#and to akol for helping me with cafe drinks (and for letting me know about sugar syrup)!
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marshmallowgoop · 2 years ago
Text
They Only Murdered Him Once
Fandom: Detective Conan
Summary: The antidote doesn't fix everything.
Notes: My contribution to the DCMK Fanfic Server's noir zine, A Study in NOIR. You can find the whole thing here!
This piece is also available on AO3.
-------
The first time that she lays eyes on Shinichi Kudo, it’s nothing more than a passing glance from the backseat of a stuffy, unbearable car that she’d never be allowed to drive.
It could have been a newspaper. He’d tell her so someday, a pout on his thin lips and his face pinkening, only slightly, starting at his nose and threatening to spill over to his cheeks. She could have seen his photograph paired with an unbelievable headline, or glimpsed his likeness on the cover of the kind of magazine you might find stocked near the front of your favorite convenience store. Or perhaps she could have caught the now-familiar tuft of hair that never sits flat on the back of his head, and his too-big smile, and his eye-bleeding sense of fashion, splashed all across the evening news.
But that bland, ordinary October afternoon, she doesn’t see some recreation of him, composed of pixels and ink. She doesn’t see smudges of black and white that somehow combine to resemble him. She sees him in the flesh, walking casually along a pristine sidewalk in the opposite direction of her car.
His hands are hidden, concealed by the pockets of a brown coat too warm for the not-yet-biting chill of the season. He wears a goofy, toothless grin for the girl beside him, a beautiful, wide-eyed thing dressed even more warmly, with a rib-knit turtleneck collar wrapped tightly around her neck and a blush-colored jacket encasing her arms.
He doesn’t notice the car. Not the sound. Not the sight. Not the smell, the reek of the people housed within it. His entire world walks beside him.
So she stares. She peers out the rolled-up window, her face leaning into her closed fist, her eyes narrowed and her expression both utterly meaningless and the most meaningful expression she’d ever allow to come over her.
She thinks him a stupid boy. Someday, she’ll swear that this was the only thought that ever crossed her mind.
-------
The tenth time—eleventh time, twelfth time, she loses track eventually—that the girl at the doc’s place lays eyes on Shinichi Kudo, it’s in a place she least expected, at a time that should be impossible.
But as she drags the body, arms first, across the worn carpet of the home that is not hers, she looks down, and she sees him.
She very nearly drops the wrists to the floor.
-------
The sixth time—maybe—that Haibara lays eyes on Shinichi Kudo, it’s nearly fifteen minutes later than had been arranged.
He half-jogs his way to her table, his mouth opening and his hands coming together as though he means to pray, but she speaks before allowing even the slightest bit of sound to erupt out of him.
“You look like shit,” she says.
It’s true. Kudo has never been one she’d describe as stylish or up to date, but it’s worse than usual. His familiar bright red bow tie has been replaced with a tie of quiet purple, perhaps to stand out against the garish crimson polo shirt that he’s inexplicably paired with a white vest, and the resulting effect is as embarrassing as it is painful.
But his face fares more poorly than his outfit. It’s as though he rummaged through the makeup of the girl from the detective agency, uncapped her favorite mascara, and attempted to coat his bottom lashes in black, but he failed so spectacularly that the color leaked past his waterline and pooled up in the creases beneath his eyes.
He grips the cold edge of a metal chair across from her, sitting down with a scowl that looks as half-hearted as his apology undoubtedly would have been.
“Well, excuse me,” he says.
“You smell like shit, too,” she adds.
He does. There’s no way that his dark circles are the result of a makeup accident. He couldn’t have even walked in a bathroom this morning to brush his teeth.
Or comb his hair, which is covered in a thin layer of frizz and sticks up in places it shouldn’t. For all she knows, he could have rolled out of bed five minutes ago. He probably did.
The chair beneath him shrieks as he slides it back and lifts an arm. He presses his cheek into the brilliantly red fabric, his nose hovering near the pit, and sniffs.
“C’mon,” he says, after a moment of this. His arm comes down, and he directs his attention away from his body odor and back towards her. “It’s not that bad. Give me a break.”
