What You Wish For, ch. 2 (DC)
Apr. 29th, 2007 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
candyficsTitle: What You Wish For
Fandom: Detective Conan
Rating: PG
Genre: Humor/Romance
Publish Date: 8/23/2005 through 5/21/2006 (incomplete)
Disclaimer: I don't own Detective Conan. But I do have homemade hand-puppets for each character...that's normal, right?
Ran’s first thought, upon waking up, was that something wasn’t quite right. Before she even opened her eyes, she knew that something was different than it had been before. And for a long moment, she was a bit hesitant to even open her eyes and find out what it was.
It wasn’t that she felt bad, necessarily. It was just that there was some little nagging feeling that something, some as-yet unknown detail had changed during the course of the night, and something told her that she was not going to like whatever that something was.
She opened her eyes, feeling a little nervous and a lot silly.
The ceiling was different. Oddity number one.
A strange, almost inhuman grinding noise was invading her ears. Weirdness numero dos.
And there was just a general disoriented feeling that permeated her senses. It was most unsettling.
She sat up, and the feeling intensified, and she fell right back over again. The second time she tried to get up, though, she was a bit more successful, and even managed to stagger to her feet. It was then that she noticed something even more strange.
She was…short.
And she then noticed the source of the grating sound that had first sent her eardrums a-ringing.
Tentative fingers ran up to her face, sliding over features that were not the same ones she’d had when she had gone to bed the previous night. Now reaching a level of utter panic, she clambered to her feet and tried to sprint out of the room; her feet tangled in the bedclothes, and she ended up face-down on the floor. Now panicked AND nursing a sore nose, she scooted out of the room and into the bathroom.
It was then that she realized—for the second time in as many minutes—that she was far shorter than she had been the night before. She was missing some major height—her forehead barely reached the top of the sink. A quick search of the bathroom produced the stepstool Conan used for such simple activities as looking in the mirror.
Thus aided by the stepstool, she was pleased to discover that she could actually see over the sink and into the mirror. Her reflection stared back at her. And both of them—her and her reflection—lost their lower jaws in perfection unison.
She was…
The face…
That wasn’t her face.
It was…not the reflection of a seventeen-year-old girl.
Ran stared.
The reflection stared back.
She blinked.
She shook her head.
She slapped her hands to the sides of her face.
She smacked herself in the forehead.
But the face remained the same.
And it was definitely not the reflection of a seventeen-year-old girl…
-o-
Conan (aka Shinichi) opened his eyes when he heard a scream from down the hall, vaguely remembering dreams of a strange purple mist that seemed to determined to swallow him whole.
His first thought was that there was something wrong with someone else.
His second thought was that something was wrong with him.
This, because he felt…strange. It took a moment to shake off the drowsy haze and try to take a quick account of himself before he decided that the source of the noise was more important. Now thoroughly disoriented and confused, he crawled out of bed and headed towards the door with every intent of investigating the scream.
He fell over promptly and without ceremony or pretense.
Now face-down on the floor, he tried to steady his spinning head, and climbed back to his feet, rubbing his aching nose. He wobbled a bit, but managed to stay upright. He was insanely out of sorts, and he had a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.
And somehow, Ran was at the middle of it.
Therefore, the scream had made him even more nervous, even though it hadn’t sounded anything like Ran.
And so he headed for the door, to investigate the scream, hoping that nothing was seriously wrong.
But he made the mistake of glancing at the mirror as he passed by, and froze, completely forgetting about the shriek that had woken him up. A more pressing matter had presented itself to him.
The face that looked back…
-o-
Ran clasped her hands over her mouth to stifle any further screams.
In the mirror reflection, Conan did the same.
Conan’s face.
She ran tentative, shaky fingers over her face, constantly blinking and hoping that the image would clear, that it was some bizarro dream and she would wake up and be herself again. But no, Conan’s blue eyes and childish features remained firmly in place.
Her mind was racing a mile a minute, most of it incoherent babble. But somehow, she stumbled from the bathroom (nearly tumbling headfirst from the stool in the process) and back to the bed she’d woken up in—a futon on the floor of her father’s room.
The inhuman grinding sound? Her father’s snores.
She crawled back under the covers, not quite sure where else to go.
“It has to be a dream…” she murmured to herself, trying very hard not to fully panic. “It must be a dream…” But with each passing repetition of her mantra, she knew that it was, in fact, not a dream. She had somehow gotten trapped in Conan’s body. But what to do, what to do…
A sudden realization hit her: if she was here, then someone else had to be stuck in her body. And given her circumstances, that someone was most likely Conan. For whatever reason, they’d been switched, and the poor boy was probably terrified. So she made the decision that she would remain as calm as possible, if only for the sake of her young charge.
