A/N: Well, this is my first time writing for Detective Conan despite the fact that I've read the manga up to the current chapter and seen all the movies, though it is certainly not the first time I have thought about writing for this fandom... I hope it's decent enough for all of y'all. I haven't actually posted a piece of fanfiction for nearly two years now. I'm kind of worried about what reaction it'll get. My writing's really changed since 2006.

Oh, just a note: when it says, "It takes more than a genius," it doesn't necessarily mean that one actually has to be a genius to do it. It merely means that there must be an understanding of something different than pure logic.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: I hold no ownership over these fictional products. (i.e. Characters, Settings, and Canonical Events) I do however, own the words as they are written on the page. Plagiarism will not be tolerated.

The Difference

By: Mizuki Kurenaida

Back when it all started, there was no difference. I was me and me alone. I was the ever-social rich boy who knew everyone casually, had few enemies that would actually go around denouncing my presence to my face, and had even fewer true friends. Fewer: as in one. I had one true friend. A friend I loved more than anything else solely because she was the only friend I had. At the start of our friendship, long before this beginning, I took much more stock in her thoughts and feelings than I do now, but as the years dragged on I got used to her singular presence as my friend and I forgot what it meant to truly take into consideration what she might think or feel. I took her for granted, and in the end, no matter how many times I ask her to wait and she seems to comply, I know that I will have driven an immovable wedge between us, because, it's different now. I'm different now.

Kudô Shinichi died the day the blonde monstrosity known only as Gin bashed him over the head with a hard object and force-fed him a capsule of then-unknown poison. At least, that's what I'd like to say. If I'm to be honest with myself, it's not that Kudô Shinichi died per se, so much as he stripped away that which was unnecessary and untruthful and was brought down to his core self. My core self. I stopped using the act everyone had become so accustomed to and started being myself – except no one saw. By that time everyone I had "known" no longer "knew" me and even Mouri Ran, my only friend, could no longer see me as I had thought I was meant to be. That is – a scrawny, 17 year old, high school student who has a love for Sherlock Holmes and a penchant for solving murder mysteries. To her, I was now a 7 year old first grader with big, gawky glasses and a knack for always getting into trouble. I was Edogawa Conan, a Grade A brat with an inquisitive streak a mile wide who spoke like a cute, little kid and acted like one too. But that was not the truth that I had discovered within myself. That was yet another mask I had put on to fool her.

"Why must I always fool her?" I sometimes wonder. What will doing that accomplish? Why, oh why don't I want her to see me for me rather than the images I have conveyed thus far? What is there to be afraid of? What has changed? 'Change' is the key word. I, not necessarily of my own volition, have changed in a way that she wouldn't recognize. I am different in ways that aren't glaringly obvious, but are so strikingly awkward in comparison to what I once was that she'd have to be the fool I always make her out to be to miss them. It is because of these changes that I no longer have only one friend. And it is because of that, that it took me so long to realize just how much I was permanently separating the two of us. When it all became clear, I had realized the difference between me and my masks.

The difference, of course, is something so simplistic in theory, yet so complicated in application that it takes more than a genius to try and reason out why it changes a person so. What is this difference? Why, it's Arrogance, my dear Watson. Simple, plain, unadulterated arrogance. It is the arrogance I had built up around my person, around me, ever since I was a child. Every success I had ever made during my life, tempered by the small things that would knock me down a peg or two, was floating up around my head, showing its ugly face to all I knew – and they had accepted it as me. Even Ran. This arrogance made me both reckless and careless; it made me a fool to my own conceit. It led me into an incident that I never wanted to be a part of, but can never regret going through.

It was like a balloon, stretching and expanding as more and more helium was pumped, until one day, at one instant in time, it exploded from the pressure. It hit me the second I walked through the doors of Teitan Elementary School for the first time in five years. I could no longer afford to be an arrogant little shit. I was now seven years old, in body anyway, and no one would be there to listen to my reckless debauchery or cater to my spectacular whims. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Kudô Shinichi, the arrogant, conceited high school detective, was no longer what he had been. Those assholes from the Black Organization had stripped him of everything he had and he realized the one, indubitable truth.

A person can only be himself or else he will fall.

And fall I did.

Finis