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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Oddly enough…
Oddly enough, Taiki Kou's threat—instead of throwing you into a panic—only calms your tattered nerves. Believing in the proverb that barking dogs don't bite, you note in amusement that Seiya's perfect flower-loving brother is not only impatient and rude but also makes empty threats of the sort which only a twelve-year-old would ever carry out.
"Seems like we're going to stay here for a while," you observe in resignation, using your toes to fish for the blanket on the floor without having to leave Seiya's lap. His devil-may-care attitude is rubbing off on you, as you can already see Taiki and Yaten Kou leave the apartment in a huff when they finally comprehend that their brother won't come out of his refuge. Making yourself comfortable on Seiya's lap and draping the blanket over your precious singer so that he won't catch a cold, you console yourself that the situation could be worse. It was dumb luck that you've placed the vases directly in front of the door, forcing the intruders to make a hubbub loud enough to startle you two out of the drunken haze. Also, the compulsive kissing had begun to hurt, and it was time to take a break from it to recover and let time flow naturally again.
Outside, the sun is still rising as if time had really stopped or at least slowed down so much that you can no longer feel how it passes—or the reverse is the case and you can sense the passing of time so acutely that every second seems to last for an eternity. Some people claim that time flies when you're having fun but you've discovered that it's actually the opposite. Time always seems to pass slowly when you're enjoying yourself—and happy moments only appear so short in retrospect, after they're gone forever.
Overcome by exhaustion and the warmth Seiya radiates under the blanket—he has already dozed off, to all appearances—you close your eyes as well and listen to the hustle and bustle from the corridor with smug satisfaction. It seems Taiki Kou is now mopping up the water on the floor and collecting the shards while Yaten Kou (having exhausted his thesaurus of expletives in the meantime) is rummaging through something you believe to be a medical kit. Thinking of Kudo, who is hopefully still asleep, you've just fallen into a pleasant reverie when Taiki-san's deadly serious voice announces, "One!"
Within a fraction of a second, Seiya has pushed you off his lap and is now shoving you towards the wardrobe with his right hand, his left hand fixing the door handle in a tight clutch to make sure that no one can come in.
"My clothes!" he orders, eyes wide open and alert.
"Two!" Taiki Kou dramatically continues. "If you don't come out in a second, I'll come in!"
"Wait a minute!" Seiya gives the door a curt knock. "I'm still in my pyjamas," he lies, smirking at you as the blanket slips from his shoulder. "Just one or two minutes so that I can get dressed and do my hair." With an impatient flick of the wrist, he holds out his palm to you. "Quick! Any pullover and any pair of jeans will do."
In answer to your raised brow, he hurriedly explains to you that Taiki is in an extremely foul mood. And whenever Taiki is in his (admittedly rare) psycho mode, he is the most impetuous and irresponsible of the three of them. "If you don't want him to walk in on us like this, please give me something to wear."
"What play are you staging, Seiya? Don Juan?" Taiki Kou pounds on the door with his fist. "I give you exactly one minute from now on! One minute! Sixty seconds! Do you understand?"
"Got it," Seiya sighs. "We'll come out in one minute."
"Like hell we will!" You glower at the door, suppressing the urge to tell his brothers to get lost. On the one hand, you haven't wanted to make a negative impression on Seiya's foster brothers, who are obviously very close to him even after their band breakup. On the other hand, they're too dense for nuances so that you will have to depend on your skill at using unambiguous wording.
"Listen!" you raise your voice, keenly aware of Seiya watching you with undisguised enjoyment. "You two have barged in on us in a most embarrassing moment. And I really don't want to make your acquaintances when I'm only dressed in a bathrobe which doesn't even belong to me. I'm also sure we can handle the mess in the corridor on our own. So please go away before—"
"Fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight," is Taiki Kou's only response to your speech. Leaning against the door, Seiya is now huddled under the blanket, laughing openly about both Taiki-san and you. While he is indubitably the most charming man you've ever met, he is also the most exasperating in his unflappable happiness. Irritated, you give him a slight kick in the ribs, which he parries with his wrist before he plants a placatory kiss on your ankle.
"Don't brag! We all know how great your voice imitation skills are." Yaten Kou's high voice sounds now dangerously near. "You have forty seconds to come out. It's two against one. You know you don't stand a chance, Seiya!"
