Description: Short study on a moment of the series in books 18 and 19.Character study. Haibara. Rating: K.
Let her mourn: tears.
It had been the first time she had really seen him at work.Kicking a few objects around with his powered up shoes was nothing, and you merely needed a keen eye and to be good at maths to figure out where the fake money makers were. He might have impressed her then, but she had found it hard to take him seriously when he asked the gang's leader if she was one of them. As if such a clumsy enterprise could be their handiwork... He always seemed so uptight when he thought they were involved, going as far as to drop his cover in front of school kids. It had been way too tempting to yank his chain on the subject afterwards... And very much amusing. Especially since she had been one of them.
She had merely considered him lucky the first time.
The second case was a different story. She had just told him about who she was, had faced his ire, and had found herself giving details to him about her sister. Her recently deceased sister. They hadn't stayed on the topic long, but the conversation had refreshed it anew in her mind. Figuring out that she might have accidentally sent her sister information on the poison that had shrunk them didn't help either. As they drove out to the Professor who was said to have the disk they were after, her mind had been filled with recollections of her... and questions.
Did he remember meeting her? How much had he known then? Could he...?
The name did seem to ring a bell for him. She watched him ponder it, wondering whether he would figure it out, how he would react.
And then they had found the dead body.
The dead body of the professor who had found himself with her disk amongst her sister's. Barely a week after she had left the Organisation. Too close a call for her to believe it a coincidence at first. Conan had quickly found reason to suspect it could have been a murder, and she hadn't failed to notice the striking absence of any disk that the professor might have put aside expecting their visit. She could feel their shadow, their motive... But as he had said, it was too early to be certain.
Hearing Vodka's voice on the recording machine had been both relieving and worrying at the same time. Relieving in the sense it meant they didn't have the disk, and hadn't killed Hirota. Worrying in the sense that it indicated they did indeed plan on visiting Hirota's house. Oh they wouldn't try much as long as the police were there. But if they noticed her presence...
She had watched quietly as he puzzled through the clues, doing his best to solve the closed-room murder. But her mind wasn't on the murder. Her mind was on her last meeting with Akemi. Akemi had mentioned him that day, the boy from the detective agency. Ironically it had been alongside Kudo Shinichi's name. She had not known then. She had only noticed the boy a couple of weeks later, when she had found the article with her sister's fake name, with the photo of a boy beside her dead body. The body of the one who had said she would be perfectly fine...
No. There was no way he could have figured out she was anything else than a thief, a girl who had committed suicide. He couldn't even solve a closed room murder, let alone find one of them on his own. Best to tell him to give up the case and go through the back door. She was sick of the pain, of the memories. She had seen enough; the police did not need them any more.
And yet all of a sudden he had turned, this glint in his eye. "I'll show you the truth behind this case," he had said. His grin was so cocky, his eyes so certain, it was hard not to see the Teenage Detective she had read about in the news. All of a sudden he had taken out his bow tie and borrowed Professor Agasa's voice. Humph, amusing. You want to play puppet do you? Might as well play along. It wouldn't be long before his theory would be proved wrong yet again. She might as well challenge him herself.
But her challenge did not make him pause, he challenged her back, pointing out the most insignificant of details that suddenly pulled everything into place. She watched, -dumbfounded, as all the others were,- as he proved it, as he demonstrated the how, pointed to the who, explained the why. He had managed to figure it out.
He had figured it out.
And if he could figure this much out...
"Why?" she had asked, her voice weak as unwanted emotion pushed forth nonetheless. "Why didn't you help... my sister?"
He had the cheek to not understand what she meant. Did she need to spell it out for him? Masami Hirota was Akemi Miyano's fake name. The Billion Yen thief was her sister, the one he had failed to save. Oh yes, she could read it on his face now. He remembered the case...
Anger fuelled her emotion as she went on to ask him why, with such a keen eye for detail and a talent for deduction, he hadn't figured out her fake identity.
She couldn't understand.
Why hadn't he seen it? Why couldn't he have saved her?
Why had her sister died?
Why?
The question lay forgotten, as the tears took over. He stood silent, as she gripped his shirt and let her emotion flow, her anguish take form. There was no answer to give. All one could do was let her mourn.
Fin.