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He didn’t remember the way home. It was probably sleep deprivation, Conan thought. Too many cases, too many nightmares. He heard heartbeats fading into faint tremors with gaps longer and quieter like ebbing tides between sleep and consciousness. Sometimes he woke up fearing they were Ran’s; sometimes he gasped and thrashed as if they were his own until he realized.
It was unnerving, when what you believed for certain shattered and dissolved right in front of your eyes, by alien streets and unknown buildings. Don’t panic, he warned himself. When you get lost, stay exactly where you are. Let people come to you.
Haibara was patient. She asked nothing, leading him back into familiar streets, distorted from the sharp edges of diagonal shadows. Grade school textbooks sank and cut deeper into his shoulders; pencil case clanked softly as he trudged onward.
“It was probably sleep deprivation,” he explained lamely, in front of Poirot Café, breathing labored from long walks and the brooding storm in her expressionless eyes. She still said nothing, but dropped half of an Estazolam pill into his palm before she left.
Conan fell asleep by ten, and slept past the alarm the next day; neither Ran nor Kogoro woke him up for school. He dreamed of nothing, but shuddered awake to a cold, empty agency, heartbeats again thumping and bleeding into his eardrums, hair damp with sweat. Blinking at the sunlight pouring in from the window, he realized that he had no recollection of what time it was. The clock on Kogoro’s bedroom wall said ten twenty-one.
Ran left him a note by his pillow, saying that she had called the school for him, and there was breakfast in the microwave. She also sent a text at seven minutes past eight, checking if he had woken up. That was not long after the class started; Conan imagined her typing under the cover of notebooks and test paper with a small smile.
He proceeded to scroll down and tap open the unread text under, from Haibara at six twenty-three. She asked him to come to Hakase’s as soon as he can.
She said she was sorry.
Ran drew him a map. He could’ve bought one himself if he really needed one; of course he knew how to read maps, ever since he was actually six. Ran’s map covered “the safe zone” from school to the agency, from Hakase’s to the nearest clinic two streets away. On top of their friends’ houses she drew little icons of them. The agency was labeled “home”, with Ran, Kogoro and Conan’s smiling faces floating outside of the windows. The Kudo mansion stood gray and quiet next to Hakase’s house of vibrant colors; there was no name, no smiling face, a spot of vacancy. Edogawa Conan had no reason to go there.
“Promise me you’ll take it with you,” Ran said. “If you get lost again, you can show people this map, and ask them to show you the way. But don’t follow them. If they ask you to come with them, ask for their phones and call me.”
He lost his Conan phone a week ago; Kogoro and Ran held different opinions on getting him a new one. Haibara had his Shinichi phone now. She kept it charged, but let the missed calls and unread texts build up to hundreds. He planned to steal it back at some point.
“I promise, Ran-nee-chan,” he said, with what he believed to be a bright, brave smile. Ran smiled back, her arms around him, tight, warm, familiar. She smiled sadness and dread, he wondered, as face half-buried in her hair and the crook of her neck.
“See you after school,” Ran was still smiling. He only nodded.
“Conan-kun, what’s wrong?”
“Genta took my book and won’t give it back,” He kept his voice calm and level. How could Genta do this to him, making fun of him at a time like this? He rooted himself stubbornly in the aisle, hand outstretched towards Genta, face turned away from Kobayashi-san. The curtains were pulled, but sunlight was still overly bright, lacking the elegant clearness of autumn. It was just bright; shadows of pots and plants spills of ink against the thin, aged fabric. He tried not to blink.
“I didn’t take your book!” Genta yelled, arms flailing, seconds away from grabbing Conan’s collar if Mitsuhiko hadn’t pulled him back. “I don’t even need your book! It’s all garbage!”
“Conan-kun—” Kobayashi-sensei tried to cut in. She shushed the children, stepping into the almost-gone space between two boys, one hand pushing Conan back, the other blocking Genta. Before her next sentence and amidst the chaos, Haibara Ai stood up. The classroom fell quiet.
