Archive of Our Own

“Kaitou Kid sent another heist note,” Sera informs Shinichi.

Shinichi, as slowly as he can get away with, lifts his face from the pages of interdepartmental notes that he has strewn across his desk. Sera leans at him in the doorway to his office, in a way pointed enough to break skin. She has her hair styled off her forehead today, 2015 GQ model style, and is wearing a leather jacket that doesn’t conform to the first division’s usual standard of suit-and-tie dress. Shinichi sighs.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he says, and leans back in his wingback desk chair. Behind him, twelve floors below, two cars erupt into a honking battle. “He’s still not our department’s problem, unless he’s gone and murdered someone.” Which he hasn’t. Shinichi would know. “Shouldn’t you be talking to someone from theft?”

“I would be, if any of them were capable enough to catch him,” she points out, rocking back on her heels. A trace of worry has stolen its way between her eyebrows. “He’s stolen five pieces this month, Kudou-kun. And that’s on top of last month’s heists. At some point, someone’s going to have to step in.”

“And that person has to be me?” Shinichi folds his hands in front of him, then thinks better of it. The vibe that he’s going for is not disappointed middle school principal; it’s disinterested head inspector. “If I recall correctly, you’re just as capable as I am.” Sera smirks at him.

“I am, but I’m also not as likely to be suffering from wet dreams featuring Kaitou Kid,” she says. If Shinichi had been drinking anything, he would be finding himself with lungs full of liquid. As it is, he somehow manages to choke anyway.

“That—is not true,” he coughs around his tongue. Sera tilts her head this way and that, like well, if you say so.

“Mm,” she says. “Well, if you change your mind, the Suzuki group is planning to display some tasteless, million-dollar tiara or something in the next few days.”

“Right,” says Shinichi faintly as she saunters out. He swallows.

When Shinichi gets home that night—eyes dry from staring into crime scene photos, head aching from filling out forms and forms of busywork—he makes it two steps into his house before he’s slammed face-first into the wall beside his shoe rack.

“This is an interesting way of welcoming me home,” he wheezes. Adrenaline is pouring through his veins, along with the usual blend of arousal and confusion. His hands are clasped behind his back, crossed at the wrists. His cufflinks press into his skin. They’re little diamond magnifying glasses, and Shinichi couldn’t bring himself to ask if they were stolen when he received them.

“Welcome home, darling,” the interloper says against the side of Shinichi’s neck, which he’s begun mauling. Shinichi shudders at the feeling of teeth against his jugular, and then feels his knees weaken when the teeth are followed by a hard sucking kiss that’s guaranteed to leave an unsightly and intensely hot mark. “I got dinner ready, but I think I want my dessert first.”

“That’s a terrible—oh—line,” Shinichi mumbles when a hand slips down the front of his pants, easy as anything, and begins to pet at his cock, short, dry little strokes that make him squirm. He’s ashamed to recognize that he’s been hard since the second he was slammed into the wall. He’s also ashamed to realize that he’s arching his back to push his ass against the bulge he feels behind him. “If you’re going to do it at all, do it properly—” He bites down on a whimper when the pets turn into a tight fist around his cock and another hand, already wet with lube, reaches down the back of his pants.

He comes all over the wall and his own shirt an embarrassing few minutes later, the man three fingers deep against his prostate and his grip too-tight and excellent around Shinichi’s dick. The sound Shinichi makes when he does it is possibly the worst thing his vocal folds have ever produced, breathy and whimpering and too loud for his pride to handle. His knees wobble. He’s still coming down, reaching the level of coherency needed to start wondering how he’s going to get the mess out of the wallpaper, when there’s a groan, his shirt is being rucked up, and he feels a warm splatter against his lower back.

They stand there, panting together like two out-of-sync metronomes, before Shinichi fumbles around, clutching at the wall for support, to glare.

“You couldn’t have waited until we weren’t at the front door?” he demands. He feels the effect of his anger may be mitigated by the fact that his hair feels like a mess of sweat and his face is definitely still red.

Kaitou Kid—the man of mystery, magic, and mystique himself—looks back at him, sheepish, his dick still hanging out of his pants, his cheeks bright red, and holds up his wet hands.

“Can we have this conversation after I clean up?”

Shinichi didn’t mean to shack up with an internationally wanted thief. He really didn’t.

It just so happened that Shinichi got back from Don Quijote one night and found Kaitou Kid bleeding to death on his doorstep. Shinichi—despite having earned the moniker of the homicide division’s “Ice Prince” for the time he arrested a murderer on her wedding day—found himself not entirely unmoved by this sight. He was, after all, a protector of the people, and that lent itself to protecting criminals as well as civilians. Also, he had just happened to have bought a new first-aid kit from Don Quijote, so it wasn’t as though he had to go out of his way too much.

It was also very satisfying when Kaitou Kid woke up the next morning, took one look at Shinichi’s face, and fell out of bed, landing solidly onto his injured side.

“Are you serious,” Kid gasped out around groans of agony, while Shinichi stared down at him with his eyebrows lifted. As far as first impressions went, it was not the smoothest that Shinichi had encountered. “Of course the doorstep I happen to crash-land on is yours. The universe can’t even let me die in peace. Aren’t you that guy who arrested someone right before she said ‘I do’ and carted her back down the aisle in handcuffs, right in front of her three hundred and fifty wedding guests?” He began scooting away from Shinichi, as though he would be able to outrun Shinichi if it came to it.

“It was before they cut the cake, and the DJ even gave them a refund. And if you keep that up, I’ll start thinking that you don’t like me,” Shinichi informed him, bland, even as he wondered just how infamous he was amongst the general populace. “Did you want my help back into bed, or shall I call for a forklift?”

Kid squinted at him. He seemed to finally be sizing Shinichi up. They had never met, after all, and Shinichi himself was quite taken with the charming way Kid’s hair frizzed up around his temples and how animated his whole face got when he wasn’t unconscious from being shot clean through one flank. Of course, it wasn’t like that would ever matter, Shinichi reminded himself, and went to firmly lift Kid back into bed. Kid’s arms were solid muscle in the clutch of Shinichi’s grip when Shinichi levered him up by the biceps. Shinichi had seen it all, of course, in the process of treating his gunshot wound, but it felt different when Kid was awake and aware of Shinichi’s hands on him.

“Your sheets smell like jasmine,” Kid said when he was back in bed. This seemed rather arbitrary. Shinichi eyed him, wondering if he should have checked for a concussion.

“I’ll let the laundry detergent know,” he said. “Tea, or prescription painkillers from the evidence locker?”

For a stark second, Kid stared at him, before he grinned and Shinichi was abruptly, intensely sure that he was now in trouble. He hadn’t lasted this long as a police officer with subpar instincts, and the ones he had were vindicated when Kid asked, flirtatious, “Have you heard of ‘kissing it better,’ tantei-kun?” Shinichi frowned.

