Disclaimer: I do not own Detective Conan.

Oneshot Six

Clone

"It all makes sense now! Why you're so similar to Shinichi!" Ran shouted as she burst through the entrance of the detective agency, attention latching onto Conan at once. The shrunken teen had thrown himself back from where he sat doing his kiddie homework in alarm, and Kogoro merely lazily raised his head to give Ran a glazed-over glance before allowing it to flop back onto his crossed arms, returning to his drunken snooze.

"You're his clone!"

. . .

"Haaah?"

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Ran was staring at him again. Conan squirmed under her scrutiny, the crackers that he had been snacking on losing their taste even when he forced himself to ignore the heavy gaze resting solidly on him. Things had been like this ever since Ran had found out that he was Shinichi's clone. Or at least, thought that she had things figured out. Conan wasn't going to dissuade her of this, knowing that if people came to their own conclusions they were not as likely to probe deeper.

Still, the constant stares were really starting to wear his nerves thin, especially whenever his sorta-girlfriend appeared to be lost in thought while doing so. Such as now. Suddenly Ran straightened up, her eyes widening as some epiphany dawned upon her.

"Conan-kun, if you're Shinichi's clone then why do you wear glasses? Shinichi doesn't need them," before Conan could respond, let alone think up an excuse on the spot, Ran snatched the glasses off of his face and held them up close in front of her own eyes.

"Hey, these lenses aren't real at all!" she exclaimed, much to Conan's consternation. Inwardly he was panicking, scrambling to come up with an excuse, and frankly enough his countenance was not much calmer. After a few more moments of examining the glasses – fortunately not finding the hidden devices it possessed or realizing that the glass was bulletproof (and wouldn't that take some explaining?) – she turned her attention back to Conan.

"Conan-kun, is there something you're not telling me?" Ran stressed Conan's fake name in a way he did not like, almost accusatory. Fortunately, her engrossment with the glasses had allowed him just enough time to come up with a viable excuse.

"They belonged to someone important to me! I had the lenses replaced since the old ones made everything weird and blurry!" Conan chirped, laying on the small child attitude that he knew his "big sister" had a weakness for. Sure enough, Ran visage relaxed, and a flicker of – guilt? – passed over her face for a moment. Then Ran smiled at her young charge.

"Eh, who was that?" curiosity tinged her tone.

"Eh, ah, it – it doesn't matter now. He's gone."

Inwardly, Conan winced. He had come up with the response on the spot, having half-expected to have to do so anyway, but now he would have to add more to his admittedly enigmatic backstory if further questions were asked.

Fortunately, Ran realized that she had hit upon what would have been a sensitive matter, had Conan not really been Shinichi. Her smile faltered, and then was forced into a slightly too-cheery one for the boy's sake.

"You should go along and play now. I'll clean up your dishes." with that said, Ran leaned over and carefully slid the spectacles back onto the child's nose and then drew back. After staring at Conan for a moment longer, she started picking up the dishes used for his snack. Eager to get away from Ran before she went back on a warpath investigating into him and developing further suspicions of his and Shinichi's connection, Conan needed no further prompting. He was on his feet in a moment and hurrying out the door of the detective agency with shouted word that he would be at Agasa-hakase's.

Ran strode into the kitchen and placed the plate and glass into the sink. Turning on the sink and picking up a bottle of soap and a washrag, she started pondering the mystery of one Edogawa Conan. Their brief conversation had caused her to realize that she really did not know much of his past at all. The precocious boy had just popped into her life one day and quickly became an immediate feature in it, as if to replace her wayward not-boyfriend.

As suds ran over her hands and made the adroit movements of her fingers slick as she washed the dishes that had piled up, a frown tugged the corners of Ran's lips down and she furrowed her brows as a few disturbing facts that she knew about Conan came to mind.

