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)
g.
Although Paris is not…
Although Paris is not the city of love but rather the city of dog poo—after a few days, it grows on you. You could stay here forever, studying your guinea pig Kudo, who is studying Hattori and Jean Black while the former FBI agent and the hot-headed Detective of the West teach each other kendo and fencing.
Hattori, Kudo, and you have been sharing a spacious bedroom with an adjoining study, which must have been the old bedroom of M Jean Black and his wife. Within a few days, your group has morphed into a small family, for which you cook while Hattori and Kudo do the laundry and the grocery shopping, as you three have to care for yourselves when M Jean Black's housekeeper is away and your host is busy holding master classes. In the evenings, Hattori usually practices fencing while Kudo and you read mysteries or watch old thrillers together over a cup of tea. Every other day, there will be a small dinner party, during which you meet M Jean Black's allies, the people who have a personal interest in the files in Pandora's Box. There have been the usual bickering and annoyances since Kudo has ruined your favourite cashmere pullover and Hattori has always bought either too much or too little for lunch, turning cooking into a tricky task. But all in all, the situation only weakens your resolve and pours burning oil into your wounds, for living with Kudo is much more pleasant than you thought.
Weekend in Paris means having another large party, mainly held for all the former agents motards who were busy or indisposed the last time. There are a few who are still young, the children of the victims or the children of the late victim's spouses and lovers, who have remarried but never forgotten the grudge. Among them are a few twenty-odd-year-old men who have set out to irk your fake husband as much as possible by trying to flirt with you or behaving so gallantly towards you that they convey the impression of flirting although they are only being polite. And when the music begins to play and a particularly nice-looking, well-dressed specimen walks up to you to ask you for a dance, Kudo grabs your hand and pulls you to the dance floor, claiming that the slow waltz is a special dance, which his wife has promised to save for him alone.
"Jealous?" you smirk at Kudo as he nervously looks about himself, trying to copy the poses of the men around him. It's blatantly, painfully obvious to you (and probably to everyone else in the room who is watching him) that he can't dance. And since you can no longer dance either, you wonder how you two are going to get out of this situation without feigning headaches or staging a marital quarrel.
"Not really, but since you're supposed to be my wife as long as we're in Paris, I have the feeling that you belong to me."
"So you're feeling possessive?" you smirk. "That feeling, Kudo, is called 'jealousy'!"
Only a mentally challenged person would claim that Kudo is musical, but you have to admit that your detective can lead. You two are now moving in perfect synchronization, in silkily smooth but hopelessly wrong moments syncopated to the music.
"You're a terrible dancer, 'darling'. Even much, much worse than I've imagined," you gravely point out.
"I thought it would be easier to copy the movements." His face reddens, and he keeps shooting attentive glances at the other couples' feet, observing their steps and turns. "But you must admit that, until now, we've done really well."
"Well, yeah… we're dancing a completely different dance, in case you haven't noticed. You're going to get a prize for inventing a new version of the slow waltz for tone-deaf people."
"I dare you to become even nastier towards me than you already are, my dear," Kudo laughs, parodying the husband he is playing while pulling you closer to him. He smells like spring in winter and feels like a warm summer breeze, and your mind fails to think of a new insult for the time being.
"Charade", the old, lonely Parisian waltz, tells of love lost when fate pulled the strings while the music in the wings were still playing on, and you wonder whether Tenoh-san's mother—M Jean Black's wife and the youngest of the first-generation crows—had known about her impending execution when she watched the movie and sang the song to her husband and her child. Giving in to the twisted urge to say goodbye, you've asked Kudo to watch Charade with you before you two left for Paris. In one or two weeks, you will either be under the sod or on a plane to Venice. Hence you feel like being selfish for once, telling yourself that Kudo's girlfriend wouldn't mind if you stole him from her for another week.
Letting your eyes roam about the blue hall just to take in your surroundings and to engrave this moment into your memory, you meet M Jean Black's watchful gaze. It seems he has finally recognized you as the sixteen-year-old girl he saw with Kaioh-san and his daughter in front of the aquarium years ago. When he gives you a meaningful nod and disappears into the library adjoining the hall, you keep dancing with Kudo until "Charade" fades out. You're thirsty and would like to have a drink, you tell your present "husband", whose eyes are shining like stars and whose cheeks have taken on the colour of a glowing sunset. Preoccupied by his own muddled feelings and the intensely romantic mood, he luckily fails to notice that, to you, the spell is broken.
g.
