(FS' Standard) Disclaimer: "Detective Conan" belongs to Gosho Aoyama. I'm only writing fanfiction for fun and don't make any profit with my fanfics.
Thanks a lot to my wonderful beta-reader Astarael00/Rae00. :)
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FS
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His Deepest Secret
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Deep down, he had always known that she would go away someday although he had never expected their farewell to be so abrupt and accidental: They met each other for the last time at Charles de Gaulle airport, in a pizzeria, at the door of the gents when he pushed the door open and she walked out.
"What are you doing here?" He stared at her.
"The ladies' room was occupied." She grinned.
"I mean here in Paris," he said. "You're supposed to be in Tokyo!"
She was leaving Japan because, now that the Black Organization members were all dead or arrested, there was no reason for her to stay in Japan any longer, she told him. Her plane was taking off in twenty minutes, so she had to hurry.
"Oh," he said in bewilderment. "But..."
"I must go now. I'll send you a mail when I'm in New York." She smiled and hurried away.
For the first three days after she left, he continued to live his life as if nothing had happened: writing files on the case that was the reason why he had come to Paris, solving another case, bickering with his childhood friend, who had—for a reason he refused to acknowledge—grown irritable in the past months. On the fourth day, however, when he opened his mailbox and still didn't find the mail she had wanted to send him, the emotions he had so successfully suppressed broke out with a vengeance. Furious about her leaving Japan so suddenly—without saying goodbye to him so that, if he had taken another flight, he wouldn't even have had the chance to see her for the last time—he spent the whole day running aimlessly through the streets, jumping at the sight of every woman with short blonde hair until he couldn't take it anymore and decided to call Tokyo.
"She wanted to see you before she left. But since you were busy solving the case in Paris, she told me to say goodbye to you in her name," Mouri Ran told him on the phone.
"And why didn't you tell me immediately when I came back?"
"I've just told you, haven't I?" was her startled reply.
"After four days!" he snapped. "You should have called me four days ago!"
"Sorry! But I didn't know it was so urgent. Besides, how should I have known that you're back? And you're so seldom home in the past months that not even..."
He began to behave very strangely in the following weeks, constantly checking his mailbox for a message, writing her long mails he never sent, keeping a bottle of sherry on his bookshelf because it reminded him of her.
Five weeks went by before her mail came. She had clean forgotten to write to him because she was drowning in work, it said. But she had heard about his latest cases and congratulated him to his rising fame. "James was impressed, too, when he read about you," she concluded. "Best wishes to Cool Kid, Angel and your sweet girlfriend from James, Shu, Sherry and me."
That was all she wrote in her mail. She neither told him to write back, nor did she say that she would ever return to Japan some day.
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A/N.: Since several people have asked me to reveal the pairing in the Author's Note, I'll tell you the pairing is supposed to be Heiji/Jodie. XD