One, that he was actually a clone, and of her childhood friend. That had been a shocker when the results of her school biology project came back with that being discovered. Ran wondered if Shinichi even knew that the boy was his clone. Considering that Shinichi seemed very familiar with her charge, she deduced from this that yes, he did. For some reason he had been passing Conan off as his cousin. That made sense, since who would believe that he had a younger clone of himself if he ever claimed that? What had happened to that arrogant detective, that he had been cloned? Ran shuddered as she came to the conclusion that no, she probably did not want to know, that it had probably – undoubtedly – been unethical at best, knowing the kind of trouble that Shinichi was prone to getting into willingly or not. She was pretty sure this had fallen under the latter, and the implications lingered like shadows around the edge of her mind, guaranteed to terrify should she delve too deep into them.

Determined not to continue down such a dark line of thought, Ran shook her head clear of it and moved on.

When had it happened? Ran was not the scientific sort, but from what she had heard of the cloning process the product – she cringed a moment later, noticing that the word she used dehumanized not only clones (although she had never heard of a successful human clone before Conan himself), but Conan as he was one – developed at the normal rate of the species they were cloned from. Thus, Shinichi had to have been cloned several years ago back when he and she were preadolescents.

Conan being Shinichi's clone also explained so much that had been suspicious, if not just plain off. May fourth being Conan's birthday, why he had expressed no want for his parents despite their noticeable absence, why her risky donation of blood had been a surprising success . . .

But in place of this new understanding it was as if, concerning Conan, she had been wandering over a frozen pond covered by a snow drift, and only with the revelation of his true nature had some of the snow been cleared away to reveal the thin ice cracking beneath her feet. Underneath that fragile shell was frigid water . . . deadly and dark, a world of unknowns.

And for that matter, who was Edogawa Fumiyo; perhaps one of the creators of her charge? Conan didn't have any parents, of course. Conan's "mother" had come to take the boy she had come to care for as her own younger brother so suddenly, and he had not seemed eager at all to see her. Heck, that over-the-top reaction of his was probably genuine, and not just sulking as his "mother" had claimed! Acrid guilt ate at her stomach and sent it into knots as Ran realized just how much she had let Conan down. Just because he was a kid didn't mean that she couldn't take him seriously, especially with how mature he could show himself to be. She should have known better than to take the word of a complete stranger at face value like that!

Well, whoever she was, she hadn't been able to take Conan back for long. That was a relief, although Ran still worried her lower lip as she scrubbed at a tenacious spot of sauce sticking on one of the plates she was cleaning.

Still, although the imposter's attempt had somehow been thwarted (and Ran was determined to get that story from the boy clone sooner or later, no matter how much wheedling she had to do), how many others remained that had something to do with Conan's existence? Creating a human clone would demand who knew how many people collaborating to produce such an end result, in addition to whatever child-rearing they would then have to go through. Conan had mentioned an important person, so there was at least one more . . .

. . . even though that important person was 'gone'. A shudder wracked Ran's form and the plate she held escaped from her slippery fingers and clattered loudly into the sink. The connotation was not a good one.

These people, whoever they were, were dangerous, weren't they? Ran had encountered far too many criminals than was what should be normal for a high school girl, even one with a detective as outstanding as her father, but this was unlike anything she had ever been caught up in before. If there was any way to describe the epiphany, it was like suddenly discovering that sharks were circling one just out of sight in the gloom of water below.

There was no doubt in her mind that they were dangerous. If nothing else would convince Ran, the fact that Conan had never once balked at the sight of a corpse since she knew him would. Why had she never thought this through before, never questioned how it was that a child could be raised to the point that a dead body would not upset them! Obviously, poor Conan must have been faced with corpses before he had come to live with her and her father, there was no other way that he could have been so desensitized to them.

Ran smacked a fist into the upward-facing palm of her other hand, sending a spray of water at her face that she did not even flinch at due to having found her resolution. That was it, she would help Conan whether he wanted it or not and see to it that this mysterious organization would meet its end!

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AN: Of course, Shinichi is now going to have to bluff more to add to his identity as Conan, newly-exposed "clone" while Ran, in the process of looking for something that isn't actually there, will end up stumbling upon the Black Organization and making a whole mess of things for everyone. And by everyone, I mean everyone. Not that I'm going to continue this anytime soon or anything . . . But seriously, clone makes so much more sense than "shrunken best friend/not-boyfriend". Pssh.