A.N.: My entry for the "Survival" themed contest at the Poirot Cafe Forums. My apologies to anyone who actually knows what kind of food would actually be in a Japanese house; I didn't spend as much time researching that as I probably should've, so it might be more than a bit westernized. Hopefully it came out well enough though.
SUNDAY
Kudo Shinichi wakes up one Sunday morning to find that his mother and father are, quite simply, gone.
He's ten years old when it happens, more than half a detective already. But it's hard to deduce from a place you see every single day – the familiar blends into the background, and he doesn't see it anymore. He looks for footprints across the rugs, but only sees the well-worn paths his father paces. He checks the doors – the front door is locked, but that could mean a lot of things. His father's keys are gone from the tray by the door, but they aren't always there in the first place – sometimes his dad leaves them in the library or the study or the kitchen. They're not in any of those places. He has to assume they're gone.
As are his parents.
There are a lot of things he can assume from this. Shinichi, being extremely well read in the vein of spy and mystery novels, has a few assumptions that come more naturally than others.
Namely, that his parents have potentially been drawn into an international web of intrigue, and are currently undercover to reveal a ring of criminals intent on selling secrets to dark and sinister figures with badly-transcribed accents.
It probably says something about Shinichi's life up to this point the assumption doesn't immediately seem ridiculous, and he can think of at least once where it's happened already. (Just not to his parents. Family friends, mostly.)
But if it is actually the case, he shouldn't call them. He'd blow their cover. Or maybe they've been kidnapped, and he should save them?
No. If they'd been kidnapped, his father probably wouldn't have taken his house keys.
In any case, Shinichi's best bet is to sit tight at home and not draw too much attention to himself. Besides, if the truth turns out to be something mundane, like his father investigating a locked-room double-murder of a prominent but scandalous diplomat and his mistress (and not taking him along because his dad is a jerk sometimes), they'll probably be back by lunch.
Well, that's fine by him. That's perfectly okay. He's ten, that's not a child, he can take care of himself. He'll just have to come up with something even better than a locked-room double-murder to tell his dad about so he'll have to take him along next time. He stomps back to the kitchen and decides to make himself a perfectly mature and not-ten-years-old breakfast.
A perfectly mature breakfast turns out to be the sugar cereal from the top shelf. He pours more sugar over it because nobody is there to stop him. (That's what being an adult means; doing what you want because nobody is there to stop you. His parents, by example, have drilled this into him for years.) He makes himself real coffee too and only scalds his hands a little.
Coffee tastes worse than he thought it did. He pours sugar into that as well.
Breakfast done, he considers the perfectly mature and respectable day ahead of him. He could go outside and practice soccer kicks. Or he could read Sherlock Holmes in the original English and try not to need the Japanese-to-English dictionary this time. Or he could go over to Agasa's house and see if there's any particularly explosive chemical reactions to learn.
Or he could pick the lock on his dad's desk and solve the cold cases he's not normally allowed to look at.
Nobody's here to stop him. He goes with the last option.
The crime scene photos are a good bit... bloodier than he's used to. The shredded remains of the parietal and visceral peritoneum are... quite different. He'd only seen those before in diagrams. And he hadn't quite realized exactly how much the the fatty layer over the abdominal cavity – superficial facea, he recites to himself – changed the appearance of the small intestine when it hadn't been clinically removed. It looks a bit like scrambled eggs, over the bile-green and bruise-purple color of the viscera beneath.
...Maybe another case. Yes. This one wasn't even locked room. Not nearly challenging enough for him. And nothing at all to do with the photos. He tells himself he only feels sick because of the sugar, and definitely not because he has a weak stomach. Detectives don't have weak stomachs. That's why they can drink such strong coffee.
Maybe he should get more coffee.
He does.
