We Are the Men in Black

by Velgamidragon

AU inspired by DragonlordRynn's "Black". The Organization is secretly the Japanese branch of the Men in Black and APTX-4869 was intentionally made to shrink its victim. Kudo was shrunk for his own protection, and Sherry shrunk to protect Dr. Agasa and go into hiding. Vermouth was behaving suspiciously as of late, and Gin was determined to find out and expose her secret agenda.

15. The Secret Order From London

Author's Note: Surprise! Merry Christmas everyone! I got the next chapter done! I was thinking of waiting to post it either tomorrow or on Christmas, but I figured most people would probably be spending the time with their families and I didn't want an email notification about this story to detract from that.

This chapter's alternate title would probably be 'Some of Haibara's Backstory!'

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The Secret Order From London

When Haibara woke up that morning, she had no idea where she was. Her first impression was pink and there was a large stuffed whale in her face. It all came back to her moments later through the morning mind haze and she remembered.

"Oh, right. Yoshida allowed me to stay at her place while the Professor's away," she muttered and took a better look around the room.

She'd seen it last night of course, but the details seemed to have escaped her. Everything really was pink in here and the room was full of cute plushies. There was even a painting of a European-style maiden on a unicorn.

"A huge difference compared to my room," she commented aloud. Even when she had been Ayumi's age, her room had been nothing like this. She'd been a genius child living in a secret world where the existence of aliens was as natural to her as breathing. Nothing about her life had been normal.

There was a quiet knock on the door and then it opened. It was Ayumi. She was already dressed for the day in a yellow t-shirt and blue shorts. "Ai, you're awake?" she asked.

"Yeah…" Haibara answered, still feeling a little out of sorts from having just woken up.

"Papa and Mama had urgent errands to run, so they went out," Ayumi explained as she fully came into the room.

If they were already out running errands, how long had she been asleep?

"Mama's made some sandwiches, so let's eat together!" Ayumi exclaimed and grabbed her wrist, dragging her out of bed and pushing her out of the room.

Haibara was still trying to process that Ayumi's mom had made them sandwiches. Was that a typical breakfast food in the Yoshida household or had she really slept late enough for it to be lunchtime already? She supposed that without having any science projects to distract her, her body – child's body that it was – had decided to overcompensate for the lost sleep time. She washed her face and got dressed (wherein she finally got a glance at a clock and discovered it was already after eleven) before joining Ayumi in the living room where a large plate of sandwiches was sitting on the table. Her stomach growled audibly as soon as she saw them and her face flushed in embarrassment while Ayumi giggled and offered her a sandwich.

"Here, you can have the first one since you haven't eaten anything yet today."

"Oh…! Thank you, Yoshida," Haibara said, accepting the food and taking a bite. It was an egg sandwich and it was quite good.

"Do you like it, Ai?" the younger girl asked hopefully.

"Yes, your mother's pretty good at cooking," she answered.

Ayumi giggled happily. "I love ham sandwiches and egg sandwiches, so Mama always makes these for me. What kind of sandwich do you like, Ai?"

She still wasn't fully awake yet, so the question took her off-guard for a moment. "Hm? What kind do I like? I guess…" she paused and smiled fondly as she recalled one of her most favorite foods from the early days of her childhood while growing up in America. "… Peanut butter and blueberry jam," she said at last.

"Peanut butter and blueberry jam?"

"Yeah," she said and began to explain what it was and how to make them. "You spread each on one side of separate pieces of bread and stick them together, and that's how you get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's a staple in American lunches. Even now, I can't help but yearn for that sandwich from time to time. However, there was one time I was eating some at the Professor's house, and he was looking at me with such big, pleading puppy eyes that I gave up eating them."

Adjusting to Japanese culture had surprisingly not been nearly as difficult for Haibara as adjusting to the food had been. Akemi had already taught her about the lack of a formal dress code, the alcohol codenames, the greater diversity of agents and divisions, and the fact that the agents could still have real lives outside of the MiB in the Japanese branch. Apart from those four things, the differences between the American and Japanese branches of the MiB were not as exaggerated as in other institutions and Akemi helped prevent her from making too many social faux pas outside of it. The food was not something she could so readily adapt to, though she'd eventually managed, and now Haibara still had occasional cravings for a sandwich she used to eat for lunch so often, she thought she'd become bored of it.

"I see. If Dr. Agasa were to eat them, he'd become even more overweight, right?" An interesting query given that his body was a machine and yet, it did seem to gain weight when he ate too much unhealthy food. "Hey, let's go out and get some!" Ayumi exclaimed.

Haibara frowned slightly. It was a nice gesture… "But what they have in the nearby supermarket is completely different from what I had in the States. It's no good if they're not from an imported food store."

"I know just the place that's on the opposite side of Beika Station!" Ayumi said, undeterred and grabbed her hand "Let's go and buy some! I want to try it too!"

Haibara looked down at the unfinished sandwich in her hand and smiled in spite of herself. Why not? Shouldn't she be allowed to indulge herself on occasion? "You're right. I'm in the mood for some as well after such a long time," she agreed.

"Then we should get going right now! Oh, but before we do that…" Ayumi trailed off with a mischievous smile and dragged her away from the sandwiches, leading her to a closed door.

She opened it and Haibara stiffened as soon as she saw the massive bed and the mature, formal décor. "Yoshida, is this…?" she said uncertainly.

"Yup, this is my parents' room," Ayumi said, answering the unfinished question.

"Are you sure it's okay to be in here?"

"It's fine, it's fine," Ayumi said, waving her worries aside and brought her over to a vanity lined from one side to the other with more makeup, skin, and hair products than even Haibara would have known what to do with. Did her mother work for television?

"Your mother's makeup cabinet?" Haibara inquired.

"Yes, I want to try wearing this just this once! Please do it with me, Ai!" Ayumi begged.

"But why do we have to apply makeup?" she asked, not really understanding the appeal. She could do it, of course, but putting on makeup and then taking it off was also a lot of work.

"The supermarket in front of the train station is a fancy store that celebrities always go to. That's why we have to make ourselves look like celebrities too," Ayumi explained with her forthright childish logic.

"But still…" she said hesitantly.

Ayumi was insistent however. "Why not? Let's try it out!"

Haibara stared back at the mirror and all of the different containers neatly lined up. She gave in with a soft sigh and picked up a bottle of foundation. "You're right. It's been too long for me, anyway."

"What?! Ai, you've already tried putting on makeup before?" Ayumi exclaimed.

"Eh? N-no, I didn't mean it that way…" Haibara said hastily. She didn't know what was wrong with her today. She seemed stuck in her memories and if she kept this up, she'd end up saying something really odd that she wouldn't be able to so readily dismiss.

"Phew, I was so shocked," Ayumi said with a dramatic sigh. "Sometimes you mumble weird things, Ai. Same for Conan, though."

Haibara gave a nervous laugh, having nothing to say to that. She'd noticed, huh?

Ayumi seemed unbothered by the lack of explanation though. "Mama won't return home until this evening, so let's give ourselves a grand transformation!" she said excitedly and grabbed randomly at the first thing in front of her, which happened to be blush.

Haibara watched her briefly before turning to the foundation she was still holding. She had to admit her mother had a well-stocked makeup cupboard, but it probably wasn't a good idea for her to leave it all out in the open like this within reach of kids. Well, since she was there, she would make sure Ayumi didn't do anything dangerous with the makeup. She decided to forego the foundation, remembering that she was already wearing some on her left cheek to cover the bullet scar (getting around that when she'd been washing her face with Ayumi watching had been a special challenge), and picked up a tube of dark pink lipstick instead.

"Done!" Ayumi exclaimed after a while. "How is it, Ai?"

Haibara stared in stunned horror at the mess Ayumi had made of her face. She'd used the darkest blue eye shadow to color completely around her eyes, the red lipstick was smeared all over her mouth, and the blush was so heavy on her cheeks, it looked like she'd applied it with a stamp instead of a brush.

"Maybe I put on too much eye shadow?" Ayumi wondered as she looked back in the mirror.

"R-right…" Haibara said weakly. There was really no polite way to tell her young friend that she looked like a clown. "I think a more natural look suits you."

"Natural?" Ayumi repeated in confusion.

"Don't worry, I'll do it for you," Haibara said as she quickly scanned the containers for some makeup remover, knowing there had to be some if Ayumi's mom had all of this.

She found it and started to remove the excess, letting herself get lost in her thoughts again as she worked. Everyone had to start somewhere and in her own experience of putting on makeup for the first time, she'd done no better than Ayumi and she'd been thirteen instead of seven. Akemi had also had no problem telling her how ridiculous she looked and had never let her live it down, but at least she had been willing to show her how to apply it properly afterward…

"Shiho, what did you do?!"

