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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There it is…
There it is, the tiny detail which has torn a hole into the flimsy fabric of my perfect universe. Just when I believed to have solved it at last, the mystery evaded me.
For a moment, I allow myself to indulge in the idea that it was a fiendish plot Tenoh-san (and Kaioh-san?) had hatched in order to persuade me into helping them take revenge on that person before I dismiss the far-fetched theory. Tenoh-san may have been eager to steal Pandora's Box and eliminate the crows when we were both students at Infinity, but she was clearly reluctant to fight against the Organization after committing herself to a life partner and a child. Her fear of endangering the people she loved during a half-baked attempt at shooting the crows and her fury when I suggested that we take out our opponents with my painless drug were real. M Jean Black, too, clearly believed that the crows whom we were fighting were the same people who had murdered his wife. The truth, however unpleasant, may be simpler than all the conspiracy theories I had concocted in my mind: Due to Anokata's secretiveness when it came to the Organization's first idealistic phase and the story of the first "seventh crow", which was to them a failure they didn't want to be reminded of, Tenoh-san didn't know that the six crows who had murdered her mother had already been shot by the Boss, who had been less willing to execute her mother than Tenoh-san thought.
After surviving the bomb attack on their family and executing the first-generation crows, Seiya's parents kept the new seven crows apart by dispersing them and assigning them different branches of the Organization. The age gap between the original crows and the second-generation codename members who replaced them were so small that the new "first-generation" crows must have been the same age as Tenoh-san's mother, who was the youngest of the real first-generation crows. In a few cases, they must have been even older than her, as the first-generation codename members didn't only recruit orphans but also homeless people. All these things must have contributed to the fatal misunderstanding, which wasn't cleared up because unlike the first codename members, the later "generations" didn't socialize outside work.
Tenoh-san was seven when her mother died—and her memory of the tragedy must have consisted of a few startlingly vivid images, feelings, and sensations but also scores of gaps, which her imagination had to fill in. How frustrated must she have been after infiltrating the crows and stealing a backup of the files on her mother from Pandora's Box just to learn that they only contained useless information she had already known! The answers to the questions she had were stored in a hidden folder protected by the Night Baron, to which only Anokata had access. The development of the Night Baron copy, which Meioh-san had already started before I applied for Infinity, however, was so excruciatingly slow that time was running out for the Organization's last "seventh crow". Hence she immediately jumped at the chance when she realized that she could worm the information out of that person's lovely, naive child—the Black Organization's sheltered princess, whom Three Lights had introduced to Odango and her friends after rescuing her from her overbearing mother.
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Following the downfall of the Organization, M Jean Black committed suicide while Tenoh-san continued to help the victims in her own radical way: blackmailing the judges and the lawyers. No one can tell why Jean Black cut his wrist, as the popular fencing teacher didn't care to leave a suicide note for his few relatives and many friends, all of whom genuinely mourned his passing. A nicer, more tender-hearted person like Ran would choose to believe that he had taken his own life out of guilt or had succumbed to the depression he had never been able to shake off after his wife's death. But I prefer to believe that he, following my advice, had left the world with a smile because he had finally avenged her murder and no longer had the will to live. Believing himself to be the only winner of a fight which had brought both his enemies and allies nothing but pain, having successfully destroyed the Organization and exacted his revenge on Anokata and their crows without ruining his spotless reputation or dirtying his beautiful long-fingered hands, the duplicitous jerk happily stole out of this empty world to join his only love in death, abandoning his daughter for his deceased wife once again.
