Please insert a classic disclaimer in the space provided for.
A/N:
Rejoice! I've got my computer back! Yey me!
I can now type whenever I want to! No more begging and pleading and taking turns!
And this is the second part of the story of what on earth are our spy girls actually trying to do.
Anyways, I tried to be as accurate as I can with Sherry's story. Unfortunately, I know about it through surfing the web and other fanfictions I've read… The anime episodes shown here in our country are only until the first appearance of the Kaitou Kid (where he tried to steal the gem belonging to Sonoko's family, hence the reference in the last chapter). I mean, Ai hadn't even shown up yet, so I know zilch about her. That's the reason why I'm avoiding writing her into the story as much as possible…but it seems that her part is demanding to be written. It'll be the string that'll wrap this baby up.
And warning! This chapter would contain a lot…and I do mean A LOT…of flashbacks.
Chapter 7:
The Secrets of Johnny Walker
"Ran?" Sonoko asked tentatively as she stepped into her best friend's room. She saw Ran by the bed, on her stomach, with her face down.
Kazuha went in after Sonoko. "How are you holding up?" She asked gently.
Miyagi shook his head as he started to climb out of the window to give the girls some privacy. "She needs to rest," he instructed them. He had picked up his karate champion from the train station moments before, pale, bloody, and shaken.
After he had taken her home (through the windows, of course), treated her wounds, she just burst out crying.
Kazuha nodded her acknowledgement to the retreating man.
Sonoko went to the bed and sat beside the woman on it. Sonoko reached out and touched her shoulder. "It's alright, Ran. Cry all you want."
Ran slowly sat up. "I can't believe it," she cried. "I don't want to believe it."
Kazuha watched helplessly as s fresh batch of tears made their way down Ran's smooth cheeks.
"H-how am I supposed to go on?" Ran cried. "How?"
Sonoko enveloped the usually strong karate champion in her arms. "We're spies, Ran. We're pretenders." She replied. "You'll just have to put on the best performance of your life."
It was a bright Monday morning.
"Ran!" Sonoko called out as she saw her friend walk towards her with Conan beside her.
"Good morning!" Ran called out brightly.
They met Sonoko by the Suzuki front gate. The three walked in companionable silence. However, moments later, Conan was dragged ahead by the hyperactive Detective Boys. Soon, the two teenagers were a couple of steps behind.
"How are you holding up?" Sonoko asked Ran gently.
"The trick is trying not to think about it," Ran admitted.
"How about physically?" Sonoko asked.
Ran shrugged. "Good thing our uniforms are long-sleeved." She told her blond companion. "And as for the bruises that do show, I can always blame it on karate practice."
Sonoko's eyes were drawn to Ran's shoulder where the bullet had more than grazed her.
"I finally found you!" A voice boomed that made the group of students stop.
Conan looked behind in time to see a man hurl himself towards Ran. "No!" He screamed, too late.
And before anyone could react, the man had Ran in his arms!
"Sweetie!" He called out joyfully. "I missed you so much!"
Ran winced as the man unwittingly compressed her fresh bruises. She then pried the man's arms from her neck. Good thing that the man was skinny, or else she would have one heck of a time trying to get him off.
As the boys of the Detective Boys were frozen in shock, Ayumi walked back to her Ran-neechan and stared at the guy suspiciously. "Is he your boyfriend?" She asked the taller brunette.
"I thought Shinichi-niisan was her boyfriend." Genta suddenly piped in with a confused frown.
"Sweetie," the man began with tears in his eyes. "You didn't tell me you have a boyfriend,"
"Argh!" Ran groaned. "Get off! And I don't have a boyfriend!" She cried out in frustration. "Not you! Not Shinichi!"
"But, sweetie," the man started to argue.
Sonoko, who was trying very hard not to laugh, suddenly turned to the kids. "Run along now, children." She said. "Or you'll be late."
The kids protested as they turned around to start walking to their school. But one certain kid with glasses threw dagger looks towards the man before reluctantly walking away.
