Chapter 37
Pandora turned a page of the comic it was reading, scanning the flimsy paper with interest. Shinichi had bought the comic for it earlier that day, when they had stopped off at the store to buy some groceries. The jewel hadn't really been expecting Shinichi to actually buy the comic for it when it had asked, and had been subsequently delighted.
Pandora wasn't much of a reader. Its transparent lips moved as it followed its finger along the page, occasionally pausing to figure out a word. Sometimes it giggled at the terrible puns the story featured, making sure to keep the noise down so as not to disturb Shinichi, who had fallen asleep in the chair beside it.
It clapped a hand over its mouth and sniggered as another joke caught its attention.
"What are you finding so funny?"
Pandora gasped and jumped to its feet in surprise. The chair it had been sitting on rocked backwards, and was saved from falling by KID grabbing a leg. Shinichi shifted in her sleep.
KID sighed in relief and set the chair down again. He caught Pandora's eye and theatrically wiped sweat from his brow, causing the jewel to smile.
How can you see me?
KID held up the necklace he had taken from Shinichi a minute before. "Skin contact, right? I wanted to have that talk I was promised."
Pandora's face lit up. Okay! But... what do you want to talk about?
KID shrugged. "You, I guess. I mean, you're not exactly a boring subject. I guess I want to know what you are, who you are... I'd like to know how Shinichi came across you, too."
Pandora studied KID silently for a few moments. And Toichi too, right?
KID nodded, a shadow crossing his face.
Pandora sighed, as though speaking to KID was a perilous task it, nevertheless, had to do. Come on then, it said heavily, beckoning to KID as it walked into the kitchen.
It wasn't about to let him see it too eager.
===
Hattori jerked awake as the boot of the car opened. He'd lost track of how long he'd been in there, the cold freezing his body and the petrol fumes making him nauseous. Although he suspected that he had only been in there for a day or two.
He tried to glare up at the face of the person who had imprisoned him, but the light shining from behind the figure rendered it to no more than a silhouette. He could see the taser though.
Hattori was dragged upwards and forced out of the boot of the car, into a garage of some kind. He stumbled and a hand twisted into his hair and yanked him upright again. Cold metal was pressed into his back, and he was guided through a pair of doors and up a set of stairs. He was shoved into a room, the ropes on his arms cut so his hands were no longer tied. A packet of biscuits and a bottle of water was lobbed into the room, and the light vanished as the door was closed and locked.
Hattori growled as he tore away his gag and freed his feet. He gulped half of the water down, remembering just in time to save some- who knew how long it would be before he was given any more?
He thought back to the boot. During his time in the small enclosed space, he had been made aware of the existence of a toolbox of some sort by it repeatedly sliding into his head. As he shook some life back into his limbs and stretched his aching back, Hattori thought back to the dried blood he had seen on the handle and sides of case as light had flooded into the boot.
===
... And that was how Shinichi became Christie, Pandora finished. It was all the fault of the Black Organisation. Of course, this was after Shinichi got me from Toichi. Toichi stole me from Snake.
"And he got injured in the process?"
He got shot. But he was alright afterwords.
"I don't remember that", KID said.
He wouldn't have told you. Toichi didn't want you to know. He wanted you to have a halfway normal life, as normal a life as a kid could have with two world-famous thieves as parents.
KID hesitated before asking the next question. "Do you know... why my father knew about you and Snake in the first place? I know he was trying to find you... I just don't know why."
He was paid, Pandora said bluntly. Snake was being paid too. They were both working for a very rich man hell-bent on finding the secret to immortality.
KID coloured angrily. "My father would never-"
Pandora shot the thief an amused glance. He wasn't a saint, you know. Even Toichi was capable of feeling the lure of money. But you're right, Toichi wouldn't have willingly worked with such people, had he known that they were like that. But he didn't know.
Toichi was offered money, enough money that he would no longer have to work for a living. He could send you to the best schools where you would receive the greatest education. You would live in a big house. His wife would be able to buy anything she wanted. You would never want for money again. Even your children, and their children, would be rich. And all that just to find one pretty little jewel hidden inside a bigger one. It was more than a bargain, it was a deal of a lifetime.
"So... what happened?", KID asked slowly.
Pandora sighed heavily as it remembered the past events. I wasn't hidden inside a bigger jewel. It was just a little detail to confuse people enough that they wouldn't find me. My guardian at the time, a young girl, was the next in line to protect me. I had been passed down her family for generations, and now it was her turn.
Toichi was smart enough to- eventually- figure out that I wasn't hidden inside another jewel. How would I get in there anyways? You can't put a jewel into another jewel, that's impossible. So, after a lot of hard work and research, Toichi tracked me down. My guardian refused to give me away. Toichi gave up for that night, deciding to appeal to her again tomorrow, urging her to think about it overnight. But Snake, who had been employed as a back up plan, followed Toichi. He was ordered to take me from the girl. She fought back and was killed.
