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“What’s with that expression, Ran?”
Mouri Kogorou, in his graciousness, parts his attention briefly from the TV screen— which is currently showing what to some must be an absolutely riveting horse race— to question his daughter and her abnormally cheery expression.
Her dad’s tone is snooty and suspicious, but Ran can’t find it in her to be bothered by it this time. Maybe when she’s in a worse mood she’ll pick a fight, but not today!
“Eh, what expression? I’m just waiting on a text,” she replies in an almost sing-songy manner, phone held casually in her hands.
Kogorou’s attention is now fully divorced from the TV, his parental senses tingling. He swings around in his chair to inspect his daughter. Don’t let his appearance fool you, because despite his sloppy and slovenly appearance, he is in fact a renowned detective, you know! He has a lot of solved cases under his belt! It’s a surprise, he knows, but it’s true!
And if he can solve those practically in his sleep, he can for sure grill his daughter on her currently elevated happiness levels that seem to have nothing to do with him or this riveting horse race. “A text, huh? Better not be from— ” “Ah! He texted back!” Ran interrupted joyfully, eyes crinkling. Kogorou’s eye twitches.
On the couch a little ways away from the father-daughter duo, at the exact opposite side of the TV screen, sits Conan. His homework is splayed over his lap. At Ran’s happy words, his dangling feet seem to swing a little harder back and forth.
Fully hidden, his personal phone, the one he uses as Kudou Shinichi, is slotted against the inside of his notebook, readable and reachable. Shinichi’s messages were open on Ran’s name. Unbeknownst to him, this was subtly reflected off his glasses.
“That better not be that brat Kudou! He’s bad news, and bad for my business. Just forget about him, Ran. A girl your age should focus on your studies!” Kogorou’s face twists as he hmphs in derision. He turns back around towards the TV. His horse better give him at least one win today. The less time he spends speaking that kid’s name, the quicker Ran will forget about him.
Ran’s eyes flit across her phone screen, taking in the new message. She then glances up at her dad’s expression in the reflection of the TV screen. His face is mildly pinched and somewhat annoyed, but at least he seems to be focused on the race rather than her now.
Too bad, Ran’s still in the mood to talk and tease.
“Don’t worry Dad, I do focus on my studies! In fact, that’s what me and Shinichi talk about sometimes,” Ran tells him, purposefully circling back to Shinichi. She keeps her gaze on the TV screen, as does Kogorou. Him more out of spite at this rate.
“But regardless of what we talk about,” Ran pauses, slightly out of genuine nerves, and slightly for dramatic effect, “My heart pounds a little harder whenever he sends me a new message, I can’t help but try to keep him talking,” Ran lets out a laugh, sounding a little in love.
Kogorou’s eyes bulge out of his head and he nearly pulls a muscle to look Ran in the eye. Inspired, he begins a passionate tirade of the protective fatherly type, the TV forgotten from his mind in his paternal fervor. Ran smiles blandly, and just maintains her focus on the TV screen. If he thinks she’s paying him any mind, then that’s a bonus, but it’s not Kogorou that Ran is focused on at this moment.
Smaller than her father, in the reflection of the screen, hidden among its moving, colorful pixels taking the shape of running horses, is the overlaid sight of Conan seemingly reading his school notebook, suppressing a wide smile. His expression is distant and ever so slightly glossy, and his cheeks a bright pink.
Ran catches the very moment his idly swinging feet transform into a loud and rapid knocking as the tip of his toes repeatedly tap together, unable to suppress his emotions. Each knock is loud in the room that just before only featured the sounds of familial chatter and TV announcing.
Keeping her eye on that sight, facing her dad, Ran idly says, “I should send him another text, maybe see if he has any opinions on that one cafe that opened up near the school. You know, the one we went to last week?”
It wasn’t as good as Poirot downstairs, but it had a cozy hole-in-the-wall atmosphere. Ran's not against going there again. Conan jolts and all of his energy seems to freeze, and his fluffy head is shoved further into his notebook. He looks very studious, like a curled up shrimp that is wholly dedicated to graduating elementary school with top marks. Ran wants to laugh so hard.