Even though she felt like curling up into a ball and screaming her head off, consequences be hanged.
She made another decision then, as well. Glancing over at her father, she realized that he would NOT take this news well. Best not to tell him right off the bat until she herself had some handle as to what was going on. So she decided to act as much like Conan as she could until further notice.
Ran realized then that she was missing one of Conan’s most obvious traits—his glasses…but if that was the case, then why in the world could she see perfectly? Maybe…maybe she was seeing things as she usually saw them? That didn’t make much sense…but neither did switching bodies.
A quick search produced the glasses by the pillow, and she slipped them onto her nose…only to find that her vision didn’t change. The glasses were…fake? Whiskey tango foxtrot?
She slipped them off her nose for further examination. But she must have touched something because an antennae appeared, shooting out of the frames. What looked like a tiny tracker appeared on one of the lenses. Ran stared blankly at this new development.
Feeling pole-axed was getting to be an unpleasantly regular occurrence.
Another press of the nearly-invisible button made the oddity go away, and she slid the specs onto her nose, at a loss for what else to do. She sat there for a moment, pondering. Why in the world would Conan have something like that?
Come to think of it, he seemed to have an awful lot of unusual toys laying around. He always said that Agasa-hakase made them for him. She’d never really given it much thought before.
Looking around blankly, she noticed Conan’s bowtie sitting on the floor. She absently picked it up and began twirling it around her fingers. It was then that she noticed another strangeness.
There was some sort of mechanism on the back of the bowtie.
Making a quick decision, she slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her as quietly as she could. Once safely out of her father’s earshot (not that he could have heard anything over his insanely loud snoring), she took a closer look at the strange mechanical contraption that graced the back of Conan’s fashion-esque trademark.
There were a couple of dials, and something that looked like a speaker or a microphone. All nestled on the back of the bowtie, completely invisible from the front. She flipped it over, studying it carefully, then sighed.
“Well, this is weird…” she murmured, then jumped a mile when Shinichi’s voice came out the other side of the bowtie. As she stared at the fashionable (snicker) object questioningly, a few things fell painfully into place, like a Plinko chip landing right in the big money spot.
Conan’s bowtie was spouting Shinichi’s voice.
Shinichi had called her yesterday.
So one of two things was going on. Either Conan was calling her as Shinichi to make her feel better—which was an oddly conflicting thought, because she wasn’t sure if she should be angry or flattered by the action. Or…option B.
Gripping the bowtie in one hand, and the glasses in the other, Ran headed down the hall towards her own room, not quite sure what she was going to find there.
-o-
Long brown hair, a bit frizzed from prolonged contact with a pillow.
Blue eyes that were now wide awake and almost frightened.
Teenaged height that allowed him to actually see into the mirror without the aide of a ladder.
And a few certain anatomical parts—of the female persuasion, no less—that Shinichi certainly hadn’t had when he’d gone to bed the previous evening.
In short, uh-oh.
Needless to say, Shinichi Kudo was really freaked out.
I mean, wouldn’t you be a little weirded out if you woke up and looked in the mirror and saw your best friend’s face staring back at you? Your female best friend, no less? You certainly would, wouldn’t you.
Shinichi’s mind, so well-trained in logic, was going like a bullet train. But even as brilliant as he was, even as awesome as he was when it came to piecing together the most baffling of puzzles, he was absolutely perplexed as to how in the world he had wound up in Ran’s body.
And every time he thought about it, he resolved to come up with a different way of saying that, because it just sounded so wrong to him. Bad, bad, bad…
And slowly, the idea that they’d been switched kind of faded into the fact that he was actually in Ran’s body (bad!). It was a decidedly new experience, especially when he tried to fold his arms across his chest to think, and found, ahem, obstacles in his way preventing him from comfortably doing so.
Another thought occurred to him—if he was looking through Ran’s eyes right now, then where was Ran. Oh, duh. She was probably…oh dear. This was not good. Not good at all.
But still…Ran…
She felt nice…
Soft…
In pajamas…
No! Naughty! he berated himself, lightly smacking himself in the forehead.
“Problem?”
A painfully familiar soprano voice asked from the doorway. He whirled, belated pushing a few stray locks of long hair from his (her?) eyes as he regarded the speaker with a certain degree of carefully concealed panic.
Conan stared back, blue eyes absolutely frigid.
That was especially freaky, Shinichi realized. An actual out-of-body experience. He was staring himself in the eye…and damned if he didn’t look absolutely menacing at the moment!
Swallowing hard, he ventured (in her voice), “…Ran?”
The small figure in the doorway nodded. Then his (or rather, her) expression turned angry, and she held up two items: a familiar pair of glasses, and an equally familiar bowtie. She raised the bowtie to the level of her mouth and said, “Shinichi?” His own true voice came out the other side.