When Toichi heard about it, he was horrified. He said it was his own fault she was dead. He stole me from Snake, who was on his way to give me to his master, and that's when we... linked, I guess. I explained that I could think and feel, and that I should be kept away from Snake and the people who employed him. So he passed me on to the people he thought could best help him- the Kudo family.
"And then Snake killed him", KID finished, his voice hollow.
Yeah. Snake was angry at having been bested. He sabotaged Toichi's magic trick and killed him. He was an idiot in my opinion- shouldn't he have left Toichi alive to find the whereabouts of me? In my opinion, he didn't make a good assassin- too impulsive.
"I often think it was a pity he fell and died", KID said quietly. "I wanted to see him behind bars. I wanted to see him pay for what he did."
Pandora bit its lip. ... Yeah. Me too. But it must have been painful to fall from that height, so it's not all that bad, right? He got what he deserved.
KID shrugged."I guess."
Pandora searched around desperately for another topic, but KID beat it to it.
"And what are you?", he said, leaning forwards to stare at it curiously.
Huh?, Pandora said blankly.
"What are you? In my experience, jewels don't just learn how to speak by themselves."
I'm a magic jewel!, Pandora said gleefully, clapping its hands.
KID stood and looked at a photo on the mantelpiece next to him. There was a picture of a young Shinichi standing at a crime scene. She had a thoughtful look on her face, her chin in her hand, and her parents were standing a little way off, gazing at her proudly.
The scene was only slightly marred by the garroted man lying slumped against the wall behind the family, half in, half out of the picture.
"So... what? You were created by a witch or something?" KID thought about Akako.
Haha, do witches even exist? No, I wasn't created by a witch.
"Then how were you created?"
I was interested in immortality a long time ago, I remember, Pandora reminisced. I studied it, among other things. That's how I know a lot of trivia and stuff. I know lots of things.
"You studied things? Then you... were human once?" KID struggled to understand.
Pandora's smile dimmed a little. I guess.
"What happened? You got yourself put into a jewel? Or did you study something through someone?" KID grimaced at the dead man in the picture. No wonder Shinichi was unafraid of the dark, if she had been seeing such things at a young age. The only thing she had to be frightened of were the acts of humans themselves.
The smile faded until it was just a ghost of a smirk. I studied things myself.
"So you were human? Do you remember anything about who you were?"
I don't.
"If you were a boy or girl? Do you remember what age you were?" KID finally looked up from the photo to see Pandora gazing at him with a blank stare. The colour of its eyes had dimmed to a dull red. He shuffled back a step, momentarily frightened.
I don't know, Pandora said, its voice a blank monotone. There was a splintering sound, and the glass of the photo frame cracked.
KID nodded and quickly set the photo back.
Pandora flipped back to normal in a split second. I'm surprised you didn't come to talk to Shinichi. She would have been happy to see you.
"Happy?", KID said dubiously. "Exasperated, yes. Weary, yes. Blushing, yes. Happy? Nope, I don't think so."
Pandora was still for a second or two before laughing. Wow, you really don't get it, do you? How glad she is when she sees you.
"Glad? She certainly doesn't show it. Like, I know she doesn't hate me, but she doesn't exactly celebrate every time I turn up here."
Ah, said Pandora wisely. That's because this is Shinichi we're talking about. Quiet, genius, book-reading Shinichi. The only time she ever shows her true feelings is when she blurts them.
KID looked at the jewel sideways. "Like that time at the last heist?", he suggested casually. "When she said that she might have got the wrong idea?"
Pandora's grin covered half of its face. Yes.
KID blinked at it. He was so used to getting 'maybe's and 'what do you think?'s from Shinichi and the jewel that it was a shock when he finally got a straight answer. "So... what? She- she likes me?"
Pandora smirked. Wow, you're really clueless, aren't you, KID?
"I'm not!"
What about you? Do you have someone you like?
"I- well- I'm not going to tell you that", he said firmly, seeing the hungry glint in the jewel's eyes.
Oh, come on! Please? Pleeeaaase?
"No."
There's no need to hide it. It's obvious.
"No!"
Well, it's not going to be Shinichi who's going to confess, you know, Pandora warned. She might not seem like it, but she can be shy at times. And she's frightened of driving you away.
"If you've worked out I like her", KID said curiously, "then surely she has too?"
Pandora ignored the implied insult. Shinichi's pretty dim when it comes to relationships. Besides, she just thinks that you're messing around with her. It's a good way to get away, isn't it? The thief flusters the detective in order to escape. You flirt with girls enough that she thinks that that's what you might be doing with her. The jewel paused, noticing KID's horrified expression. I take it that wasn't your intention, huh?
"No! I wouldn't do that to her! I wouldn't do that to anyone!"