She gives her order. Black coffee. She agrees to creamer without a thought.
He asks for juice. She raises an eyebrow but says nothing.
It’s only when the server has stepped away that she asks, “So? What did you want to talk to me about?”
Kudo throws her the coldest, hardest glare. “Don’t act like you don’t know,” he says, but his voice isn’t furious. It’s soft, tired. Haibara might even be inclined to call it sad.
“Not all of us are great detectives,” she tells him. She flips her hands so that the palms face the ceiling. Her shoulders sway, and her fingers bob up and then go back down again. “If your dolphin is causing you that much anguish, I’d suggest seeing a starfish over a shark.”
“What?” Kudo stares at her wearily, if one could call it that. His eyes appear to be barely open, nothing more than slits of blue. The table is small enough that the stench of his breath, even after uttering nothing more than a single word, is overpowering. He most definitely woke up five minutes before he came here.
“If you mean Ran,” he eventually tries, “then no. That’s not it.”
“Oh?”
“Well.” He pauses. “It is, but…”
“‘It’s not her, it’s me?’”
Kudo nods. “Yeah.” He brings his voice down to a whisper, leaning in closer and holding his hand in an arc around his mouth as though they are breezy teenage girls sharing worthless gossip at a slumber party.
“She called me last night,” he says. “Or early in the morning. Three o’clock. I was sleeping. She rang and rang and rang.”
Haibara doesn’t ask for elaboration. He continues without prodding, the volume of his voice dropping so low that Haibara very nearly decides to listen to the conversation behind her instead, about an old dog who’d been adopted and only recently started to warm up to its new family. Things certainly would have been better for her if she had.
Kudo says, “She was crying about…” but stops before revealing the answer, as though his life is a TV show and he’s deciding where the conveniently timed commercial breaks sit. But she doesn’t roll her eyes at him, doesn’t say anything. She watches, nothing more, as he swallows and lets the hand that had been brushing against his cheek fall to the table, only to then fall off the table too and rest in his lap.
He leans back in his chair. If he were one for smoking, Haibara could imagine him lighting a cigarette. He’d suck in the smoke and watch it dance through the air. He’d look at it as though it held all the answers that she couldn’t give to him.
But there is no cigarette. There’s only a server who places their drinks down in front of them and asks sweetly if there isn’t anything else she could do. She lacks the effortless charisma of the girl at Poirot, but there’s a warmth in her eyes and smile that tells Haibara all she needs to know.
Haibara shakes her head. She drinks her coffee without the creamer. Kudo eyes his juice, filled with ice cut into tiny cubes and poured in a tall, clear glass. There’s a straw placed inside, as brilliantly white as an old woman’s first dentures, and he gawks at that, too.
“She was crying about Conan,” he finally says, once the server is long past them. He is hardly audible over the barely muted screams from the old-new-dog table. Cute pet photos, shared by passing a smartphone across iced tea and minuscule pitchers of sugar syrup, incite explosions of giggles and laughter.
Kudo pays it no mind. The bubbles of excitement are probably why he continues here in a more normal voice. They’re not children anymore, not tiny and wearing clothes too big as adults stare or even yell but do nothing to help. They’re more invisible than that, situated so close to normalcy. No one would think twice about the words that spill out of their mouths.
So Kudo tells her, in a pointed not-whisper, “She was crying about Conan because he hadn’t come home last night. And he couldn’t have been at Dr. Agasa’s because the doc is out of town right now. So, she called me because she didn’t know what else to do.”
“I’m sure that was a mistake,” Haibara says. The coffee is bitter, biting. It’s so hot that it scalds her tongue. It’s delicious.
“It was a mistake,” Kudo agrees, without even a hint of sarcasm. “I… yelled at her, Haibara. I told her to stop bothering me about stupid things when I’m trying to sleep.”
Yes, Haibara could picture him doing so. “And?”
“And I went to see her this morning.” Smells like bullshit. But Kudo goes on, “The old man was hardly awake. I probably stopped by too early. But he mumbled something to me about going to her room. He probably wasn’t really thinking.
