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.
FS
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Ghost at Twilight
(edited version)
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Proceeding to the large...
Proceeding to the large single window, where the first light of dawn is reflected in the streams of water running down the blue-tinted glass, you realize that one can see the street where you live from the stranger's window, as it overlooks the southern part of Azabu Juuban.
"It's unbelievable that I've never seen you through this window, isn't it?" The stranger smiles, following your gaze. "Or maybe I've already seen you many times without noticing. Everyone looks almost the same from this height except for Odango, whose hairstyle I'd recognize everywhere."
"Maybe we weren't supposed to meet," you observe, consulting your watch, whose hands say six o'clock. The second hand seems to move slower than usual, a strange phenomenon, which can only be explained by your heightened awareness of time since yesterday's twilight.
"You mean fate had something against us?" he asks in mild amusement, pouring espresso into two small printed coffee cups. "If it had, it must have changed its mind last night."
Don't run away from your destiny, Kudo once told you, surprising you, as you hadn't expected someone like him to believe in fate. To you, destiny is a path one can only recognize in retrospect, an illusion of order which materializes out of the mess of life when a series of coincidences have led to an inescapable conclusion. Six years after Kudo's remark, it appears to you as if the "destiny" he referred to has chosen you to betray him and to deactivate Pandora's Box. But at that moment, it was only a sentence which moved you because you realized that the detective who just impulsively risked his life to save yours was so pure and naive that he would never stand a chance against the Organization...
"Why should I blame it on fate?" You join the stranger at the round coffee table in front of the window. "You were the one who turned down Professor Tomoe's invitation to come to Infinity."
"I still think it was a good decision." He smiles, placing a cup in front of you. "If I had come to Infinity, we wouldn't be here together now."
"Most probably. Or we would but many things would be different."
Whether it would be for better or worse if he had come to Infinity, you do not know. Nevertheless, you have a funny feeling that he is the person you've always missed. And the fact that you suddenly encountered him at twilight on the bench where you expected to find Kudo simultaneously thrills and disturbs you.
Afterwards you both watch the rain in comfortable silence, for the scent of coffee or the previous subject of your talk has put the stranger into a contemplative mood. Letting your eyes roam the cream-walled living room where large bouquets of red roses, fastidiously wrapped presents, and fan letters in colourful envelopes are scattered haphazardly over the carpeted floor, you draw the analogy between his life and this room, where one can't move about freely without stumbling over unwanted tokens of love.
Turning your gaze back to his face, you catch him watching you with friendly but unreadable eyes.
"If there was really something like destiny, I'd certainly fight it." He smiles. "I've never liked the idea of predestination. You?"
"I don't like it either. But if there was something like destiny, it would be futile to fight it. After all, the main tenet of the whole destiny theory is that you can never escape your fate..."
You know many people who believe in the idea of destiny—you tell him between two sips of the espresso his coffee maker has kept so hot that it almost burns your lips—and you can imagine why destiny enjoys such popularity. It gives happy people a sense of security and eases the pain of unhappy people by offering them the perfect scapegoat. You yourself have sometimes indulged in it when the burden of responsibility for your own failures and mistakes became too heavy for you to bear.
"But have you ever really believed in it?"
"Only to a certain extent... I still believe in it, in a way. I think we all start under conditions that influence the course of our lives more than we'd like to admit—but I don't believe in things like the red string of fate."
"I've never believed in it either." He wraps his hands around his cup as if he were trying to warm them. "It's a handy tool against jealousy, though. Just label your present partner your 'true love' and you'll be able to convince yourself that they will stay with you for life."
Jealousy... The word triggers memories of an afternoon at the aquarium with Rye and the following night in Professor Tomoe's lab with Gin, of pain, handcuffs, suffocating cigarette qualms, and gleaming cigarette butts... And you hastily take a huge gulp of the hot espresso to mask the unpleasant taste the memory has brought to your mouth.
"Are you often jealous at Chiba-san?" you casually ask.
"At Mamoru-san? Not at all." The stranger languorously sips his espresso in contentment. He doesn't think one can call it jealousy because he only regarded "Mamoru-san" as the main obstacle to what he wanted. All in all, he isn't the jealous type even though he wouldn't ever go as far as sharing his girlfriend or wife like people who believe in open relationships do.