You're Kaitou KID, Pandora said. How are we meant to know what you will and will not do?
===
Shinichi woke up to find Pandora gone. She panicked inwardly for a second or two before she sensed its presence in the kitchen. Pulling herself out of the chair, she walked into the room to see Pandora seated cross-legged on the kitchen table. It was staring blankly into space.
"Pandora?", Shinichi said, approaching quietly. She put her hand on its shoulder- well, where its shoulder would be if it had one. It was an impossible task to touch something that wasn't there in the physical sense, but Pandora seemed to appreciate human gestures like that.
Pandora didn't stir.
Shinichi felt worried. She hadn't seen that expression on its face for a long time. Not since years ago, when she had tried quizzing it about its past. She remembered how it had curled in on itself halfway through the conversation and refused to say any more after letting slip that it might not have always have been a jewel. She hadn't mentioned it since.
Shinichi? Pandora spoke suddenly, shattering the silence.
"Yes?"
... Nothing.
A moment of silence. Shinichi removed her hand and sat down next to the jewel, shoulder to shoulder. The jewel untensed a little.
Shinichi?
"Yes?"
Love you.
Shinichi looked at it. "Where did that come from?"
It shrugged. I dunno.
Shinichi looked at the ceiling, then at her knees. "Ah... love you too." She scratched her cheek. Some days she felt like she knew how gruff fathers like Mouri felt when trying to express their feelings to their kids.
Pandora sighed and relaxed completely. It looked at Shinichi.
"You going to tell me why your jewel is randomly in the kitchen?", Shinichi suggested.
Padora grinned and floated up out of Shinichi's reach. No.
Shinichi sighed. "Pandora-"
I know something you don't know!, Pandora sang, and Shinichi knew that whatever crisis she had just glimpsed had been averted.
===
Kaito sighed and adjusted the lid of his laptop. He had followed the man he had seen tailing Shinichi back to his apartment and set up cameras and bugs. He had then watched eagerly for any signs of suspicious activity.
So far, the only thing bad thing he had seen the man do was forget to put his vegetable peels in the recycling bin.
Kaito wasn't stupid. He knew that the suspected Black Organisation member would be tricky to pin down. He knew that he wouldn't openly do something illegal, or conveniently speak about the organisation in front of one of the cameras and microphones, but he had expected something. In truth, the thief wasn't entirely sure what exactly he was looking for. Pictures of Shinichi pinned up on a dartboard for target practice? Shady phone calls conducted entirely in code? But whatever he was watching out for, it clearly wasn't forthcoming.
Of course, the man might have been an FBI agent keeping an eye out for Shinichi's enemies. Protecting her.
But if he was, Shinichi and Pandora clearly hadn't been consulted about it. According to Pandora, they were around 99% sure that the man was a Black Organisation spy.
And it was all because of Pandora that KID was finally sure of their name...
The lap top screen blinked.
Kaito straightened up, staring at the moniter. One of his cameras had just gone off. He tapped the screen, but the camera shot stayed resolutely blank. It was the only one in the tiny kitchen of the apartment. Had he just missed something? Had his view been blinded deliberately, or had his camera just malfunctioned?
He sighed, then clenched his jaw. There was only one way to find out.
===
Hattori listened carefully, and with growing alarm. He could hear sobbing in the next room over, and a thumping sound. Occasionally, he could make out the word ,"why".
He was pretty sure that there had been someone in that room earlier. He had been tapping out a tune on the floorboards to pass the time after a search of the room yielded no results, when someone had started tapping back at him. They had exchanged tunes through the walls, which were so thick they could only just hear each other. Now the tapping had stopped.
Gradually, the sobbing wound down. Hattori could feel, rather than hear, the sound of something being dragged along the floor until it faded.
He tapped many tunes out that night, but none of them were answered.
===
"This one", Shinichi said, "Is different."
Before her lay another teenage victim of the serial killer who had by now claimed several lives in the space of a few weeks. He had been opened up like the others in the front room of his apartment, splayed out on the floor.
Pandora peered over its guardian's shoulder at the corpse. How so?, it said, puzzled.
Shinichi frowned. How was it different?
Well, the state of the walls for a start. There were no blood spatters as there had been before, no signs of a struggle either. That, and the rope burns found on the wrists and ankles of the victim, suggested that the victim hadn't been killed at his home.
The victim hadn't been seen since a few days ago. The killer was kidnapping his victims and murdering them somewhere else, leaving them for the police to find. His past mistakes, his close shave, had obviously given him a scare.
Shinichi bit her lip. This sudden change would make it even harder to find Hattori. And that was if the killer even had Hattori. The detective had a sudden image of Hattori lying dead in a ditch somewhere, the victim of a simple mugging or accident.
"Damn it", she hissed.
