« La vérité est comme le soleil. Elle laisse tout voir mais ne se laisse pas regarder. »
(Truth is as the Sun. It lets everything appearing, but doesn't allow to look into it).
Victor Hugo
COLD CASE
The Hidden Face
CHAPTER 1 : Reminiscences (disponible en Français )
Night has just fallen on the Japanese megalopolis. Thousands of artificial fireflies were now lightening the city. From her bedroom, the young girl sitting on her bed could just see the light of some of lampshades, lightening to the cars in the street, still moving on at that late hour. The flatt, quite dark, was quite calm. Her 'little brother' has just went to bed, letting her father alone on the living room, who was drinking bier before Yoko Okino's show...
This erased mood settled introspection. Into her hands, she was holding a necklace, a present from Shinichi, but Conan gave it to her, in her friend's name. Today was her birthday – a year more – but he didn't came back yet.
"He had always taken care of me. He had always protected me. He would never letting me alone like this. He's quite selfish, but not to that point."
She could see him, walking hesitantly before disappearing as always… It has been months since he last reappeared. It seems that he has huge issues…
"I miss him."
Missing someone is something vicious, which push you into suffering, pain as hope. The more you know, the more painful will be the disillusion.
She surprised herself. It was the first time she realized that she was missing him so much since his disappearance. She used to see him everyday for almost fifteen years, why would he go away so suddenly?
"That was the proof that nothing is definitively won ."
This last thought was the most terrifying of all. She understood that she could lost everything she love in a second, that life is just a silver wire. We're all a tightrope walker without his rope. Every gesture, every choice can attract us into the depths of our existence.
What could she do? Waiting? Until how? Should she embroider a tapestry as Penelope, waiting for Ulysses' return?
Waiting means letting our destiny onto the hands of the Providence, that is to say to be dispossessed of our own existential power. Would she allow herself to see him coming back and run towards him with a walking aid?
Time is also an enemy. It is the one which kills us in the end…. The second before we pass out, we're still alive... What will be her feelings about him in five years… In ten or twenty years? Running after a pipe dream is the ultimate damnation. She has hope. If he doesn't come back, disillusion will be her destiny. And if he comes back one day, noticing that her feelings had changed, that years destroyed the link they had, that she wasn't waiting for the student as he was for years, seeing that she was in pursuit of a simple pipe dream would also bring her onto a disillusion and an infinite sadness.
The inaction is the worse choice. She must do something, she's convinced of it somehow.
What usually do people when someone around them disappear?
They tell the disappearance to the authorities. About that detective student, things had gone differently.
She remembered now: Professor Agasa prevented her to go to the police station. Why, after all? We can understand it the first day, but after so much time, that was weird that Agasa didn't care much about her friend's disappearance…
She took her decision, she wants to find him, she wants to help him.
She softly opened the necklace to put it around her neck, then stood up.
Her shadow followed the stairs, then called a taxi.
Life is held only by a thin sliver wipe, everyone of ours choices can attract us into the depths of our existence...
This story was translated by Dr MAD and Co ( AKA Tinalabombe ). Here's the link to acces the Doctor's profile : u/6562211/tinalabombe . So dont't forget to check his work (and to write reviews BTW ) !
I give a HUGE thanks to him for the translation !
Chapter 2 next Saturday.