Despite our current disagreement over my obsession with Seiya, which I believe to be the last great, fateful love of my life while Tenoh-san believes it to be a "foolish, ill-fated, tragic, doomed" venture upon a lasting relationship, which could never stand the test of time (whenever Tenoh-san gets agitated over other people's business, she tends to chuck adjectives about), I sincerely hope that Tenoh-san will never find out that none of the crows we had poisoned so cruelly had played a part in her mother's murder. Tenoh-san's sense of justice and her firm conviction that she has made the right choice have until now protected the "distant ruler of heaven" from all the nightmares which inevitably plagued lesser mortals. In this case, the saying applies that ignorance is bliss. I must admit I've always had a soft spot for Tenoh-san even during the few moments in which she seriously misbehaves whereas I can't feel a scintilla of pity for all the "innocent" crows, who hadn't murdered Tenoh-san's mother but had cowardly voted for Akemi-nee-san's execution.
And yet I know that, if I were in Purgatory or on a similar post-death trial, I'd have lost my case even before I can muster the nerve to fight. Perching on a wool-, linen-, or silk-covered boulder on Mount Olympus, surrounded by the curious bunch of first-generation and second-generation Greek gods that Tenoh-san likes, (disheartened by my hopeless situation but tipsy and emboldened by the ambrosia they had given me!), I would tell Zeus or Jupiter or whoever presides over the meeting my honest opinion that the true villains of my story are neither Gin and Anokata nor Tenoh-san and me but the gods themselves: the hardened, resentful, incompetent bosses, who had unleashed Death and Pain and Sorrow and Hope upon the unsuspecting world when they used Pandora. Secure in the knowledge that, once dead, I cannot be eliminated again, I would proudly march off in the direction of Styx even though I would wonder what my trial had really been about. Did I create bureaucratic or administrative hassle by flooding the underworld with twenty-six people whose time on earth wasn't officially over yet? Or did I break a cardinal rule of the universe by reversing the flow of time when I created the Silver Bullet for the so-called "Black Organization"?
Perhaps all those offences are only bagatelles in the eyes of our rowdy Greek gods, and my true crime was my inability to live up to their expectations when I failed to develop my great potential. Like many other lives, mine has been full of disappointments and missed chances, personal failures and broken promises. Only during the last twenty-four hours, when it was already too late to salvage either the remnants of my past love for Kudo or the future Seiya and I could have shared, I've begun to value my limited time.
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In the deepening…
In the deepening twilight, on the bench where we first met, my stranger and I are making the most of our time together by spending it in the best way we can considering the circumstances. Exchanging scandalous, longing kisses (which would ruin my reputation for good if the paparazzi caught them on video to sell them to the gutter press), we inform each other during the short breaks we take to catch our breath on all the happenings which occurred while the other person was away.
"Odango has been searching for you. I saw her on the bus…"
In spite of my effort to sound casual, the edge of jealousy is clearly audible. If she were really serious about her decision to limit their frequent semi-romantic dates—a peevish voice in my head remarks—she wouldn't have met up with him so soon.
He doesn't even miss a beat.
"I know. I've already met her. She has returned to Hikawa Shrine to wait for me there."
Even to my infatuated, delusional ears, it doesn't sound like he has resolved to stay in Tokyo with me. Brushing aside the dark, sobering thought that unlike Kudo, Seiya doesn't tie himself (or let himself be tied) to one place (and one person?) even when he falls in love, I make a superhuman effort to focus on other feelings to distract myself from my growing disenchantment. Unfortunately, my negativity—a tiresome, overprotective childhood friend—easily finds another feeling to latch onto: ever since I talked to Hino Rei and saw the cherry wish tree at Hikawa Shrine, jealousy has been gnawing away at the fragile trust I have unthinkingly placed in a stranger who is by reputation promiscuity incarnate.
"How well do you know Odango's friends?"
Fairly well since they were classmates for a whole year—before Kakyuu's accident, which caused Three Lights to drop out of school. "Rei-chan" went to a Catholic all-girls school but hung out with the others at the Crown game centre whenever she didn't drag her friends to Hikawa Shrine for joint study sessions. Usually he doesn't believe in the preposterous idea that five heads are better than one—Seiya dryly remarks—but in this case, he must admit that Odango would never have passed her finals without her friends' efforts. Apart from sacrificing a large part of her free time to her vigilante group, Odango was so easily distracted by the simple joys of life—tasty food, nice weather, pleasant company, time-consuming hobbies—that she failed at the most simple academic tasks. She was also often late because she overslept, and she could never work up the motivation to memorize her Kanji.
