Mikau: Hello everyone! Welcome and thanks so much for checking this out! This is my entry for the Poirot Café forum's writing competition "Alone". I really hope you enjoy it!

Disclaimer: If I owned it, I'd really push for a Kid vs. Lupin III special or something.

…

Unknown Isolation

I didn't know that I was alone, nor did I feel the pangs of loneliness during the years of my infancy, when I was but an ignorant child, that would later characterize so wholly my adolescent existence.

At that time, for a little more than half a decade, I was more or less free and almost blissful as I was spectacularly dumb to my own isolation.

I was the first grandson of the 12th Baroness FitzHerbert of Eastwell, born to a vivacious English mother (as naïve as she was fond of debauchery) and a reckless Japanese father who loved the respect and admiration of others more than he ever did his wife or son.

I was born but three months after the wedding, just this side of legitimate.

Of course, I knew nothing of this. It was not spoken of save in the whispers of servants…which I was too young and innocent to understand.

My mother, but a child of seventeen herself, cared not for me as I was the very embodiment of her liberty lost. She had been forced to bare me and wed my father to save the family from scandal (and her soul from hell, so the Baroness believed staunchly).

My mother resented it all fiercely…and me for it.

So I was given to my mother's own governess to raise—Margaret, whom I have always called my dear, sweet Baaya. That woman became my foster mother, closer to me than any of my blood ties.

I like to think she raised me well: to be gentle and compassionate yet stern and unyielding, to be benevolent yet command respect, to listen twice as much as I spoke and to choose words carefully so as not to waste them, and to forgive freely but forget never.

Above all, she raised me to search.

Search for knowledge, search for love, search for truth, search for purpose, search for the good inside everyone.

Baaya was a sage; however, she pretended to be dull and slow-witted, sometimes inane but never to the point of incompetence. Her reason for playing the fool was to avoid offending or injuring the pride of her masters to whom Baaya was the intellectual superior.

Baaya was the daughter of a traveling scholar, a man of the world. He was a European mutt of German and Irish stock (to name but a few, the most prominent) who had taken a Japanese bride, a school teacher, home to England as a souvenir.

Thus, Baaya had received a well-rounded education. She had all the sensitivity and whimsy of the Irish, the work ethic and steadfastness of the Germans, and the refinement and poise of the Japanese with all of the legends and folklore of both Europe and Asia at her hand.

She was my teacher. I did not attend a regular school until I was seven years old, but I learned from Baaya all the necessary subjects and so much more. Mostly she read to me. I sat on her lap as she read me the great works of fiction, all of the masters. I came to love the Greeks, poets and philosophers alike. I luxuriated in the words of Shakespeare, and I basked in the tales of other great men and women of many nationalities, all long dead.

The classics were read to me, of course, along with the usual children's fiction, but Baaya introduced me to works that no one save members of academia remembered as well. I might have been the most well-read five year-old in the history of our great nation. I certainly read a greater breadth of literature, being possessed of linguistic abilities exceeding my peers and even some of my elder countrymen.

I could speak English, Japanese, and French, and I was able to read Latin fairly well. The first two were my mother tongues. Everyone around me spoke English while only Baaya and my father (whose presence was variable) could communicate with me fluently in Japanese. My mother Helen spoke phrases here and there with dreadful pronunciation, and she could have simple conversations which she had learned from Baaya (and my father during their courtship). Still, I daily practiced to keep in touch with my Asian roots. Well…more to read their detective fiction, but…

French was the doing of my grandmother. The Baroness was descended from French noble blood that had come to England seeking refuge during The Terror. Her line had clung to this heritage, and even now the Baroness Charlotte spoke dazzling French like a native Parisian. Thanks to that unbreakable link, I was required to speak French as well. It wasn't really too much of a chore to learn. I was young, brilliant, and very motivated to read of the exploits of Arsène Lupin.