Shiho froze and whirled around to find Akemi staring at her from the door of her room with a mixed expression that she couldn't identify. Her eyes were wide and her jaw hung open, but the corners of her lip kept twitching.

"I… Well, I… I was… I just… Uh…" Shiho stammered as she looked around for anything, literally anything that she could use to somehow explain why she was sitting at her sister's vanity with her face covered in her makeup.

She had just admitted defeat to herself and was ready to accept her sister's reprimand when Akemi suddenly started laughing! She was doubled-over, holding her stomach with both arms, and there were even tears in my eyes! Every time she seemed to get her breath back, she would look at her again, and her laughter would redouble. The alarm Shiho had felt upon her sister's initial discovery was converted into embarrassment as she slowly accepted the fact that she wasn't in trouble, or at least not as much as she'd feared.

Eventually, Akemi managed to stop laughing long enough to wheeze, "Shiho, you… oh my god, you look like a clown!" Then she promptly dissolved into another laughing fit, leaving Shiho feeling even more defensive for it.

"Are you done?" she asked bitterly when Akemi finally seemed to have gotten a hold of herself.

Akemi nodded and said, still with a laughing smile on her face, "Would you like me to help you get that off before someone else sees you?"

Shiho's eyes widened and darted to the doorway, trying to see around Akemi. "Is anyone else here?" she asked.

Akemi shook her head and approached, dropping her handbag on the vanity next to all of the makeup. "No, it's just the two of us, but it would have been much worse for you if I had come back with Dai or Gin and Vodka, right?"

At the mention of Gin, Shiho stiffened, and she nodded mutely in response to her sister's question. As embarrassing as it was for Akemi to make fun of her, Gin seeing her like this would have been mortifying. She sat perfectly still as Akemi began to wipe all of the makeup off her face.

"So as your sister, I have to ask: why were you trying to put on makeup in the first place?" Akemi asked gently.

Shiho frowned at her. "You're the one who's started wearing it a lot now," she retorted. "I almost never see you leave home without some on, even if you're just going to do your shift at the restaurant you still insist on working at."

Akemi sighed patiently. "I've told you before, I like working there, Shiho. I get to interact with normal, carefree people blissfully unaware of the secret world existing hidden before their very eyes. It's a surreal experience, you should try it too; it would be good for you to see how the other side lives. And as for the makeup, sure I may not see Dai every day, but he has a habit of turning up when I least expect him and is it wrong that I want to look nice for my boyfriend?"

The mention of said boyfriend caused Shiho to frown further and cross her arms. "You know his real name's not Dai, so why do you still use it? He's not even a real boyfriend, he's just using you to try and infiltrate the Organization. Gin told me."

"Gin should mind his own business about personal matters that don't concern him," Akemi said acidly, which caused Shiho to prickle defensively.

"It is his business," Shiho insisted. "He's trying to protect the MiB and Shuichi Akai is trying to undermine him."

Akemi looked at her then and smiled in a semi-exasperated way. "I'm glad you've become fonder of Gin-" Shiho tensed briefly. "-since you first arrived here in Japan, but there's no need for you to defend him from me. He's my friend and he does an excellent job of protecting the MiB's secret existence, but ever since he found out Dai's true identity is that of an FBI agent, he has not stopped hounding me about not letting him know too much or being careful not to get captured."

Personally, Shiho felt Gin was right to worry. The way Akemi talked about 'Dai' and acted around him, she was being so airheaded and sickeningly sweet that she'd probably walk right into any trap he might set with hardly a thought. It made her want to vomit. She also hoped that it wasn't contagious because she was afraid Gin would lose any respect he might have for her if she started acting loony like that.

"Anyway, makeup. That's what we were talking about before we got off track. I've been wearing makeup regularly because I want to look nice for my boyfriend, but you're only thirteen, Shiho. You don't have to start worrying about makeup and boys for a while yet."

Unbidden, Shiho thought of Gin with his long, silvery blond hair and foreboding presence. Just one look from those icy eyes was enough to turn her into frozen fire. Privately, she disagreed with Akemi's assessment of her dating prospects, but there was no way she was going to tell her that. Not when the guy she liked happened to be ten years older than her and was also Akemi's friend. Still…

"Maybe not…" Shiho agreed slowly, "but maybe you could teach me how to apply makeup now so that I'll have plenty of time to practice, and I won't make a complete fool of myself when I do start dating…?" she suggested.

Akemi hummed in thought and then smiled. "Sure, why not? We've already got all the stuff out and you're so independent already, I don't think you want me putting on the makeup for your first date, huh?"

Shiho blushed and nodded. No… no, definitely not.

"Wow, I look like a completely different person! You're really good at makeup, Ai!" Ayumi exclaimed happily once she saw herself in the mirror after Haibara had finished.

"It's because you have large eyes and a cute face to begin with, Yoshida," she said as she started applying makeup to her own face.

"Thanks, Ai!" Ayumi said and hopped off the vanity seat, running pell mell out of the room without a word of explanation for her behavior.

Haibara shrugged and resumed her work. She decided she would use a little eyeliner, but she would ditch the mascara altogether. Her eyelashes were dark enough, she wasn't looking to impress anyone, and it was a pain to clean off anyway. After Akemi's lesson, she'd practiced applying makeup, but she had not been nearly so confident in her choices the first time she'd decided to wear it in public while on her first date with Gin. She'd had so many concerns that seemed silly in hindsight but were perfectly reasonable at the time. Was it too much? Was it too little? Did she look mature enough or did she just look like a kid that was trying too hard? She had not really been in love with him yet, but she did have a huge crush on him and she had craved his good opinion of her more than anything.

She finished with the eye shadow and picked up the thin pencil eyeliner. Only at her current age could she appreciate the potential danger she'd been in if Gin had been more unsavory. He had seen her as a budding adult rather than a growing child, and that was attractive to any teenager, but he could have done so much damage to her young heart and her self-esteem if he'd been insensitive about her age. If anything about her displeased him, she would have changed it in a heartbeat. If he'd told her she was starting to get a little pudgy, she'd have gone on a diet or irrationally foregone eating altogether. When he'd told her she looked beautiful in red, her already-favorite color immediately predominated her closet. On their first date, he'd told her she looked beautiful with the makeup on in the same breath that he confessed he preferred her natural beauty. If he hadn't done that, she would have worn makeup all the time, as she wouldn't have believed herself to be attractive to him without it.

But he had been careful and sensitive, and gone slow with her, giving her time for her to grow, both physically and emotionally, and for her crush on him to either die or mature into love. He didn't even kiss her until after they'd been dating for nine months, and even then, it only happened because of her heated accusation that he wasn't taking their relationship seriously. Haibara put down the eyeliner with a fond sigh and inspected her appearance in the mirror. Yes, with her youthful age, it could have easily gone all wrong between them, but she was lucky… Lucky that Gin was the kind of man he was…

"Wow, you look so pretty, Ai!" Ayumi exclaimed, startling Haibara out of her reverie.

"You think so?" she asked with a slight smile as she turned around to face her friend. "Yoshida, what is that?"

Ayumi had changed into a cute pink dress and was holding up another of the same size in periwinkle blue. "A dress for you to wear," Ayumi said as if this was obvious.

"But I'm fine with what I'm wearing right now," Haibara protested.

Ayumi's expression suddenly became cross. "That won't do. If you're going to wear makeup, then you have to look your best and since you don't have anything here, I'm letting you borrow one of mine. Besides, I think the blue would look much better with your reddish-brown hair than with any of my other pink ones."

Ayumi had a point about the color. Haibara always thought of red as her color and made a point of wearing it regularly, but blue in any shade looked good on her too. She personally preferred the darker shades as an adult as they tended to look more formal and mature, but she could see the appeal of the lighter shades, especially while she was still physically seven.

"Alright, I'll wear it," she caved and shed her clothes while carefully turning herself away from Ayumi in such a way that it wasn't obvious she was trying to hide her front.

She could not remember if Ayumi had ever been in a position to see the scars on her leg, arm, and shoulder where Gin's bullets had struck her on the roof of the Haido City Hotel, but if she had, she had not known what they were nor asked. If she hadn't though, then Haibara didn't want her to know or ask. She slipped the dress on over her head, careful not to ruin her makeup and found it fit her very well. It was light and smooth like satin and it flowed between her fingers with ease. It was a very nice dress.

"Thank you, Yoshida," she said with a smile.