You can't help but laugh. He has just talked about sharing a lover as if it were only an alternative way of life or a personal habit, convincing you that, in a way, it is.
"I doubt you will ever have to. With all your obsessive female fans in mind, I think it's your future girlfriend or wife who will have to share you."
His vivid eyes follow the movement of your hand to rest on the bouquets of roses on the floor.
"I only got so many since the announcement of Taiki's and Yaten's comeback." He gives a dismissive wave. "People are trying to convince me to return to the stage as well."
"And? Will you?"
"I don't know yet," he evasively says. "It depends..."
Without continuing his sentence, he suddenly leaps from the sofa and changes the topic after a glance into the fridge.
"Would you like a piece of cake? I have tiramisu and chocolate cake ready to be served. Judging from the size of the pieces, Taiki was in a good mood."
"So your flower-loving brother can bake as well?"
"Oh, there is nothing Taiki can't do. He is great at anything: housework, cooking, baking, gardening, music, poetry, art, sciences... I'm glad he isn't here since he is exactly your ideal house husband type. That would ruin my chances of tricking you into marrying me someday." He raises his hands balancing two china plates. "Which one do you want, chocolate cake or tiramisu?"
"Either is fine for me. But you see, there is a world of difference between what we think we want and what we're really gravitating to... I've just discovered I have an unfortunate weakness for reckless and clueless men who can't even cook—"
"—men like Kudo, I know." He gives you a wry smile. "But you're somewhat slow yourself." Leaving the plates on the kitchen table, he rummages through his drawer in search of the ideal spoon before settling with two forks. "Any other woman would have understood perfectly what I told you earlier and at least given me a response. But you're so fixated on your detective that you wouldn't even get what I meant if I repeated it to you!"
There is no limit to his unparalleled idiocy, you realize. Nevertheless, it's quite apparent to you now that he would immediately kiss you if he weren't convinced that you aren't interested in him because you're still clinging to your feelings for Kudo. The thought of Kudo leaving for Osaka still upsets you for no logical reason—as if these new feelings of yours haven't extinguish the old ones at all but simply coexist with them, sharing the same host in the same easy way in which the stranger breezes through life.
"So which one looks more tempting," he asks again after returning to the table. "Chocolate cake or tiramisu?"
"I don't care." You eye the two plates full of empty calories you expect to find on your hips soon. "They both look delicious. Just give me the one you don't want. Either of them will do."
"Fine." He chuckles and places both plates in front of himself. "If you really don't care, I will keep both." Smirking at your undoubtedly stupefied face, he arms himself with a fork and smugly adds, "Since you can't decide which one you want, it's only fair that you don't get either."
"At least I won't be the one who puts on weight," you testily remark, watching him sip coffee and eat both cakes at the same time with contagious appetite.
"What about burning the calories together?" He winks, shoving a large piece of tiramisu into your mouth when you open it to ask him what he was actually suggesting. "I hope you remember you agreed to dance with me as long as I stick to my word and keep my hands off you."
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As much as you would like to keep your word, there is no way you can go with him to Two Lights' now—you discreetly direct his attention to the oversized bathrobe you're wearing lest he has forgotten about it. Also, you will have to go home when your clothes are dry since you don't want Kudo to investigate your disappearance and find you in the company of a man you've only known for a few hours at Two Lights'. Before your inner eye, you can already see Kudo crouching in front of your landlady's azalea shrubs, inspecting fresh footsteps on the grass and a strand of long black hair his hawklike eyes have spotted in the maze of blazing red Azalea blossoms...
Who knows what Kudo will be capable of if he decides to treat your private life as a new case out of sheer boredom—apart from his gift for attracting murders wherever he goes! You can also imagine him rolling his eyes at your instantaneous and intense crush on a stranger of dubious reputation while comparing it to his own steady relationship with his devoted and faithful future wife. Perhaps he might even feel a slight pang of jealousy at seeing the old friend he had been in love with for a few weeks so completely smitten with the same culprit who once evaded him with style. And you inwardly grin at the thought of him fishing for his APAH bottle in the bulging pocket of his short leather jacket, taking out ten to fifteen APAH capsules to fight the beginnings of a new migraine...
