Post by doctorpeggy on Jul 9, 2017 19:28:31 GMT
Themed Writing Contest #35 - Games: Ready or not?
(I think that this story seemed much better inside my head. As it stands, it's probably hilariously awkward, but as usual, I decided to post it anyway. As long as I've written something, why keep it to myself?)
Word count: 2572
Summary: Someone was getting close to her secret and Ai wished she knew what to do.
Ready or not?
With how disturbingly eventful her life had been, Ai was surprised she hadn’t burst an artery yet.
Though at the moment she felt like it wouldn’t be too long before she did.
She took more than a minute to process what she had just heard, cellphone frozen at her ear with Kudo-kun asking her if she was still on the line, getting increasingly concerned.
Because for once she had let herself think her life had been pleasant and normal, and she had started to not regret the decision to become Haibara Ai forever. All that had just been run over with a bulldozer.
As if being shrunk and sought out by a crime syndicate for nearly a year hadn’t been enough. She should have already guessed that the fates had some secret, anti-biochemist agenda, because now Kudo-kun was telling her that Tsubarya-kun had suddenly started investigation Conan’s disappearance, and asking questions about Kudo-kun’s reappearance soon after. Apparently, he had showed up at Kudo-kun’s house unannounced last evening.
Before two full minutes of brooding had been completed, Kudo-kun hung up, likely having run out of patience, so Ai was left to her own, unpleasant thoughts.
Kudo-kun had made it obvious that he would tell Tsubarya-kun the truth if he couldn’t avoid it. Which meant that either she had to discourage her friend from investigating further, or risk losing him.
She jammed the phone in her pocket and continued on her way to school, her mind in turmoil. Normally she would have let Kudo-kun do what he thought was best. If he trusted that Tsubarya-kun would take the truth well, who was she to argue? Especially since Kudo-kun had an annoying knack for being right about things.
Except that Kudo-kun knew her too well. She was sure he was leaving it up to her because she was the one who was worried about revealing the truth. And she’d argued before that he couldn’t blame her for it. He wasn’t the one who had once been part of a large crime ring. He hadn’t been the one to create and illegal drug designed to kill people. Of course, Kudo-kun hadn’t replied, patiently waiting for her to realize: who was she kidding?
The truth was the truth, and playing hide and seek with it wasn’t going to help her or her relationships.
Ai bit her lip hard.
What was she going to do?
She stared at the edge of the sidewalk as she walked, wishing she could push her problems off it and into the traffic in hopes that they would get run over.
Kudo-kun knew all her secrets. He knew that ten years ago she had thought she had a crush on him. He knew that six years ago she had discovered otherwise when she had fallen head over heels for Tsubarya-kun and understood what being in love actually was.
And he knew that she would do anything to keep her past from Tsubarya-kun, in fear of losing him forever. Because she was fine with unrequited love, but she could never be fine if their friendship were to end. She’d likely be chucked out of the detective boys, losing both Yoshida-san and Kojima-kun along the way.
A hand on her shoulder startled her out of her thoughts. She let out an undignified squeak.
A pleasant laugh behind her. Breathing hard, she turned to face Tsubarya-kun
“Haibara-san, what were you thinking about? Seemed pretty important, considering you were walking right past the school gates.” He joked.
Ai took a deep breath. It was the first time any of the detective boys had caught her off guard, and she didn’t know what to do.
“Just… nothing.” she said, shrugging, and then turned to walk toward the school gates, hoping she hadn’t sounded as shaken as she felt.
Tsubarya-kun fell into step next to her.
Ai thought, in the back of her mind, that she’d have known how to react if the same thing had happened with Kudo-kun instead of Tsubarya-kun. Her footsteps slowed as realization formed a cold lump in her gut.
She hadn’t ever let herself be free around the detective boys. She had always been their friend, sure, but they she had never let herself fully lose her self-consciousness with them, but she had with Kudo-kun. She sighed. This was the most painful day she’d experienced in a long time.
