Chapter Text
His arm aches. Kaito flexes his hand, blood running down from the bullet graze that feels like fire. The robot that impersonated him is wires and synthetic skin smoking in a pile. He feels sick in his stomach, both from almost dying after a few days trapped in a lab and because he’d just seen something that had run around with his face blow its own head off.
It’s just a robot, but it’d thought it was human. It’d thought it was him, had seen his memories, just hadn’t quite been human enough to understand life, death, or morals. What kind of sick fuck made something like that?
Kaito shudders. His hand flexes again. Bandages. He needs bandages, and maybe stitches, or maybe to just. Go lie down.
His skin doesn’t feel quite right but that’s the shock probably. A lot’s happened in a couple days’ time. Like finding out someone with his face killed someone. A creepy scientist who also kidnapped Kaito, but yeah. How anything that had Kaito’s memories and personality could do that… He shudders again.
Kaito isn’t a megalomaniac in disguise right? He has lines and morals and things he’d never do in a million years, even if some of his morals are grayer than others. He doesn’t hurt people. Not physically permanent. And not any other way if he can help it.
Blood drips from his fingertips.
There’s a laboratory burning down with a corpse of a man who tried to make a man from metal out there and Kaito doesn’t want anything more to do with it.
He turns away. He has a gem to return and a budding reputation to save.
o*O*o
He feels weird for a while after that. It’s the trauma probably. Kaito can’t say his life has ever been normal. His father was a stage magician, both his parents turned out to be thieves, and he puts on a white suit to stir up shadows to try and find out why his father was murdered. That’s hardly the sort of thing a teenager usually goes through, but killer robots and kidnapping were new. His balance a bit off for a day? He spent two days strapped to a table. His arm took a bit to work right? He did get grazed by a bullet. Swimming takes a bit more effort than the last time he did it? Not weird since he generally avoids swimming in the ocean if he can. Aoko’s mop swings seem a little slower? He’s kind of hyper aware of attacks lately, so he’s just paying more attention.
Things are different but not that different so it’s just his head being weird about it all. Life goes on, he stops feeling a bit off and he keeps on going as usual. Bait Aoko, play like a good student, perform magic, and pull of the next heist. Simple.
But then there’s suddenly a magic wielding witch and a detective trying to sniff him out, and life just keeps getting weirder. He doesn’t remember it being this strange before he became Kid, but it must have been at least a little weird. It’s just that practicing magic and acrobatics with Aoko and actual magic and jumping off buildings are very different things. It’s a miracle he’s managed not to break anything. What with the roller coaster, or jumping off buildings, or getting shot at, or ghost(?) pirates, or being attacked by a hoard of hairy rats… Yeah. Life is weird.
So if Kaito’s a little weird in it, well, he fits right in, now doesn’t he?
o*O*o
Kaito’s chest is aching and there’s a nasty bruise forming. He supposes that’s what happens when a gem blocks a bullet. It’s yet another miracle the sapphire didn’t shatter let alone that the bullet hit it instead of him at all. Aoko liked her birthday gift but it had taken all Kaito had to set that up for her and he’s dead on his feet now.
He might have a cracked rib too. He winces, easing off the costume. It has a hole—two really where the bullet deflected—that will need patched and the usual bleach treatments to keep it white. White is the worst color for climbing around rooftops and crawlspaces. He’d change it if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s one of Kid’s signature identifiers at this point. Thanks, Oyaji.
The bruise is worse than he first thought when he gets his shirt off. Mottled purple all along the left side of his chest. Like someone took a wooden mallet to him.
Thankfully there’s an x-ray machine down in Kid’s hideaway. It’s old and definitely not something he’s going to ever use much because, well, radiation, but he’d rather know if he’s managed to break a rib or not so he knows how much acrobatics he can get away with.
It takes a bit to set up and a bit longer to figure out how to get everything to work, but fifteen minutes later he’s got x-ray film developing in a little darkroom off to the side because apparently his dad had a little bit of everything thought out down here. He loves and hates it in equal measures sometimes.
He sighs, feeling the deep breathing ache, and looks at the forming image. And frowns.
He’s not a medical expert, far from it, but he has a general run down of the human body and has seen x-rays before. What Kaito’s looking at? Not what he’d expect to see. There’s ribs, yes, but they’re not quite right, and too dark. Then there’s all the metal. It’s like his nervous system is registering as wires, radiating out like something from one of his textbooks, same with the circulatory system that’s a bit too dark on the film. Should he even be seeing that? Heart, maybe, but branching signs of the rest of his veins and arteries? His lungs aren’t the right shape. The vague shadows of organs aren’t right either. And there’s… there’s the shadow of screws and pins and mechanical bits that shouldn’t be there. There’s wires instead of tendons that shouldn’t be showing and he has to stare.