Sonoko wondered if the man who's now currently trying get Ran to let him carry her bag, knew how lucky he was to have escaped death, not once, but twice.
Sonoko had almost pepper-sprayed the guy. And then, Ran almost killed him her world-renown flying kicks. Good thing they simultaneously recognized the man, or they would have a lot to explain to Miyagi.
And there was last night.
"We're ba-ack!" Sonoko announced gleefully to the microphone. "What's up so far, Ra-, I mean, Agent number 1?"
"He's got company," Ran replied under her breath.
Kazuha took the joystick and zoomed the camera on Ran's pendant. "We don't see anyone."
"They're also watching," Ran told them. "I counted at least two, and I don't think they know I'm here."
"Be careful," Sonoko told Ran in worry, remembering about the Black Organization Ken-kun told them about earlier.
"I will." Ran said.
And for a while, nothing happened. Sonoko, Kazuha, and Miyagi started to breath in relief. They thought that like Ran, the men Ran saw were merely watching.
"They're making a move!" Ran shouted as she saw one of the two men in black whip out a gun.
"Ran!" Sonoko screamed as she simultaneously heard a gunshot and saw Ran dove as she shoved their informer out of the way.
"Looks like someone decided to join our fun, Screwdriver," the man with the gun said with a sinister smile
"Ran!" Kazuha cried helplessly.
"Hello, Sweetie," the man called Screwdriver stepped closer to Ran and the informer. "Looks like Johnny Walker got himself a hero,"
Ran immediately stood up and helped their informer, the one they call Johnny Walker, to his feet.
"All heroes are dead, aren't they, Cognac?" Screwdriver asked as he whipped out his own weapon and pointed it menacingly at Ran's chest.
"I'm no hero," Ran told them. She fingered her bracelet.
The move didn't escape Cognac's eyes. "Our little Sweetie's nervous." He laughed, misinterpreting Ran's fidgeting.
"No, not nervous." Ran pulled her bracelet, which broke in half.
A piercing sound filled the air.
The three men cringed and tried to obscure the sound by covering their ears.
Ran took off two of the bead from her broken bracelet, turned around, and shoved the beads in Johnny Walker's ears. "Sorry about that," she said.
Johnny's tortured expression ceased as the beads in his ear filtered the horrendous sound that the broken bracelet made.
She then turned to the two men who were in pain. "My move," she snarled.
Cognac looked up in time to see a kick aimed at him. He tried to dodge but the ringing in his ears was slowing him down.
He made a grab at the mad woman attacking him, but he only got her necklace. He threw it to the ground and lunged at the woman. Then, he felt a sharp pain on his abdomen. He stumbled backwards and fell. The gun in his hand was suddenly gone. He was starting to black out.
"Go, Ran!" Kazuha cheered behind the monitor as she panned the camera from the ground. It was even better from that perspective. They could now see Ran. She had muted the sound for it was annoying to the point of being painful.
Sonoko watched as Ran turned unmercifully to the other man. "Ouch!" She winced as she watched the monitor. "That must've hurt."
"And the man is out!" Miyagi called out victoriously with a peace sign.
Kazuha reactivated saw Ran deactivate the sound through the remaining beads of her bracelet.
"Sweetie!" Johnny Walker cried out as he dove for Ran from behind. "My hero!" A set of skinny arms wrapped themselves around Ran's waist.
Ran yelped. "Let go!" She cried. "Let go!"
"Aw, how sweet!" Sonoko cried. "Ran got herself a new boyfriend!"
Ran reddened. "I heard that!" She grimaced.
"Sweetie?" Johnny Walker cried out in confusion. "Who are you talking to?" He asked worriedly as imitated Ran as she pulled out the beads in her ears..
"My friends," Ran replied as she knelt down to pick up the pendant. "They're watching," she took out one of her earrings. "We'll be watching you," she said. She handed him the silver stud. "This one's for you in case you need help."
Johnny Walker mutely accepted it.
