the crime scene to its original state the moment Agasa gives him the cover to do so, but they wind up being yelled at anyway for being so close to the body.

The suspects have been suitably narrowed down to an easily digestible three people, all of which are fellow botanists working in the neighbouring rooms; the fourth person not present on the scene is confirmed to have left the country long before the crime had taken place. The remaining researchers are made up of: Poppy Dubeau (an American specialist in invasive species), Amaranta Ruiz (a Spanish specialist in poisonous plants) and Liliya Samsonova (a Russian specialist in cross-breeding). Forensic analysis had gone on to reveal the cause of death to be something akin to anaphylaxis. Having been pushed to the sidelines, Heiji and the rest of the Detective Boys are made to watch the wildly underwhelming display of the police doing their jobs. Thankfully, their competence has cemented the investigation as one of homicide. Heiji isn’t sure what he’d have done if they hadn’t come to that conclusion on their own.

“Anaphylaxis, huh?” he mutters. “And, they still haven’t figured out what caused it? It couldn’t have just been the snacks.”

“No, the waste basket next to his desk was full of wrappers, so it seems as if he’s been eating them for a while already. It’s unclear, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume the plants stuffed into the victim’s mouth is a result of trying to conceal the weapon...though, it’s a bit weird to call something that causes an allergic reaction a weapon, especially if it’s a plant.”

“It’s like killin’ someone with hay-fever. Alright, so we’ve gotten that far, and we’re not out of the game yet. It sounds like they’re checkin’ out the phone now, and the suspects are confined to their rooms, so...about these crumbs.”

The children are lined against the walls like dominos, having been scolded for their interference, and ordered to keep their hands to themselves until the investigation is over and they’re free to leave. A few crumbs had been swiped for analysis, but what came back had already been deducted; crumbs of the snacks he’d been eating prior to his death. Heiji stares at the crumbs framing the tips of his shoes, still matted and dusty from their ten years in storage, and the sight of them is a painful nostalgia. He splays his hands against the wall behind him to steady himself; he’d only just been looking for a way to muscle in on the investigation, and already he’s distracted by this new reality. Whatever Kudou is blathering on about now falls on deaf ears, until Heiji feels something brush against his fingers.

“Heiji,” Kudou whispers. “Are you okay?”

“I mean...sure,” Heiji laughs hollowly. “About as good as I can be. But, I ain’t dead yet, so I got one less problem than that poor guy over there. So, what was it you were sayin’?”

Kudou doesn’t reply immediately. There’s a lull where a breath rolls over his vocal chords, non-committal and soft, and the curl of his rightmost pinkie finger catches a dent in Heiji’s knuckle. Heiji doesn’t realise he’s been holding his breath until his lungs start to burn, and he slumps against the wall with a lacklustre frown.

“What I said was that the victim had crumbs on his fingers, but...that doesn’t necessarily mean he was eating the moment he died. There was time somewhere for him to make this trail, it’s too neat a trail for that not to be the case. But, I can’t work out what it means. If it led to a particular door…”

The door they’re closest to is the currently unoccupied room, with Genta, Mitsuhiko and Ayumi standing between the two opposite doors. The trail makes a perfectly straight line that separates the two groups and doesn’t veer off enough to warrant suspicion, but no amount of bored staring on their part has revealed anything else about it. It’s a line cut straighter than most drug dealers, he just doesn’t know what it means.

“It could be that the killer swept up any traces of it pointin’ to their room, but...if you were goin’ to do that, you might as well just sweep up the whole thing, so that seems unlikely. Are snacks relevant to any of this? This is a botanist’s lab, right? What did the victim do for a living?”

“The victim was a university student from China who specialised in the study of natural remedies. You know, herbal medicines, medicinal application, that sort of thing. Apparently the work on his desk was a project he was working on with another researcher in this block, but there was nothing suspicious about it. No threatening emails, no hidden files, no bad blood of any kind. It all seems above board.”

“Eh? You’ve been standin’ here next to me this whole time, how’d you pick all that up?”

Kudou blinks in the face of Heiji’s incredulity, and breaks out into a snigger. “Oh, right,” he laughs. “Since you’re not part of the Detective Boys, you don’t have any of Professor Agasa’s gear to work with. I’ve been using my badge to listen in on the conversation he’s been having with Inspector Megure.” He clutches his stomach, doubling onto his side as Heiji wonders to himself how hard he can get away with kicking him without anybody noticing, but a gleaming delicacy fills his eyes as he adds, “But, if you’re here to stay, then you can consider yourself one of us. It’d be a dumb move not to invite you. We’ll get you a badge when we get back.”

