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His phone was ringing again, she observed.
This was the third time that he had to take a step outside the Professor’s kitchen to receive a call from who knew who. Based on his dead-serious glance at the caller’s ID, most likely it was one of his collaborators sharing some information he needed for a case.
Half an hour was all it took for him to get three different incoming calls, she counted. 5-minute intervals were in between. The longest time record spent on each call was ten minutes; three minutes was the shortest. Who knew if the last one would break those records.
He would excuse himself every time he was going to get out of his chair and answer his phone. He did that out of courtesy for the Professor and her whom he was having dinner with right now. It was very thoughtful of him, even though this was just one of those daily dinners they had together– the one which he crashed in almost every evening only because he and things in his kitchen didn’t go along very well with each other.
However, watching him and his phone so inseparable like two married lovers, she couldn’t help thinking badly of one particular wicked what-if scenario about it.
“I wonder if Shinichi’s phone would ever explode again like that time.” The Professor muttered unexpectedly. “It seems to never get its rest.”
Haibara let out a small wry chuckle at his quip. What a happenstance that they thought the same thing. But his words, for sure, had jogged her memory to the only time when Shinichi miraculously broke his phone during one of his catching criminal episodes. It was about three years ago, she believed, when things between him and her were merely bound by the word partners.
She remembered him come to the Professor’s house in a state similar to a living mummy. The bandages were here and there all over his head, arms, and legs; his clothes in tatters and dirt. Yet the one thing he was worrying over was his dead broken-screen phone. Well, it was the data stored in it that he was fretting over to be exact.
Too bad, recent smartphones models had only a built-in internal storage which was almost close to being unrecoverable if anything severe happened to the hardware underneath the screen. And by the look of his phone’s condition, anyone could see the unjust harassment he had done to the unfortunate thing. Its deformed state was indeed dreadful like it had been exploded.
“Can’t you do something about it, Professor?” He was pleading, desperate.
“I’m sorry, Shinichi.” Agasa sadly delivered his findings. “The microcontrollers and the IC are terribly damaged. There’s nothing I can do to retrieve the storage.”
Listening to the Professor, he sighed dejectedly with his shoulders slumped. He said his thanks to the old man. There was nothing he could do except for accepting the fate of his stored data.
“Didn’t you back it up regularly?” Haibara gave him some ideas. “Stored some of the data on a cloud storage or some sort of it maybe?”
Instead of finding her ideas useful, he swam deeper into the ocean of despair. Her questions had only made him realize the degree of his own foolishness and he was lamenting over it.
He was too busy these past few months that he forgot to make a backup for his phone’s storage. He didn’t even have such things like cloud storage or whatever it was called. Dealing with numerous dangerous cases in the past had given him some alertness to not store his personal stuffs online as much as possible, let alone–
“The explicit picture collections of you and Mouri-san.” Haibara interfered with her blunt remark. “Are those what you’re worried about?”
The dark purple atmosphere around the detective vanished within a blink. He looked at the strawberry blonde, stunned. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to ease his mood out or she was only being sarcastic here. All he understood was that his body temperature raised once his brain caught her saying. A thousand shades of blushes filled up his face without missing a single spot.
Agasa who was still there also had his cheeks tainted with pink. He decided to leave the room quietly and get back to his own laboratory before he could know Shinichi’s answer. He just didn’t want to hear anything beyond that. He couldn’t imagine that the two pure children who used to play with him weren’t so naïve anymore– he felt old.
“N-no… Of course it’s not that!” Shinichi sputtered, defending his innocence. “We haven’t even done such things yet!”
It wasn’t a thing that was supposed to be said aloud, though.
But it was true that the hundreds of pictures he took together with Ran was what put him on edge. It was their precious memories, their reminiscence of what they had shared for the last few months.
“Well, however it is, you only lost few months’ worth pictures.” She said with such a disinterested look. “You can just start collecting those again with her from here on.”
Little did she know that a hint of jealousy was also mixed in her words of encouragement. After all, she couldn’t have that kind of remedy with her sister even if she was wishing for it with all her heart.