My knowledge of Latin was first cultivated by my grandmother as well, albeit unwittingly. A very pious woman, the Baroness took me with her to hear mass said in Latin several times a week. I soon became curious about the meanings of the strange words the clergyman was saying and endeavored to figure it out.

For the first seven years, that was my education: books. And how I cherished them.

It didn't matter what it was about; I read everything. Science, maths, history, religion. Some of it I didn't understand…a lot of it I didn't understand, but I asked Baaya my questions and reread the difficult passages over and over, looking up words and trying to wrap my small mind around great concepts so much bigger than my puny existence.

Looking back, I fear I was a very queer child.

Whenever Baaya could not supply me with a satisfactory answer, I wrote to the professor friends of her father. Still, many times their patient replies and detailed explanations escaped my comprehension. I was very young. Sometimes I had to accept my own inability to completely absorb the information contained in the tomes and the professors' clarifications. When such an occasion arose, I packed the accounts away for a time when I would be older and not quite so slow of mind.

I told myself that I was still growing, that there simply wasn't enough physical space in my brain for that idea at present, but, when I had grown, space would be made.

…

And that was one facet to my peaceful, fulfilling childhood: the interminable quest for knowledge.

There is, however, another side to this story, because, while I do admit that the majority of my time was spent in academic pursuits, there was—and maybe still is deep down buried—also a search for the spectacular and the wondrous.

Baaya had fed me a heathy diet of fiction and fantasy along with all of the Plato and Confucius. Budding scholar and devotee of the scientific method though I was, I was also a young boy who wholeheartedly believed in the fair folk.

When I was not curled up in an armchair with a book or fooling around with my microscope, telescope, or the junior chemist set (all sent to me from Japan by my paternal grandfather once he learned of my sensitivities), I was out in the meadows and surrounding forests, searching for fairies and the other legendary creatures that Baaya had told me of in the myths.

The land surrounding our estate was vast and verdant, creating an ideal environment for my explorations. I searched the woods, climbed the knotted, gnarled trees in the groves and investigated the moss nesting in the grooves of their trunks. Often I brought books with me and made a bower out of the trees' enormous roots. They were my stronghold to whence I absconded when the Baroness was too demanding about what a young nobleman should be or my mother was too cold and uncaring…or too busy with her work in fashion designing.

I loved the groves best, but another favorite of mine was the lake. Though, it might only have been a pond. It seemed so much larger when I was small, and since I haven't been back there in a few years now, I can't be entirely certain of the size.

Regardless, it was a grand lake that inspired in me a simultaneous sense of awe and dread. The edges of the water were clear, allowing you to see to the bottom where a myriad of stones, rocks, and pebbles lay. Some oblong and thin, some round and squat, the small ones no bigger than your thumb nail, the large ones the size of my head, the grey ones, the black ones, the pink ones, the bronze ones…they were quite the sight to behold when the sun cast its rays down on the surface of the water and made the rocks along with the lake itself shimmer.

But farther out on the lake, the atmosphere changed, warping from a mystical place where mermaids sunbathed to a dark abyss from which one could expect the sudden surfacing of some great beast whether that was the white whale of Moby Dick, the Leviathan of old, or maybe even Dagon of whom H. P. Lovecraft had told. The water out in the middle seemed to grow jetty black as if soaked in the ink of the giant squid, and it was still. There were no ripples—nor did I ever want there to be lest they signal the advent of some horrible fiend of the depths. Not even a breeze seemed to blow out in the center. Even though the trees surrounding the lake may have been whipping wildly in the gales, nothing stirred out in the center.

I imagined what might lie under the surface, and I shuddered. Surely there was something terrible down there, something of mammoth proportions. I thought of the pictures I had seen of the creatures of the ocean depths, so far removed from light that they no longer had need of eyes. Grotesque, queer creatures. I imagined that the beasts of the lake depths must be quite like those odd beings…only much larger. Much, much larger. For surely it was some prehistoric creature down there, some kin of the dinosaurs that had managed to survive the eons down there in its pit.

I feared the lake, and yet…that fear was what drew me back there again and again. I was a morbidly curious child.