Although I wonder whether Odango's weakness for the comfortable middle-class life played a role in her decision to marry her fiancé instead of eloping with Seiya, I'm more interested in Hino Rei.
"How is 'Rei-chan' like? She seemed rather frank and fierce…"
Very frank and very fierce, Seiya agrees. He likes her very much although he finds her scary. Alarmed by my pensive mood, he throws me a curious, slightly anxious look. "What happened? Did she try to have your guts for garters because Odango has told her how you dumped me?"
Hino-san only informed me about his past affairs, I tell him as I free myself from his embrace. It's best not to get too attached to a man who can pack and leave at any moment. How could I believe that I've finally learned to make good use of my time so that I can saunter past all the steep slopes of life with a placid and benevolent smile like a smug, enlightened female Buddha? Living is like doing household chores: just when you think you've finally mastered the skills and can relax, the dirt will accumulate and you will have to clean up the mess again.
To my indignation, my stranger bursts into laughter while tiny teardrops are glistening in his impeccably innocent, impossibly blue eyes—and I'm so piqued by his reaction to my (fully justified!) anger and insecurity that I feel tempted to yank at his ponytail again. In fact, I'd already have succumbed to the urge and committed the public 'spousal abuse' if I hadn't caught sight of the elderly couple, who are preparing to leave because they've run out of bread crumbs and either given up waiting for their friends or been scared away by our open display of affection.
"What are you laughing at? For your information: I despise people who deceive others for their own selfish pleasure, and it's definitely not flattering to be the thousand-and-second or thousand-and-third one-night stand of a notorious womanizer!"
The only thing he has lied about—or rather omitted and sidestepped—was his family background, Seiya insists. And he only hid it from me last night because it wasn't only his but also Taiki's and Yaten's secret and because he couldn't dump such sensitive information on a woman he didn't know well. As for his supposed affairs, he honestly doesn't know why Rei-chan claimed that three quarters of the paper wishes on the cherry tree belonged to his past one-night stands. He has never even kissed anyone before me unless I classify the one farewell kiss he gave Odango, all the greeting kisses he gave his mother and Kakyuu, and the extremely chaste cheek kisses he did for a few awkward ads during his time as a teen idol under "kissing". He can assure me that my lips are the only ones he has ever touched, and he is actually relieved that I didn't notice how inexperienced and nervous he was.
Trust is hard to be revived once it has been killed—or rather the seed of mistrust is hard to remove once it has been planted into fertile soil. As I retrieve the image of Hino Rei's proud, sincere demeanour from a closed drawer of my mind, I recall that she also said that Seiya is "the greatest actor alive" and that "when he is in the mood, he even believes his own lies…"
"It's your word against Hino-san's, isn't it? And unlike you, she doesn't even have a motive for lying."
In response, he gives me a long, exasperated look—the sort of gaze I had often inflicted on Gin whenever his jealousy began to irritate me. Never would I have imagined myself in the role of the possessive lover who doesn't only control the partner's love life but also probes into the details of their past affairs. On the other hand, I can't stand being manipulated! If he is not only promiscuous but also a duplicitous lying cheat, I'm not going to apologize just because he has genuinely fallen in love with me.
Rei-chan doesn't have a high opinion of men in general, he sighs. Perhaps she really believes all the fanciful stories the reporters—fiction writers who base their stories on real people and events—have made up about him? "Or she was angry at you for dumping me and only tried to punish you a bit." After all—he muses—Rei-chan seems to have a very keen sense of justice.
It's all right—I try to appease him. "As difficult as it is, I'm going to believe you for now. I couldn't check the facts at the moment even if I wanted to."
