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.
To you…
To you, Kudo belongs to Beika like the cherry trees to Ueno-koen or the ducks to Shinobazu-no-ike, which is why you've always associated Beika with Kudo and vice versa. You've expected him to stay in Beika for life like an indigenous plant because, well, that's where he is supposed to be.
Judging from his frame of mind tonight, you deduce he isn't happy about leaving Tokyo either, which makes you wonder once again why Ran has resolved to go. If Ran had been more devoted to karate or if Kudo had been overjoyed at the prospect of going away, you wouldn't have had any doubts about their decision to exchange Beika for Osaka in view of such a rare opportunity. But Ran, according to her own words, has never intended to turn karate into a career. And since (this came from her own mouth as well) caring for her family and Kudo is her top priority, you can't imagine why she would want to leave Tokyo if Kudo obviously doesn't want to. It seems she naively believes that her parents would return to each other after she is gone, failing to think of the obvious outcome that such a pair would immediately split up again when the first problems arise. Fire and ice don't suit each other, you think. Accepting that fact will save everyone unnecessary heartache and time...
"...APAH... I'm going to visit you once in three months to fetch them..."
Lost in thought, you haven't paid attention to what Kudo said until he brought up APAH. But no sooner did you hear him mention its name than you snap out of your trance.
"So, after you've gone to Osaka, we're going to see each other more often than now?" You walk to the bar to pour yourself another glass of water. "But I told you I won't make you APAH anymore."
"Come on, you have it down to a fine art whereas I'm a hopeless case when it comes to those things." Resorting to bribery in his desperation, he adds with a smile which could melt ice, "I'll make it up to you on your birthdays. We can do whatever you want together."
The words which could have been mistaken for an outrageous double entendre sound from Kudo's lips like things a babysitter would tell the troublesome child they have to appease until its parents come home. Even Gin, exasperated by the ardent display of affection with which you showered him when you were three or four, had once told you something like, "If you're a good kid and leave me alone tonight, we can go out tomorrow and do whatever you like..."
"No matter how much you beg, my answer will still be 'No'. I'm only doing this because I feel responsible for your well-being. You can't forever depend on me!"
Thinking that it will be difficult for him to visit you on your birthdays when he is in Osaka if he already has a hard time doing it in Tokyo, you add in a sudden fit of selfless generosity, "In return, I can free you from our birthday-dinner deal if you like. Just keep in touch and give me a call from time to time."
Rather than agreeing with you as you would have expected, Kudo doesn't reply. In fact, he is so silent that all you can hear are the usual sundry sounds of the night, faraway steps and hushed voices of people walking on the other side of the street, the obnoxious ticking of the clock in your bedroom, and the rustle of the cherry trees in the wind…
Worried, you put down your glass and turn around to look at him, meeting his thoughtful and strangely sad gaze.
"Didn't you mean to say that you'd like to free yourself from our deal?" he asks. "Spending your real birthday with me was your promise to me after I deleted the files on you, not vice versa. What is it about meeting me once a year that disturbs you so much?"
"Nothing. It's just the run of bad luck you always bring. My life is peaceful when you're not around."
"Mine is peaceful, too, when I don't see you," he calmly says, reminding you of his capability to sound composed and bitter at the same time. "You have a habit of turning my life upside down and messing with my mind every time we meet. One moment you're amiable and generous, the epitome of kindness, and the next moment you would suddenly decide to trample on my feelings with a smile. Do you really have to make it so obvious to me that you'd rather not see me again?"
Trample on his feelings? How could he say that to you if it's he who overslept your dinner, ruined your evening, and kept you up all night to fill hundreds of APAH capsules, which he could have made on his own—you ask in disbelief, skipping the part that he invaded your privacy by rummaging through your closet since he wouldn't understand what's wrong about it, anyway.
"I didn't know that's how you feel about tonight," he says quietly. With a pang of guilt, you gaze at him in frustration, wondering how an evening which has started with such a gorgeous sunset could have turned into such a bitter disappointment.
"Listen," you tell him. "I don't mind waiting for you on my birthdays as long as you really come. But this eternal waiting in vain drives me insane! You're always ruining my birthdays for me!"
"Not always! I spent your last birthday waiting for you in your apartment, too, because you intentionally stood me up. Out of the two birthdays I've missed, I only missed the first because I was held hostage by a mass murderer and the second because I had to meet up with Mizuno-san, who didn't have time later in the evening. When I came to your apartment, Kuroba had already taken advantage of the situation..." His voice trails off, and he frowns at the memory.
"But since I was waiting for you that night, I wouldn't have gone out with him if I had known that you would come," you reply quickly before he can dwell on the thought.
"I called you... But I can never get hold of you because you always turn off or misplace your Detective badge and your mobile phone."