“Kissing your open bullet wound seems counterproductive to the healing process,” he pointed out—Kid grinned at him, full-force, clobbering Shinichi over the head with it—before he swept out of the room to get both the tea and the painkillers (which were over-the-counter and not actually stolen evidence, thank you very much) and not kick Kid out of his house.

From then on, things were kind of decided.

“So I hear you’re planning another heist,” Shinichi says after a shower, midway through a stuffed cabbage roll. Kid hooks his foot around Shinichi’s ankle and tugs. Shinichi’s life now includes playing footsie with a criminal at his own kitchen table.

“I am, darling,” Kid agrees. “Will you be in attendance?”

“Am I ever?” Shinichi scowls. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to get involved in anything that you’re a part of. We need to keep our names separate in the papers.” Kid’s eyes glitter at him over the edge of his rice bowl.

“Are you ashamed of me, tantei-kun?” he asks. Shinichi blinks.

“Do you think I am?”

“Mm,” Kid says, laying down his chopsticks. He folds his hands in front of him. He’s wearing a shirt so old it looks chewed around the neckline, and his hair is still damp from when he ducked into the shower and made another pass at Shinichi. “You won’t think about introducing me to your friends—in fact, you don’t talk to them anymore. And you never even consider coming to my heists.” He says all of it very mildly, with no judgment in his tone.

“I don’t want to risk mentioning you to my friends,” says Shinichi, staring at his plate. “And unless you’ve killed someone recently, there’s no real reason that I’d ever interact with you. Since I’m from the homicide division. There’s no reason that I should go to your heists.”

“I suppose,” Kid agrees, sounding unconvinced. He picks up his chopsticks again. “Not wanting our names even vaguely related in the media, though…”

Abruptly, Shinichi has had enough.

“I’m not sure I can be ashamed of someone whose first name I don’t even know,” he says. The sentence sits wrong, curdles in the air between them. It’s like addressing the proverbial elephant they’ve been carefully stepping around for as long as Kid has been popping up around Shinichi’s house. Shinichi clears his throat. The ball of Kid’s foot slides up the inside of his calf, reassuring. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know,” Kid says. His smile is wry when he finally directs it at Shinichi. “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to ask it that way.”

Shinichi smiles back at him and jams a cabbage roll into his own mouth.

They didn’t sleep together—or “make love,” as Kid phrases it, when he’s trying to put Shinichi off his dinner—until a few months into their acquaintance. After he declared himself recovered and flitted off into the night, Kid kept showing up: Shinichi would come home from work and find him lounging on the couch, eating all of Shinichi’s Umaibou and watching ahead on Shinichi’s Netflix series so he could drop spoilers at a moment’s notice.

(“Hey,” Shinichi said, affronted, when he came home and Kid pointed at the screen, where the murderer in the season finale of Detective Samonji was being revealed and summarily carted off to a dramatic soundtrack. “Now that’s just rude.”

“I know you’ve read the books already,” Kid pointed out, motioning at where Shinichi indeed had the entire body of Samonji works laid out on his coffee table. Shinichi squinted. It was less about the fact that Shinichi had known who the killer would be from the first episode and more about the principle of the thing.)

“Are you living here?” Shinichi asked once when he came home, found Kid assembling hotpot in the kitchen, went upstairs to change into something more comfortable, and found his closet full of unfamiliar, Kid-like attire (t-shirt, jeans, bright blue sneakers, underwear patterned with Kid logos). A glance into the bathroom revealed an array of citrusy shower accompaniments that Shinichi didn’t recognize. Kid stirred the hotpot before he plucked out some mushrooms and deposited them in Shinichi’s bowl. The mushrooms were Shinichi’s favorite.

“Maybe,” Kid said.

Things came to a head (literally, in their case) one Saturday night. Shinichi was doing the dishes. He was on his last item—a soup ladle that that been pivotal in the curry-making process, according to Kid—when Kid crept up behind him and wrapped his arms around Shinichi’s waist.

“Uh,” Shinichi said. This did not feel like normal phantom-thief-who-breaks-into-his-house behavior. “Did you need—”

He was cut off when his face was turned directly into Kid’s, so smoothly that Shinichi barely knew what was happening until it clicked that the soft warmth against his lips was Kid’s mouth. They were mouth-to-mouth, and not in a resuscitative manner. Soon enough they were tongue-to-tongue as well. Kid nipped him on the bottom lip. Shinichi was so startled he dropped the ladle back into the sink.

“Um, Kid?” Shinichi said once they broke apart. His mouth felt swollen. Other things, in other places, felt swollen as well. “What are you—”

“Shh,” said Kid, and it was then that Shinichi realized his hands had crept down from where they had rested against Shinichi’s stomach and were now making progress on the zip of his pants. “Tell me to stop if you want me to stop. Better yet, punch me in the face.”

“I—I’m not,” was all Shinichi could get out, really, because that was when Kid had reached into his pants to press his entire palm against where Shinichi was hardening with great speed. Shinichi moaned. He was gripping the edge of the sink with all the strength in his arms. It was becoming very difficult to think of any reason to oppose anything about this situation.

“Last chance,” Kid whispered into his ear, which was just unfair. Shinichi fell into a moan when his hand tightened around Shinichi’s cock, and Kid bent in to steal it out of his mouth. With a surge of bravery, Shinichi let one hand reach back for Kid, squeezing at the firmness he could feel against his hip. Moments later, Shinichi found himself being whirled around so they faced each other, spun so quickly he almost lost his balance and tipped into the sink.

“Kid, what—”

And then Kid got down on his knees and put his mouth on Shinichi and that was that. Shinichi decided that he was going to have to move, because it seemed doubtful that the neighbors hadn’t heard the sound he made when Kid ducked all the way down, easy and smooth, and swallowed all of Shinichi. Shinichi had been in relationships before—relationships that involved blowjobs, even—yet the clutch of Kid’s throat around the head of his cock felt so unfamiliar, and intense, and good, at that. He barely lasted a minute before he came down Kid’s throat, noisy and juddering in Kid’s grip, head thrown back and fingers knotted in Kid’s hair.

After a recovery period—which involved Kid licking over him until Shinichi shuddered, oversensitive, and begged him to stop—Shinichi grabbed a bottle of cooking oil, slicked up the space between his legs and the split of his ass, and made Kid thrust his cock there, squeezed right up against Shinichi’s hole and balls until he came all over Shinichi’s thighs, groaning desperately and biting savagely into Shinichi’s neck. It was the start of something maybe not beautiful, but close to it.

Shinichi is brushing his teeth and reading (getting distracted by) an NHK article about a matchmaking AI net when Kid appears in his periphery. He’s wearing Shinichi’s Touto University t-shirt, which is probably a calculated move on his part. It has become quite clear to both of them that Shinichi experiences no greater joy in life than when he’s ripping that shirt off of Kid.