M Jean Black has disappeared from the library by the time you arrive, having left it through the second door, which leads into his private study. Looking about yourself in admiration, you take in the cozy Victorian style room with crown moldings, red velvet, and dark wood. It reminds you of Tenoh-san, who has an old-fashioned, romantic aura about her despite being the most modern and emancipated woman you know.
Taking Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, which is lying on the table next to you, into your hand, you open it to the bookmarked page. The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
"You're too young for these thoughts," says Jean Black, who has just joined you in the library and looked over your shoulder. In response, you only knit your brows, put down the book, and scrutinize his face. If you hadn't known that Tenoh-san and he are related, he might not have reminded you of her at all. But knowing that he is her father, it's easy for you to spot the similarities. The same fine mouth and the same pointed chin, eyes of a different shape (longer and narrower than hers) but of the same colour, which you also have: a very bright shade of hazel running into teal blue instead of green.
"You don't like me," he smiles, stating the obvious while lighting himself a cigarette. "But I thought that you liked Haruka when I saw you with her, and I'd like to talk about Haruka with you. Let's go to my study to talk in private, shall we?"
"I'd rather talk about Kudo instead. Why did you have to drag him into this?" you ask M Jean Black after you two have settled yourselves beside each other on the small sofa next to the desk. He has shut the door to the library so that you two can't be overheard. But since Kudo will come to the library to search for you as soon as your drink has been mixed and will deduce that you're in the study within a second, M Jean Black and you only have a few minutes.
"Do you think he is too young for it?" He offers you a cigarette, which you decline. While he is of Franco-American origin, M Jean Black speaks British English. It's difficult for you to trust a person who is so inconsistent and so hard to read.
"Too young to die? Yes, he will be twenty in May. But he won't be able to celebrate it if he dies next week."
Why are you so certain that Kudo is going to die, M Jean Black asks you. The chances are high that all of you will come out of this alive. Without Pandora's Box, the Boss and the seven crows will no longer be immune from arrest. They're going to be in even deeper trouble than Kudo and will most probably be assassinated in prison because they know too much. Most of the codename members are also going to receive capital punishment in Japan, considering all the crimes they've committed.
"Not the Boss and the crows. They're going to get witness protection."
There is no doubt about it—he agrees—if they don't commit suicide before they can be arrested. And even that wouldn't be the worst ending to this fight, which has lasted for too long. "They need our protection. And we need them alive. With the knowledge they have, the crows can change the fate of so many people."
In short, incomplete but coherent sentences, he tells you how he has been preparing for the downfall of the Organization in the past years, about his excitement when he learned from James, his cousin, that Kogoro Mori has been added to the Organization's list of potential enemies. Having made the acquaintance of the detective during one of his Japan trips, Jean Black knew that Kogoro Mori couldn't have been the genius he claimed to be. Even without Haruka's help, it was easy for Jean to guess that the mastermind behind the Sleeping Kogoro was Edogawa Conan, who, even if he were a prodigy, was too brilliant and mature to be a six-year-old child. And the fact that Edogawa Conan appeared out of nowhere just when Kudo Shinichi disappeared from the news was too curious a coincidence to be dismissed.
His wife, who was usually secretive, had told him a few things about the Silver Bullet and Pandora's Box in her rare talkative moments, and Jean Black would certainly have been assassinated as well if the crows had expected him to know anything about them. But since she took her secret to the grave and he stayed inconspicuous, retired from the agency, and only worked as a fencing teacher ever since his mental breakdown after his wife's death, the Boss seemed to have been sentimental enough to let him live to raise his daughter, who was only a seven-year-old child at that time.
"You're too young to have regrets," he puffs at his cigarette with a nostalgic smile. "But at my age, regrets begin to consume you. I've neglected Haruka—a failure my late wife would never have forgiven me. I've taken her with me to all the meetings of the agents motards but was never available whenever she reached out to me. All I could think of was how to plan my revenge. And when Haruka was fourteen and I had finally recovered from my grief, it was much too late." His teal eyes are looking through you into a past which can never be revived. "Haruka was once a wonderful girl—the kindest person I knew, nicer than I or even her mother ever was. Immersed in her idea of revenge, she has become radical."