The file he eventually settles on – after setting aside a case with a shredded trachea, one with a series of bone-crushing blows that made the eventual corpse look both floppy and purple, and one with an impressive and creative use of a bone saw – is fairly simple, once he's looked through it for a few hours; he can't see why his father hasn't solved it yet. Something about a magician and an explosion and a trick gone terribly wrong. It was totally tampered with. Granted, the proof probably burned down, but still. Apparently there was something weird about the body, too, but there weren't any photos of it.
Which was totally not why he picked that case. He can handle bodies. He can.
Then he finds the photos – a tally of extremely impressive third degree burns, so much so that skull shows through – and his breakfast, abruptly, rebels. He manages to hit the wastebasket, then contemplates how the bright artificial colors of this morning's cereal don't remain bright and appetizing for very long.
He skips lunch.
The rest of the day is spent on soccer practice, in the hopes that if he works at it long enough, when he closes his eyes he'll see the black-on-white of the soccer ball rather than the black-on-white of charred flesh over bone. He manages to give himself both dehydration and a sunburn, and tries to fix the first with more coffee. He's getting the hang of coffee. As for dinner... Cereal probably isn't a very good dinner, he thinks. But there's instant ramen in the pantry, and he can make that.
It explodes in the microwave. He eats it anyway, and goes to bed early.
MONDAY
He wakes up the next morning – very early the next morning, before the sun begins to show, but close enough to dawn that he doesn't have to go back to sleep and face his dreams again – with his mouth feeling like it's been glued shut, and a pounding headache that makes his racing heartbeat unignorable. He stumbles out of bed and heads for the bathroom. Brushing his teeth doesn't make his mouth feel any less dry, but the routine slows his heart and the subsequent pounding in his head. He goes to check if his parents have come back sometime in the night.
Nope.
He takes a deep breath. Okay. Don't panic. Whatever case his dad is on, it must be more exciting than he though. Triple murder. Locked room. Framing an unfortunate assistant who just happens to be the younger brother of an ex-lover. With... No visible wounds. Yes. That would do it. They'll be back sometime today.
He hopes.
He makes himself breakfast, again – mature and responsible because he can do this – and doesn't put quite as much sugar on it this time. He manages the coffee black, and it helps him wake up some – puts the nightmares that much further behind – so he has another cup. He needs to be at school in two hours, so that's plenty of time to get ready. He'll have to pack his own bento today.
The rice cooker is harder to use than he thought. He cleans up most of the mess and puts together the rest of his lunch. His dad has been hiding pudding cups on the top shelf of the pantry. Shinichi packs himself two.
He gets to school on time, barely, and gets through the day without much of a problem. He throws himself into his work, because he still kind of sees the pictures behind his eyes if he lets himself think too much, and swaps one of his pudding cups for a piece of fruit from Ran. He walks her back to her house after, and stays for a few minutes before his feet start itching to leave.
Normally, he would stay a while; go over their notes and share his deductions about the classmates (apparently his version of gossip was even more accurate than Sonoko's, if that was a compliment) but today, he needs to get home. He doesn't want to miss it if his parents come back.
So he finds himself alone, again, in the huge empty house.
He considers, for a moment, going and getting his Sherlock Holmes books out of the library. But he's left the case files out, and he doesn't want to look at the photos again quite yet. Not because he's scared. He just doesn't want to, in a perfectly mature and totally not scared way.
More soccer, then.
He makes his sunburn worse, rehydrates with coffee. He considers making himself actual dinner – but the instant noodles were easy, and he doesn't want to clean up after the rice cooker again. The inside of the microwave is crusty with yellow-orange, from the flavor pack of last night's ramen, and when tonight's ramen explodes too, it gets worse. He must be doing something wrong, but the end result is edible still.
He doesn't want to sleep, not yet. Not because he's afraid of nightmares. It's because he's ten, and not a child, and only little kids go to bed right after dinner, even if their dinner was kind of late. Instead, he sneaks into the library, very pointedly does not look at the files on the desk, grabs a book at random, and dashes back out. He ends up with an old physics textbook, and reads it anyway.