"Hey, Charlie," Ran called out to the other earring left in her ear. "Can you send out someone to pick up the garbage here?" She said. "And I'm ready to go home now," she then turned around.
Back in Tokyo, Miyagi whipped out his cell phone and barked instructions to it.
"Sweetie!"
Ran turned around expectantly.
"You're bleeding,"
"Sorry girls," Miyagi appeared seemingly from nowhere. "He was very insistent on seeing his Sweetie."
Ran glared at him. If looks could kill…
"Sweetie!" Johnny cried. "I owe you my life! I'm living it out for you! I love you!"
Ran reddened. "You're embarrassing me!" She hissed.
"You're going to school?" Johnny asked as he grabbed Ran's purse. "I'll walk you,"
"No!" Miyagi suddenly interjected.
His three companions whirled around in surprise.
"Why not?" Johnny whined.
"We have reason to believe that the school's contaminated." Miyagi told them.
Johnny visibly paled. "You mean this is the school Vermouth's in?"
Miyagi nodded.
"Who's Vermouth?" Sonoko asked with a frown.
"She's the person who's on the APTX case." Johnny replied hoarsely.
It was Ran's turn to pale. APTX 4869. The drug that could have possibly…
"You're bleeding!"
Ran froze. She looked down on her waist. A spot of red. She remembered the gunshot, the way her body reacted, the way she shoved their informant out of the way, the way the bullet… "I'm shot," she gasped, her eyes widening. Suddenly, her world started spinning. She's never been shot before...Oh, wait. That's not right. I have been shot. By Shinichi. No! It's Conan-kun who shot me… Her head felt light, she was giddy. And now that the adrenalin's running low, she felt pain. And fear.
"Sweetie!" Johnny cried as he rushed forward when he saw Ran slump in a faint.
"Ran!" Sonoko screeched in her ear.
"I'm OK," Ran gasped as she struggled out of Johnny's grasp. "I'm just...er...hurt." She stumbled a little before straightening up.
"Hang on, Ran," came Miyagi's voice. "Help's on the way."
True enough, moments later, five rescuers came, treated both Johnny and Ran, and the two men in black.
"How are Cognac and Screwdriver doing, anyway?" Ran asked.
Miyagi shrugged. "They're clueless about the Pandora Project." He replied. "They're just the guys who do the dirty work. If we really want information, he's our best bet." He motioned towards Johnny who was now arguing with Sonoko because he had accidentally stepped on her foot.
"Yeah," Ran said. "We've talked." She sighed.
"That's why you were like that last night." Miyagi said knowingly.
"Why are they after you again?" Ran asked as she sat beside Johnny Walker on the train towards Tokyo. Since their rescue the night before, he had refused to leave Ran's side, even insisting on going with her to Tokyo.Johnny's face fell. "It's a long story," he sighed.
"We've got all the time in the world," Ran replied, motioning outside.
Johnny looked around suspiciously before taking a deep breath to begin his story. "It all began with the search for the Fountain of Youth,"
Ran nodded. She didn't need to ask who they were. She already knew. Those men in black.
"Realizing that searching for it in legends weren't going anywhere. So they turned to science." Johnny began. "They tracked down a scientist, a genius in his own right, who claimed that he can reverse the aging process. He was laughed at and shunned by the scientific community. No one was crazy enough to fund his research. No one but the Black Organization, who immediately snatched him. They were leaving no stones unturned.
"Unfortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how one would look at it), just as he was beginning to breakthrough in his research, he and his wife died in an accident. The scientist had a photographic memory so he had no need of writing anything down. And when he died, the experiments were sent back to square one. They left behind two daughters. One was groomed to replace her father. The other, the older one, was," Johnny paused with a frown.
"What is it?" Ran pressed him.
Johnny blushed. "Actually, I don't know anything about her," he grinned sheepishly. "I only know people in the research section, and she's not in the research section,"
Ran sweat dropped. Ho~okey.
