Shadows in the Dawn

Chapter Four – The Faces We Hide

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Conan took first one, then another step back, away from the boy. Kaito simply blinked, but it was obvious to someone who knew him as well as his cousin that the obliviousness was all an act.

“What’re you talking about?” Kaito asked with mock confusion mixed in with more than a little of the real thing. “I am acting my age.”

Bakura, who had still been holding a hand to his head, shook his head with a grimace.

“I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t. I simply. . .” he groaned, and ran his hand through white hair. “It hurt.”

Kaito frowned, and Shinichi understood only part of the other’s confusion. Even taking in due course, the brain ache of having figured out both of their true identities would get to someone, but not in this way. The way that kid had said that made it seem more like the same way Shinichi himself would sometimes get when he wanted to get people to understand the real truth, but not in a purely emotional way.

All in all he didn’t really know what to think of the situation. It shouldn’t have been possible for anyone to figure out both of their secrets in less than half an hour; yet here was living proof, right in front of them. More to the point, right in front of Kaito, who had now placed both of his hands on the other boy’s shoulders.

“Oi, Bakura-kun? Bakura, you all right?”

The boy in question dragged his hand slowly down and away from his face, looking just away from them and then indirectly at Kaito before heaving a sigh.

“...Yes. Better, I think.” He seemed to hazard a look in ‘Conan’s’ direction, only to go cross-eyed, eyes ending up focused somewhere between the top of the young detective’s head and somewhere around chest height on Kaito. “Er. . . are there supposed to be three...” He took another look at Kaito. “... and a bit... of you? I don’t think there are.”

Conan stared wide-eyed at him, incredulous and fear of suspicion half forgotten.

“What are you – concussed? How the- How can you still be standing like that?!”

Bakura looked truly and utterly confused for the first time since they had met him.

“Concussed? When did I ever say I was concussed? I simply-”

“How much do you know?”

The park – or at least their section of it – went silent. Conan stilled by confusion, suspicion, and the complete inability to comprehend what the other two were going on about apart from the fact that it was something that made the Bakura kid widen his eyes with what he thought was disbelief.

Kaito put on a bored expression, crossing his arms behind his neck.

“Well... I, ah... um. I didn’t mean to,” said Bakura Ryou in a rush. “I’m sorry. I really am. I just couldn’t, um. . .” he trailed off, but let out a deep breath. When he looked back up at them, his expression had turned somewhat more serious – and not to mention a lot more curious. “You. . . you said that you happen to be a magician, Kuroba-san? What precisely.... which kind of magic did you say you studied?”

Conan found that he had inadvertently backed himself up against a tree, and he was breathing rapidly. What the hell was going on here? he wanted to shout at them, but he couldn’t. Call it morbid curiosity to see what was going to happen next or sheer disbelief that someone else could figure out all of their secrets – and for that person to be a thief, another thief – was doing his head in.

Kaito’s eyes cracked open slightly, but he could still see the Poker Face layered above his cousin’s emotions quite clearly.

“Illusions, mostly,” he said. “But not, I think, the same kind of illusions as you. I could well ask you the same question. All that I’ve seen so far points to some very interesting things.”

Bakura flushed, ducking his head again.

“I really am sorry, you know,” he said. “I shouldn’t have burst out like that; I shouldn’t have pried. Perhaps I could...” he cut himself off, closing his eyes in what looked like familiar frustration, expression changing rapidly between irritated, amused, angry and finally soft triumph. When he finally opened his eyes again, it was to both Kuroba cousins staring at him with a great amount of interest. He sighed. “Perhaps it would be better if we took this conversation somewhere a little more private? People here in Domino are used to strange things happening, but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be talk if someone accidentally overheard something they weren’t supposed to hear.”

Conan and Kaito shared a look, and the taller of the two nodded.

“Sounds good. You know of anywhere like that?”

“Well,” Bakura said, scraching his head, “I was rather thinking that we could go over to my place. I might as well get everything out into the open with you all at once, seen as I already know so much more about you so much sooner than you would have liked.”

Conan pushed himself away from the tree, crossing his arms in a show of suspicion – he didn’t completely trust the other yet, and couldn’t see why they would be safe in his home as opposed to somewhere that was more like neutral territory for the three of them.

“Oh, I’m sure you’d be quite safe – after all,” Bakura said as he started to head off in the direction that was bound to lead to his home, “we are on equal terms, aren’t we?”

Conan decided that he definitely did not like the look of suspicion in his cousin’s eye at that last comment, or the twinkle in the white-haired, brown-eyed teen’s eye when he had said it.

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Kaito followed the older teen and thief in the walk towards their destination with curiosity hidden behind a carefully constructed Poker Face.

He had fixed his hair back up into his cousin’s neater style before they had left the park, all too aware that if they were in a less open space than the park and with more people who wanted to take notice, the switch between comfort and disguise would mean an awful lot to all of them. And with the hair had returned his Shinichi act. Not, he would admit, that it was very hard for him to do.

He had found himself in the middle of the small procession of three, most probably Shinichi’s way of using him as a human shield against the enigma that was Bakura Ryou.