“Are you going to give me a reason for why you’re standing there staring at me silently, or do I need to start listing some reasons and you can tell me when I’ve hit upon it?” Shinichi asks around a mouthful of toothpaste when he’s been ogled for a long, discomfiting five minutes. When Kid doesn’t speak, he sighs and sets his phone down. “Number one: you’ve contracted a deadly and inoperable terminal illness. How unfortunate. I’ll make your funeral arrangements. What are your feelings on oak, or maybe mahogany?”

“See,” says Kid, which makes limited sense, at least until he adds, “See, this is why I love you.”

Shinichi drops his toothbrush. He may also swallow all the toothpaste in his mouth, which is disgusting.

“Oh,” he says once he finishes choking and fumbling at the sink for water to rinse out his mouth. “Because I just made an inappropriate joke about you dying of an incurable disease?”

“No—well, yes.” Kid reaches out to clasp his hand, the one that’s gone limp around his phone. “I like the way that you make fun of me—”

“I mean, you make it pretty easy,” Shinichi says, but Kid gives him a quelling look and he subsides.

“I like the way you make fun of me while using multisyllabic words to sound extra pretentious, and you’re always so sarcastic and cutting, and yet I somehow know that you respect me and care about me,” Kid continues. His eyes radiate something sincere and almost pleading. “In a way, it’s your way of being affectionate while maintaining your pride. I like the way you pretend to be unimpressed by me even though I can tell you think I’m suave and handsome.” (Shinichi narrows his eyes.) “I like the way you look first thing in the morning, when you sit up in bed with your hair flat on one side and look all betrayed that morning’s come again. And I like the way that you squint when you look at your phone because you need glasses but you don’t want to admit it because you’re secretly a little vain.”

“Hey,” Shinichi bursts out, finally unable to keep quiet at the aspersions cast on him. Kid laughs, his eyes crinkling up in the corners. He tugs Shinichi’s phone free of his grip and sets it on the counter so he can hold Shinichi’s hands properly.

“And I love the way that you accept me, even though there are so many reasons why you shouldn’t,” he finishes, before he leans in and rains kisses upon Shinichi, soft and fleeting against his lips, cheeks, jaw. Shinichi blinks when he’s done. His heart stammers at the expression on Kid’s face: longing, almost, as though Shinichi isn’t standing right in front of him, yet also overflowing with affection and warmth softer and more comfortable than a well-worn blanket.

“Thank you,” whispers Shinichi. His voice comes out wispy and squished and underdeveloped, as though the strong, solid parts of it couldn’t make it through the thready web of emotions stretched across the inside of his throat. He tries to swallow it back and fails. “I don’t know that I—that I can say—” Kid’s eyes go wide, then soft, far more understanding than Shinichi really deserves.

“You don’t have to,” he assures Shinichi, stroking a big hand through Shinichi’s hair. “I didn’t want to pressure you into anything. I just wanted you to know.” Shinichi, for all his multisyllabic words and mastery of prescriptive grammar, can’t think of a response that wouldn’t embarrass him.

“Let’s go to bed,” he says, still in that too-quiet voice, and they do just that, sliding underneath the comforter on the bed they share, wrapped around each other in a knot so intricate Shinichi doesn’t think they’ll ever untangle as themselves. Hopes for it, actually—hopes they’d need to be cut apart.

The morning after Kid’s next heist, Shinichi gets into work late.

“Did you lose a fight with an octopus? Or a very toothy pigeon?” Sera asks when she sees him. With a surge of composure, Shinichi manages not to slap a hand over his neck, even as he clears his sore throat. When Kid got back from the heist around three in the morning, smelling like explosives and filled to the brim with manic energy, he insisted on chewing on Shinichi until Shinichi capitulated and worked up enough liveliness to jam Kid’s cock down his throat and shut him up with judicious application of suction.

“Any new cases that I should be alerted about?” he asks instead of deigning to respond, taking a long sip of his battery-acid-flavored double espresso in a vague attempt to look busy. Sera gives him a pointed eyebrow wiggle before she sets down an unfamiliar case file in a high-priority red folder. Shinichi flips it open to find a glossy photograph of Kid in full regalia. Kid is standing on the edge of a high-rise, his cape billowing out behind him and his arms spread, as though he’s preparing for a trust-fall. Shinichi’s gaze snaps back to Sera’s.

“I know you have some kind of aversion to talking about Kaitou Kid, but this is relevant to our actual division for once. He’s suspected for murder. Last night, after the heist, one of the officers who’s on the Kid task force was found dead in a room beside the viewing gallery. One of Kid’s cards was found on the scene. We don’t have many other leads at the moment, so for now we’re investigating the Kid angle,” Sera informs him, then, “You okay? You went really white for a second there.”

“I’m fine,” says Shinichi. He clears his throat. “Do you mind getting me another coffee? Sorry, I know that’s rude.” His knees aren’t strong enough to carry him all the way to the break room.

“Of course.” Sera is looking at him with concern scrawled all across her face. “Are you okay? Were you actually mauled by an animal on the way here? Do you feel sick?”

“No, no, of course not,” Shinichi says, but he waits a beat too long for it to sound natural. Sera frowns, and the look she throws him over her shoulder on her way out is heavy with worry. The moment she’s beyond his sightline, he drops his face into his hands, rubs at his eyes, and flips the file open to read the report.

The two of them have had a total of one conversation about the fact that Kid is a criminal and Shinichi is a police officer and Shinichi’s job is, in theory, to arrest him. It went like this:

“You know, for Halloween, maybe I should dress up as a police officer, and you can dress up in an orange jumpsuit,” Kid said. “That might be fun.”

Shinichi moaned, mouth open into a pillow and hands knotted in the sheets. His brain felt scrambled, and not just from the concussive force that Kid was using to pound into him. Well, not just from that, at least. It was also the fact that Kid had his hand wrapped around the base of Shinichi’s cock and had denied him four orgasms so far. Shinichi’s dick hurt.

“Please,” he gasped, feeling ready to dissolve with the next rough slide of Kid’s cock against his oversensitized prostate. Pleasure shot through him. His toes curled hard enough that his feet cramped. “Please, Kid, I’ll do anything—”

“Yeah, handcuffs would be really nice,” Kid said, breathless, eyes gleaming with hunger, and sped up his thrusts until not even his hand around Shinichi’s dick could keep Shinichi from whimpering pathetically and coming so hard that he couldn’t form words for a whole fifteen minutes afterward.

“No handcuffs,” was the first thing Shinichi said once he regained the ability to speak. Kid just dragged a hand through his hair and petted the back of his neck.

“It is a little too on-the-nose,” he said, looking far sadder than someone who had just groaned himself hoarse and left come dripping out of Shinichi’s ass had any right to. Sadness didn’t look good on Kid, darkening his features until they were shadowy and crumpled; it made something deep within Shinichi’s abdomen ache, just seeing sadness on him. When Kid caught Shinichi looking, he asked, brightly, “Do you think you could get it up again if I ate you out?” The answer turned out to be yes, with much enthusiastic effort on both their parts.

