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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Although you know that…
Although you know that haste often causes accidents and that you had better hail a cab, you storm out into the twilight and follow the bus route to Ueno-koen for lack of a better plan. Cursing yourself for losing your handbag with the result that you don't have any cash for a cab ride, you stumble on your impractical, soon-to-be-disposed-of new sandals along an endless procession of sky-bridges and skyscrapers, tree-lined avenues, and sumptuous villas, past a string of gourmet restaurants, exclusive boutiques, and five-star hotels. As the clothes in the boutiques grow more trendy and affordable and the number of the stars on the hotels in the vicinity diminishes, the lush, pale pink cherry trees at Shinobazu-no-ike materialize into view.
Shivering with anticipation, you fly past the bustling streets towards the water, which is glistening in the same ever-shifting shades of violet and purple as alexandrites glow at night under incandescent lights. The last squirrels of the evening are scrambling along the branches, leaping from tree to tree. At the intersection you just left behind, children are playing ball while cars and bikes are chasing each other for fear of getting into another never-ending rush-hour traffic jam, honking aggressively at the passersby who dare to step on the busy streets despite the faulty traffic lights, which have yet to be repaired. In the distance, a few ducks are paddling eagerly towards the food an elderly couple—ignorant of the danger their ill-advised kindness may cause—throws at them.
The sense of déjà-vu, which assails you again all of a sudden, is no longer vague but tremendous, sheer overwhelming. Time has rewound again, hurling you back into yesterday's pre-stranger-san world. The similarities between last night and tonight are so disturbing that you seriously question your sanity for a moment. You didn't pay attention to the faces of the children playing ball at the intersection where the accident occurred—but now that you whirl around to gaze hard at them, you could swear that they're wearing the same school uniforms as the group of children you saw last night on the way to Ueno-koen. You can't distinguish one reddish-brown squirrel from another squirrel of the same colour, just as all ducks of the same sex and the same size look almost identical to your ornithologically uninterested eyes—but the couple that are feeding the ducks now are, without doubt, the same elderly couple that had been feeding the ducks yesterday, the same couple Kudo and you met at the bus station.
On your phone, which must have acquired a previously undiscovered glitch, the calendar brazenly lies when it claims that tonight is really Friday night.
There are slight differences between tonight and last night, however… White seagulls have joined the teal-brown-tan patterned ducks at the pond. All the cherry trees are shedding their blossoms in the rising wind while the deep lilac sky is still overhung with thin layers of scudding crimson and scarlet clouds, which partly obscure the full moon and the stars like a protective red veil. The air is fresh and damp but distinctly warmer than it was last night. For all the merits, your heart, which has been thudding in your chest to the peculiar beeping sound you can still hear in the distance, fails for a second and then hammers on with a throbbing, nagging ache when you arrive at the old place. As far as your eyes can see, all the benches at Shinobazu-no-ike are occupied. The bench in front of you, on which Seiya sat last night, however, is empty.
With a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach, you let yourself fall on the familiar bench to give your aching feet a rest. Seiya hasn't come to the place of rendezvous or has already left, as he didn't expect you to come after the dismissive words with which you ended the affair. You remember admiring him for his ability to take whatever life throws at him in his stride. But now you realize for the first time that his talent for avoiding undue complications and resisting other people's influences despite being smothered with love also enables him to let go of strong attachments and free himself from you as if you had never crossed his path.
A cool breeze sweeps through the trees, rustles the leaves, and brushes against your naked arms, reminding you that you've forgotten your cardigan at Seiya's place in your hurry. Since it's much too late to go back now, you decide to leave it to Seiya as a souvenir.
Sitting alone on the bench for two, waiting again for a man who doesn't come, you summon all your courage to revisit the past once more, as you still feel the urge to hunt for the last puzzle pieces to the picture and sift out the truth from the lies. But this time, neither your stranger nor your detective will be around to inspire you or direct your attention to the details you might miss. You've always been a pessimist and a coward when it comes to facing your guilt. And despite Seiya's lucky charm in your pocket, you don't nurture high hopes for success, for you know that you will have to wrestle with your demons alone.
