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
g.
Ghost at Twilight
(edited version)
g.
It seems I...
It seems I've been sleeping with my eyes wide open, staring at the distant horizon while dreaming about something I can't remember anymore now that I've woken up with a start. I can dimly recall that, in my dream, I had been lying in my cozy children's room where I lived twenty years ago (before they moved me to an orphanage of the Organization), snuggling against the ugly beige teddy bear I loved when I was three or four and carelessly misplaced then lost when I was a few years older. It turned out that the bear wasn't a present from my family as I had thought but from an unremarkable member of the Organization who had worked with them and whom I had never met because he had committed suicide in one of the Organization's laboratories. And since I didn't attach any sentimental memories to the teddy except that I had once believed it to be a present from my parents, I didn't feel utterly dejected when it disappeared. Perhaps my subconscious had decided to get rid of it to free myself from another dispensable material possession.
The more we dwell on a detail of a forgotten dream, however, the more fragments of that dream we suddenly remember—although we can never be sure whether we really remember what we've dreamed or whether our fancy only played a trick on us by filling the most significant gaps with products of our own wishful thinking.
The flickering light of a candle dancing in a glass of reddish-brown wine, the diffused light of a full moon breaking through the patterns of the transparent blinds, casting stripes of blueish shadows on the ochre sheets of the bed; Gin's smooth, silky hair between my fingers; his expensive eau de toilette mingling with the smell of fresh tobacco; the mellow tone of his deep voice and his slightly slurring speech when he was intoxicated... I can recall that there had been many nights like that one, long ago, indeed so long that I can't remember what we had talked about or why he had been in my room in the first place. And it startles me that—even though I thought I had forgotten that time and moved on—those nights are still hiding in a dark corner of my mind, forcing me to relive the past in a dream, which has felt surprisingly pleasant, almost like a fond distant memory.
During my involuntary nap, which must have been so short that no one else has taken notice of it, the stranger seems to have run out of pebbles to kick and has proceeded to the low railing in front the pond, where he is standing now with his left foot comfortably resting on the railing while he languorously yawns and stretches his limbs.
"I've been sitting here for three hours already." He sighs. "What about a short walk around the pond? I really doubt our 'dates' will still come tonight. And if they come, they won't have any problems finding us because we'll only be walking up and down for a while and won't go far. Besides, you look like you're cold. A short walk will do you good, too."
"Well, why not?" A glance at my watch has shown me that it's almost eight o'clock. Kudo is already two hours late and can't expect me to stay glued to this bench and wait patiently for him for another hour like his beloved Ran certainly would have done. Apart from that, I do feel cold.
Now we're strolling along the wide path in silence, avoiding walking in the direction of the temples, where it must be swarmed with tourists even at this hour. Although it's already past seven, there is still a faint band of light in the horizon, I absently note. The rainbow I saw on the way to the park has become so pale that it's barely visible in front of the sky, which looks strangely velvety tonight. A glimmering lavender on the horizon and a shimmering indigo at the top of the buildings, which gradually turns into a midnight-blue and deepens the higher my gaze wanders. I recall that, sitting in the bus, I had stared in wide-eyed wonder at the sunset, thinking that it was the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen, indescribable with its rich pink, orange, gold, green, and blue running softly into each other like the first transparent washes of colour on an exquisite piece of Chinese silk. I had almost expected that Kudo and I would miss it just as we had missed many other sunsets before. And now that my fear has turned out to be justified, as I came late and Kudo hasn't come at all, I have the sneaking suspicion that we will never manage to watch a sunset together, as either of us will always be late or will not come.
Despite the pouring rain this morning, the pavement and the wooden bench the stranger and I have been sitting on are completely dry owing to the fierce sun and the warm, strong wind blowing this afternoon. Now that the sun is almost gone, the wind has become chilly and light, although a few breezes are still strong enough to ruffle the surface of the water and the hair of the people walking past us. The leaves of the ginkgo trees are rustling melodically as their branches are moving slowly to and fro in a fantastic dance, waving with ghostly arms at us when we pass by.
As it strikes me that the lower layer of the stranger's hair, trimmed at the nape of his neck, barely moves in the wind, I take a closer look at his hair and notice that the short locks behind his ears have obscured the fact that his hair is long in the middle and neatly held together by a broad satin band.