“Look, ” she said quietly, holding up his A Case of Identity. Worn around the edges, binding slightly loose, no bookmarks. His. “It’s here. Under your schoolbag.”
Conan replayed the videotape in his head. Pause, rewind, pause. Frame, freeze, zoom in, out. It was stuck halfway, but his brain made the decision for him to cut, skip and delete. If he didn’t look very closely, he wouldn’t have noticed.
He strained to reach for the missed frames. They were overexposed, white all over. His head hurt.
He apologized to Genta. The other boy didn’t talk to him for the rest of the day. Mitsuhiko tried; Ayumi too. Conan remained in his seat after they left, staring at the orange sun setting earlier and earlier as days went by. Haibara opened the radio, homework a neat stack in front of her.
Eventually, inevitably, they asked about head traumas, and Ran remembered the night he stumbled into her life. Conan was energetic like every other six-year-olds, though almost too bright and eloquent, unlike most other six-year-olds. She remembered pushing a comb through that familiar, stubborn cowlick after his shower and how he yelped in pain. She let it slide when he claimed that he slipped and hit his head earlier.
They wanted details, so Conan picked out half-truths. He sat on the yellow sofa, a ginger cat purring a cushion away. He wished he had a cushion or the cat on his lap, but there was only Ran’s hand. Kogoro loomed behind them, uncharacteristically solemn. No, it only happened once. Yes, maybe for a few minutes; Agasa Hakase found and woke him. He did remember what happened. No, he didn’t feel dizzy afterward. Or maybe for a little while, he guessed. He did his homework okay. He slept well. No seizures. No black-outs.
He told them his name, the correct one. He answered the year, season, date and day. Where exactly was he now, from country to the floor he was on. He was shown a crocodile-shaped ruler, a calendar and a torch. He counted backward from one hundred by sevens. He stopped by sixty-five, mostly because he felt a little bored and embarrassed.
He didn’t pay attention to the calendar. It just slipped.
“Take the paper in your right hand, fold it in half, and put it on the floor.”
He took the paper. A twenty-centimeter square, also green, he observed. He held it in his hand, slightly askew, at approximately twenty degree. He folded it, but not in half, letting corners poke out of the edges. He flattened the crease.
“It’s a stegosaurus,” he explained.
Haibara didn’t ask about the results. They sat in the lab of calm blue and white, their isolated capsule, watching 279 running on the wheel, identical mugs of hot chocolate cupped in their hands. The mouse had his own cage now, his own wheel, a cardboard tunnel and a wooden hideout. With a tiny ladder.
Mice loved to climb, Ai had said. Give them plenty of height if you meant to keep them as pets.
“You can feed him if you want,” she offered, voice flat and weirdly strained. She rarely looked at him these days. He couldn’t blame her. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. “You can let him out for a little bit. He won’t bite. They’re bred to be tame.”
He asked if he could have his phone back. She said no.
And. “And no, the antidotes wouldn’t work.”
Time stopped being linear. It flowed and radiated towards all directions, leaving him on a never-ending train ride without station names. Seconds of haze can push him from past to present or back, with deviations of hours or days or months.
Sometimes Conan thought he was dreaming. Nightmares were scarcer now, but dreams occupied every second of his sleep. The usually organized tape of memory spilled loose and tangled when he dreamed; scenes were shifted, rearranged, reattached, with bits and pieces missing. But if he was only dreaming, that was okay.
He forgot the way home again. It was spring, cheery blossoms danced like thousands of pink feathers, shedding from giant sleeping birds nesting between tall branches. Again he wandered into some park he had never been to, standing by the hedges, frowning at Ran’s map. He traced his fingers uncertainly along the colorful lines. Weird; Beika wasn’t that large.
Children laughed and ran around. Dogs barked. A border collie sniffed his trousers; he stroked its ears. Its owner smiled down fondly at him.