He’s not sure how to feel about that. By all accounts he should be thrilled to be joining forces with one of the most quick-witted detectives in the country in this perilous time, but the thought of it makes him feel quite sick. There’s a sense of permanence about the whole thing that’s frightening, and the shadow thrown over the hallway – a detective passing by, towering overhead – ignites a moment of self-preservation where Conan’s hand is snatched. The flesh is soft and fresh, with stubby fingers and tiny nails, and none of the callouses that come with playing the violin. This innocence so endearing to the rest of the world elicits an inexplicable rage in Heiji that drives an urge to break his partner’s knuckles. He doesn’t get too far with the idea before his own hand is locked in an iron grip; a shockingly dense strength attributed to children that he’d forgotten he now shares with Kudou.

After all, their hands are the same size now.

“I’d like that,” Heiji cackles tersely before Kudou can say anything.

The suspension in the conversation is carried by the appearance of an officer who has to fold himself so far down to meet their level that it’s practically bragging, and he holds out a small, rectangular box to Mitsuhiko. “Here,” he says. “You kids can play with this until we’re ready to question you. It won’t be long now. I know you probably didn’t see very much, but it’s all part of the job. Oh, and that Agasa guy had a note to give to Conan. He’ll be right along with you when he’s done.” The box given to Mitsuko is a standard deck of playing cards wrapped in a slip of paper, which he unfurls and hands to Conan across the hallway. The police officer promptly disappears.

“What does it say?” Heiji sidles over, and in doing so realises he’s still holding Kudou’s hand.

“It says the police found this open on the victim’s phone. It might be a dying message, but…” He squints at the paper. Tilting it from side to side offers no further elaboration, and he holds it up for Heiji to see. If it’s a cipher, it’s the shortest one yet, as it has only two symbols written in vertical format: an M with a long dash above it, and an X beneath. He’s kind enough to let the Detective Boys in on the secret, but they’re equally clueless.

“It kind of looks like those vertical signs you get outside of shops,” Ayumi hums thoughtfully. “Are you meant to read it that way, too?”

“The symbol at the top is meant to represent the number one, right? That’s got to be it,” Genta decides. “But, then the other symbols aren’t really numbers, so...maybe it’s a shopping list?”

“Ah, it could be a sum!” Mitsuhiko offers brightly. “There are some questions that instead of just having numbers, have letters as well! It could be that!”

“Algebra,” Conan frowns. “That’s not a bad idea, but these letters can be numbers. After all, an X can mean the number ten in Roman numerals. That would make the M one thousand, but then the symbol for one would stand out as being uniquely Japanese. Could that mean anything…?”

“None of our suspects are Japanese, so that could be a problem,” Heiji mutters, grabbing the note to get a closer look, but the only details to discern from pressing his nose to the paper is that the professor’s pen is running out. “They ain’t just numbers either. The letters M and X are also letters of the alphabet. The dash at the top could be a minus, but it’s not in a place to do anything if that’s the case. Hah, this is getting interestin’…”

“It...could be a diacritic.”

The suggestion is met with a blank look. Conan smiles a touch sheepishly.

“I-it’s an accent that some letters have. It’s a rare one, but a dash like this is sometimes used in certain languages. Latvian is the first one that comes to mind, but...it doesn’t sound like any of our suspects are from there—”

“Okay, I’ve had enough!” Heiji groans. “We’re low on clues, an’ we don’t even know what our suspects are like! We ain’t got a motive! So, I’m puttin’ a pin in this clue, and checkin’ out these rooms.” He makes a bid for the door closest to him, but he’s still holding Kudou’s hand, and inadvertently pulls him along in the process; Kudou is forced to manoeuvre with the grace of a gymnast to avoid dragging his heels through the unsolved mystery of the trail of crumbs, which draws an odd sort of laugh from his cohorts lined up against the opposite wall.

“Why’re you two holdin’ hands?” Genta throws up a brow, and an unreasonably cocky laugh escapes him. “You’re scared ‘cos this is your first mystery, huh? You’ve got to be tougher than that if you want to join the Detective Boys!”

“Don’t worry, Mallow, it’s okay if you’re scared,” Ayumi says sweetly. “Even Conan gets scared sometimes. We all do!”

It’s not at all like that, and he wishes his existence here didn’t have to hinge on so many misunderstandings. He has the mind to yank his hand out of Kudou’s grip to prove a point – because he has everything to prove to a bunch of children – but he can’t quite will himself to. It’s not that he’s scared. A body is the least scary thing in the world. It’s the people around it are the ones he has to watch out for. Right now, there are three of them, and he’s had no chance to talk to anybody. That has to change, and...if Kudou has to come along for the ride, so be it. Kudou also seems desperate to escape and uncover some clues, and as he stows the paper into the pocket he keeps his phone in, he shoots a harsh whisper over Heiji’s shoulder.