It's midnight and he can't keep his eyes open anymore when he finally gives up. He's too tired; he can't possibly have nightmares again, and he hasn't looked at the pictures at all today. He should be okay. He crawls into bed and tries to sleep.
He's wrong about the nightmares.
TUESDAY
He gets up before dawn again, with another pounding headache – what is doing this? The nightmares? The coffee? Not the coffee, never the coffee, coffee is now his bosom friend as it chases away the last edge of the nightmares. He thinks it through – dehydration? Maybe. He promises himself to drink lots of water and juice today and see if that helps.
He runs out of sugar cereal, and isn't sure what else to make. Toast? Toast can't go that spectacularly wrong... he hopes.
It doesn't, though it's a little darker than he likes, and he accidentally gets jelly all over the floor trying to put it on the toast. He steps in it, slips, and ends up with a sore tailbone and jelly all over his pajamas. He takes a shower, and rinses his clothes off under the water. He hangs them to dry over a doorknob.
The sun rises outside, and he thinks to check his parent's room. Still nothing, no sign of them. There are no marks on the path to show that anyone but him has come or gone. He's still alone.
He thinks for a moment, tries to revise the case that could keep his parents away for so long. Locked room, double murder... serial killer. With ties to the mafia. Who's hidden his true target among a list of unrelated victims, one of which just happened to be a secret operative and thus has confused the investigation with the many bugs and hidden compartments found around their apartment, which is where they were killed. And someone was doing drugs. Yes. That would do it.
But that could take even longer than this.
He decides, as he probably should've decided several days ago, to call his parents.
His father's phone rings through, and Shinichi spends what feels like a small eternity listening to it ring, before it finally goes through to voicemail. He almost chokes at the sound of his father's voice.
"You've reached the phone of Kudo Yuusaku. I can't come to the phone right now, but I promise you I'll get you the next chapter before the deadline. Leave a message after the beep."
It beeps. Shinichi chokes for a moment before coming up with something to say.
"...Dad?" he starts. "I... I was just wondering how much longer you're going to be gone. I can take care of myself though so don't worry. Whatever case you're working on, you should solve it. Please call me back. Bye."
He hangs up, and tries to breathe. Okay. He can do this. He calls his mother's phone.
It doesn't even ring; the battery must be out. "Hello, lovelies, you've reached the phone of Kudo Yukiko! Can't talk now, leave me a message. I'm a very busy lady, but I'll get back to you when I can! Ta!"
Another beep, and Shinichi starts again. "Mom? I think your phone is dead. Help Dad solve his case, okay? Come home soon. Bye."
He hangs up again. Okay. That's done. They know he's okay. They must be hot in pursuit of a criminal right now. That's why they're not answering. They'll catch the criminal and solve the case and come home.
Soon.
He packs another lunch – only one pudding cup this time but maybe Ran will trade for something else. He scoops out a bit of the leftover rice from yesterday and hopes it'll be enough.
He gets to school early enough to sit and make a plan.
He doesn't know how long his parents will be gone. And despite what he's been telling himself, he's ten. That's not perfectly mature. That's not old enough to take care of himself. He knows his parents; he knows they love him. They wouldn't leave him like this unless it was a matter of life or death. So he can't count on them coming back for him.
Today, he thinks, he'll go to Agasa's house. If his parents told anyone where they were going, it would've been him. Even if they didn't, the professor knows how to cook, and the dwindling supplies of cereal and sugar are beginning to worry him.
He goes straight home after school, confident in having a plan.
Except Agasa's gone too.
Scientific conference. Now that Shinichi's faced with two empty houses, he remembers Agasa telling his father about it. Some kind of chemistry/biochemistry symposium; he'll be gone until Saturday.
...Okay then.
Shinichi takes a deep breath and pointedly does not panic. He is ten years old, and that might not be perfectly mature and he knows it, but he's smart. He's always been smart. He just needs a new plan, and he'll be okay. Sherlock Holmes wouldn't panic; he'd plan. He'll be okay if he makes a plan.