“Haven’t seen you around here,” she said. “New to the area?”
“I lived in five chome,” he answered politely. The dog laid down playfully in front of him, tongue lolling, inviting him to rub its belly. He was reminded of John, and the afternoons when he and Ran sneaked ice cream cones and yogurt cakes through the fence for the shepherd. “I don’t come here very often.”
“That’s a pretty long way from here,” she hummed. “Took a walk here with your family?”
“Not really,” he admitted, folding his map up and slipping it back into his pocket. “Actually, can I borrow your phone, obasan?”
Ran arrived twenty-seven minutes later, her pace rushed and anxious. Conan kept his word: he stayed exactly where he was, and made sure he was near something noticeable enough. He sat on a blue iron bench next to the yellow dog-shaped slide, schoolbag on his lap, thinking about the collie’s warm, slightly rough fur and John. He wondered where John was now, when Ran called his name and offered him her hand.
With his hand now in hers, he slowly re-recognized the streets, the shops, and the iron tower looming in the distance under a clouded sky. He scolded himself for not being calm enough, for not thinking clearly. But still, one more small mystery, about the direction they were heading...
“Why are we going to your house?” he asked, puzzled. “Won’t Eri-obasan be angry?”
Ran froze. She froze as if electric-shocked from touching a lamppost in a flooded road; her grip tightened reflexively. Her eyes wandered; he counted seconds and minutes until they reached him again. Shinichi held his breath. Something was wrong, and he should ask. But—
“Alright then,” but she said softly, smiling again. “I’ll take you home.”
She took him home. His parents were out again; the house smelled stale and dusty. But he was just glad that he made it home, and Ran was there. Ran cleared his textbooks, half-written homework and dog-eared novels from his duvet for cold winter months, and fished a clean blanket out of the closet.
He was asleep before she draped it over him.
Conan assumed that Hattori knew. There were the missed calls, and talks between Ran and Kazuha. One didn’t need to be a detective to put two and two together. One Friday night there came poundings on door thundering into the agency, and Hattori stood there, cap turned forward, sharp gaze locked deadly on him.
“How dare y—”
Ran grabbed Hattori’s wrist and forced it back to his side. She suggested a walk.
They ran into sirens and blurs of black-and-white cars two streets away. A detective’s instinct tempted Hattori to follow; Conan saw his eyes lit up, his feet eager to take him running. Yearning ached and hollowed his heart, but Conan shook his head. Ran’s features fell rigid and unreadable in the light-polluted night. Hattori nodded. He stood still.
“Let’s go eat. You haven’t eaten yet, right, Hattori-kun?” Ran asked, voice still gentle; Conan shut his eyes momentarily at the faked, easily crumbled causality. He didn’t want to be here, with Ran and Hattori, being reminded of what he had lost and what he was going to. He wanted no food, no case, no pity from his dearest friends. He wanted a car crashing into the sidewalk and him; he wanted a murderer on the loose driving that knife into his chest; he wanted his heart to give up before his brain so at least—
“Let’s go home,” Shinichi said, a half-whine; he sounded terrified to even himself and he hated this even more. “I don’t want to eat.”
“You have to. You’ve already skipped lunch, you need to eat at least something,” Ran stated firmly, finality in her tone. He flinched, but shook his head in defiance. He started to wriggle his fingers out of Ran’s grip.
“Ku—kiddo—” Hattori tried, reaching for his shoulder. Shinichi flinched away but Hattori was fast and his arm was long; then in blurs of streetlights and headlights and flickering signposts, he wasn’t Hattori. It was a face he’d never filed and categorized, a face with no definition and he was scared because it must be wrong something had happened he must be in danger—
“Go away!” he screamed in fear, tottering back. Cars honked; noises and movements flooded in, pushing past. “You—I don’t know you—you are here to hurt me isn’t it, you know I’m sick so you’re here to hurt me go away leave me alone go away—”
He drew in shaky breaths; he fought and thrashed. He heard himself whimpering and moaning as his trachea convulsed. His vision swam. It took him decades to realize the arms holding weren’t doing anything else; they were strong but unharming. It took him eons to both hear and process.