His chest throbs and he looks down at it. Bruising. At the film. Barely resembling something human. He hurts. Aches. Yet there in front of him is mechanical parts.
Feeling like he’s floating, or maybe sinking, Kaito plucks one of his razor cards from its deck. He slides it along his finger. Skin parts, blood wells up, pain registers dimly.
But is it blood?
It drips, just a few drops, already clotting as he stares. It’s red as any blood he’s seen. The pain is real. And yet. He looks at the film.
Kaito hasn’t thought about the robot in months. Why would he? It’s over and done. He’d read a police report about the lab in the paper. About the body found and the equipment sitting in police evidence for ages as the murder case went cold. They didn’t know to look for a robot. And the robot had been left for scrap. Kaito doesn’t know what had happened to its remains.
There hadn’t been a second body found.
He looks back at his hand and finds it shaking.
The robot’s face had peeled off, but when he tugs at his cheek he just feels pain. Same with his hair. He feels. He eats and shits and sleeps and bleeds. His breath is coming too fast and it hurts.
It’s a mistake, right? He could take another scan and it’d be normal. Human. He could scan his hand and it would be bone and tendons and the ghost of muscle, not wire and metal joints that would make a prosthetic expert weep. Not too-dark veins and tendrils of nerves that shouldn’t be visible.
His lungs were the wrong shape, he couldn’t breathe.
“Shit.”
He’s Kaito, right? Just a normal teenager with an abnormal life. Just a normal, human teenager.
The robot thought it was human.
The robot thought it was Kaito.
Kaito doesn’t remember being taken, he just remembers waking up strapped down. But the robot barely passed as human. But Kaito has wires in his chest.
He looks at the film again. “Well. No cracked rib.” He laughs. It’s not funny at all. He can’t breathe. “What do I do?”
The empty basement hideaway his father left him has no answers at all.
Like usual, it’s just Kaito facing crisis alone.
He’s never felt worse.
o*O*o
Eventually, he picks himself off the floor. Eventually he changes into new clothes. Eventually he slides into bed and sleeps, terribly, but sleeps. He sees his face melting in his dreams, a broken metallic skull leaking fluid and smoke and blank mechanical eyes staring at him. His skin peeling away to show metal bones and wires as everyone he loves stares in horror.
Kaito wakes up feeling like he’s going to throw up, in a cold sweat. He can dream and sweat and feel sickening terror, surely he’s wrong. Surely.
But the x-ray is the same damning image this morning as it was last night.
Kaito’s hands start shaking again.
If he goes into class, Hakuba will take one look at him and know something’s up. Hell, Aoko will notice. He laces his fingers together. Poker face. Poker face. Whatever is going on, he’s still been Kaito for months without noticing anything wrong so. So maybe he’s… a cyborg or something. A robot wouldn’t be having a panic attack about being a robot. Who would want to make a robot capable of having a panic attack in the first place?
He doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but he needs answers before he can do anything else.
Kaito calls in sick, leaves Aoko a message so she doesn’t show up demanding he get ready for school. Eats plain toast without tasting it—how can he taste it?—and slides on his shoes. His chest is a mass of dark bruises just like a human body that had a bullet deflected should be. But nothing under his skin is apparently human.
It’s easy to slip into the police record room with a borrowed face, and a matter of minutes to seek out the mad doctor’s case record. His charred remains are photographed in gristly glory front and center, but his cause of death isn’t fire. Kaito knows his hands don’t have the sort of strength to do what that file describes.
He almost throws up looking at it.
There’s lab equipment listed off, melted computers and bits of paper files to survive the destruction kept in evidence files. Kaito might need to come back and see what he can salvage from them. If he’s… not fully human, he might need some of the doctor’s research no matter how much the thought makes his skin crawl. There’s nothing in the file about the robot, but there is notes about unfinished pieces parts sifted from the wreckage. Police notes only speculate what they thought was going on in the labs.
The file doesn’t mention another body.
Kaito does a quick look into active unidentified male bodies found in the last few months, but none of them are young enough to be him. None of them recognizable. It should be a good thing.
It should be.