In summary, they’re not likely to win any awards for Most Functional and Healthy Relationship or Best Communication About Serious Moral Dilemmas. They might, however, win Best at Glossing Over Their Myriad Issues with Life-Changing Sex.

Shinichi has been locked in his own office for around two hours—his head hurting from how long he’s been staring into the case file on Kid, news footage from the heist, and photographs of the crime scene—when there’s a sharp knock on his door. He’s so startled by the unexpected sound that he drops a stack of forensics reports into his own lap.

“Come in,” he calls as he reorganizes the papers. When he looks up, Satou is in the doorway with an unfamiliar man beside her. He has a mop of dark hair and is wearing a Touto University t-shirt underneath his jacket. When he and Shinichi make eye contact, he nods respectfully.

“Inspector Satou,” Shinichi says, blinking. “To what or whom do I owe the pleasure?” At Satou’s side, the man’s smile widens.

“This is Tsugaki Doitou-san. He got lost and ended up in my division. He says he’s a witness from the—I believe he said the Tanaka case?’ Satou says, glancing at the man for verification.

“Oh, of course,” Shinichi says. “The beheading and dismembering cases, where the body parts have been found in outbound shipments, occasionally after they’ve been delivered. There have been four victims so far. The latest was Tanaka Akihiro.” He turns to the man, who looks seasick. “You’re the one who called before, right? The one who saw the killer pull up to the warehouse with the duffel bag that you described on the phone as ‘wet-looking’ and ‘oddly bulky.’”

“Yes, that’s me,” the man agrees, slightly strangled. “I was the one who said… those things.”

“Excellent,” Shinichi says, smoothing the folders shut in front of him. “Well, I expect I’ll have a lot of questions for you. Thank you for bringing him, Inspector Satou. I’ll conduct the interrogation in here, so Tsugaki-san is more comfortable. The topic is, well.” He spreads his hands. Satou nods, sympathetic.

“We haven’t had a dismembering case around my section in a while. Only a disemboweling, and it wasn’t even well-done,” she says, looking a little nostalgic. She smiles reassuringly at the man, then Shinichi. “Well, good luck. Hope you have a reliable memory. Don’t skimp on the details. We have counseling if you need it afterwards, on the fourth floor.”

“Thanks, I think,” says the man.

“Oh, and Satou-san? If you don’t mind, can you everyone know that I don’t want to be disturbed? I don’t want to interrupt the flow of the investigation, you see,” Shinichi calls as Satou steps back out. “It’s important not to throw off witnesses, especially with a case like this one.”

“Of course,” Satou agrees, winking. “Have a good time, Kudou-kun.” The man smiles at her as she closes the door behind herself, then turns the lock. When he looks at Shinichi, Shinichi glares.

“Kid,” he hisses. “What are you doing here?”

“What,” the man says, because of course he was Kid in a latex mask and one of Shinichi’s shirts, “you mean I’m not allowed to visit my ladylove at his place of work?” He gives Shinichi a mushy look that would be sweet under different circumstances.

“If you ever call me your ‘ladylove’ again, we’ll be investigating your dismemberment case,” Shinichi replies. His heart is racing. It’s been a while since he had to lie so unexpectedly to a senior inspector. “Also, no, you’re not allowed to visit me when visiting me means walking through a fourteen-story building filled to the brim with law enforcement.” He can sense his gaze growing deranged, a theory that is only verified when Kid’s expression goes even gooier. Kid’s self-preservation instincts have always been crossed with his affection-giving ones. “Did you go past the theft division, by any chance? They have a dartboard with your face on it! Nakamori hits you between the eyes every time they use it!”

Kid sashays across the room to stand beside Shinichi, hooking his fingertips underneath the edge of the mask to pull it off. He drops it into Shinichi’s guest chair, which makes Shinichi grimace. It’s disconcerting seeing it there in a heap of latex skin and hair. Shinichi always hates coming across Kid’s masks around the house.

“I just wanted to see you, darling,” Kid whispers, leaning in to kiss him. Shinichi scowls, keeping his mouth firmly shut, but as always, Kid somehow manages to work him over, nipping at his bottom lip and then soothing the sting with his tongue, pulling him in with soft, shorter kisses.

“I hate you,” grumbles Shinichi against Kid’s mouth, into which he finds himself pushing his tongue a few minutes later. His lips are still swollen from sucking Kid off that morning, and it almost hurts when Kid takes hold of his head and really presses into him with his lips. “You’re the worst. Why can’t I stay mad at you?”

“Because I’m suave and handsome and very good with my mouth,” Kid tells him, pulling back to kiss his jawline. Shinichi shivers. “And you can’t resist my charms.” He doesn’t say because you love me, even though Shinichi can feel both of them thinking it.

The thought makes Shinichi’s chest seize up. Now that the adrenaline born from seeing Kid in his workplace and lying to Satou’s face has faded, he just feels shaky on the inside. He’s spent the last two hours reviewing how Kid is the only person who could’ve killed the police officer, how nobody else had access to the room, how even if they did have it, they had an alibi. And now he’s making out with Kid in the main headquarters of the Tokyo metropolitan police force, with only a locked door and a verbal warning away from discovery. He clings to Kid’s shoulders.

“Take off your clothes,” he begs when Kid pauses to mouth over the marks he’s already left on Shinichi’s neck. Kid laughs, breathless.

“That might be the neediest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he mutters, even as he strips off his jacket and shirt and steps out of his shoes. His body is familiar, by now, and lovely as always, giving off heat when he steps close and brackets Shinichi in, kisses Shinichi, wraps his arms around Shinichi. Stomach churning, Shinichi presses his hands flat against the plane of Kid’s chest. He can feel Kid’s heartbeat beneath his palm, thundering, steady.

Gasping, Shinichi wrenches his mouth away and stands so abruptly that Kid almost trips moving out of his way. Kid stares at him, probably to ask for an explanation, when Shinichi takes him by the arms and directs him into his own desk chair, reversing their positions. Kid blinks at him, watching as Shinichi yanks off his suit jacket and nearly rips his shirt open and trips out of his shoes.

“I’m getting kind of a weird vibe right now, darling,” he says, eyes wide when Shinichi unbuckles his own pants, yanks them off one leg, and climbs astride Kid’s lap. His hands drop to Shinichi’s ass, a reflex. “What’s the play, here?”

“Did you bring lube?” Shinichi asks. Kid’s eyebrows jump.

“I… did,” he says, stumbling over the words as Shinichi fumbles at his pants pockets until he finds a travel-sized tube. “Shinichi, darling, you’re starting to worry m—”

Shinichi cuts him off with a kiss that hurts, that clicks their teeth together and bruises his mouth even further. By the time Kid manages to get away, Shinichi has two fingers inside himself and a cramp in his arm. The look on Kid’s face as he peers up into Shinichi’s eyes makes him groan and sink down harder on his own hand.

