Case Closed Fan Fiction ❯ The First Woman In The World ❯ 15 ( Chapter 15 )

Ten Years Ago

“I never meant it to lead to this. I'm sorry.”

Eta, disguised, veiled, hidden at the back of the crowd of black-clad mourners, wanted to scream it from the rooftops. But what use would it be?

It hurt. Kami, but it hurt.

And once again, in was all her fault.

“He's certainly come along since Paris.” She'd just made that comment, offhand, without thinking about it, without remembering that she had gone to some lengths to convince Ushi that the Kaitou Kid had simply picked up Kuroba Toichi's ball from the Louvre heist and gotten running with it. She had forgotten that she had so convinced Sake that the Kid's identity was unknown that he had even tried to convince the Kid to work for them, telling him the story of the Pandora in the process. She had tried to protect him, tried to protect little Kaito, but in the end one slip of the tongue had ended it.

Sake had joined the dots and found himself a target.

Eta hadn't seen the show. She'd only heard about it on the news, and then from Ushi. Kuroba Toichi was dead. The Kaitou Kid was dead.

Two days ago, two days after his death, there had been a heist planned. Crowds had formed. The police had swarmed in. Nakamori Ginzo had been prepared.

But there was only silence.

Eta kept her distance from Minami, his widow, shoulders heaving as she swallowed sobs, clutching Kaito's hand as if she feared the boy may also slip away from her. The child himself wasn't crying. He only stared at his father's coffin with cold, dead eyes.

That hurt, just as much as her friend's death. She didn't want to see such pain in that child's eyes. Of all the children in the world, she didn't want to see pain in that boy's eyes.

Not far away, one child was crying, a little girl clutching the hand of Nakamori Ginzo. Eta's gaze roamed over her, then returned, a classic double-take. Her own long-practiced Poker Face crumbled as she recognized that girl's face.

Angel. She's an Angel.

“Kaito has an Angel?” Eta realized, seeing the face of her daughter from her dreams. “So he... is the one...?”

She'd seen the uncanny similarities between Yukiko's son and Toichi's. They could have been twins; the same little face, the face she'd seen in her dreams for ten thousand years. And she'd seen quite a bit of Yukiko since college, the bubbly woman blissfully ignorant of what Eta really was- though she was far from smiling, not today, not now.

She'd seen little Shinichi several times, too, and had often wondered; which boy was the true Silver Bullet, and which an unfortunate doppelganger?

But Kaito had his Angel. So it was him, right?

“But...” she thought. “But they both...” They felt the same to her; their identical faces sparked the same need in her, the desperate desire to protect them, see them grow, see them shine.

She couldn't let the Syndicate hurt them. Not any of them.

“I will protect you all,” she swore. “Until the time comes when I know... I know who I have to protect...”

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Not quite single years, Pretztailfan95. There isn't really a set distance to the jumps, I just go to the next time when something's happening XD

New York is still to come, Mel72000, I just had to do Toichi's funeral first… T_T

I'm just joining up all the little extra moments, FHP2208…

Like father, like son, StargateNerd XD

Precisely the point, KageNoNeko ^_^ As a Furuba fan, I adore the power of the little moments in the past to affect the future…

I keep nearly crying when I reread this one, DiGi T_T

Um… Happy Independence Day, PlayingThePiano? *is scared of the MOP* XDXDXDXDXDXD I totally did not know that their names meant that… I derived Eta from the English word “Eternity” and Ushi from the Japanese word “Fushi”, meaning “Immortality”… though you might argue that the words were derived from their names… XDXD I figured they might have meanings in different languages, I just prayed that it wasn't anything rude ^_^; (though apparently “Eta” is an insult towards a group of people called the Burakumin… Gomenasai! ^_^;)

I do not claim to own any of the characters in Meitantei Conan. They are the intellectual property of Aoyama Gosho. All characters, couples and locations, if Canon, will be faithful to the manga, so if you're into fics with weird pairings like Shinichi and Heiji, the back button is at the top there. The fic may not make sense if you have not read up to chapter 698, which you can do at a site called (read between the lines) O/n/e/ma/n/g/a, but I advise you to buy the official Tankoban novels (up to volume 30 are out in English at the time of writing) so that Aoyama-sensei can afford to continue gracing us with his imagination. Now, I hope you enjoy the fic! (If you don't, please see my previous comments re the back button).