Shinichi Kudo froze. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to deny the accusation, especially not when she had finally found the proof she had always lacked when making her previous allegations. He proceeded to do a perfect imitation of a hooked fish.
Her expression grew dark, and her fists clenched. Both bad signs.
He started to sweat.
Not only had they somehow switched, but he had just been caught, and he didn’t have the wits left about him to try and derail her suspicions. His thoughts were running in circles like little panicked squirrels, and they basically repeated the same phrase over and over: Oh SHIT I’m SCREWED she’ll KILL ME DEAD and I can’t GET AWAY and DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOOOM…doom…
-o-
In spite of his best efforts to ignore the dreaded ringing sound, the telephone wouldn’t shut up.
Finally, grudgingly, Heiji Hattori rolled over and grabbed the stupid thing off of his nightstand. Blinking owlishly in an attempt to wake up, he put the receiver to his ear. “’lo?”
“Hattori!” a panicked female voice rushed from the other end. “Hattori, it’s me!”
“Neechan?” the Detective of the West yawned. “I bet you know what time it is, so I’m waitin’ for an explanation.” He wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment, no matter who was calling.
“It’s me!”
“…Neechan?” Heiji asked, a bit confused.
“No, Kudo!”
A pause. “Wishful thinking?”
“No, you idiot!” Ran’s voice was agitated. “It’s me! I’m Kudo!”
Heiji yawned again, wishing he could end this phone call quickly and go back to bed. He was actually supposed to meet Kazuha in an hour so she could drag him shopping (and he had carefully-laid plans to whine through the entire thing, just to make sure the ahou knew exactly how big of a sacrifice it was for him), so he figured could easily squeeze in another forty-five minutes’ worth of sleep before panicking and going chasing after her at the last minute.
It was their little ritual, really.
“Look, your dad’s not the best example to follow. Really. And you shouldn’t be drinking anyway,” he mumbled, feeling himself start to nod off again. “’specially not this early.”
“Hattori, would you listen?” Ran huffed. “Wait…I know. Listen, I’m going to hold the phone by the door so you can hear this.” There was the sound of movement, and a noise that had previously been merely a muffled sound in the background now became clearer.
Namely, Conan’s voice.
Screaming.
Even muffled as it was (coming through the door, apparently), it was still perfectly plain as to what the pint-sized wonder was shouting. Something about death to…Shinichi? In fact, the death’s she seemed to be wishing on him were nothing short of creative. Burny, stabby, shooty…all quite painful.
Heiji was suddenly wide awake as it clicked. “Wait a minute…you’re Kudo?”
“Brilliant freakin’ deduction!” Ran’s voice—apparently with Kudo’s mind behind it—said shortly. “Honestly, what did I have to do, sing it for you?” He sounded a bit irritated. “And before you ask, I have absolutely no idea how this happened. I just woke up and I was in Ran’s body.”
Heiji paused. “That sounds really wrong…”
“I know,” Shinichi half-moaned. “But I’m in her room right now. I kinda pushed her out of the room and locked the door. So for the moment, at least, I’m kind of safe. But now she also knows I’m Conan, as you could probably guess from those lovely death threats.”
“I’m surprised you had the presence of mind to lock the door,” Heiji teased, finally sitting up and perching on the edge of his bed. “First you get shrunk, now you and your girlfriend have managed to switch around, and you still think clearly enough to put distance between you?”
He could almost hear the eye-roll on the other end of the line. “Hattori, if a lion is charging at you at full speed, you’re not going to stand there and comment on what a lovely color its coat is while you wait for it to maul you. You’re going to run like hell,” Kudo said flatly. “Well, the lion is on the other side of the door, and I’m trying to postpone the inevitable mauling for as long as humanly possible.” A pause. “And I think we could maybe use some help…” That last was slightly plaintive.
Heiji couldn’t keep himself from chuckling. “Read ya loud and clear. I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t hafta go to shopping today…” He completely ignored the fact that Kazuha would probably kill him and burn the body, but he didn’t care. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was utterly oblivious to it. “I’ll call ya when I get there.”
“Sounds good.”
“So…how long are you going to hide out in there?”
“I don’t know,” Shinichi looked towards the door, through which he could hear Ran (in Conan’s voice) screaming something about the fascinating things that one could do with Nair and some super glue. “I was thinking I’d be in here for a while. Like, until she dies.”
“Fair enough. I’m getting up. See you soon.”
Heiji hung up first, and Shinichi disconnected his end of the conversation. Then he sighed, and turned his attention back to the mirror. Just when he thought nothing could rattle him…
And Professor Ran’s through-the-door lecture on the “Many Uses of Centipedes and Kitchen Cleavers in Causing Extreme Amounts of Pain to Detectives 101” wasn’t helping matters much, either.