Ayumi beamed at her and helped her gather her regular clothes to stuff them in Ayumi's room until they returned. Then the two dolled-up little girls left the condo via the elevator and Ayumi led the way to Beika Station since she knew the quickest way from her home. It wasn't long before Haibara noticed they had a tail and she smiled in amusement at how conspicuous Genta and Mitushiko were being in their attempts to stay out of sight while following them. They had a long way to go before they'd be able to successfully sneak up on her.

Ayumi eventually noticed them too and she said quietly, "Hey, Ai…"

"Yeah, I know," she reassured her, glancing back over her shoulder at the two boys. "Although I don't know what those two are up to-" She broke off with a startled gasp.

She'd felt it; that pressure again! Short and sharp, but definitely present! Her eyes darted everywhere and they fell on a man in a black suit wearing sunglasses and talking on a cellphone. His clothes made him stand out to her as much as his behavior. Everyone else nearby was acting normal. Had the pressure come from him? Who was he? She didn't recognize him. Was he another member of the Men in Black that Pandora had gotten a hold of?

"Ai, what's wrong?" Ayumi asked worriedly, noticing how she'd paused.

"Oh, no, nothing. Let's go," Haibara said more brusquely than usual and resumed walking, but not without one last cautious glance over her shoulder at the man in black.

The pressure had gone as suddenly as it had come, just like it did the two times she felt it from Okiya, but what did that mean?! She was tired of no longer knowing what to make of her sensing ability, but didn't know how fix it. Ayumi took her to the store and her eyes widened in surprise. She didn't realize it was so big. Since neither of them had been inside the store before, Haibara held Ayumi's hand and held the basket with her other hand as she peered down the aisles for the ingredients she was looking for. If they had arranged everything in the same order she had seen in other stores where she'd bought peanut butter and jam in Japan, then both of them should be…

"Ah, there they are!" she exclaimed, pointing them out to Ayumi sitting on opposite sides of the same aisle."

"Yay, I'll get the peanut butter!" she yelled and dashed off down the aisle to the brown, nutty spread.

Haibara followed behind at a more sedate pace, glancing curiously at the labels of the jars once she approached the jams. They really had all kinds: the classic strawberry as well as blackberry, raspberry, huckleberry, and even peach. Her greenish-blue eyes lit up when she saw the first label declaring itself to be a blueberry jam and she looked over the rest of them for prices and sizes. There weren't many; even in the States, blueberry jam wasn't as common as some of the others, but she could make do with the available options.

"And here's the blueberry jam," Haibara said as she put the jar into the basket next to the peanut butter Ayumi had procured.

A quick glance at the ingredients list told her it was made of just peanuts and there was no palm oil present. Good. Ever since Akemi had that Environmental Studies class in university and told her about the Indochinese rainforests being destroyed to create palm oil plantations akin to the old tobacco or cotton plantations of the American southeast, Haibara had tried to be diligent about making sure she purchased no products with palm oil in them.

Akemi… "When I was younger, probably around Ayumi's age now, these were my favorites," she said softly to herself.

She had not grown up with Akemi. Their parents had died when she was still a baby and her sister already eight years old. At first, Pisco had taken over raising her and Akemi as a favor to her parents who had been his friends, but problems began to develop early on. Akemi was active and spirited, and she was enough of a handful for an old man who was already a high-ranking, full-time MiB agent and the president of a car manufacturing company to boot. An already-ornery, headstrong, scarily-intelligent two-year-old Shiho just proved to be too much for the old man, and Akemi at ten was in no position to look after her either.

There was nobody else in the Japanese branch of the MiB able or willing to take on the task of raising such a difficult child, so she'd been sent off to the American branch where an older man named Agent K grudgingly took her under his wing. Kay was the only parental figure she had in her formative years, even though he acted more like a strict teacher, while his arguably more casual partner, Jay, was an annoyance she had no respect for. Kay didn't put up with her nonsense and taught her everything he knew about the different alien species and the Men in Black. He was also the reason she ate peanut butter and blueberry jelly sandwiches for lunch all the time. He couldn't cook and it was one of the few simple things he knew how to make. Before she had the chance to learn the more practical applications of her alien knowledge from him, the orders came down from on high for her to be transferred back to Japan where she belonged.

Just like that, Kay shipped her off halfway across the world with only a short pep talk right before putting her on the plane. "You've already graduated from university, kid, and Japan thinks I did a good enough job curbing your stubborn, disobedient tendencies that they want you back. God knows Japan's still not ready for you though, so give 'em hell, Tiger."

That was the last thing Kay had said to her and she hadn't heard from him, Jay, or anyone else in the American branch since. Not even a "You adjusting alright, kid?" or a "Happy Birthday" or anything. She hadn't been especially close to him, but it still hurt a little.

Still, the fact of the matter was that although she had spoken with her sister and met her a few times when Akemi came to visit her in America, she had not lived with her for an extended period of time and feared that despite the blood connection, they would have nothing in common and wouldn't get along. In the beginning, it seemed to start out that way, but then everything started to change when Akemi asked her what she wanted for lunch one day, and she had wistfully told her a peanut butter and blueberry jam sandwich. Never having had one, Akemi asked how to make it, so she told her and Akemi left her alone only to come back half an hour later with a wind-swept look and a bag of groceries she held up and said "I hope it's alright." She'd gone out in the cold, windy March weather just to buy her the supplies for her favorite sandwich, and to surprise her further, Akemi wanted to try the American-style lunch. Not only did her older sister try it, but she loved it and declared they should make them a regular meal.

Yes, it had been this very sandwich that she and Akemi had first bonded over that then paved the way for the continued growth of their relationship.

"I've never seen so many different kinds of peanut butter before," Ayumi commented as they started making their way to the checkout counter.

Haibara gave a wry smile. "Oh, this is nothing. In American supermarkets, they have dozens of different brands on display for everything, even for peanut butter. Some stores even have machines that can squeeze out peanut butter the same as you would for soft serve ice cream."

"Really? Sounds interesting!"

They really were, and they weren't common either. Just as they reached the end of the aisle and were starting to turn around the corner, Haibara felt the eerie sensation of being watched and her eyes fell on a woman two aisles over dressed all in black and wearing shades. Instinctively, she looked behind and saw the same black-suited man from earlier. Two of them so close by? Were they after her? But she wasn't sensing anything dangerous from either of them. She clenched her hand into a fist and turned back around, but the woman was gone and Haibara didn't see her nearby. Where did she go? She frowned worriedly and hurried Ayumi to the checkout counter, eager to get out of the store as quick as possible.

"Are you okay, Ai?" Ayumi asked her.

"I'm fine," she reassured her automatically, still thinking of the black-clothed man and woman. "I thought I saw something, but it was just my imagination."

They had everything they needed for the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches now, but with those strange people appearing, she wasn't keen to be out in the open leading them directly to Ayumi's condo. She spotted a shop full of trinkets just ahead and Ayumi gladly agreed to make a stop in there before heading back home when she suggested it. The younger girl was quite content to amuse herself by looking at everything and it gave Haibara a chance to calm down to think.

She had definitely sensed something from the man while on the sidewalk, brief as it was, but then felt nothing from him in the store or from the woman. They were dressed to similarly to not be accomplices and it was difficult to make a case for them not to be following her and Ayumi. She didn't think they were MiB agents; they were behaving too conspicuously, even if they were brainwashed by Pandora. Wearing black was not a crime, or else gothic teenagers everywhere would be imprisoned. It was a formal color that even perfectly-respectable, decent people wore. Still, she couldn't have faked sensing that intense pressure from that man, so what was it? Haibara let her thoughts wander back into her past once more, back when she was still new to Japan… before Akai came into Akemi's life… before she trusted Gin… back to the first time she had first sensed that malicious aura…

Shiho's cellphone started ringing and she pulled it out, grimly wondering which displeased person she was going to end up talking to. "Hello?" she said.

"Sherry, where the hell are you right now? You were supposed to call me to take you home if you stayed at the lab late and Akemi couldn't get you," a man's voice answered.

Shiho grimaced. Great, it was Gin.

"I figured you were probably busy and I didn't want to bother you," Shiho lied. "I'm not a child; I'm thirteen and I'm old enough to be able to get home by myself without being chaperoned everywhere."

"And how did the clearly-knows-better-than-everyone-else teenager decide she was getting home tonight?" Gin said snidely.

Shiho scowled and snapped, "A taxi if you must know." Dead silence met her response and the crease in her brow lessened slightly. "You still there?"

"What's the taxi company's name?" he said suddenly in a low, serious voice.