Keep it together Ran, keep it together… Ran tip taps on her phone’s keyboard until she’s typed out her text, each one nearly matching the tap tapping of Conan’s reignited feet. She sends it without hesitation.
In her text, she doesn’t ask Shinichi if he wants to go to that cafe, she just asks if he’s been there before. She knows he has, but he doesn’t know that she knows that, and she doesn’t want to prompt him into lying about why he can’t come out for himself to see it.
She knows Shinichi’s unable.
And even if their texting is merely a simplistic back and forth that doesn’t go anywhere, Ran still likes being able to talk to Shinichi and call him by his name. She can’t do that to his face very often, but at times like these she can at least savor his name spoken in the third person.
It is funny when it happens to be that he’s the actual third person in the room. It’s funny but it hurts too.
If Ran keeps saying his name out loud, it helps her feel like he’s not actually gone. It helps her feel the truth of it all. That he isn’t. And she’ll remember to speak his name for him, until he can reintroduce himself properly to the world for more than a few stolen moments.
Moments, it seems, that he spends almost entirely on her.
In the meantime, she’ll just entertain herself with what she has, what they both have. And what she has is very tempting to toy with. It’s not every day you can tease your lifelong friend who you have mutually tender feelings for— yes, she’s not blind— as much as you want with him unable to fight back! It’s not every day that you get to live with your friend and crush under the same roof. It’s also not everyday that your friend and crush is mysteriously shrunk down by ten years and forced to hide under a secret identity. It’s not everyday that your own seeming ignorance is the key to your lifelong friend staying safe from some great harm lurking outside the walls of your home, shrouded in the shadows somewhere unknown.
It’s not an everyday situation in the slightest, but it’s been Mouri Ran and Kudou Shinichi’s everyday for nearly six months now. It’d be one thing if she maintained ignorance for a couple days, or maybe even a couple weeks, but Ran’s not been side by side with Shinichi nearly their whole lives to not catch on to when things don’t add up with him.
She’s always been more fanciful than Shinichi about magical things, about supernatural things, more willing to believe in them, but his preference for logic must have rubbed off on her at some point, and that is both what kept her unknowing for longer than she wants to admit, and what finally ferried her to the truth.
If Ran could remember it correctly, she’d bring up that one Holmes quote about something being true after everything else being eliminated, but she’s not the Holmes fanatic between the two of them.
That little figure, texting when he should be working, endangering his identity just so he can reply to Ran despite being in the same exact room as her, that’s her precious little detective nerd.
The glasses suit him, Ran thinks. Maybe he’ll actually need them in old age like his dad does! Ran giggles at the mental image. Hopefully he ditches the facial hair though. It’s a bit too familiar to her, and she doesn’t take after her mom’s taste like that, she thinks. She hopes.
She dutifully and righteously ignores the little voice in her head telling her she takes after her dad in type, particularly on the age front. She’d rather focus on laughing at the image of old man Shinichi with a handlebar mustache than anything else. Or an old man Conan, both work.
“—and Conan! Stop it with the noise, it’s making me forget my point,” Ran’s father scolds Conan before his attention is brought back to his daughter. “And what are you laughing at now?” Kogorou has been diligently lecturing Ran about the merits of getting into a good university over boyfriends, and then was briefly distracted by Conan’s noisy tapdancing, but Ran’s laughter immediately derails him.
“You’re right, Dad.” Kogorou stops in his tracks. “I’m right? I mean, of course I am! And very persuasive too. Now go to your room and work on something, your old man has his own business to attend to.” He shoos her, looking away. Damn it, it seems like his horse came in last place while he wasn’t looking!
Kogorou grits his teeth and makes a mental note to not try to rope his daughter into his hobbies next time, she seems to be a jinx. Either her or the brat, they tend to come in pairs these days so he can’t say for sure which is to blame.
Ran’s phone beeps with a new notification.