He knows Agasa will be back on Saturday. Today's Tuesday, that's only four days. Twelve meals. That's not too much food; he won't run out. He forces himself to breathe, then heads back over to his house. He has to plan this.
There's only one cup of instant ramen left, he notes, and nothing else in the kitchen that he really knows how to cook. Maybe he can learn. As for breakfast, there's bread – western, yes, but his family is that way sometimes – so he can make toast. With jelly, he has that, he just has to be more careful with it than he was this morning. Lunches – he can use the rice cooker, he just doesn't like to. And there are pickled vegetables and tinned fish, he'll be okay with that. There are two more pudding cups, and he's sure his mom has stashed some chocolate somewhere in the house. There's probably money somewhere in the house, too, and if he finds that he can buy more food.
He'll be okay. He repeats that to himself as he stares at the last cup of instant ramen. Maybe he could eat this tomorrow? He doesn't feel all that hungry now. And if he skips meals when he's not hungry, he won't have to make as many of them.
He has three cups of coffee – no sign of that running out – for dinner, reads the physics textbook for a while longer, and goes to bed. He's kept awake not by nightmares but by his stomach instead.
WEDNESDAY
He wakes up the next morning – pounding headache, itchy sunburn, no idea why – to find that he's only got one clean shirt left. He stares at it in an exhausted sort of horror for a moment, because he doesn't know how to do laundry either. He forces himself out of it, into the shower and the last clean shirt, and downstairs to the warm and wakeful embrace of coffee. He's getting good at making it now, he can practically do it in his sleep.
His sunburn is peeling, and between that and the exhaustion he looks diseased. He makes something like a proper bento, though the rice is undercooked and everything is falling apart, and drags it to school. He's struggling to stay awake. The teacher doesn't notice. Not so with Ran.
"Shinichi?" she asks quietly. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," he lies smoothly. "It's just a sunburn. It makes it hard to sleep."
She nods with a sort of sympathetic understanding that he's never learned to fake. "Did you put something on it?"
"What would I put on it?" he asks, because if it's the sunburn that's making his head hurt, yes, he wants to fix that.
Ran's about to answer, when Sonoko hisses from behind. "Cucumbers."
Ran glares at her. "Moisturizer. Or aloe."
"Cucumbers," Sonoko insists. "They have nat-u-ral anti-oxi-dant properties. It's science. That's why they use them at spas."
"Oh." Ran thinks about that. "Okay, cucumbers too."
He thinks back to the contents of the fridge. There is, indeed, a jar of pickles. Those are cucumbers, so he doesn't see why that shouldn't work. .
"Okay," he says. "I'll try it."
The day passes, mostly uneventfully. His bento's fallen apart and he forgot to put chopsticks in, so he eats with his fingers and Ran tries not to make fun of him for it. She gives him her fruit and doesn't ask for the pudding cup in return. Shinichi tells her she's a good person, and provides a number of scandalous insights into the crushes of their classmates to show his gratitude.
He goes home alone, again. He knows it's silly, but he's almost afraid that if he isn't there, the house will leave too. The house is still there, and still empty, when he arrives.
He covers himself in pickles and lies on the kitchen floor for an hour. It doesn't help. It actually kind of stings. And now his skin's all pickled, and the kitchen floor has both pickle juice and jam all over it. He has to take another shower to wash it off, and this time he goes for Ran's suggestion – moisturizer. That helps more.
He's finished the physics textbook by the time he can't ignore his stomach for dinner. He gets the instant ramen cup down and stares at it, the last thing he knows how to make, and wonders if he could maybe split the one cup between today and tomorrow night. He nods to himself, good plan, he can do that, and then the soup explodes in the microwave again. By now the microwave is a solid crusty block of yellow. Shinichi's stomach doesn't let him stop at half, and before long he's staring at the bottom of the ramen cup and still hungry. He's just eaten the last thing he knows how to make.
The thought almost makes the ramen come back up.