“Right. Haibara will want some answers. We’ll have to get on that after we solve this case.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. One thing at a time—”

“Oh! What’re you doing in here? I know it must be boring for you, but just wait a little longer! I’m sure the detectives will be done in no time.”

A twinkly sort of voice comes from beyond the open door, belonging to a lithe, tanned woman braced against her desk. She’s got a very short length of dark hair, round, friendly eyes, and brightly painted nails. Her desk against the window is full of papers and pens, and the adjacent wall is teeming with leafy, green plants, blotting out every inch of the wallpaper. It’s her hope that the detectives will be done quickly, and they plan to be, with the pair of them silently deciding that storming the room for clues as quickly as possible to be the best way to go about a resolution. Heiji is forced to take something of a backseat as he watches Conan work his childlike charm to root out some details. It’s no more effort than playing pretend, but it is a uniquely...different way of approaching a case. He’s got to give Kudou even more credit.

“Wow, what pretty nails!” Conan chirps, abandoning all sense of personal space to investigate the woman up close. It’s lucky for him that she seems perfectly receptive to strangers. “Did you do these yourself?”

“Oh! Why, thank you, I did!” She then presses a finger to her lips, and whispers, “But, I really shouldn’t be. It’s not good to have painted nails when you’re doing my kind of work. It can interfere with the subjects, but I’m on a bit of a break right now, so don’t tell anybody!”

“What is it you do? You’re...Amaranta, right?”

“That’s me! I work with poisonous plants, so it’s very important that I keep my hands clean and free of things that could transfer any nastiness.”

Heiji squints suspiciously up at Amaranta, where her details are hard to make out when she’s backlit by the window behind her desk. “Poisonous plants?” He makes a point of scanning the room, where there are many potted plants arranged not only across the wall, but the floor as well. “That could be dangerous...especially if you ate them.”

“Oh, no, no, I hope you’re not suggesting I killed him!” Amaranta squeaks, pressing a hand to her chest. She emits a long, weak sigh. “I take my work seriously. I’d never let my plants get mixed up in anything that could cause something so terrible. I don’t even eat in the same room as them! In fact, there isn’t a single poisonous plant in this room! See?” She’s an energetic sort, and proactive to prove her innocence. Normally, that might spark an extra layer of suspicion on Heiji’s part, but she gestures to her cluttered desktop, and snatches up a paper bag to wave in his face. “See? I know it’s a bad habit, but I like to eat when I’m doing my paperwork. All of my dangerous plants are kept in a lab downstairs. I don’t ever bring them up here.”

“Huh?” Conan blinks. “What’s that you’re eating?”

“Pipas,” she replies. “They’re flavoured sunflower seeds. This brand is impossible to buy in Japan though, so I have to import them from home. It’s something quite a lot of us who work overseas do.”

“So, those crumbs…” he mutters, meeting Heiji’s similarly-enlightened eyes. “That could be a useful clue. Say, you don’t happen to know what the plants they found in the victim’s mouth were, do you?”

“Of course. They asked me to identify them all,” she says with some pride. “Let’s see, there was allium ursinum, lavandula dentata, taraxacum, and—”

“W-were there any that were particularly dangerous…?”

“There were. Convallaria majaris – what you might know as lily-of-the-valley – is often mistaken for allium ursinum, but can be poisonous when ingested. But, from the sounds of it, it doesn’t seem like he was poisoned. I thought maybe if it was anaphylaxis, he could’ve ingested something like toxicodendron radicans – or poison ivy – but I found nothing like that on the body. I was really expecting to. It’s quite the mystery.”

It’s not an insubstantial amount of detail, so there are no complaints. Heiji backs out of the room with a narrowed stare in the hopes of instilling some dread in the potential killer, but his chubby, tanned face impedes his attempts to regain any authority; authority he has no business having right now. Kudou, next to him, is fiddling with his phone, and pockets it suddenly when he notices Heiji staring. He’s no doubt talking to Haibara, but he relays no further detail from her end, and instead stoops to look apologetic. In lieu of directing frustration his way, Heiji simply snaps up his hand again, circling around a thought that placates the part of him that needs to be on top. He promptly storms across the hallway and straight into the room opposite.