It was like Odysseus and the sirens' song. I knew it had every possibility of bringing about my ruin, but I was determined to experience it for myself anyway.

I never did. The great terror of the depths never showed itself in my midst, so I had to content myself with the nymphs and the kappas (with whom I was on very good terms, as I brought them a steady supply of cucumbers).

The kelpies were harder to win over, but with the assistance of Coral, my mermaid confidant, I was able to successfully parley with their queen, Bridget.

Yes, I did indeed speak with the fey. But…whether they truly did exist or if they were but merely the conjurings up of a highly imaginative boy's mind, I cannot say.

The cool, logical scientist in me says my old friends were no more real than octarine is an actual color.

…But the dormant dreamer in me quietly persists that I conversed with fantastic creatures in those woods.

But then…perhaps I only summoned up the phantoms on survival instinct. It is said that one might die of loneliness or, at least, surely go mad from it, that longing for one's fellow living creatures. And without the fey, I should have spent my early years distressingly alone.

Certainly there were other people populating my life: Baaya, the servants, the Baroness, Mother, and Father (in that order of prevalence), but…save for Baaya, none offered me the companionship, the camaraderie that did those otherworldly creatures.

So I spent my days in the woods, coming home in the evening smelling of the earth. Twigs and leaves adorned my hair like the laurels of the monarchs and Olympians. I was the prince of the forest, returning to my human abode triumphantly on the heels of dusk.

And so it was for my first seven years. I communed with the forest folk and was tutored by Virgil. My creativity and thirst for knowledge were fostered even as my father was an entire continent away and my mother held no tender feelings for me.

And I did not realize until later, for, as I have said, I never knew that all this time I was alone.

…

School, strangely enough, was the undoing of my happiness.

You'll think my statement odd because I was a very pious son of Athena, an ardent learner, but…my knowledge upon entering the institution of primary education far exceeded that of my peers…and even surpassed some of my instructors.

The other seven year-olds did not have intimate knowledge of the solar system. They had never heard of the great Hydra or counted the stars joining Pollux and Castor. They were not familiar with the deeds of Jason and Medea, did not know the terrors of Charybdis and Scylla. They had never heard of Yog-Sothoth or the happenings in the Rue Morgue. They were strangers to Sir Percy Blakeney, Prince Paul Sernine (and all of his other aliases), and even to my dear Holmes and sweet Watson. They didn't even know what a Houyhnhnm was! They were all Yahoos!

And they looked at me strangely when I spoke of my friends in the woods. They looked frightened and told me that dragons didn't exist.

I quickly responded that yes, yes they did. Though, my friend Uhfrir was technically a wyvern, but she knew many dragons that still lived in the caverns up north in Scotland. Most of the majestic creatures, however, had migrated east, immigrated to Asia where their proud race was venerated instead of hunted and slaughtered.

It goes without saying that I was not popular at school. Nor did I get along with my peers. I did not make friends, and not even the teachers liked me, for I was a know-it-all who regularly corrected them.

I had not learned social graces, as I had spent most of my life in the seclusion of the Griffin family estate. I had not been exposed to other children, and I very seldom interacted with people outside of my immediate family circle for that matter. And the manners of the fair folk differed greatly from those of human beings.

I was a perfect fey nobleman, but a rude, conceited human brat.

I always received full marks, but my academic career was a far cry from successful.

I dreaded going to lessons, and it was not simply because the classes were boring or that I did not fit in. The other pupils bullied me.

They did not like the way I spoke in antiquated English far too complex and archaic for their simple minds to understand. They did not like my foreign features, inherited from my Japanese father. I was smaller than they, my eyes were apparently shaped funny, I had a strange nose, my mouth was too small and pouty, and I looked too much like a girl. They found fault with my imagination and my intellect. They jeered at my mismatched eyes: one gold like crystalized honey, the other blue as a robin's egg. It was the result of a rather unfortunate accident where I had been slapped and sent tumbling down the stairs, much to Mother's horror. I believe that to be the only time I have ever seen her afraid for my sake…or perhaps she was afraid for herself, fearing the consequences of accidentally killing me.