He sneaks through the library for another book – A Study In Scarlet, he's read it so many times that he can still see the words when he closes his eyes, but that just makes it feel like home, really – and pointedly avoids looking at the open files on the desk. He should just walk over and close them – he could manage it, without looking at the pictures – but they've taken on a life of their own, now, and he winces away from the desk like a monster in the middle of the room.
He reads himself to sleep, and hopes, desperately, for no nightmares, and no headache.
THURSDAY
He gets his wish about the nightmares – he spent the night in the fog of London, and even if there was a murderer there was Holmes, too, and that makes it a good dream no matter what – but not about the headache. He drags himself downstairs without getting dressed, and makes coffee. He drinks two cups before going back upstairs to poke through the pile of his dirty clothes.
He finds a shirt that doesn't smell much and doesn't have grass stains. It does have food stains, but they kind of blend into the pattern. He takes inventory of the rest of his clothes while he's at it. He shouldn't run out of shorts until Sunday, but he'll have to be careful not to spill things on them, because if he has to change he'll run out.
The key, he thinks, is rationing. He can't use too many clothes or eat too much or read too fast, because if he does he'll run out of clothes or food or book, and have to go back in the library for another. Like the military, maybe. Doctor Watson would understand, he thinks, and he immediately feels better.
He burns the toast, eats it anyway, and heads off to school with another poorly-packed bento. He did remember chopsticks this time though.
Sonoko's disappointed to hear that the cucumbers didn't work. Ran's triumphant to hear that the moisturizer did. Though neither helped the headache, which is now sitting dully in the back of his head instead of going away. It feels like a different kind of headache almost; he's not sure why. Ran gives him her fruit again, and he goes over to her house after school. They have juice and crackers and it's somehow the best thing he's ever tasted, and then he goes home alone again.
The empty house is somehow growing, and he feels so much smaller than he did before. The spaces where his parents aren't are impossibly huge, and furniture that used to be his size is now far larger. He doesn't really understand it, and he crawls under the kitchen table with his book and reads it twice before dinner.
He wonders, briefly, if he could find a cookbook in the library. But no, he doesn't want to face the files and the desk, and he can do this on his own. He can make... eggs. Maybe. He pulls a chair up to the edge of the oven so he can see the dials and the burners. He gets one switched on – the hiss of the gas flame is alarming for a moment, as it breaks the silence – and pulls the frying pan out. It's heavier than he thought it would be. He pulls the eggs out of the refrigerator, only drops one on the floor, and cracks two in to the pan. Clear goo sizzles into white he tries to pull the eggshell fragments out without burning himself. When the eggs look done he flops them onto a plate and tries to turn the burner off.
But he burns himself, leaning over the pan. Not bad, but his arm droops just a bit and touches the edge of the metal, and the sudden searing pain makes him flail backwards. He managed to get the burner off, though, and he sits on the floor amidst dried pickle juice and jam and stubbornly eats his eggs through the tears.
He puts a pickle on the burn, because it's cold and maybe it will help. He climbs onto the countertop to reach the phone, and calls his mom and his dad again and again, listening to their answering machines just to hear their voices.
That's how he falls asleep.
FRIDAY
He wakes up on the kitchen counter with the now-standard pounding headache, still clutching a pickle. He starts with the coffee. The burn is bright red and throbbing, not quite bad enough to blister but very much bad enough to hurt. He makes and doesn't burn toast while the coffee brews, and feels, for the first time in a few days, very mature. He picks another shirt without many stains and showers. The cold water makes his arm feel better, but he's running out of soap. That's okay. Soap can't be that important.
This is the last day, he tells himself, that he has to pack a bento. Which is too bad, because he's getting kind of good at it. He gives himself the last pudding cup as a reward, and puts in two pairs of chopsticks just in case one breaks.
