The Vampire Detective – Omake

The Two Sides of a Coin

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Another click-tick. . . clack. Boom.

Haibara Ai – born Miyano Shiho – sighed quietly. The professor had been harmlessly blowing things up for most of the day like he usually did when working on something, but this was just getting ridiculous.

She needed to work on some of the more obscure parts of Kudo-kun's new blood properties, how they interacted with not only the Apotoxin – that had in fact been her first trial – but also other poisons of varying toxicity, both common and rare diseases and, last but certainly not any less important, whether or not normal human blood was or was not accepted by means other than ingestion. Things were going slowly, but at least she was being left mostly in peace until Kudo-kun himself got back from school.

She both envied him and didn't. Envied, because he had his seventeen year old body back. Could go to school and interact properly with those of his own, true age. Didn't, because those same people, while being their age, were in all probability not even as mature in some things as the threesome that had named their group the 'Shounen Tantei' despite two of the members being girls.

Besides, her work here was much more interesting than whatever Kudo-kun's teachers had to be setting him.

Now, if only. . .

"Ne, Ai-kun?"

"Hn?"

"I've been wondering, you know... Back then, when Shinichi-kun was here. How did you know what was wrong with him? I mean, I know there was what we saw back at Unobo-san's, but..."

Ai sighed and put the test tube full of blood that she had been experimenting with down into a separate rack for the moment so that she didn't lose track of it.

"It was a matter of looking at the two sides of a coin, hakase. On the one hand, we could have imagined the scene in the darkened room, or we could assume that there was a bright light shining in through a window or wall that we were somehow unable to see."

She paused. The professor's chair creaked.

"Ah, but..."

She sighed, and kneaded her forehead with one hand.

"Yes. But. If what I had just said was true, then what Kudo-kun was feeling later on would have been merely the anticipated onset of the spasms that come prior to the return of one Edogawa Conan-kun. Which is what I would have believed had I not witnessed for myself sufficient evidence to the contrary."

She turned around to glance at him sardonically.

"Besides that," she said with an accompanying smirk, "if my gambit had proved false, then we would have lost nothing, merely only causing not a slight amount of confusion on the parts of both you and Kudo-kun."

The professor frowned.

"Yet you were right."

The shrunken scientist threw her hands wide in an expansive shrug.

"What can I say? I chose the wild card, it worked. Only..."

"What is it?"

"Don't ever let the Organisation get a hold of even one sample of his blood. Ever."

At first, the man seemed surprised, then wondering, and at last he seemed to understand. Because the devil alone knew what the crime syndicate she had once worked for would do with something like this. . . They had sent her out after even the faintest rumours while she had been with them, that might lead to their goal; she didn't want to inadvertently give them an easy way there when she was trying to work against them, for the first true time in her life.

Because here, with these people, she had found something that she wished to protect. . . a feeling that she had almost thought had died with her sister.

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AN: Okay. Um, this one. Not funny, this one – more of a plot hole filler that I kept wondering about – why and how did Haibara know to bring out that blood pack in the fourth chapter? Well, I hope this explains to everyone else, as well. Anyone who has read up to the Shiragami-sama case and beyond should know what she's talking about. Not too hard if you think about the fact that I'm merging the BO and Kid's Org (if they were ever really seperate) in TVDverse.

Title and Omake inspired by Ellery Queen, who likes to see to sides to things, apparently. (I'm reading Double, Double, an oooold copy. 1958 old. I think that I'm on Shinichi's side, though – I've been reading Holmes a lot longer, so I'm biased.) I thought the reference suits her quite well, here.