Work Text:
“You need to stop.”
Kaito, who was deeply absorbed in his tinkering, doesn’t even glance up. “I need to stop what?” He asks, as he finally looks up at the voice, only for his eyes to widen as they meet the deep azure of the guy standing in front of him. Kaito recognizes the rest of the face immediately and internally panics, while not letting anything show on his own face. The boy talking to him is Conan, a guy his age who frequented the same coffee shop as Kaito, which is the one they’re in at that exact moment.
His hands ceased working on his gadget then, moving all of his concentration to Conan. Kaito may have developed a small crush on the dark-haired, blue-eyed guy that drank entirely too much black coffee for his young age. The guy in question looked mildly pissed.
“You need to quit tellin’ everyone my name is Conan. It’s becoming a serious problem.” His eyebrows scrunched up cutely, Kaito noticed. Momentarily distracted, Kaito expertly fell back into the conversation. The perks of being a master performer.
“What do you mean? Isn’t that your name?” Kaito questioned, sincerely confused. ‘Conan’ looked unimpressed as if asking “Are you for real?”
“My name is not Conan.”
‘Huh,’ Kaito thinks. Not-Conan paid no heed to Kaito’s internal blank.
“The name’s Shinichi. Shinichi Kudo.”
‘Oh,’ Kaito thinks. Then Kaito realizes.
“Wait, you mean you’re─”
“The high-school detective? Yeah.”
“...oh.”
“Yeah, oh.”
With a shake of his head, Kaito tried to argue. “But I heard this girl calling you Conan─multiple times!”
Shinichi winced, scratching his neck. “Yeah, she’s a friend of mine. It’s somewhat of an inside joke between us.”
Kaito wasn’t going to question Shinichi for having an inside joke with an 8-year-old. He flushed in embarrassment. “Uhh, sorry about that then.” Then a thought struck him.
“Although,” he wondered, “how’d you know about that anyway?”
Now it was Shinichi’s turn to blush, a wonderful color on him Kaito decided. “Hakuba told me ‘bout it. He said that I should know that ‘Kuroba is prancing around telling everyone about his crush on Conan.’”
Kaito was slightly embarrassed to say the least, but his dislike for Hakuba arose anew. Their love-hate friendship definitely suffered a new low. But most importantly, his secret crush is not so secret anymore. Kaito contemplates his options.
On one hand, he could deny the crush and claim for Hakuba to have exaggerated, or he could resign to his fate and chance it. Lady Luck hasn’t failed him yet, so Kaito decided to cannonball into the hole that was dug for him.
With the turn of his hand a red rose appeared in his hand and the smirk of a confident magician appeared on his face. “Well, now that the cat is out of the bag… Would you go on a date with me?”
Shinichi blinked at the sudden change of demeanor and appearance of a rose.
“I didn’t realize you were a magician,” Shinichi said as he tentatively reached for the rose. He huffed with a smirk, looking back at the magician.
“Guess I have no choice. You already told whole world about how much you like me, so I’ll have to at least give ya a chance, right?”
Kaito’s grin widened─if that was even possible. Shinichi was already a lot more interesting than he originally thought. Shinichi took the seat across from the magician and immediately asked about the gadget he was working on.
One date turned to two, to three, to four─turns out they worked really well together─and before they knew it, the two of them were actually dating. And Kaito couldn’t be happier to have slipped up this bad for once in his life.