“But I went over there. I had to make sure that she was okay after last night. And I would have knocked on her door, but it was already open. She was sitting at her desk, holding an old picture and crying.”
He shakes his head. His half-lidded eyes watch the condensation drip down the glass in front of him. Water pools up at the bottom, leaving shiny half-circles on the table.
“I didn’t even know she had it framed,” he admits. Something like a smile comes over him, an expression that Haibara recognizes from the days they had been small. It’s nothing happy, where the corners of his mouth reach his eyes. She might describe it as angry, but even that wouldn’t be proper. It’s the kind of face you make when you couldn’t stop a murderer the first time, but you know who they are and can keep them from killing again. She’s seen that face a lot.
Kudo says, “It’s from back when we…” Here he pauses. “From back when Conan,” he corrects, “got stranded on a day trip with old man Mori, and spent the night in that temple.”
“Of course,” Haibara says.
“They all took a picture together, under this flowering tree. It’s a nice picture.”
“But?”
“But Conan is gone, Haibara.” It’s a different smile now, more relaxed, less tense, as though the pain from it is gone. “I thought Ran would be happy. No brat to wake up for school, no one else to feed, no more worrying about where I am and whether or not I’m okay.”
He sighs. His hands reach up to adjust glasses that are no longer there, and the color drains out of him. His half-lidded eyes become huge blue discs.
He should smoke. Or drink something much stronger than juice. He clearly needs it.
“She told me once that she wished we were the same,” he says, very quietly. Fingers run through his mussed-up, rustled hair. “But she used to stare at that picture of us from Tropical Land. I’ve seen her. More than once. Just clutching that brown frame and staring at this stupid detective’s face.
“It’s still in her room, of course. But it was covered in dust, when I came by this morning. She wasn’t even thinking about it. All she was thinking about was that kid smiling under the cherry tree.”
He’s silent, and so is she. The noise from the table behind them has become just that—noise devoid of any meaning or purpose.
It’s not a funny situation, but a smile, a real one, bursts out of her like laughter at a funeral. “Idiot,” she says. “Of course she’s not happy.”
“Of course she’s not,” he repeats, and then he repeats it a few times over. “Of course not. Of course not.”
No, most certainly not. Haibara can imagine it well, can picture the scenarios in her mind. The girl from the detective agency pushing her lips over her teeth and taking this man by the hand but feeling that the fingers entwined with hers are not big and rough and his but so soft and pink and small that the little fingers become engulfed by the lines crisscrossing her palm. The girl from the detective agency leaning close to him, running her hand up his chest, only to fall back as she finds the gunshot wound. The girl from the detective agency looking into his eyes and seeing the child in the hospital bed, the child whose face she has to wipe clean during dinner, the child whose glasses she removes as he falls asleep with a book in his lap, the child she wants to carry in her arms and protect forever as if he were her own.
“Of course not,” Kudo says again. He laughs like a dead man. “I used to think that I didn’t understand it. I could understand the emotion. I have a heart. I know hatred and jealousy and anger and misery and anguish and everything that drives a man to kill.”
He draws a deep breath. The juice in his glass has grown. What had once been ice cubes the size of thumbnails are now nothing more than insignificant slivers. They sparkle in the light that filters in from the window.
“But I couldn’t understand wanting to do it. I thought I couldn’t. I didn’t want to understand.”
The entire coffee shop, the place where Conan Edogawa had first become real to her, had been uttered by the sister she could never live up to, means nothing as he says, “But I did understand, Haibara. I wanted Conan dead, and I killed him.”
It’s not unexpected, that he adds, “We’re both killers, aren’t we?”
Her scalded tongue goes dry. A pit opens up in her stomach and consumes all the warmth she had stolen from the coffee.
But she only says, “You still call me Haibara.”
He stands. His fingers fumble through his pockets, and he drops money on the table. His eyes are wide, alert, surrounded by white rings. He smirks as though he’s figured something out��solved a complicated, ever-moving puzzle.
“Right,” he says. “Thanks, Haibara.”
