Disclaimer: "Detective Conan" belongs to Gosho Aoyama, and "Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon" belongs to Naoko Takeuchi.

This is an alternative story to my other fanfic "Encounter in Venice" and one of the possibilities of what could have happened if Ai had taken the antidote before Shinichi brought down the Organization.

Thanks a lot to my friends and betas Rae (Astarael00) and SN1987a and the Aicoholics on LiveJournal, without whom I would never have started this fic.

This chapter has been betaed by aritzen (SN1987a), who hasn't only kept me motivated for years but is even betaing the long fic now that it has ended. I can't thank her enough!

FS

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Ghost at Twilight

(edited version)

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The stranger doesn't pay...

The stranger doesn't pay attention to your words, as he has just discovered a small squirrel climbing the cherry tree next to you. A smile steals into his eyes and then slowly curves his lips a second later, reminding you of the smile Kaito gave you two years ago when one of his favourite doves landed on your head...

That was a week before Kaito admitted that he was in love with someone else and you realized that his feelings for you were only a spur-of-the-moment passion—the type one experiences when one talks to a complete stranger one has just met on the train and suddenly feels attracted to them even though one can't explain why.

"Look! It's the first squirrel I've seen this year," the stranger exclaims, beaming at you. "I'm not into watching animals, but my... the girl I'm waiting for… loves to. It's a pity she is not here."

"It seems to me you're fond of squirrels, too. I don't know why you're trying to hide it."

"I'm not trying to hide it. They look pretty to me—and it's natural to like beautiful things, isn't it? I just can't stand spending hours watching animals at the zoo."

"I must admit I can't either. But a few children can watch them for hours without getting bored."

"A few women, too. I don't know any man who likes the zoo."

"I do."

"A friend of yours?"

"My ex-boyfriend. He had a strong dislike of fish, though I've never found out why."

Although you've hidden your secret trysts with the former Kaitou Kid from all your friends, you don't try to hide it from this carefree stranger, who has told you—with no apparent hesitation—about his unrequited love. Watching the squirrel as it climbs from one branch to another, stopping in the middle of its movements for some inexplicable reason before it resumes its action, you tell the man beside you in passing that—once upon a time—you had a whirlwind romance with a charming young conjurer, which ended only two weeks after it started.

"Why did you two split up? Not because of the zoo, I hope." The stranger's eyes are still following the squirrel attentively. "Or was it the fish?" He grins at the thought.

You smile, watching the squirrel jump from one cherry tree to the next in a single effortless movement.

"It was neither, sadly. He had a childhood friend he had been in love with since they were six—and it seemed that his feelings for her were stronger than his feelings for me."

"The story of your life," the stranger remarks with sympathy.

"I know plenty of people who are in love with their childhood friends," you sigh, as protesting against his implication that you're in love with Kudo for a second time would be futile effort. "Having a childhood friend must be fun. Did you have one?"

"No, I didn't. But now that I'm thinking about it… We two would have made a cute pair if we had met in kindergarten, wouldn't we? I'm not sure whether we would have fallen in love with each other as we grew older, but I'm sure I'd have cheered you up."

"Do I seem so unhappy to you?"

Since the downfall of the Organization, your life has been as peaceful and as happy as it can be. As Kudo and you have barely spent any free time with each other after you gave him his antidote and he celebrated it by running to Ran, you've even been spared from the murder cases he always draws to him like a magnet. Your trivial daily problems now can't be compared to your problems back then when you were working for the Organization—when every movement was a matter of life and death and you could be disproportionately punished for a small mistake.

"You don't seem unhappy." The stranger's expression suddenly grows serious. "I think it's because you're much too proud to wear a depressed face in public. But you do exude an aura of tragedy. It's your ironic smile and your disillusioned gaze, which are at least ten years older than you."

If he had told you these things before you took the antidote, you would have laughed at the irony of his sentence.

"Appearances can be deceptive! There were a few tragic loss... events... in my life a few years ago. But I really can't complain about my present life."

"Was the separation from your boyfriend one of the tragic losses?"

You knit your brows, ponder his question, and shake your head. "Tragic" is not the right word, you tell him, as the time with Kaito had seemed to you like a dream, which was too beautiful to be real. Waking up from it didn't hurt half as much as you had thought it would.

Now that you can look at your past crush on Kaito from some distance and compare it to your other one-time loves, you realize that it was the happiest romance of your life, certainly owing to Kaito's pleasant character and the fact that the relationship was too short to get complicated. No sooner had you fallen in love with him than he had fallen out of love with you, disappeared out of your life, and married his childhood friend a year afterwards, as you learned from Hakuba, who had innocently asked you whether you wanted to come with him to attend their wedding.

Since you didn't have enough time to get up your hopes, there had never been anything like longing, jealousy, or any other strong and selfish feelings which could have set the scene for a drama, as far as you were concerned.

As far as Kaito was concerned, you had never been a real alternative to his childhood friend despite his short infatuation with you—which you can admit to yourself without a twinge of jealousy, now that everything belongs to the past. You've taken the blow well—certainly much better than he dared to hope. All's well that ends well!