Shinichi
5:55pm
[I’ve come across that place, yeah. Have any recommendations? I trust your judgement.]
Ran reads his words. Trust her judgement, she wishes he would. Ignoring the routine but still bittersweet sigh building in her chest, Ran stands up and goes to walk to her room.
As she does, she calls out to her disguised childhood friend, “Conan-kun!”
The boy’s head shoots up, the pages in his lap fluttering save for the side pinned down by his phone. Ran inspects his face and pretends she can’t see the suspicious rectangular object from her vantage point. His mouth is open, and his face is dusted with color, and his eyes are wide and attentive behind the large black frames of his glasses.
If he was just a little boy and nothing more, Ran would only assume he’s innocently caught off guard, potentially caught slacking off on his schoolwork. But Ran is an expert at reading between the lines these days, reading between the scripted roles of Edogawa Conan the first grader and Kudou Shinichi the teen detective in hiding, and can tell he’s actually flustered at her calling his name (fake name, but still his) after all that embarrassing discussion mentioning him, and trying to suppress the effects of being affected in front of her.
He’s feeling like an exposed nerve, but trying to stay cool.
Mouri Ran, in her graciousness, does what she does best these days: talks and teases. “What’s with that expression, Conan-kun? Slacking? How about you come study in my room, leave Dad to his business.”
She extends her hand to him. She’s so much taller than him, and looking at him as he is now, she wonders if her estimate of ten years is too conservative a guess on how much time was stolen from him. At the very least he does pass for a first grader, given he’s been roped into attendance at Teitan Elementary as one. Maybe one day, when things are safer, she can get him to gossip with her about the teachers that are still there after all this time, or if that one classroom on that one floor is still said to be haunted.
One day, they’ll get to gossip like that again. But even if that time is not in the near future, it doesn’t mean they have to be separated from one another in every way.
“I’ll help you with anything that’s stumping you. And maybe you can help me with what stumps me!” Ran laughs brightly, her words wholly honest and revealing if you know how to hear it.
Wide boyish eyes framed by frames slowly and sweetly turn crescent in shape, and shyly Conan just says, “Sure, Ran-neechan,” as he takes her hand. As they walk out, Kogorou yells to Conan, “No funny business! Eyes on your homework, you hear?”
Behind her dad’s back, she sticks her tongue out at him. “Tch, what funny business? This is all funny if you think about it,” Ran mutters childishly.
“What’s all funny?” Conan asks inquisitively.
Ran blinks, then smiles down at him. “Hmm,” she coyly pretends to think. “My reply to Shinichi’s text, I guess.” Her reply, both now and in her text, is purposefully vague and confusing, but not disingenuous.
Conan tilts his head and furrows his brows. He and Ran, at the same time, think about their shared exchange of text messages. Paying no heed to the destined-for-a-dead-end train of thought that she’s knowingly put Conan on, Ran’s face splits into an easygoing smile while Conan’s devolves into a confused pout.
Without further ado she carts Conan off to her room for an impromptu study session. Perhaps she’ll sneak in more texts to Shinichi if she makes the occasional trip to the restroom, or to get them glasses of water. Give Conan the plausible privacy to respond. She wonders if she should be nervous about leaving him alone in her room.
Ran wants to laugh.
This whole situation, underneath all the hurt, at the end of the day, really is funny.
Ran
5:45pm
[Dad’s forcing me to watch a horse race, I don’t have the heart to tell him I have no clue what’s going on. Save me Shinichi (ಥ﹏ಥ)]
Shinichi
5:48pm
[That’s a grave you'll have to dig yourself out of Ran, I wish you luck www]
Ran
5:53pm
[Hey, you hear about that new place that opened up near Teitan High, Scott & Zelda Cafe? It’s actually really good!!!]
Shinichi
5:55pm
[I’ve come across that place, yeah. Have any recommendations? I trust your judgement.]
Ran
6:00pm
[And I trust yours. Ask me again when you come back from this big case <(^_^)>]