A guy who had admitted to being a thief before discovering an aptitude for detective work, and usually the kind that involved some of the cases of a stranger bent, if what he was hearing was true. Someone whose expressions had shown Kaito that either the older boy’s imagination had been kept so active that he still had an imaginary friend, there was something wrong with his mind, or that there was something rather more interesting going on here than even he, hardly a novice in the ways of magic, had encountered before.

In Kuroba Kaito’s experience, ‘interesting’ usually meant the same thing as ‘dangerous’. And just because they hadn’t seen any kind of intentionally threatening behaviour so far, didn’t mean that it wouldn’t ever appear.

Just because they were all thieves didn’t mean that they had to trust each other right off the bat, after all.

Taking all of this into account, Shinichi’s little problem with his acceptance of magic – rather, the miniature detective’s absolute refusal to accept anything more extraordinary than his classroom and parlour tricks – was not going to be helping matters any.

Necromancy, came the unwanted thought as they came upon a street of apartment buildings. How in heck does someone as nice as that know about necromancy? And if he knows about that, then I could just as well ask about that language – Egyptian, was it? – that he was spouting out earlier. Bound to be a story in that. Not to mention various other things he’d heard of during their stay.

Mister White Haired Mystery opened up the door to one of the complexes, let them through. Waited for them to be inside before he shut the door securely and led them up six flights of stairs – not too tiring for him, he was too used to dancing around Nakamori’s cops on a regular basis and keeping in shape for that to be scared of stairs, but he was sure Shinichi would be lagging if it wasn’t for the fact that the pace was kept slow enough for shorter legs. Still, he preferred stairs, right now. If he, or his cousin, for that matter, had had to be stuck in an elevator for however many seconds as it took to get to the. . . sixth floor, was it? Then they would have both gone stir-crazy.

Another door – he noted that it was apartment number six-oh-one – and they were in, switching outdoor shoes for indoor slippers and being led to the living room where they could sit down while their host could make them tea. Kaito held back a snigger, reminded of his blond classmate, Hakuba Saguru, who was also half British.

“So,” said Conan, as soon as they’d been seated. “What do you really think? And not about that magic thing, either. Would you trust him?”

Kaito ruffled his hair back into it’s normal comb-eating state, and slouched back into the sofa.

“Depends,” he said. “I think so. But that’s if what he seems to be ends up being what he actually is.”

Conan actually nodded, getting at what he meant.

“Not to mention if he’s really got a good reason for doing what he does,” he said, crossing his arms.

Kaito had to silently agree, not that he’d say so. But just because he was a kaitou himself and his cousin was by blood if not choice, didn’t mean that either of them would do a thing without good reason. Especially Shinichi. It was often hard to get the guy to do a thing even with a very good reason.

Bakura, however, chose that moment to walk back in with a tray bearing three steaming mugs of tea.

“Look, you guys,” he said, sighing as he sat down with a hand straying to something underneath his shirt. “Let me just say this again – I really am sorry. I never would have done any of this if . . .”

“If what?”

Bakura glanced sharply over at Conan, who had spoken, and let his hand drop to his lap.

“If I hadn’t thought that there was any other way,” he finished, solemnly and seriously.

“Any other way to do what?” Conan continued, Kaito staying silent for the moment.

“Whatever it is we have to do, I should think,” Bakura shot back with his first hint of sarcasm. “I would imagine that the first step of play would be to solve the case that you were called here for.”

Well, that’s interesting.

“And what do you mean by that? ‘First step of play’?”

Bakura stopped himself short as he looked at Kaito, as though not realising that he had said anything strange.

“What. . . oh. I apologise. I am used to using games as a way of explaining myself – my friends and I all play one particular card game, and I had always had an interest in games before then, especially in, ah. . . role play.”

“Role play?”

Bakura nodded seriously, taking the chance to have a long overdue sip of his tea.

“Yes. Where one takes on the role of the character for the duration of the game. . . I specialise in board games of this sort. I’ve been known to be able to create some rather extraordinary landscapes for the boards, at times,” he said, finishing with a curiously bitter note.

“And how does that tie into what we were talking about before?”

Kaito tapped his cousin lightly upside the head. Not really hard enough to be a breach of the Rules, but hard enough to get the kid’s attention. Really, he could be so clueless sometimes, for a detective.

“Idiot,” he said as ‘Conan’ glared up at him, silently promising revenge of some sort, “what else were we talking about earlier? Don’t tell me, your magic expresses itself through games.”

“That and more,” the museum owner’s son said with a glance at Shinichi. “And then, of course, there are always those times when the games seem to play by rules of their own devising. . .”

Something caught in Kaito’s throat, and a shiver made its way down his spine with a sense of foreboding accompanying it. For some reason, I really don’t like the sound of that. Especially what with what he just said a minute or so ago. . .

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AN: And so here it is, not yet Christmas, and a new chapter’s up. I think this is the longest so far. I’m not cutting off their conversation straight off like that, though – it’s going to go back in on the rest, and what’s going to be revealed is going to be very interesting indeed...

I hope no one’s too confused about the whole magic-ness of the story. Very much AU from Relative Truth the way Becky did it this way, tho. I’m sorry to say that there’s no other backstory to the DC/MK side, too. Only to what Bakura’s said and is going to say regarding that jaunt in Azumano.

(BTW, the Christmas crack’s because the shops are already insisting that it IS .)