Instead it has Kaito’s breathing tight again because what if he died and no one ever found the body? What if he rots somewhere and no one will ever know he’s not. That’s Kaito’s not.
He leaves the police station.
There’s a disconnect between his self and emotions and it’s something he’s done before, but rarely outside of a heist. His poker face, most of the time, is an act. This is different. This is shutting bits of himself away because otherwise he couldn’t function. This is putting off a breakdown knowing it’ll be that much worse later. This is shutting a door knowing it’s going to open later and drown him.
He heads for the lab. It’s the only place he can think to go.
o*O*o
The building is condemned. It’s a burnt husk of a thing and a surprise that it hasn’t been torn down yet. Perhaps the doctor had owned it and it’s in the air what to do with it. Either way, Kaito approaches with detached caution.
He can remember leaving here in a rush, the explosion that followed not long after he made it out. He can remember the sickening glimpse of a body on his way out, trying not to look too hard and knowing it’d haunt his nightmares. Kaito steps inside and pinpoints the twisted metal that was once where he was strapped down, the shattered remains of the memory transfer machines still imbedded into the wall behind it.
The police had removed a lot of things, but they couldn’t remove the scorch marks on the walls and floor or the dark bloodstains in the corner. He shivers.
What is he doing here? The scene was gone over by police. It’s not like he’s going to find something they didn’t, and it’s not like he’s going to know what any of the machine bits left can do beyond the memory transfer one.
It’s damp and drafty inside. It smells like wet ashes and chemicals and he wants to turn around and leave, especially when he sees a metal start of a skeleton still bolted to the back wall. How many had this guy made? How many robot failures before the one that Kaito fought? How many thought they were human? How many other people were kidnapped in the process of building these things?
Things. Robots were things. And Kaito was…
The wall had collapsed along one side, and no one had bothered to clear the rubble. If Kaito was a crazy robot building scientist that kidnapped teenagers, what would he do with them? Ok, he’d been strapped down to the memory machine. But if he built a robot and implanted memories in it, he’d want to compare, right? He’d want to prove that he’d done the transfer right, so he wouldn’t just get rid of the teenager. The robot Kaito faced had transferred memories fine, but the emotional and moral processes hadn’t been right. The doctor had been basing it off Kaito and if Kaito was. If he was then that meant the transfer had worked right on Kaito. Probably. And maybe the scientist had been trying to duplicate whatever happened with Kaito or maybe they’d been two different models for different purposes. Who the hell knew at this point? Certainly not Kaito.
Kaito prods at rubble. If there’s one thing he’s learned about people who have secrets to hide, things aren’t as they appear. This is a lab, but it’s missing living space. It’s missing storage and a metal foundry. The pieces that built the robots are too specialized to not be custom made. The cabinets that had existed had to have been full of wires and polymers and the fine details bits that you’d want a nice open workspace to better work with, but there had to be a place the doctor had done the base work and he’s not seeing any sign of it here. Just the start of the skeleton on the wall that’s missing its head and lower half.
He can’t look at it. It’s somewhere in between the scan Kaito took of his chest and the metal chassis from the robot he fought, its skin peeling back and—
There had to be a basement. Still is a basement probably. But the door is either hidden or buried, and Kaito’s not sure what to do first. Test the shattered remains of cabinet bases? Try scrounging through rubble? See if anything still hooked into the wall shifts and shows a hidden room like his painting at home?
The basement wouldn’t have been legally added or the police would have its existence on file for the building blueprints. But most of this place can’t have been legally built. Not with the amount of equipment secreted away. People would have asked questions. So. Hidden door.
Kaito estimates wall thicknesses versus the interior versus how dangerous it is to get close to places where the ceiling and walls are still crumbling bit by bit.
There’s a cabinet with shattered glass cases and medical supplies that have all been taken away as evidence. Kaito vaguely remembers it before the explosion. Despite half a roof caving in around it, it’s still in one piece structurally and that means it’s built stronger than a cabinet should be.
It takes twenty minutes of careful prodding and digging and tugging to get it to budge and when it does it shrieks like rusted hinges. But Kaito keeps pulling and gets a space big enough for him to crawl through, stairs traveling down.
It’s dark and even mustier than above. The floor must have cracked or the foundations, and it’s growing mold, but Kaito’s surprised to find it isn’t completely dark. Somehow there’s still power running here, probably underground. The overhead lights are shattered but in the gloom are a few red blinking lights of appliances.
Kaito wants to turn back but he’s never been one to shy away from the truth.