"The man who told me the story about the Twilight Ghost had long hair and a ponytail, too, when he was seventeen or eighteen," I remark, thinking that one substantial difference between Gin and this stranger lies in the fact that Gin loved to show his hair instead of hiding it beneath his long coat. He was rather proud of his hair, his clothes, and his Porsche, and treated them with meticulous care whereas the man next to me seems the sort of person that would handle a dinner jacket with the same attention with which he treats an old pair of jeans.
"You don't like him anymore, you said... So you mean you once liked him very much?" the stranger asks, fixing my eyes with his expectantly. "Was he only a childhood crush? Or was there something more than that between you two?"
"How on earth did you come up with that theory?"
I've tried to sound exasperated in the hope that he won't probe into my personal affairs any further; but he only gives me an amused look and I smile in reply, giving up the facade. His childlike directness is infectious.
"I thought you wouldn't dislike him so much if he had only been your unrequited childhood love," he simply states. "People tend to idealize those feelings afterwards, when everything belongs to the distant past, and you don't look like the resentful type to me... There must be a reason why you loathe the man so much."
"I only wonder why you're so sure that I've ever idolized him or had a crush on him in the first place. He could have been a mentor or a friend who disappointed me, couldn't he?"
He stops short in his track and turns to raise an inquiring brow at me, his lips curving into a victorious, self-satisfied smile. It seems he has an extensive collection of smiles, which are always available to him when he needs them.
"You look as if you despise yourself for the things that happened between you and him. It's not hard to read your face, you know. Your thoughts are flitting across your eyes so quickly that I get the feeling they show up on your face as soon as they cross your mind. Don't frown just because I dared to tell you the truth!"
I laugh.
"You're the first person who tells me that. Other people often complain that I'm something of an enigma."
"Then today you must be very different from other days. Anyhow… I wonder how you became involved with a man so much older than you. It's not that I mind the difference in age! I'm only curious."
"He wasn't so much older than me," I protest, "only fourteen years or less."
Now I'm painfully aware that this was an unfortunate slip, as fourteen years are quite a remarkable number in a world where mentors aren't supposed to have affairs with their young protégés and where girls are supposed to know the real age of their lovers and seldom content themselves with a fake birthday and a code name. The stranger must have noticed my blunder, too, judging from the alert, strangely knowing look on his face.
"How did it end?" he asks, elegantly leading our conversation away from the dreaded question of Gin's real age.
"Badly! I fell in love with someone else... He noticed it very quickly and began to show me a few sides of his I didn't know before. We never split up officially. But we both knew when it ended."
There it is, the whole tragic and ugly thing beautifully wrapped up in a tiny package easy to swallow! Hearing my own voice talk about it, I can almost deceive myself into believing the pretty lie that it had been a normal love affair like many other love affairs: ignited by curiosity and a superficial attraction, burning with the intensity of an inferno for a short while to be snuffed out by a breeze in the end, leaving nothing but—first glowing and then cold—ashes and a few other unrecognizable remnants that turn to dust as time goes by.
"Oh, so that's how you fell in love with the conjurer, the one with the phobia about fish!" the stranger exclaims gleefully, beaming at me; and I'm suddenly reminded of Kudo, who has often used the same ringing, airy tone when he tried to cheer me up.
"No!" I grimace. "I fell in love with my sister's boyfriend. It sounds awful, I know, but I couldn't do anything about it."
Having told this stranger almost everything about my love life, I see no reason to lie to him when it comes to Dai. I will never see him again, anyway, which makes it easier for me to dump all the memories of my past loves on him and get rid of them all at once.
"Don't flatter yourself! It doesn't sound so awful at all, although I must admit you do have a talent for getting into trouble." He grimaces, mimicking me.
"Says the person who is waiting here for the wife of someone else," I wickedly remark.
"Let's agree that we share the same luck when it comes to love!" He smiles and offers me his arm, which I take in a daze, not quite sure what to think about his behaviour until it dawns on me that he must be spending a lot of time abroad, judging from his clothes, his shoes, his odd hairstyle, and the familiarity with which he treats a woman he has never met before. The remarkably regular and straight features of his face, his azure eyes, and his fair complexion point towards some European ancestors. And from his flawless Japanese and his chivalrous but easy-going manners when it comes to women, I guess that he has had a conventional European upbringing among Japanese people or has attended a Japanese school while spending a considerable amount of time with Italian or French teenagers.
However, I am neither Holmes nor Kudo and tend to misinterpret my observations as soon as I make them. Knowing that deduction is not my forte, I would rather stick to my habit of observing my surroundings without trying to come to a conclusion—especially when a conclusion is of little or no importance.