“Something really seems to be on your mind today, Haibara-san." Tsubarya-kun noted as he slowed to her pace. “If something is bothering you, I’d be willing to listen.” he added.
Oh, if only she could tell him.
If she had heard any of what had happened in any of her classes, Haibara would not have been wondering what math project people were talking about at lunchtime, but she knew she’d be able to figure out easily enough.
The bigger issue was that the detective boys had been chatting since the beginning of the break, and she had taken over ten minutes to snap out of her worry-filled stupor and go back to being her usual self, which had not been lost on her friends. They were, after all, detectives to this day.
“Ai-chan, are you really okay? You seemed so upset just a little bit ago.”
“Haibara, you can tell us you know. I mean, what are friends for? We’re willing to listen the same way we’re willing to share eel.”
“Genta-kun, I cannot even begin to tell you everything that is wrong with that comparison. Ai-chan, you know what he means, though, right?”
“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to, Haibara-san, but what Ayumi-chan and Genta-kun are saying is that we’re here if you need us.”
And somehow the conversation was over. Ai had hardly said anything. She caught Tsubarya-kun’s eye gave him a look of gratitude.
“No problem.” he mouthed discreetly.
Ai somehow managed to get through the day without brooding too much. She congratulated herself on laughing at a teacher’s bad pun despite the chaos inside her head. Except that at the end of the day she realized Yoshida-san and Kojima-kun both had club activities, so she had to walk home with Tsubarya-kun.
Which was usually a good thing.
Usually, but this time she could almost see what was going to happen. She knew it was going to end badly.
And when, halfway home, Tsubarya-kun said, “Is it okay if I ask you about something that might seem a little absurd?” she fought to not break into a sprint and get away from her friend.
“Of course.” she gritted, hoping desperately that she didn’t sound like she was struggling as much as she was. It felt like a game of cops and robbers, where you’re hiding and you know the other team is just around the corner, and you’re trying not to breathe so they can’t find you.
And ironically enough, she had played the game in her second childhood and felt the fear despite already having been a criminal for some time and having faced much, much worse.
“Actually… maybe some other time. You seem like you’ve got something weighing on your mind to day, and I’d hate to addd anything to that.” Tsubarya-kun decided aloud.
Ai released a breath that had been caught in her throat.
The rest of the walk home ended up being one-sided conversation from Tsubarya-kun, and Ai felt a little guilty after, but she couldn’t get herself to to do anything but think about it over and over again till she felt miserable.
At night, she couldn’t sleep. Guilt for not revealing the truth about herself to her friends plagued her just as much as thoughts of them finding out her secret and hating her for it did.
She wondered frustratedly why she was even so worked up about all this at all. Did it really matter? So what if she lost some friends. there was a time when she’d had nobody.
But she did care. She cared a lot.
She all but rolled out of bed, and switched on her laptop. She messaged Tsubarya-kun, saying hi. It was the middle of the night, but she got a reply anyway.
It was followed by a message saying “Just doing some midnight research.”
And before she had time to think about it, she was working furiously to hack into Tsubarya-kun’s laptop, hiding her presence as best she could with he skills she had gained by years of being in the Black Organization and time after that trying to take it down.
She cursed herself for having gotten good so at it.
And then she was searching for and deleting files with information regarding Edogawa Conan’s disappearance, the takedown of the Black Organization, and Kudo Shinichi’s reappearance. She was blocking his computer from looking at websites with any amount of substantial information related to the incidents ten years ago.
She wondered what she was doing. She asked herself why it had come to this. She wished she wasn’t so scared. If only she could stop playing this horrible game of cat and mouse, of hide and seek, of cops and robbers, all of which were disturbingly accurate representations of what was going on in her life.
She got a message from Tsubarya-kun about how the website he was looking at had suddenly and strangely stopped working.
She said something about reloading the page, turned off her laptop and slammed the lid shut.
Ai then crept back into bed. She dreamed she was running, running away from something big and horrible that kept appearing in the most unexpected of places, like it was playing some twisted game of tag.