“Darling?” Kid says, sounding uneasy even as his gaze flickers between Shinichi’s arm and his face. He licks his lips. His face is bright red and undeniably turned on. “Uh—are you—”

“Get your cock out,” Shinichi mumbles, panting as he shoves a third finger in. It burns, but somehow, in the overheated, messed-up mass of neurons inside his head, it feels good, too. Especially when he rocks down into Kid’s lap and feels how hard Kid is beneath him. Especially when Kid pushes up against him with a soft grunt. “Don’t you want to?” He punctuates the question with a bite to the side of Kid’s neck, high enough that his mask might cover it when he leaves.

Kid groans and yanks his own pants open, pulling his cock out. It’s almost as red as his face is when he reaches around Shinichi to nudge his fingers away. The wet sound they make coming out makes Shinichi close his eyes in embarrassment. He wraps his damp hand around Kid’s dick to keep himself from losing his nerve, rubbing some of the leftover slick down the shaft before he levers himself up and lines the head up against his hole.

“Shinichi,” Kid says, reverent, when Shinichi pushes down. He’s studying Shinichi’s face, so intently, that Shinichi doesn’t know what to do save for bury his face in the join of Kid’s neck to his shoulder. “Shinichi, what’s—” Shinichi suddenly doesn’t want him to finish the question. He shoves all the way down, graceless, muffling his sounds in Kid’s neck, and Kid cuts himself off with a grunt. His arms come up and clutch at Shinichi.

Shinichi rides him like that for what feels like a century, hard enough that the desk chair creaks every time he comes back down onto Kid’s cock. His thighs start hurting, not too far into it. His dick is swollen and aching where it’s squeezed between their bodies. He can’t bring himself to look Kid in the face. It’s all too much, Kid holding Shinichi against himself as he groans into Shinichi’s ear, the fabric of his pants chafing against the inside of Shinichi’s thighs, the solid feel of him around and inside and everywhere, pressing on nerves that Shinichi didn’t even know he had.

Shinichi comes first, because Kid forces a hand between them and grips him hard enough that he can’t hold himself back from climax, squirming in Kid’s lap as he whines and loses it all over Kid. When Kid soothes him with a hand over his flank and tries to lift him off his cock, Shinichi pushes him down into place and leans back so they’re face-to-face.

“No,” he rasps, swallowing, and forces himself to keep going, even though every brush against his prostate makes his whole body shake uncontrollably. His eyes water. Kid looks worried, even as he rubs gently at Shinichi’s oversensitive, half-full dick, but there must be something in Shinichi’s face telling him not to say anything, because he keeps quiet, lips parted as he stares.

By the time Kid comes, thrusting roughly up into Shinichi with a deep groan, holding Shinichi down by the hips as he spills inside, Shinichi is hard again, just barely, on the edge of painful. He’s not sure he even wants to come, even as Kid pulls out, stuffs three fingers back into him, and fingers him into another orgasm that makes his cock dribble and his vision go blurry as he whimpers.

The room is filled with the sound of their panting. The air feels muggy against Shinichi’s skin. He can feel Kid’s semen trickling out of his loose hole and Kid’s dark gaze fixed on him. He reaches for the box of tissues on the corner of his desk and sets to work cleaning them both up, as much as he can, just so he doesn’t have to look at Kid.

“That was hot,” Kid says when Shinichi has gotten most of the come off his thighs and Kid’s chest—Shinichi really did come everywhere. “But also not what I was expecting when I came here.”

“Well,” says Shinichi, after a long pause during which he scrubs at one of Kid’s nipples and doesn’t meet his eyes. “Normally I wouldn’t let a civilian”—or, in all technicality, non-police—“do this, but.” He clambers off of Kid’s lap and steps to the side, nods at the files still spread across the desk, and goes to put on his pants instead of watch Kid’s reaction.

Kid gives a muffled, slightly irate sound, which is followed by a shuffling of papers. Shinichi rubs at the zipper on his pants. He never noticed, but it sticks slightly, halfway up the track. The slit that his button tucks into is worn from use. The carpet beneath his feet is a dull gray, but there’s a single spot of bleached white beside the trashcan.

“Shinichi,” Kid says quietly. Shinichi forces himself to look up. Meeting Kid’s eyes is like putting a hand on an electric fence. He holds back a flinch when Kid licks his lips, nervous rather than turned on, eyes two dark, wide pools, and says, “You don’t think that I—that I did this, do you?”

“Of course not,” Shinichi snaps, horrified. “I’m an idiot who compromises their moral code and decides to ruin their career, but not to the point that I’d sleep with someone I suspected to be a murderer.” He winces, but forces himself to keep on. “I just—I know that you didn’t do it. But I don’t know how I’m going to prove it when all I have right now is the fact that oh, Kid is my boyfri—" He bites his tongue the second the word tries to come out. It’s like locking the prison door after the inmate has already escaped. They’ve never technically put a label on what they’re doing. Shinichi wasn’t planning to be the one to do it.

Kid is smiling faintly, somehow both worried and touched.

“Darling,” he says, with so much affection packaged into the one word that Shinichi’s heart cramps as it washes over him. Shinichi turns away and rummages through his desk drawers for a pack of antibacterial wipes. On second thought, he cracks open the window behind his desk.

“You should get dressed,” he mumbles, wiping down his desk chair instead of being remotely brave. “And go. You’re still in a police station, and there’s a warrant out for your arrest. I’ll see you at home.” His voice catches on home. He really is living with a criminal and the prime suspect in a murder case. Somewhere, Megure is regretting ever giving him an in to the police force.

Arms descend on Shinichi between one heartbeat and the next. Shinichi doesn’t even know what’s happening until he’s being pulled up against Kid’s chest. They’re both kind of disgusting, damp with half-dried cold sweat. It’s not unlike being enveloped by a clam. Shinichi presses back into Kid’s hold anyway, because he’s a fool in love.

“I love you, darling,” Kid says into his ear. “And I’m going to tell you everything, tonight. I’m sorry that I didn’t, before.”

“Okay,” replies Shinichi, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “You might want to keep your shirt untucked. I think I might’ve gotten come on your pants.”

“It’s not about trust,” Kid says.

Shinichi, partway through taking off his shoes, pauses.

“So when you said we were going to talk ‘tonight,’ you meant the second I got home,” he says, and slides his shoes into the shoe rack. When he straightens, Kid is giving him a quizzical look. “Feels a little—abrupt.”

“Oh, sorry. Welcome home, darling. What would you like first? Dinner, a bath, the truth about how and why I’m a thief and therefore suspected for murder, or…” Here Kid strikes a pose that, while ridiculous, still does something for Shinichi, and purrs, “Me?” somehow managing to slip in a tongue roll.

“A bath sounds pretty good,” Shinichi says, blandly. After he says it, he realizes he’s still a little sticky from earlier. Kid laughs, full-bodied, and straightens out of his pin-up pose.

