Detective Conan Fanfiction: Kiss of Death

Checkmate

Conan was alone.

The boy was sitting in a fetal-like position, eyes as lifeless as the people in the recent massacre. He had always liked being a detective, didn't he? Oh how fun it was, solving murder mysteries daily and feeling a sense of justice when the accused has been put behind bars. It seemed like a game for him before.

Yet, this was real. In fact, those murders had been real, it was just that it did not affect him. Did the deaths of the people he cared about had to happen before he actually starts to comprehend the unhappiness of people during cases? Maybe.

He was still staring at the wall like it was his enemy.

For the first time in his life, he could not think.

At all.

The deaths...they were all washing him like a tsunami. Everything was a disaster so far for him.

He was a useless tool -it had been a while since he felt like this. The last time he did, was pertaining to his failure to Akemi's death. And that crying face -Ai, his heart ached of seeing a beautiful girl could be so unhappy. Her tears were staining his shirt, but it did not matter - Why? If you're such a great detective, then why couldn't you have saved my sister- her words... he felt so useless. He tried to protect Ai and everyone else, futilely. He tried. Yet everyone was dropping dead, as if they were just rain.

It hit him. How being Shinichi and Conan were different. When he was Shinichi, he only had Ran (and maybe considerably Sonoko) as his true friend. But as Conan... perhaps it was the fact that he had very few individuals to be sincere of as Shinichi made being a detective easier. With the exception of Ran and Sonoko, he had no friends to actually worry about. Even so, whenever his friends were on the edge of dying, he had never failed to save them -except this time of course. Ai, Cedric, Genta, Heiji, Megure -anyone else, they were either gone, injured or on the verge of danger.

It was all because of his incompetency to predict all of this.

Thinking back now, he shouldn't have taken things for granted... then maybe the raven wouldn't have clawed back at him...

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[Flashback]

"Geez, what's taking the other teams so long?" Conan lamented.

But in actual fact, he hated this. He remembered doing a similar game when he was Shinichi. But because on that day, both Ran and Sonoko were ill and unable to go to school, leaving him isolated. No one wanted to join his team, given that they are already in other groups; or simply did not want to join him in fear of having their intelligence insulted by seeing how capable Shinichi was. So in the end, Shinichi, at the tender age of 14, had to go through the game by himself - how he dreaded it, in spite of winning the game. To make matters worse, his lone victory made others' blood boil, since they had worked with three heads and yet their efforts to solve this mini-case were futile whereareas Shinchi triumphed alone. He recalled having a bunch of boys assaulting him for the prize on the way to the café, leaving him in salty tears.

Conan wanted to be anywhere except where he was now, given that this familiar situation was giving him poisonous memories.

They were at an event held by the school. It was "The Mystery", where the Science department had set up a crime scene - with red paint as the hoax blood, footprints, pen ink stains - and other clues. On teams of three, they had to use their own wits and scientific methods to deduce which of the fictional suspects was the one guilty of murder.

"Don't be so harsh on them. They are still middle schoolers after all," Ai coaxed him. She looked a little pale, as Conan had noticed- perhaps not feeling well?