Disclaimer: "Detective Conan" belongs to Gosho Aoyama, and "Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon" belongs to Naoko Takeuchi.

This is an alternative story to my other fanfic "Encounter in Venice" and one of the possibilities of what could have happened if Ai had taken the antidote before Shinichi brought down the Organization.

Thanks a lot to my friends and betas Rae (Astarael00) and SN1987a and the Aicoholics on LiveJournal, without whom I would never have started this fic.

FS

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Ghost at Twilight

(edited version)

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Contrary to your expectations…

Contrary to your expectations, tonight's twilight is breathtakingly radiant, exhibiting not only spectacular scarlet and pink cloudscapes but also a mysteriously shimmering, deep lilac afterglow high above the reddish-golden band on the horizon. The full moon is hanging on this silky curtain of light like a flawless white diamond. As the light behind you fades, the afterglow before your eyes only seems to intensify—and all the trees and buildings in the distance gradually disappear, their outlines blended together into the dramatic skyline.

Driven by a bewildering brew of jealousy, despair, fury, compassion, and love—it is peculiar how the label you were once so hesitant to attach to the feeling has become synonymous with his name after less than one day—you fly to his apartment at a speed which doesn't only ruin your sandals but also your knees and feet. When you arrive at the lift, breathless with anticipation and fatigue, you become aware of the problem that you haven't hatched a plan of action yet although various hypothetical scenarios ranging from rosy to apocalyptic have played out in your mind like a film.

If Seiya invites you in—you suddenly know with certainty when you're finally standing in front of his apartment—you will pin him against the wall and kiss him after kicking the door shut. In revenge for his outrageous lies, the joke he played on you, and the humiliation you had to endure from his brothers and his friends, you will seduce him and use him, struggle free from this ill-fated love, and drop the accomplished Casanova in time for his flight to New York so that he will never forget the woman who has bested him in his own game.

No one opens the door when you ring. If he is at home, he must be sulking in bed or—your blood boils at the thought—distracting himself from his heartache with the help of another woman.

You turn the key and open the door without making a sound, entering his apartment as stealthily as a weightless spectre. Stepping across the threshold, you inhale the familiar scent of roses in the deathly silence. The apartment still looks the same as when Seiya and you left, you observe. Vases of roses are still scattered over the floor between the living room and the kitchen. Piles of love letters are still lying on the coffee table in a heap. From the balcony, the high clouds, the moon, and even the first evening stars, which have come out much too early, seem so near that you can almost fall under the illusion that they are within reach. For all that… Through the blue-tinted glass of the large window, the twilit world has lost its rose colour.

"Seiya?"

If he is in the company of Odango or another woman he has chatted up in a café or on the streets, you're not going to barge in on them without a warning. Taking off your cardigan to hang it on the lowest hook, you begin to feel like Kakyuu, who must have done the same whenever she came home. In a ghost story, her soul would have chosen you as its host for one day, using you to steal the heart of the man who never fully succumbed to her charms when she was still alive. Or the love you once felt for Kudo in Paris has returned to haunt you in disguise, pretending to be a stranger so that it won't be recognized and killed off again…

The beeping sound, muted as if it came from behind a thick, soundproof door, steals into your ear the moment you allow yourself to ponder the untenable, ridiculous idea that the last twenty-three hours have indeed been unreal—a game whose rules provide that you can never see Kudo and Seiya, who have the same initials, at the same time even when they appear at the same place. Like two sides of the same coin, or the same lover in two parallel universes, they have supported you, taunted you, and got under your skin as they ceaselessly prodded you to leave your comfort zone to retrieve the memories you had chosen to forget. Pushing open the door to the bathroom, whose muted green colour is as soothing as its owner's voice before he drifts into sleep, you register that the washer-dryer combo is not even plugged in although the faint beeping sound is continuing in your head, counting the seconds which pass in the ceaseless, steady flow of time.

In the bathtub, countless bouquets of roses in white, yellow, and red are lying snuggly pressed against each other, filling the air with their heady sweet scent. The warm, nostalgic fragrance of kinmokusei is still lingering in the room as well, wafting from a blue carafe, which lacks the hand-drawn label.

Unnerved by a premonition you cannot name, you knock a few times at the closed bedroom door and push it open. The room is empty, much to your relief. You would have died if you had found him with another woman in it.

Letting your gaze roam the bedroom and linger on the window, whose translucent patterned curtains cast soft, sinister shadows on the bed, you realize with a sinking feeling in your stomach that Seiya and you won't see each other again before he leaves for New York or will see each other much too late, when no time is left for explanations and apologies. Whatever he might have lied about for fear of scaring you away, his love for you felt real. From whichever angle you look at it, it was you who has degraded your fairytale romance to a casual one-night stand, who once again ditched her ideal lover and surrendered to the circumstances. The pattern must have emerged when Gin ended your "marriage" by shooting the only person you truly loved at that time. Since then you've let go of love whenever you could feel it in your grasp—and it doesn't help to know why.

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Removing your sandals before treading on the soft carpet, you climb into his bed and rest your head on his pillow, on which you can still smell the scent of his skin. Since it's highly unlikely that you will find him in Ueno-koen within the one hour you have left, you decide to wait for him here instead of rummaging through his drawers for his number or run aimlessly around Shinobazu-no-ike. Maybe—so you tell yourself as you're falling into a pleasant reverie, teetering on the brink of a deep, dead sleep—maybe he will appear in the door in a few minutes and welcome you into his arms. And you two will elope before Tenoh-san can stop the wedding, or she and you will negotiate, and all will be well again.