Glass crunches under his shoes as his small pocket flashlight illuminates fragments of the dark. A table. A kitchen. A bed, all in the first room, but heavy metal doors beyond. They’re warped though, and the ceiling sags ominously where a support beam crumpled slightly from the explosion above. Kaito has no idea how it didn’t get destroyed with the rest of the place, but it had to have been the placement of explosives.
He creeps further, leaving the eerily normal living area for one of the metal doors. It’s stuck, but he gets it to move enough to squeeze past, his ribs protesting the movement. It’s fine. It’s not important. The room is the metal foundry he’d expected, casts and tools and carefully disguised air vents branching off. It’s heavily reinforced, probably also muffled so the metalwork didn’t make too much noise. He sees finished metal bones, all sorted neatly into labeled bins and racks of molds. There’s a half-finished skull just sitting there on a work bench, empty eye sockets unnerving.
Kaito wrenching his eyes away from it. There’s papers and diagrams, documents on the doctor’s research about how the robotic body comes together, about alloys and density and weights that Kaito should keep if it ever becomes something he needs—He drops the thought into that emotional void growing in his head.
If he needs anything from here, he will take it. And will not think about what it means.
The documents about the muscular, nervous, circulatory and digestive systems aren’t here. Might not even exist anymore. But there had been a personal computer in the living space and it had glass littering it like the floor, but it wasn’t destroyed. It was one of the blinking red lights, so maybe…
Kaito’s taking that when he leaves.
The other metal door is warped worse than the foundry. Kaito has to go and get a metal femur to lever the gap wide enough to pass through and he’s surprised to find the inside almost fully intact.
One light flickers on, the only bulb not destroyed. He’s not sure at first what the room is. There’s a filing cabinet by the door, sure, but also a chest freezer and something that looks like an opaque glass case except there are wires running to it and an electric hum that’s louder than the freezer. Something in his instincts prickle and Kaito can’t explain the heavy terrified feeling bubbling in his gut the longer he stares at the simple room in the dim, flicker light.
Glass crunches and he tugs the freezer lid up. He’s half expecting to find a dismembered corpse in there. There’s not a corpse but there is vial after vial of dark liquids with strings of numbers on them and containers labeled ‘skin’ with numbers after them. The liquid looks a lot like blood. Kaito’s stomach lurches. The other containers are opaque and thankfully impossible to tell the contents of, though they could be organs, real or synthetic. Kaito really hopes the skin is synthetic.
He lets the lid close and tugs the file cabinet drawers. Locked, but he can easily get in them later. That leaves the glass case.
It has a computerized box attached to the front with strings of numbers displayed that mean absolutely nothing to Kaito. There’s controls too, but the only one he cares about is the one that opens the glass case. It unlocks with a pneumatic hiss, like its contents were under pressure and Kaito swings the glass up.
And stares down at his face.
Peaceful. Like it’s asleep. He’s asleep. But his lips are bluish and his skin is pale and, when Kaito reaches out with a shaking hand, he’s cold to the touch.
The police never found a second body.
The room goes a little sideways and dark and Kaito realizes only after his face is mashed against the metal edge of the glass case that he’s hyperventilating.
“Shit,” he hisses through chattering teeth. “Shit.” His hair’s standing on end and his whole body is shaking and he’s having a panic attack next to his own corpse. “Shit.” It shouldn’t be possible to have a panic attack when he isn’t even real.
The room keeps spinning and blinking bright and dark as he tries to control his breathing. Shit, how can he hyperventilate when he doesn’t have real lungs and maybe not even a real brain—unless. He pops back up like a man drowning and scrabbles for the case.
He tilts Kai—the body’s head one way or another, but there’s no sign of it being cut open. The hair’s the same wiry texture he feels when he touches his head and there’s no injury he can feel. The knobs of its spine along the neck are intact. There’s wires, now that he’s looking, glued at the temples, but they’re not going in the body. There’s wires other places too and he has a stupid, fleeting moment of gratitude that at least the sick fuck that did this left Kaito’s underwear on. The body’s. Shit. There’s no marks and no indication of what happened, but the body isn’t breathing and there’s no pulse at its throat and it’s Kaito’s body right there.
It’s him but it’s not because Kaito isn’t.
He has to let go of the body and take three steps away to empty the meager contents of his stomach on the glass-littered floor. Stomach bile burns his throat. Is it even stomach acid? Is it even—how is he digesting if he’s wires and not-quite-organs? What is he?
