Chapter Text
Edogawa Conan had hit something of a dead end.
He glowered at the crayon in his hand, tempted to scribble out the grand master-plan he’d detailed as best he could on the paper before him. But it was hard to write in small print with these things even with the semi-sharp edge he’d so carefully given this crayon, and it wasn’t like he was getting new materials anytime soon. Satoru had eaten three of the last pack, and now the caretakers didn’t trust them with art supplies anymore.
So he flipped to the next page in his notebook and started from scratch. At his elbow, Takeshi whined and made grabby hands at the paper.
“No, you drool on everything.” Conan handed the drippy toddler a block to slobber on instead and got back to work.
What did he know?
He was six. Real name: unknown. Birth-date: unknown. Parents/legal guardians: unknown.
Personal history: he’d been found by two security guards in the local amusement park of Beika, Tropical Land, with a notable head injury and no memory of how he’d ended up there. Security called the police, who called child services, and when no one came forward to claim him, he’d ultimately been sent off to the child care institution, pending investigation.
While life at the institution was less than ideal, he’d been something of a hot commodity immediately. Despite his suspicious origin, he was smart, mature, and exceedingly well-behaved. Most importantly, he didn’t have any parents the institution had to defer to or that could refuse his placing with a foster family. He was one of the few kids that could actually be considered for adoption.
To no one’s surprise, shortly thereafter, he’d been adopted for the first time by a wealthy, older couple in need of an heir. He was happy to escape the under-funded, over-crowded orphanage; they were happy to have a child that required little actual raising. It seemed like an arrangement that suited everyone.
And then they’d been abruptly murdered by their only blood-related relative, because he’d been counting on their money to resolve a truly immense amount of debt.
Unfortunate, but decidedly not Conan’s fault.
So he’d been returned to the institution.
Unpleasant, but thankfully, it wasn’t that long until he’d been fostered again. After all, he was still smart, still mature, and everyone was very impressed with his apparently remarkable resilience.
The couple that took him in the next time was younger, with an assortment of relatives that were to become his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents…
They’d dropped like flies, of course. A real ‘another one bites the dust’ situation. After one of his new parents brutally stabbed the other over a petty domestic dispute, he’d been handed over to the nearest, stablest aunt.
She didn’t last long either. At least the circumstances around her demise were completely unrelated to the family, so the next pair of relatives had taken him with only a little bit of nervous reluctance. And then…
Well. Everywhere he went, something awful happened.
Eventually, he’d been returned to the institute, and hadn’t had much luck since. The story kept finding new and elaborate ways to repeat itself, even when the adoption offers stopped coming. The director of the institute got arrested for fraud, and before that, the eldest caretaker had been mysteriously shoved down the stairs.
All the clues suggested one single answer: Conan was cursed.
Now, Sherlock Holmes once said: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Normally, curses would fall under the impossible category, and Conan’s situation, no matter how statistically improbable, would be dismissed as complete happenstance, but Conan knew something Sherlock did not.
And that was that the supernatural was real.
How did Conan know this with complete certainty?
Because he was psychic .
He didn’t know how, or why. It didn’t even work like it did in the movies or on TV. It wasn’t like hearing voices inside other people’s heads, or reading their thoughts. But when he looked at people, he just knew things about them. He looked at people and he knew their professions, hobbies, sensibilities, just like that.
Simply put, he knew things he shouldn’t have.
Naturally, if ESPers were in fact real and observable (and he was, in fact, real and observable) that meant all other supernatural phenomena were up for consideration as well. Including, but not limited to, curses that inflicted immense misfortune upon everyone in the vicinity.
Of course, those answers raised a near infinite number of other questions. What was the cause of his curse? Why was he psychic? Were the two phenomena connected? Was the source his mysterious history?
They were all questions Conan just couldn’t figure out, at least not with the information he had. He needed more clues, something to go off, but the only place he could think of that might have some key to his past was Tropical Land. He had to go back there. But as a penniless, nameless orphan not even in first-grade yet, a place like Tropical Land might as well have been Ryugu Palace for all that it was completely inaccessible to him.
Hence the master-plan.
“Haru, no .” He said absentmindedly, as on the other side of the playroom she tried to climb onto the windowsill. Takeshi sneezed out a truly impressive ball of snot in agreement, and Haru sat back down on her butt and gurgled.
The plan had been to get his most recent potential guardians to take him to the amusement park to celebrate his “adoption”.
They hadn’t even made it that far. And he really had tried to keep them alive as long as possible, but the elaborate revenge scheme with the piano wire and the brakes had just come out of nowhere. Conan would have to look out for that one next time.
But for now, he was once more stuck in the orphanage, with no money, no transportation, and no adult supervision. Just a building full of bumbling infants, despondent children, and adults trying very hard to pretend like they didn’t think he was Sadako herself.
It was frustrating. The more time that passed, the more minuscule the chances of finding a clue regarding his origins grew.
At this rate, he was going to spend years in this miserable place, not even knowing his own name.
Conan resisted the urge to rip the page out of the notebook and crumple it. Limited resources, he reminded himself. Can’t waste anything.
“...no, no! It’s not a problem at all!” The perky voice of Fujiwara, the second youngest care worker, came from down the hall. She sounded eager, almost manically so, hiding desperation underneath.
She’d been twitchy lately, half-convinced the curse would claim her next. It was her idea to ask him to “help” with the much younger kids, since she was of the belief literal babies were less liable to cook up any elaborate murder schemes.
He quickly turned to a blank page of the notebook and scribbled down something that could be a bug or a dog or even a particularly bad stick person. Takeshi gurgled with notable delight.