“H-hey, you can’t come in here!” a thickly accented voice accosts them from the desk pushed against the leftmost wall. “Have the police said anything yet? Ugh, this is a nightmare! I’m supposed to be on a diet, but this whole thing has me stress-eating like hell!” The room’s occupant snatches up something flaky from a bag on her desk, and under the wide-eyed gaze of the two boy’s in the doorway, crams the whole thing into her mouth. “Seriously, this is ridiculous. First, I lose out to those two idiots, and now I’m cooped up in here.”

Spurred by a curiosity that separates itself from nosiness – it’s got a cold edge to it the way mindless queries don’t – Heiji launches himself at the desk to get a good look at what’s atop it, but he misjudges his size with the swivelling office chair he’d hoped to use as a foothold, and winds up headbutting the edge of it, and collapsing into a heap on the floor. The dismayed owner is too busy yelling at him to help him up, which Kudou obligingly does instead. In the hopes of concealing his boisterous partner’s lapse of judgement, he meets her ire with a sunny smile.

“S-sorry, miss. Are you okay, Mallow? That’s going to turn into a nasty bump, I think. You’re Poppy, aren’t you? Could you use any of your plants to help my friend feel better?”

Poppy – heavy-set with rosy skin – turns her nose up, and her face scrunches with the quality of a plastic bag. “Me? Absolutely not. Sad to say it, but the only guy who could’ve helped you out here is already dead. What the hell were you even trying to do, anyway? What kind of kid just barges into someone’s room like this? You realise a man has died, right?”

“I was...hungry,” Heiji grumbles, for he has no answer more dignified than that. He rubs his aching forehead, and feels a wobble of something that threatens to floor him if he doesn’t steel himself. He goes on to mutter dejectedly, “What you’re eatin’ looks tasty. What is it? I ain’t ever seen it before.”

Poppy snatches the bag up out of his reach, though he’s too dazed to have made an attempt to wrest it from her. “It’s just this pastry snack I like! They’re miniature apple pies, and I’m not sharing it with you because it’s expensive to import! Sorry kid, but there’s a vending machine downstairs if you’re that hungry.”

“I think this lady is mean,” Conan suddenly pouts, and thrusts an accusatory finger at her. He looks ready to start wailing. “First, she calls us idiots, and now she’s yelling at us! It was just an accident! You should say sorry!”

“Huh? I never called you—” She slaps a hand over her face, and grunts, “Ugh. Right. I wasn’t talking about you two, I was talking about my colleagues. Jeez, don’t get so worked up.”

“Why, what did they do? If they work here, they can’t be that dumb.”

“You’d be surprised, kid,” she spits, sauntering over to the window to perch herself on the ledge. “One of them is the man who died, and the other is my awful neighbour, Liliya. They spent a lot of time working together, and what do you know? It pushed me out of a spot at a seminar I was hoping for. They did this whole project that involved...I don’t know, something about cross-breeding certain herbs? Well, the world wouldn’t have the space to do that kind of research if it weren’t for my work! So, there!”

That’s a solid motive, Heiji would decide if he wasn’t still keeled over on the floor, palming the space ahead of him to find that his own sense of perception is utterly wrong. His arms shouldn’t be this short. His legs shouldn’t be this short. He should’ve made that jump with inches to spare. If he’d just been tall enough to reach the desk in the first place, none of this idiocy would be happening. Now, he has to get rescued by Kudou, experienced as he is in this unfamiliar world, and he’s burdened by a resentment for the childhood memories that have offered him no advantage in navigating this body. He can’t be struggling this much. If he can’t level things out here between him and Kudou, what use is he going to be? He won’t lose.

“Don’t worry about it, Heiji. Let’s just—”

“I ain’t worryin’ about it!”

Kudou watches him with a shaky apprehension. Rather than helping him off the floor, he removes himself to allow for space, and turns back to the irate researcher who is still scarfing down snacks. “W-well, thanks, miss,” he says plainly. “Sorry for the trouble.”

“It’s not you that needs to apologise, it’s those detectives. They’ve already questioned me, but I still have to stay here? Seriously, how am I supposed to get any work done with all this…”

The moaning and griping of a researcher with skewed priorities is hastily shut behind the door, leaving them with another bit of information, and two important facets to the crime; one person has the motive whilst the other has the means. That just leaves the last suspect, apprehended in her study by the two boys having snuck quietly past Genta, Mitsuhiko and Ayumi, who have started playing cards together.

The pale, dark-haired Liliya lacks Amaranta’s energy and Poppy’s indignance, and sits quietly in the corner when Conan enters the room. He holds the door open for Heiji, and says, “Excuse me, but my friend fell over and hit his head. The lady next door said you used to work with the victim; would you have anything around to help? He was studying natural remedies, right?” He asks earnestly enough that a refusal would seem callous, but Heiji rubs his head pitifully to give the request a bit of depth. He hates the idea of being forced into the background, but needs must.

