Haibara Ai. Being pretentiously existential.
Haibara Ai lives in the aftermath of Miyano Shiho.
Even when she looks at the mirror and her reflection is so short – such a child – and, like the APTX4869 white as snow, so obscenely harmless-looking, she remembers the past still and envisions her life like a long ribbon: bloodstained, long swathes of ominous white, endlessly black.
In this new world where everything couldn't be deconstructed to theory and stratagem and targets and collateral damage, Ai – perhaps the smartest girl in the world, this side of the horizon at least – is hopelessly lost. And alone, despite Professor Agasa with all his gullible kindness, and the kids, and even Kudo Shinichi who knew nothing of honor except embodying it. With them, she's the least sorrowful she can remember being, and yet they don't have an inkling of the depths of Miyano Shiho's sins: the way she'd mapped deaths as mere points a scientific chart, how she'd learned her intimate knowledge of human physiology from the secrets found under the skins of prisoners, how she'd helped multiply the injustice of unexplained, unanswered deaths.
They forget she'd once tried to kill herself, already accustomed to the prospect of death (the suicide attempt failed, but not because of a lack of conviction), they can't know how she feels like she'll never be the good person in a conversation and she refuses to let them in, not a crack, not a peep, because she'd learned in her past life that love wore too many faces to be trustworthy.
There are still too many unkown variables, too many questions – the most important of which, the one she ponders late into the night until her computer screen blurs: how do you forgive yourself? Ai promises herself that she must know the answer someday and made it her one wish: an answer – not possibilities, not probabilities, not compromises – but forgiveness in its absolute truth and unction.
Only then will Miyano Shiho cut Haibara Ai loose.
.
End.