Act 1 Scene 4 – 嘘吐け [Usotsuke] 'Liar'
Conan was late for lunch, and after the past few weeks, or rather, the past two years, they knew better than to ignore it.
"Conan! Where are you?" Ran and Sonoko called. Their voices together made their call the loudest, and first that Conan and Areku heard.
Kogorou Mouri's call was a little more colorful, but held the same meaning.
It sounded like everyone was out searching for Conan. They aimed for Ran and Sonoko, who were looking in the garden behind their cottage.
"I found him!" Ran spotted them first, and ran over to meet them. "There you are! And who is this?"
He grinned up to Ran, turning his child-act up a few notches. "Ran, this is Areku. I fell, and he took me to the doctor, so we should give him lunch!" He showed off the big bandaid on his elbow.
"You took Conan to the doctor?" Ran asked. "Thank you so much!"
Areku look bashfully at the ground and said, "It wasn't any trouble. You don't need to repay me."
"I disagree," Sonoko said, grabbing Areku's hand. "Come on, everyone's already waiting." She started dragging him towards the restaurant.
"He-HERE? There's no way… I can't…" Areku stuttered, his Japanese failing him. Ran took up the rear-guard, and together they marched barefooted, raggedy Areku into the fancy restaurant, and sat him down between them. Conan took the seat on the other side of Ran. The waiters, who were busy seating the rest of the group gave him icy glares. "They don't like me here!" Areku whispered.
"I'm Sonoko Suzuki, and you are?" Sonoko asked, leaning closer.
"Umm…" he turned red under his tan. "I'm Areku Kusanagi." His voice was almost a whisper.
"So how did you save Foureyes?" She got a little closer, and Areku leaned a little away.
"I just led him to the doctor and led him back here, that-that's all."
"Give the poor boy some space," Sonoko's mother barked. "He's a small town boy; he isn't used to Tokyo girls." Her tone shifted dramatically into a soft, welcoming lilt as she addressed Areku. "We're very glad that you looked after little Conan. He always manages to find himself some sort of trouble."
"You've got that right," Kogorou said loudly from the other end of the table. "He's been shot, blown up, kidnapped… all within the last year!"
His dark eyes went wide. "Really? Being a detective must be really dangerous!"
Ran sat down on the other side of Sonoko, her new place setting ready.
"Normally Ran does the rescuing," Sonoko giggled. "She's like his personal bodyguard! She's a Karate champion, and she's won all kinds of awards!"
"You're exaggerating," Ran said, smiling.
One of the waiters took Mr. Suzuki, Sonoko's father, aside and whispered something to him. Areku noticed, and made himself smaller.
"Is it true that you're homeless, boy?" he asked, and the entire table fell silent, and stared at Areku. His sun-bleached, tattered clothing and messy hair suddenly seemed important.
"If… if you want me to go…" Areku said, not looking up, tensing.
"No, we don't want you to go," Mr. Suzuki said, sitting back in his chair. He tapped the waitress and said, "Tell them to get a cot ready for this young man. He can sleep in Mr. Mouri's room along with young Conan."
Areku jumped up and bowed, saying, "Thank-you very very very much sir!"
"Sit down boy, and order something to eat," Mr. Suzuki said, resting his hands on his large stomach.
He sat down quickly, blushing even more. A frowning waitress handed him a menu with a sharp "Here." He looked at it a moment and set it down, not saying anything.
"What's wrong?" hissed Ran into his ear.
"I can't…" he mumbled, hunching over, "…read it."
"Oh my gosh," Sonoko said quietly, her hand over her mouth. "I didn't even think about that. You don't go to school, do you?"
He shook his head.
"Well then, we'll read it too you. Problem solved!" Sonoko grinned. Ran put the menu back in his hands. The two of them leaned over a madly blushing illiterate Areku, explaining the menu and giving their recommendations.
After ordering, Areku held onto the menu, and started asking about the kanji readings. "That really says, 'Lightly roasted chicken with bamboo'?" he pointed to the phrase he was referring too. "Because that looks like 'the garden bird is burning bamboo' to me."