"Uh, Green Tokyo…" she said slowly, wondering at his abrupt change in tone.

"And the cab's ID number?"

"43314; why do you want to know?" she asked.

Gin didn't answer, but he didn't hang up either. She squinted her eyes in annoyance and pressed the phone as close to her ear as she could. She could make out a faint tapping sound coming through the line; was someone on a computer near him?

Shiho huffed, "Look, thank you for looking out for me on my sister's behalf, but I've already got my transportation covered for the night, so you don't need to worry about me anymore. Goodnight."

That seemed to get his attention. "Wait, Sherry, where-?"

She hung up on him midsentence and smirked. There was just something satisfying about cutting off that stiff, stone-faced guy. She had no idea how he and Akemi were friends; they seemed like complete opposites. Shiho looked up from her phone and frowned slightly. She hadn't been paying attention to her surroundings and they were in a part of the city that she didn't recognize. The prickling feeling under her skin became more insistent, but she ignored it. She'd only been in Japan for a month and Tokyo was a huge city, so of course there were going to be parts she didn't recognize. It didn't make her feel comfortable though.

"Hey, are you sure we're heading in the correct direction?" she asked the driver tentatively.

"Absolutely," the woman answered with certainty. "We're taking a shortcut to get there."

Shiho wasn't sure about that considering she should be home in less than ten minutes now, but she chose not to argue about it. The driver seemed to know what she was doing. Still, she kept her greenish-blue eyes fixed on the scenery outside the window, searching for the first sign of something familiar. Nothing popped out at her though and her sense of unease grew. It felt like worms were writhing restlessly beneath her skin. When Shiho noticed that the street they were driving on was in a distinctly poorer area of the city, she knew they were going in the wrong direction and was forced to admit that she was in trouble.

She quickly pulled out her phone to call for help when it was snatched out of her hands by something gray and rubbery and she released a startled yelp. She looked up and a shocked scream escaped her. Her phone was being held in the air by a large gray, single-clawed tentacle waving about. The tentacle squeezed the phone until it snapped. Just like that, it was crushed into pieces.

"Let's not be hasty, sweetheart," the woman purred as the tentacle shook her phone fragments to the floor. "We girls haven't had the chance to get to know each other better yet. Let's not ruin it by inviting someone to spoil our fun."

Shiho found herself in a full-blown panic. The prickling sensation she had felt earlier towards the woman had grown into a pounding, pulsing sensation throughout her whole body. It was literally screaming at her to run, even if that meant throwing herself out of a moving vehicle. Her fear was so great, she didn't even question the impulse and she rolled the window all the way down. She was already halfway out the window when the car braked so fast and hard that she was thrown off-balance and her side collided painfully with the edge of the door frame. Shiho only spared a second to catch her breath before she finished her mad scramble out of the cab through the window, which was much less painful with the taxi in a stop. She cleared the cab and took off at a run, not knowing where she was or where she was going, and had no thought in her head except putting as much space between herself and the alien behind her.

However, she hadn't gone more than three meters when something caught her ankles and her feet flew out from under her. She hit the asphalt chest first with her palms splayed out in front of her, and she felt the wind knocked out of her lungs. She fought to breathe and her body was stunned from the impact, unable to move. The first coherent thought she had was that she didn't hit her chin. At least she didn't hit her chin. She winced as she tried to move her hands to get up when her wrists were grabbed and she was hauled upward.

"No! Let go of me! Let- mmph!" Her shrieks were muffled by another rubbery tentacle that wrapped around her head and covered her mouth.

Shiho struggled to move in her captor's grip, but she was airborne, being held up by the tentacles on her wrists and the ones on her ankles further restrained her movements.

"Hmm, that house looks nice and cozy," the alien holding her said and carried her forward towards an old rundown house with a smashed front door, broken glass in the window frames, and a gaping hole in the roof.

As soon as they were in the front room, Shiho was turned around by the tentacles and pinned to the floor. There were actually six tentacles, five of them were holding her, and all of them had punctured through the woman's sides like worms in an apple, the sight alone making her gag.

"Now that we have some privacy, I can shed this awful skin," the tentacled she-alien said and Shiho watched in silent horror as she used her sixth tentacle to pull on some invisible zipper at the back of her head and a large, slimy, gray squid-looking creature with one eye wriggled out from the skin.

The arms went slack, revealing two more tentacles, and once the skin was down around the hips, another two tentacles stepped out of the legs and the human skin collapsed to the ground like a one-piece suit. That made ten tentacles, and with the claws on the end of them and the one eye, that made this alien a Tethuidian. The Tethuidian released a heavy sigh of relief and Shiho screamed, heedless of the tentacle over her mouth stifling the sound. As with any of the Earth's natural cephalopods, the mouth was a beak at the base of the body surrounded by all of the tentacles, but no Earth-born squid or octopus had a beak full of serrated teeth like a shark!

"Ahh, that's much better. Now then, let's get rid of those nasty-tasting clothes you humans insist on wearing," the Tethuidian said as her arm tentacles grabbed the front of her pants with her claws.

Shiho squirmed desperately as the fabric of her pants and underwear tore like paper and the cool evening air hit her bare skin, but she couldn't break free of the alien's strong grip. Terrified tears escaped the corners of her eyes and the heavy black pressure coming from the Tethuidian was so strong, she was nearly choking on it. The Tethuidian inhaled deeply from a tube near the mouth that she hadn't noticed and it hummed in contentment.

"I've never seen a human with such an unusual hair color before; what a rarity. I'll admit you're a little small compared to most of my meals, but your body still smells mature at least, so that's good. Child eggs don't taste nearly as good as adult eggs."

The toothed beak opened wide and started to approach her groin to feast on her reproductive organs. Dizzy with fear, Shiho screwed her eyes shut and apologized over and over again to Akemi for not listening to her, thinking of anything and everything but the gaping maw drawing closer to her flesh.

A gunshot went off, the Tethuidian shrieked, and Shiho suddenly found herself free. Her eyes snapped open and she hastily scrambled away from her captor. The she-alien was writhing on the ground with half her tentacles to her mouth when a deep man's voice yelled, "You will not touch her!"

Shiho gasped and whirled around to face her savior. Gin and Vodka were both standing in the doorway with their guns drawn and Gin's was still smoking. His green eyes were wild with uncontained rage and she instinctively recoiled at the malevolent aura of death emanating from him.

"Going after her was the last mistake you'll ever make," he hissed in pure, visceral hatred and he shot at the Tethuidian again. The bullet ricocheted off the tough outer mantle, and Gin sneered, shoving his gun into his belt. "That won't save you," he said darkly

The Tethuidian made to escape into the next room and Shiho watched in amazement as Gin charged forward, planting himself in the doorway before the alien could escape.

The she-alien gave an enraged yell. "I'll tear you apart limb from limb, scum!"

Her tentacles lunged towards Gin and Shiho cried out in alarm. If she got a hold of him, he was done for! The tentacles caught his arms, but he sidestepped the ones that went after his legs and pinned them to the ground with his knees. She watched slack-jawed as Gin successfully moved his arms to the tentacles on the ground, grabbed them, and stood up without any apparent difficulty. She hadn't been able to move at all; what kind of monster was he? Even the Tethuidian seemed stunned by this and Gin's eyes flashed. In the few seconds worth of stillness from the alien, he tucked some of the tentacles under his arm, grabbed onto the ones holding his arms, and spun the alien squid around him in a circular motion until it slammed into the next wall with such force, it broke through the dry wall and caused the whole house to shudder ominously.

The Tethuidian's tentacles went slack and Gin stalked forward, drawing his gun and staring coldly down at the alien. He grabbed two of the tentacles roughly and yanked them away, exposing the toothed beak that was opening and closing like the being it was attached to was panting. Gin mercilessly pulled the mouth open and shoved his arm with the gun halfway down its throat. He shot once and the alien flailed, so he shot again and a third time after which the Tethuidian finally stopped twitching. He shot it twice more and only then did he remove his arm from the dead alien's mouth. It was completely covered in thick, slimy orange blood.

"Eugh, Aniki, that's gross," a voice said from right next to her which caused her to squeak and jump.

Vodka was kneeling down next to her and she hadn't even noticed, but he wasn't wearing his black jacket, just his burgundy dress shirt. That was odd; she was sure he was wearing it when he arrived. What happened to it?

Perhaps sensing her eyes on his face, Vodka looked at her and she instinctively shied away. "It's alright, Sherry, don't be scared. She's gone and won't ever come after you again. Aniki made sure of that. You can keep my jacket as long as you need it. I've got plenty more at home."

