Somewhere in her list of tasks between watering the garden and slicing vegetables for dinner, the police knocked on her door, toting her daughter covered in dried mud and leaves. "We caught bank robbers, mama!" shrieked Ayumi in horrifying delight, smiling through the abrasions on her cheeks.

By the time her consciousness finally exited the stratosphere and crashed back to earth, she realized the officers had been speaking to her for 15 minutes, assuring her that "Yes, Mrs. Yoshida, your daughter is fine other than some scrapes and bruises", "Yes, the other children are safe," and "Yes, the suspects are in custody". Her fingers moved mechanically, copying down names and locations and phone numbers, while her mind struggled to catch up, mired in dark forest groves and abandoned campgrounds.

"You sure she's alright?" she asked for the third time, trying and failing to spell the names of the arrested suspects onto her to-do list, underneath "Buy Laundry Detergent" and "Stop Overwatering the Begonias (1/2 watering can only)". Ayumi bounced on muddy shoes a few too many feet away, sweetly interrogating an officer about buried treasure and brandished guns.

"We had the medics look over them all and tend to their wounds, Mrs. Yoshida," repeated the first officer with a practiced, patient smile. It was late on a Friday afternoon and this primary school shakedown probably ended in a swamp of paperwork and cheap take-out. Her focus drifted to the police uniform and, in that moment of weakness, it unspooled memories of cramped desks, guarded by rumpled-looking men with hard eyes. Black ink and stale coffee. She almost felt the cold metal of a hand-cuff against her wrist.

"Mrs. Yoshida?"

"Himari," she whispered, lapsing 10 years into the past out of reflex to authority.

"Himari," the officer conceded without any emotion, "Ayumi is fine. She just needs some rest. I'm sure you could do with some sleep, as well." He added that last part politely and she would have taken offense if it wasn't blindingly obvious. She swayed in the light spring breeze.

Ayumi wasn't finished with her bright-eyed inquisition but the distance between them had metaphorically doubled as of late, now that she moonlighted as a crime fighter. Himari pulled her closer, smoothing her daughter's dirt-stained hoodie as Ayumi resorted to screeching the rest of her questions behind a breathless smile.

"Some things have to remain classified for now as the case unfolds, but we'll give you the rest of the information when we can," said the first officer. Himari could probably just read his badge to get his name but that kind of detail would result in solidified memories, of which she wanted none. Her daughter was safe and that was the only footnote that mattered. Everything else could stay [REDACTED] for all she cared.

Ayumi finally realized her position in space had changed and her eyes readjusted, focusing on the closer target. "Aren't you glad we were there to help, mister?!" The officer looked down at the girl, his formal mask shifting, machine-like, into a placating smile.

"We're glad that you and the other children are safe," he replied neutrally.

Ayumi crossed her arms and shifted her stance into something probably borrowed from a television show. "Conan said those bad guys had been on the run for months. It was the Detective Boys who finally found them, and we weren't even looking for them! What had you guys been doing all that time?"

The directness was astonishing from the six-year old that used to hide when packages were delivered to the door. She didn't know whether to be proud or worried based on her own upbringing, when sassiness picked up an edge and became stubbornness. Where the little girl had been sharpening herself, Himari had no idea.

The officer nodded absently and infuriatingly before ignoring her daughter's question. "We'll keep you updated, Mrs. Yoshida."

She re-bandaged Ayumi's scrapes herself because her mothering track record took a serious hit today and treating her daughter's wounds felt like treating her own. Ayumi recited her tale multiple times with conflicting details but Himari cared very little about the plot, only the ending, in which her daughter was still here, alive, sitting on the edge of the bathtub getting slathered with antibiotic gel.

"Mama," Ayumi said quietly, "Are you mad at me?" Himari scrubbed out some stray gravel from the divots in her knees. The cops did a decent job treating the wounds but didn't bother washing off the dirt, which was probably a metaphor for something.

"I'm not mad, sweetie. I'm just glad you're okay. Tip your head forward, please." She ran her fingers through Ayumi's hair, checking for stray bleeds, spiders, or concealed weapons.

"You've been quiet for a really long time."

Himari rewet the wash cloth and scrubbed dirt from under her fingernails as she squiggled on the porcelain. Yesterday, she was marveling at how much she had grown but today her hands looked so small.