She who ran away from the organization empty-handedly, didn’t have a single thing that could keep the memories she had with her sister alive. The only treasure she could get ahold of was a very old photo of them from the time capsule and her letter to her. Everything else remained deeply as fragments inside her head.
There was no way she could create a new ones with her sister who was no longer a part of this world now. On the contrary, he had that chance to make amend for all his lost. He and that girl still had their future ahead together, didn’t they?
“No.”
Shinichi’s immediate short and firm reply pulled her out of her trance. Then, she saw his cute flustered expression slowly shifted to a slight frown, his dark blue eyes were showing her a glimpse of an inexplicable hurt.
“Huh?”
“I can’t do that anymore, because–” He clenched his teeth, hesitated, before he let it go. “Well, it’s because we’ve broken up some months ago.”
Haibara’s lips were somewhat sealed by the established fact she had just discovered. That was then she realized that despite all the small chances he might have together with that girl in the future, the ones left in his phone were the last evidences that proved the best they could get in their relationship. Perhaps, he wanted to keep them, knowing he could never get his childhood best friend back to the way they used to.
Eighteen years of friendship, five years of dating, only to be brought into the past by two short words: break up. How irony that was.
.
.
.
“Let me help you with the dishes.” Shinichi grinned as he approached Haibara who was turning on the kitchen tap. He put his phone down on the nearest table top beside the sink and rolled his sleeves up.
“If you’re feeling sorry for disturbing our dinner with those numerous calls, please don’t be.” Haibara straightforwardly declined. “I can manage this myself.”
“But doing this together will be fun.” He curled his eyebrow, insisted. “You’ll finish the chores faster too.”
“No, it will not. And for your information, you’re slowing me down right now.” She stated matter-of-factly.
They kept exchanging banters afterwards, like two little kids who were fighting for some candies. They were too focused on their bickering that they didn’t notice Shinichi‘s phone’s vibrating noise– it was another incoming call. Until it fell to the sink and got under the running tap water. The moment they came to rescue it, it was already soaking wet.
It won’t even turn on.
“Why do I get reminded of a certain unpleasant memory all of a sudden?” He said, rolling his eyes. One of his hand was holding his dead phone and Haibara’s borrowed hair-dryer on the other. He was trying to blow some cool air into his phone’s charging port, hoping it would work well to dry the components inside.
“Heh, I wonder.” Haibara threw him a smirk. She was standing beside him, arms were folded on her chest while checking if he would need her help. “But you do show a totally different reaction than that time.”
“I’ve learned my lesson, you know.” He turned his head to look at her, pouted, as he switched the hair-dryer off. A little rosy tint lingered on his cheeks. “Besides, I believe the moment we break our boyfriend-girlfriend status, it’d be the moment when I propose to you. So even if I were to lose our months’ worth memories, we could always start collecting them again as many times as we like, right?”
Those were the same words she once told him, she noticed. She just never expected that he would say it back to her, moreover use it to describe their future together. She felt like she had just been incidentally proposed by him. How dense he was. And so, Haibara couldn’t hold her skipping heartbeats.
“Oh!” Shinichi exclaimed in excitement, drawing Haibara’s full attention back to reality. It seemed he was booting his phone and it was working. She leaned in closer to him to see it for herself as well.
To her surprise, the first thing that greeted them was the picture of her sleeping soundly on his bed. Just when did he capture this? Taking a more detailed view at the bedsheet’s colour and the blanket’s pattern wrapped around her bare chest, she eventually guessed when he had taken it. It was on the weekend after her final exams ended.
Her blushes instantly returned to her face as she remembered the affair they had have that day. It got even more harder when she realized that he had set it as his phone’s lockscreen.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t ask the Professor for his help.” He let out a sigh of relief. “He’d be mad at me if he saw this.”
“Oh you bet, stupid pervert detective.” She said as she grabbed her hair-dryer back and quickly turned her heels, walking away toward her bedroom. Even so, his observant eyes didn’t miss her reddening look and the shy smile on her lips. He grinned happily at her small back.
She was being self-conscious now that she knew he’d always see her sleeping face whenever he took a look at his phone. And among her other pictures he had taken, he had to choose the suggestive ones nonetheless. But, since he had said some bunch of nice stuffs just now, perhaps she’d let him have it for now.