Detective Conan - Magic Kaito oneshots

Changes

The rain rushed from the skies outside the window, steadily as it had been doing for hours at this point, the sound intermingling with the swooshing noise of cars driving by on the wet asphalt and birds singing in the trees, utterly undeterred by the weather.
Shinichi let his gaze drop back down from the watery scene outside the hospital window to the screen of his phone glowing in the dim light of a cloudy day.

How are you doing? Dealing with everything alright?

There was nothing and everything wrong with that text message, with Hattori's questions that should be so simple to answer but weren't. He wished he could've sent him an impression of the sound of the wind and rain outside, of the dim light filtering through the thick clouds, of the persistent hospital smell that was no doubt still continuously assaulting his nose like an ant colony on a mission except by now he couldn't register it anymore.

It shouldn't itch under his skin like that, Hattori being so clingy. He was worried, Shinichi had been holed up in the hospital for about two weeks and been awake for a little over one, Hattori had visited him the day after he'd awoken, had been one of the first. He hadn't brought lilies this time.

Whatever flowers were in the bouquet that he'd carried in his arms like an unimportant afterthought had been dropped in just as unceremoniously amongst those already stuffed into the vase on his bedside table, teal eyes a darker shadowed tone in the poor lighting as they catalogued the bandages and bandaids and the cast on Shinichi's leg, ignoring the cast around his own arm. Yet Hattori had a right to be worried.

Although he still slept a lot, Shinichi knew exactly how many days, how many hours he'd spent in this hospital bed, if he made the effort to think and really focused. Why was it so hard to focus.

The clock's ticking faded in and out of his awareness in tandem with his own heartbeat. Someone must've filled his head with cotton during surgery and whatever drug cocktail they'd pumped into him had turned the blood coursing through his veins into liquid uncertainty with a whispering undercurrent of anxiety and grief. There was a pit that had grown in his stomach that bad hospital food couldn't ever hope to fill.

Restlessness was like a wild bird imprisoned in his ribcage and trying to break free. His limbs seemed to weight a ton and more, resting limp and leaden on the white and worn hospital linens. Exhaustion dragged on his eyelids most hours while his wafting foggy thoughts whirled into tornadoes, hidden behind a clammy pale forehead and the dulled blue of tired eyes.

Shinichi supposed what bothered him was his lack of answers to the concerned questions bombarding him from all sides, not just from his emotional best friend from Osaka. Supposed the itch under his bandages were the stitches and his flesh slowly knitting itself back together. Healing. He was healing. They all kept saying it.

The itch under his skin, going far beyond the broken skin and torn flesh and fractured bones, drowned it all out. The very cells of his body refused to stop vibrating with unrest, tried to claw and crawl their way out of a skin-thick blanket of exhaustion.

Dealing.

He might've as well typed 'status unchanged', but every twitch of his fingers sent pain jolting up his nerves, so he limited his texts. The doctors were way too obviously trying to look and sound neutral when they came by and talked to him about there being hope that the pain would fully disappear again some day soon. They couldn't fool him. It was a generally helpless game of wait and see, even for them.

Wait and see. What his body would do with time as it healed from its wounds, the same going for the country of Japan and all other nations affected now that the ugly ulcer of the Black Organization had been messily cut out of their underbellies. They just had to wait and see and deal with the new reality they were confronted with. Just had to keep inhaling and exhaling one breath after the other, repeat. Repeat.