Death was three feet tall…
-o-
Shinichi sat, perched on the edge of the bed. He felt really strange looking down at his knees and seeing pale pink pajama pants there. He felt even stranger knowing that he was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top that really showed off Ran’s…arms.
What, you thought I was going to say something else? Hentai…
In front of him, Ran was pacing a trench in the carpet, small feet parading him back and forth with a regular beat. March, two, three, four, five, six, seven, about-FACE, march the other way, two, three, four, and so forth. She stepped with a precision and sharpness that would have made any drill sergeant proud.
But when she stopped and glared at him, in no way resembling the child she was at the moment, Shinichi actually shrank into himself. Even at that height, the top of her head not even brushing his waist, she could intimidate him like no one else.
“Shinichi…” she said finally, in a tone that did not allow for arguments or protests, “you have approximately thirty seconds to explain to me what the HELL is going on, or so help me God, I will break your knee-caps…” She paused then. “Except…then I’d be breaking my knee-caps…” Her expression faded momentarily into bewilderment. “Now I’m confused…but that’s beside the point!” Blue eyes flared again. “YOU ARE GOING TO START TALKING OR I SWEAR BY ALL THAT IS HOLY—“
“What’s going on?”
Both of them jumped at the growl that interrupted their conversation. They whirled to see Kogoro Mouri standing in the doorway, looking every inch a relative of Bigfoot. And his murderous glare was directed specifically at the small child in front of him.
Ran visibly froze.
Shinichi hesitated, then jumped up, trying his damndest to act like he thought Ran would. “Sorry, Dad. Conan had a bad dream, and he woke me up. Surprised me.” He put her most charming smile on his face and hoped to God that The Idiot’s state of non-wakefulness would cover for the fact that his hands were shaking AND that “Conan” was trembling from head to toe.
For several heartbeats, the room was still.
Then Mouri groaned something that sounded suspiciously like, "Breakfast..." and headed down the stairs towards his first morning beer. His feet thudded heavily on the stairs; they listened intently as he padded down to the landing and opened the door to his office, and then the click as the door closed behind him.
Slowly, they both turned and looked at each other, wide-eyed and nervous.
Ran’s eyes narrowed angrily in Conan’s face. Now, instead of yelling, she started hissing at him, venom in every word. “Well? Start talking. Now. You are in such deep kimchi right now—“
“Look,” Shinichi’s own temper finally started to rise, and he leaned over and hissed right back at her, “I can understand why you’re so pissed off, but hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re not giving me a CHANCE to explain? And furthermore,” his eyes slid towards the open door and the frown-lines on his forehead deepened, “your father is NOT the most understanding person in the world. I would rather he NOT find out about this little…development.”
Ran glared from her shorter stature.
Shinichi straightened up to full height and put his hands on his hips in a nearly-flawless imitation of Ran at her most imposing, the pose she often assumed just before someone’s head would be forcibly knocked from their shoulders via kick-ass karate. “So here’s what I think we need to do. We can go to Agasa’s place. It’s safe, and we can talk there without anyone who’s not supposed to know overhearing anything. You can yell at me there. Okay?”
For a moment, he was pretty sure that his kneecaps were going to get smashed beyond repair.
But to his slight surprise, she folded her arms and nodded. “Fine. Fair enough. Truce until we get to Agasa’s—“ The penny dropped, and her eyes flashed again, “Wait a minute…Agasa-hakase knows, too?” Her infamous temper flared, “AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO DID—MMPH!”
That last was cut off as Shinichi lunged and clapped a hand over her mouth when her volume started to rise. She continued to scream against his hand; most of what she said was fair-well unprintable, and at one point, he had to bite his tongue to keep from interjecting that she could leave his mother out of this and yes, his parents had been married, thank you very much!
Finally, she calmed down and sighed. “We’ll yell at each other later. Let’s just get dressed, and…”
A pregnant pause hit as the full implications of getting dressed smacked them both upside the head. With a hammer. Both faces simultaneously flared to the point of spontaneous combustion.
Ran recovered first, and stormed around the room, making a stop at the closet and the dresser (though Shinichi had to move her desk chair over so she could actually reach the drawers); she then shoved the resulting bundle of clothes into Shinchi’s arms with far more force than her little hands should have been able to muster up. “Here. Wear this,” she growled. “I’m going to go change. I can manage on my own. And I promise you, Shinichi—If. You. Look. You. DIE.”
And she stormed out of the room, leaving the poor boy-now-girl to figure out exactly how one was supposed to get dressed without looking…especially when one had never before had to venture into the wonderful world that was the modern brassiere.
He looked down at the clothing in his arms. Something white and lacy peeked out at him from under the dark red sweatshirt she’d chosen. Shinichi swallowed hard, and closed his eyes.