“Hm?” She raises a brow, and replies curtly, “Is that the noise I heard through the wall? Sorry, but I can’t help you. My colleague was the one who knew those kinds of details. I study cross-breeding, not medicine. Try Amaranta instead.”

“Cross-breeding? What’s that?”

“It’s…” She pauses for a second, and Heiji realises she’s trying to condense this for the understanding of a six year-old that does not exist. Through an exhausted grimace, she explains, “It’s when you merge two plants together. Like mixing colours. You’ve done that in school, right? You mix blue and yellow to get green, and red and yellow to get orange… It’s like that, but instead of just mixing colours, it mixes certain physical traits, flavours and various other factors. Are...you meant to be in here? I thought the police told you to stay still.”

Barrelling through her more than reasonable suspicion, Conan beams and asks, “So, you worked with that man, then? How did you do that? Did he tell you what plants to mix together? The lady next door said you were invited to a seminar.”

“Did she, now?” Liliya grunts, and swivels to face her desk. She picks something up and puts it in her mouth, and through the crumbs mutters, “Of course, she would. How jealous of her. Breeding out poisons and irritants in plants is far, far more impressive than whatever she’s up to.”

Though she makes no point to look at them, the bountiful bushels of leaves and vines blooming from the corner of the room are pushed into focus. Heiji unlatches from Conan – when had he started holding his hand again? – to investigate further, pressing his nose against the flat of the desk to stare through the verdant tangles. There are so many, they seem to be fighting each other for space, taking up every inch they can cram their leaves into. In way it reminds him of his relationship with Kudou, battling each other to take centre stage as the nation’s top junior detective, but though these plants are growing furiously, they seem remarkably comfortable intertwined.

“Wow, you’re going to take the poison out of plants? That’s amazing! But, wouldn’t that put Amaranta out of a job?” Conan giggles, inching closer to her desk in the hopes of casting a quick eye over it. “You must know all about poisonous plants too, right?”

“I suppose.”

“So, what did you do that was so special you got a place in the seminar?”

“Nettles.”

“N...nettles?”

“Yes.”

The small sigh that escapes Conan does not go unnoticed by Heiji. Feigning stupidity isn’t hard, but it is exhausting. “But, don’t nettles sting you? Were you trying to make them stingless? That could be pretty cool, you know!”

“Stingless nettles already exist. Dead-nettles, and such. We use those nettles as a base for merging with other plants.”

“Oh!” Heiji coos brightly, reaching out to grab a handful of sage-coloured leaves hanging overhead, “So, you can touch these? Can you eat them, too?”

“W-wait, don’t just—” Liliya jumps out of her seat, and as a result, spills some grey-coloured crumbs onto the floor that are squished beneath the soles of her heels. Her eruption seems disproportionate when Heiji looks up at her so calmly. She frowns at him, and sighs, “Don’t touch my work, please. The nettles may not sting you, but there might be thorns in there somewhere.”

“I didn’t feel any,” Heiji replies blithely.

Equally blithely, Conan rakes a finger over the floor and asks, “What’s that you’re eating? You made a big mess all of a sudden.”

“It’s...a snack I like from my home country; we call it halva. I was sent some from home from my family,” she says waspishly. “I should clean this up. Could you two please leave? I know you’re bored, but this is a serious investigation. If you’re still injured, go and bother Amaranta instead. Go on, get out.” She sweeps them out the door and out into the hallway, shutting the door so narrowly behind them that it almost catches the hem of Conan’s shorts. Outside, the Detective Boys are still playing cards.

“Oh, Conan,” Ayumi chirrups, holding out the deck to him. She has five cards nestled in her other hand, which she’s holding very protectively to her chest to prevent any cheating. “Do you want to play, too? The professor said they’re almost done. Apparently, they say it might be an accidental death, but that somebody tampered with the body.”

“Tampered with the body? No, that can’t be it,” Conan insists, his hard gaze falling to the floor in thought. “Why would anybody do that? It would be a needless crime if the person were totally uninvolved with the victim’s death. The plants in the mouth have to be hiding something. Ugh, I’m starting to get stuck. Heiji, I...Heiji?”

“Who’s Heiji? Are you talking about Mallow? He went back into the room across the hall. Hey, are you sure you don’t want to play with us? We’re almost done with this round!”