Regardless, those children berated and persecuted me for being different, and it was miserable.

That was the first time I ever realized that I was alone. That was my first taste of rejection and isolation.

I endured it for two years, but my spirit gradually weakened. I grew tired and reticent. I trusted no one, and I despised my fellow man. I too seemed to be hated, but I knew not why. Purely because I was different? Because I was smart, rich, obnoxious? I didn't understand. Neither their hatred nor their motives made sense to me. My peers remained an unsolvable mystery.

This was a very influential factor in my development as my confusion and inability to read men's hearts led me to become a detective, styled much after my idol Holmes.

And I was good at it. Once I applied the principles of reason and science to the various cases, I found myself able to see through them. The whole sordid nature of crimes did not bother me too terribly much. I felt nothing when I looked down at the corpses. Once the breath had left their lungs, they were people no more, simply puzzles. And I solved them with skill and ease.

And yet, still the inner workings of the human heart alluded me. I could see through everything yet understood nothing.

Owing to my newfound talent, I unfortunately became haughty in addition to taciturn and insufferable.

The British school system was clearly not serving me well, so when I was nine, I was sent with Baaya to Japan to live with my father, a police inspector.

I fear Japan was much worse. Though I had studied the language and the customs, living it was another matter entirely. I looked foreign, I acted foreign, and I was treated like a foreigner in accordance.

The children there could be cruel, wicked demons, much like my old schoolmates, but I had long ago grown indifferent to the torments of immature brats, so I acted every bit as unaffected as I felt.

Deriving no joy from a victim that did not seem to feel their jests and their jabs, my classmates soon began to look elsewhere for sport.

The Japanese schoolmates that I had been cursed with were wretches, the lot of them, but Japan itself, I loved dearly.

Tokyo was big and boisterous, but there were little retreats around every corner in the hidden parks, temples, and shrines. There were little patches of nature right there, interspersed with the stony grey buildings, the busy subway stations, and the throngs of rushing people.

I adored the food, the city, the history, and even the quaint culture of respect and honor that I found there. As well as their detective fiction. Edogawa Ranpo soon became my new favorite writer followed (albeit with a sizable gap between them) by Murakami Haruki.

But I digress. I remade myself a bit during my three years there. I still failed to befriend any of my peers, but I talked to the people in the neighborhood, as I actually had neighbors closer than a few dozen miles away like it had always been in England on the estate.

I learned from the shopkeepers and the old men and women that sat on benches and walked about the parks. I learned from the kami that inhabited the land, and I studied under the mischievous youkai that haunted the street corners, seemingly unseen but sometimes sensed by the human denizens of the city.

Also during my sojourn in Japan, I got to know my paternal grandfather, a great scientist and inventor. He taught me many things in his laboratory and rejoiced in my attentive ear, my successes under his guidance and tutelage. That was the first time I had ever felt close to, affection from a blood relative.

Above all, what I learned from my years in Japan was history, pride, and respect. When I returned to England at the start of my twelfth year, I was changed. I was a polite, genteel nobleman, ready to once more suffer the abuse of my classmates.

I can't say that my new attitude made things much better for me, as I was shipped off to a boarding school in London soon after my return to the Europe. I was separated once more from the woods and the meadows I had once reigned over, and the fey were not plentiful in the city. In Japan I had gotten in touch with a whole new race of fantastic beings, but in London with no fair folk and no Baaya…I was alone, and I was painfully aware of it.

…

Over the years I had learned how I was supposed to behave, so at my new school I didn't try to outdo the other pupils, and I didn't correct the instructors. In fact, I didn't do or say much at all. I let my test scores speak for me; I came across as the quiet intellectual type.

