Detective Conan - Magic Kaito oneshots

Promises

This didn't feel right. Didn't feel real. Yusaku sat in the long shadows of the dimly lit room and stared at the other man presenting him with his company, also half-hidden in the shadows. They hadn't seen each other in person for so long, it had to be years. Yusaku hadn't counted how many and despised himself for it.

It was a relatively warm night, summer was quickly approaching, and the windows were still open to air out the large dusty library of the house he'd only recently purchased with his wife. Well, technically she'd purchased it, financially she was still ahead of him quite a bit. For now.

It was only a matter of time until his books became bestsellers. She said that every time he published a new one. His beloved, very pregnant wife sleeping upstairs, oblivious to his late night visitor.

Currently he couldn't presume with absolute certainty that she would've been more upset at being woken up in the middle of the night than at missing a chance to play hostess for her mentor even at such a late hour, but if he was completely honest with himself he'd never intended to involve her in this anyway so it was a moot point.

She didn't need to see him staring at Toichi as if he wasn't sure the man who looked pretty much like his mirror image was real and wasn't going to dissipate into fog any second now. Didn't need her commenting on his stunned silence in the man's presence.

Didn't need to see concrete evidence on her face that he really was the only one for whom Toichi had been a painfully distant concept instead of a real person for what felt like forever. A washed out memory, a fading echo of an emotional goodbye long ago that still whispered traces of sorrow in his ears during some unfortunately lonely nights that left him with too much time to think. To remember.

Somehow it was fine when it turned out that he was the mentor behind his wife's skyrocketing acting career. Somehow knowing that the someone he shared his bed with, had exchanged wedding rings with almost two years prior, and who he was closest to in the entire world regularly saw a person who only existed in the back of his head anymore was fine, didn't register. Didn't make him real again for Yusaku even if she talked about him often.

It didn't make him real when Yusaku figured out a key fact about that white clad phantom thief the press talked about every other month and kept it to himself, at first out of disbelief and then out of an utter helplessness regarding the emotions that locked the words beneath his throat and his doubt if he was even entitled to feel them.

But now they were sitting in the same room, face to face, and that made it a little more real. Not completely, because they were both half hidden in the shadows of the tall, halfway filled bookshelves, Yusaku hadn't finished unpacking yet, and Toichi didn't exactly announce himself visiting, simply appeared, probably slipping in through the open window uninvited.

From outside the darkness and quiet wrapped around the moment like a blanket, keeping everything else away. Not even a breeze rustled the leaves of the trees and bushes in the garden. And neither of them had said a word yet. It was so surreal Yusaku wasn't sure if he wasn't dreaming or hallucinating this meeting. But the expressionless yet familiar face staring back at him was older than the one he saw in his sleep.

His brother had come to visit. His brother who he'd failed so many years ago when they were still just teenagers. His brother who's parting words to him had been angry shouts tinged with heartbreak and despair. His brother who he hadn't been able to invite to his graduation or his wedding because he had no idea where he'd gone, what he was doing, what he called himself now.

And Yusaku still didn't know if he would've invited him even if he could've back then, didn't know what he really could've done differently to avoid this. That was the worst part about it all.