Conan neatly steps over the crumb trail despite the fact it’s long since been ruined, and as he does so, absent-mindedly runs the finger he’d scraped across the floor into his mouth. The door to Amaranta’s study is ajar, and peering through, he finds Heiji and the young botanist having a conversation. He slips neatly through the gap, and shuts the door behind him, blotting out the background drone of forensic investigators doing their jobs.

Heiji is holding his hand out to her, and bending in to meet him, she says, “Something to help you? Did you hurt yourself? I heard this crazy, loud thud coming from across the hallway. Don’t tell me that was you…?”

“Heiji,” Conan coughs, sidling up behind him. “I might have a clue.”

“Me too,” comes Heiji’s uncharacteristically stony reply, which is crammed into the conversation he continues to have with Amaranta, leading him to explain to her, “Nah, that wasn’t anythin’ big. Actually, I was wonderin’ what you had for plant stings. There are a lot of stinging plants around, aren’t there?”

“Stinging plants?” Her eyes widen, and she crows, “No, no, there shouldn’t be. I mean, I personally don’t keep poisonous or stinging plants in my office, and I don’t think the others do either. They have no reason to, plus it’s always kind of annoying when you brush past one when you’re trying to work.”

“But, didn’t you find anything like that in that dead man’s mouth? If it weren’t anythin’ poisonous, then it must’ve stung him to death, right?”

“Stung him…? N-no, no, you must’ve misheard. I did find nettles, but they were dead-nettles. They were the ones I think he and Liliya had been working with for their seminar. They were lamium purpureum. The red dead-nettle. I handled them myself, so I knew for sure they didn’t sting. And, in any case, eating stinging nettles won’t kill a person. It’ll be incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s not fatal.” She offers a sympathetic smile. “It was a good idea, though.”

“I s’pose so.” Heiji feigns dismay. “I s’pose if he got stung, he’d be the right person to fix it, huh? What is it they use to treat stinging nettles? You’re s’posed to rub a leaf on it, right?”

“A dock leaf,” Conan offers helpfully. “So they say, but I always thought that was an old wives’ tale. Is it really true?”

“If you crush it up, yes, the dock leaf can help cool the stinging a little. Malva verticillata has also been said to help as well. I can’t speak for the efficacy of them myself, but—”

“The victim knew, right?”

She laughs half-heartedly. “It was a Chinese remedy. Malva verticillata is a species found in that region. You can find it growing in this country sometimes, too. Though, most people tend to think of malva sylvestris when they think of mallow.”

“M...mallow?”

“Yes. Malva is mallow.”

Conan’s further interrogation disguised as whimsical, childish curiosity ebbs out of earshot as Heiji slinks for the door. There’s a lot he could say for the situation, the way it twists and turns with hope and disappointment, and with so many potential leads slipping through hands that are too young to hold them. It’s all so baffling, but he can’t help feel that he’s on the verge of something. Not just in his head, but churning in his stomach, and searing up his right arm. He’s putting effort into playing it cool, fulfilling the role of innocent child number five, but even if he can fool the others, he can’t fool Kudou. That fact is made painfully clear beyond the door, where a small hand grabs the hood of his jacket from behind.

“What happened? You opened the door with your left hand. What’s wrong with the right one?”

“Observant as ever,” Heiji huffs. “It was that plant. The one I grabbed.”

“You said it didn’t hurt…?”

“I lied, and it doesn’t just hurt. It fucking kills. Kudou, I...I have never felt a plant that can sting like this. If this is something that woman made, I don’t know what to think, but I can’t help but feel like this is just because I’m a kid again. I want to say it never hurt this bad. I just can’t remember.”

Kudou looks grim. “Is it really that painful? We’ll get the professor to look at it.”

“If this is the murder weapon somehow—”

“If it is, we still don’t have enough evidence. There’s no concrete proof that that’s exactly what killed him either, but I think we’re on the right lines. For a project cross-breeding stingless nettles, having the stinging kind in your office doesn’t make it look good, but our clues are spread across three people. The American has the motive, the Russian has the weapon, and the Spaniard has the knowledge. On top of that, we’ve not even started to work out that dying message.”

“K-Kudou. I...I’m sorry.”

Kudou flashes with surprise, and the wide-rimmed glasses perched on his face tumble down his nose. “Huh? What’re you talking about? If it’s about when you chased me around the park earlier, forget about it. I get it. This whole experience is surreal. You...kind of do what you have to.”