"She is still a wonderful person," you tell him in a sharp voice. "She has a family she truly cares about although you wouldn't accept her girlfriend, which was the only reason why she distanced herself from you. It's hard to believe that she has become such a good parent to Hotaru although she didn't receive love from her own parents."
"She didn't get much attention from me, not even before her mother's death, because I was always busy—but her mother was very affectionate towards her," Jean Black admits, studiously ignoring your comment about Tenoh-san's relationship with Kaioh-san. "Although she belonged to the crows, my wife was a lovely woman." He hesitates for a moment. "Has your boyfriend told you how we lost her?"
You shake your head in silence. It was Tenoh-san, who described her mother's death to you in detail when you suggested that you two take out Anokata and the six loyal crows with the undetectable poison you created for yourself instead of APTX. I'm not their Good Samaritan, she had screamed, staring at you through unshed tears. If you dare to propose such a thing to me again, I'm going to shoot you!
"I'm going to spare you the details," M Jean Black gives a mirthless chuckle. "She received the second red card when she left the crows to stay with me. We were well prepared for an attack, but after years of waiting, we thought they'd forgiven her or forgotten about us. When Haruka was seven, my wife got sentimental, asked me to marry her although she had never cared about official documents. She disappeared in the night of the wedding, leaving the last red card on our bed… I found her clothes and all the pieces of her body after days and weeks. The only thing I couldn't find was her wedding ring."
"And now you want that the same happens to us?" you ask, unimpressed by his tragedy when all you can think of is Kudo's safety. "Are you telling me all these things to prepare me for the aftermath?"
He sighs, regarding you with a sharp, cold gaze.
"I've warned your boyfriend beforehand that this will be dangerous. But it's a matter of social conscience! There have always been people who selflessly put themselves in danger to protect others. Without those people, how would our world be? Kudo Shinichi is one of those people, and he is extremely competent. He is old enough to know what he is doing and young enough not to be burdened with children and a wife—people who depend on him and who could tie him down. If I weren't absolutely sure that he is the right man for the job, I'd never have told him where the crows keep Pandora's Box."
"Why don't you do it yourself?" you coolly ask, unable to hide your contempt. "You could have done this on your own instead of asking a teenager to do it for you."
"I can trust your boyfriend but not myself." Jean Black gives you a sad smile, which resembles Tenoh-san's so much that it throws you off-balance, and chuckles. "You believe I'm afraid of death? On the contrary! To me, death is a luxury. The only thing which keeps me alive is Pandora's Box. To die in peace, I need to witness the downfall of the Organization."
"Well then, after the Organization goes down, you can go ahead and kill yourself!"
Instead of being offended, he flashes you a humorous smile, which changes his features drastically and makes him look ten years younger than he is.
"Maybe I will…"
Revenge—he changes the topic—is always personal. To serve justice, however, you need to be open-minded and impartial, which is almost impossible if you have a compelling reason to seek revenge.
"You see, I don't have anything against revenge," he says, puts out his cigarette, and throws the cigarette butt into the ashtray. "Personal revenge can be sweet and healthy, especially when it's fair and straightforward. But this…" He shakes his head with a mournful expression. "…This is too big! Killing one person out of personal revenge, in a fair fight, is not the same as killing eight people or more. If I kill the crows, I'll also have to kill their sniper spouses and their devoted secretaries. The quantity always makes a difference, and guilt grows exponentially. I'm afraid of losing myself in this."
You calmly hold his piercing gaze until he averts his eyes, turning his attention to the cigarette butts in the ashtray. Instead of asking you whether his daughter and you are plotting a revenge or not, he only sighs, leans back, and closes his eyes.
"Kudo Shinichi is the perfect man for this," he says at last. "He can comprehend the pain of the victims because he has had a taste of it. But his personal loss—three or four years of his life—is absolutely nothing compared to mine." For an instant, his deep eyes flash with icy rage. "If Pandora's Box were in my hands and I knew the identity of the seven crows, I'd simply kill them all—more than that, I'd torture them, rip out their guts, and cut out their eyes! Your boyfriend, on the other hand, is going to keep a clear head and make the right decisions."
When you rise from the sofa without saying a word, he only follows you to the door and opens it.
"Although I'm sure that Kudo Shinichi is the right one for the task," he tells you in a low voice as you leave, "I'm not so sure about you."
g.