“Conan-kun!”
“Please, Conan-kun! Conan-kun...”
“... Shinichi!”
He calmed.
Ran was holding him. Something hot, something liquid burned his neck in drips. Ran was crying.
Hattori passed him the chocolate bar again. He shook his head. Hattori put it down. His own mug of Americano was left untouched as well.
“I’m sorry,” Conan said.
Poirot Café was quiet. A few guests scattered here and there, eyes fixated onto their respective laptops or phones. They sat lifelessly under cold, pale light, with only fingers flying, lips moving, empty shells with minds elsewhere, operating on caffeine. Hattori and Conan took window seats. People walked by from time to time, a consistency that Conan found comfort in.
“They only said that you were sick... I didn’t know,” Hattori started. He didn’t shout, and his quiet tone kept Conan’s gaze on the pavement outside, away from his best friend’s face. “You should’ve told me.”
“I lost my phone,” Conan said, as-a-matter-of-factly. “Haibara confiscated Shinichi’s.”
Momentary silence. Silence was rare for them; Hattori always found ways to defuse it into an air lighter and easier, sometimes leading to endless bickers. Silence was rare as he can always hear him, with or without exchanges of glimpses. The Holmes fans gathering was a lifetime ago, which he recalled faintly with raging waves and splattering rain.
“I wish I died,” he gave a hollow, humorless chuckle. “Correction: I had died, once. But this is much worse than dying.”
Then there was the Hattori he was more familiar with. His fists clenched; fury and incontestable passion sharpened his features. “There must be something,” he growled. “Have you tried the antidotes—”
“It doesn’t work,” Shinichi stated, interrupting him. “Nothing will.”
Silence again. There were mysteries that were, and would be, left unsolved. Hattori’s fists remained clenched, his jaw set. In a split second Conan thought he heard it: I’ll take them down for you I’ll figure it out I’ll crack this I won’t just give up on you right now—
“Stop,” he snapped. Hattori’s head jerked up; he replied nothing. “It’s not your fight, barou. And stop treating me like I’m already dead.”
He heard Ran’s light footsteps and said hi. Spring and summer wheeled past and it was autumn again, with chilly nights edging longer and quieter. She padded past the mess on the floor, still in her pajamas: schoolbag and textbooks, coins, a pocket knife and the Detecitve’s Badge. She knelt across from him.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked, voice thick with sleep, hair draping messily over her shoulders. Shinichi shrugged.
“I should go back to school,” he said. “I’m bored out of my mind here.”
“But this early?”
He tilted his head at Ran’s tone. He didn’t understand why she asked. It was obvious, wasn’t it? He checked the battery of his glasses out of habit, though he hadn’t put them into use for a long time. “I need to prepare for school,” he said.
Ran paused. Drowsiness slowly cleared and faded from her eyes. Shinichi stared, frowned: he still couldn’t comprehend. He started listing possible reasons in his head, things that could’ve happened; then Ran spoke.
“It’s two in the morning.”
“No,” he corrected, “It’s seven. I don’t want to be late.”
He started to pack, absentmindedly thinking about all the assignments and examinations he had missed. He picked up and counted the coins one by one, when Ran grabbed his arm. He looked up, inquisitive, and Ran wordlessly guided his gaze towards the clock on the wall. Two thirteen.
“Couldn’t you just check the clock?”
Ran sounded quiet. He opened his mouth to apologize. But as if a small volcano resided inside her she started to shake, first the shoulders, then all of her. Her face contorted and his mind went blank. No words, no thoughts. He sat frozen.
“COULDN’T YOU JUST CHECK THE DAMN CLOCK?”