"It's actually two against two," you tell Seiya as you're ransacking his wardrobe for something which doesn't look like a theatre costume or a rag—obviously, stranger-san has been wearing the same clothes for the past ten years. Throwing him a pair of black-and-blue striped socks, a decent pair of black trousers, black underwear, and an old midnight-blue shirt, whose colourful diamond-shaped patches and whose frills at the cuffs match his whimsical personality more than the mundane jeans and pullover he has asked for, you grimly inform your new boyfriend about your strategy: "If they really dare to break in, you'll have to tackle Taiki-san so that I can take Yaten-san because Taiki-san is too tall for me."
Getting dressed at a speed which makes you feel dizzy just from watching, Seiya only laughs at the idea.
"You really want to fight Yaten in that bathrobe?" he asks, leaps over the bed, and throws open the window to let the crisp morning air in. Watching him make the bed in three efficient movements, you can't help but swell with proprietorial pride. There he is, your perfect house-husband. Your perfect life partner!
"Your perfect assassin," Gin's voice, which has been preserved intact in your memory, mocks. And another morning in another apartment in Azabu Juuban springs to mind, when he routinely made the bed before loading his trusted Beretta for "work"…
"What are you thinking of?" Seiya has just removed the satin band around his hair so that the long black waves are now spilling over his shoulders and cascading down below his waist. Startled, you recall the fedora and the shawl he wore when you two first met and hazily wonder how he would look if he were languidly leaning against a black Porsche, bending his head and cupping his hand to light himself a cigarette.
"On second thought, I'll pass. I'll wait for you here until you've escorted them out. Just pretend that I'm not here and fake a migraine so that they leave you alone." Still bewildered by your own thoughts, you distractedly brush your palm over the heads of the roses on his bedside table, enjoying the sumptuous pleasure of their petals against your skin. There have been similar roses in your hotel room in Kyoto as well, scarlet roses which Gin bought you after noticing your admiring gaze when you two passed the flower shop. You've almost forgotten that Gin had been an attentive and caring lover whenever he was in a good mood—when whatever demons he had been fighting with gave him a short break to focus on you.
The fragrance of kinmokusei and orange blossoms in Seiya's hair only contributes to the curious feeling of déjà vu, reminding you of the first months of your relationship when Gin still wore a similar perfume. But rather than feel unsettled by it, you prefer to see it as a good omen. It looks like your otherwise infallible nose really did pick the wrong lover back then—at Infinity when you saw stranger-san for the first time and met Gin again after years of studying abroad. Be that as it may, now that you've eliminated the wrong choice, the remaining man must be the right one…
It's peculiar how your mind is always trying to find a pattern behind coincidences—sifting through the random occurrences to search for the "fateful ones" in a futile attempt to bring the events of your life into a narration.
"Why do you want to hide here?" Seiya, who has redone his ponytail in a flash, quickly collects the damp clothes on the floor and drops them into the basket behind his electric guitar. "I thought you wanted to go home because you've locked up Kudo in your apartment. And Yaten and Taiki won't leave very soon because they usually stay here until three p.m. when we all go to the studio for a jam session. They wouldn't leave me alone even if I pretended to be sick… I also thought we didn't want to hide this."
There is the saying that if you marry a man, you also have to marry his parents. In this case, you seem to have slipped into a relationship not only with Seiya but with his foster brothers as well.
"Say, aren't you ever alone?" You shudder at the thought that not only his brothers but also Odango's friends—"Mina", for instance—seem unduly fond of him.
"Almost never," he grudgingly admits. "Not when they're within the radius of one hundred miles."
"You can't seriously expect me to meet them while I'm only wearing your bathrobe!" You demonstratively fold your arms in front of your chest, frowning.
He gives you an uncomprehending look, reaching out to smooth the crease from your forehead.
"Why not? It's not like you're naked."
"I might as well be!"
"Should I give you a pullover or a long shirt of mine?"
If looks could kill, he would be dead. But at least he seems to know as well as you that yours truly in his trousers would be a ridiculous sight.
"Five, four, three," Taiki Kou interjects.
"Stop it!" Seiya pushes the bed against the door to block the entrance. "Just give me another minute." Perching on the bed with the sun in his face and his tousled black locks crowning his head like an eccentric hat, he reminds you of someone—an image, an icon, or an allegory?—whose name has slipped your mind.
