I now have Firefox, and copy-paste works for it. *glees*
This isn't violating the moratorium on writing, for the record - I've had this finished for a while. It was written in anticipation of having my questions answered so I could post this for the au100 comm. I'll be reposting this there or at crossovers100 if it fits better there.
Title: Injustice
Fandom: Detective Conan/Case Closed and Magic Kaito
Characters: Saguru Hakuba, unnamed (Saguru’s father), Saguru’s mother, random doctor, OMC
Claim: Saguru Hakuba
Prompt: Paralysis
Word Count: 1,367 without standard post-notes and disclaimer; 1,578 with
Rating: PG-13 for mentions of violence, death
Author's Notes: Apologies, but I don’t have much experience with hospitals beyond the bits and pieces I snatch off random medical-oriented TV shows and fanfic. I also do not have experience with the conditions listed below. As such, please excuse any mistakes and help me to correct them wherever possible, and pass off everything else as artistic license. No spoilers, pre-series for both fandoms. No resemblance to any person, living or dead, is intended. Full disclaimer at end of fic.
Saguru is thirteen when it happens.
December 13 - the anniversary of the event, and he occasionally laughs at the irony of the date.
(Twelve was four times three, or three fours. Three sets of death . . . but he doesn’t subscribe to numerology at the time.)
He doesn’t remember much of what happened; he only knows a screeching and somebody (either his father or his mother; his mother, more likely) screaming watch out-
He wakes in the hospital four hours later to the news that he is now paralyzed from the waist down and unlikely to recover, that his mother is dead, and that the driver who ran the red light is nowhere to be found. (Not in that order, though.)
When he is trying to move, to get up and walk around, to find his parents and figure out precisely what happened for him to end up here, the doctor walks in (male, late thirties to late forties, married, might be having an affair).The look on the sympathy on the man’s face cements for him the truth he’s been unwilling to admit about himself.
It’s okay, though. He can learn to use a wheelchair to get around instead (unfair-fury-where’smother?). He asks, then, about the driver responsible for the accident.
Gone.
He is not yet as controlled as he will be in his later years, and as such spews forth a set of creative invective (howdarehe!-irresponsible- He curses mentally for the first time; aloud as well.)
A word from his father silences him, though he still seethes with the injustice of it all. He consciously recalls that Mother was present, and asks how she is.
The grief that is abruptly radiating from his father’s body is what plants the doubt that cracks his composure.
The doctor’s quiet explanation (neckbroken-goneinstantly-nopain-whydoesithurtsomuch?-apologiesandcondolences) is the thing to shatter it.
*****
Weeks have passed and there is no progress in finding his paralyzer and his mother’s killer. He returns to school and distances himself from his classmates. He will be moving to Japan at the end of the school year, leaving all of summer to readjust. He’s okay with that, too.
(Motherhappy-motherglowing-motherfuriousbutnotangry-fleeingmemories)
Then, the week before the last week of school, the police find him.
His name is Clayton Patch. He is forty-one years old, married and widowed, taking care of the three children he had with his wife. The day of the accident, he was rushing to the hospital to join his youngest child, who had been rushed there after an accident at school.
(Saguru finds himself wishing that they’d never discovered the driver. Better to direct his anger at an unseen foe than one who bore a face of innocence.)
Then he discovers that the man was lying.
It is no more than a series of fortunate occurrences. Since he is fairly certain that the statue of limitations has not expired yet, he gathers all the evidence and presents it to his father first, to make sure it’s in the proper format.
(The look on his father’s face is one he’ll never forget. Astonishment-guilt-relief-vindictiveness all blended together is a combination that he thinks he’ll not see very often in the future.)
The truth is as follows:
His mother’s killer was rushing to get to his wife.
His third wife.
Three women had all married the same man, and he’d been constantly rushing from one wife to the next when he’d run the red light and-
So. Yeah.