"I actually have a lot of work to do as well," you continue, rapidly calculating the time you will need for Kudo's check-up in your mind. Taking account of the possibility that you might have to alter the formula for APAH to suit Kudo's requirements, you surmise that you will be working like a maniac for the whole afternoon.
"Ah," your imperfect but devastatingly attractive stranger (Does he really look like this in reality or does he only look like this in your eyes?) gives you an understanding smile and innocently remarks, "You will be working until Kudo leaves to fetch his girlfriend from the train, I suppose."
Since you don't know how to tell him about APAH and APTX4869 without giving him the impression that you're as mad as a hatter (or as a certain white-haired professor, who once believed that he could create a superhuman race), you only shrug—hoping that you come across as delightfully enigmatic—and ignore his implication.
"I'll be free after six at the latest. We can have dinner together and go out for a dance afterwards if you have time."
Or in other words: What about repeating our rendezvous on a daily basis? Not even a clueless idiot of Kudo's calibre can miss the hint that you would like to give this puzzling relationship a clearer definition.
"I do have time tonight, but I don't get why we can't dance together here and now," he responds in an elegant attempt to pass up your offer without hurting your feelings.
"You can't be serious!" You try to mask your disappointment by emptying your cup of coffee. He is disturbingly hard to read, tempting you with impossible suggestions while obstinately keeping his distance at the same time. Haven't you yourself categorized him as the type that will never commit? Blaming his evasiveness on his naiveté would be self-deception since it's indisputable that you've just asked him for a second date and have been coolly dismissed with a polite rejection.
"Why not?"
"No space?" You smile at him in bewilderment. To all appearances, he really intends to dance with you right now regardless of your unconventional attire and the fact that you two can't turn on the speakers in his apartment for fear of disturbing the neighbourhood.
"There will be enough space if we move the flowers into the corridor and the kitchen." He gracefully rises from his armchair and gives your shoulder a gentle nudge. "Come on, give me a hand, will you?"
After dividing the bouquets of roses between the corridor and the kitchen adjoining the living room, the two of you proceed to inspect his presents and fan letters, as you refuse to throw away so many lovingly wrapped boxes unopened into the trash bag he has placed on the floor.
"Trust me, I know exactly what they usually contain," he claims, "which is why I'm going to dump anything which is wrapped in red or black or has a heart on it unopened to spare us the embarrassment."
In spite of your prudish character, you don't easily get embarrassed by love letters no matter how impertinent and corny, you retort. Since he seriously wishes to get rid of all his fan letters and presents, you will consider them yours and open all of them to have a look at what he is so afraid of.
"Don't forget that I've warned you!" He sighs in defeat, shaking his head at your obstinacy.
"What do you usually do with all your fan mails which aren't red or black and don't have a heart on them? Filing them away to publish them in your memoirs as a postscript?" You give the letter he is now reading a skeptical look.
He smiles at you while casually ripping the letter apart. He only keeps a few he likes and throws away the rest, he claims. When he was still a teen idol, he sometimes replied to the fan letters he liked on the radio.
"How nice of you!"
"I actually like this one." He hands you a small watercolour card he has just decided to keep because he thinks one can call it art. Yaten dumped (and still dumps) all types of fan letters without reading them while Taiki used to keep all of them for purely intellectual reasons. Taiki also used to answer to most of the fan letters in his spare time, claiming that he only did it because he was fascinated by the workings of the human mind.
"But back then Kakyuu was still alive." The stranger turns away to place the two letters he intends to keep on the coffee table. "She used to choose the ones she liked most and ask us to reply to them first." Taking a giant lace bra and a pair of heavily perfumed panties out of a red box to throw it into the trash bag, he explains to you that "Kakyuu" was his lovely foster sister, who was one year older than him and whom Taiki, Yaten, and he had been in love with during their early teenage years.
"In retrospect, I think one can say we had been sharing her," he admits. "Somehow it worked without any complications since we all got along extremely well."
"You mean you lied to me when you said you didn't have a childhood friend?" You shoot him a withering look.
"I didn't consider her a childhood friend since I seldom saw her—she went to a private all-girls school until she was ten—and because she was my sister... well, sort of."