"I think I've developed a hatred against it since the students at university began to bother me. But you could have sent me a mail. And you didn't only stand me up because of your cases... You forgot me during the first anniversary as well, do you remember? Later I learned that you had been watching photos and videos with Ran all day."
"What anniversary?" He stares at you in surprise.
The downfall of the Organization—you look at him in bewilderment, wondering whether he is being deliberately obtuse or whether APAH has erased parts of his memory. "Don't tell me you've already forgotten it!"
"I remember it very well," he darkly says, "and I remember you said that we could celebrate it together on the train to Osaka. But I didn't know you still wanted to celebrate it after what happened between us at Pandora's Box."
You two gaze at each other in dismay, realizing that, despite your efforts to pretend it never existed, the incident at Pandora's Box is as ignorable as the elephant in the living room.
"Sorry," he says at last. "I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. The prospect of leaving Tokyo is getting to me."
"I don't know what's wrong with me either," you admit, sitting down next to him.
He smiles at you in relief, giving your arm a friendly nudge, and you smile back, thinking that you two have got worked up about nothing at all. Trampling over his feelings? Forgetting anniversaries? An outsider passing by your window would believe you were having a lover's quarrel.
"Perhaps I'm in such a bad mood because, on the way to Ueno-koen, I witnessed an accident," you admit, taking a sip from the glass on the table before remembering that it's actually his. "The victim was a boy, about nine or ten years old. I told myself accidents always happen... But then I saw his football lying there... And there were his little friends crying on the other side of the street, two girls and two boys of his age. Somehow, I was reminded of us when we were still with the Detective Boys. The boy looked a bit like you..."
Even to your ears it sounds desperate and wistful, resembling an admission of a hopeless love. The night he returned to his original size, you two had been sitting on the same sofa in the Professor's house together, discussing whether you should take the permanent antidote or not. How many pills did you make, he asked you, and it took you a moment to answer that, even though you weren't sure you would take the antidote, you had made two, one for him and one for you. Relieved that you, too, could return to your original body at once, he didn't notice the small pause before you answered... Or did he notice and didn't guess its meaning? By the look of things, he has never found out that you had been lying.
Inwardly cursing your vulnerability, you get up from the sofa to return to the bedroom. Jumping up as well, Kudo makes a gesture to hold you back but accidentally grabs your leg instead of your arm and, in his embarrassment, pulls his hand away so forcefully that he wipes the glass out of your hand in the process, causing it to shatter on the floor.
"Oh great, now I've even begun to wreck your apartment!" he says before you can say it, and you two laugh at each other, gingerly moving around the shards of glass and the spilled water.
"There are many memories for me in Tokyo, too," he admits, poking at one of the larger shards with a long finger. "I can't believe I want to stay in one city for life at my age, but I really don't want to go."
You know that he doesn't, but who are you to tell him what to do? Torn between one thing and the other, one can either choose the easy way out or the one which matters more. When you were small, Akemi-nee-san once showed you a method she always applied whenever she felt indecisive: Just toss a coin and let it decide on the outcome for you—then either act according to it or, if it feels horribly wrong, rebel against the decision.
And yet, how could you give Kudo the same advice, knowing that Ran is involved? While you aren't the most loyal person in the world, even you feel that you would be backstabbing Ran if you told him to consider an option which entails leaving her.
"I've run out of kitchen rolls, but there is a rag in the bathroom," you tell Kudo instead. "I'm going to print out the formula now because it's late."
"Does it mean I'm allowed to enter your bathroom again?" he asks in mock shyness.
"You're even allowed to use it if you want." You smirk at him. "Just make sure to keep things in order so that I don't have to clean up after you." Then, deciding to play the role of the coin for him, you casually add, "Just look on the bright side: You'll always find new cases even in Osaka. If you feel like coming back for a visit, it's only a few hours by train. Take care of yourself, and don't expect me to make APAH for you."
g.
Blinking at the screen with tired eyes, you print out the formula before disconnecting the laptop from the printer and shutting it down. Three o'clock in the morning and he is still in your apartment, you think, utterly exhausted by the ups and downs of the evening. You can't even remember whether he has called the taxi at all.
In the meantime, he has returned to his favourite corner of the sofa after wiping the floor and discarding the shards of glass, according to what you can hear. He is extremely efficient whenever he wants to be, using his terrific brain and quick reactions to excel at almost anything. Hence, to you, his weakness in simple things like cooking, along with his atrocious singing voice and his inability to communicate with you, will always remain a mystery.
"After taking the antidote, I often wondered what would have happened if you hadn't been able to create it," says his voice from the sofa, sounding huskier than usual as if he has either caught a cold or is falling asleep. "Sometimes I think I'd solve my cases faster if you were still around. Back then you were pretty good at making random remarks which put me on the right track."
If you weren't sure that his thoughts were wandering, you would have received the wrong impression and believed he just tried to say that he missed you. Since you've repeatedly misread his intentions tonight, however, you're not going to make the same mistake again.