This was going to be tricky…
Fandom: Detective Conan
Rating: PG
Genre: Humor/Romance
Publish Date: 8/23/2005 through 5/21/2006 (incomplete)
Disclaimer: I don't own Detective Conan. But I do have homemade hand-puppets for each character...that's normal, right?
Ran’s first thought, upon waking up, was that something wasn’t quite right. Before she even opened her eyes, she knew that something was different than it had been before. And for a long moment, she was a bit hesitant to even open her eyes and find out what it was.
It wasn’t that she felt bad, necessarily. It was just that there was some little nagging feeling that something, some as-yet unknown detail had changed during the course of the night, and something told her that she was not going to like whatever that something was.
She opened her eyes, feeling a little nervous and a lot silly.
The ceiling was different. Oddity number one.
A strange, almost inhuman grinding noise was invading her ears. Weirdness numero dos.
And there was just a general disoriented feeling that permeated her senses. It was most unsettling.
She sat up, and the feeling intensified, and she fell right back over again. The second time she tried to get up, though, she was a bit more successful, and even managed to stagger to her feet. It was then that she noticed something even more strange.
She was…short.
And she then noticed the source of the grating sound that had first sent her eardrums a-ringing.
Tentative fingers ran up to her face, sliding over features that were not the same ones she’d had when she had gone to bed the previous night. Now reaching a level of utter panic, she clambered to her feet and tried to sprint out of the room; her feet tangled in the bedclothes, and she ended up face-down on the floor. Now panicked AND nursing a sore nose, she scooted out of the room and into the bathroom.
It was then that she realized—for the second time in as many minutes—that she was far shorter than she had been the night before. She was missing some major height—her forehead barely reached the top of the sink. A quick search of the bathroom produced the stepstool Conan used for such simple activities as looking in the mirror.
Thus aided by the stepstool, she was pleased to discover that she could actually see over the sink and into the mirror. Her reflection stared back at her. And both of them—her and her reflection—lost their lower jaws in perfection unison.
She was…
The face…
That wasn’t her face.
It was…not the reflection of a seventeen-year-old girl.
Ran stared.
The reflection stared back.
She blinked.
She shook her head.
She slapped her hands to the sides of her face.
She smacked herself in the forehead.
But the face remained the same.
And it was definitely not the reflection of a seventeen-year-old girl…
Conan (aka Shinichi) opened his eyes when he heard a scream from down the hall, vaguely remembering dreams of a strange purple mist that seemed to determined to swallow him whole.
His first thought was that there was something wrong with someone else.
His second thought was that something was wrong with him.
This, because he felt…strange. It took a moment to shake off the drowsy haze and try to take a quick account of himself before he decided that the source of the noise was more important. Now thoroughly disoriented and confused, he crawled out of bed and headed towards the door with every intent of investigating the scream.
He fell over promptly and without ceremony or pretense.
Now face-down on the floor, he tried to steady his spinning head, and climbed back to his feet, rubbing his aching nose. He wobbled a bit, but managed to stay upright. He was insanely out of sorts, and he had a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.
And somehow, Ran was at the middle of it.
Therefore, the scream had made him even more nervous, even though it hadn’t sounded anything like Ran.
And so he headed for the door, to investigate the scream, hoping that nothing was seriously wrong.
But he made the mistake of glancing at the mirror as he passed by, and froze, completely forgetting about the shriek that had woken him up. A more pressing matter had presented itself to him.
The face that looked back…
Ran clasped her hands over her mouth to stifle any further screams.
In the mirror reflection, Conan did the same.
Conan’s face.
She ran tentative, shaky fingers over her face, constantly blinking and hoping that the image would clear, that it was some bizarro dream and she would wake up and be herself again. But no, Conan’s blue eyes and childish features remained firmly in place.
Her mind was racing a mile a minute, most of it incoherent babble. But somehow, she stumbled from the bathroom (nearly tumbling headfirst from the stool in the process) and back to the bed she’d woken up in—a futon on the floor of her father’s room.
The inhuman grinding sound? Her father’s snores.
She crawled back under the covers, not quite sure where else to go.
“It has to be a dream…” she murmured to herself, trying very hard not to fully panic. “It must be a dream…” But with each passing repetition of her mantra, she knew that it was, in fact, not a dream. She had somehow gotten trapped in Conan’s body. But what to do, what to do…
A sudden realization hit her: if she was here, then someone else had to be stuck in her body. And given her circumstances, that someone was most likely Conan. For whatever reason, they’d been switched, and the poor boy was probably terrified. So she made the decision that she would remain as calm as possible, if only for the sake of her young charge.
Even though she felt like curling up into a ball and screaming her head off, consequences be hanged.