"'Sort of?' It makes a real difference, doesn't it? If she had been your real sister, it would have been incest."
"That's exactly why I added the 'sort of'—"
"—You also told me you would never go as far as sharing your girlfriend!"
"She was never really my girlfriend. It was a purely platonic love. We only held hands and hugged. I was never jealous of either Taiki or Yaten."
"Say... did you 'sort-of' kiss her, your sort-of sister/girlfriend/childhood friend?"
"If you consider a peck on her cheek as 'sort-of-kissing,' yes."
Life became increasingly insufferable at home due to the overprotectiveness of his foster parents (and their fully justified worries about their children's unconventional love life?), he tells you while quickly ripping apart a long letter from another fan after skimming it. Perhaps that's why Yaten, Taiki, and he rebelled when they were fifteen, leaving home with the declaration that they were going to take Kakyuu with them as soon as they could take care of themselves.
"It took us only a few weeks before we realized we had bitten off more than we could chew." He opens a box of chocolate-coated praline and offers a heart-shaped piece to you. "There we were, three spoiled teenagers running away from perfectly nice foster parents, who were begging us to come home because they could already see us ending as burglars or hired assassins. Taiki considered going home but Yaten and I would rather have died than admitted that we had failed. If Shizuka-san's father hadn't discovered us during one of our street performances, we would still be working in the circus for food and lodging."
"So you convinced your foster sister to leave your parents and live with you after you became a teen idol?" you ask with a glance at the white bench and the parasol you can see through the open door.
"Yes. She shared the apartment with Taiki, Yaten, and me for a few months. Then she discovered this apartment and suggested that we should move here..."
"...and that the four of you share this apartment." You scrutinize the four antique coat hooks in his corridor from afar. The four coat hooks suddenly seem to carry a deeper meaning to you now that you consider the difference in height at which they've been fastened on the wall.
"No, it was only her and me. She was living with me here while Yaten and Taiki were sharing the apartment above us. Of course they still often came down since we four always cooked and ate together." He gazes at you with troubled eyes. "I loved her in a purely emotional way, which was probably too little for her since our relationship wasn't going anywhere. Things became increasingly more awkward between us... Before one of our last concerts as Three Lights, she got into an accident and fell into a coma."
Taken aback by the implication and the sudden break in his voice, you wonder whether Kakyuu had made a scene when she noticed that he had fallen in love with another girl. Judging from the timespan it has lasted, his feelings for Odango seem to have been more serious than his feelings for Kakyuu, which were probably protectiveness and admiration he had mistaken for love.
You can hazily imagine the scenes of his life before his path crossed yours: the empty apartment after Kakyuu's accident, the mob of angry fans protesting against Three Lights' band breakup, Odango's wedding and their meetings at Ueno-koen after her marriage, his unmovable figure at the hospital bed of the comatose woman he once loved, pondering whether he should or should not pull the plug to her life support system...
Kakyuu died in her coma two years ago, he continues. Taiki dealt with her death by starting to write morbid poems while Yaten became an even more antisocial person than he already was. He himself was the only one who continued his life unscathed after a phase of mourning.
"A friend told me once that I'm the most resilient person on earth," he says, his voice cool and slightly ironic.
"It's something you should be proud of." You furrow your brows in concentration, pretending to occupy yourself with a particularly outrageous fan letter. "Whenever someone close to me died, it was hard for me to continue living. I always wished I had been the one who died so that I wouldn't have to deal with it." Ripping the shameless love letter apart with the air of a possessive long-time girlfriend, you add, "If that situation ever happens again, I don't think I will be able to bear it."
"That situation is hard to avoid." He calmly helps you collect the paper scraps. "Two people who love each other seldom pass away at the same time under normal circumstances. Unless you distance yourself from all the people you love, someday you will have to deal with the death of a loved one or vice versa."
"The 'vice versa' is exactly what I want." You let a red-and-black striped box (whose contents were short dyed-blonde curls and a photo with the capture "You can have me at any time!") fall into the trash bag. "I want to be the one who passes away first, as selfish as it sounds."
"Really?" He smiles at you across the pile of unread letters he has placed between you and himself. "I'd liked to be the last person left so that no one will have to mourn for me."
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