Detective Conan - Magic Kaito oneshots

Doomed from the start

Kaito had been sullen again recently, the persistent kind of way that Aoko hadn't seen on him in between having gotten over his father's death for the most part - she knew he hadn't truly gotten over it to this day and probably never would completely - and witnessing the horrible events of the Nightmare heist.

Though she couldn't actually remember where exactly he'd been for most of that, not that being unable to keep track of him was anything new. But he'd met Kenta Connery and he knew that the boy had been orphaned that day. Given his own personal history it was bound to hit hard.

She wasn't surprised that he stopped being the class clown for the next week or so, for the first time in their entire school career. And while the class enjoyed their brief respite from his pranks, they couldn't celebrate in good conscience with Kaito forlornly staring into space at his desk. It would've been heartless and unfair. But that had been a while ago. As for what was up with him now... Aoko had no idea.

Akako watched Nakamori eye Kuroba in obvious concern, once more wondering how she'd gotten to the point of sitting at a table with them to eat lunch in the first place. Well, if she was honest with herself it was her own fault, she had been the one who'd moved herself into their line of sight by taking an interest in Kuroba.

That Nakamori had dragged her and Hakuba into the KID-capture-brigade, as their friendship group had been called upon forming, before it turned into more than a team supposed to be working on catching Kuroba's alter ego, which they never really did anyway, was the only fair consequence she presumed.

And it had landed her here, at a point where she was mad at whatever it was that made Kuroba look sullen and Nakamori concerned, wishing to hex it. The despair in Kuroba's, the worry in Nakamori's aura bothered her in ways it shouldn't. What in Lucifer's name had they done to her to make her care...

Saguru noticed the mood at their lunch table immediately as he walked over to take his seat. Kuroba was staring into the middle distance absentmindedly again, Aoko watching him in concern, and Koizumi looked upset enough at seeing her friends upset to punch a hole in a wall.

He had weird friends, he knew, but they cared, even if two out of the three of them would rather eat their own shoes than admit it out loud, and that he could call them his friends at all was more than enough for him, more than he'd hoped for when moving to Japan.

The teenage detective was fully on Koizumi's side in getting rid of whatever was bothering their friends. Or rather bothering Kuroba and by extension worrying the rest of them.

There had been no heists recently and there were likely none planned for the foreseeable future, no gem that might catch KID's eye was currently making its way to the country. Maybe someone was forcing him into a heist again? But the barely veiled spark of grim excitement, the silent promise of a milder form of revenge, was missing from his eyes. So not that. Was he being blackmailed again?

The tension in his shoulders could be interpreted that way, but... he wasn't twitching to look around him. Rather his hand kept making small aborted motions of going for his phone before he seemed to think better of it. So he was expecting a message, important enough to crack the usually unbreakable poker face of the magician thief just enough to allow visible tension to leak out.

Well, and the obvious absentmindedness. That was also something Kuroba would never allow himself on a normal day, when he kept up his act of ever energetic prankster.

To allow himself to drop it... something was looming on the horizon and Saguru had a feeling it was an unpleasant something that he wouldn't manage to catch up to with his deductions before it blew up in their faces, if it hadn't already snuck up on them, unnoticed but unavoidable.