Kudo, who has been waiting for you in the library, has naturally overheard the last sentence. Pulling you to the veranda after fetching your coat for you, he hands you your non-alcoholic Blue Lagoon and leans against the iron railing. Since Kudo has turned off the light of the veranda, only the crescent moon is illuminating the old honey locust next to the entrance, whose thorns are throwing dark shadows on Kudo's face, creating the illusion of scars and burns and claw marks.
There is no excuse for not doing the right thing, he claims. There are always sacrifices you need to make and risks you need to take to achieve your goals. But from a moral point of view, it's of primary importance that the people who risk their lives are doing it of their own accord. "I can risk my life but not yours. If you're not sure that coming with Hattori and me is really what you want, please give me the key and stay with the Professor in Tokyo after we return to Japan."
You laugh, much to your own surprise, as you're trying to imagine how Kudo is going to use the key if he has never learned to hold a tune. The first-generation crows are, without exception, musical people with an acute sense of rhythm and pitch, who have taught the younger generations to cope with that person's quirky sense of humour whenever they try to enter the cabin.
"Nice try. But I've told you I'm only going to assist you on condition that I come with you and open the cabin, haven't I?"
You can remember a talk Gin and you had in Kyoto before he went to the meeting at Pandora's Box. Let's face it: the Organization isn't what it once was or what it claimed to be, you told him after an uncommonly pleasant evening, during which you two listened to his favourite jazz singer and shared a bath. Like any other organization, it has traitors, corruption, and bureaucracy. I think we two have already done enough. We should simply retire and let the other codename members do all the work.
We both would be executed, Gin only said, sitting up in bed without shoving you away. Spewing blue smoke and lazily running his fingers through your damp hair, he asked you where you would go, for whom you would work if it were possible to leave the Organization. For the industry or for the government? Everyone in this world was corrupt, which couldn't only be blamed on the corrupt system.
You see, Sherry, we have a recurring problem: You can't comply with the regulations. A girl like you would never be happy—he asserted—as freedom and justice didn't necessarily need to be part of happiness to most people but to you. Like other people, however, you didn't only need freedom but also security. In life, you can never have both. Believe me, it would be easier for you if you were just a decorative doll like the redhead you liked so much.
Even if I had it, why should I give you the key, you remember asking Tenoh-san, who had been waiting for you in front of the lab to pester you about Gin and Pandora's Box. What do I get in return?
Freedom, the blonde racer, whom you had never talked with before, smirked. Most people don't need it but you need it, like me. I can see it in your eyes!
At Infinity, Meioh Setsuna-san once told you that your incessantly working mind, combined with your pessimism, would be your greatest enemy when you grew up, and predicted that you would be having a hard time fighting against your destructive intellect because you're unable to trust your own intuition. Back then you thought she was indirectly flattering you, trying to be nice. But now you begin to consider the possibility that Meioh-san was only brutally honest and that her words weren't meant to flatter you at all.
Just as Kudo doesn't know all about the crow's security measures and the key, Kudo doesn't know what the real Pandora's Box is, for you've never revealed to him the dreams of the Organization. More than once, Gin has ranted about the corruption of power and what it meant to live in a world where everything was a social construct, how unbearable life would be if it weren't for that person, who was going to change the world for the better. Most people—Gin told you—didn't question their beliefs, preferring to trust all the arbitrary moral values and life views society imposed on them. The codename members, on the other hand, fought for their ideals and dedicated their lives to changing the future for the next generations.
It's hilarious how philosophies resemble each other, how Gin, Rye, Kudo, and Jean Black all say the same thing…
Kaioh Michiru, the most interesting of all, says that people often let themselves dictate by what they think is right and natural. There is the tendency to do the things which seem right in one context in another as if it was universal, causing unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecies. Despite (or because of?) his unquestionable brilliance and integrity, Kudo, too, has a pattern he can't escape. He will always solve mysteries. If he gets the tool to bring criminals to justice and save all the victims, he will definitely use it.
Your memory for formulas has always been excellent. If you hadn't feared that Kudo would get himself killed as soon as he returned to his original state, you would have made the permanent antidote long ago. You've only created the temporary antidote because you pitied Ran and him, whose carefree lives would never have been messed up if it hadn't been for the Organization's utopian dreams.