By the time the police found him, the man was on the way to the airport to join his fiancée and soon-to-be fourth wife. The officers were slightly rougher on the man then they should have been (regardless of nationality, a police officer was a police officer, and that an innocent was so badly wounded (though he protests being called innocent under the understanding that innocent refers to his actual state of mind and not relative age) only served to fuel the fire.)
He is there when the police make the arrest, as he has requested. (They are happy to seal an alliance with the Japanese police department; happy enough that they’re willing to ignore the fact that a thirteen-year-old half-breed showed them up.) Though he doesn’t know it yet, it is a decision that will seal his destiny.
He stands to the side as the head of the investigation locks the handcuffs into place around the man’s wrists. Another officer, smirking, announces that the man’s clearly been doing a bad job of hiding his affairs if a kid can figure out the truth. He bristles at the title (thirteen years old means that he’s a teenager, and he’s not that short!) but then sees the look on his father’s face.
Pride.
The realization that his father is proud of him makes him glow. (His father, proud of him! HIM! It’s a moment he’ll treasure forever.) That memory is one that he vows to burn into his brain, he decides then and there, even as he smirks at his mother’s killer’s look of rage.
He isn’t prepared for the man to break free of the officers restraining him.
Instincts from fencing (though he’s just started) and judo save him from the man’s first charge.
The gunshot that rings out over the newborn chaos saves a young girl from his second, blood and brain matter spraying from the man's head.
(Five years later, he will have a perfect series of events on which he can base his nightmares of a phantom exorcised.)
*****
Hakuba Daisuke glances to his right at the still form of his son. He’s asleep at the moment, the book that he was reading sliding from limp fingers to rest upon the tray table which had unfolded from the armrest of the chair. Smiling to himself, he slid the bookmark from its resting place between the cover of the book and the first page of the book (his son was already halfway through) and set it where his son had stopped reading before easing it completely free to set gently on the tray. As he did so, he gazed at the title of the book.
Law of the Country of Japan
(The last of Saguru’s childhood is packed away in a box and sent to the farthest reaches of his brain. Somewhere inside, he knows that he is mourning, but can’t really bring himself to care at the moment. He has a new mission, now: to prevent this from happening again, and to minimize the loss of life in the future.)
*****
It's the first day of eighth grade and Saguru Hakuba speaks Japanese with traces of a lingering British accent despite having only passing fluency at the beginning of the summer. He’s confident that being exposed to it for the rest of the school year will mean that he’ll end middle school speaking Japanese with only the faintest reminder that he once lived in New England.
It is now 07:45:56, and the bell signaling the start of the first class rings. He’s currently waiting outside the door of his new classroom (5-A) at his new middle school (Ekoda Middle School) as his new teacher (Ikenama-sensei introduces his classmates (who have been in the same class since they started at the school) to their new classmate (he pretends not to hear the word ‘gaijin’).
At last, hearing the teacher announce his name, he enters the room in his new uniform. He’s already decided on his introduction to the class. It’s designed both to set himself up as being an arrogant prick and vastly superior in intelligence (not letting anyone get close to me; can’t let anyone close. Best this way - easier to tell who wants to use him for his father’s connections, limits the possibility of his classmates being kidnapped to be used as leverage against him, ensures that the teasing over his new disability will not hurt as much.)
"September 1, seven forty-six twenty-three A.M.,” he announces crisply. “I just transferred from London Bridge School.”
(Admittedly, London Bridge School was not his middle school of origin. However, it did sound stereotypically British, and that was what he was going for.)
“My name is Hakuba Saguru.”
“And what do you want to be when you graduate, Hakuba-kun?”
A smirk works its way across his lips. “When I graduate . . . I want to be a detective.”
Fin
Disclaimer: I only own the name of Saguru’s father as Daisuke, the guy who ran the light, that Saguru’s mom died, the title of the book at the end (unless there actually is a book out there named that, in which case it is unintentional plagarizatoin) and the fact that this is how Saguru got his start as a detective. Saguru Hakuba himself, that his father is a member of the police force, and all related matters are the property of Gosho Aoyama. In short, if you recognized it before reading this fanfic, it’s not mine.