“Want company?”

“Please note that I didn’t say I wanted you first,” Shinichi points out.

Kid ends up joining him in the bath anyway, but not for anything untoward (or so he says). He makes Shinichi sit while he washes Shinichi’s back with his yuzu-scented shower gel. His hands are far gentler than Shinichi deserves, and the slide of skin to skin urges Shinichi into a hazy, half-asleep state.

“So my father was a famous stage magician,” Kid says when Shinichi’s eyes are starting to close for real. Instinctively, Shinichi knows not to turn to look at him. There’s an uncharacteristic vulnerability in his voice, one that says Kid doesn’t know if he’ll be able to get the words out if they’re face to face. “He was murdered one night during a show. Nobody knew what went wrong. I spent years grieving him.”

Kid’s hands trail up to Shinichi’s neck, fingertips rubbing over his jugular, the jumping spot of his pulse.

“When I was in high school, I found a secret room in my house. It turns out my dad was the original Kaitou Kid. He was killed by a criminal organization that was searching for a jewel called Pandora that would supposedly grant them immortal life. He interfered, so they murdered him. Ever since, I’ve been acting as Kid. For a while, I was trying to draw them out and get justice for my dad. I cleaned out the last of their branches a while ago—that night when I showed up on your doorstep was when I finished them off. You might recall the mention of a smuggling ring that was taken down around that time. Since then, I’ve continued looking for Pandora, just to ensure that nobody else gets any ideas about finding it and using it.”

Shinichi catches a hand as it smooths over his ribcage, gives it a squeeze, and lets it go.

“I didn’t kill anyone at the heist. After it finished, I came straight home. I didn’t stop to kill Hamada, because even if we were technically against each other, I’ve never wished for anyone from the task force to die. Messing with them the way I do at heists—it’s always been in good fun, at least to me.”

“I know you didn’t do it,” Shinichi murmurs. Kid strokes down the back of his neck, lightly enough that he shivers.

“I didn’t want to tell you any of this before,” continues Kid. “Not because I didn’t trust you—like I said, it’s not about trust. It’s because I knew that telling you about my dad would give you enough information to figure out my real identity. And I didn’t want you to figure that out because then you would have to carry that information with you. It would be another secret you’d have to hold onto. You already hated the fact that I was a secret you had to hide from everyone you work with. But now that it’s come to this, that you’re having to risk all of this for me—I just feel like it’s time that I take a risk.” He leans in, mouth to Shinichi’s ear. “Kuroba Kaito. That’s my name.”

Shinichi’s heart nearly stops.

He’s frozen for a moment, stuck in fight or flight, a knot of something blocking his throat and immobilizing his tongue, before he gives up and turns and clings to Kid—Kaito—with all the strength in his body, his bones. Kid clings back just as hard, his breathing ragged, as though he’s come to the end of a long, long run.

“We’ve had a break in Hamada’s murder,” Sera tells Shinichi a few days later, not bothering to preface the conversation with pleasantries or knock on his door. Shinichi shakes himself out of a haze. He’s been staring at the same case file for an hour, thinking about how likely it is that one of his rookies would be willing to go on a coffee run. Starbucks has a new seasonal drink available, starting today.

“Yeah?” Shinichi says. He’s assigned several officers of middling caliber, along with a senior detective, to the Kid case, just to keep up appearances. From the way they grit their teeth through their department-mandated daily updates, he senses they’re not getting anywhere with their investigation.

Hamada—early forties, quiet, avid member of the Kid task force for over six years, no known enemies—was shot in the stomach with his own service revolver, upon which no prints were left, and suffered for several minutes before dying of blood loss. A playing card—a jester—determined to be from Kid’s card gun was left at the scene. None of the material evidence points anywhere. Surveillance cameras don’t show anyone else entering the gallery where his body was found. They’ve interrogated every officer who was there that night. Kid was the only non-police individual who was known to be in the building, and every exit was blocked by police following the heist’s end.

“Kid sent out another heist note,” Sera tells him. “There’s an envoy from the Newria Islands coming to Tokyo for a week. Their crown princess, Adalya Clémence Herman III, is bringing one of their national treasures, a blue diamond they call ‘Le trésor du ciel,’ or the ‘treasure of the sky.’ It’s going to be on display to the public at the Grand Beika Hotel. Naturally, Kid has already laid claim to it. He’s planning a heist for the last day of the exhibit, in exactly two weeks.”

“Oh.” Shinichi folds his hands in front of him. “We should plan to apprehend him at the heist, then. I’ll make sure that Miyagawa, Kouno, and Itou collaborate with the Kid task force as soon as possible to formulate a plan.”

“Right.” Sera lingers for a second before she says, “You know, Kudou-kun, if you ever wanted to talk about anything—as in, personal things—I’d be down. We’re friends, right? Even if I married your ex-girlfriend and the two of you don’t talk anymore.” Shinichi stares at her. He and Ran talk. Ran is busy with her dojo and the kid she and Sera have—but they talk. Or they would, if Shinichi wasn’t terrified of slipping up and mentioning his live-in phantom thief. That’s probably not the part of the statement that Shinichi is supposed to focus on, though.

“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind,” he says. “Was there anything else?” Sera eyes him for a moment longer.

“No,” she sighs before she leaves him in peace.

There was only one time that Kaito—Kid, at the time—suggested he meet Shinichi’s friends. It was about a month after they’d started sleeping together, right after Shinichi finished recounting a story about the hell that Ran and Sera’s then-one-and-a-half-year-old daughter had been putting them through. She liked to pretend to start crying when either of them tried to cut her nails with nail clippers, and then laugh at them when they inevitably panicked.

“She sounds demonic and adorable,” Kaito said, half into the pillow as Shinichi kneaded his shoulders with the “totally not sex-related” body oil that Kaito had brought home from wherever he went during the day. Kaito had insisted on giving Shinichi a body rub that had, to the surprise of no one, ended in some very slippery sex, and now Shinichi was returning the favor, but not under illegitimate pretenses, as Kaito had.

(“Sure,” Kaito had said when Shinichi had told him that and clambered onto his legs to get easier access to his shoulders. “I’m sure your reasons for wanting to get your hands all over me are just as ‘totally not sex-related’ as my reasons for buying that body oil.” Shinichi had pinched the back of his knee and nearly gotten kicked for his efforts.)

“She is,” Shinichi agreed, digging a knuckle in beside Kaito’s upper spine and feeling him melt into the bed. He dragged his fingertips through the sweaty bits of hair sticking to Kaito’s nape and felt himself smiling. As if from a distance, he heard himself say, “They’ve said that I seem happier lately, you know. Sera and Ran. They keep asking me who I’ve shacked up with.”

“Oh.” Kaito went quiet. Sensing that he had just planted one foot on a pressure-sensitive mine, Shinichi clamped his mouth shut and went back to massaging Kaito’s shoulders, flushing a little as he realized there were legitimate scratch marks developing down Kaito’s back. How embarrassing.