A few people turn to gape at us (as if there were anything unusual about a pair walking arm in arm along Shinobazu-no-ike on Friday evening!) and don't even stop when I wheel around to meet their eyes. Their impertinent, unconcealed stares irritate me whereas they bounce off the stranger like water off a duck's back. Judging from his relaxed appearance, he takes as little notice of them as if they weren't here at all.
Some of the azaleas, which have begun to blossom unusually early this year, are already in full bloom, giving off a delightful sweet smell. Their distinctive, overwhelming scent reminds me cruelly of the night in the spring three years ago when I was sitting at the window of my new apartment, staring at the blazing red, at night blueish-grey shimmering azaleas in front of the gate, waiting for Kudo in vain because he had forgotten me in Ran's presence.
The stranger, on the other hand, doesn't seem to connect any unpleasant memories to the fragrance of azaleas in full bloom. To him, they only belong to the "beautiful things" he naturally admires. He neither notices that their scent is much stronger than usual, nor does he wonder why they're blooming so early this year.
"We're already out of sight!" he exclaims, stopping at a large pink azalea shrub for a moment to give the flowers a radiant smile, and then turns on his heels, dragging me along with him. "Although I really doubt that they will come tonight," he continues in a voice which makes it sound like an excuse for disrupting our pleasant ramble to hurry back to the bench.
"I don't know if she will, but I'm sure that he will come," I assert. "He will come as soon as possible because he knows that I will be waiting for him!"
Even to my own ears it sounds like I was reciting a spell, which sounded a bit forced—as if this witch didn't really believe in her own charm.
"Perhaps he will," the stranger says, skeptically, and cleverly changes the topic. "Excuse my insatiable curiosity, but you said you had fallen in love with your sister's boyfriend and that you and your first love split up as a consequence. What happened afterwards?"
"Nothing happened. I never had the slightest chance to begin with. I never got the idea of stealing him from her, anyway. You see... I had hoped that she would meet someone else she fell madly in love with and leave him to me someday, which was not the case."
"What was the case then?"
Betrayal, death, and a murderous grudge which ended three years ago? There is so much I'd like to tell him and too little time for me to do so. It might take me a whole night to sort out my recollections and another night to explain to him that there is not only one version of my story but many versions, which differ greatly from each other, and that I don't really know which one of them is true.
Whenever we tell someone the true story of our life, we dig for the few surviving tattered remnants of our past, pathetically trying to piece together the fragments we find in an old, dusty corner of our memory to provide a coherent, believable account of our story. But the reconstruction of the past, no matter how vividly remembered, will not be equivalent to the past itself, as we can only catch a fleeting glimpse of our temporary subjective reality before it evades our perception and withdraws into the impenetrable realms of the past. As a result, the story of our life continuously transforms with each of our new attempts to fill the gaps, to give the vague shadows of our recollections a fixed shape and meaning.
At the beginning of a biography whose title I've forgotten because I only leafed through it once when I was waiting for Kudo in a bookstore, I found an interesting quote by William Maxwell, supposedly taken from his short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, saying that, "In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw..."
"They split up... but not because of me," I reply after a pause—after deciding to tell the stranger the short version of the story, which is only half a lie. "He pretended to be something he wasn't. And when he stopped living that lie, he left her... us."
I'm aware that I suddenly sound exhausted and listless. Either the thoughts of Gin had tired me out or I'm simply not accustomed to talking about my life.
"What's your sister doing now?"
I hesitate, not because I'm not sure whether I should tell him or not but because I'm afraid of the impact of hearing myself saying it, as tears have begun to come easily to me since the downfall of the Organization—as if I had to get rid of all the tears I had held back when I read the newspaper Gin had nonchalantly tossed on my desk after informing me of her death.
"She died six years ago," I tell him at last, almost surprised at how easily the words leave my mouth.
"Ah," he gently says without asking me how she died. Despite his boldness and flippancy, he seems to feel instinctively when to stop.
"Isn't it unsettling how fast life can end?" he finally remarks, leading our private conversation into a more general and philosophic direction. "You spend your whole life living only in your own small world until everything comes to a sudden stop. You're gone forever. And afterwards nothing matters anymore."
"Well, maybe you'll be lucky and encounter a stranger who can bring you back to life." I grin at him.
He smiles, enigmatically.
