Work Text:
"Hey you. Boy. You shouldn't be here. Go home where it's safe."
Shinichi spun, startled. "Are you talking to me?" he demanded of the middle aged woman who had apparently spoken. It had been years since any stranger had been able to see him, or spoke to him so directly.
The woman looked startled to be addressed, and as she frowned briefly in thought, the scar above her eye crinkled back in line with the scar below, across her cheekbone. "Yes, I was talking to you. I'm a figment of your imagination, but even in fantasy, your brain knows you shouldn't be here."
Shinichi snorted at the hastily invented excuse. No, he definitely belonged here. Something had drawn him to this place, some instinct that something was wrong, that there would be something to investigate. Knowing his luck, it would be another murder. He could rarely prevent them. Only on very rare occasions, when the would-be-murderer had only just decided to kill someone, could they ever be talked out of it. Shinichi had figured out that most people could only hear him as a suggestion in the back of their mind, and his calm, rational description of why murder was a bad solution didn't persuade those who had made up their minds more firmly.
Akako said he could appease the instinct more easily by haunting a courtroom to enforce Justice, but he wouldn't. Too many murderers covered their tracks too well, in ways the police didn't look for, and would never even be brought to the courtroom if there wasn't someone on-site to catch them. Sure, in the courtroom he could ensure that innocents didn't face unjust punishments, but he wanted to do better than that. He wanted to ensure murderers and other criminals truly had to face justice. They had to be caught or confess and face the courts in the first place.
The instinct to investigate wasn't pulling urgently at him yet, so Shinichi quietly observed the scene around him and the woman who had told him to leave. No one's gaze even flickered to focus on either of them, and while no one ever ran in to either of them, they came closer to the woman than to other strangers they were dodging around in the street.
"You're like me," Shinichi realized aloud. At her questioning eyebrow, he elaborated. "Almost no one realizes that we exist, yet we can still influence their thoughts and by extension their actions." He had found himself speaking more and more bluntly, since people never actually heard him. His friends teased him over his increasing disregard for etiquette, but it was just the easiest way to get people to act like they'd heard him.
Honestly, that explained the woman's fumbled excuse about being a figment of Shinichi's imagination. She too, was used to being heard only subconsciously. And she probably didn't want a little boy to seem crazy by talking to someone who wasn't there.
Shinichi had encountered more offensive people in his life. He didn't mind this woman. Sure if he'd been properly tangible as Conan, following this instinct, and someone had tried to say 'kid, you need to leave and go somewhere safe', he might have suspected that person of planning the upcoming crime, but right now, she was oddly unsuspicious.
If anything, the same instincts drawing Shinichi to a suspicious location, said that he could trust her.
"What's your name, kid?" the woman asked, interrupting Shinichi's silent analysis.
His instincts said to trust her, but his old paranoia had flared back to life at being addressed so directly by a stranger. "Edogawa Conan," he answered, half-honestly. That was the name that belonged to his current appearance anyway.
"You used to follow around Mouri Kogoro, back when he was a competent detective," she realized.
Shinichi grinned and nodded. Practically no one else remembered that Kogoro and his daughter had played host to a grade schooler back when Ran was still in high school. She was almost done with her law degree now, following in her mother's footsteps.
"Samonji Kaori," the woman introduced herself in return. "You seem pretty young to be an Enforcer," she said pointedly.
Remembering how Heiji's classmates had asked if Kudou Shinichi was a character from tv, it didn't take long for Shinichi to put the pieces together. "As in the book series, Detective Samonji?" he asked delightedly. Samonji Matsuda was nearly as great as Sherlock Holmes, perhaps more so, since he was apparently based on a real person.
Samonji nodded. "Shinmei-kun forgot me like everyone else did, but he still had his journals about the cases we solved together. It seems he decided to turn those notes into novels." She seemed pleased that Shinichi hadn't challenged her gender, but it was easy enough to guess that the author had decided a male protagonist would be taken more seriously. Plus he had named his daughter for her. It made perfect sense.
"What did you mean by Enforcer?" Shinichi asked innocently. He suspected he knew what she meant, especially as a fellow forgotten detective, but...
They both turned their heads at the same time, tracking a man who was laughing a little too loudly, being a little too handsy with his date outside of the bar they were trying to enter. An argument started up; it seemed the man was already so drunk he had misplaced his ID. The bouncer, rightfully, wasn't letting him in.
Without discussion, Shinichi and Samonji simultaneously started weaving through the crowd towards the laughing man. Something was off about the situation, aside from him being so drunk.
"You came here to enforce what is right," she explained quietly as they drew closer."