He was considering finding a way to surreptitiously apply Neosporin to the scratches when Kaito asked, “Do you think I’ll ever meet Sera and Mouri-san and Chiaki-chan?” He said it in this very careful way, as though he was the one with his foot on the mine. And maybe he was, Shinichi reflected as a thrill of icy chill slipped down his spine at the thought of his best friend and her police officer wife meeting his secret criminal boyfriend. He couldn’t say that he thought they would report Kaito, just that he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t, and that realization threatened to bring down the wall that was holding back the mountain of anxieties about Kaito and who Kaito was and who Shinichi was, relative to him, and Shinichi’s career and code of ethics, that Shinichi was trying to keep from filling up his head and spilling out of him at every turn.

“I don’t know,” he finally said, simply, and slipped off into the bathroom to grab a tube of Neosporin.

“You sent out another heist note?” Shinichi demands later that night, when he comes home to find Kaito dancing to early 2000s Kuraki Mai in the kitchen. It’s bright in here, the curtains drawn against the early evening dark, and it smells like onions and red wine from the hayashi rice that’s on the stove. Kaito’s moves are horrendous and physically painful to witness.

“Yeah,” Kaito says, pulling to a stop mid-moonwalk. “There’s a nonzero chance that ‘Le trésor du ciel’ is Pandora. It’s a blue gemstone, and the name has to do with the sky. So.” He shrugs. Shinichi presses his fingers against the inner corners of his eyes.

“You do realize there’s a warrant out for your arrest right now? So hosting a heist isn’t the best idea, because there’s going to be approximately fifty able-bodied police officers trying to catch you?”

“Darling,” Kaito laughs. He spins around the room so swiftly that Shinichi doesn’t have time to dodge his arms when they get him around the arms and dip him.

“Secret of my heart,” Kuraki Mai sings.

“You are treading on very thin ice right now,” says Shinichi, encouraged into an uncomfortable backbend over one of Kaito’s arms with one leg hoisted up, quite against his will. Blood rushes to his head. Kaito’s head is silhouetted against the overhead lights, his hair haloed around his head, his smile huge when he leans in to kiss Shinichi.

“I haven’t been caught yet,” Kaito points out when he pulls back. “Have a little more faith in the world’s greatest phantom thief.”

“Funnily enough, I don’t recall there being official rankings for that,” Shinichi says dryly, but he loops his arms around Kaito’s neck as they straighten. “Just be careful, okay? Because if you get caught…” There would be nothing that he could do, if Kaito was caught. He swallows. “If you get caught, I don’t… I wouldn’t—”

“I know.” Kaito kisses him on the mouth before he even finishes talking. When he pulls back, his smile has gone predatory, dirty. He glances at the cat-shaped kitchen timer sitting on the counter beside the stove, makes a considering sound, and fits Shinichi up against the fridge. “The stew is supposed to simmer for another seven minutes. Think that’s long enough?” One of his hands dips into the waistband of Shinichi’s pants.

“That’s kind of insulting,” Shinichi scoffs, and then doesn’t last four minutes. It’s something he would be embarrassed about if Kaito didn’t look so proud of himself when he wipes his mouth off, climbs off his knees, and jerks off all over Shinichi’s stomach.

“I love you so much,” he says when he’s done, breathless and messy-haired. Shinichi runs his fingers through the evidence gathering on his skin and laughs, a little desperately, before he leans in to kiss Kaito again. The kitchen timer dings.

“Just start in my life,” sings Kuraki Mai.

For once, it’s not Sera who stops by Shinichi’s office around two weeks later—the morning before Kaito’s next heist is scheduled—to deploy the bomb. It’s Miyagawa, one of the officers he assigned to the Hamada case. She hovers in the doorway, looking nervous, until Shinichi makes a point of looking up, smiling, and asking, “Did you need something, Miyagawa?” as kindly as he can. He’s not sure why he intimidates her. She was there the time he came in with the flu and poured half a bottle of cough syrup into his coffee, which resulted in several bouts of hallucinations and Takagi driving him home halfway through the workday.

“Um, well,” she stammers. “I just thought I should, erm, give another update, sir?”

“On the Hamada case?” he asks, just to be sure. Miyagawa nods frantically. Her ponytail bobs behind her.

“We’re apprehended our main suspect, sir,” she says. Shinichi blinks, once, then twice, then four times in a row.

“And by that you mean Kaitou Kid?” His gaze drops to the little desk calendar on his desk. His heart kicks in his chest. “But the heist hasn’t happened yet.”

“Yes, sir,” Miyagawa tells him. Something about the fall of her face—the draw of her eyebrows, the downturn of her lips, the puppy-dog gleam of her eyes—makes her look anxious on a good day. Right now, however, she looks as though she’s expecting to be slapped. Shinichi can’t dedicate enough energy to discerning why. “Er—ah—to be more accurate, we’ve arrested someone we suspect to be Kid. A man named Kuroba Kaito. Sir.”

“I see.” Shinichi puts his hands in his lap so they don’t give him away and schools his expression as best as he can manage. He feels cold. Has his air conditioning been turned on? “And how did you find out that he was Kid? As far as I knew, his identity wasn’t known.” He would’ve remembered them telling him that they’d figured Kaito’s identity out. Taking a deep breath, he snatches up the relevant case file that’s been sitting on the edge of his desk and begins re-reading the notes as Miyagawa continues talking.

“Well, sir, uh, Superintendent Hakuba came back from his consulting job with the English police just today, you see, and when he, erm, heard about the case and how Kid was our main suspect, he suggested that we look into this man named Kuroba Kaito? Apparently, they were classmates in high school, and he always suspected Kuroba Kaito of being Kid. He had some circumstantial evidence, and he is a superintendent, and his father is the superintendent general, so we, ah, decided to do as he said.” Her voice grows in confidence. “We arrested Kuroba and got a warrant to search his home, but we couldn’t find any Kid-related material at the residence listed on his file. The house seemed empty, actually, which suggests that he’s been living somewhere else. So what we’ve been instructed to do by the superintendent is to wait for the heist time to pass. If it doesn’t happen, then it’s evidence against Kuroba. We can charge him with Hamada’s murder.”

“I see,” Shinichi says after a moment. His heartrate has steadied into something healthier. He gives Miyagawa another smile, one that feels stronger and more genuine than the last, and shuts the case file. She blushes and ducks her head. “Good work, Miyagawa. I suspect we’ll find out the truth about Kuroba—and Hamada—soon enough.”

Shinichi is lucky. He’s lucky that he knows Kaito well enough that the notes he reads, disjointed into fragments like “turn left @ corner—mybe 2 flash + 2 smoke if Naka, 10 more = 4 flash + 5 smoke” and “Naka/Kusa/Takano/prin???!!!”, make sense to him. He’s lucky that he can call his mother two hours before heist time and ask her how to make a latex mask of the Crown Princess of the Newria Islands, with few questions asked. He’s lucky that Professor Agasa, who still lives across the street, has a new voice-changer in the shape of a bedazzled choker necklace, and he’s lucky that he and Kaito are about the same size and he can fit into the outfit that Kaito has ready.

