Case Closed Fan Fiction ❯ When Pandora's Box Is Opened ❯ Deja Vu ( Chapter 73 )

Chapter Seventy-Three

Déjà Vu

“Should you not be going to school?” Shinichi asked Ran as he dropped two piles of clothes on the couch- for himself and Heiji.

“Frankly, with everything that's been going on, this school year's going to be a loss anyway until all this is over,” Ran pointed out. “Besides, you get yourself into enough trouble when you're small, Kami knows what kind of trouble you'll get into as an adult without someone to guide you... and I know what places are liable to trigger memories.” She pinked slightly at this last sentiment, causing Kazuha to wolf-whistle.

“So why do I have ta hang around here all day as a test dummy?” Heiji muttered.

“Well, the main reason for this drug trial is that I have to ensure that this antidote has precisely the same effect on both of you, despite being slightly different strains,” Ai said. “If all goes to plan, I'll be able to work from the composition of this drug and the one that Kudo-kun tried on Christmas, the one that lasted nearly fifty hours, and hopefully have a permanent cure. There's a lot of scientific gibberish about growth hormones, but I'll spare you.”

“There really is,” Kazuha muttered with a sigh.

“Frankly, it's dangerous enough for Kudo-kun to be out and about with the Organization on red alert, but he really does need to try and regain his memories so as long as he keeps his head down...”

“Like we need to,” Shinichi said pointedly to Heiji.

“Is this revenge fer all th' height cracks I made at you,” Heiji groaned.

“Height cracks?” Shinichi asked, looking genuinely dumbfounded. Ran and Kazuha glanced at each other and rolled eyes as the boys grabbed their piles of clothes and headed for different bathrooms.

“Try and take your pills at the same moment, this is a controlled experiment,” Ai called.

“Exactly five minutes from now,” Shinichi said, tapping his watch. Heiji nodded and jogged up the stairs.

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“Ya actually do that on a regular basis?”

“How should I know?

“All right, you two. Warning signs to watch for; fever and heart pains, like when you first popped the pill...”

“Soundin' more like a druggie trader warnin' a customer by the minute...”

“Hey, yer lookin' back ta normal!” Kazuha said happily as they returned to the main room.

“Not fer as long as we'd like,” Heiji sighed, tugging the top couple buttons on his shirt open. Shinichi stretched, looking curiously at his larger body.

“You could have reminded me it was going to be that painful,” he said to Ai.

“Gomen,” she said with a shrug, “but you've been acting fairly normally recently, so I forgot that you still don't have much of your actual memories back yet, just what you've been told...”

“Which we intend to remedy today,” Ran said, taking his hand and tugging him towards the door. “Do you have any idea of the time frame, Ai-chan?”

“I just gave them a small dose for research purposes,” Ai said, “So I don't suppose it'll be even twelve hours... length isn't what we're after here, though...”

“Suppose not,” Heiji shrugged. “Ah, it's good ta be back ta normal... how did ya ever get used ta that?”

“I don't know,” Shinichi said, pulling on his coat, “but I hope to find out soon.”

“Have fun, you two!” Kazuha called, waving them off.

“This is slightly weird,” Shinichi said as he and Ran strolled down the now almost empty street. “It's different and unfamiliar, but at the same time, it's so much more comfortable that my kiddy body...”

“No memory epiphanies, though?” Ran asked, taking his hand.

“Not really,” Shinichi said. “Kind of a constant nagging sense of Déjà Vu, though...”

“Well, I've got a couple of ideas of where to go,” she said with a little smile.

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“How'd it feel?” Kazuha asked curiously.

“Eh...” Heiji scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “Kinda like bein' set on fire...”

“Geez!” Kazuha said in shock. “That bad?”

“Yeah, but it ain't like it lasted long or anythin',” Heiji shrugged, draping himself over an armchair and stretching his temporarily restored limbs. “Worth it ta be back ta normal fer a while, maybe permanent... sucks bein' stuck in here, though…”

“Try not to go stir crazy and start fiddling with things, they're liable to explode,” Ai said dryly, examining the needles full of blood that she had taken from him and Shinichi. Heiji winced just from looking at them, rubbing his arm. Ai, at least, had clearly remembered his past wisecracks about midgets, if the number of times she had “missed” the vein was any indication. “I'm going to analyze these, I think Hakase's in his mech lab… can I leave you unsupervised?”

“I'll keep him on a leash,” Kazuha promised as Heiji spluttered. He glared at her.