"I don't have the impression that you've lost your edge, though," you remark. "Do you really consider the case you told me about such a dismal failure?"
He doesn't say anything in reply but only yawns and moves a little in the sofa, as you can hear the rustle of his jeans and shirt as they're rubbing against the sofa cover.
"Say, have you even called the taxi yet?"
"... Too bad you couldn't marry me?... but you were the one who..." he mumbles sleepily, apparently referring to your joke earlier when he told you that even he could make himself useful when it came to household chores.
Who what? Ruined it? At the Professor's grave, you had promised each other to carry on with your friendship as if nothing had ever happened. Something which didn't even last for a night didn't count, and it seemed easy enough for him to run back to Ran and pretend that he had never thought about another girl apart from her. Why does he have to touch on it now when it seems so far away, even further than your childhood crush on Gin, as if it had happened in the bygone days of a different era?
It's not like him to talk about the past so freely, but you know him well enough to see that he tends to let his guard down when he goes to sleep. Walking to the sofa with the formula in your hand, you are not surprised to see that he is indeed sleeping, lying on the side with his head resting on one arm of the large sofa and his long legs draped over the other, looking as lifeless as a corpse in the dim light.
Grabbing your mobile phone, which Kudo has left on the table, you check the call log to convince yourself that he hasn't called the taxi yet. For a moment, you seriously consider calling a taxi for him, waking him up, handing him the formula, and sending him home. But when you touch his arm a few times and notice that he is sleeping so soundly that he doesn't even react, you automatically walk into the bedroom to get him a blanket instead.
It has become so late that the few hours more or less he spends in your apartment really doesn't count, you try to justify yourself while throwing the blanket over him, ignoring the thought that you should have foreseen this situation when he asked you to let him wait in your apartment. From past experience, you know that Kudo's exhaustion and lack of social skills (at least when it comes to you) could induce him to settle himself on your sofa and simply stay there. Although you can say with a clear conscience that you haven't encouraged him in any way, you must admit that you didn't make an effort to prevent this outcome. Deep down, you don't want him to go, perhaps because you're terrified of being alone and exposed to your own mind in a night like tonight—when all the ghosts of your past suddenly decide to come back, haunting you.
Yet having a sleeping person in your apartment is not the same as having a waking one, who can talk to you and distract you from pondering destructive thoughts. And you suddenly miss the stranger and his uncanny ability to tempt you into revealing your innermost feelings, facing the wildest waves while keeping you on the safe shore. He and you were like ships that passed in the night; and even though you didn't know each other, you were honest to him most of the time, and there was only one thing (or were there two things?) about which you lied.
He is going out with a girl he has been in love with since they were six. You can be sure that he doesn't have any feelings for me.
Perhaps that wasn't a complete lie because you really believed that, after three years, that's all what remained between Kudo and you. Before you learned that the reason for his sadness was leaving Tokyo, you would never have guessed that a part of him might still be clinging to the past, just like a part of you.
I know that's just wishful thinking, but it's still a very comforting thought, the stranger said.
Who are you kidding, you think, smiling at the sleeping form on the sofa. Seeing him so seldom, you've almost forgotten what a pleasant sight his face can be. Want to spend a night at my place before you go away, you ask him, pleased that he can neither hear it nor reply. Then lets continue to pretend that friendship is all that ever existed between us, don't touch upon Pandora's Box, and let sleeping dogs lie.
Stepping onto the balcony to clear your mind, you let your eyes roam over the sky and the neighbourhood until you stop in surprise. In front of Dr Chiba's open door, two people are standing, talking quietly about something you can't overhear while Luna is sitting on the shoulder of the young woman, rubbing her head against the woman's long blonde hair. Illuminated from different angles by the lights inside the house, in the garden, and on the street, the profiles of both the woman and the man are clearly visible even in the middle of the night. As he pats her lightly on her blonde buns (odangos?) and she bids him goodbye with a smile before she disappears behind the door, you think who would have thought that they know each other, the blonde woman sitting next to you in the bus and the stranger you met at twilight.
g.
A/N: A rhyme this time since this is a special occasion:
Another edited chapter although I'm on vacation!
Aren't you all impressed by my dedication? *shot XDXD
These days I'm scribbling the last three chapters for "Becoming Conan" into my notebook while lounging in a roofed wicker chair on the beach, which is a great luxury although it slows me down somewhat (I tend to walk around and also have to apply sunscreen all the time.) XD Will post the new chapters as soon as I've finished writing them and typing them up.
Congrats to the authors/artists who have made it in time for the prompts! You're awesome! I'm sorry for being so slow. :(( Things came up and then I didn't have time to write anymore (I had to pack for the vacation and to take care of a few things before leaving; then the tasks accumulated and everything took me longer than planned).