Just like me, he isn't fully satisfied with this half-hearted call of truce, for he shoots me another dark look, stares into the water, and gloomily remarks, "I don't know why I have to justify myself! If our sexes were reversed, you would be the dissolute, heartless jerk!" It's him, who has been mistreated—he claims—beguiled by blatant lies about everlasting love and lifelong commitment and then tossed away like an old rag just because I can't accept his family.
"You've forgotten the 'seduced and used'!" I coolly add, mimicking the jerk he has just called me. "Seduced and used and deflowered by a complete stranger—you poor, poor innocent no-longer-virgin!"
"Oh, I absolutely didn't mind that part!" His lips curve up in reminiscence, and he cheekily tips me over with visible enjoyment, catches me and places my head on his lap to kiss me again. "You can use me as often as you want," he murmurs against my lips between two kisses. "Taiki would claim that I've developed Stockholm syndrome but I think I've always been a perfectly willing victim."
"See, that's the difference between men and women!" I smirk up at him. If he were a woman, he would automatically be burdened with all the possible outcomes of last night. "As things are, you can be so carefree because you can focus on the pleasure without fearing any repercussions." Of course he would feel the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy eventually, but it's not biologically hardwired into his subconsciousness. Virgin or no virgin, a woman will always suffer more from an affair's social and emotional and physical reverberations, which is why the same situation reversed doesn't necessarily mean that the man will suffer as much as the woman would do.
"Your theory sounds a bit too convenient, doesn't it?" Seiya surveys my face with renewed curiosity. "But there is a certain logic in it… Why do I have the feeling that you will always win an argument even when you're in the wrong?" He pinches the tip of my nose, which only proves to me that I'll have to fight hard to regain the upper hand now that he has dared to overstep the boundaries like a badly brought up Doberman.
Rubbing my nose, I cast my mind back to the moment when he offered me a place on his bench, and linger over the thought that the stranger's innocuous, friendly gesture didn't happen yesterday but years or even decades ago, long before our tentative friendship, courtship, marriage, honeymoon, separation, and reunion. Rather than twenty-four hours, it feels like twenty-four years of my life has passed. And now, after seven years of absence, divergence, mild extramarital flirting, longing for our past, and mourning the future we could have shared if we hadn't let the world come between us, we have met up for a second attempt at romance, facing the question whether we could overcome all the obstacles and give our relationship another try.
"I'll always win because I'm more intelligent than you," I tell him as a matter of fact, whereupon he puts on a dejected face for me. "But don't worry…" I give him a conciliatory kiss. "Intellect isn't the most important thing in life." As unfair as it is, I grudgingly add in my mind without telling him, he will always win in the end just because he is so infuriatingly beautiful.
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"I've asked Odango about your handbag," Seiya suddenly remarks, breaking the comfortable silence, into which we two have lapsed after watching the last tints of gold and scarlet drain out of the horizon. The sky is now a vast, tranquil silk painting, on which semi-transparent layers of violet and purple clouds are dotted with tiny, almost invisible stars. Like an eerie spectre, the moon is hovering over us with its deceptively blueish light in the lilac afterglow, reminding me of Taiki-san's comment on the roof terrace that we can never see the moon's red light due to the nature of our own perception.
"There was no handbag on the seat next to her when she woke up," he proceeds with a bewildered expression. "Odango said she would have noticed a Fusae handbag if it had been lying there because she loves the brand."
A hazy memory, unreal as a dream which has already passed, rises to the surface of my consciousness as a sharp pain shoots through my body, and Seiya's lap, where my head is still resting, begins to feel oddly like a slightly damp pillow, on which my head is firmly fixed. Before my eyes, the blazing sunset with its hurtful, glaring gold and copper and red—colours of a pre-iron-age war scene—emerges once again as the handbag slips out of my hand…
Grasping at his motley-coloured shirt, I blink away the last remnants of the vision, an afterimage of yesterday's sunset, with a peculiar sense of urgency. To my relief, the creepy sensations instantly disappear when my stranger shifts his position and draws my attention back to the immediate present, which is scented by his faint fragrance of orange blossoms and kinmokusei. In my state of heightened awareness, I even detect a soft note of wild roses in the familiar fragrance, an ingredient I've only discovered after one day.