“One positive a' bein' a midget,” he grumbled as Ai left, “ya can stick yer tongue out at people…”

“Hey, at least we now have proof that ya have matured since grade school,” Kazuha pointed out. He gave her another glare that indicated that he was wishing he could stick his tongue out at her.

“Aho.” Then he glanced over at her again. “Hey... back before Gin an' Vodka got ta us, weren't ya gonna ask me somethin'?”

“Um...” Kazuha said, blushing a little and praying that his tantei-memory wouldn't fully kick in when he snapped his fingers as he remembered.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I was gonna tell ya the story a' what happened in Kyoto when we were kids, wasn't I? My first love.”

“Yeah,” Kazuha sighed, resigned to the fact that this conversation was going to happen after all. “Ya said ya found her in Kyoto, but ya wouldn't say who she was or what happened...”

“Not much had changed,” he said with a shrug. Kazuha felt her heart sink.

“Does that mean, he's still...?” “So what happened back then?” she asked, her voice falsely bright. Heiji tipped his head back, as if looking for the memory.

“I was explorin' some a' the nearby temples,” he explained. “When I was doin' that, a window I was climbin' on broke, an' I fell through an' hit my head on the floor inside. Dunno how long I was outta it after that, but what woke me up was the singin'.”

“Singing?” Kazuha asked.

“Yeah,” Heiji said. “A little girl, singin' a song- that “The Children's Son” thing. Anyways, I climbed up ta th' window ta have a look. Then I saw her, standin' underneath th' sakura tree, playin' with a ball...”

“I couldn't find you, so I played with a ball I found in the yard,” she remembered hearing herself saying. “Hang on a mo...”

“I thought she musta been a grade or two above, she looked so grown-up and pretty,” Heiji said reminiscently, still staring at the ceiling rather than her. Was she imagining it, or were his cheeks a little darker than usual? “She had `er hair all done up, an' makeup too, and wearin' this cute li'l red kimono... with all the sakura petals swirlin' around, gotta say, she was one a' the most beautiful things I ever seen...”

“Heiji...” Kazuha said, her own cheeks aflame but still desperate to know, “That... I remember that...”

“Yeah,” Heiji said thoughtfully, “I thought it was a kinda funny coincidence when ya told me that story about when ya were a kid... An' then ya sang it wrong, talkin' about Ane-san rather than th' bride...” Heiji looked down at her, and there was no mistaking the blush now, “just like ya did back then.”

“So... it was... me...?” Kazuha said in shock, thinking, realizing, could it be that this faceless figure from Heiji's childhood, the girl she'd been so jealous of, was...

“Like I said,” Heiji said quietly, “ain't much changed since then.”

“Um...” Kazuha couldn't meet his gaze, blushing furiously, fiddling with her charm. Then she remembered. “Hey, Heiji, about the picture of ya I had... it wasn't me that graffitied it, I swear. Ran-chan told me that Kuniesue-san had done it `cause he found the picture inside an' got pissed off, an', um...”

“So ya had a picture of me anyways?” Heiji said curiously, getting up and walking over to her. “Why?”

“Umm...” Kazuha was blushing furiously now. “What can I say? What if... but he said nothing had changed... does that mean he still... ahh, what do I do?”

“By the way, Kazuha-chan...” Ran said with a wink, “thanks for the advice! Trust me, it worked perfectly!”

“Well, if it worked fer Ran-chan...” she thought stubbornly, then, before she could think about it enough to stop herself, she leaned up to kiss Heiji.

He went rigid with surprise for a moment. “Please... don't let me be wrong...” Kazuha prayed, squeezing her eyes shut. Then he leaned forward, kissing her back, wrapping his arms around her to hold her steady, which was a good thing since Kazuha's knees had just turned to jelly.

The world could have ended there and then, and she wouldn't have cared, not if it meant spending forever like this.

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“Yeah, this place triggered something before...” Shinichi said, crouching on the ground at the end of the alley. “This is... where it happened, I think. Where I shrank. It really freaked me out when the memories first started returning... hell, it freaks me out a little now, but... it's not really pulling anything back.”

“You were here already,” Ran said with a shrug. “Come on. I want to show you something, it's nearly time...”

“Time?” Shinichi asked, but in his head he could hear the faint echo of his own voice saying something similar. “Something I... showed her...?”