"Mama, you're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Spacing out. It happened outside when the police were talking to you. I bet you haven't been listening to my story at all."

Honestly, she was pretty hazy on the details because they made her queasy and Ayumi's memory was more crayon-drawing than photographic. What she lacked in historical accuracy, she made up for in evocative storytelling and pulled heartstrings. There were frayed edges to her tale where the narrative didn't quite match up, but Himari summarized as best she could while Ayumi crossed her arms behind her head, taking it in with the gravity of a war tribunal.

"Alright, that's pretty good, I guess. But it was Conan who distracted him, not Genta." Himari had finished up with triage and Ayumi flexed her knees under stiff bandages. "He was the one who probably got the most hurt out of all of us."

There was that name, again. The newcomer.

"Is Conan okay?"

"Yeah, the medics took him back to the ambulance first. He didn't want to go but they wrapped him up in the thermal blanket and carried him back." She giggled like a gremlin. "He really didn't like that."

Nothing seemed to divert her brightness. Cover her in dirt and she still shined. A gun had been in her face four hours ago and her laughter hadn't dimmed. It was either resilience or naivety, and Himari was terrified of the day when they both figured out the difference. Her daughter's closest brush with the concept of death had been a distant great-uncle. Loss was a foreign concept that stared down at Ayumi from the far edge of time's arrow.

"Mama, this is Apple. Do you copy, over, ksshh." Ayumi mumbled the words into her hands, clutching the pretend walkie-talkie.

Her message hit the right frequency and cut through the static. "Yes, yes, Apple. Sunflower is here, over."

"Kssshh, glad you're back, Sunflower. We were getting worried, over." Apple went radio silent, and kicked a leg outward, grimacing at the bandages that would mercifully reduce her mobility for a few days. "These are real annoying."

"They double as your restraints, because you're grounded."

"What?!" came the expected screech, audible without imaginary radio equipment. "But we caught them! We caught the bad guys! We won! Why am I being punished?"

Himari pulled the trash can out from under the bathroom sink and filled it with medical fallout. "Should have called for back-up, Apple. Over."

"Mama, the game's over. This is serious. We foiled a bank robbery!" She scowled an adorable scowl, crossing her arms behind her head again.

The gesture was alien and weird, out of place on the little girl's frame. "Are you stretching or something?"

"No!" spat Ayumi, overflowing with first-grade venom.

"Then what's this new power pose you're mean-mugging me with?"

The effort to remain bratty was too much for her daughter's delicate constitution, and she deflated with a sign. Her limbs unspooled and she pressed them against the porcelain, cooling her scrapes. "Conan does it a lot, but I'm not really sure why. I guess I kinda picked it up from him."

"A little follow-the-leader?"

"It's not like that, mama. When he does it, it usually means something serious is going on. He does it when he's thinking really hard. Or when he's mad. He does it a lot."

"Conan's mad all the time?"

"No. Well, maybe. He does this a lot." She repeated the gesture, interlocking her arms behind her head. "Usually when he's really trying to figure something out, which is a lot of the time. But he also does it when he's mad..."

"You hang out with this boy even though he's mad all the time?"

The girl rolled her eyes, because the apple never fell far from the tree no matter how sweet it started out in the spring. "He's not mad at us, mama."

Himari knew the us meant her, Genta, and Mitsuhiko, because the three had been inseparable since toddlerhood. Which is why this newcomer gave her pause. Ayumi had made "Best Friends" bracelets for the entire class, because she didn't believe it was an exclusive title, but she had stuck like glue to two boys for years. Or rather, they stuck to her.

"Who is he mad at, then?"

Ayumi looked pensive, and muscle memory drew her arms back behind her head, almost meditatively. The gesture made her look older, which sent little knives into Himari's heart. "He's not even really mad. Just kind of… fed up?" She paused to organize her thoughts, carefully choosing her next words from old vocabulary tests. "Irritated, that's a good word for it. He's always really polite with the teachers, and nice to us, but in class he just looks… irritated."

Himari recalled the many ways school irritated her growing up, distilling the preteen fury into ink for her journals, but she'd been out of primary education by a couple years at that point. Old enough to see how everyone was a hypocrite who did what they want but too young to realize it was the best way to move forward.