I never spoke of Milton or Chaucer or Emerson, though, at this point my peers were getting old enough to have knowledge of these subjects. I sometimes heard them conversing over those or other pieces of literature, but I never said anything. Their ideas were silly, and their understandings were limited. It would do no good for me to tell them that or try to elucidate for their benefit. They would not thank me for my input, and I knew it.

I did not loath my fellow man now so much as I had in the past, but I still did not enjoy his company nor understand his inner workings. I seemed to be different from others, set apart, and I could not comprehend their motives, their ways of thinking. They were the puzzle I could not solve…until one of their number lay dead on the floor. Then I was master of the situation, unraveler of riddles.

There was a murder at school once. One of the professors had been involved with a student. He had killed him when the student wanted out of the relationship and threatened to tell others about what had been going on between them.

I solved the case, bringing myself much acclaim. It seems that the whole affair had baffled everyone else. Things seemed fairly simple to me…besides the one point. I didn't understand why the professor had killed. Hadn't he loved the student? Did he really think that killing the young man would solve his troubles? Why extinguish a valuable, promising young life and risk jail when it would have been easier to just admit the wrong he had committed? People never wanted to admit their wrongs. They all thought that they could get away with it. They were all fools, and I did not understand them.

But with my deductive reasoning coming to light, I suddenly found myself in the limelight. No longer was I "tha' strange, quiet boy over thar, readin' a book and eatin' 'is lunch all by 'isself". Now I was a silent genius, always pondering some cosmic question or mulling over an as of yet unsolved crime.

Finally they understood me.

My fame did not last long in the favorable form it had begun, though. Soon I faded from the positive light into the grey area of things. When they discovered that I was odd, that is. They didn't shun me for it as I has been ostracized my entire youth. They merely ceased to seek out my company. That suited me just as well.

So I carried out my adolescence, feeling incredibly alone for the first time in my life. It was easier if they hated me. At least then they paid me some attention. I felt better having enemies. The way things stood…I was away from home, from Baaya, and no one paid me much mind. Before I had been kept company by my tormentors; now…I was ignored or avoided. I came to understand the expression of being "alone in a crowd".

…

I was seventeen and incredibly depressed when once more I returned to Japan with Baaya to live with my father.

It was good to be back living with my surrogate mother. I had missed her warmth and companionship, even though we had spoken daily while I was away at school and I had made sure to come home to the country estate on weekends and holidays.

I had missed Japan as well. I was quite excited to pay my grandfather a visit. I felt that he would be proud of the young scientist I had become. In general I was looking forward to finishing out my high school career in the little island country.

My father had risen through the ranks of the police force while I'd been away, and he now occupied the post of Superintendent of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. He'd bought a new house befitting of his title a little more than twenty minutes away from his previous abode.

This new manor suited me nicely. It was in a new district, meaning that I would attend a different school than my former schoolmates.

I wasted no time in getting involved with the local police as I was now old enough (or at least tall enough) to be allowed to help with investigations to some extent. My father assisted me in getting my place, but I was determined to keep it by earning it on my own merits.

Once my place with the local law enforcement had been settled, all that was left was to grow accustomed to school life. This did not prove to be difficult. My new classmates took to me well enough at first. I was handsome and foreign. What's more, my fame as a celebrated English detective was whispered of here as well. They were star struck and quite earnest in their interest in me.

But I knew it would soon pass as they discovered my deficiencies. And so it did.

They all fell away within the first month…except one, though, he had never seemed to take an interest in me in the first place. Only now that I was queer and boring did he seem to find me worth the trouble.

I had noticed him right away as I stood before the class introducing myself. Everyone else gazed at me in awe and excitement. He looked at me warily with unnatural, almost effulgent violet eyes. He reminded me of a predator preforming calculations, evaluating the situation before determining to strike.

I knew what he was the first moment I set eyes on him: fey. It had been a while since I had seen one, but…this new classmate of mine…his face was that of any son of Robin Goodfellow. He was handsome and witty with a devilish grin. Mischief shone like lighthouse beacons in those iridescent plum-colored orbs. The way he carried himself, the way he moved…and the acrobatic way he flitted about, all spoke of superhuman ancestry, though, he did not seem cognizant of his extraordinary origins. A changeling, then?