And there is nothing more. Not another word. Not another sound. He leaves, and she doesn’t call after him. She watches him go and hears the bell ring as he opens the door and sprints down the pristine sidewalk.
When the server returns with a pleasant smile and puzzled glance at the untouched juice and creamer, Haibara smiles just as pleasantly back. It’s not as if the woman could ever understand.
-------
She refuses to see him, the next time that she can.
It’s the girl from the detective agency who finds the body. He’s collapsed in front of the gate by his house, the one whose handle had only months ago been too high for him to reach.
There’s no sign of a struggle. No dying message on the ground, or conveyed with his position, or in his pockets, which held nothing but loose change and a pair of crushed glasses. There’s only a boy in a green jacket and yellow shirt and blue slacks with his chest pressed against the sidewalk.
His face is so calm that he could be asleep. That’s what they say. That’s what the girl scientist hears.
The story reaches the black-and-white papers struggling to get by and the kinds of magazines stocked in the front of your favorite convenience store. It becomes the juiciest gossip of the evening news. The photo that Kudo had mentioned in the coffee shop, the one in the brown frame and him in his green jacket and yellow shirt and blue slacks smiling next to the girl from the detective agency, becomes synonymous with the case. It’s the thumbnail for every YouTube video, the picture attached to every Tweet, the cover image for every crime podcast.
But the girl scientist never looks. Never sees. Never listens to the claims of the girl from the detective agency being the killer, or his friend from Osaka, who’d left behind hundreds of text messages that ultimately went unread. It’s nothing but noise, the thought that Sleeping Kogoro’s daughter was mad at her boyfriend. That the Detective of the West was jealous. That the girlfriend lost it. That the supposed best friend lost it. That they lost it and used everything they knew about detective work to conjure up the perfect, untraceable murder.
In the end, law enforcement declares it nothing but noise, too. Unknown natural causes, they say. The body is burned and the girl scientist stares out Dr. Agasa’s window and watches the rain hit the glass, one hand in her pocket, her fingers twisting round and round.
It’s the Osaka friend who comes first, unannounced. The door is unlocked, and he lets himself in after a great deal of pounding against the metal.
“I know yer in there!” he says. He slams his fist and screams, threatening to break the whole thing down before he realizes that he can simply turn the knob.
When he enters, he’s sopping wet. His front is more drenched than the back, as though he had run nonstop from the train station, which he probably had. His hair clings to his face, his usual hairstyle reduced to nothing more than strands of deep, dark black that fall into his green, green eyes. His brown jacket sticks to him, and his eggshell-colored top underneath has become transparent, making the mechanisms of his breathing more obvious and real. She watches the rise and fall, listens to the hard gasps, takes note of his hand placed almost defensively on the brim of his hat.
“Welcome,” she says at the sight. She wears a scowl tinged with exhaustion. “Let me get you a change of clothes. But you’re stuck with only what the doctor’s got.”
“I don’t need nothin’ like dat,” he says, through his heaving breaths.
“You’re not spilling water all over my floor.
“Yer floor?”
“My floor,” she repeats. “If the doc’s not here, it’s mine.”
She leaves him there and finds the worst outfit in the doctor’s closet. She should kick him out. Push him out the door he barged into and make him go and never come back. He has nothing to do with her. She means nothing to him.
But she carries the clothes in her arms and somehow cajoles him into the bathroom to change. It’s as difficult as convincing a child to switch out a mismatched top, and it takes her until the light is flipped on and the stupid boy stands straddling two rooms for her to realize why.
“Kudo wore these,” she says.
His face pinkens, more than slightly, starting at his nose and spilling all across his cheeks. He fixes his eyes to the ground, where the tiniest puddles have already formed from the water dripping off his skin.
He says very quietly, “Bastard ripped ‘em, too. Had to sew it back up myself.”
“Why?” It falls out without thought. She stares at him, utterly bewildered.
But he smiles. It’s gentle and soft. The way he used to look at Kudo. “They… still smelled like him,” he says. “Even after washin’.”
“I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
“It is.”