"Sweetie, you don't need to hang out with this boy if he makes you uncomfortable."

"Mama, it's like you're not even listening to me. Conan is usually really nice and really cool."

"Cool enough to get you involved with bank robbers?"

"Yes!" She answered with wicked glee, then narrowed her eyes. The gesture was simultaneously foreign and perfect on her face. "Wait, you meant that as a bad thing, didn't you?!"

Ayumi seethed for another 15 minutes as Himari scrubbed the last remnants of the day from her. Eventually her teakettle temper cooled underneath the washcloth and a dose of soothing, muscle-relief gel Himari had found at the bottom of the first aid kit. The physical stains of the day may have been gone but the mental ones couldn't be wiped away so easily, and Ayumi was nodding off by the end, threatening to pitch backwards and brain herself on the bathtub.

When Himari finished and coaxed her awake with the promise of a warm bed, she didn't fight her for one, blessed night. Ayumi flopped herself off the tub onto both scraped feet, then tipped backwards as the joints refused to bend underneath six feet of gauze. Only the best for her little girl.

Himari reset her child's balance and Ayumi, in her infinite, sleepy patience, deigned to be scooped up and carried to her bedroom. Dinner was forgotten and the sun was beginning to crawl into its own bed at the far end of the horizon. She gently whispered the girl awake one last time to gulp down some water and a child's dose of Tylenol to ward off the night pains before tucking her in tightly.

Downstairs, Himari stood by the window as the breeze chased the sunset west. There were old cigarettes in her raincoat pocket and a very young, very foolish, and very persuasive part of her thought of scrounging them up. Instead, she tempered the urge by washing the rest of the dishes, though there were very few tonight as no dinner had been served. After that, she promptly vomited into the sink.

She turned on the hot water and let it run for two minutes, washing the bile down the drain, then soothed her empty stomach with a pilfered cigarette. She smoked in the backyard beneath the shadow of the fence, afraid her neighbors would take notice even as the light faded. She wasn't afraid enough to curb her vices but the wind mercifully blew away the evidence. The smoke tasted like pocket lint and a distant adolescence, when she felt she had all the answers.

She tapped the ashes onto the garden and smothered them with the remnants from the watering can, wondering where those answers were tonight.

Dizzy with hunger, smoke, and time, she fumbled her way back inside. She had forgotten to turn on a light, forcing her to paddle her way through the dark looking for the switch. When the bulb blazed bright and rekindled the nausea she had tried to chase away with nicotine, she collapsed into a chair by the kitchen counter.

I need to call Hideo. The thought was a reflex but greatly delayed this evening, only arriving now that the ghosts were vomited or smoked out of her system. And just like a reflex, it was useless most of the time it turned on, because Hideo was in North America. According to the numbers tacked to the refrigerator, decorated with stickers of stars and flowers, it would be 5 AM in New York City.

The phone was suddenly in her hand and she had already pressed three numbers before cancelling the call. It would do nothing but worry him, she reasoned. It would throw off his morning. Ayumi was home and clean and resembled a toddling pharmacy; there was nothing more to do tonight.

We could worry together, whispered a breathless and stupid part of her. Probably the part that had asked for a cigarette.

She relaxed the fist she didn't know she had been clenching and found a paper crushed between her fingers. She smoothed it over on her thigh, realizing it was the repurposed to-do list, now recruited for police work. Himari pressed the wrinkles out, searching around neat, tidy rows of tasks for the scrawl in between the margins, of robbers and would-be murders and almost-victims. One name stood out in particular, foreign yet distressingly familiar tonight. Edogawa Conan. She traced the letters with her finger, following them to the next block of words.

Mouri Detective Agency. A number followed, and the phone beckoned.

Thank you to everyone who has read this! I really appreciate it and love recieving any and all comments!

I imagined this story taking place within "Living With Strangers" but, honestly, it could work as a stand-alone, as well. For those who haven't read my other work, "Living with Strangers" is basically the same as canon except that Shinichi and Ran did not grow up together, focusing on themes of abandonment, trust, and sibling/family dynamics. However, I still feel people can enjoy this story without knowledge of the other series (which is still ongoing!)

Thank you!