He’s crying and hiccupping and he can’t quite seem to stop, the sour taste in his mouth and the smell of mold in his nose. What was the point in making a robot so close to human it can’t tell the difference between flesh and machine? What’s the point of a machine that can cry and vomit and panic like a real person? What’s the point of killing a teenager to replace him with a machine?
He crouches for an unknown period of time until the panic sort of flat lines and his tears dry. His hands stop shaking and his throat is raw, each breath a rasp. He bleeds and feels pain and emotions and—
Kaito goes back to the body. His body. Say the memory transfer worked. Say that Kaito in his entirety went from human flesh and bone to this. Intact. Say that the process fried Kaito’s brain and the doctor was left with a comatose teenager and a robot that didn’t know it was a robot. What would the doctor do with his mistake? Was the case to preserve the corpse? To keep the body as reference or had there been another purpose?
Or maybe the process hadn’t fried Kaito’s brain. Maybe the real Kaito had looked at his double. At the other Kaito and tried to break free. Maybe he’d been sedated or something else went wrong. But maybe that Kaito had died in terror and left an imposter in his place.
Kaito will never know.
There is no sign of decomposition. No sign of the body going through rigor mortis or any kind of trauma. Like he’s just sleeping. Like a few tiny stimuli could open the hidden blue eyes and the body would rise up and express how frigging cold it is in the case.
Maybe, for a scientist playing god, that had been the intent. Make a man from scratch achieved, next step bring back the dead. The first person to successfully revive a cryo patient.
Kaito closes his eyes, then closes the glass case. He can’t look at his own body anymore. He can’t. It seals with another hiss, preserving the body for however long the machine keeps running.
What the hell is he supposed to do?
He presses the heels of his hands against his swollen eyes. It’s not right to leave this here. It’s not right for any of this to be left here. It’s not right for Kaito to take the place of the real Kaito either but he doesn’t know what the hell to do. He’s been taking his place for months now; what else is there for him?
Is it better or worse if he is, in fact, a complete imprint of Kaito’s brain? Would he even know the difference if something is missing?
Worst of all, no one noticed. Not Aoko. Not Kaito or Jii. Not Kaito’s own mother. No one.
Kaito died alone. And no one noticed.
He’s crying again, not sure if it’s for himself or for the body at his back. Months. Months.
The overhead light flickers out and all at once Kaito can’t stay here. It’s like he’s the one in the box, trapped and slowly running out of air, and he squeezes out the door and up the stairs before he can even process moving. He doesn’t stop until he’s up a tree and breathing smoke and mold free air and trying to stop trembling. ‘What now?’ his mind asks. ‘What now, what now, what now?’
It’s night when he finally moves. He doesn’t know how long he sat up a tree, can’t remember the sun going down, only knowing that his body aches everywhere from stillness and unforgiving solid tree limbs beneath his ass. He makes a call. “Jii?”
He doesn’t know what his voice sounds like, couldn’t pick up his poker face if he tried right now.
It must be horrible though because Jii’s voice comes through the line sharp and worried. “What’s happened?” he asks.
There’s no way to start, no words to draw on to explain the mess that this is. How does someone say that they’re dead? That they’re dead and not, human and not, all at the same time?
“Kaito-bocchama?” Jii says sharper.
“How good,” Kaito says, voice gone all wobbly and out of control, “is that friend of yours with robotics?”
“…Kaito-bocchama?” Jii says a lot more dubiously.
Kaito licks his lips with a dry tongue. Dry mouth. Probably dehydrated and doesn’t that make no sense for a robot to have that feature. “There’s a problem. And I don’t know what to do,” he admits.
He can’t say it. How can he say to Jii that Kaito’s dead, like Toichi is dead, to Kaito’s mom that he’s dead and there’s just this remnant body of wires and meat-mimicking mess wearing his face left? How can he do that?
“Where are you?” Jii says, the sound of him getting clothing, maybe or a coat in the background.
Kaito hesitates, but gives the address of the burned down lab. “How good is your friend with robotics?” he asks again.
“…It isn’t his specialty,” Jii says after a long moment.
“Ah.” Too much to hope for. Still, maybe this mysterious friend Jii gets the occasional gadget from will know how to read the research notes better than Kaito would. Keys jingle as Jii locks his front door. “Jii?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, in advance,” Kaito says knowing it’s not enough. He hangs up before Jii can say anything in response and doesn’t pick up the return call. Instead he stuffs his phone in a pocket and covers his face with his hands and just breathes. If nothing else makes sense, at least he can do that.