In the morning she was in a daze. The events of the day before seemed far away and unimportant.
In school she was back to normal. She solved her worksheets at the speed of light and used the teachers for more.
She ate her lunch listening to the chatter of her friends, and offered her own two-bits at times.
Everything was fine.
Except it wasn’t.
She stayed back for cleaning duty, and when she got home she hadn’t so much as stepped through the door when her cellphone rang.
Tsubarya-kun.
He asked to meet her in the park near his house.
Guilt clawed up her throat. She couldn’t make up an excuse.
Ten minutes later she found herself in the park with her friend.
“Haibara-san, how much are you willing to stretch your side of reality?”
Ai just shrugged.
“See, I thought of something crazy.” he went on, “And it shouldn’t be possible, but it just all adds up. And, bear with me, but I think that Conan-kun was actually Shinichi-san all along.”
Ai didn’t reply. She bit her lip and nodded for Tsubarya-kun to go on.
“I mean,” he said, “Conan-kun was always so unusually smart. Precocious, even. And I thought at the time it was just because he was a prodigy, but I realize now there was no way a real seven-year-old could handle actual crime that well. And then, exactly between Conan-kun’s disappearance and Shinichi-san’s return, a crime syndicate was taken down, and there were rumors about the possibility of a child being involved in the investigation and subsequent destruction of the criminal organization. Not to mention the fact that Conan-kun always knew what was happening with Shinichi-san, and Shinichi-san was updated on what was happening with us when he returned, even though we barely knew him at the time. I wouldn’t blame him for it if it were true, of course. I’m sure he had his reasons, and they probably had to do with the crime syndicate. And, well, he never did anything inherently wrong.”
Tsubarya-kun took a deep breath.
“Sorry, was that a bit of a long explanation?” he asked.
Ai didn’t reply. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She was running. She was escaping. She was playing at ignorance.
“Haibara-san?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because… don’t take it the wrong way, I’m not accusing or blaming you, but I just thought that you knew the most about Conan-kun out of all of us, and well… I don’t mean to say it’s the truth, but maybe… you know, were kind of like Conan-kun, so maybe you’re something like Shinichi-san? I mean, I… you know what ai mean.”
“Would you hate me for it?” She had stoped running. She was giving up. She was letting herself get caught.
“Not at all. And, you know, it’s not like it’s really true, I was just being stupid and putting a possibility out there.”
“What if it was true?”
“You’d still be Haibara-san to me.”
A tear escaped Ai’s eye.
“What if I was ten years older than you? What if... what if I had done terrible things in the past? What if I had been the cause of the death of some people!”
More tears. Her throat was closing up.
Silence from Tsubarya-kun, then:
“Shinichi-san told me. He told me everything. It doesn’t change anything for me.”
He’d found her. He’d found where she was hiding before she had even began hiding.
Ai buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
“He didn’t tell me what your real name was, though.” Tsubarya-kun added.
She wiped the tears off her face, even though more filled the stains that the first ones had left.
“Miyano Shiho.” she choked out.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“I’m not Shiho anymore.”
“ I know.”
“I deleted your files and and blocked all your websites and everything.”
“I know.”
More tears fell.
“I knew you had become good at sleuthing, but I did know you had become this good.” Ai joked through her tears. “Tsubarya-ku… no, Mitsuhiko-kun.”
He blinked at her, surprised.
“I think I’m in love with you.” she said, plainly.
“Ha— Ai. Ai-san, I think I’ve been in love with you for a very long time.”
They both stood in silence that was part comfortable and part awkward, and Ai knew that later in the evening she would open her heart up to him and tell him everything about herself that only she had ever known. And she knew that sometime soon, she'd let the other detective boys know, too. And then maybe, finally, she’d stop playing hide and seek, and be open with them the way she was open with Kudo-kun. She could only hope that she was every bit a good person as she had been told, and that her friends trusted her as much as they said. And, that she could manage to be the person that she felt like from the inside in from of everyone.