She made another decision then, as well. Glancing over at her father, she realized that he would NOT take this news well. Best not to tell him right off the bat until she herself had some handle as to what was going on. So she decided to act as much like Conan as she could until further notice.
Ran realized then that she was missing one of Conan’s most obvious traits—his glasses…but if that was the case, then why in the world could she see perfectly? Maybe…maybe she was seeing things as she usually saw them? That didn’t make much sense…but neither did switching bodies.
A quick search produced the glasses by the pillow, and she slipped them onto her nose…only to find that her vision didn’t change. The glasses were…fake? Whiskey tango foxtrot?
She slipped them off her nose for further examination. But she must have touched something because an antennae appeared, shooting out of the frames. What looked like a tiny tracker appeared on one of the lenses. Ran stared blankly at this new development.
Feeling pole-axed was getting to be an unpleasantly regular occurrence.
Another press of the nearly-invisible button made the oddity go away, and she slid the specs onto her nose, at a loss for what else to do. She sat there for a moment, pondering. Why in the world would Conan have something like that?
Come to think of it, he seemed to have an awful lot of unusual toys laying around. He always said that Agasa-hakase made them for him. She’d never really given it much thought before.
Looking around blankly, she noticed Conan’s bowtie sitting on the floor. She absently picked it up and began twirling it around her fingers. It was then that she noticed another strangeness.
There was some sort of mechanism on the back of the bowtie.
Making a quick decision, she slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her as quietly as she could. Once safely out of her father’s earshot (not that he could have heard anything over his insanely loud snoring), she took a closer look at the strange mechanical contraption that graced the back of Conan’s fashion-esque trademark.
There were a couple of dials, and something that looked like a speaker or a microphone. All nestled on the back of the bowtie, completely invisible from the front. She flipped it over, studying it carefully, then sighed.
“Well, this is weird…” she murmured, then jumped a mile when Shinichi’s voice came out the other side of the bowtie. As she stared at the fashionable (snicker) object questioningly, a few things fell painfully into place, like a Plinko chip landing right in the big money spot.
Conan’s bowtie was spouting Shinichi’s voice.
Shinichi had called her yesterday.
So one of two things was going on. Either Conan was calling her as Shinichi to make her feel better—which was an oddly conflicting thought, because she wasn’t sure if she should be angry or flattered by the action. Or…option B.
Gripping the bowtie in one hand, and the glasses in the other, Ran headed down the hall towards her own room, not quite sure what she was going to find there.
Long brown hair, a bit frizzed from prolonged contact with a pillow.
Blue eyes that were now wide awake and almost frightened.
Teenaged height that allowed him to actually see into the mirror without the aide of a ladder.
And a few certain anatomical parts—of the female persuasion, no less—that Shinichi certainly hadn’t had when he’d gone to bed the previous evening.
In short, uh-oh.
Needless to say, Shinichi Kudo was really freaked out.
I mean, wouldn’t you be a little weirded out if you woke up and looked in the mirror and saw your best friend’s face staring back at you? Your female best friend, no less? You certainly would, wouldn’t you.
Shinichi’s mind, so well-trained in logic, was going like a bullet train. But even as brilliant as he was, even as awesome as he was when it came to piecing together the most baffling of puzzles, he was absolutely perplexed as to how in the world he had wound up in Ran’s body.
And every time he thought about it, he resolved to come up with a different way of saying that, because it just sounded so wrong to him. Bad, bad, bad…
And slowly, the idea that they’d been switched kind of faded into the fact that he was actually in Ran’s body (bad!). It was a decidedly new experience, especially when he tried to fold his arms across his chest to think, and found, ahem, obstacles in his way preventing him from comfortably doing so.
Another thought occurred to him—if he was looking through Ran’s eyes right now, then where was Ran. Oh, duh. She was probably…oh dear. This was not good. Not good at all.
But still…Ran…
She felt nice…
Soft…
In pajamas…
No! Naughty! he berated himself, lightly smacking himself in the forehead.
“Problem?”
A painfully familiar soprano voice asked from the doorway. He whirled, belated pushing a few stray locks of long hair from his (her?) eyes as he regarded the speaker with a certain degree of carefully concealed panic.
Conan stared back, blue eyes absolutely frigid.
That was especially freaky, Shinichi realized. An actual out-of-body experience. He was staring himself in the eye…and damned if he didn’t look absolutely menacing at the moment!
Swallowing hard, he ventured (in her voice), “…Ran?”
The small figure in the doorway nodded. Then his (or rather, her) expression turned angry, and she held up two items: a familiar pair of glasses, and an equally familiar bowtie. She raised the bowtie to the level of her mouth and said, “Shinichi?” His own true voice came out the other side.
