Disclaimer:
"Detective Conan" belongs to Gosho Aoyama, but Chibi-Sherry belongs to me. *kicked
About Rats and Anxiety
by FS
x.
That person had asked—well, ordered!—him to babysit that brat, again!
Gin was sweating profusely in his new Parisian wool felt fedora and his best cashmere coat. The sheer prospect of staying in an enclosed area with the (still four-year-old) redheaded fury for longer than five minutes sent shivers up and down his spine. No sooner had Gin spotted her tiny figure on the Boss' lap than his hands had turned clammy and his chest had felt so tight that Gin had been forced to fight for breath like a dying fish. Faint with foreboding, he had clung to his trusted Beretta, raised his right hand in protest, and prepared himself to curse. But only one gaze from that person, who was stroking that brat's evil witch's reddish hair, had been enough to make him swallow the expletives on the tip of his tongue.
What should Gin have done? After all, the Boss was their father and mother and teacher and priest and God and Devil combined. Like all other members of the Organization, Gin had internalized the Organization's musketeer motto, which was: "Everyone for themselves and for the Organization, all traitors deserve a gruesome death, dead people can't talk, and whatever the Boss wants, the Boss gets!" Therefore Gin was now knocking at the door of a penthouse apartment on the thirtieth floor of an inconspicuous skyscraper in Azabu Juuban, where the brat was waiting for him to fetch her and to drive her in his new Porsche (the apple of his eye!) to the recently modernized torture chambers, which she had helped furnishing.
"Vodka is going to be my guinea pig," the brat casually informed Gin before he could bark a semblance of a greeting at her. "Your new partner has promised me that he will assist me during my research—and I have promised that person that no guinea pig shall be hurt."
"Guinea pig for what?" Gin inquired, stooping down to eye the prodigy-shrimp, who was already as articulate and vain as a teenager, judging from the girl's fashion magazine stand in the corridor. Vodka might not be the brightest star on the firmament (actually, the Boss had warned Gin that Vodka was positively "dead from the neck up"). But Vodka was Gin's greatest fan, and Vodka was as loyal and as devoted to Gin as an old guard dog. In a job in which one could lose one's life (and one's Porsche) like other people lost their change or their keys, no character trait in a partner was more worth than loyalty.
"For the experiments in our new torture chambers," the brat beamed, much to Gin's dismay. Since their last meeting, during which Gin fell asleep and let her read scientific studies on rats, she had been haunted by the sheer endless possibilities of how she could put the theory she had learned into practice. Following the Organization's guidelines, which stated that knowledge should always be shared and not hogged, she had jotted down a few ideas on how one could improve the Organization's antediluvian and barbaric torture methods, and her superiors had been so impressed by her suggestions that they had reported back to the Boss, who had given her free rein.
Gin didn't feel particularly protective about Vodka (if truth be told, sometimes Gin was tempted to lock Vodka into one of those torture chambers and throw away the keys). But since the procedure of getting a new partner was a chore (finding a devoted and sturdy doggy like Vodka was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, not to mention the hassle of explaining to a new partner Gin's favourite brands of humour, cigarettes and eau de cologne, modus operandi and rules of thumb), Gin was adamant to save his partner, whom he had got used to, from the whims of this miniature monster.
"If I have to get myself a new partner after your experiments, I'm not going to let you see your sister on her next birthday!" he threatened when he opened the car door for the kid, placed her on the child car seat, and helped her with the seat belt. He had been ordered to get her the child car seat she had chosen for his Porsche and drive slowly through Azabu Juuban so that she could enjoy the surroundings, which totally cramped his style. But at least the brat had a strong sense of beauty and chose blood-red, one of Gin's favourite colours, which also went well with black. (According to Vermouth, the brat's sister had always insisted on magenta and pale pink… Gin would rather shoot the girl and then himself before buying a child car seat in pink!)
"Oh, that…" She flashed him a mischievous smile, which he found unbearably, inappropriately sweet for such a mean-spirited child. Since he valued his position in the Organization, he refrained from telling her that her newly acquired cuteness made him sick to the core. "Today is my birthday, so my nee-san got the permission to see me at the torture chambers. She is waiting in Chamber Two. I've already asked that person to put Vodka into Chamber One so that she won't get bored until we arrive there."
The three of them were going to watch Vodka on the large screen in Chamber Two while Vodka would be taking "the sprint and reaction test" in Chamber One, where eight security cameras had been installed, the brat explained to Gin in reply to his silence and his blank stare. Since Vodka wasn't going to be hurt (admittedly, he might be electrocuted just a little bit, but he wasn't going to suffer permanent injury!), Gin should try to relax and entertain her on the way to the torture chambers by telling her a long, romantic story, preferably by Grimm or Andersen.
Great, Gin thought, crossing himself mentally although he had no religious inclination (he had learned that in times of despair, rituals always helped). Now that Vodka was done for, Gin had to forget about him and focus on saving his own neck. From past experience, Gin knew that sitting with the redheaded witch in the same torture chamber wasn't the best situation to start with. But since Gin had learned his lesson, he was going to keep an eagle eye on her.
x.
A/N: As a few readers may have noticed, this is a sequel to "Learning Like Rats" (although the two one-shots can be read separately).