When the anniversary of Akemi Miyano's death came, Ai didn't go to school. She didn't ask him to make up an excuse, but what else could he do? He warned her that the only good excuse was to say she was ill, and that would invite problems. The Detective Boys would probably want to visit. What was he going to say then—that she was too ill to be seen? "Tell them whatever you want," she texted to him when he asked. He scoffed on reading that.
Of course, things only got worse from there. They had handouts to take home, which meant Conan would have to take Ai's copies and make a delivery. Ai had been scheduled for duty during lunch, so Conan took that over, too. Then, of course, the four of them ran into a dead body in a tree on their way home from school. How a dead man ended up five meters in the air was, unfortunately, the only thing interesting about the case, and having to corrall the Detective Boys on his own was no easy feat, either. They were good kids, but they still had a lot of learning to do about the finer points of detective work, and with no one else in on his secret to talk to, Conan felt like he was going to lose his voice after trying to speak like a child for so long.
When he did finally make it to the Professor's, Ai was predictably holed up in her basement lab. She wasn't working, and she'd hardly eaten. From what the Professor could tell, she'd been listening to her mother's tapes all day. Conan didn't bother asking about them, knowing she wouldn't talk about it if she didn't want to, but when he urged her to go upstairs and eat dinner, she spoke up.
"Each meal could be our last, you know," she pointed out. "I think I'd like to have something fancy before I die."
None of them could afford things like that often, let alone every day, but he gladly would've paid for that a thousand times over if it would've made a difference, but it wouldn't. Ai may have worried about Gin or Vermouth or someone else coming after her, but in Conan's opinion, the real danger was the threat inside her own head. He could install cameras on the Professor's property and have the police keep tabs on them, but he couldn't keep those dark thoughts out of her skull.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked curtly.
"Just go," she said, still with her headphones on. "I'm fine."
"I said I wouldn't."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He wasn't going to waste his time explaining. He needed to get home for dinner.
"Kudo-kun."
He stopped at the doorway. "What?"
"There's something I don't understand from one of my mother's tapes," she explained. "Some kind of coded riddle. Would you give it a try?"
A coded riddle, huh? Leave it to her mom to put something in there like that. She must not have trusted that everything she said would be left alone. Ai had already written it down, but he'd need everything—the point in the tape where her mother had said the lines, the context, all of that.
She let him sit in her chair as she rewound the tape to the right time, and for some reason, she was smiling about it. He asked her what she was so happy about all of a sudden, and she only turned it around against him. "Look at you," she said. "Given a case you instantly cast all your worries away. It's so predictable."
Under a different set of circumstances, he might've been irked that she was making fun of him, but knowing what day it was, and that she would never let him listen to her mother's tapes lightly, he let it slide.
After all, he was trying to keep those dark thoughts out of her mind, and as long as she thought making fun of him was more important, that was mission accomplished.
For CoAi Week 2018 Prompt #2 – "Protect"