===
Kaito slid the window shut behind him and gave a sigh of relief. It would have been problematic if anyone had seen him breaking in, but the street was fairly quiet at this time of night, and there hadn't been anyone out.
He had foregone his KID outfit in order to make breaking in easier- he now wore grey sweats with a cap, the bill pulled down low to cover his eyes. Gloves ensured no fingerprints would be left behind, and the thickly padded soles of his shoes eliminated all noise. And he was wearing grey because, well, every successful thief knew that if you truly wanted to remain unseen, you should wear grey. Black showed up at night- the night was never truly black. But grey made you the night.
The suspected Black Organisation member was working late, due to a false KID message Kaito himself had planted, to ensure he would not be disturbed.
Kaito quickly located the broken camera and frowned. It didn't look broken. It looked at good as new. He replaced the faulty camera with a new one and slipped the old one into his pocket for further examination. Wearing a congratulatory grin, he turned to leave...
... and came face-to-face with a wooden bat.
The first blow caught him in the jaw. He fell backwards over a coffee table, a few teeth flying free. The second blow snapped the bone in his upraised arm, and the third hit him so hard his brain bounced in his skull.
He blacked out.
His attacker lowered the bat, breathing heavily. It looked at the face of the person it had knocked out and felt a momentary twinge of surprise. So that was why there had been cameras all over the house.
The sound of a key rattling in the lock snapped the attacker from its reverie. It straightened up, swinging the bat to and fro. Back to business.
===
Shinichi raised her head from her hands as the phone began to ring in the hallway. She heaved herself up and answered it.
"Shinichi?"
"Hi, Ran", Shinichi said tiredly. She caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and tried to neaten her hair.
"I just saw that thing about Hattori-kun."
Shinichi's hand paused in the act of wiping sleep out of her eyes. A television announcement had gone out that Hattori was missing, and his parents had been interviewed on TV. Kazuha had phoned her earlier, frantic, desperate to know if Shinichi had any leads.
"Yeah", Shinichi said. She felt her response was somewhat inadequate, but couldn't summon the energy to do anything about it. They had located the place Hattori had been abducted- his phone had been found lying on the pavement, partly hidden beneath a hedge, and scuff marks indicated that he had been dragged away. Shinichi had spent hours at the scene, leaving only when the darkening sky made searching too difficult.
Ran was silent for a moment or two, then said, hesitantly, "Do you want some company?"
Shinichi opened her mouth to say no, she was fine, you should get some sleep Ran... and surprised herself by blurting, "Yes."
"I'm on my way."
"Make sure the old- uh, your dad, drives you."
"Okay. See you soon."
Shinichi hung up and stared into the mirror. It ocurred to her that, while she liked being alone, she didn't much enjoy being lonely.
===
Kaito opened his eyes, hissing at the headache that immediately began to pound behind his eyes. He blinked a few times, then felt his face to check that his eyes were really open. They were. It was just too dark to tell.
Where was he? The last thing he remembered was being in the Black Organisation spy's house... replacing the camera... getting hit around the head...
His hand jumped to his scalp, brushing against something set to the side of him as it did so. He felt dried blood, sticky in places. He grimaced, feeling his head. There was a lot of blood, and it hurt like hell, but head wounds always bled an alarming amount. In any case, he probably wasn't about to slip into a coma.
He tasted metal and spat blood. One of his teeth in the left side of his jaw was dangerously loose, and the one next to it was missing. He couldn't raise one of his arms for the pain that it gave him. He gingerly felt it and decided it was broken.
He blinked again, squeezing his eyes open and shut, trying to banish the haze in his mind. Where was he? It was stuffy, but the floor felt chilly. It had a weird feel to it, like... wood?
Kaito tried to sit up and bashed his head into something. He fell back again, groaning. Surely it wasn't possible to be in this much pain?
He felt above him with his good hand. There was something set just above him, wood, like the floor. He felt around himself with increasing urgency. Wooden boards on all sides, cold from whatever temperature was outside them. He was in a box. A wooden box, just long enough for his body to fit neatly inside. Cheap board boxing him in.
A coffin.
Kaito's breath was coming faster and faster, and he tried to calm himself down for fear that he would fall unconscious again. He scrabbled around, searching for an opening, a hole, something that would disprove his theory. There was nothing but wood.
A few metres above him, a figure walked away from the freshly-turned earth of a new grave in the cemetery. It opened the gate and closed it again behind it, walking away with the feeling of a job well done.
===
AN:
I usually consider myself a good person, and then I take a look at what I do to my characters and am forced to revise my opinion ^_^' Poor Kaito.
Soon I'll be leaving uni for my Christmas holidays, so I expect I'll be able to update more often. I've got some original stories in the works too~
Thanks for all of your comments! I know I don't answer them all that often, but I'm really grateful for all of the positivity this story receives- plus, a lot of them make me laugh :)