“No, not about that. You totally deserved that,” Heiji confesses soberly, which draws a flat look from the boy he’s asking forgiveness from. “I mean this. Ugh, I hate feeling so useless. If I were back to my old self, we’d have knocked this out of the park in time for lunch. I ain’t goin’ to harp on about how hard it is for you like this, but...I really...don’t feel like myself. It ain’t right. It’s a damn curse. Those bastards that did this to me will get what’s comin’ to ‘em! I just…”

“It...does feel impossible sometimes.”

The huddle of children playing cards in the hallway chitter to one another with little regard for the sombre moments occurring at both ends of the complex; one of death of body, and the other of death of self. Mitsuhiko slaps a card down victoriously onto the pile, and grins when Genta leans over to glare at the move he’s made. When the cards in Genta’s hand fall into view, Mitsuhiko is quick to lecture him.

“Genta, put your cards upright! Otherwise, everyone will see what your hand is!”

“Huh? There’s no way you can see my cards from here! They’d be upside-down.”

“Silly Genta, that’s not true! They have the same pattern on them no matter which way up you hold them. They’re reversible!”

If only his situation were reversible. If he could just go to bed and wake up as himself again, it would be a blessing he’d be willing to credit the gods for...or Kudou, depending on how things work out. He’s always thought a great amount of Kudou, and has always held the belief that he will one day find the truth he’s looking for. There’s no way he can’t. He’s a man who fights for justice, who pursues the truth no matter how grisly the journey or the outcome might be, so if he failed here – if he failed to wrest his body back from the villains who poisoned him – then...what would that mean? He’s never doubted Kudou on his own, so how could that change just because he’s joined his ranks? To grow fearful now would be pathetic, but he’s been burdened all day by this lingering dread that grows in bitterness when the proximity between them widens. When he’s as close as he is now, Heiji feels a warm kind of security that dulls the pain, and gives him room to breathe. Room to think. And, he thinks…

“I think...I know who did it. The dying message.”

The intensity on Kudou’s face – a passionate blend of nerves and breathless excitement – begins to blossom. The overhead lights cast a gleam over the lens of his glasses that magnify the colour of his eyes when he smirks, and says, “Go on, then. I believe in you.”

“The first symbol of the dying message is an M with a dash over the top, right? In languages, that could be seen as an accent that changes the pronunciation...but in a card game, a dash is used to symbolise which way up the number goes. So, if we applied that logic, we’d flip the M upside-down.”

“To make a W?”

“No. To reverse its meaning. That would mean nothing for a deck used in a card game, but...for a deck of tarot cards, it would render the card inverted. It would then have the opposite meaning. So, if we use that broad idea, it might mean that the M vanishes. After all, on a phone, you can’t type an M with a cross through it. That don’t exist as a unicode, and attempting to write it as an equation might risk the meaning getting lost through superfluous symbols.”

“And, the X?”

“I think it’s meant to replace it. In a word. D’you remember that word Amaranta used for mallow? She called it malva, and said it can be used for treating stinging nettles. If you’re keen, you might’a noticed that’s pretty similar to halva.”

“That’s...what Liliya was eating. But, if it’s an X—”

“It’s not the alphabet. It’s Cyrillic. The letter M is shared between the two, but the letter X is used to represent a different noise. One that don’t exist in Japanese phonetics, but...she said it just like that; in Russian, that’s the letter that would be used to spell it. The crumbs left on the floor were just to point us in the direction of the connection. And, with the use of malva, it would imply the thing that killed him really was some kind of nettle; an implication only a botanist with the knowledge of what cures it would make. If the nettles she used are the ones I touched, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find it caused somethin’ close to anaphylaxis. The pain is ridiculous.”

An inane, happy sort of grin grows on Kudou’s face, and he whispers, “So, what were you so worried about? You don’t really think this would be enough to stop you, right? Come on, where’s the Heiji I know? You won’t let them walk all over you.”

“Us. I won’t let them...walk over us.”

He can feel Kudou’s eyes grazing the soft, rounded plane of his cheek. He can’t bear to meet him halfway when this case has brought him no satisfaction, but it’s not without benefit when it has renewed his sense of self-actualisation. It’s not easy to imagine what could’ve happened to him without Kudou here, but it similarly frightens him to imagine that he’d be useless without him. He needs to stand tall on his own. He’s meant to protect people, not be the one protected...but he has to admit, it’s been nice to hold Kudou’s hand without reason. He doesn’t flinch when Kudou snakes his fingers into his palm...but Kudou does.

“Ow! Fuck, that really hurts! Did that transfer from the nettles you touched? Are you serious? Okay, that has got to be the murder weapon! Damn it.”