Shiho stared at him blankly for a few seconds before she realized what he was talking about and looked down to find his jacket laying across her lap and covering her nakedness. She blushed and muttered under her breath, "Thank you."

"I told Akemi keeping you in the dark was a bad idea, but did she listen to me? No, and now this happened," Gin said from somewhere far above her.

An hour ago, Shiho would have bristled at such a cutting remark about her sister and would have said something just as scathing back at him. But the Shiho of an hour ago had not been attacked and nearly eaten alive, nor had she been rescued by the same man she so strongly disliked for his cold, distant demeanor. She felt oddly disconnected from reality and she didn't know how to react. That terrible black miasma had finally disappeared with the alien and she could breathe normally again. She gazed up at Gin who was watching her carefully from eyes partially-hidden by his long bangs. The rage had gone and they seemed to be back to their normal cold indifference, but… was she just imagining it or was there concern for her still lingering there?

"You saved me…" she said blankly.

"Of course I did," he snorted and lowered himself to his knees in front of her, staring hard into her eyes. "How do you feel right now, Sherry?"

Shiho tilted her head to the side in confusion. "Fine?" she offered.

Gin raised an eyebrow and took her wrist in his clean right hand, turning her hand palm up. "Can you feel this?" he asked.

She looked down and startled at the sight of her palm skinned raw and oozing both blood and lymph. She turned the other over and it looked exactly the same. "No…?" she said worriedly because her hands should be in a lot of pain right now and she wasn't feeling any of it.

Gin sighed heavily and carefully placed her hand back on her lap. "I thought so. You're in shock. Come on, we need to get your injuries treated before they get infected and I think we're close enough to an MiB medical ward that we don't have to take you to a regular hospital."

Haibara came out of the memory with an uneasy shudder. She hated that she could still recall it in such clear detail, even after all this time. She'd had nightmares for weeks afterward and had gotten desperate enough to try and use a neuralyzer on herself, but Gin caught her and talked her out of it. As terrible as that ordeal was, it had done two good things for her. It had allowed her to start trusting Gin and given her the ability to sense when someone dangerous was after her. But looking back on everything that happened, she realized that the Tethuidian was not the only one she'd felt that murderous pressure from. It had also emanated from Gin when he first appeared and was so deeply enraged to find his friend's little sister under attack. He definitely hadn't been directing any of those vengeful, hate-filled feelings towards her.

Was that it? Was that what she was picking up on from Akai and her ability was growing more sensitive to such a small level of pressure that didn't include murderous blood lust or danger necessarily directed to her? She still wasn't sure about the first time, but it would fit with the instance at Ikkaku Rock when Ayumi was briefly taken hostage. So what about the man dressed in black that was following her and Ayumi? It was so quick, it didn't seem possible for the pressure from him to be the result of blood lust, which meant that if her hypothesis was right about the alternate meaning of her evolving ability, the pressure she felt had nothing to do with her at all. Haibara sighed heavily and glanced out the window of the shop to look for him or his companion. She hoped that was the case. She wasn't in a position to be able to fight back if she was wrong and Ayumi was with her. She didn't want her young friend getting caught up in her mess.

When Haibara still didn't see either of the two adults outside, she turned to Ayumi and asked, "Are you ready to go now?"

Ayumi immediately put down the broach she was holding and said, "Yes! I want to try Ai's favorite sandwich!"

"Then let's go," Haibara said smiling and they left the shop to head back to Ayumi's condo. "Did you see anything that you liked in there?"

"I did! There was even a really pretty butterfly hairclip that I wanted to buy, but I didn't have enough money. I'm going to try and bring my mom later and see if she'd be willing to buy it for me. She might say 'no', but it can't hurt to ask, right?"

"I suppose not," Haibara agreed. She didn't remember seeing the clip in question, but she was sure it would look very cute on Ayumi and she half-hoped her mother agreed enough to buy it for her.

She was so caught up in talking with Ayumi that she forgot to keep a lookout for the people in black and only remembered when she saw the man's shadow looming over them from behind. Haibara whirled around to face him and shoved Ayumi protectively behind her, wondering what she could do in this situation when she heard footsteps from behind. She glanced back over her shoulder and gasped. It was the woman from before and they were cornered! She was wrong about her sensing ability then?

"Hello, little princesses," the woman said sweetly.

"This way!" Haibara hissed as she grabbed Ayumi's arm and tried to make a break for it, but a pair of black-slacked legs moved directly into their path and blocked them.

"Can't you give us a bit of your time?" the man said in a smooth tone that put Haibara on edge.

"These two are so cute!" the woman cooed.

"My radar's never wrong, see?" the man said cockily and started reaching into his jacket, presumably towards a chest pocket or even…

'A gun?' she thought frantically. 'No way! In the middle of the street?!'

Before she could react, a loud war cry rang out and a small body tackled headlong into the back of the man's legs, nearly causing him to overbalance. It was Mitsuhiko!

"Both of you, run away!" he yelled at them. Haibara didn't move and stared bewildered at this actual seven-year-old boy taking on a full-grown man to give her and Ayumi a chance to run away.

"What the hell are you doing, brat!" the man snarled and started beating him over the head with a wallet!

"Hurry up!" he screamed, wincing with every blow he took but refusing to let go.

"What the hell are you doing to Mitsuhiko?!" Genta roared and tackled the man to the ground, all three of them ending up in a tangled heap of arms and legs.

"Boys, what…?" Haibara murmured, completely overwhelmed by her two strongest instincts telling her to run away or protect her friends when a sharp whistle abruptly cut through her thoughts.

"Hey, what's going on?!" a man in a blue police uniform shouted as he ran straight towards them.

The presence of the law reestablished order and quelled the rampant chaos. Mitsuhiko and Genta got off the man to allow him to rise and he got back to his feet, brushing dirt off his black dress slacks. The two adults looked nervous at the sight of the police officer, but the boys had surprisingly-defiant expressions on their faces.

"Officer, I didn't do anything. These two boys just attacked me out of nowhere for no reason at all!" the man said angrily.

"Sir, we were trying to prevent our friends from being kidnapped by these two," Mitsuhiko declared with a determined expression on his young freckled face.

"Kidnapped? What the hell are you going on about, brat?" the man said as he rounded on Mitsuhiko.

"Alright, knock it off right now," the officer said and physically inserted himself between the boys and the man in black. "I'm going to have to request all of you come with me to the station and see if we can't get this sorted out."

"Yes Officer," both the boys and man said in unison.

The police officer led the way and Haibara rejoined the boys with Ayumi while the woman in black sidled up to her companion and there seemed to be an invisible wall separating the two groups as they followed the policeman.

"Tsubaraya, Kojima, that was a very stupid and reckless thing for you to do," Haibara scolded the pair of them. "You were lucky that police officer happened to be so close by and stopped the fight before things could escalate into something worse."

Her friends hung their heads in shame and muttered, "Yes, ma'am."

Haibara felt a twinge of pity and guilt at the sight of their remorseful expressions. They were good kids and they'd only done it to save her and Ayumi. They shouldn't have had to act, and that was her fault. She should have been more aware of her surroundings and not gotten herself stuck in that situation in the first place. She was losing her edge, getting too comfortable, and that was worrying.

"However, it was very brave of you both to risk yourselves to come to our aid, so thank you," Haibara said with a slight smile to soften the reprimand.

That seemed to do the trick, for they looked embarrassed at the compliment coming from her but perked right back up. They followed the officer into the police station. There were only four chairs, so Haibara took one and crossed both her arms and legs while Ayumi took the one next to her. The adults took the other two while the boys stood behind them. Once inside, the officer moved to his desk and looked at the two adults.

"Do you two have your IDs on you?" he asked.

"Yes, we do," the woman said as she opened up her purse and handed her ID over to him, her partner doing likewise.

"Chiharu Seino and Youji Kurokawa, yes?" Both nodded in affirmation and he handed them back. "Good. Now, since we already know these two young men seem to think you were going to kidnap their friends, why don't you tell us your version of what happened?"

Kurokawa scoffed as he gave the officer what looked like a business card and Seino followed suit. "We aren't kidnappers, we work for a talent production."

At this, Mitsuhiko suddenly exploded to his feet. "A talent production!" he cried.

"Yeah, we merely wanted to scout her," Kurokaway said.

"Scout her! So you guys aren't with the mafia?!" Mitsuhiko exclaimed.

Good god, Mitsuhiko thought the mafia was after them and he still threw himself at the man? That only made his actions even more reckless.

"Mafia?" the officer repeated and then laughed. "Oh, I see, so you mistook those two as part of the mafia, huh? I guess this clears up that little misunderstanding."