“Stop here,” Ran said, in the middle of a courtyard. Shinichi glanced around. Tropical Land, though open, was largely empty, hosting only tourists whose school years had not yet restarted and daytripping adults in couples or with small children. There was nobody else at all in the little courtyard.

“Just give it a minute...” Ran started, then laughed happily as fountains shot to life all around them. “There we go!”

“Wow,” Shinichi said, glancing around.

“Look! A rainbow!”

“Is there...?” he asked, then grinned and tugged on Ran's arm. “Look! A rainbow!”

Ran giggled, wrapping her arms around him. “Do you remember? You showed me these... on our first date, a long time ago.”

“I still don't so much remember as have major déjà vu,” Shinichi admitted. “But I remember... I was happy...”

“Hey...” Ran asked, facing him. “Do you remember... this...?” She leaned up and kissed him.

The sensation was something warm, something beautiful, something familiar; not familiar in the sense of conscious memory, perhaps, but simply in that it was right; she was something that he could never let go of, never forget. How could he? She was the only thing that mattered, all that he lived for…

“Yeah, I remember,” he said softly, as he held her, watching the fountains fall. “I didn't really forget. From the first moment, when I was cold and confused and so afraid... then you were there, and somehow, it was all right. Everything was all right... because you were there. I never forgot how much I loved you...”

“Good,” she said softly. “Do you know... that's the first time you've ever actually said it? That you...” her cheeks pinked. “That you love me?”

“Haven't I said it before?” Shinichi said, bemused. “I thought I must have... because it's so...” he trailed off as Ran leaned up and kissed him again.

“I'm glad,” she said. “Because I love you too, so much... I'd hate to think you really forgot me...”

“I never could,” he promised, “and soon... it'll all be all right. I promise.”

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“I was right... well, if it isn't the Black Knight,” Jodie thought in surprise, seeing the fountains fall around the embracing couple. “I ought to catch them out for skipping school, but I can hardly talk...”

Jodie was suspicious. Eri had called and told her that Edogawa Fumiyo was in fact Edogawa Conan's mother, but she'd simply always had to visit him in disguise so that the Syndicate couldn't track her and thus find him; supposedly he was in hiding at the Mori's, though Jodie couldn't imagine why they thought he'd get himself into any less trouble there. It still worried her, though, so she'd been going to see Conan when she'd seen Ran and Shinichi crossing the streets several cars ahead. That had surprised her; Conan hadn't been at school- she'd checked there first- so if he was staying home, either ill or to look for his memories, she would have thought that Ran would be with him. Plus, it had been implied by Shinichi's father that he was pursuing his case in some secrecy elsewhere. So why was he wandering around Tokyo on a date with Ran?

Things had gotten odder when they reached Tropical Land. Jodie had been wondering if it wasn't actually Kudo Shinichi- after all, she'd only seen the boy once before, over a year before, and she hadn't really gotten a proper look at him yet today- when she realized that they were going to all of the rides that Agasa-Hakase had taken Conan on, and had even gone down the alleyway that had so scared Conan- the alleyway where Conan had been found over two years before.

And on top of that, from the snippets of conversation that she'd heard between the two as she shadowed them...

“It sounds almost like... He's got amnesia as well,” she thought with a frown. “The Hakuba boy had been saying something about a drug... Amnesial. If Vermouth really did something like that... well, for one, we still don't know why she's so loathe to kill the boy, though it certainly would have been more effective... anyway, is she putting that stuff in the water or something?”

That was a theory, a rational, possible one. But other theories were suggesting themselves, other explanations for two people having apparently developed simultaneous amnesia, explanations for their obvious physical and mental similarities.

“Demented theories,” she thought, shaking her head. “You're an FBI investigator, girl, and that means sticking with the rational theories... no need for weird ideas about poor Cool Kid or Vermouth...”

Of course, that was the crux of it, wasn't it? Given what she'd seen of the boy, what she'd seen him do, the strange theory made just as much sense as the rational one, and if the strange theory was true, what other bizarre theories could prove true? How many of her strange theories about Vermouth's apparent agelessness...

“Just because her cheek bled...” she thought, remembering Shuu's proof for the reality of her face. “She could just age well, some endlessly irritating women do... or there's plastic surgery, even if your face ends up with more plastic than a Barbie Doll, it can still bleed... all sorts of perfectly rational explanations...”

But it was coming to her too; that insidious little idea which, no matter how bizarre, how impossible it seems, simply wouldn't go away. It sat in the back of her brain, niggling away, pointing out little bits of evidence, support for the theory, slowly making it seem less and less strange and impossible.