"You can read Kanji?" Sera piped up, brows furrowed. "I thought you couldn't read?"
He shrugged. "I can read Kanji – in Chinese, not Japanese. My Chinese isn't Mandarin either – it's a dialect that I've never seen anyone else outside of China speak, so I think it's non-standard."
"You come from Tibet, right? Did you learn Chinese from the soldiers?" Conan asked, thinking of the history of the region.
The teen bit his lip, thinking. "The soldiers didn't teach us anything. There was a school that we all had to go to. The teachers were trying to teach us Mandarin, but they themselves didn't speak it natively, so I learned that strange Chinese instead."
"So when did you learn English?" Conan asked.
"He speaks English too?" Sera asked, studying him.
"Yeah," Areku self-consciously fiddled with the corner of his napkin. "We ran away to the south, in India, and we learned English at the orphanage, because rich foreigners would want to adopt kids who could speak English."
"So, how did you end up in Japan?" Sonoko asked.
He winced. "Let's talk about something else."
Sera caught Conan's eye and gave a perplexed frown. Conan nodded.
Areku went back to amusing his hosts by reading the Kanji in Chinese, the way he knew them, then retranslating the phrases into Japanese. Their end of the table was quite lively, and the meal lasted for a whole two hours. By the end, they'd gotten used to the scraggly teen.
Looking at the skill that Areku had for manipulating the group, and endearing himself to them, Conan figured he was witnessing Areku's survival strategy. Be non-threatening, make them feel in control, make them laugh… make them want to keep you around them. Conan must have disrupted his strategy by frightening him earlier. It was probably second nature to him now. First nature would be hiding.
After dinner, Sonoko's father took the boy aside and spoke to him quietly, with a concerned expression on his face. The teen kept his head bowed, staring at the floor, and eventually nodded. Mr. Suzuki tried to give him a hearty clap on the shoulder, but the teen flinched away from it, and scurried to catch up with Masumi, who was waiting at the door.
"I'm not a charity case," Conan heard him grumble in English, but he kept his cheerful expression on.
The sun had heated up the air quite a bit, and the humidity outside the air conditioned building was like stepping into a sauna. "This is sooooo nice," Sonoko said, "going outside and actually feeling warmer. I bet we could even go swimming!"
Areku laughed. "The water is still pretty cold. The currents here come from the north, so the water isn't as nice as the air, at least not until summer."
"Then we should go shopping!" Sonoko countered. "You know your way around town, right? You can show us where everything is, and we can buy you some new clothes…"
Areku scowled. "I don't need any new clothes. I don't need any things either. Just because I don't have much doesn't mean I need more."
"Oh," said Ran. "Did we insult you? Sorry, that wasn't what we meant. We just want to hang out with you and get to know you more, and thank you for helping Conan."
"I know," he sighed. "You've already thanked me for helping Conan with the meal and bed. Over thanked, I think." The girl's faces drooped, and Areku quickly said, "But I do want to hang out and get to know you better! Just not in a way that ends up with me having more than I can carry in my bag."
Sonoko looked puzzled. "How to socialize with someone that doesn't involve buying things…"
"While you think on that, I'll grab my bag and stow it in the room you want me in," Areku said, starting off at a brisk jog towards the shoreline.
"Wait up!" Sera called, "I have some questions to ask you."
"Me too!" said Conan, starting up after them.
Once they were out of earshot of the others, Areku slowed to a walk and let them catch up to him.
Conan looked up at Sera, the two of them building a strategy on the spot.
"You know," Sera began. "The Chinese government has been mandating the use of Mandarin Chinese for schooling, even forcing Uyghers and other ethnic minorities to learn it. They bring in teachers from the big cities in the East, where they speak Mandarin natively."
"Not to mention, the Chinese government simplified the Kanji to make them easier to read and write. Those words would all have been unintelligible to him," Conan added.
"Why would he lie about the place he came from?" Sera wondered out loud.
