Chapter Text
07. mend & break
As a scientist, Shiho believed only in phenomena that could be studied, in theorems that could be proved by a mathematical formula. Had she believed in the supernatural, or at least in destiny, perhaps she would have drawn an imaginary line reconnecting June 30 of twelve years earlier to this exact moment.
She and Shinichi walking down the streets joking with each other as though nothing ever happened had felt like a memory years away. Now there was only Ayumi staring at her from below with two eyes that Shiho swore could kill her.
She tried hard to give her a comforting smile, just as Akemi had done that time when Shiho had fallen off her bike and her sister had carried her home on her shoulder.
Shiho really tried, but this was not her territory, and every time she was asked to step out of the world of numbers and reason it was like throwing a little girl into a cage of lions. She was not like them—like Akemi, like Ayumi—she was not like them and would never be.
“It will sting a little,” she said, and when she spread the disinfectant on Ayumi’s knee with the help of a cotton swab, Ayumi couldn’t help the ouch! that escaped her. She bit her lip trying to hold back some tears.
It’s all right, Shiho, just give it a moment.
(It’s all right, Shiho.)
“It’s all right, just give it a moment.”
Shiho was six years old. Akemi, only thirteen. Not even eighteen: thirteen. Akemi who had had a mother for barely enough time to learn how to be one and take over the role, little did it matter that she was a daughter and not a mother, and needed a mother as much as Shiho did. Akemi had stepped up when Elena had died, and all Shiho could do was accept it.
And now, though eighteen years had passed, it felt like nothing had changed. She woke up in the middle of the night and wanted her mother, wanted her because she had never had her; she woke up in the middle of the night and wanted Akemi (back), she wanted her (back) because she had always had her, and now that she was gone it felt as though Shiho was walking around with a leg suddenly gone. As in phantom limb syndrome, sometimes it seemed as if Akemi had never left: Shiho would look for her, couldn’t find her, and losing her hurt as much as the first time.
“Ayumi-chan, here you go!”
It was Mitsuhiko’s voice that tore her from her thoughts. He propped himself up on the tips of his feets to leave a glass of juice on the table on which she herself had made Ayumi sit when, on her way back to the Professor’s (Shinichi had eventually given in to his mother’s persistence), she had found Mitsuhiko and Genta—Ayumi on Genta’s back—knocking at their door. Shiho had told them the Professor had left and so she had been the one to let them in.
Shiho, what did you do? Idiot! Come here!
“How did you get hurt?” Shiho asked Ayumi, but it was Genta who answered.
“A vase broke and she fell over it.” Shiho nodded as she bandaged Ayumi’s knee with clean gauze. “I just hope Mrs. Yamamoto doesn’t find out…”
“Genta-kun!” Mitsuhiko hissed, elbowing Genta on the ribs. But even if he’d intended to prevent Genta from betraying himself, he only made things worse—not that Shiho was to be fooled anyway.
She did, however, try to hold back a smile. “You ran away without apologizing?”
Genta tried to come across as nonchalant, but he only ended up looking even more guilty than he already was.
“You should apologize to her,” Shiho said. “I’m sure she will understand.”
“Shiho-san is right!”
(Shiho-san, no longer Ai-chan: she and Ayumi, after all, were strangers.)
“Oh!” said Mitsuhiko, pounding his clenched fist in his palm. “We could bring her one of those sweets Subaru-san makes to make up for it!”
“But he moved somewhere else,” Genta pointed out to him.
“Maybe Yukiko-san can tell us where to find him!”
The following exchanges took place without Shiho having time to do or say anything. Mitsuhiko and Genta told Ayumu to stay there until Shiho-san had finished medicating her, and in the meantime they would take care of inquiring about Subaru-san’s new residence!
Shiho doubted that Shuichi Akai—or Subaru Okiya, or whatever other alias he had decided to live under in the meantime, given his penchant for doing so as if it were a sport—had time to cook for them.