It worried Jodie, because she'd found out that false theories and lies fell apart easily; the impossible fell apart in no time. It was the truth that wouldn't go, making the impossible into the merely improbable.

“Well, if anybody's liable to know...” she thought, getting up to go talk to the two of them, but then stopped as they were suddenly swarmed.

“Hey, long time no see!”

“Oooh, it's the lovebirds again!”

“...Who are they?”

“What'd he say?”

“He can't have forgotten all of us, right?”

“Now see you, Jimmy...”

“I'm sorry, I thought they might have gone home already...”

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“See you, Jimmy” is a general sentiment of threat in some parts of Scotland, regardless of whether or not the target's name is Jimmy. I just couldn't resist XD

Akako's scene was intense emotionally, Desperatembrace, then Sato's scene was just… intense… XD I thought I hadn't had Sato kick butt in long enough XD We're in the runup to the end, so tensions will be running high…

Plenty of Shinichi here, FHP2208 ^_^ Just about everyone's in trouble at the moment… XD Don't worry, I always understand you. You're really fluent… and you write far better than some people who are native speakers XD

Sato PWNZ, International DCFanficNut 1207 XD Will Gin strike today? It would just be perfect Déjà Vu if he did, wouldn't it…? ^_-

Everybody makes mistakes, Mel72000… let's just hope the Organization makes a few more… (their first mistake was messing with Shinichi and Kaito, of course XD)

I actually checked out School Days, Pretztailfan95, and apparently the last episode of the anime- where one of the girls goes mental with a machete- was cancelled because the day before the broadcast a 16-year-old girl in Tokyo brutally murdered her father with an axe. They replaced it with half an hour of gentle scenery and classic music, including the iconic image of a boat sailing in a lake. Fans were upset about this unannounced switch, and one made a picture with the image of the boat and the sarcastic caption “nice boat”, which quickly became a meme. The episode was broadcast in full at a later date. Which is where the “nice boat” thing comes from XD Everyone may be in the deep shiznit right now… I've done that in games before too XD IT WAS RIGHT THERE THE WHOLE TIME! I had a VERY embarrassing experience of doing that in something like the very first stage of LOZ: Ocarina Of Time… ^_^;

That's why I hope that Kid's enemies are something to do with the Syndicate, MimzSilver… it gives Aoyama-sensei a reason to put more MK characters in… It's nice that he occasionally (twice ) puts Hakuba in, BUT WHERE ARE AKAKO AND AOKO?? I like playing Laura and Akako off each other… XD more theories absorbing your brain? XD

And Sato PWNZ all evil, StargateNerd ^_-

Magic is a deep business, virushunter981… (I think length alone ought to qualify this for an English essay. It would be awesome if I could write an essay on my own story… XDXD “Where is your evidence that the writer intended this message?” “IN MY MIND!” XDXD) Heiji torturing has happened… and then… I MANAGED TO MAKE THEM MARSHMALLOW FLUFF! YAAAAS! XD

It was kinda shorter, TwilTye. I just had no way to extend it ^_^; I couldn't resist pointing out how well Sato is known for kicking ass… XD She appeared in about ten chapters of MK and two anime episodes (both of which were made from MK chapters), which means there's not a lot to go on for her… arrogance, supreme seductiveness, obsession with Kaito (simply because her powers do not affect him), Hakuba's similar but less remarked-upon immunity, tendency to chat to Lucifer, inability to cry, really awesome Gothic Cleopatra outfit… XDXD

I really enjoy writing Akako, KageNoNeko, so rest assured she shall appear ^_-

Akako may just make it so long as she's not alone, Kayla Edogawa… but that all depends on what horrors lie in her past… XD what a threat… reminds me of a great line… “Good night, sleep well, I'll most likely kill you in the morning… he said that to me every night for three years” XDXDXD Plenty of Shinichi in this chapter ^_-

Gin: you just love to hate him, don't you, A Midsummer Night's Dream? XDXD

Magic, DiGi XD Awesome Akako moments are rare, and thus must be worshipped accordingly… XD I missed being in this. Weeee're BACK! XD It cannot be said enough: Sato PWNZ. XD That's a common guess at the moment… and that was a fragment of a flashback, which may soon be explained… I think I'm the one writing a novel here…. XDXD

PUPPY EYES! Cannot… resist… powerless… against… puppies… take them, PlayingThePiano, they're yours! PUPPIES! XD

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).