Summary : Ran, while writing about Conan in her diary, is seized by a melancholy feeling and decides to go to Shinichi's house to reminisce. While there, she discovers documents that contain a heart-stopping revelation… Takes place after 5th movie.

Disclaimer : I do not own Detective Conan or its characters.

Author's note : This is an old crappy story of mine that I posted just for kicks. Also to see what kind of response this level of writing would have. I have a few other chapters of it not yet reviewed. I might continue this story after reviewing.

Blabla: diary writing

Blabla : flashback or thoughts

Prologue

Conan-kun is a very special child. In fact, he's almost… strange.

Mouri Ran nibbled on the end of her pen, frowning down at her diary.

She had just spent the whole week relaxing at home to recover from the events of a few days ago. To begin with, the Nishitamashi Councilman, Oki Iwamatsu, whom they had met at the Twin Towers, had been murdered in a hotel room of one of those very buildings.

Then, the game programmer, Hara, had been killed in his own home.

And then, at the Twin Tower opening party, the buildings' and Tokiwa corporation owner and old friend of her father's, Tokiwa Mio, had been hung above stage, in front of her art instructor's latest painting. The curtains had been pulled back to the horrifying scene. The worst part was that the artist, Master Kisaragi Hosui, was Mio-san's killer.

I've often thought so. I mean, he appeared out of nowhere one day.

His parents, who are away in America, seem to neglect him completely. We get a check every month to cover his living expenses. Sometimes, if he's lucky, he'll get a phone call. But that's it. No visits, letters or whatever. I feel really sorry for him, but the weird thing is, he doesn't seem to miss his parents at all. That makes me wonder if it's always been like this for him.

Explosions. She hated explosions. They happened suddenly and made a whole lot of noise and usually heralded mortal danger. And she also hated the dark, for criminals favored it. Yesterday's explosions had made the lights go out. A very bad combination in her book.

And then there's the way he acts. I've grown more or less used to his quirks, but when I stop to think about it, there's just no way a normal child would behave the way he does, especially in a crisis.

When something bad happens, you expect a kid to scream and cry and cling to whoever's closest for reassurance and comfort. What you don't expect is for them to keep their cool and think about the best course of action.

I've stopped counting the number of dead bodies we've seen, but I remember that the very first one was in Okino Yoko-san's hotel room. I can't imagine that Conan-kun had been at a crime scene before coming to live with us, and yet, of the two of us, he was the one to keep his head and I was the one who freaked out and screamed.

By some miracle, the VIP elevator had still been working, and the police had used it to get the women and children out.

Well… most of them, anyway.

Sonoko, Conan and herself had taken the third lift down with the last of the women. Just past the 45th floor, the elevator had, for some reason, stopped. They had been forced to escape via the trap door on the ceiling and from there get back inside the building.

Conan had been the first to think of it.

"Ran-neechan! Lift me up!"

A second was all it took for Ran to understand. She hauled the boy up on her shoulder and from there, gave him a boost. With surprising agility, Conan-kun had flipped himself over using the bar on the ceiling, and kicked out the trap door. In the next moment he standing out of sight on top of the elevator.

Ran was next to emerge. Looking up, she spotted him already trying to pry the doors to the 45th floor open.

At that time, though, she hadn't known it was the 45th floor. Conan had been the one to tell the rest of them. Then, after one woman spotted smoke filtering in the corridor, he had been the one to urge them to run to the Sky Bridge.

He doesn't fidget. He doesn't yell (except when it's unavoidable), doesn't even talk loudly, doesn't pester anyone for attention when he's bored. He almost never complains. He has a knack for getting into trouble, like that time he and his friends were supposed to chaperone a younger boy called Toshiro-kun on the First Errand event, and somehow they all ended up trapped with a cadaver in the basement of a building that was being demolished.

Luckily they escaped through the sewers, but I shudder to think about how the whole thing could have ended.

They had been hurrying across the Sky Bridge when the one above it had come crashing down. Conan, being last, and she, being right in front of him, had been trapped in the A tower.

Shaken and slightly disoriented, she'd pushed herself up on her knees.

Even now, she couldn't believe what she had said at that moment.

"What now, Conan-kun?"

Instead of the child relying on the near-adult, it had been the other way around. And yet, at that time, it had seemed perfectly normal, like instinct, to turn to her charge for advice.

He's related to both Agasa-hakase and Shinichi. Now THAT is WEIRD. That means hakase is related to Shinichi, if only vaguely.

Unfortunately, all that Conan had to say was that they were in a very bad situation.

"All the escape routes are blocked. The fire is immersing the fire doors."

Indeed, even as she stared, smoke billowed into the corridor from both ends.

"No way…"

Stricken with fear, all she could do was stand there, until her protégé had started coughing. His lungs being smaller than hers, he was more vulnerable to the smoke. His distress had awakened her will to survive, as well as the instinct to protect her young companion.