"Well, I worked with the younger daughter, the scientist, they call her Sherry." Johnny grinned. "She's a genius, though only nineteen. The Black Organization spotted her talent immediately and she was sent to the US to be trained. After her father's death, she was sent back here to replace him. She tried to replicate her father's experiments, but it was supposedly a failure. When tried on lab rats, well, the rats disappeared to nothingness."
Ran's eyes widened. "Into nothingness?"
"Well, the older sister apparently did something that pissed off Gin, the overseer of the research department. So he killed her." Johnny continued as if he didn't hear Ran.
Ran's eyes widened at Johnny's casual way of describing the murder.
"Sherry found out and refused to work for the Black Organization anymore." Johnny said. "They'd kill her too, if only she didn't escape. She was handcuffed to in the gas chamber. When Gin went back for her execution, the handcuffs were still there, only she wasn't. Up until now no one knows how she escaped."
Something stirred at the depths of his eyes. Suddenly the goofiness was gone.
It was only then that Ran remembered that this man was a genius in his own right.
"All Sherry had when she was cuffed was a pill." Johnny said in contemplation.
"So she took it and disappeared?" Ran queried. A woman who would much rather kill herself than die in the hands of her adversary. She wondered if she, too, had the strength to make that kind of decision when the time comes. Ran shuddered. That situation doesn't seem farfetched anymore…
"That's what I thought initially. But then, if she indeed took the pill, her clothes would be left from where was cuffed, but there were no clothes. That's how Gin knew that she didn't disappear like the lab rats, but escaped." Johnny told Ran, oblivious to the fear that shook his companion. "So that got me thinking. Maybe the pill worked after all. So I tried the experiment on a forty year old turtle."
"What happened?"
"At first, I thought it was going to die, the way its temperature rose. It was in obvious pain. Then, it started shrinking." Johnny told her. "Afterwards, it stopped. The turtle seemed OK. But when I asked a veterinarian to inspect the turtle, the report he handed me told me that it was healthy and doing OK. And that it was only thirty years old."
"The pill worked."
Johnny nodded. "The pill reverses the aging process for ten years. The lab rat disappeared into nothingness because it was barely a year old. And that's how she escaped. A child's arms could've easily slipped through the cuffs."
"So the creator of the pill was the first victim of her own creation,"
Johnny shook his head. "No," he replied. "The second."
Ran's eyes widened.
"I heard Gin boasting to Vermouth about giving a pill to a detective wannabe. Apparently, the kid caught Gin on the act during a transaction. Not wanting to draw attention to them, he force fed the pill on the kid and left him for dead." He told her. "Or he thought he left him for dead. I still haven't tried the pill on humans, but I'm willing to bet that there's a sixteen –year old detective inside a six-year old body."
"You mean to say that mental age is not affected?"
"I repeated the experiments with chimps," Johnny said. "Their body regressed, but the things they've learned over the years did not."
Wait.
Teenage detective. Men in Black. Pills that can rewind the hands of time.
All of a sudden, everything clicked into place. Shinichi's disappearance. Conan's appearance. The two men's similarities. Conan's maturity. Shinichi's impromptu visits that were always cut short. Hattori's closeness to Conan. Hattori's slip-ups. Miyagi's flirtatious attitude towards Ran whenever Conan's around. Miyagi trying to draw Hattori in their little game.
She wasn't loosing her mind after all.
Ran rubbed her head. Then it struck her.
He lied to her.
He was there whenever she was feeling down, and yet, he didn't say a word.
She told him her secrets.
A sharp pain that had nothing to do with her gunshot wound pierced through her heart. How could he?
The train had stopped in the station.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Miyagi waiting for them outside, no doubt to take Johnny from her hands.
Good. She needed time to think.
The tears threatened to fall from her eyes…
-tbc
P. S.
If you have questions, please click on the review button (I know ya want to, don't be shy). I'm very unsure about my plot. If you spot an inconsistency, please tell me immediately so that I can do something about it. Or just review, it'll be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
P.P.S
If you want to, read the all the italicized parts first, then the normal ones. I would've written it that way, but decided to experiment. Hope it's OK. =)