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Fumbling in your pockets…
Fumbling in your pockets for your phone to check the date again before embarking on another journey into the past, you notice in dismay that it's gone. You can even remember leaving it at home—in fact, Kudo has commented on it in annoyance on the way to Hikawa Shrine—which is most disturbing, as you could have sworn that you used it to check the date on the way to the pond. Did you only imagine it in your distress because you didn't find Seiya on the bench? You have the absurd feeling that it will take shape before your eyes now if only you make an effort to conjure it up. When you were five or six, you could control your dreams—making the monsters in your nightmares disappear and calling your fairies and guardians with a mental snap of your fingers—a skill which gave you a tremendous sense of power and freedom. Waking up from those dreams invariably hurt more than words could express. But it was impossible to hold on to them once you had realized that they weren't real, and every morning you would wake up in tears no matter how hard you struggled to keep on dreaming.
You bring your hand to your mouth as if to cover a yawn, discreetly bite into your thumb, and note in satisfaction that it hurts. Studying the very real looking bite marks on your skin, you recite the formula of APTX4869, the antidote, and APAH in your head, assuring yourself that you can still recall them as well. The curious beeping sound in your inner ear has stopped, much to your relief. Beneath your stoic exterior, you've always been the emotional, volatile type. Thrown off balance by stranger-san, who has thoroughly wrecked your inner peace within a few hours, and devastated by the speed at which he let go of you, you must be imagining things after your latest mental breakdown.
Why should you deny it? Lovesickness is a serious mental condition, which can turn the most sensible person into a pathetic emotional wreck. Usually, the delusional, obsessive-compulsive state lasts for three months and the woes of unrequited love can last up to three years until the victims finally move on or—in a few hopeless cases—succumb to the sickness anew. You've gone through this more than once although this time feels like the most severe case of all, and you don't need to feel ashamed of it since greater mind than yours have suffered from it as well. Dante and Petrarca, Shakespeare and Goethe, Schubert and Liszt, even the prudent and practical Agatha Christie and the principled, respectable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had once fallen victim to it. Perhaps Kudo's overly romantic reading of "A Scandal in Bohemia" was a valid interpretation, after all, and Sherlock Holmes, the flawless "automaton" and "calculating mind", had kept the photo of the woman just because he had, inexplicably, fallen hard for an unattainable stranger he didn't—couldn't—know and not because he felt obliged to keep a reminder of the lesson that one should never underestimate a foe. Watson must have been fooled by Holmes' usual nonchalance, claiming that his friend was incapable of sentimental feelings while the poor detective was actually trapped for life in an especially persistent case of unrequited passion. Why else should Holmes have thought of a married woman of dubious reputation, whom he hadn't ever had a real conversation with (their hurried encounters in disguise don't really count) as the ideal of a female who "eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex" just because she managed to outwit him once?
Having thus assuaged your anxiety and mended your pride, you set off to rummage in your past for the missing pieces of your story. There are so many memories to dwell on and so little time to weigh them against each other, to separate the essential from the trivial and isolating the fiction from the facts. So you only brush against most of the recollections with a distracted glance, acknowledge their existence without trying to relive them, much less analyze them. Analyzing in itself seems now a futile, redundant act, which more often obscures the truth rather than unveil it.
Gingerly, you feel your way along the poorly lit corridors of your mind, pass Tenoh-san's picturesque seaside house, where you practiced shooting and studied the plans of the isle, the Werewolf Cliff, the subterranean passages, the log cabin, and the outwardly decrepit ship while lying on the beach in the autumn sun. You barely gaze at the train where you jotted down random ideas for the perfect poison in personalized, encrypted shorthand, evade the Professor's frequent worried glances, ignore the Detective Boys' reproaches, flee from Ran's attempts to take care of you, and pause for a moment in front of Kudo, who, after returning to his original body for good, looked like a stranger you didn't know.
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How many pills did you make? Kudo asked you the night he took the antidote. You had just left the sofa and he had followed you to the stairs to the cellar, where he was now leaning against the door frame near the window while the full moon was peering through the blueish clouds, through which no star could be seen. He didn't only sound curious but also anxious, and you could tell that he was wondering whether you were going to take the antidote.
You turned away from his prying eyes, and for a weak moment, you almost consider showing him the twenty-five pills you had created for the crows and Anokata. However, you were sure it wasn't the criminal's urge to confess their crime but rather the artist's need to share their latest creation with a proud, excited smile: Look, I've toyed with the idea for so long and now I've finally made this! Isn't it nice?
Since Kudo was much too staid and upright to appreciate your masterpieces and you would endanger Tenoh-san and put the whole enterprise at risk, you only gave him your trademark smirk and told him in feigned boredom that you had made two pills—one for you and one for me.