"When I was small, I always wondered why the gods put Hope into Pandora's Box." Kudo smiles at you, watching you sip your Blue Lagoon with thinly disguised enjoyment while you're staring in fascination at the changing patterns on his face, which the moonlight and the shadow of the honey locust, whose thorns sway gently in the biting wind, create. "When I got older, I began to realize that the gods, no matter how harsh they were, still liked humans too much to punish them with all the evils of humanity without giving them something else in return." He doesn't mind spending his whole life on the run, he adds. As long as you don't mind it either, he will take it in stride and accept Monsieur Jean Black's protection even if it means to spend the next twenty years of his life in Europe.
You, too, wondered why Hope has been kept in Pandora's jar when you heard the Pandora's Box legend for the first time, you think to yourself. But in the end, you've come to an entirely different conclusion. In one version of the tale, Pandora closed the lid of the jar before Hope, the greatest evil of all, could escape. In another version, the naive woman released it, and it flew out into the world to prolong the torment and perpetuate humankind's suffering with its irresistible face and its angelic voice, which coaxes the mortals into believing that they can defeat all evils someday.
Inside, the music is playing "Starry, Starry Night". Kudo reaches out to rub your shoulder, giving you a reassuring squeeze before pulling away. It's easy to get lost in the moment, thinking this is how things are supposed to be. You two are sitting on the vast veranda at the breakfast table like a middle-aged couple, beholding the crescent moon and the "starry, starry night"—the emblem of the eternal coexistence of light and darkness in the universe and the symbol of unattainable, endless beauty. The smog has cleared, but the air is bitterly cold. Kudo is being really docile these days, you think as you sip your Blue Lagoon and listen to Don McLean's song on Vincent Van Gogh from the hall. It must be his guilty conscience, as (without really touching you), Kudo has been betraying Ran with you for days.
"And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you…"
g.
In life, there are sometimes moments of infinite sadness like now, when you're sitting alone on the double bed, drying your hair with the hair dryer of a long-deceased woman, who once belonged to the seven crows. Sometimes, you wonder whether Kudo ever feels like people like Tenoh-san and you and whether Kudo only doesn't have a truly dark side, against which he has to fight, because he has been spared from all the things which could have triggered its development like deep, unbearable sorrow. You wonder how he would be if he had to go through genuine hardship. Not the sort of challenge that turns one into a hero and an acclaimed detective but the sort of hardship which Tenoh-san, Gin, Jean Black, and you went through—the sort which makes you despise the whole world. What a person would Kudo become if he suddenly lost everyone he cared about… Ran, her parents, his parents, the Professor, Hattori, you?
You wonder why you feel this uncontrollable urge to protect Kudo although it can't be your duty to stop him. It should be Ran's task, you think with bitterness. But she can't do anything because you've advised him not to tell her about Pandora's Box before the whole operation was over.
In fact, there have been many cases in which you let Kudo endanger himself and almost sacrifice himself for others when you two were still Edogawa and Haibara. But during all those cases, it was him, who had to make the decision for himself. Now the situation is entirely different. You've given him the permanent antidote and are going to open Pandora's Box for him so that he won't run off and try to wring the key out of Gin, the only crow he knows. It goes without saying that you will have to take responsibility for the aftermath as well.
The coin flies high before it comes down, rolls to the door of the bedroom, and falls on one side. Let Kudo proceed with his plans to secure Pandora's Box, it says. Assist him as well as you can—and let him die.
Impossible, you realize, since that's the one thing you can never do. No matter how much and how often you will have to dirty your hands, no matter how high the price will be: the most important things to you—in the past, in the present, and even in the remote future—is to avenge Akemi-nee-san's death and ensure that Kudo stays alive.
Removing the small Cupid from your locket, you replace it with the twenty-sixth pill. The remaining twenty-five pills, all fastidiously numbered so that Tenoh-san won't mix them up, are lying snugly next to each other in the red jewellery box, which once contained the love necklace you're wearing.
You can't even tell whether it is love or obsession, or just the simple urge to protect. For everyone needs someone like the red-haired girl in their life: a symbol of frail perfection, without which the world can't function. Gazing at the white-gold Cupid, which is now lying forlornly at the bottom of your jacket pocket and which you're going to throw out tomorrow when you meet up with Tenoh-san so that Kudo won't find it by accident, you have the premonition that love itself will be the price. But love, or at least romantic love, is so fleeting and so insignificant compared to life.
g.