"Maybe because I don't want people to know where I came from," Areku said. He was hiding his eyes again, and his fists clenched. Fear and anger… mostly fear. They were breaking through his defenses. Time to close the noose.
"What would the harm in it be? If it was painful, I'd understand not wanting to talk about it, but why replace one sad story with another sad story?" Conan asked.
"Unless, knowing that sort of information is dangerous…" Sera guessed, stroking her chin as though trying to puzzle out some great mystery.
"Or he just wants to make fun of us," Conan said, crossing his arms and shaking his head.
Areku made a strangled growl and spun around to face them. "What the hell do you want from me?"
"You're in some kind of trouble," Conan looking out of the corner of his eye to Sera.
Taking the cue, Sera added, "We're detectives, and we can help."
"Now there's two of you?" Areku teared at his hair. "Are all Japanese kids obsessed with being detectives?"
"Don't change the subject. What sort of trouble are you in?" Sera said, looking him directly in the eye.
He evaded her glare, then spun and broke into a sprint towards his tree. Suddenly he ducked into the thick forest and vanished behind the veil of vegetation.
"Dammit," Sera cursed. "No choice but to follow him in there. Did you get an idea of its layout when he led you through last time?"
Conan shook his head. "I could recognize the path he took me on, but I don't know much else. It's dense in there."
They slipped into the forest, instantly being swallowed by the trees, losing all of the landmarks. The sun was lost to them, the canopy was so thick. There was a game trail where Areku had run into the forest. A few yards in, and it split into two trails, with no obvious signs pointing to the right path.
"Shall we split up? We can't get too far without hitting the town or the road, so getting completely lost is unlikely. We'll be able to cover more ground," Sera suggested.
"Sounds like a plan." He walked to the left, and Sera walked to the right.
A few twists and turns in and a newly bent branch told Conan he was probably going to right direction. Then a quiet whine, like a puppy dog confused over why its master was angry, confirmed Conan's suspicions.
Areku was slumped on the ground at the base of a tree. Spotting Conan, he said softly, "When people know something, their behavior changes. They act in accordance to that knowledge, and that alone is enough of a pattern for them to find me… and kill… everyone…"
This wasn't a normal crime syndicate. Normal syndicates could be bloody, but killing everyone would mean they wouldn't have people to do business with, which meant their goal wasn't business. A cult perhaps? "No one is that powerful, not without making a lot of enemies just as strong."
"They said they had people in the government."
"I could say I was the Emperor of Japan, but that wouldn't make it true."
"They were able to catch other people who ran away and kill them. Then they'd put their kids' to work in their place."
This pattern sounded suspiciously like the story of Shiho Miyano. It was worth the guess, at least. "These people, do they wear black?"
The teen looked up, his brows furrowed. "I hadn't really noticed any sort of color scheme. Why do you ask?"
Conan put back on his kid-face and smiled, "The people you were describing reminded me of some cases I saw when watching Uncle Mouri. They get rid of anyone they suspect of knowing anything, even business partners. Their hitmen wear black, but their spies don't, at least not often. Their scientists, at least Sherry," the teen winced at the name, "wears red."
Areku finally met Conan's eyes. They weren't focused on Conan but on some distant, horrible memory. "This Mouri person, he lets you know these things?" His jaw didn't move much when he talked. He'd tensed up. This guy was definitely connected to them somehow.
"He doesn't know the cases are connected. I'm doing the investigation on my own. You don't have to blame him," Conan said quickly.
"Then what did they do to you?" The words were sharp, rapid, designed to turn the conversation around and distract him, make him stop needling.
Match this aggression, with aggression. Make him break, it doesn't matter if he's hurt, make him confess. He knew the name Sherry. He was connected to the Black Organization somehow. This chance couldn't be let go of, before the teen ran away again and vanished without a trace.
"They tried to kill me with Sherlock." If he knew about APTX 4869, and its nickname, derived from the Japanese pronunciation of "Sherlock" – "shyaarokku" and those numbers – "shi-ya-ro-ku", then he would have to have been intimately involved in its making.