“I mean this is the 21st century! Why shouldn’t a single man be able to foster?” Fujiwara’s strained laughter stopped at the entrance of the room. “Oh, there he is!”
Conan looked over, and froze.
There was a spy in the doorway.
He didn’t look like a spy— he was in disguise, obviously. Quite an advanced one at that, but Conan wasn’t fooled . The stranger may have looked like an unassuming young man in a black turtleneck and spectacles on the surface, but Conan could tell.
A spy.
In the child care institute.
Shit, that wasn’t good, was it? Had he been noticed, figured out? He thought he hid his ESP well, but the curse was a bit too dramatic to conceal. If someone somewhere had taken notice of him and became interested, or even just scared, then this man’s presence could mean either kidnapping or death or so much worse.
“Conan-kun!” Fujiwara called, waving with a little too much enthusiasm to pass as casual. “Someone is here to meet you!”
Conan was a bit busy being seized by a terror he’d never known before to respond.
He most definitely did not go over there.
Unfortunately, that just meant Fugiwara and the spy came to him instead. The spy walked with the natural grace of a predator, even when his posture was purposefully nonthreatening. When he met Conan’s eyes, he smiled amiably.
Conan struggled to smile back.
“Conan-kun,” Fujiwara said, “this nice man is Okiya-san. Okiya-san, this is Conan-kun, our best and brightest.”
Oh no.
He'd been had. They’d (the government, the shady organization behind the government, whoever) totally noticed his ESP. They were going to take him in under the guise of fostering him, quietly vanish him, and then he was going to wind up on a dissection table—
Oblivious to his escalating horror, Fujiwara continued on cheerfully: “Conan-kun’s only six, but he can already read hiragana, kanji, and English! He’s our little genius, we’re very proud of him.”
It was the usual advertisement spiel, look how amazing our product is, don’t you just want to take it home, but each word only dug him in a deeper grave.
They were totally going to steal his brain.
The spy, Okiya, smiled. “Is that so? That’s very impressive, Conan-kun.”
It was a smile that could mean anything and nothing. Completely bland. But Conan knew the man was interested in what Fujiwara was selling, and it had shivers running down his spine.
Conan laughed nervously. He only had one option. Desperate times, meet desperate measures.
“Yeah, look what I can do!”
With a silent apology to his stomach, Conan took a big, solid bite right out of his crayon.
It tasted horrible. Like wax plus death.
He screamed internally even as he swallowed. Non-toxic, he reminded himself, non-toxic. Better a stomach ache than vivisection.
Okiya’s pleasant facade cracked like an egg, just for a second. Next to him, Fujiwara made an aborted squeak of protest. Okiya’s eyes were upon her in mere moments, his disbelief tangible in the air as she wilted under his gaze with a burning face.
This was his emergency exit strategy, Operation False Advertising!
Technically, Conan had never sabotaged a potential adoption deal before. In fact, he usually did whatever dog and pony show he had to to appeal to the sad, lonely schmucks that happened to come by. Whether they wanted a kid that could read and write, or one that could follow a conversation and enunciate clearly, or even just one that could be propped up as decoration, he always played the role to perfection. He was, by all accounts, the ideal child by anyone’s standards, if not an absolute prodigy.
But he'd prepared a strategy, just in case. Today he was going to be a perfectly normal six year-old that did normal six year-old stuff like eating crayons and throwing tantrums!
And like anybody else offered a product that was clearly subpar compared to the top-of-the-line model they’d been promised, this man would think he’d been conned. Embarrassed and offended, he’d over-correct to cover the shame of being fooled, and undoubtedly rescind his offer with extreme prejudice!
But eating one measly crayon wasn’t enough. Conan couldn’t afford to let this man leave with nothing less than the unshakable impression that he was a complete idiot!
“I can also do this!” Conan held his notepad aloft and showed off the pitiful excuse of a drawing.
Okiya was forced to lean down to look at it, struggling to put on and keep on an encouraging expression. “And…what is this, exactly?”
“English! Duh!”
Fujiwara, who had been the first to find out he could read English when she’d unleashed him upon the library with the wonderfully specific instructions to 'pick himself a name', nearly shrieked. “Conan-kun! You know that’s not English!”
She was clearly mortified by the whole situation, but that was too bad for her. No matter how desperate the staff were to get rid of him, it wasn’t an excuse to be handing him over to a clearly suspicious individual! If his brain ended up pickled in a jar, it was going to be their fault!
Okiya, however, wasn’t without words. He straightened and adjusted his glasses with a disapproving frown. “Well, Fujiwara-san, I must say—”
Fujiwara was near tears. “Please, Okiya-san, this isn’t—”
“Please let me finish.” Okiya interrupted and Fujiwara cowered. “You don’t need to lie. Though I do find your dedication to finding these children homes is admirable, I don’t think deceiving people is the right way to go about it.”
Conan nearly cheered, practically nodding along as he struggled to hide how pleased with himself he was. He’d successfully fooled the spy and avoided death—there was no point in stealing the brain of a perfectly normal child after all!
Though, he was a little surprised it was so easy to throw Okiya off. Did it not occur to the spy that an ESPer wouldn’t be fooled by a disguise? Didn’t he come prepared for a target that could potentially read minds?
Conan suddenly got a bad feeling.
“And it’s also wholly unnecessary.” Okiya continued. “I’m not looking for some child prodigy. A child doesn’t need to be extraordinary to be deserving of a home.”
Eh?
“Okiya-san…!” Fujiwara clasped her hands in front of her, her eyes overflowing with admiration.
Was this some kind of joke…?
Okiya stooped down, looking to be the very picture of a gracious nobleman as he looked Conan straight in the eye.
“What do you say, Conan-kun? Want to come live with me?”