Sobs and screams erupted into the night air, a raging storm. Her father rushed out, disheveled but sober; he pulled Shinichi away and scooped him up, tightly against his chest. His other hand on his daughter’s shoulder, firm and reassuring.
“It’s not fair,” she pressed out between sobs, trembling even more under her father’s touch. “It’s not fair at all, you know?”
“Go back to sleep, Ran,” Kogoro only said softly, as if she was still a child, and had just woken up from a nightmare. “It's okay. Just leave him to me. Go back to sleep.”
Minutes or hours later, the agency quieted, their breathing hitched by invisible, residual tephra. Kogoro was still holding Shinichi. Shinichi didn’t move. Ran’s shaking voice echoed and clung to him like unwashed blood from his hands; names drifted past his mind, with gunshot and eerie piano melody raising from crackling wood. Kogoro’s heart beat fast but steady; he still smelled of alcohol.
“I’m going to make some calls,” Kogoro said, finally setting him down on the couch. “Can you sit here and wait for a little, Shinichi?”
“Sure,” Shinichi said.
Kogoro handed him The Sign Of Four and turned on the light. He dialed, hung up, and dialed again. He yelled into the receiver, thumped his fist on the desk and cursed from the pain. He yelled for a long time. Shinichi sat there and read.
He woke, but not in the bed he fell asleep in. It was warm, though at times there was breeze; his limbs were heavy. His eyes were open but they recognized nothing, only colors and shapes without meanings. He heard dialogues, broken sentences and words from various voices, but they drifted and dissolved before he held onto them.
He was neither awake nor asleep. Light flickered on and off; days and nights and seasons turned. He was nowhere and anywhere, not in any set places or time.
“... not your fault, Ran, he’s not your responsibility...”
“... talk as if you know he’s yours... didn’t even... did you know he got shot once...”
“... not now... at least when he’s more... doesn’t even know who he is now...”
“... no point waiting... no difference... tomorrow... in America...”
“But I want to. I’ll wait.”
Curtains were drawn; sunlight spilled in and Shinichi blinked. He heard birds chirping, fluttering past his window. He thought he would see his parents, but there was just Ran.
Ran sat on his bed, in blue Teitan uniform, sorting out pills of various sizes and colors and placing them on his palm. She counted them, lips shifting soundlessly. She didn’t look at him, and she looked sad. Shinichi knew it was because of him. His heart ached.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked, his small voice echoing in his own ears, his own too-large room. She paused, a round yellow pill slipped out of her fingertips and onto his palm.
“Of course not.”
“Ran.”
She sniffled. Her eyes shone in a way he was too familiar with and thus too afraid to see. His other hand sought for hers under the cover; she replied with a very light squeeze, and he loosened. The sky was blue and cloudless, a surreal painting against the window frames.
“Silly,” she said lightly, almost a scold. “Angry with you, yes, and all the time. But afraid of you? What do you think you are? A zombie?”
He sought words but there was none. She handed him a glass of water. He took the pills.
“What are you doing here?”
“You’re going on a trip, remember?” she said, gesturing towards the half-filled suitcase laid open by his bed. “I’m here to say goodbye.”
“Oh,” he said. He didn’t remember, but he trusted Ran. “Right.”
His hand remained in hers. There were old scars and calluses from karate practices, from years of chores and cooking. It was much, much larger than his, he thought. He felt safe. But then she drew back.
“Enjoy your trip, Shinichi,” she said. She stood up and smiled down at him. He wanted to stop her, and apologize, for something he had obviously forgotten. But if he forgot that easily, it mustn’t be that important. And if it was important, Ran would’ve been angry. He would’ve known.
“Bye, then,” he said, smiling back. He felt like he was drifting off again, not into sleep but to other places, other fragments of time. “I’ll call. But don’t wait up.”
She nodded. She held him briefly and let go. She smelled of cherry blossoms; he wondered if it was spring, because he couldn’t see it from where he sat, from the window. Maybe it was.
“I won’t,” she promised.