"I must have lost the handbag before getting on the bus or after getting off the bus," I dismissively remark. "It really doesn't matter anymore." Irritated by his tendency to bring up Odango, whom I suspect to be the only woman he has ever given a nickname, I pull myself into a sitting position and run my fingers through my hair to restore a part of the order in my life, which he has thoroughly messed up. He grins about my gesture although a tinge of sorrow has stolen into his gaze. And I realize with chilling clarity that kisses don't equal commitment because, at a certain moment of our story, which I can't pinpoint (I suspect it to be the moment he accused me of not caring about him at all), he has made up his mind to leave... and that if I proposed that we tried out our paperless marriage anew, his answer would be an unequivocal "No, thank you".
"Kudo and I have talked about the Kakyuu case," I can hear myself saying, referring to her in an insultingly impersonal manner as I surrender to the wish to hurt him a bit—to tear down his serene smiling face because he seems oblivious to the fact that his nonchalance is killing me. Although he claimed that he has moved on after a phase of mourning and might even believe what he said, I've begun to believe Taiki-san's assertion that she was the one open wound in his life which would never form a scar. As if to confirm my suspicion, he slightly moves away from me and retreats into himself, murmuring a barely audible, "Ah, have you, I should have known..."
"It was impossible to hide anything from Kudo, you know, as incredibly observant as he is. It was unpleasant for both of us, but he has simply deduced the whole night from the few marks it has left on me."
He leans back and regards me gently, with his steady, thoughtful gaze, which jars with his easy smiles and impulsive hugs and kisses, and I get up from the bench to rest my foot on the low railing like he did last night as I inform him about Kudo's warnings, Kudo's depiction of the case, and my deduction. For unknown reasons, I firmly believe that Seiya is not going to hurt Misa in revenge for ending Kakyuu's life. And it only dawns on me that I've unwittingly exposed her to him during my narration of the case when he flashes me an amused smile and points it out to me.
"I could walk to her place and wring her neck just because I believe what you've just told me. Or I could shoot her and burn down her place! You should be more careful, especially now that you know about my family background," he mocks. "I could run amok and commit unspeakable crimes just because I trust you and you've made a logical but faulty deduction."
I can tell that he despises both Kudo and me at the moment, just as he despised his brothers, the two closest people in his life, when they tried to force his comeback in order to help him get over me. The downside of his childlike purity is his tendency to run away from all the things he dislikes and to fight when he doesn't really have to fight. And I regret for an instant that I've picked a senseless fight with him over Kakyuu when I remember that he is going to New York in ten minutes or less and that the pretty, cold bastard—despite all my kisses—is abandoning me!
"You don't look like you could kill anything but ants, and I can't imagine you to hurt Misa just as I couldn't imagine you to be Kakyuu's murderer." For lack of a repartee, I'm offering him a tacit truce although I'd rather strangle him and shoot him at once. But instead of saying something charming to salvage the situation as I've hoped, he only tugs at the jacket I'm wearing, pulls out his packet of cigarettes in full knowledge of how much I hate the smoke, and studies me with his mysteriously dark eyes, which are now almost navy or indigo in the shadow of the swarm of seabirds gliding by.
"A good detective shouldn't let her feelings interfere with her work. And it's better for both of us if you don't have such a high opinion of me."
With a knowing smirk (and without aiming), he throws the packet of cigarettes into the trash bin next to the bench near ours, scaring away a small rat, which has been devouring a piece of bread under a cherry tree. And I'm once again overcome by the urge to kiss him after wishing him to die a violent death, which must be the reason why it takes me a few seconds to grasp the implication of what he has just told me.