The teen stared at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, body ridged. Confusion, no probably terror.
"You recognize it, don't you? Which means you're probably part of the team that developed it."
"Alive." The boy voice was shaking. "You're still…"
"They must really mess with their scientists heads."
"Wrong." His voice was small. "I wasn't making… I'm not…" he said in English, his Japanese failing him.
Conan frowned. They liked to isolate their scientists. Sherry had been raised in the organization for the sole purpose of working on their project. Another teen scientist like her wasn't impossible, though this guy hadn't seemed particularly intelligent. "Then what are you?"
The teen started shaking. His eyes weren't focused anymore, and the blood was draining from his face. His lips turned the color of the bloodless flesh, a pale yellow. This was getting dangerous. He might faint here, in the middle of the woods, and Conan couldn't carry him.
He stepped forward cautiously, and grabbed Areku's arm. Areku shuddered and shook off Conan's hand. "They won't find you. Tell me everything you know about them, and you can stay hidden. Just give me a way to contact you when I've rid the world of them."
The color was returning to his face, and he'd started breathing again. "If you fail, you'll be a lab rat. If they find out that it worked…"
"What worked? It's a poison, isn't it?"
The teen shook his head. "They want to make people like me."
"Like you? How?" Conan recalled something that Haibara had said, about never wanting to make a poison.
"Immortal." That was absurd. Then again, Vermouth had played the part of both Sharon and Chris Vineyard, and he and Haibara had become children again. He didn't understand the science necessary to believe this claim. He'd have to ask Haibara later. The teen drew his knees to his chest and covered his head with his palms, the fetal position. He seemed genuinely in distress, and didn't seem to be lying. Conan felt a pang of guilt. He'd have to help Areku feel safe again, perhaps hide him in Oosaka, with Hattori. Keeping such an important piece close at hand, in Tokyo, would probably be more dangerous, especially if they knew his present face and appearance.
Not hearing a response, Areku continued. "You could shoot me in the head, or chop my head off, and my pieces would come back together. I've been living like this for thousands of years, and every time I'm found, many people die. I can't be found. I can not be found. And now you also…" his voice shook "… can not be found." He suddenly lunged at Conan, knocking him to the ground. In one smooth motion, he was on top of the little chest, hand clamped over Conan's nose and mouth.
Conan was too shocked to struggle at first. This guy had seemed so passive, so weak, that he could turn violent so quickly hadn't occurred to him.
The teen started speaking. His words came out too fast, making his Japanese slightly slurred and his English accent more apparent. "You need to disappear, like I have. I'll show you how to live between the cracks. It'll be really hard, but you have to do it, because your existence alone means they'll keep trying, keep killing, keep fighting for this. They must not know it worked yet, which is good, that makes it easier." Conan choked on sweating palm on his face, trying to squirm out of its grasp. The teen was suffocating him, believing that he could survive it.
Author's Note
Japanese is classified as a Topic-Comment language. This means that you start a sentence by saying what you're talking about, then the rest of the sentence. We do this in English sometimes too, generally framed something like this:
In March, the snow melts into a vast sea of mud.
My friend Cait, she speaks Mandarin Chinese.
About going to work tomorrow, can't we call in sick?
As for me, I like linguistics.
But, this isn't the primary structure of a sentence in English. Instead, we have "Subject Verb Object" and stick to that most of the time. In Japanese, you'd use a Topic-Comment structure first, in a way that would sound awkward directly translated into English.
Both of these, for example, would be a translation of "I go to college."
私は大学に行く。(Watashi-wa daigaku-ni iku.) – As for me, I go to college.
大学は私が行く。(Daigaku-wa watashi-ga iku.) - About college, I go to it.
These sentences are perfectly grammatical in Japanese, but weird sounding in English. To make the dialogue sound more like a translation from Japanese, I applied Topic-Comment structures where I could without sounding awkward. See if you can spot any!
また来週！(See you next week!)
dreamingfifi