It could’ve been a dream. Everything from the day before really might’ve just been one long, miserable dream interspersed with warm, clammy hands and long looks through millimetres of glass. When Heiji awakes groggily the next morning, he runs a hand over the angle of his jawline; gone are the chubby cheeks, the small, snotty nose and the sensitive skin. Gone is the identity of Mallow. As silly as the name was, it was nice to join not Kudou but Conan in his bid to bring his attackers to justice. Perhaps it was too self-indulgent a dream, but when Heiji blinks and finds himself sleeping on the sofa in Mouri’s office, he realises it was a self-indulgent reality. He got to live in Conan’s shoes for only a day, but now it renders the situation unexplainable. Inescapable, too, when he realises he has no clothes that fit him. Tiptoeing naked around his rival’s office is certifiably a crime, but Mouri won’t notice a shirt and a pair of slacks disappear from his wardrobe when he’s sleeping off a hangover sprawled over his desk. The biggest hurdle is explaining to Ran and Conan why Mallow has disappeared, and Heiji is in his place.

When they emerge from the bedroom, Heiji is met with two wildly different expressions. He can placate Ran’s confusion with, “I thought I’d stop by and say hello. If you were lookin’ for that little, snot-nosed kid, he passed me on the stairs and said he had to go. It...don’t sound like he’s comin’ back.” But, for Conan’s wide-eyed disbelief, he’s got nothing. There’s a sliver of pain that magnifies the crease between his eyes that makes Heiji’s heart ache.

“Is that so? I have to leave for a club meeting today so Conan will have to entertain you, but it sounds like that kid left in a real hurry. I hope he’s okay.”

“He’s...going away again,” Conan says, hanging his head. From so far above, all he can make of his face is the tip of his twitching nose, fighting back the urge to sniffle. “I think he mentioned it to me yesterday. Things didn’t work out how he thought they would, so...I might not see him again for a while.”

Before Ran can offer a consolation, Heiji beats her to it, and when he says, “I’m sorry, Conan,” he’s not speaking to Kudou. Kudou may be Conan, and Conan may be Kudou, but they feel and breathe very differently. Heiji knows that now.

Ran bustles out of the room in a rush, leaving Heiji and Conan suspended between the raucous snoring coming from the sleeping detective between them. Conan gives the floor a petulant sort of kick, scuffing the tips of his shoes, and when he’s certain he won’t be overheard, he mumbles, “I don’t get it. I know what I saw yesterday, so how have you reverted to normal? It doesn’t make sense.”

In his comfortable state of normalcy, Heiji gets to enjoy exerting his untouched faculties, and without the anxiety of an uncertain future impeding his deductive reasoning, he quietly remembers, “The night before I transformed, I think I did drink somethin’ unusual, but I didn’t think of it that way at the time ‘cos it was just some tea that Kazuha made for me. She’s never made me sick before, so it never occurred to me, but she did say somethin’ about a new blend she’d made. It had these kind of pink petals in ‘em.”

“Pink petals?”

“You and I would know ‘em as common mallow.”

“Is...that so?” Conan emits a burbling, unsettled laugh. “If I were a suspicious man, I’d think she might’ve inadvertently created a tea that gives a temporary effect of the drug, but the chances of that happening sound...unrealistic.”

“She didn’t like the taste so she canned the recipe. I can’t say I liked it either, so...I can’t see myself drinkin’ it again if I were given the chance.”

The barely-perceptible nod from Conan has his dark hair bristling over his grey, bland face. “I understand. I don’t think I would either, even if…”

Something goes unsaid that Heiji understands but can’t put into words; as much as he wishes he could ignore the truth, it’s not who he is inside. “I can’t hold your hand,” he murmurs quietly, and solemnly slides his hands into his pockets. One is still red and itchy, the curve of his wrist an uncanny resemblance to the lesion across Conan’s palm. “Not right now.”

“No,” Conan smiles sadly. “That wouldn’t be right.”

“One day, though, I promise you. When we’re...equals again. I’ll make it happen. I swear to you, I’ll bring you back. I-I won’t let you—”

“Stop it.”

Heiji swallows. “You should...really find some salve for your hand.”

Edogawa Conan, with the body of a child and a mind not as unhindered as he hopes, stows his hand behind his back with a juvenile recalcitrance that boils the abundance of thought in his eyes down to a single feeling. As the adult, it’s Heiji’s duty to do the right thing and disregard the whims of the child in favour of his health, but having been a child only the day before, the memory of it still stings. His responsibility puts him at a distance that Conan isn’t comfortable with, and to be honest, neither is he. If he wants to help him, he shouldn’t waste his time with salves and pills. There’s only one way this can be resolved. One way to allow them to stand one again shoulder-to-shoulder.

Hand in hand.