Mitsuhiko hung his head remorsefully. "I'm sorry. It's just… you guys were following them and you said something like 'getting those two at once'," he explained.

"Geez, we were informed that there's an elementary school girl nearby who looks just like the American child star, Grace Aihara. We've been tracking her down since," Kurokawa grumbled in annoyance.

"Grace Aihara!" Mitsuhiko gasped and she could feel his eyes staring nervously down at her.

"What are you looking at me for?" she said perhaps a little snippily to be justified.

"Uh… nothing."

"After a month's work, we finally found you, and just as we thought we'd arrange for a chat today, we saw you and your friend coming out, all dressed-up and with makeup on too. That's when we decided to get you both for our scouting," Kurokawa said.

"So was that what you meant by 'getting those two at once'?" Mitsuhiko asked desperately.

"We certainly didn't mean kidnapping," Kurokawa snapped and Mitsuhiko gave a nervous laugh. "I figured that if I'm dealing with a little girl like her, it'd be best if I had a young woman along rather than just myself. That's why I called her in for back-up," he said with a jerk of his head at the woman next to him.

"That sums up what happened," Seino agreed and turned to her and Ayumi. "Now that we've cleared our misunderstanding, can you listen to what we have to say? I think if you girls were to team up and become a princess unit, you'd sell big."

"Princess unit?" Ayumi exclaimed, her eyes wide with awe.

Haibara couldn't fault her reaction. She was a little girl full of romantic fantasies untainted by the ugly reality of adulthood. It was just fortunate for the both of them that Haibara wasn't actually seven and could recognize a bad situation when she saw it.

"I refuse your offer," Haibara said sharply. "I don't care what went wrong, but I have no intention whatsoever of cooperating with a man who would hit a child's head with a wallet. Same for her."

Ayumi was caught off guard by her inclusion for a moment, but agreed with a firm, "Yes."

Seino looked disappointed and Kurokawa tsked in annoyance. "What a waste of time. Bunch of stinkin' brats. Let's go!" he barked as he marched himself out of the police station.

"Ah, hey, wait for me!" Seino called and hurried after him.

It seemed as if her original assessment of her sensing ability towards Kurokawa was correct. He appeared to be a temperamental guy and she'd probably just picked up on that while he was on the phone.

"Hey, well said, kids!" the officer congratulated. "Just like you said, it'd do you no good to go to a company that's willing to employ such ill-mannered staff. Good thing you refused. And you guys who stood up to them to protect your friends were splendid as well."

Genta and Mitsuhiko both gave pleased, embarrassed laughs which annoyed Haibara. She'd already complimented them both for being brave after scolding them for being reckless, and the officer should be doing the same. They were seven, not seventeen, and didn't have half a chance of defending themselves from a serious threat. She hoped this police officer never had kids.

"But you're too young for makeup, okay little princesses?" the officer scolded gently.

"Yes, sir," Haibara agreed dutifully along with Ayumi, and once they left the station, she turned to Mitsuhiko. "What was going on back there, Tsubaraya? You were behaving very strangely."

Mitsuhiko sheepishly pulled out a rolled-up magazine that he had stuffed into his back pocket and handed it to her. Haibara unrolled it only to gasp in astonishment at a girl that was the spitting image of her seven-year-old self.

"I thought that girl was you," Mitsuhiko admitted.

From there, he launched into his 'crazy' deduction about how she was only pretending to be seven when she was actually older, how she was an MI6 agent and had gone undercover into the American show business to investigate its connection with the mafia and taken 'Grace Aihara' as a stage name, how her cover had been blown so she'd gone into hiding in Japan, and how he'd thought Conan calling him from the plane to warn him not to let her near the house meant that the mafia had found her again and was after her. She was going to kill Kudo for running poor Mitsuhiko ragged like that.

"I see, so that's why you followed us," Haibara said at last after Mitsuhiko had finished. His retelling had taken them all the way back to the street Dr. Agasa's and Kudo's houses were on.

"You're right! She looks just like you, Ai!" Ayumi exclaimed in amazement.

"I know, right? That's why I thought she was indeed Haibara!" Mitsuhiko added, happy to have someone else agree with him.

"But your theory concluding Ai was a spy, was being chased by the mafia, and hid herself in the Professor's house was really clever, Mitsuhiko," Ayumi praised.

Haibara was also impressed by what Mitsuhiko had come up with. If you broke the deduction down to its most basic elements, it wasn't that far from the truth – either of them. "Well, some of it wasn't exactly wrong," she mused under her breath.

"Huh?" Mitsuhiko perked up.

"Oh, don't worry about it," she reassured him gently.

He'd gotten so close to the truth of the matter with nothing more than an old magazine, her ability to put on makeup, hearing a single suspicious sentence from her mouth, and one shady guy following them, and he was only seven. He was actually seven. It was not the first time he'd done it either. Kudo was a Sherlockian through and through, relying primarily on cold facts and logical reasoning with the occasional burst of inspiration to solve cases. In this instance and in the two previous cases Mitsuhiko and not Conan had solved, he'd had very little evidence at all to support his deductive reasoning, just his intuition telling him what to do and where to go to acquire that so-very-necessary proof. Strangely enough, that particular brand of intuitive reasoning reminded her of Gin.

"But if that's the case, then why did Conan tell me not to let Haibara near the Professor's house?" Mitsuhiko asked.

Ah yes, and that mysterious phone call was exactly the reason they were heading to Dr. Agasa's now.

"Come to think of it, when we were near his house earlier, I saw someone going through the gate," Genta commented idly.

Haibara stopped and whirled on him fiercely. "What?"

"It was that Okiya guy who's living next door," he said.

Haibara took her gaze off Genta and stared absently at the ground with a deep frown and anxious thoughts tumbling in her head. Without warning, she took off running down the street to the house, heedless of the kids' shouts of protest from behind her. Akai had gone into the house while both she and the Professor were absent? What was he up to or was it even really him? She had just turned onto the street the house was on when she saw Okiya appear from inside Dr. Agasa's front gate and she put on a burst of speed. She skidded to a halt right before him, panting and glaring up at him and the box he was holding. He didn't react to her presence in any way, either good or bad.

"Hey, what's wrong, Ai?" Ayumi asked, the kids having finally caught up with her.

"Why'd you run away all of a sudden?" Genta added.

"Huh? What's in the cardboard box?" Mitsuhiko said.

That was exactly what she wanted to know. "What are you planning to abscond with from a house that's currently vacant?" Haibara demanded.

"Ah, no, it's a package delivery," Okiya said.

"A package delivery?" she repeated.

"Yes, the Professor asked me to get the package that was scheduled to arrive for him today, so I've been checking the house from time to time," the fair-haired man with that annoying, ever-present stupid smile on his face.

"So that's when Genta saw you!" Ayumi exclaimed.

"But then how come Conan told me not to let Haibara go near the house? If a package delivery was scheduled, couldn't she have gotten it?" Mitsuhiko pointed out.

Haibara gasped, a sudden thought coming to her. He wouldn't…! "Could you let me see the label, please?" she asked Okiya.

He obliged by setting it down on the ground for her. It was a decent-sized box and it had some weight to it judging from how Okiya had set it down, but it was also marked as fragile.

"Don't tell me…!" she said as she grabbed at the edges of the box and started ripping them open. As soon as the folds were clear and she saw the contents inside, she felt a sharp stab of betrayal and muttered darkly, "I knew it."

There were three jars each of peanut butter and blueberry jam carefully packed together in the box and on top of them was a folded piece of paper. She took the paper to read what it said and found herself frowning even further. It was a receipt detailing the contents of the package, and right at the bottom, it read:

Thank you for your continued patronage.

Points earned from this order: 50P

Total: 650P

You may redeem 650P on your next purchase.

"Your continued patronage?!" Haibara exclaimed in outrage.

If he'd earned 50 points with each order he'd placed, then he'd bought peanut butter and blueberry jam twelve separate times before this without her knowing about it?! He knew how much she loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she'd given up eating them so that he wouldn't be tempted and this was how he repaid her?! By sneaking around behind her back to buy the peanut butter and jam and then not even sharing!

"Continued? Hey, could it be that the Professor keeps buying these when Ai's not looking?" Ayumi asked innocently.

The fact that an actual child could figure out what he was doing only incensed her further and she growled, "A-ga-saaaaa."

He was going to be in soo much trouble when he got back home from London, and then she was going to raid the house for any other unhealthy food items he might have stashed away somewhere!