"Wouldn't you like it if things like that came true? If fairy tales were real?" he asks softly, in a voice suddenly as enchanting, as hypnotic and irresistible as if it belonged to a magician who was trying to pull me into the realm of dreams.
I chuckle at my own imagination, breaking the spell.
"I don't think so. I don't like witches and ghosts at all. I already have enough trouble with real life—going through these never-ending trials and errors."
"But you don't want it to end either," he says as a matter of fact, flashing a small witty smile at me.
"Sometimes I thought I did. But since it will end someday no matter whether I like or not, I might as well try to enjoy it until then."
"That's the right attitude! The only difficulty lies in the question of how to find a way to enjoy it, of course. But that surely depends on one's own creativity. I've set myself the goal of living happily and creatively!"
"That sounds really impressive! On the other hand, waiting for hours for someone who doesn't come doesn't seem very creative to me, you see."
"It depends on the company you spend the waiting time with," he gallantly retorts, and I'm about to remark that his attempt to flatter me is rather wretched (as he has already betrayed his impatience by looking about himself at least ten times during our conversation!) when I spot a petite young woman and a tall man coming towards us. She is waving violently in our direction while he is busy dodging her flying arms.
"Oh no!" I gasp in mock horror. "She has even taken her husband to your tête-à-tête!"
"Don't be silly! And I almost thought that he was your friend, who came with his puppy-love girlfriend. That's how the two of them look, you see."
"How?" I ask, uncomprehendingly.
"Boring," he says with a grin.
As they get closer, it turns out that they're not waving at us but at an elderly couple walking behind us, who seem to be their aunt and uncle or the aunt and uncle of a friend of them.
Oh dear, Auntie Jenny, we're so sorry we came late, shouts the young woman and immediately begins to unleash a torrent of English curses directed at traffics jams and ruthless drivers, after which she rapidly proceeds to the description of an accident that seemed to have caused another traffic jam:
Ohhhh... There was such a teeerrrible accident you can't imagine how hooorrrible just because somebody was searching for a ball on the street yes the children lost it and a driver was too fast and hit the guy and somehow a motorbike fell over and another car crashed into the young girl crossing the street and then into the traffic lights which didn't work by the way and so three or four people died or are seriously injured no we don't really know since we didn't see anything but blood oh we only heard it from somebody who heard it from an eyewitness I think of course we didn't see it because we were waiting in the long queue as if the traffic jam wasn't enough no no of course I mean it was another traffic jam and then there was this accident and then we were stuck again until the ambulance arrived and ooohhh there was blood everywhere on the pavement and this ball lying there added to the macabre scene why oh why do these children always play ball on the streets while there are playing fields and the parents should really take care of them if I imagine that I could have been walking over the street just at that moment and wouldn't have been able to react although of course I know I'd have been fast enough to dodge the cars and of course I'm not stupid enough to try to get a ball even if it were lying at my feet but some people are always too nice for their own sake and it's always the wrong ones who die...
She doesn't pause for even one second or at least slow down to catch her breath but rambles on and on while dragging the elderly but just as energetic people with her to gawk at what is left from the scene of the "teeerrrible" tragedy. Her husband or boyfriend (or whoever he was) clumsily stumbles after them, puffing like a locomotive, his tiny ears glowing pink from excitement. I remember that seeing the bloody ball on the pavement made me feel sick (even though I should be accustomed to blood by now!) and recall that I had passed the street with eyes glued to my feet to avoid glancing again at the scene. To say I'm a rather composed person is an understatement, as I've witnessed enough murders, suicides, accidents, and other types of gruesome deaths without my nerves failing me. But perhaps the peaceful life during the past three years has softened me—for this time I intentionally turned away and censored whatever I had accidentally glimpsed... Certainly not out of embarrassment, terror, or even pity, but only out of self-preservation, out of the feeling that, in my mental condition today, I won't be able to bear it.
Feeling that the arm I'm leaning on is growing tense, I look up at the stranger and notice that his fresh complexion has turned visibly pale. Now he halts dead in his tracks and narrows his eyes to stare into space with a slight but deepening frown, lost in his own thoughts.
g.
A/N: The book with the Maxwell quote is Dancer: A Novel by Column McCann.
The next fic update will be for either "The Red String of Fate" or "Encounter in Venice" depending on which one I finish first.
Also, I've finally finished university. Yay! :D Life is still busy (in a good way), but I'll have a bit more time to write and draw again.
In other news, I'm not going to tweet anymore whenever I update my DW journal.