In a flash of brilliance—in one of these lucid moments which have become rare since yesterday's sunset—Kudo's words that Seiya had been drumming away his sorrows like a maniac a whole week before Kakyuu's death echo in my head while the image of the potted cyclamen, the symbol of farewell and death, emerges before my inner eye. Clues which I would never have dismissed if I hadn't been so thoroughly infatuated with Seiya and so busy inserting myself into Misa, the hopeless dreamer who was (and still is) obsessively in love with Taiki-san, to listen to Kudo, who is almost always right! Something is wrong about the case, just as Kudo said, but the truth was different from the one I believed to have seen.
"Did you really pull the plug to her life support system?" I ask, turning revoltingly straightforward in my eagerness to unravel the mystery. "If you really did it, why didn't you tell Kudo the truth although he didn't even ask you to turn yourself in?" I sit down on the bench again and lean towards him, waiting for his explanation with barely controlled impatience. While I couldn't care less about the moral aspect of the deed, I flatly refuse to believe that my amiable, good-humoured would-have-been boyfriend could have done it.
Seiya regards me with a distant, resigned gaze, and I wince at the realization that to him, Kudo and I are hyenas or, even less flatteringly, blowflies feeding on his pain. Within a day, I've done at least three unforgivable things in his eyes: I've alienated him from his brothers, left him after promising him lifelong companionship, and poked my nosy finger into a miserable, traumatic episode of his life, whose memory he doesn't want to refresh, while trying to prevent him from embarking on a promising world-class acting career.
"I'm going to tell you if you want," he pleasantly offers, "but you'll have to promise me that you will never, ever, reveal it to Kudo!" He leans in to kiss my cheek, a gesture which cuts me to the quick. "Even if you two ever end up in a boring traditional marriage and you begin to wish that we two were having an affair behind his back or you had married me instead, you're not allowed to spill the beans."
This time, the broad hint that he is just not that into me anymore has become an elephant that can't be ignored. And we are sitting together in this wreckage of a love we both still enjoy too much to give up but can't save from all the wedges which have been driven between us when the evening light is fading from the sky. We don't have much time for a lengthy confession and a discussion of the case since he has to get ready for his flight, he admits at last. His super-competent flower-loving brother is negotiating the payment for his future roles—offers he will probably have to accept since he needs a well-paying job if he doesn't want to go broke by the end of this year.
"After the Organization went down, so many people were on the run, totally ruined, or out of work… I couldn't watch so many friends of my family commit suicide over a utopia my parents have created."
Sunsets are never the same and yet always alike—just like love, which is always the same ever-changing shape shifter. It has induced even the most intelligent and most sensible people to make the greatest sacrifices and commit the most treacherous acts, disregarding morality, tradition, and society's rules. But even in its strongest manifestation, there are problems which love alone can't solve.
"Well, you can't live on air and love only, I suppose," I lightly remark, holding on to the key to his apartment while in my other hand, the scrap of paper Taiki-san has given me feels like a block of stone. There is absolutely no logical reason why Seiya should give up this opportunity for a fickle stranger who has ditched him after a few hours. And perhaps I should feel flattered that he is struggling hard to stay sensible and focus on work instead of throwing away everything he has built up in life for a woman he doesn't know.
We are all obsessed with love while we are in love—I try to convince myself before I break down and confess the reasons why I've dumped him so callously after one night—but how many couples are lucky enough to experience a happy ending? This all-consuming passion doesn't only influence but also controls our lives like a cruel, petty tyrant, steering it towards bliss or destruction while we blindly abandon ourselves to an arbitrary chemical reaction. After waking up from another love-induced stupor, former lovers often wonder whether Amor had only shot them out of spite. And yet I wish I could drag Seiya to another place and another time or simply turn back time to this morning, when he wanted this relationship as much as I did. Now that it's more or less over for him and reality is suffocating me like a plastic bag I can't get off my head, I've almost forgotten all the sensible reasons why I've voluntarily ended it.
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