Shinichi hummed, noncommittally. "A witch I know claims we're Ideals. She insists I'm Justice itself." he answered.
He remembered, suddenly, Akako's remark this past weekend that 'Justice would meet his equal.' As usual, she hadn't clarified what she meant, and Shinichi was starting to believe Kaito's insistence that she was just repeating the cryptic comments from some other source, and didn't want to admit that she didn't understand them herself.
"I think she expected me to meet another Justice," Shinichi mused aloud. He was glad it had worked out this way, and his equal didn't seem to be an enemy.
"An Enforcer of Justice," Samonji agreed, with a slight grin. "I suppose that fits me. You have friends that can actually see you?"
"He's not worth stabbing!" Shinichi shouted, spotting the flash of a blade being pulled from a purse. Samonji didn't seem to mind his failure to answer her question immediately. She matched his pace as they both rushed closer to the scene.
Damn. Too late again. Shinichi scowled as the bouncer collapsed to the sidewalk, knife embedded in his stomach at an angle that made Shinichi worry for the man's lungs. It wouldn't be immediately fatal if it were just a gut wound but he couldn't quite tell how deep the knife was without removing it, and he knew better. That was a task for the paramedics.
The drunk man's date started shrieking, asking how dare he stab 'this innocent man'.
Shinichi was close enough to recognize that the man was entirely too drunk to defend himself. The woman must have plied him with alcohol anticipating this. He hated when people tried to frame others for their crimes.
Meanwhile, Samonji had stalked forward until she was right behind the woman. "You cannot leave until the situation is resolved. You will explain yourself thoroughly to the police." She stayed close behind the woman, ready to restrain her if she resisted, but the woman stayed right where she was, still shouting at her no longer laughing date.
The bystanders didn't need any encouragement to call emergency services and it didn't take long for an ambulance to show up. A pair of police cars arrived shortly after - fortunately not carrying any of the Detective Boys, who had continued trying to be detectives even without consciously remembering the inspiration that Conan had been toward that dream. They were the same age now as Shinichi had been when he had first been actively invited to crime scenes. To his eternal frustration, Shinichi still looked like a scrawny first grader, when all his friends had grown. Even Ai had grown older. She had made it to her second to last growth spurt at apparently twelve, before fading from memory the way Shinichi had. Ai continued hanging around schools, watching for children that feared going home, and murmuring in the right ears until custody was transferred to a less abusive guardian.
She had told him she would rather free children from her own former position; born into the Organization, with no choice but to work for it, but she was scared. Vermouth still protected the Org for her own reasons. And while Akako had definitely implied that, as Ideals, they were immortal, no one was willing to test that theory.
Shinichi shook himself - physically since he was no longer used to hiding it - and forced himself to pay attention to the scene. He'd directly witnessed the attack, of course, but he had to make sure the evidence the police could collect was more than eyewitness testimony. The lack of blood on the cuffs of the drunk man's sleeves, for example, was one particularly important factor in preventing him from being framed.
With two detectives running around unnoticed, making suggestions and pointing out the incriminating bits of evidence, very soon the correct suspect was identified. It didn't even take another verbal nudge from Samonji before she confessed.
When the police vehicles were driving away with the woman responsible, an ambulance had departed with the bouncer, and the drunk man had been led away to recover, Samonji turned to Shinichi and repeated her question. "You have friends that can still see you?"
"Yep, a few," Shinichi confirmed. "Our witch says that all the ones that still properly exist have the potential to become Ideals themselves. It's been a few years, and we still haven't figured out exactly what that means, but I'd be happy to introduce you."
Her face lit up, eyes sparkling with badly disguised enthusiasm. "Really?"
"Of course," Shinichi agreed easily. Samonji had worked impeccably with him to ensure Justice was served. They hadn't even had to talk, each detective seamlessly picking up where the other left off. Shinichi only ever felt that kind of synergy with Heiji, and it had taken them a few cases before they settled into that pattern of working together. On the other hand, maybe that ability just came with maturity. Shinichi was old enough to be exasperated at his teenage self for treating a murder as something to compete over, no matter how young he still looked.
The point was, he trusted her instinctively, by reputation as a detective, and now also by experience. And Shinichi himself had survived the transition from person to Ideal mainly through the support of his friends. Samonji didn't have that now. Had she ever? She had already said that Shinmei had forgotten her like everyone else.
Shinichi had never been one to abandon anyone to a tragic fate, especially not a fellow detective. Not when he could help it.
"Come on," he said, turning towards the nearest train station. "I'm sure they'll love to meet you."