In truth, you feel too fatigued to move, as though you had wandered across countries and continents and walked thousands of miles within one day. It was the same during the "party" on the day after the Professor's funeral, when you watched Kaito perform his magic tricks. The children and even most of the adults present were delighted by the flowers, the doves, the playing cards, the flickering light, the mirrors and the smoke and the petals flying through the air. To you, however, everything was only a variant of the same game, the repetition of a trick you had already seen.

Watching Kudo and Ran, who were cozily settled close to each other in a corner of the very sofa where Kudo and you had sat and watched Charade before you two went to Paris, you replayed the quarrel at Pandora's Box over and over again in your head. You could see with painful clarity that things would have taken another turn if only you had lied at the crucial moment. Overwhelmed by a sense of loss and indignation at the injustice of it all, you wondered briefly whether you should win your detective back by lying to him now.

"Why did you do it?" he asked her. And the camera focused on her flushed cheeks—which might have been coloured by the harsh, cold wind—and her hard eyes or even her firm mouth as she gazed into the distance and gently murmured, "I did it for you!"

His eyes widened as realization dawned. The music played—a romantic, sickeningly sweet tune. And when they dramatically sank into each other's arms in the rain, which washed away her lies, romance would have bloomed, and he would have forgiven her for deleting the files…

"To keep you safe," you could have said. But it would have felt so wrong to say it at that moment. Although you had intended to protect him at first—when Tenoh-san's name was to be sent to all the blackmailed people on the list, the game had changed, and you learned for the first time that you could never build your happiness on another person's pain. Perhaps you had been too weak or too stubborn, or simply too proud. Or maybe you erased the disk because it was the only way to make sure that Kudo will stay safe—or because you were fed up with the machinations and had to end it all. Since one lie more or less didn't make a difference, you could have lied to Kudo or give him a simplified version the truth—if only you hadn't felt utter disgust at the very thought of it.

In a utilitarian world view, saving the files would have been the right decision no matter whose name Gin had attached to the mail—but your notion of loyalty dictated that you couldn't sacrifice Tenoh-san's happy family for all the Organization's victims. In saving Tenoh-san for Kaioh-san (whose blue umbrella once protected you from being drenched on the way to the dorm while she missed a date with her girlfriend, as you later learned), you had sacrificed thousands of strangers and your own happiness. Tenoh-san, whom you had left in the belief that you had planned to erase the files right from the start, would have called it an act of formidable self-defeat.

Too bright to be black but too dark to be white, poisoning twenty-six people without remorse just to lose what you wanted most due to a moment of weakness and the refusal to live a lie—you were left with a story you couldn't tell, rendered mute before the man you loved like Andersen's little mermaid. But what was wrong, and what was right, you wondered as you were watching Kuroba Kaito's magic tricks with almost clinical detachment. The truth had so many facets and faces of which none looked really right… not when the sunlight faded away at the end of the day and the boundaries blurred into each other in this never-ending twilight.

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Some people believed that tragedy was transcendental, a poignant reminder of the gulf between our wishful thinking and the truth—the gap which sometimes equaled the distance between the stars and the earth. And yet you couldn't feel anything of the supposed greatness of suffering as you were walking down the stairs to the cellar. The detective was tailing you from some distance—an elegant, urbane figure in a tailored suit, who offered you his hand when you arrived at your empty desk. Since he wasn't the detective you wanted, however, you didn't take it.

The Professor had been a genius, who had only invented gadgets and toys, Hakuba Saguru said, pulling out a chair with a flourish to sit down next to you. But while the Professor had squandered his talents on inconsequential games, he had known how to make use of time, a resource most people wasted.

Time and life usually slipped away as people focused on their negative experiences, on the repetitiveness of tradition and the familiarity of the known. On a stopwatch, time seemed forever to elapse at the same unchanging pace; but our personal perception of time—the time which really counted and which depended on our awareness—was stretchable to the extreme.

Days could feel like years while years could feel like weeks. How did time pass for someone who was dreaming, who had gone into a coma, or whose life flashed through their mind in their last moments on earth? At the end of our lives, time often revealed itself to be the treasure we had foolishly thrown away in our relentless quest for happiness. Unhappy people were those who left the world with regrets while happy people knew that they had made the most of their time.

When he wished for a party instead of a traditional funeral, your Professor had tried to give you all one day of mirth, which would otherwise have been lost to grief and gloom. Since happiness couldn't be forced on anyone, you were free to stay away from the party if you wanted—but Hakuba, whose task was to coordinate the event, felt responsible to keep you company and make the day bearable for you.

It has never occurred to either of you to steer your growing friendship in the direction of romance, for the chemistry between Hakuba and you are of a purely platonic nature. But you two sometimes meet up when he returns to Tokyo to do some catching up. And as the words which once saved you again enter your consciousness, you force yourself to get up and let your eyes sweep the bedroom.

You haven't been searching for a clue or anything in particular. In fact, you aren't even aware of having searched for anything at all. But when your gaze falls on the small razor and a tube of glue Seiya has left on the bedside table between the helmet and the vase, you instantly recall the curious expression on his face when he asked you why Kaito had given you a death card, and put two and two together...

Seiya has slipped the card back into your pocket along with the key to his apartment. And since you were elated by the fact that he had given you his key, you didn't pay attention. Taking the two playing cards out of your pocket, you behold them in the luminous glimmer of twilight. The Jack of Hearts you found on the street is a regular court card—but the other card is not the Queen and the Ace of Spades, which Seiya must have kept for himself after stealing it from you.

It's an Ace of Hearts with a note in his illegible sloping hand, which you decipher as "Tonight, in Ueno-koen". Turning it to the other side, you discover that in reference to Seiya's character and name, Yaten-san has drawn a colourful jester in front of a starry night, who is wandering on the edge of a precipice and reaching for the stars with a disarming smile, heedless of the danger in front of him and unaware of the ruins he is leaving behind.

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