Detective Conan and Magic Kaito characters, settings, and ideas do not belong to me but to Aoyama Gōshō.

Warnings: None

Graceful Athleticism

By Taliya

"Ballet is not a sport."

Twelve-year-old Haibara Ai's eyebrow twitched in irritation. "Oh really? It isn't?" She leveled a mild glare at her classmate and friend, Edogawa Conan. "I don't think you realize just how difficult ballet is."

The boy huffed. "You just flounce around and look pretty in a tutu. Anyone can do that, right?"

Ai's glare intensified. "I don't think you should insult a sport and an art that you know nothing about, Kudou-kun," she warned. "You'll just make yourself look like an idiot, in the end." The two entered Professor Agasa's home and settled at the bar to work on a joint paper for their English class. "I'd like to see you try a beginner ballet class and see how hard you think it is, Kudou-kun," she challenged.

Twelve-year-old Haibara Ai was no ordinary twelve-year-old girl. In actuality, she was twenty-two-year-old Miyano Shiho, a defected laboratory scientist of the now-defunct Organization. It was she who had formulated the drug that had resulted in her current de-aged state. Edogawa Conan, who was in reality a shrunken twenty-one-year-old detective by the name of Kudou Shinichi, had been the first human test case—and the only other survivor of the poison that she had called "Apoptoxin".

"It has to be easy, since ballet dancers make it look easy," Shinichi dismissed.

Ai scowled. "Try standing in first position," she demanded before she smiled a sickly-sweet smile. "I'll make sure you're standing correctly."

Shinichi grumbled but turned his feet out, heels together, and straightened his back. "Like this?" he asked, his arms windmilling as he fought to maintain his balance while keeping his feet glued to the floor.

"First off, Kudou-kun, never force your turn out." She tapped one of his feet with her toe and nudged him to relax. "You need to rotate your legs from your hip socket, using the muscles in your leg to turn your foot out. Using friction against the floor will destroy your knees in the long run." She demonstrated by turning out one leg while holding it out before her and then placing it on the floor, repeating the process with the other.

Her friend gingerly copied her, and realized his stance was much more stable.

The strawberry blonde nodded. "Now, your posture needs a lot of work." She moved around to his back, using her hands to nudge him in the shoulders, neck, and stomach as she aligned his spine properly. "Your hips should always be upright," she lectured, placing her hands on the sides of his hips and tilting his pelvis so that his tailbone was more vertical. "You're trying to make your back as straight as possible." She then grabbed him around the back of the jaw to the base of his skull, gently tugging his head upwards. "Feel this sensation, this lifting?" she asked, careful not to hurt her friend. "You always have to feel lifted. Your weight should always be centered on the balls of your feet."

She released the brunet, and he held a correctly postured first position for a full second before he wobbled and fell out of it. "That… sort of hurts to hold like that."

Ai raised a skeptical eyebrow at him. "I didn't even work on the arms with you," she deadpanned, and Shinichi stared incredulously at her.

"There's more?"

"Kudou-kun," she muttered with a longsuffering sigh, "You haven't even started moving yet." She easily slid into first position, positioning her arms in a graceful rounded shape held out before her at sternum-height. "This is first position. She moved through the other four positions, pointing out second, third, fourth, and fifth. "Five basic positions, and all this before you ever start adding movement."

"Fine, so it's a bit harder than I thought," Shinichi grumbled petulantly. "Don't know if I would still call it a sport."

"By definition, what is a sport?" she asked flatly, as she reached up to the bar and pulled down a dictionary. She held it out to the detective.

Shinichi took the book and flipped through the pages until he found the definition of sport. "'Sport: n. an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment'," Shinichi read. He glanced up at Ai. "There's no competition in ballet."

Ai smirked. "There isn't?" she asked dryly, leaning into his breathing space. "There's no competition to see who can lift their leg higher, jump further, turn one more than someone else? There's no competition to earn a spot as a principal in a company, to catch a choreographer's eye so that they can create a work on you? There's no competition to see who can dazzle their audience more?"

"All right, all right, I get it! Ballet's a sport," Shinichi relented, if only to get Ai out of his personal bubble.

"But it's also an art," she added insistently.

The brunet chuckled. "I never said it wasn't, Haibara."

Author's Note: A short that is sort of in keeping with the ballet-theme I have going right now with Ai. I've had this argument before with an ex of mine—I won. Anyhow, Happy World Ballet Day, people! I hope you enjoyed it.

Completed: 04.10.2016