She was only vaguely hearing the kids talk about the timing of the package's arrival when she heard Mitsuhiko say, "But the way Conan panicked, it didn't feel like it was anything ordinary."

"You need to use a credit card when using in-flight payphones and the charge is pretty expensive. That's why he was in a hurry," Haibara said dully.

"Oh, I get it." Mitsuhiko said in understanding.

Now that everything had finally been cleared up, Haibara was left staring at the delicious evidence of her housemate's sneaking around. Her anger towards Kudo for causing Mitsuhiko to freak out had been superseded by Dr. Agasa's betrayal, but she still wasn't letting him off the hook.

An evil smirk slowly played its way onto her lips. "Say, here's an idea," she said softly. "Why don't we all enjoy this together?"

"Is that okay?" Genta asked, never one to turn down food, but the face she was making was a little off-putting.

"Of course," Haibara said casually. "After all, the Professor's being so kind as to order these just for me!"

"Uh, didn't the Professor…" Mitsuhiko began.

"… want to splurge on these?" Genta finished.

"Ai, you're kinda scary," Ayumi commented.

"Peanut butter and blueberry jam go very well as sandwiches," Okiya said suddenly and effectively interrupted Haibara's vengeful thoughts. "Earlier today, I bought some bread at a bakery in front of the station that's famous for its fresh taste. Shall we make sandwiches with them?"

Haibara gave a start and looked sharply up at the man. She'd felt the pressure near that bakery. Had she sensed it from Akai instead of Kurokawa as she'd first supposed? But even if she had, did it really change anything? It still shouldn't mean he wanted to hurt her. He probably just saw the man in black following her and she felt his instinctive reaction before he undoubtedly noticed something that clued him in that the man in black wasn't a threat to her. Or was she just telling herself that because the alternative was so much worse? That was dangerous. She had no way of proving what her sixth sense was reacting to. She'd already been careless enough about letting someone potentially dangerous get close to her today and it had miraculously turned out alright. The next time something like that happened, she might not be so lucky.

()()()()()

Deep within the central headquarters of the Men in Black based in Tokyo, Gin was working late at night in one of the high-security data centers where some of the most top-secret and sensitive data of the entire Organization was stored. Very few people had access to these rooms, even among the codenamed agents. He was one of them.

He heard the acceptance beep from the door and he quickly shut off the monitor of the computer he was working on just as the vacuum seal was deactivated on the door and it slid open. The light from the hallway beyond backlit the tall, athletic build of a woman with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and wearing a black suit with a knee-length skirt and heels.

"Bit of an odd meeting place for a late-night rendezvous, huh Gin?" she said as she strode boldly into the room, the door automatically sealing shut behind her, and the data center's soft lighting illuminated the silvery strands of her ash-blond hair.

Curaçao was another such person with the necessary clearance.

Gin snorted and stood up from the computer station he was working at. "There's something important I have to discuss with you, Curaçao, but first…"

He stuck his hands in his coat pocket, feeling his Beretta in the left one, and approached Curaçao until he was just out of arm's reach of her. She crossed her arms, no doubt fingering the knives she had hidden up her sleeves. His green eyes stared deeply into her heterochromatic blue ones and she raised an expectant eyebrow, silently waiting for him to finish his assessment.

At last, he spoke, and he asked, "What was the estimated time of our mother's death?"

Curaçao flinched away from him as if he'd physically burned her with the question. She gazed imploringly up at him, silently asking him what was wrong, but he remained stoic and revealed nothing. Not until she answered the question.

Her expression hardened and her eyes took on a haunted appearance as she said hollowly, "Only thirty minutes after elementary school got out."

An unbearable weight he hadn't known he was carrying immediately evaporated into thin air with his younger twin's answer and he removed his hands from his coat pockets to show her he was unarmed. Curaçao was still herself. His little sister hadn't been compromised.

"Thank you for indulging in my paranoia. I had to be sure," Gin told her as he returned to the computer station he'd been working at and turned the monitor back on.

"Does it have anything to do with why you wanted me to meet you down here in the data center so late at night?" she asked as she followed and joined him at the computer station.

"It has everything to do with it," he said gravely and pulled up the files he'd been working on.

"Hm? What's this?" she asked.

"These are files in the MiB chemical database," Gin answered.

"I can see that much, you ass," Curaçao retorted with a roll of her eyes and smacked his shoulder, but then let her hand stay there. "I meant what are they of and what are you doing with them? I recognize the one on Scotch, but the other three are unfamiliar to me. Are they new?"

"Yes… very…" Gin said slowly and then glanced up at her over his shoulder. "Can you memorize them?"

"Sure, I can mem- Oh…" he felt the slightest bit of tension in her body through her hand still resting on his shoulder and she met his even gaze with a worried frown. "You mean that, don't you?"

He nodded once.

From one of the pockets of her skirt, Curaçao pulled out a black case the size of a thin smart phone and fanned it open, revealing a color palette with five transparent slides of different colors: white, blue, green, red, and orange representing the different types of the alcohol she was codenamed for.

"The full palette or just a selection?" she asked and he understood the cryptic question without further clarification.

"The full palette," he confirmed and moved out of the way so that Curaçao could see the data fully without him blocking part of her view.

She leaned forward over the console and her mismatched eyes, her left royal blue and her right a blue so pale it appeared transparent, quickly scanned through the records on the screen, including the match scan reports he'd pulled up for the chemicals in question, and then she held up her color palette, staring intently at all five colors. When Curaçao snapped the color palette shut, Gin knew her abnormally-shaped left thalamus had received the color vision signals from her retina which had automatically triggered the instant transfer of the short-term information in her pre-frontal cortex to the hippocampus in the temporal lobe where long-term memories were held. Curaçao had always been able to pair information with colors from as far back as he could remember. As incredible as her ability to completely bypass the entire process of creating long-term memories simply by looking at a color was, it was very anticlimactic to watch from the sidelines. He remembered when they were kids that nobody in school had believed them at first because surely with a superpower like that, there had to be some sign that her ability had activated, but life wasn't an anime and didn't give you cool special effects like that. Fortunately, the immediate storage of information in her long-term memory meant he didn't have to explain everything to her; he just had to fill in the pieces she didn't already have.

Curaçao pulled back from the computer and looked at Gin in alarm. "Edward, what does this mean? Scotch, Calvados, and Irish all had a similar small, unknown chemical found in their livers post-mortem as some Rainbow Dazzlefly?"

"I'll get to that in a minute, but first, have you ever heard of an alien referred to as Pandora?" he asked.

The left corner of Curaçao's lip twitched downward, the only outward sign that she was perusing through her vast memory to see if she'd ever heard the name before. Gin might have been the best when it came to word games and riddles when they were growing up, but Emma was literally unbeatable when it came to memory-based games. He could never beat her and he wouldn't have been able to even if he didn't have a memory that tended to forget things as soon as he deemed them irrelevant.

Her frown deepened. "A rumor?" she said at last.

"More than a rumor," Gin said darkly as he shoved his hands back in his coat pockets. "Several weeks ago not long after we finally captured Ringore, Sherry was kidnapped briefly by a family unit of Rainbow Dazzleflies that had been robbing convenience stores in order to lure her out of hiding while we were busy, and they had apparently done so on the order of a being they called Pandora. They were confused about Sherry's small body so she used their distraction to escape and hide herself, when Pandora appeared, resembling my own form and mannerisms so completely that not even Sherry could tell the difference were it not for the unusual situation, and killed the entire unit except for the one hiding with Sherry. The dazzleflies had referred to Pandora as female and Sherry overheard her say 'The one I used on Irish wasn't strong enough, but this one ended up being too strong, and Sherry's still alive to boot', before she departed, unaware that Sherry had been present and listening."

"You think this Pandora character is the one after Sherry!" Curaçao exclaimed suddenly and Gin nodded. It was the best and only lead they had. "And that's why you wanted to verify my identity and asked me about the time of our mother's death. We're the only two alive who know that and it's not something an alien shapeshifter would have easily stumbled upon or even taken the time to investigate."

"Exactly, but there's another reason why I needed to verify you and it's because of those chemical reports I had you memorize," Gin said with a jerk of his head to the computer screen. "Sherry knew the dazzleflies were behaving strangely and suspected Pandora had done something to them to override their hive-centric instincts, so she performed an investigative necropsy on one of the corpses she'd brought back home with her. She was searching for literally anything out of the ordinary, which is how she discovered the strange clear blue liquid she found in the liver. The analysis software didn't recognize the chemical, so she ran a match scan with the chemical database and she discovered a 72% match similarity with the drug that was found in Scotch's system during his autopsy."