Ai reminded herself to thank the a certain detective when she got the chance.
(I think that this story seemed much better inside my head. As it stands, it's probably hilariously awkward, but as usual, I decided to post it anyway. As long as I've written something, why keep it to myself?)
Word count: 2572
Summary: Someone was getting close to her secret and Ai wished she knew what to do.
Ready or not?
With how disturbingly eventful her life had been, Ai was surprised she hadn’t burst an artery yet.
Though at the moment she felt like it wouldn’t be too long before she did.
She took more than a minute to process what she had just heard, cellphone frozen at her ear with Kudo-kun asking her if she was still on the line, getting increasingly concerned.
Because for once she had let herself think her life had been pleasant and normal, and she had started to not regret the decision to become Haibara Ai forever. All that had just been run over with a bulldozer.
As if being shrunk and sought out by a crime syndicate for nearly a year hadn’t been enough. She should have already guessed that the fates had some secret, anti-biochemist agenda, because now Kudo-kun was telling her that Tsubarya-kun had suddenly started investigation Conan’s disappearance, and asking questions about Kudo-kun’s reappearance soon after. Apparently, he had showed up at Kudo-kun’s house unannounced last evening.
Before two full minutes of brooding had been completed, Kudo-kun hung up, likely having run out of patience, so Ai was left to her own, unpleasant thoughts.
Kudo-kun had made it obvious that he would tell Tsubarya-kun the truth if he couldn’t avoid it. Which meant that either she had to discourage her friend from investigating further, or risk losing him.
She jammed the phone in her pocket and continued on her way to school, her mind in turmoil. Normally she would have let Kudo-kun do what he thought was best. If he trusted that Tsubarya-kun would take the truth well, who was she to argue? Especially since Kudo-kun had an annoying knack for being right about things.
Except that Kudo-kun knew her too well. She was sure he was leaving it up to her because she was the one who was worried about revealing the truth. And she’d argued before that he couldn’t blame her for it. He wasn’t the one who had once been part of a large crime ring. He hadn’t been the one to create and illegal drug designed to kill people. Of course, Kudo-kun hadn’t replied, patiently waiting for her to realize: who was she kidding?
The truth was the truth, and playing hide and seek with it wasn’t going to help her or her relationships.
Ai bit her lip hard.
What was she going to do?
She stared at the edge of the sidewalk as she walked, wishing she could push her problems off it and into the traffic in hopes that they would get run over.
Kudo-kun knew all her secrets. He knew that ten years ago she had thought she had a crush on him. He knew that six years ago she had discovered otherwise when she had fallen head over heels for Tsubarya-kun and understood what being in love actually was.
And he knew that she would do anything to keep her past from Tsubarya-kun, in fear of losing him forever. Because she was fine with unrequited love, but she could never be fine if their friendship were to end. She’d likely be chucked out of the detective boys, losing both Yoshida-san and Kojima-kun along the way.
A hand on her shoulder startled her out of her thoughts. She let out an undignified squeak.
A pleasant laugh behind her. Breathing hard, she turned to face Tsubarya-kun
“Haibara-san, what were you thinking about? Seemed pretty important, considering you were walking right past the school gates.” He joked.
Ai took a deep breath. It was the first time any of the detective boys had caught her off guard, and she didn’t know what to do.
“Just… nothing.” she said, shrugging, and then turned to walk toward the school gates, hoping she hadn’t sounded as shaken as she felt.
Tsubarya-kun fell into step next to her.
Ai thought, in the back of her mind, that she’d have known how to react if the same thing had happened with Kudo-kun instead of Tsubarya-kun. Her footsteps slowed as realization formed a cold lump in her gut.
She hadn’t ever let herself be free around the detective boys. She had always been their friend, sure, but they she had never let herself fully lose her self-consciousness with them, but she had with Kudo-kun. She sighed. This was the most painful day she’d experienced in a long time.
“Something really seems to be on your mind today, Haibara-san." Tsubarya-kun noted as he slowed to her pace. “If something is bothering you, I’d be willing to listen.” he added.