School is fine. His sunburn doesn't make him look diseased anymore, so Ran doesn't give him her fruit, but that's okay. He's going to be okay. Professor Agasa comes back tomorrow and everything will be fine. He goes home on his own feeling better than he has in a while. He puts another pickle on the burn because maybe it actually did help. He's running out of pickles.
If he's careful, he can make eggs. That's good. He counts the eggs, six left – plenty of meals if he doesn't drop them. He's hungry already, but there's still something in the back of his head screaming that if he doesn't eat now, he can eat later, so he puts it off. He reads his book once more, drinks two more cups of coffee, and replaces the pickle on his burn twice.
He drops one of the eggs on the floor, next to where he hasn't cleaned up the other one. He should do that, he thinks, but he wants to eat first. He's extra careful about the burner this time, and avoids another burn. He can do this, he thinks. He can have eggs for breakfast tomorrow too and then Professor Agasa will come back and everything will be okay.
He even works up the bravery to go get another book.
He's getting the hang of this, he thinks, and sleeps.
SATURDAY
Shinichi wakes up with yet another pounding headache, but he's managed to sleep past dawn for the first time in a week. He puts on his favorite shirt even though it's dirty and makes himself eggs and toast and coffee, and the coffee chases the headache off.
He remembers sunscreen, takes his soccer ball, and scales the fence into Agasa's yard. The professor isn't back yet, but Shinichi will be waiting when he is. He kicks the ball all through the yard all morning, then goes back to his own house for eggs.
He's just climbed the fence again when a taxi squeals to a stop in front of his own house. His parents launch out of it as if on rockets, headed for the door that Shinichi didn't lock because he doesn't have keys. He throws his ball over the fence and climbs back into his own yard.
"Shinichi!" His father is yelling, over his mother's frantic cries of "Shin-chan, where are you?" His father's keys have been thrown at the dish by the door, but have missed, and neither one of them has bothered to take off their shoes. "Where are you? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay!" he yells, and his voice no longer seems to echo in the empty house. "I'm over here! I'm okay!"
And in what feels to be half a heartbeat his parents are back, throwing themselves around him and weeping. Everything from the last week wells up at once – the fear and the nightmares and the burns and the rationing – and he starts weeping too, because he doesn't have to be mature anymore.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," his father is saying, again and again. "It wasn't supposed to take this long, I promise, we didn't mean to..."
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," his mother is saying, again and again. "We didn't think... We thought we'd be back by Sunday afternoon, it wasn't supposed to..."
"You're back, you're back, you're back," Shinichi is saying, again and again. "I was so scared, I didn't know what happened, and..."
None of them can properly hear, over the others, but that's okay. They stay that way for what could be an hour, but is probably only minute before Yuusaku notices the burn and the sunburn and the dark circles under Shinichi's eyes, and the world turns into a whirlwind of panicked questions and amateur medical treatment.
Turns out, the headache's dehydration, but over the week he's given himself a pretty spectacular caffeine addiction too. The files are locked away again, making the library the safe place it used to be, and nobody's even a little bit upset about the mess that the kitchen has become. They're treating the burn with actual medicine rather than pickles when Shinichi finally finds the words to ask about the case.
"So was it a serial killer?"
Yuusaku pauses for a long moment."Yes," he finally. "Among other things. But that's... No reason. No reason at all to leave you like this. I promise, we won't do it again. Not until you're much older." He meets Shinichi's eyes with a steady, guilty gaze. "I promise."
"Okay," Shinichi says. "Tell me about it, then."
And he does.
A.N. Part 2: Just in case anyone's considering it, pickles are a pretty terrible thing to put on burns. Fresh cucumbers actually have the potential to help but that does not carry over to pickles! Even though the pickled vegetables that Japanese people put in bento boxes aren't anything like the dill or sweet pickles that western readers will be familiar with, the preservative effect is in the salt, which can draw water out of a burn and make it effectively worse. So... don't treat burns with pickles. Won't help. The only positive effect I've given it here is the same as any cold pack, which is a more appropriate treatment.
But anyway. Let me know what you think!