Chapter Text
Pain. More pain than Shinichi had ever imagined feeling. The poison burning in his veins, the utterly indescribable feeling of his bones cracking and reshaping themselves, he could feel himself dissolving. He wondered if that was what they meant by hiding the evidence. He vomited up blood, at least it was mostly blood, he thought. He wasn’t in much of a condition to check the exact composition but he was sure some of it must have been more serious than blood, because there had been squishy lumps of something forcing their way out of his throat along with the red. He was going to die here, the knowledge settled ice cold over his thoughts, he was going to die here, alone and no-one would ever even know why. And he wasn’t done, he wasn’t ready to be done. He’d never even had a chance to tell Ran that… his thoughts stuttered, losing coherency as pieces of skin started to peel away, thick and bloody, it was almost a mercy when his vision began to blur.
He could hear screaming as though at a great distance. It sounded like someone being murdered. Then he realised that someone was, and that someone was him. That the screaming was coming from him, and he was dying, and oh god the pain was so bad. Then his vocal chords cut out and he couldn’t scream anymore, even when he really really wished he could.
It took a long time. By the time he finally blacked out, death was a relief.
He hadn’t expected to wake up. He really really hadn’t expected to wake up, so when he did he was utterly disoriented. It took him a moment to register that he wasn’t dead, that whatever they had done to him hadn’t worked like it should have, because he was still breathing. It hadn’t worked like it should have but it had still had an effect because he sat up to find himself half swamped in clothes far too big for him, and soaked head to toe in blood. His own blood, came the sickening realisation. He blinked, looked around at the crime scene, at his own murder scene with a sense of morbid curiosity. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and the sheer horror of it paralysed him for a good few minutes.
He had to get out of here. The thought came to him suddenly, through the sense of numb shock. He had to get away. Because if what they’d done to him hadn’t worked they would try to finish the job, and he really didn’t want to die, not again, he couldn’t face that again. He tried to stand, and found himself tangled up in the bloody clothes that he abruptly realised were his, even if they were sizes bigger than they should have been. He disentangled himself, wrapped himself in the red soaked sweatshirt as he stumbled away. Somewhere in the distance he could hear sirens, and he picked up his pace. He couldn’t afford to get caught like this.
But he couldn’t wander the streets covered in blood either, heading home probably wasn’t the smartest decision, but he needed clean clothes, and a shower, and somewhere to take shelter while he planned his next move, and he had nowhere else to go. It took him far longer than it should have to realise it wasn’t his clothes that had grown, it was him that had shrunk.The sight of his reflection in a shop window was what finally connected the dots for him. He was a child again, six years old at the most. The price of survival. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that, the shock of his almost death leaving him numb to complex emotions.
It meant that Agasa Hakase didn’t recognise him when he caught him trying to break into his own house. Well that and the blood, which would probably have rendered him pretty unrecognisable in itself. He looked like something out of a cheap horror film he knew that much. It was a miracle Agasa hadn’t called the police the moment he saw him. It was even more of a miracle that Shinichi had managed to convince him of his true identity, that Agasa had been flexible enough, that Shinichi had been convincing enough. He wasn’t sure why he’d made such an effort to make him believe, except that a part of him wanted to be recognised just to prove to himself that he wasn’t dead.
That decision had at least got him inside, off the street, and gained him access to a shower, and he hadn’t realised just how pervasive the metallic scent of blood had been until he was finally free of it. Dressed in the old clothes Agasa had retrieved from his house he almost felt human again. Human, but not himself. Would he ever be himself again?
“They think I’m dead. The people that did this to me.” Shinichi said numbly.
“Will they be looking for a body?” Agasa asked, understanding instantly what would happen if they found out he wasn’t. Whatever else he might be, the professor was smart.
“No, I don’t think… No, there were enough… remains, at the scene to be convincing.” He tried not to think about the scene, about people finding it, about them realising what had happened. He hoped they didn’t get Ran to identify the body. She didn’t need to see that.
“Remains?” Agasa sounded worried, but Shinichi was feeling too numb to respond to his concern. Shock, a part of his mind informed him helpfully.
“There was… You know I’m a lot smaller now?” Agasa nodded. “Well all that extra body mass had to go somewhere right. There’s… not a whole body, but there’s enough there that no-one will believe I could have survived. Nothing bleeds that much and lives.” Agasa looked pale and slightly ill at the thought. Shinichi knew the feeling.
“What do you want to do?” Agasa asked, clearly trying to be supportive. Shinichi just laughed, an awful hollow laugh that he could barely believe was his.
“I don’t, I don’t know. What can I do? I can’t fix this. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Fuck there’s more pieces of me on the ground where they killed me than there are sitting here talking to you. And everyone will think I’m dead, and it’s better if they think that because those guys are still out there.” He made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob “Maybe they’re right. Am I really alive, am I really Kudo Shinichi. Or am I just an echo, a leftover of a person.” Agasa clearly didn’t know what to say to that, to Shinichi’s mounting despair so he wrapped his arms around him like the child he appeared to be. Shinichi froze for a moment at the gesture before relaxing into the hold. He stared over Agasa’s shoulder as he continued in a small and broken voice. “Ran will cry when they tell her.”
If he started crying then, Agasa was too polite to call him out on it.