Oh, if only she could tell him.
If she had heard any of what had happened in any of her classes, Haibara would not have been wondering what math project people were talking about at lunchtime, but she knew she’d be able to figure out easily enough.
The bigger issue was that the detective boys had been chatting since the beginning of the break, and she had taken over ten minutes to snap out of her worry-filled stupor and go back to being her usual self, which had not been lost on her friends. They were, after all, detectives to this day.
“Ai-chan, are you really okay? You seemed so upset just a little bit ago.”
“Haibara, you can tell us you know. I mean, what are friends for? We’re willing to listen the same way we’re willing to share eel.”
“Genta-kun, I cannot even begin to tell you everything that is wrong with that comparison. Ai-chan, you know what he means, though, right?”
“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to, Haibara-san, but what Ayumi-chan and Genta-kun are saying is that we’re here if you need us.”
And somehow the conversation was over. Ai had hardly said anything. She caught Tsubarya-kun’s eye gave him a look of gratitude.
“No problem.” he mouthed discreetly.
Ai somehow managed to get through the day without brooding too much. She congratulated herself on laughing at a teacher’s bad pun despite the chaos inside her head. Except that at the end of the day she realized Yoshida-san and Kojima-kun both had club activities, so she had to walk home with Tsubarya-kun.
Which was usually a good thing.
Usually, but this time she could almost see what was going to happen. She knew it was going to end badly.
And when, halfway home, Tsubarya-kun said, “Is it okay if I ask you about something that might seem a little absurd?” she fought to not break into a sprint and get away from her friend.
“Of course.” she gritted, hoping desperately that she didn’t sound like she was struggling as much as she was. It felt like a game of cops and robbers, where you’re hiding and you know the other team is just around the corner, and you’re trying not to breathe so they can’t find you.
And ironically enough, she had played the game in her second childhood and felt the fear despite already having been a criminal for some time and having faced much, much worse.
“Actually… maybe some other time. You seem like you’ve got something weighing on your mind to day, and I’d hate to addd anything to that.” Tsubarya-kun decided aloud.
Ai released a breath that had been caught in her throat.
The rest of the walk home ended up being one-sided conversation from Tsubarya-kun, and Ai felt a little guilty after, but she couldn’t get herself to to do anything but think about it over and over again till she felt miserable.
At night, she couldn’t sleep. Guilt for not revealing the truth about herself to her friends plagued her just as much as thoughts of them finding out her secret and hating her for it did.
She wondered frustratedly why she was even so worked up about all this at all. Did it really matter? So what if she lost some friends. there was a time when she’d had nobody.
But she did care. She cared a lot.
She all but rolled out of bed, and switched on her laptop. She messaged Tsubarya-kun, saying hi. It was the middle of the night, but she got a reply anyway.
It was followed by a message saying “Just doing some midnight research.”
And before she had time to think about it, she was working furiously to hack into Tsubarya-kun’s laptop, hiding her presence as best she could with he skills she had gained by years of being in the Black Organization and time after that trying to take it down.
She cursed herself for having gotten good so at it.
And then she was searching for and deleting files with information regarding Edogawa Conan’s disappearance, the takedown of the Black Organization, and Kudo Shinichi’s reappearance. She was blocking his computer from looking at websites with any amount of substantial information related to the incidents ten years ago.
She wondered what she was doing. She asked herself why it had come to this. She wished she wasn’t so scared. If only she could stop playing this horrible game of cat and mouse, of hide and seek, of cops and robbers, all of which were disturbingly accurate representations of what was going on in her life.
She got a message from Tsubarya-kun about how the website he was looking at had suddenly and strangely stopped working.
She said something about reloading the page, turned off her laptop and slammed the lid shut.
Ai then crept back into bed. She dreamed she was running, running away from something big and horrible that kept appearing in the most unexpected of places, like it was playing some twisted game of tag.
In the morning she was in a daze. The events of the day before seemed far away and unimportant.