Maybe you had been silly and sentimental, but it was out of the question that you used the Silver Bullet—the ray of hope, which was supposed to "kill the Werewolf in Man", according to the Organization's scriptures—for the ugly task. The mental image of twenty-five dead children strewn across the hall (you didn't care about the one scapegoat you'd have to shoot at Pandora's Box) would have haunted you for life. The other choice, betraying Tenoh-san by giving her the painless drug you had designed for yourself, wouldn't be wise—not when she had spent her whole life cooking up her unlikely revenge and when forgiving her enemies didn't belong to the many skills she had honed at Infinity.
I'm glad that you're taking the antidote as well, said Kudo, who seemed too relieved and thrilled by Miyano Shiho's upcoming 'comeback' to notice the small pause you made before you replied. He had already feared that you'd stay a child to experience a second childhood—a decision he could have understood but wouldn't have liked.
Why not? Because one should never run away from one's fate? You were almost amused by his naiveté, the black and white view of the world he had managed to keep intact despite all the cases he had solved by now.
He didn't know, Kudo admitted. Perhaps he was interested in the grown-up Miyano Shiho, whom he had never had much time to get accustomed to. He was curious about whether Miyano was similar to Haibara or distinctly different. Even though the two were technically the same person, the connection between body and mind was so strong that the differences couldn't be ignored. One moved differently in an adult's body, and movements were crucial to thoughts.
Likewise, Kudo Shinichi and Edogawa Conan weren't exactly the same person, you thought, scrutinizing the young man in front of you with the impersonal but intense interest of a scientist studying a beautiful specimen of a previously undescribed, unexplored species. Your senses weren't attracted to him at this point in time—not yet. But in either form, Kudo caught your intellectual interest.
In the beginning, you only wanted to toy with the detective a bit when you told him that you were eighteen: perfect for him. You had flirted with him out of habit, forgetting the fact that you were in the body of an elementary school child and therefore of no romantic interest to his teenage mind. You had forgotten what you expected from him, a blush or a grin or any other display of embarrassment at having his ego stroked by a pretty girl. Instead, he only looked startled because he knew that you weren't interested in him in the way Ran or Ayumi-chan were. He couldn't make sense of your flirtatious jokes, which seemed to jar with your distant, reserved demeanour.
That was the moment when you decided that the chibi sleuth was rather intriguing despite his boyish, rather nondescript face.
If you expect my grown-up form to be different from me, you should have told me to stay Haibara Ai, Kudo, you taunted him. It's not flattering to me that you're so keen on getting rid of me although I've just restored you to your real body.
With a sigh, you shut the door to your lab and locked it from the inside before he could protest. You were going to take the antidote now and didn't want him to peep, you told him through the closed door.
In the brilliantly lit cellar, all the tables, desks, and surfaces had already been cleared and cleaned, all the carcasses had been removed. Still, Kudo must have known that you had been experimenting with rats and mice but wisely refrained from preaching about the moral implications of animal testing, as he needed the permanent antidote and couldn't risk getting himself killed by a faulty calculation. Taking the antidote as the first human being was already risky enough. You had told him that you needed to make sure that there wouldn't be any unmanageable after-effects because you didn't want to gamble with his life and weren't keen on spending the rest of your life as his personal doctor.
After creating APTX4869, its counteragent, and APAH, you had become a specialist when it came to cell division, aging, and pain. You knew how to target the exact organs you wanted to age, ruining them within hours or even minutes without arousing the slightest suspicion. The sweet tooths got all sorts of cancer, the drinkers ruined livers, the smokers damaged lungs—an exclusive, custom-made punishment for the Organization's highest-ranking members and its leader. All the conditions being equal, we all paid for our mistakes and ultimately lost to our vices at the end of our lives. Looking at it from that angle, it was justice par excellence!
To give Tenoh-san, who had been exceptionally supportive and charitable, an early Christmas gift, you had made sure that the little pills would cause excruciating, absolute, unalleviated death agonies for at least a day. You naturally invented the antidotes to them as well in case Tenoh-san or her allies were forced to drink from the same bottle as Anokata and their crows. You had done the best you could do to protect the good guys and punish the bad guys and couldn't feel even a soupçon of guilt—why should you? Tenoh-san's mother had died a horrible death before her seven-year-old daughter's eyes, the price she paid when she asked them to spare her husband and her child.
You silently endured and almost welcomed the pain when the antidote burned into your flesh and stretched your bones. It was really a walk in the park compared to what the mice had gone through. A few minutes later, Miyano Shiho's fine, almost sharp features greeted you in the bathroom mirror… and Haibara Ai, the cute girl whose perfect oval face was tempered by childlike round cheeks, who used to hide behind Edogawa-kun's back, was no more.
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