He takes the clothes from her hands and goes into the bathroom. He’s in there a long time. When he returns, he looks exactly as ridiculous as she’d imagined, especially because he’d refused to remove his hat. The letters face her. S-A-X.
She brews coffee. They sit on spinning chairs on opposite sides of Dr. Agasa’s half-circle table. The rain continues to pour down in sheets, and the room is shrouded in a gloomy gray.
He calls her Sis. The sound brightens her cheeks and gets a stirring going in her chest, but if he notices the reaction, he certainly doesn’t show it. He leaves the coffee she’d prepared for him untouched. He holds the brim of his hat. She stares at the letters.
“I can’t let it rest,” he says. “It don’t make any sense.”
She looks at him blankly. She says nothing in reply.
“He was healthy,” he continues, and though he is swimming in the extra fabric of Dr. Agasa’s wardrobe, her eyes slide down from his wet hat to really look at him. The boy detective no longer looks so much like a boy. His shoulders have grown broader in the time that’s passed, and his eyes are no longer the wild, limitless eyes of someone who doesn’t understand. They’re tired eyes, worn eyes. Eyes that have seen too much.
“If you’re looking for answers,” she eventually says, placing down her own mug, “I think you’d be better off asking a detective, not a scientist.”
His unspoken words fill the silence. It’s not as though this conversation hasn’t happened before.
She says, “It wasn’t the antidote.”
“I know,” he answers.
“Then why come here?”
He sighs. His fingers stop fiddling with the brim of his hat and instead fall to his lap. He anxiously twists his hands, round and round, staring at them as though they’ll provide him with the answers he’s looking for but won’t find.
“I can’t talk ta anyone else. Yer the only one who gets it.”
“Who gets it,” she repeats.
But then she sighs, long and heavy. This isn’t how she intended to spend the afternoon, and a look at the watch on her wrist tells her that this shouldn’t have been how he spends his afternoon, either.
“You missed school for this.”
“Don’t act like you’ve been ta yer job.”
“School is more important.”
For a moment, he stares into the depths of his black coffee. Maybe he sees his reflection staring back, the reflection of a pitiful man who is both too young and too old for his body. But before long he looks at her, really looks, exactly as she had really looked at him, his gaze piercing and unrelenting. He looks at her like a detective would, as if everything he needs to know could be deciphered from a single glance. She makes no effort to stop him.
He says, “Look. I’ll quit beatin’ ‘round the bush. I think ya know somethin’ that ya ain’t told nobody.”
“Nobody would believe—“
“I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout dat. Kudo met ya just days before…” He stops. “…what happened happened. What did he want ta talk ta ya about?”
“Troubles with his dolphin,” she says easily. She ignores his confusion and doesn’t let him respond. “But if you want to talk about withholding information, I think that’s you, Mr. Great Detective. Did the police ever get a reason why you sent all those text messages?”
For the first time since he’d arrived, he doesn’t look merely tickled with embarrassment but absolutely flooded with it. “Jus’ had a bad feelin’,” he says, which she’d already known.
But then the embarrassment morphs into distress. He clenches his teeth. The hands in his lap still. “And I couldn’t get here in time. The little lady had ta find him like that.”
The girl scientist removes herself from the chair. She stands. “I think you should go,” she says. “And turn your hat the other way.”
His eyes widen. A million thoughts must race through his head because that’s as many facial expressions she counts coming over him in the span of a second.
He doesn’t move to go or turn his hat around, though. He stands and slams his hands down on the table. His mug clatters, and flecks of the black liquid mar the surface.
“Don’t ya dare,” he says—screams, more like. His hands reach for her, as though to grab her by the shoulders to try to shake the truth away. “Ya idiot—!”
But she doesn’t let him say a word more. She opens the watch on her wrist and fires the needle straight at his forehead. The life leaves him as quickly as it had exploded out, and she gasps for breath as he crumples to a pile on the ground.
“Sorry, Hattori,” she says.
She drags him, arms first, into the doctor’s room.
-------
It’s here that Ai sees Shinichi Kudo.