But most of all, Shinichi thinks as he finds that the passcode to Kaito’s laptop is Shinichi’s birthday, as he goes to google directions for how to deploy smoke bombs and sees the search bar autofill “dinner recipes,” “easy dinner recipes,” and “dinner recipes that will make my husband say he loves me!!”, as he sees the way Kaito’s scribbled a heart with their names written inside beside “try & get hme before 11—shinichi sleeps @ 11:30!!!” on his copy of the blueprints for the Grand Beika Hotel—he’s lucky to have Kaito.

“There has been a shocking turn of events in the Hamada Souichirou case. The police officer, a member of the special task force dedicated to capturing Kaitou Kid, was found dead following the phantom thief’s previous heist. As all other people in attendance were fellow police officers and no material evidence was found, aside from a card from Kaitou Kid’s infamous card gun, Kid was suspected to be the culprit. As a result, Kuroba Kaito, a well-known local stage magician, was arrested under suspicion of being Kid. While evidence against him was circumstantial, Kuroba was held for twenty-four hours, a timeframe that included the heist time that Kid had sent regarding ‘Le trésor du ciel,’ the blue diamond currently under the care of Adalya Clémence Hermann III, the crown princess of the Newria Islands.

“However, the heist was completed as scheduled. Despite a police presence of over forty-five officers guarding the diamond’s location, Kaitou Kid was able to infiltrate the hotel and steal the stone, with his usual showmanship and flair for the dramatic, as anyone who saw the fireworks show he set off following his successful heist will attest. This successful heist exonerates Kuroba Kaito, proving that he is not, in fact, Kaitou Kid. He was released from police custody this morning.

“Furthermore, Inspector Kudou Shinichi of the homicide department has issued a statement regarding the Hamada case. A second forensic analysis of the body found gunpowder residue on the sleeves of jacket worn by the victim, suggesting that the victim himself was the one who fired the gun—in a shocking twist, this case has been determined to be a suicide. Hamada Souichirou was a member of the Kid task force for almost seven years and had expressed significant frustration and anger over being unable to make a successful arrest of the elusive phantom thief. The card left at the scene was intended to incriminate Kid, as were the unusually strict police barricades that were enforced at the heist, which ensured that aside from Kid, all other possible suspects were police officers and therefore easily accessed, with credible testimonies. It is also speculated that the victim shot himself in the stomach in order allow himself to leave a dying message, but may have passed away before he was able to complete his objective. However, as there is no way to verify these claims…”

“Shinichi.”

Startled, Shinichi turns from where he’s curled up on the couch watching the morning news program, which is now devolving into a mess of wrong opinions. Kaito is standing in the open doorway to the living room, his expression so—big, and full of emotion, that Shinichi freezes where he sits. A moment passes before he realizes he’s still wearing the blue shirt from the Kid outfit. He flushes, for reasons he can’t understand. He’s been far more naked in front of Kaito.

The thought creeps into his head: Not this emotionally naked, though.

“I see you’ve been released from holding,” he says. Instead of if this isn’t love, I don’t know what else I have to give.

He doesn’t have to say any of that, though. Kaito smiles at him—this sort of quiet, warm smile that looks so soft, as though it would melt away if Shinichi touched it.

“I have,” he says. Instead of I know. He crosses the room in only a few steps, swallowing Shinichi up in his arms, pressing his mouth to every part of Shinichi he can reach—the side of his head, his cheekbone, the dip at his throat. Shinichi holds him close and doesn’t say anything when he feels Kaito bury his face in the Shinichi’s neck, a hint of dampness against Shinichi’s jawline. They stay like that, together, one, for long enough that the news report fades into a commercial for Pocari Sweat.

“So I have a stolen diamond prized at over twelve million hidden in the vegetable drawer in the fridge,” Shinichi says eventually. “It’s jammed between a bundle of green onions and a tomato. What should we do about that, again?”

Kaito muffles a wet laugh against the inside of his shoulder.

“We forget about it while I make love to you on this couch and then deal with it afterwards,” he announces, running his hands up underneath the Kid shirt. Shinichi grimaces.

“If you say ‘make love’ to me ever again, I’m never letting your dick anywhere near me,” he says. Kaito pulls back to raise an eyebrow at him, as if to say You like my dick too much to ever go through on that threat. Shinichi scowls. “Or I’ll never wear the full Kid costume to have kinky sex with you.”

Kaito’s face falls.

“You’re a cruel man. I demand a refund.” Even as he says it, his hands have made it down around Shinichi’s cock.

“Too bad I didn’t come with a gift receipt,” Shinichi says, a little nonsensically, and then forgets the thread of the conversation when Kaito squeezes him in response.

It’s probably the slowest sex they’ve ever had. Kaito stops midway in to push the sweaty hair off of Shinichi’s forehead and kiss him on the tip of the nose, even when Shinichi groans and kicks him in the back with a heel. There isn’t a moment when Kaito’s hands aren’t all over him, on the bony parts of his shoulders, or the dip under his ribcage, or the ticklish join of his hip to his thigh. When Kaito comes—before Shinichi, for maybe the first time ever—he does it with his face jammed up in Shinichi’s neck, clutching at his back with desperate fingers, the sound he makes strained and broken as though it’s been pulled out of him with pliers. He doesn’t let go of Shinichi for a long time, his grip too tight, his breathing ragged.

Shinichi would complain, but he’s holding Kaito back, just as tightly.

“Looks like everything’s cleared up, huh, Kudou-kun?” Sera remarks the next time she shows up in Shinichi’s office unannounced. Shinichi, who has finally procured the seasonal Starbucks drink via a Miyagawa who was very thankful that he cleared up the Hamada case, arches an eyebrow at her. She’s wearing a well-cut jacket that has a tiny sticky-looking handprint on one lapel.

“It looks that way,” he agrees. Sera nods and deposits another two case files on his desk. She’s about to turn on one booted heel and leave when he clears his throat. One of his fingers keeps tapping at the edge of the table. “Hey, Sera?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think you and Ran might be free tomorrow night?” Shinichi asks. He can only meet her gaze for a few seconds before he drops it back to the desk and the files that are staring back at him. “I—might have someone that I want you two to meet.”

“Finally,” Sera says. When he glances up at her, she’s grinning at him, looking as though she wants to tousle his hair. “Of course we’re free.” Her brow pinches, as she apparently remembers that they have a two-year-old at home, and then smooths. “Well, we can make ourselves free, at least. We can’t wait to meet whoever you’ve been hiding from us for so long.”

“Yeah,” Shinichi says. Her smile must be contagious; he can feel something just like it on his own face. “I can’t wait to stop hiding him, too.”