In school she was back to normal. She solved her worksheets at the speed of light and used the teachers for more.
She ate her lunch listening to the chatter of her friends, and offered her own two-bits at times.
Everything was fine.
Except it wasn’t.
She stayed back for cleaning duty, and when she got home she hadn’t so much as stepped through the door when her cellphone rang.
Tsubarya-kun.
He asked to meet her in the park near his house.
Guilt clawed up her throat. She couldn’t make up an excuse.
Ten minutes later she found herself in the park with her friend.
“Haibara-san, how much are you willing to stretch your side of reality?”
Ai just shrugged.
“See, I thought of something crazy.” he went on, “And it shouldn’t be possible, but it just all adds up. And, bear with me, but I think that Conan-kun was actually Shinichi-san all along.”
Ai didn’t reply. She bit her lip and nodded for Tsubarya-kun to go on.
“I mean,” he said, “Conan-kun was always so unusually smart. Precocious, even. And I thought at the time it was just because he was a prodigy, but I realize now there was no way a real seven-year-old could handle actual crime that well. And then, exactly between Conan-kun’s disappearance and Shinichi-san’s return, a crime syndicate was taken down, and there were rumors about the possibility of a child being involved in the investigation and subsequent destruction of the criminal organization. Not to mention the fact that Conan-kun always knew what was happening with Shinichi-san, and Shinichi-san was updated on what was happening with us when he returned, even though we barely knew him at the time. I wouldn’t blame him for it if it were true, of course. I’m sure he had his reasons, and they probably had to do with the crime syndicate. And, well, he never did anything inherently wrong.”
Tsubarya-kun took a deep breath.
“Sorry, was that a bit of a long explanation?” he asked.
Ai didn’t reply. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She was running. She was escaping. She was playing at ignorance.
“Haibara-san?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because… don’t take it the wrong way, I’m not accusing or blaming you, but I just thought that you knew the most about Conan-kun out of all of us, and well… I don’t mean to say it’s the truth, but maybe… you know, were kind of like Conan-kun, so maybe you’re something like Shinichi-san? I mean, I… you know what ai mean.”
“Would you hate me for it?” She had stoped running. She was giving up. She was letting herself get caught.
“Not at all. And, you know, it’s not like it’s really true, I was just being stupid and putting a possibility out there.”
“What if it was true?”
“You’d still be Haibara-san to me.”
A tear escaped Ai’s eye.
“What if I was ten years older than you? What if... what if I had done terrible things in the past? What if I had been the cause of the death of some people!”
More tears. Her throat was closing up.
Silence from Tsubarya-kun, then:
“Shinichi-san told me. He told me everything. It doesn’t change anything for me.”
He’d found her. He’d found where she was hiding before she had even began hiding.
Ai buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
“He didn’t tell me what your real name was, though.” Tsubarya-kun added.
She wiped the tears off her face, even though more filled the stains that the first ones had left.
“Miyano Shiho.” she choked out.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“I’m not Shiho anymore.”
“ I know.”
“I deleted your files and and blocked all your websites and everything.”
“I know.”
More tears fell.
“I knew you had become good at sleuthing, but I did know you had become this good.” Ai joked through her tears. “Tsubarya-ku… no, Mitsuhiko-kun.”
He blinked at her, surprised.
“I think I’m in love with you.” she said, plainly.
“Ha— Ai. Ai-san, I think I’ve been in love with you for a very long time.”
They both stood in silence that was part comfortable and part awkward, and Ai knew that later in the evening she would open her heart up to him and tell him everything about herself that only she had ever known. And she knew that sometime soon, she'd let the other detective boys know, too. And then maybe, finally, she’d stop playing hide and seek, and be open with them the way she was open with Kudo-kun. She could only hope that she was every bit a good person as she had been told, and that her friends trusted her as much as they said. And, that she could manage to be the person that she felt like from the inside in from of everyone.
Ai reminded herself to thank the a certain detective when she got the chance.