She once again made an effort to set aside the image of the man and everything about him, stowed it away in an imaginary drawer and locked it away, though she was too aware of how her mind worked to delude herself into thinking this would be enough to drop the matter for good.
When she thought back to all the people who had been involved in the fight against the Organization, Shiho wondered how they—they who had told so many lies as well—could live with the consequences of their actions, how could they look in the mirror and not see a completely different person. Part of her wanted to ask them, if only to find her own fears and anxieties in those of others’ so they would finally have a more defined shape. But Shiho was not good at opening up to other people and so she was left with only Shinichi, Shinichi who, however, was so different from her in that matter that he came across as yet another blind spot, rather than a mirror in which to see herself again.
They had said goodbye to each other on the way home when Shinichi had finally answered to one of his mother’s calls, and Shiho was yet again reminded that Shinichi, unlike her, had a mother—and a father, and friends, and a purpose in his life.
“Shiho-san?”
Ayumi pulled her away from her thoughts, and Shiho was grateful. It took her a moment, though, before she could completely regain her sense of reality, just the time to think that this wonderful child was the only friend she had ever had outside of Shinichi. How easy it had become for Ai Haibara to lower her defenses in Ayumi’s presence, and now Shiho Miyano had to start all over again. Sometimes she would wonder if abandoning Ai Haibara for Shiho Miyano had been a mistake, but then she remembered: a lie stitched to reality. A way out, which as such cannot last forever. Perhaps at first it would have been easier—going to school with Ayumi, Genta, and Mitsuhiko without having to worry about building a new life from scratch—but the past would eventually come back to claim Ai Haibara as well.
The past reminding her: you are eighteen, not six.
Yet Shiho felt as though each one of her eighteen years came with ten more and that, by multiplying like cancer cells, they would eventually dissolve her from within. She could not be a child, but yet again she never felt more as if she was one, so close to children and their fear the moment when they wake up in the middle of the night and cry calling for Mommy or Daddy. She, who was ahead of her peers in her studies, was behind on everything else. How it hurt to be eighteen and feel ninety and zero at the same time—too big to see reality through Ayumi’s eyes, too small to see it through the eyes of those who knew how to live their life.
It’s like having to constantly run towards something, and even if it feels like you’re running away from something, and even if your chest hurts and your lungs are on fire, even when you tell them: please, I’m too young, I don’t need this—they tell you: run!
And so, Shiho was running. But even then, it felt like the entire world was moving on while she just stood there, fragile and afraid.
“Shiho-san?”
This time, Ayumi managed to yank her back to reality. Shiho blinked to frame her in her field of vision and only then did she notice a hint of tears caught between her eyelashes. She managed to wipe them away by pretending to rearrange the first aid kit and only then did she turn back to Ayumi.
But it was Ayumi’s turn to look away. She lowered her gaze to watch at her legs dangling from the table. “Do you think Genta feels bad?”
“Why should he?”
“He was the one who broke Mrs. Yamamoto’s vase,” Ayumi said, “but he didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t fall because of him.”
Smiling at her came naturally. For the first time since Shiho Miyano had returned, she felt that she could confess all—almost all—of her secrets to Ayumi. Ayumi was still Ayumi. It was Shiho who, now an adult in anyone’s eyes, observed the complex layers that make up social relationships and did not know how to unfold them to dig deeper and deeper.
“You’re right, it’s not his fault.” To be fair, Genta was a boy who hardly hid his emotions, and thinking back he didn’t look as though he blamed himself for what had happened to Ayumi, but Shiho still felt like adding, just to be sure, “You should tell him how you feel anyway, so he’ll know you’re not mad at him.”
・
Ayumi’s words and her own kept echoing in her head even after Ayumi had left. At first, Shiho could not explain why. Then, like lightning suddenly ripping through the sky, she drew an invisible thread connecting Genta and Ayumi to her and Shinichi.
・
Almost a week had passed when, one morning, Shiho went downstairs unsurprised that the Professor had gotten up before her given that she’d overslept, only to find out that it was Shinichi who was making noise in the kitchen.