"And the other two files?" Curaçao asked. "Both Calvados and Irish died before the dazzlefly, but their submission dates are after it."

"I had that done at Sherry's request," he answered. "We both agreed that Pandora must have also been behind the formulation of the drug found in Scotch, and if he was behaving strangely because of the effects, it would go a long way to answering the questions we have about what happened back then. Based on Pandora's words about Irish, we expected to find the drug in his liver, but we weren't sure about Calvados. Given the circumstances of his death though, we decided it was worth revisiting, and as you can see, we obtained positive results."

Thankfully, there had been liver samples preserved from both men and just as Sherry had predicted, the chemical had been found in both, with the one in Calvados showing an 85% similarity to the one found in the Rainbow Dazzlefly, and the one in Irish showing a 94% similarity. The increasing similarity to the most recent known variation suggested that the primary difference in percentages was due to the modification – and presumed improvement – of the drug over time. Gin suspected that the only reason the chemical had not been found in Calvados or Irish during their initial autopsy was because the exact cause of death was known and nothing too unusual had jumped out at the MiB staff to warrant a full in-depth investigation of their bodies the way that Scotch's situation had.

"Three codenamed agents in two years," Curaçao murmured with a worried shake of her head. "That is troubling."

"This is why I sent Bourbon to the Beika City area near Sherry to investigate. I didn't tell him the truth of what happened to Sherry or Kudo or any of my suspicions regarding a dangerous alien infiltrator that's causing codenamed MiB agents to behave strangely and get killed, but if Pandora is really the one after Sherry, then he'll have the best chance of finding information on her movements there. I can't stand him personally, but I can't deny he's good at his work, and I trust him a hell of a lot more than Vermouth these days."

"So where are you currently in your investigation?" she asked.

"Right now? Filling you in on the secret, my suspicions, and having you memorize these files so I can permanently delete the ones on Calvados, Irish, and the dazzlefly from the chemical database at the source," Gin said as he moved back to the computer and started typing once more.

"What?! Gin, why-?!"

"-You've already recorded a perfect copy of the records in your brain, so the information's not lost, but if Pandora has been able to get so close to codenamed MiB agents, then she may also be able to obtain access to the MiB network and I don't want her warned that we're aware something is amiss," Gin interrupted sharply. "Scotch's file can stay because it would be more suspicious to delete it at this point, and at least if any other agents die for suspicious reasons, we'll still have a chemical in the system to compare it to if we find something in the liver."

One last warning box with a blank white entry square and a black lock next to it popped up demanding for an Authorized Personnel ID number and Gin typed in his own twenty-character ID number before pressing 'Enter'. The computer accepted his authorization and just like that, only the record of the chemical found in Scotch's autopsy still existed. Having done what he came to the data center to do, he began the process of shutting down the work station and turned off the monitor once more.

He turned to face his twin once more, the data center's faint blue lights reflecting off their matching hair colors and casting them in a silver sheen. Despite everything that had happened to him and all of the changes he had endured, Curaçao's presence by his side had remained the one constant throughout his life. It was only fitting that she should continue to stand alongside him as he tackled this viper in the tall grass that threatened to destroy the very Organization that had found them living on the streets of Nagano and saved them… the same Organization that he gladly devoted his life to and called home.

"I hope you will do everything in your power to secretly and subtly investigate what you can of Pandora and the Organization's members," he said, phrasing it as a statement but meaning it as a question.

Curaçao gave him a half-smile. "You know I will."

Gin nodded gratefully. "Your position as Rum's right-hand agent offers you an ideal vantage point from which to start. I only have one favor to ask of you that I hope you will abide by."

She raised a questioning eyebrow. "Go on."

"Don't tell Rum," he said.

She glared coldly at him then and he glared right back, knowing what she was thinking.

"It has nothing to do with my feelings towards your relationship with him," he growled in annoyance. "I haven't even told Vodka or 'that person' about my suspicions and I wouldn't tell Sherry either except that she's the reason I have them. We don't know who's already been compromised and who's at risk. It seems that Pandora can take on the appearance of anyone she chooses and gender is no barrier to her, which means she can appear as literally anyone we meet. Please, Emma, you know it's better if fewer people are in-the-know about what we're up to."

Whether it was the logic of his argument that swayed her or his plea to her as his sister instead of Rum's confidante, Gin wasn't sure, but she finally nodded in agreement.

"Heh, a secret just between the two of us. Just like old times, huh Edward?" she said with a fond smile on her face and Gin found himself smiling back because before she had been Rum's confidant, she had been his, and he hers as they had grown up as each other's best friend, rival, partner-in-crime, and shoulder to cry on.

"But wait, what about the scientists you had extract the drug from the livers of Calvados and Irish and submit for analysis?" Curaçao asked suddenly. "What did you do with them? Did you neuralyze them?"

"No, not yet," he sighed as he started walking towards the sealed door and Curaçao followed after him. "I only gave the assignment to Madeira, the Head of Disease Investigations, and her assistant, Singani, since he has a good head on his shoulders and Madeira can't do it alone. They still don't know what the chemical actually is, so that's what they're working on during their spare time."

While alcohol codenames were very commonplace among the field agents of the General Oversight and Intelligence divisions, very few of the members who worked in the science divisions had alcohol codenames. They were generally reserved for those with a high rank and had been with the Men in Black for a long time. Madeira and Singani qualified as such, but the scientists could also obtain codenames if they were the heads of projects working on developing ground-breaking new technology for the Organization. That was how Sherry had gotten hers the day after she had arrived in Japan from America.

"You'll neuralyze them after they've completed their analysis then?"

"No, I think I'll try that new memory-erasing drug Generic has been working on instead and see how well it works for myself."

Curaçao frowned in confusion. "Generic? Who's that?"

Gin scowled. "Honda Toyama."

Her eyes lit up in recognition as soon as the name passed his lips. "Ohhh, little Honda! That orphan that was picked up by the Organization when he was thirteen only a year after Sherry had returned to Japan! Why do you call him 'Generic'? He doesn't have a codename."

"Because in spite of his incredible intelligence, he's the most generic person I've ever met and I see no reason to call him by his name," Gin bit out.

"Wait, wait, now I remember…" Curaçao said knowingly and Gin didn't need to look at her face to know she was smirking. "Honda was working with Sherry because of their comparable intelligences and their closeness in age until you had him transferred to work in another science division on a different project because you were jealous."

Curaçao had not known he was interested in Sherry in that way at the time and was only commenting on him being jealous with the benefit of hindsight. Still...

"No, he was transferred because he was a clingy, needy little shit that wouldn't leave Sherry alone and she couldn't get her work done. My own feelings towards that wuss had nothing to do with it," he corrected irately.

"So you were jealous," Curaçao retorted with a teasing smirk as she placed her hand on the scanner and the door unsealed itself to let them exit the data center

Gin just glared at her and stalked away while she giggled at his retreating back.

---

Got quite a few notes to write down here! You know, I was never sure if I was going to end up writing the scene where Sherry was attacked by the alien that later caused her sixth sense to develop, but since it's playing such a large focus in Haibara's mind right now, it made sense for me to write it. The way that I wrote Sherry fall when the tentacles grabbed her was something I wrote from experience except that I was pulled forward by a dog and then my toe caught on the edge of the cement and I fell forward just as painfully and breathlessly as Sherry did. Also, the palms of my hands got scraped up just as badly, but I wasn't in shock and it hurt like the dickens! I couldn't even close my fingers without making it hurt!

I actually got the species name for the Tethuidian from the name for the taxonomic Order that squids belong to: Tethuidia.

Wow, I'm making a reference to actual characters from the Men in Black movies. I've never seen the third one and don't really plan on it, but based on what I can tell from the timelines of the movies, Shiho would have been sent to America after Agent K had come back to work with Agent J after his brief retirement from the Men in Black, which is good because Jay would not have been able to handle Shiho, and being essentially raised by Kay would be an excellent way to explain how her personality still ended up so stoic and cool in this universe if she wasn't raised by a crime syndicate.

Lookie! I found a way to explain Curaçao's awesome memorization ability in a way that makes sense based on what we know of her ability and some guesswork looking at the brain scans in "Darkest Nightmare."

And then there's Generic, a 17-year-old boy of the Black Organization that was featured exclusively in the Special Manga of the Detective Conan and was not written by Aoyama-sama. He probably won't be mentioned again, but I just wanted to include him for a bit. Despite my searching, I could not find any kind of alcohol called generic, so I decided that in this version, 'Generic' isn't a codename, it's just an insulting nickname that Gin calls him.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Stay warm and safe this holiday season and I'll see you all in the new year!