C. Interlude II

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"Once a person dies, 'Why?' is a useless question," she continues softly after a pause during which the two of them reflected on different things. Although he is deep in his thoughts, he is listening, but neither of them is looking at each other. His gaze is fixed on the ground while hers is directed toward the horizon. "But we ask it anyway, because we want a reason to hate and to not forgive."

His head jerks up in reaction, and he looks at her. "Why not to understand?" he asks, feeling a pang of guilt, which completely erases his anger and bitterness to this whole affair. He is defending himself, he thinks. But he also realizes that his mind is clearing, and he begins to feel the excitement associated with solving a case – a feeling he has feared he would never again find since his failure to close the case of Saruwatari's murder.

"Because we can't understand," she replies in a whisper. "We don't want to understand."

Shinichi frowns. "That's not true," he blurts out, causing her to look up at him with wide eyes. He leans his back against the fence and slides down abruptly to the ground so that he is sitting and their eyes are at the same level. "If I'd told you the reason why I didn't save your sister, would you have hated me? Would you have killed me?"

Her jaws tighten and her shoulders tense. She hesitates but takes a deep breath and says, "Yes. If your reason is because you didn't care." She paused. "Did you?"

She is challenging him, he notices. He shakes his head but does not answer her question. "You wouldn't have," he says instead, and she looks away indignantly. "You wanted to understand. And you're capable of understanding."

"You know nothing," she says in a low voice, as if she is restraining herself from shouting. She looks into his eyes, hoping that what she says next would daunt him. "She killed him, didn't she? 'I've done what I've come to do.'"

Shinichi smiles. "Yes, Saruwatari killed her dead sister's boyfriend. You knew why, didn't you? Despite what you said. Because the circumstances were similar. Because you thought in similar ways as she did. But you know the difference, too. Something happened to you when it didn't happen to her."

She scoffs as she recalls the little argument they had when he first brought up the subject of that puzzling homicide. "So what did I mean? Now that you've figured out why she committed the murder...?"

Once again, he chooses not to answer her question. This time, however, it is not because he doesn't know the answer, but because there is no more need to answer it. For one reason, he wants her to stop running away. For another, as he looks into her eyes, he can tell that she has realized that he knows. Her gaze drops, and her facade of coldness disappears. She is so sad, he thinks and wants to put his arms around her to catch her tears.

But she smiles all of the sudden and looks at him. Her voice comes out soft and gentle. "You know? When I was in Hawaii, I kept asking myself, you and me... How did I feel about you exactly?" She pauses, and he looks at her, waiting for her to continue. "I needed you. Therefore I loved you. But it wasn't because I loved you that I needed you. Do you understand?"

His heart sinks, and he looks away.

"To her," she resumes, "your existence isn't crucial. She can live very well without you. But she loves you, hence she needs you by her side. I'm different." She shakes her head and says decisively, "No. No, I don't love you."

"I see," Shinichi says in a barely audible voice. He wonders if he can believe her words. All that she has analyzed, it seems so true. Yet, he wants to think, this is Haibara Ai, who is capable of twisting right to wrong, and vice versa, and et cetera. He wonders why he is thinking all of these. Another moment passes between them, and he decides to ask, "Why? From the time we met to the time I promised to protect you, it had been a while. Why do you still say that you needed me? Needed Edogawa Conan?"

"Because I misunderstood."

Shinichi raises his eyebrow.

She smiles, and he swears that she's never smiled that gently and warmly before. It almost makes him think that it's a different girl standing in front of him. "It doesn't matter whether you say it or not," she says and looks into his eyes. "Your gaze. Your gaze will always say: I'll protect you, I'll protect you. You protect her, because she's very important to you. You protect other people, because you're stupid like that. It doesn't matter who. I can be a woman, I can be a man. I can be beautiful, I can be ugly. I can be young, and I can be old. It doesn't matter. You'll always say: I'll protect you, I'll protect you. I misunderstood your gaze..." And your confidence, your strength in it, she completes her sentence in her thoughts. "I was about to fall apart at that time," she adds in a whisper. She laughs softly.

Shinichi doesn't know what to say in response. He wants to retort all that she has said. He wants to declare all that she has said as lies. He wants... he wants. It's always what I want, he thinks sadly. From the antidote to everything else... He shakes his head. "What happened exactly?" he asks all of the sudden.

"I beg your pardon?" She looks at him, confused.

"When you went camping. When you disappeared," he explains. "What happened?"

She chuckles. "Always cases first. Be careful. It might kill you one day."

He laughs. Somehow, he finds her statement extremely funny. How he loves irony. "Yeah," he sighs. "Because at other times, I stutter when I speak, with my brain dead. Do you know?"

"I think you've spent too much time with me," she remarks with a smirk that's so familiar to him. "Why does that sound like something I would say?"

Shinichi smiles. "I..."

"You what?"

He shakes his head. "Nothing." He looks at her. "Tell me what happened, okay?"