"Why don't you want to come out and meet Yaten and Taiki?" he asks, bracing his back against the heavy wooden door as a series of violent kicks shake the walls. "Although they're somewhat nasty this morning, they're both pretty nice on normal days." Alternating between hilarity and disbelief, he endures your lecture on how society judges impulsive women who "share their favours too easily" whereas promiscuous men are viewed with a mixture of admiration, envy, and amusement, as all women—well, the eligible girls who count—are still expected to be perfect angels who can only be conquered by their great and irresistible husbands in their wedding night…
Even before you've finished your sentence, it dawns on you that he is part of a social circle which is very different from yours. Surrounded by boho artists, musicians, and actors who easily slide in and out of short-lived affairs or embark on sexual adventures without caring much about the moral judgements of the stodgy rest of the world, he might be yearning for the romantic ideal of finding a soul mate and growing old with that person without ever contemplating the physical or social aspects of the union. When he wordlessly pulls you into his arms for a kiss, your mistrustful side begins to suspect that he is bored to death by your sermon even though his method of shutting you up is a delight you would rather not forgo.
"Now I know why people indulge in extramarital affairs," he chuckles, slipping a wayward hand under your bathrobe, which you slap away in mock aggravation. "No one in their right mind can enjoy making love to a cold angel, can they?" He pulls his face into an innocent, bovine expression of contentment and coyly bats his long eyelashes—and you relent, letting go of his teasingly roaming hand to kiss him again.
"Caught in the act on the morning after… I should have expected this, knowing we're jinxed," you remark, alluding to the rain, which has changed your plans and turned what should have been a perfectly platonic date with a nice stranger into this predicament your reputation won't ever recover from.
"Doubled jinxed," he gravely reminds you. "Considering that we're doubled jinxed when we're together, this is completely harmless compared to all the disasters which could happen."
"Dammit, Seiya! We're breaking the door down!" Taiki-san announces, whereupon Yaten-san confirms with audible excitement, "I'm ready!"
"I'm coming out now!" Seiya groans. "You two are insufferable! Just give me a few seconds."
Come on, he coaxes. They'll find out about us sooner or later, anyway. Why not bring it behind us now? They will either like you or they won't, and perhaps it will take them time to adjust—but what else can actually happen?
All right, you give in, ceremoniously straighten your bathrobe, and run your hands through your hair for lack of a comb. After all, his brothers are the ones who should be ashamed of themselves for their childish antics. Waiting for Seiya to draw the bed away from the door, you resolve to face Taiki-san and Yaten-san with aplomb. The last kiss Seiya gives you before taking your hand and pulling you with him only eases your decision.
Still blissfully unaware of the impending catastrophe and delirious with unadulterated happiness after the assurance that this must be true love because he is already introducing you to the two most important people in his life after knowing you for only one night, you blindly follow your new boyfriend as he pulls the door open with a flourish and, giving you a smile which could have melted even Anokata's heart, presents you with a nightmarish scene similar to one you have already seen before…
…The large pool of blood at the door, which looks even more sickening as it has been diluted with water and smeared by the bloody mop, which has been carelessly tossed onto the floor and is now lying in the middle of the corridor like a human's remains; the masses of tiny green, white, and pink flowers strewn across the floor; the long-stemmed roses of three different colours (Yaten-san and Taiki-san have brought a few bouquets of yellow and white roses they must have received from their fans at Two Lights' to dump them on Seiya)…
Taiki Kou—who cuts a fine figure in his midnight-blue suit despite his bony limbs and his unusual height—is towering directly over you, staring down at you with intelligent, hypnotic eyes shimmering in an almost violet hue as they are illuminated by the morning light. Despite his imposing presence, however, your senses are irresistibly drawn towards the smaller, more delicate figure on the bench: a glamorous-looking young man in a similar midnight-blue suit, whose fine-boned arms are resting limply on Seiya's two helmets, between which he is sitting. His bewitching, almost feminine beauty seems heightened and, at the same time, tarnished by his long silver-white hair and his vivid, horror-filled green eyes. And even amidst the scent of roses and blood and Seiya's mysterious, alluring scent, your nose can still easily detect Yaten Kou's heavy fragrance… The refined, tea-like fragrance of pure, undiluted sweet osmanthus—the scent of the red-haired girl.
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