He often wears a suit. He seems pretty comfortable in it, whereas no other kid his age would voluntarily wear something as constricting as that on ordinary days.

He never takes off his glasses. He even wears them to bed, and in the bath. He says his eyesight is really bad, but he's only seven! How bad could it be? Then again, it could be a disease of some sort… If it is, he's never mentioned it.

He hadn't protested as she picked him up and wound the fire hose securely around them both. His grip on her shoulders had been steady and firm, getting only a little tighter when he twisted around in her hold and stared down at the vast distance between their current position and the ground.

He's just… different. Just as unique as Shinichi is.

Everybody feels it. Even dad. Or else why would he let him come along on almost all his cases? Why would Megure-keibu and the other officers answer his questions so patiently and take him so seriously whenever he makes a comment? Why would they let him stay at crime scenes, when they would try to keep any other kid away from such gruesome sights?

And then, instead of seeking to hide from that sight and clinging to her like any normal child would have done, he had fixed his wide blue eyes upon her face and asked her…

"Ran-neechan, are you scared?"

…as if trying to see how he could comfort her. She had explained to him that even if she was scared, she had to survive, because Shinichi had told her to wait for him. Beyond that, words had failed her, but that hadn't been a problem.

"It's going to be alright, Ran-neechan."

The smile on his face was beautifully warm. So much like Shinichi's. She couldn't help but return it.

As the fire raged on behind them, she jumped over the edge.

The following events were a blur. Somehow she had smashed in a window and gotten them both to safety. Over the loud beating of her heart, she had heard herself inquiring after Conan's wellbeing. And his response had been…

"That was amazing, Ran-neechan."

It was as if he had never doubted that she could save them from a horrifying death.

Ran's pen stopped its quick motions. She gazed down at the page on which she had written without seeing the words.

They had made it out of the building, using the stairs, and from there, she had become a spectator.

She had watched as Conan's yellow and blue skateboard fell from the sky and shattered on impact with the ground, only then realizing that he had gone back to help his friends, still trapped in the A tower, at the entrance to the second Sky Bridge, on the 60th floor.

She had listened numbly as officer Shiratori announced that the boy had just flown across the distance separating the two towers.

She had looked on helplessly as the roof the A tower burst into fire and the rescue helicopter was forced to retreat. The water from the hoses that some firefighters had brought could not reach the flames across such a distance, and all she could do was bite her lip and hope the inferno died out quickly.

Then had come the heart-stopping call from Conan, stating that the party room in which the children were forced to wait was full of bombs. Right after that, with no explanation, the boy had requested that they open the roof of the pool on top of the B tower.

Wanting to know if she could be of help, Ran had seized Inspector Megure's cellphone and demanded to know what the children were up to.

Conan had not answered her. Instead, his response had been most cryptic.

"Ran-neechan, I'm returning to you now."

The line went dead.

Then all they could do was wait, and wait they did, until, with a tremendous crash, the bombs went off, blowing out the glass windows of the party room.

She remembered thinking wildly that it was all over, that she would never get to see Conan—Shinichi—again, that the children could not possibly have survived, that the boy that she loved as a younger brother had lied to her—and then, miraculously, a car, a bright red car had come flying out of the smoke, hurtling towards them.

It was the convertible that her father had won in that 30-second contest earlier.

Everything happened in a flash—she had glimpsed the kids aboard the vehicle, Ai hanging from the side, and Conan standing on the dashboard, seen something blast ahead of them with incredible speed, and then the car was in the pool and the spectators were rushing inside.

She still couldn't believe that they had all survived—without even a scratch at that. Not to mention they had rescued Master Kisaragi.

There were a lot of things she still couldn't believe about that day.

And it was only afterwards, when she was safely tucked under her covers, blissfully taking in the scents and sight of her room, at home, that she wondered…

Whose idea was it to use the car as a means of transport? Whose idea was it to use the explosion as a means of propulsion? Who was it that had driven the car?

…Who was it that had gone back to make sure the kids were okay in the first place?

And she knew, somehow, that the answer to all of those questions was Conan.

She also knew that if the situation had been a little different, she would have answered Shinichi.

Shinichi…

Suddenly Mouri Ran was depressed more than confused. Her best friend's—and secret love interest's—absence weighed heavily on her, even though she had received a phone call from him as soon as she had gotten home.

He hadn't had a clue what she had just been through, cheerfully greeting her by saying, "Oi, Ran! Are classes that grueling that a whole weekend isn't enough to recover from them?"

She had explained to him, of course, and he had been appropriately concerned. And she had to admit she had felt a lot better after talking to him.

But she missed him.

She missed him so much that it was almost physically painful.

She sat up abruptly. She needed to see him, but she couldn't. So she would go to the one place that reminded her most of him.

His house.

His house, where they had met, played together, laughed together, had had adventures in. Yes, she would go there.