“You moved in here and no one thought of telling me?"
“How would you like that!” Shinichi took a cup from the shelf above the sink. “Fancy a coffee?”
Shiho was not sure she liked the nonchalance with which Shinichi showed up at the Professor’s house, but a little voice in her head reminded her that Shinichi had been loitering around the house long before she did. Unwilling to give in to reason, however, she pretended to not have heard the voice. Anything to not give Shinichi the upper hand
“No sugar.”
“That explains a lot.” Before Shiho could retort, Shinichi diverted her attention elsewhere by drumming two fingers on a white rectangle that blended in with the table. “It arrived for you this morning, the Professor opened it by accident,” he said. “It’s your admission letter.”
Shiho narrowed her eyes. “When you say the Professor opened it by accident, do you mean by accident or by accident, for real?”
“By accident, for real. He thought it was a letter from his friend back in Kyoto—seriously though, why don’t they just use e-mails?”
Shinichi asked her if she wanted to hear a funny story about that friend from Kyoto, but his voice became muffled as if underwater as Shiho opened the letter and read the lines informing her that she had been accepted. She was not surprised, yet the news had the same effect as when you hope for an impossible dream to turn into reality. There it was, the first step towards a new life. A life without Akemi, but a life nonetheless.
It was at that moment that she remembered the matter hanging between her and Shinichi since the day she’d healed Ayumi’s wound. (Ayumi who, by the way, had told Shiho she was the best doctor she’d ever been to.)
“Kudo-kun?” Shiho cut him off, and the seriousness in her voice seemed to shift from her to Shinichi’s face. “When you offered to come with me to my sister, you—why did you do that?”
She’d tried to sound normal, but something in her voice betrayed her. There was no way she could make it less personal, because, well, it was. In a way, it was thanks to Akemi’s death that they’d come to meat.
“I told you, we’re friends.”
She nodded. She believed him, but...
But?
But there was more; she could feel it, like a nagging itch under her skin.
It took her an incredible amount of willpower to hold his gaze, his eyes as blue as fresh acrylic; her throat felt as if it were on the verge of burning just at the mere idea of those words coming out of her lips.
She and Shinichi were united by complicity, by camaraderie and honesty, but shaping their innermost feelings into words was not something they were usually good at.
Shiho moistened her lips before saying, her voice so low it could almost be mistaken for a whisper in the wind, “You know I don’t blame you.”
One time she had. She had wondered why that conceited detective who could see the invisible thread connecting events that to others were just a bunch of coincidences had saved everyone but her sister. She had hated him—he who claimed to love and serve justice and yet had failed to save the one and only person who for eighteen years had kept her one step away from giving in to death.
But now that she had watched him on the sidelines for so long—him watching the world, her watching him—studying him as Shinichi would study any particularly complex case—now she could never blame him for her sister’s death. As easy and reassuring as it was to find someone to blame, that someone was not Shinichi.
It was Gin.
Gin, who was behind bars.
Because it was all over now.
“I know you don’t.”
・
He knew she didn’t, but still—Shinichi knew death is a wound you cannot heal, the vase that once broken you cannot repair or replace, only mourn for the rest of your days.
But when you’re alone in the middle of the night, when you can’t close your eyes without your mind tricking you into watching over and over again the people you care about suffer, their eyes empty and red stenches on their clothes—all you can do is scream.
He wanted to tell her: I have nightmares every night, you do too, don’t you? I’m sorry, I really do. I wish I could help you, but I can’t, I don’t know how.
He really wanted to tell her this and so much more, but shaping their innermost feelings into words was not something they were usually good at.
In the strangeness of their condition—them as equals and yet so different—there was a meeting point but, to get there, they needed time.
That is why Shinichi knew it was best to not tell her: come on, get out of this house; do this, do that.
One of those days, he would, however, tell her, “Your university is close to Teitan. I know because I googled it.”
She would narrow her eyes. “That’s not very subtle of you, Kudo-kun.”
He would shrug. “Just sayin’.”