A/N: Hi! Um… and before any of you say anything… I know, I know. I've already got a story in the works, and I need to finish it, and in the meantime, the people in the Detective Conan fandom are all waiting on me to update their story, and… well… Sorry! I'm still working on those, I promise! But still, this little three-shot idea has been bouncing around in my head for ages now, and I'm just dying to get it out there.

So. Here we go. This takes place in the same universe as "The Frankenstein Project," but makes sense on its own and has a different, independent storyline. It will have three chapters in total, and I'm going to post each of them over the next week or so. (Promise)! This first bit is just a little bit of delicious angst to whet the appetite. (Mwa-ha-ha)!

Also: one last thing. If anyone has corrections about my limited (very limited) understanding of the Japanese language or culture used in this fic, then please, feel free to correct me! Seriously! I want to be as accurate as possible, but Google only goes so far. :P

Anyway, thank you for reading! Enjoy!

.*.*.*.

There is a word in Japanese—oyaji—that means "old man."

"Oyaji" is what I call my father.

For a lot of kids, this would be normal. It's just an informal way of saying "Dad," and to most of the world, it would be a friendly, casual way of addressing the man who raised them.

For me, this isn't the case.

Oyaji hates it when I call him that to his face—it isn't fitting, he says, for the vice president of an international tech company to use such sloppy language. Sometimes, I do it anyway, just to see the way his eyebrow twitches upward and the way his teeth grind in an effort not to scold me in public. I am his vice president, after all. It would be bad publicity for him to correct my behavior like a normal father would. Despite his satisfying reactions, though, whenever we're with others, I usually just refer to him as "President" or "Sir." Making him mad on purpose really isn't worth it in the long run, and besides, it's against my nature to rebel so openly.

I don't call him Oyaji, after all, just to get a reaction. I do it for another reason, a deeper one.

I've only yelled at my father two times in my life. The first time was so long ago that now, I can hardly remember it. It was less than a year after Mother had died, and thanks to Oyaji, my entire world was shifting under my feet. My "training," as he called it, had begun within a week of her death, and by then, it had already risen to a harsh climax. I couldn't speak, smile, think, blink, or breathe without his disapproval; everything I did was carefully weighed, graded, and rejected, and he would make me do it over again until I had done it "almost right."

I was only five years old. I hadn't learned how to cope, just yet.

I can't remember what had set me off on that particular day. I think someone had mentioned Mother that morning in a casual way, which made me more sensitive the rest of the afternoon. I do remember, though, that when Oyaji ordered me to move on to the next task for my training, I looked at the ground and refused. He froze, stepped close to me, and demanded that I obey. With emotions flying through me, I rose my head and screamed at him that he was mean, that I couldn't do it, that I was tired and scared and I wanted to stop.

The argument was short-lived, to say the least. Oyaji killed my sloppy resistance with a swift, decisive word and an ice-cold glare. I was hurting, hurting horribly, but I didn't know how to express it. He punished me, I took it in silence, and we moved on with our schedule as if nothing had happened at all. The next time I spoke of him, though, I called him "Oyaji," and have done it ever since.

Oyaji. Old Man.

Oyaji. Not Father.

When I call him "Old Man," I don't mean "Old Man" as in "Dad." I mean "Old Man" as in "ancient." He's pushed himself so far past feeling that he's pushed away his life. Really, he's denied himself of anything that defines what it means to "live." He's deprived himself—and me—of every year that occurred after Mother's death, and he's found a way, somehow, to drag out each and every one of those years into meaningless millennia of wasted time.

He's "old" as in wasted. He's "old" as in dead. He's "old" as in fossilized, unfeeling stone.

My father is not my father anymore.