Shinichi Kudo froze. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to deny the accusation, especially not when she had finally found the proof she had always lacked when making her previous allegations. He proceeded to do a perfect imitation of a hooked fish.
Her expression grew dark, and her fists clenched. Both bad signs.
He started to sweat.
Not only had they somehow switched, but he had just been caught, and he didn’t have the wits left about him to try and derail her suspicions. His thoughts were running in circles like little panicked squirrels, and they basically repeated the same phrase over and over: Oh SHIT I’m SCREWED she’ll KILL ME DEAD and I can’t GET AWAY and DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOOOM…doom…
In spite of his best efforts to ignore the dreaded ringing sound, the telephone wouldn’t shut up.
Finally, grudgingly, Heiji Hattori rolled over and grabbed the stupid thing off of his nightstand. Blinking owlishly in an attempt to wake up, he put the receiver to his ear. “’lo?”
“Hattori!” a panicked female voice rushed from the other end. “Hattori, it’s me!”
“Neechan?” the Detective of the West yawned. “I bet you know what time it is, so I’m waitin’ for an explanation.” He wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment, no matter who was calling.
“It’s me!”
“…Neechan?” Heiji asked, a bit confused.
“No, Kudo!”
A pause. “Wishful thinking?”
“No, you idiot!” Ran’s voice was agitated. “It’s me! I’m Kudo!”
Heiji yawned again, wishing he could end this phone call quickly and go back to bed. He was actually supposed to meet Kazuha in an hour so she could drag him shopping (and he had carefully-laid plans to whine through the entire thing, just to make sure the ahou knew exactly how big of a sacrifice it was for him), so he figured could easily squeeze in another forty-five minutes’ worth of sleep before panicking and going chasing after her at the last minute.
It was their little ritual, really.
“Look, your dad’s not the best example to follow. Really. And you shouldn’t be drinking anyway,” he mumbled, feeling himself start to nod off again. “’specially not this early.”
“Hattori, would you listen?” Ran huffed. “Wait…I know. Listen, I’m going to hold the phone by the door so you can hear this.” There was the sound of movement, and a noise that had previously been merely a muffled sound in the background now became clearer.
Namely, Conan’s voice.
Screaming.
Even muffled as it was (coming through the door, apparently), it was still perfectly plain as to what the pint-sized wonder was shouting. Something about death to…Shinichi? In fact, the death’s she seemed to be wishing on him were nothing short of creative. Burny, stabby, shooty…all quite painful.
Heiji was suddenly wide awake as it clicked. “Wait a minute…you’re Kudo?”
“Brilliant freakin’ deduction!” Ran’s voice—apparently with Kudo’s mind behind it—said shortly. “Honestly, what did I have to do, sing it for you?” He sounded a bit irritated. “And before you ask, I have absolutely no idea how this happened. I just woke up and I was in Ran’s body.”
Heiji paused. “That sounds really wrong…”
“I know,” Shinichi half-moaned. “But I’m in her room right now. I kinda pushed her out of the room and locked the door. So for the moment, at least, I’m kind of safe. But now she also knows I’m Conan, as you could probably guess from those lovely death threats.”
“I’m surprised you had the presence of mind to lock the door,” Heiji teased, finally sitting up and perching on the edge of his bed. “First you get shrunk, now you and your girlfriend have managed to switch around, and you still think clearly enough to put distance between you?”
He could almost hear the eye-roll on the other end of the line. “Hattori, if a lion is charging at you at full speed, you’re not going to stand there and comment on what a lovely color its coat is while you wait for it to maul you. You’re going to run like hell,” Kudo said flatly. “Well, the lion is on the other side of the door, and I’m trying to postpone the inevitable mauling for as long as humanly possible.” A pause. “And I think we could maybe use some help…” That last was slightly plaintive.
Heiji couldn’t keep himself from chuckling. “Read ya loud and clear. I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t hafta go to shopping today…” He completely ignored the fact that Kazuha would probably kill him and burn the body, but he didn’t care. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was utterly oblivious to it. “I’ll call ya when I get there.”
“Sounds good.”
“So…how long are you going to hide out in there?”
“I don’t know,” Shinichi looked towards the door, through which he could hear Ran (in Conan’s voice) screaming something about the fascinating things that one could do with Nair and some super glue. “I was thinking I’d be in here for a while. Like, until she dies.”
“Fair enough. I’m getting up. See you soon.”
Heiji hung up first, and Shinichi disconnected his end of the conversation. Then he sighed, and turned his attention back to the mirror. Just when he thought nothing could rattle him…
And Professor Ran’s through-the-door lecture on the “Many Uses of Centipedes and Kitchen Cleavers in Causing Extreme Amounts of Pain to Detectives 101” wasn’t helping matters much, either.