It’s nothing more than a moment. A split second. She looks down at the detective’s sleeping face, and it’s Kudo that she sees instead, the Kudo she had refused to see, with eyes that would never open again.
When the bell rings, it takes everything she has to shut the door of the doctor’s room and wipe her face and answer it.
“Ai,” says a voice, between bursts of chimes of alternating lengths. “Ai, please open the door!”
She does. The girl from the detective agency stands there, looking as starved for breath as the detective had, though she at least had the decency to run with an umbrella. It’s been abandoned on the ground beside her, still open and swaying with the wind. Her face is panicked, with huge blue eyes set against a pale backdrop devoid of color. The girl hardly hears when Ai tells her that she should retrieve the umbrella before it blows away. When the girl closes it and brings it inside, it’s as though she’s in a trance.
They stand by the closed door for what feels like a century. If the girl from the detective agency notices Hattori’s abandoned shoes, she certainly acts as though she doesn’t. She swallows and gathers her breath and sobs. “Please, Ai,” she says, unmoving, the handle of the umbrella still locked in her grip. “Shiho. Please don’t do what Shinichi did.”
“I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about.”
“You do!” the girl bursts out. She drops the umbrella. It falls to Dr. Agasa’s floor with all the grace and noise of a corpse dumped from the top of a building. Puddles of water form and leak and ooze.
“You do,” the girl repeats, quieter now. Her wet hands find Shiho’s, and her wet eyes find dry ones.
Shiho pushes the hands away. It doesn’t stop the girl from the detective agency from running her mouth.
“I know you kept some,” she says, as though she is not the girl from the detective agency but the detective herself. Her voice is fragile, as if any sudden movement could cause it to break. “You couldn’t take too many. That’d be suspicious. Someone could get hurt. But one could fail. Two would be safer. Three, that would be the safest. ‘Third time’s the charm.’ They say that, don’t they?”
“You have no proof.” It’s the script Shiho’s heard, time and time again.
“Oh, stop it!” the girl detective says. “I have proof enough!”
“And what’s that?”
The other girl hesitates. Her white teeth make a mess of her bottom lip, and her eyes find the fallen umbrella, still leaking with water flecked with dirt from her shoes.
But eventually, she manages, “You knew what I was talking about, Shiho. And…” She bites her lip so hard that Shiho knows she tastes blood. “His pocket. He had Conan’s glasses in his pocket.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything,” the girl insists.
“Tell me what it means, then.”
The girl says, “It means that he didn’t mean to…” She shakes her head. Cries erupt from her throat. It takes a long time to calm, and when she speaks again, her words are scarcely comprehensible. “He didn’t mean for it to end up like that. It means that he wanted to bring Conan back. The pill just… did what it was supposed to do the first time.”
She wipes at her face. “But you already knew that.”
“Do you blame me?” It’s not like the answer matters. What’s done is done. But she supposes a part of her wants to know. “Do you despise me?”
“No,” says the woman. “That’s why I’m here. I know you don’t want to bring Ai back. I know that when you saw that Shinichi had taken it, you put the last one you had in your pocket. I know that you’ve been carrying it with you ever since. Your hands have always been in your pockets, ever since that day. I know you’re holding it right now.”
Shiho smiles. It’s cold. “If what you’re saying is true, then how did Kudo even find it?”
“I don’t know.” The woman smiles, too. It’s warm. Nostalgic. “If he were here, I know he’d say something like, ‘It was quite simple. The only place Haibara would hide anything like that is in something that we’d never touch because she’d kill us if we did.’”
She drops the impersonation. Tears fall freely from her face, but she does not cry. “If I had to guess,” she says, “you hid them in the back of a fashion magazine.”
Her hands find Shiho’s again. “But that doesn’t matter. Please give me that last pill, Shiho. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
The woman means it, so it feels cruel to smile, to drop the pill in Mori’s hand. But that’s exactly what Shiho does.
She laughs. “I’m the big sister who didn’t destroy this. He didn’t have to die. You should want to lose me.”
“But I don’t,” Mori insists.
The worst part is, as Shiho’s fingers turn round and round a final pill still in her pocket, she believes her.
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