Occasionally, he would send you a letter, a self-drawn card, or a present on special occasions and surprise you with the fact that he still hasn't forgotten about your romantic interlude. But, since you've never met him in person or heard his voice again, you've begun to think of him as a ghost that sometimes visits you by mail and not as a man who lives in the same city as you—a man you can meet again whenever you want to.

You don't want to, however... You never do. You don't want to see him and his wife—who bears an uncanny likeness to Ran—on their way home from the grocery store, when he is carrying huge plastic bags while she is holding his arm. And you know very well that it's not jealousy or the fear of shattering any irrational hopes or illusions, or whatever. You don't nurture any foolish hopes. There must be another reason why you don't want to be reminded of him.

Deep down, you know the reason. However, you don't want to think about it.

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What was the title...

What was the title of the story again, the stranger asks you after the squirrel has hopped from the tree and disappeared in the grass.

"Ghost at Twilight," you tell him.

It was either an old and forgotten fairy tale or—and this is more likely—only a ghost story Gin had made up to scare you to death. In any case, you believed in it for years and almost expected to see his ghost at twilight someday. Naturally, that was long before he shot your sister and long before you met your sister's boyfriend and fell in love with him. You can recall that you were four or five—and Gin was your knight in shining armour just because he had beautiful long hair and icy emerald eyes, which changed colour with his moods.

In contrast to Gin's, the stranger's eyes are blue and warm, reminding you more of the sky than of ice…

"If you love a person so passionately and deeply that this love will last for your whole life, you will usually express your love someday. But if you successfully hide your feelings from this person and everyone else, perhaps even from yourself, the subject of your love will die. Between the first and the second twilight after their death, you will meet their ghost for the last time—to say the words you never said when they were still alive."

"Why should you do that after their death if you didn't do it while they were still alive? To give their soul a reason to return to their body? Or to prevent them from haunting your dreams?" he asks with a raised eyebrow and a small, friendly mocking grin.

"I don't know. I've forgotten. To make them come back to life, perhaps. They're supposed to be already dead, I know, and it's impossible to raise the dead. But it's a ghost story, after all."

You sigh, noticing in annoyance that you sound defensive. You also begin to wonder whether you're making a fool of yourself, and regret your decision to tell him the tale.

When you turn to him again, you notice that he is smiling at you with a distant expression in his eyes. He looks as if he is trying to recall something.

He thinks he knows the story, he says, although his version is different from yours.

"One day, when twilight is three times longer than usual, you will meet the ghost of a stranger who has just died and who you could have fallen in love with if you had known them. You will see them three times during the following twenty-four hours, before they disappear from your life forever. The only way to break the spell and help them come back to life is to say the right words, which will come to you at the right time if you really want to save them."

"Who told you that story?" you ask with a raised eyebrow. "It sounds rather complicated compared to my version of it."

His friend, the girl he is waiting for, he tells you. Thirteen or fourteen years ago, when she was a child, she met a stranger on a train—a "gloomy young man in black"—who told her the ghost story when she asked him to donate something to her fairy tale collection.

"She dreamed of publishing something like Grimm's Fairy Tales, you see... And who told you your version of the ghost story?"

"Someone who... took care of my education... when I was small. Maybe it's the same man who told your friend the story. But I don't think it's an old tale. I'm sure he made it all up."

"Maybe it was the same man. But that would also mean he intentionally told two different girls two different versions of his ghost story," the stranger remarks, smiling again. "Or the original version had slipped his mind and he had to make up a new one."

He belongs to the lucky type of person to whom words and smiles come naturally and frequently. Very much like Kaito... However, you don't want to think of Kaito again. Thinking of him once a day is more than enough.

"I don't think it slipped his mind. He had a fantastic memory and was very creative when it came to inventing morbid stories. It would be just like him to tell two different girls two versions of the tale. I'm sure he would have told a third girl a third version, which would have differed greatly from the other two... Perhaps he didn't want to share the original version with anybody."

"So he is a very playful person with a very romantic mind?"

You wince at the thought.

"'Playful' is not the right word to describe him, neither is 'romantic'... But he did have a vein of humour."

"Black humour?"

You nod even though you think that "gallows humour" would have been the better choice of word.

"You don't seem to like him very much."

"Not anymore."

Your childish infatuation with Gin had died long before he shot your sister—and yet the secret affair between you and him lasted until you learned about your sister's death. You've always tried to make yourself believe that both of you had stumbled into the relationship without knowing why—that it must have been the undeniable chemistry between you two which ignited your dangerous love affair despite the fact that you two had never really liked each other in the first place.

Now you know that the truth was slightly different although you will forever be denying it, as you can't explain how you could have fallen in love with him... To put it poetically, you had been greatly enamoured with him for no reason at all when you were very young. You had hoped that, someday, you would manage to break through his thick shells of ice and see into the very depth of his soul.

Your crush on him lasted for many years, during which you thought that the impossible task of your life was not creating APTX 4869 or leaving the Organization but winning Gin's affection and stealing the key to his heart.

You wish you had failed, as you did steal his heart and discover the real man behind the facade—ironically only after you realized that you had fallen out of love with him.

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