Detective Conan - Magic Kaito oneshots

No rest for the wicked

Kaito sighed, dragged a hand down his face, ticked off another day in the calendar. Stared at the letters on his schedule sheet until they lost all meaning and blurred before his eyes. He'd overworked himself again to the point where being able to go to sleep at night was the only thing he looked forward to in a day. And where waking up again was almost disappointing.

But he supposed that's what he got for his poor life choices. Nobody had forced him to take on a highly illegal night job he didn't only not get paid for, in reality it lost him money, but that also required a gargantuan amount of effort put in, and a weekly training regimen harsher than that of a highly driven Olympic athlete. All on the side of high school.

And that wasn't even counting in his 'private projects', which took up the small gaps few and far between in his overloaded schedule. Like that firework show he did for Aoko's birthday in combination with his heist, or that magic show he held at the park to gather donations for the local animal shelter that had been in danger of having to close down. Or his efforts to find a good new home for a certain little orphan boy by the name of Kenta Connery.

Kaito would've adopted Kenta on the spot, not being a legal adult be damned, he would've had his ways to circumvent that, if he didn't feel like he was at fault that the boy had been orphaned to begin with. And the thief also had to admit to himself that being associated with him was a potential death sentence he couldn't possibly risk imposing on an innocent child. That he didn't even have the necessary time and energy to raise, on top of it all.

Because of this Kaito had spent a lot of his time in the last couple months playing the role of a social worker, to the point where he could do it in his sleep and sometimes dreamed of all the households he'd scouted. At least he'd found some genuinely nice foster parents for the poor boy and the process to get him into their care was finally underway.

Kaito could finally tell himself that he had done his part and move on to his next project. Or maybe take a break for once. What a concept. Less than half a year of being a wanted criminal and he was steadily working himself towards burnout in his mid to late teens. No surprise there, really. He sighed. So much for living the best years of his life, as the saying went, referring to a person's youth and teenage years.

The young thief checked his schedule again. Aoko had complained about him not spending time with her again recently, like they used to in the past, before high school, and when she got worked up on the idea that he was trying to get rid of her things got ugly. Her insecurity was sadly known to run rampant at the slightest opportunity, so he should better do something about that soon. He was unwillingly upsetting her enough as it was.

His Saturday mornings were free now, since he'd completed his online course on professional make up art last week. (Not that he'd needed it as much as other participants, but his parents hadn't exactly been preparing him to take on the role of KID when they'd taught him magic, so some expansion of his very limited knowledge in the disguise department was necessary.) He'd invite Aoko out for breakfast then.

Maybe he'd also finally get around to regularly doing homework again afterwards. Maybe. The teenager chuckled at his own naïveté. Wishful thinking was a habit that was hard to break, it turned out.

The harsh reality was that, while he'd already been outfitted with a lot of the skills he'd eventually need for being KID the Phantom Thief during his childhood, like the secrets of being an entertainer and a showman, as well as the intricacies of stage magic, there were obviously a lot of things he'd been lacking when taking on the mantel of KID. And in order to survive this new occupation of his he'd had to mostly bury his private life for some unforeseeably long part of the near future.

He'd already been an athlete, enthusiastic gymnast and acrobat before KID, but he'd not been practicing with the necessary diligence that would have to guarantee his survival from then on out. Those had been some of the first classes he'd picked up again, aside from the suddenly very necessary course on make up artistry and theater prosthetics.