Death was three feet tall…
Shinichi sat, perched on the edge of the bed. He felt really strange looking down at his knees and seeing pale pink pajama pants there. He felt even stranger knowing that he was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top that really showed off Ran’s…arms.
What, you thought I was going to say something else? Hentai…
In front of him, Ran was pacing a trench in the carpet, small feet parading him back and forth with a regular beat. March, two, three, four, five, six, seven, about-FACE, march the other way, two, three, four, and so forth. She stepped with a precision and sharpness that would have made any drill sergeant proud.
But when she stopped and glared at him, in no way resembling the child she was at the moment, Shinichi actually shrank into himself. Even at that height, the top of her head not even brushing his waist, she could intimidate him like no one else.
“Shinichi…” she said finally, in a tone that did not allow for arguments or protests, “you have approximately thirty seconds to explain to me what the HELL is going on, or so help me God, I will break your knee-caps…” She paused then. “Except…then I’d be breaking my knee-caps…” Her expression faded momentarily into bewilderment. “Now I’m confused…but that’s beside the point!” Blue eyes flared again. “YOU ARE GOING TO START TALKING OR I SWEAR BY ALL THAT IS HOLY—“
“What’s going on?”
Both of them jumped at the growl that interrupted their conversation. They whirled to see Kogoro Mouri standing in the doorway, looking every inch a relative of Bigfoot. And his murderous glare was directed specifically at the small child in front of him.
Ran visibly froze.
Shinichi hesitated, then jumped up, trying his damndest to act like he thought Ran would. “Sorry, Dad. Conan had a bad dream, and he woke me up. Surprised me.” He put her most charming smile on his face and hoped to God that The Idiot’s state of non-wakefulness would cover for the fact that his hands were shaking AND that “Conan” was trembling from head to toe.
For several heartbeats, the room was still.
Then Mouri groaned something that sounded suspiciously like, "Breakfast..." and headed down the stairs towards his first morning beer. His feet thudded heavily on the stairs; they listened intently as he padded down to the landing and opened the door to his office, and then the click as the door closed behind him.
Slowly, they both turned and looked at each other, wide-eyed and nervous.
Ran’s eyes narrowed angrily in Conan’s face. Now, instead of yelling, she started hissing at him, venom in every word. “Well? Start talking. Now. You are in such deep kimchi right now—“
“Look,” Shinichi’s own temper finally started to rise, and he leaned over and hissed right back at her, “I can understand why you’re so pissed off, but hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re not giving me a CHANCE to explain? And furthermore,” his eyes slid towards the open door and the frown-lines on his forehead deepened, “your father is NOT the most understanding person in the world. I would rather he NOT find out about this little…development.”
Ran glared from her shorter stature.
Shinichi straightened up to full height and put his hands on his hips in a nearly-flawless imitation of Ran at her most imposing, the pose she often assumed just before someone’s head would be forcibly knocked from their shoulders via kick-ass karate. “So here’s what I think we need to do. We can go to Agasa’s place. It’s safe, and we can talk there without anyone who’s not supposed to know overhearing anything. You can yell at me there. Okay?”
For a moment, he was pretty sure that his kneecaps were going to get smashed beyond repair.
But to his slight surprise, she folded her arms and nodded. “Fine. Fair enough. Truce until we get to Agasa’s—“ The penny dropped, and her eyes flashed again, “Wait a minute…Agasa-hakase knows, too?” Her infamous temper flared, “AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO DID—MMPH!”
That last was cut off as Shinichi lunged and clapped a hand over her mouth when her volume started to rise. She continued to scream against his hand; most of what she said was fair-well unprintable, and at one point, he had to bite his tongue to keep from interjecting that she could leave his mother out of this and yes, his parents had been married, thank you very much!
Finally, she calmed down and sighed. “We’ll yell at each other later. Let’s just get dressed, and…”
A pregnant pause hit as the full implications of getting dressed smacked them both upside the head. With a hammer. Both faces simultaneously flared to the point of spontaneous combustion.
Ran recovered first, and stormed around the room, making a stop at the closet and the dresser (though Shinichi had to move her desk chair over so she could actually reach the drawers); she then shoved the resulting bundle of clothes into Shinchi’s arms with far more force than her little hands should have been able to muster up. “Here. Wear this,” she growled. “I’m going to go change. I can manage on my own. And I promise you, Shinichi—If. You. Look. You. DIE.”
And she stormed out of the room, leaving the poor boy-now-girl to figure out exactly how one was supposed to get dressed without looking…especially when one had never before had to venture into the wonderful world that was the modern brassiere.
He looked down at the clothing in his arms. Something white and lacy peeked out at him from under the dark red sweatshirt she’d chosen. Shinichi swallowed hard, and closed his eyes.
This was going to be tricky…