I studied him even as he analyzed me. And when he finished, a puckish smirk quietly spread from one corner of his lips to the other.

I was worried then. Did he see something that he liked? Something he didn't? What did he want with me? I didn't find out until later…once my curious classmates lost their taste for me.

And then he made his move.

One day near the end of the second week for me back in Japan, he came up to me during lunch and sat backwards in the desk chair in front of me. "Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you. Come, I'll take no denial; we must have a trial: for really this morning I've nothing to do."

I blinked. Lewis Carroll's The Mouse's Tail. It was one of my favorites, and…he was reciting it to me? No. He'd left off the first part and now seemed to be waiting for me to respond. If he had taken the part of Fury, then…I supposed I was the mouse.

"Such a trial, dear sir, with no jury or jury, would be wasting our breath," I replied.

And he smirked wide, almost malevolently, just as Fury in the poem must have. "I'll be judge. I'll be jury," he snickered softly, and it sounded like the hissing of some vile, venomous creature. "I'll try the whole cause and condemn you to death."

There was a moment of silence between us, filled by the chatter of our classmates, the sounds of desks being scooted about, probably scuffing up the floor.

When it became apparent that he was content with our wordless staring contest, I felt compelled to ask, "Do you like that poem?"

He shrugged, resting his elbows on my desk, a serpentine grin coiling on his lips. "I like Jabberwocky better…but you like that poem. I saw how the binding of your book automatically fell open to it."

I nodded…and then frowned. "But you sit in front of me. How could you…?"

He just smiled. "You read a lot. Ever read anything by Oscar Wilde?"

"His poetry, yes. A few essays," I admitted.

"Terry Pratchett?" The smile persisted.

My face lit up.

I had made a friend.

He was a bizarre one, to be sure, but I was quite peculiar myself, so we got on well. He tutored me on the subject of music—one of the former holes in my education—and I exposed him to Lovecraft, Poe, and Whitman.

What a mind he had! For the first time I was able to have the conversations and debates I had so long craved. He understood. And on topics he was ignorant of, he was willing and able to learn. Just as often I was the pupil.

I could talk to him, talk to him like I had spoken to no one else save Baaya and the fey (who may or may not have been conjurings of my own mind). I told him of my life growing up, my time in the forest, my parents, my struggles…and he believed me. He empathized with me, and he reciprocated my show of trust. He confessed to me the trauma of his father's death, his mother's slow mental decline afterwards. We could speak openly with one another, and it was freeing, like a gulp of fresh air after being held underwater for so long.

We spoke of commonplace things too: his failing love life, the food in the cafeteria. We laughed over the latest comic books, vented our frustrations with the idiocy of our peers over a cup of tea for me, a mug of hot chocolate for him.

And he introduced me to his group of friends.

He was not close to them like he was to me. They were people to spend time pleasantly with whereas I was his intellectual sparring partner, his treasured confidant…as he was mine.

But for me, it was good to finally be part of a group. Certainly, I was not a favored member, but I was accepted and respected. They asked my opinions and listened, considered them when I spoke. The girls in the pack were nice to me, and I began to feel genuine affection for them as well as the males a little while after.

I had a place.

And with my indispensable friend, my spiritual brother at my side, I felt no fear of ever being alone again.

The

End

…

Mikau: So…yeah. I feel like this is actually more like an original work than a fanfiction since it's pretty much just my second string headcanons about Hakuba and it doesn't have anything in it that's really specific to canon "Hakuba" and "Kaito". The characters could be anyone really. But I digress. What did you think? I thought I'd been doing enough angst lately, so I decided to try writing about something I usually portray as tragic in a bit of a lighter light. And what did you think of the imagery and the descriptions? I was working really hard on those since I usually delegate all of my efforts to the dialogue. Was there a particular part that you liked best? Thank you so much for taking the time to read! I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Have a great week!