i Think

She was defined by what had happened when she was a child. A fat lot of good it did her.

Despite dedicating her life to bringing the woman who all but destroyed her innocence to justice, she was thwarted, time and again, first by the organization shrouded in the darkness, and later by the institution she had sworn to serve and protect.

That was why when she was offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to walk away from her past, away from the bureau that betrayed her, away from everything, she took it with both hands and promised herself that never again would she allow herself to be this helpless, this powerless.

Therefore, when her past came calling, in the form of the man she once loved, she did not immediately respond. She had to make sure that she would not be meeting him out of some misguided hope that she would be able to fix the past. In the end, she said yes to meeting him because, like a cat, she could not help but know what had happened after she left.

“You’re a hard woman to find.” Shuichi Akai told her as he slid gracefully to the booth where Jodie Starling was sipping her coffee.

“I have to be,” she replied. She set down her teacup carefully to hide her hand’s subtle but unmistakable shaking. “A long list of people want my head on a platter.”

She absently noted that he was no longer wearing his disguise. He had ditched the blonde hair and the glasses that made him look harmless. He went back to growing out his dark hair. His look reminded him so much of the young man she met and loved so long ago.

Her heart ached.

Akai’s lips thinned as if her statement gave him displeasure, but he did not say anything until the server who approached their table to take their order had left.

“Don’t you think we’re too old to live like this?” He asked her honestly.

“By we, you mean me, don’t you?” She asked. As the head of a no-name, internationally funded, but globally disavowed organization, she knew that after helping bring down the Black Organization, Shuichi semi-retired from the FBI and concentrated on piecing back his family.

Unlike her.

Jodie shrugged when he didn’t reply to her question. “I actually spend more time behind the desk now,” she told him honestly. She was surprised how much paperwork being the head of a no-name organization generated. She took a deep breath; forced herself to relax and smile. “Hello, Shu. How are you?”

Taking his cue from her, he also relaxed. “I’m good.”

“Me, too. Let’s get straight to the point. After five years, why contact me now?”

“Direct, as always. I have information that your agency has in its custody an asset believed to be dead.”

Jodie struggled to keep the shock out of her face. It would have worked on any other person, but it was Shuichi watching her. He knew all of her tells.

One of the advantages of being the head of a no-name organization was that she could run it as she saw fit. And she saw fit that knowledge of her newly acquired asset would be known only to few people inside her organization: three people, to be exact: herself, one reluctant consultant, and the asset herself. 

The consultant would literally die before he revealed information about the asset while the asset would not talk, also literally. Since the leak did not come from her, that could only mean—

“That bitch.” She muttered. Jodie winced. She did not like calling other women  names. However, the shoe fits the woman now going by the name of Alicia Vineyard, the daughter of the late Chris Vineyard. To Jodie, that woman would always be Vermouth.

“That is why the PSB, the CIA, and the FBI all agreed to keep her alive and on the streets.” He told her gently. “She’s a veritable fount of information.”

“That woman needed to die. At the very least, she needed to pay for her sins. Putting her on the streets would only endanger more people.” Jodie told him vehemently.

“I agreed with your assessment five years ago,” he reminded her. “But we were outranked and outvoted by our superiors. “And you can’t place the blame entirely on her. Word on the street is that a certain Phantom Thief also had a run-in with your asset.”

A run-in which was not disclosed to her.

“How accurate is our asset’s information?” Shu asked, careful not to utter any names as one never knew who was listening. “Is your asset really the girl from Beika? All that the Kaitou Kid would say is that it’s her, but it’s not her.”

“I’m not at liberty to—”

“Don’t give me that, Jodie. Some people back in Japan deserve to know what happened.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Jodie looked away, figuring out how much she could tell him without her telling him anything. She knew that she would not get away with misleading him for information. Knowing him, he had already done his due diligence and confirmed what he could before confronting her with the information he already had.

“So, it is her?”

“If it’s not her, she’s an excellent imitation of the original.” She shrugged. “I tried to bring her home, but she had so many decisions taken away from her already. Now, I don’t think anyone could force her to do things she doesn’t want to do.”

“How is she?”

“She doesn’t speak much of what had happened to her.” She replied truthfully. “In fact, she doesn’t speak to me at all. She only talks to the doctor.”

“The doctor?”

Jodie nodded. “She found him and decided to trust him. She talks to him. He talks to us. She doesn’t trust me or anyone else. And he only talks to us only when it’s convenient for them. They help us, but they’re not with us.”

“Who are they with?”

“Who knows?” Jodie shrugged. “The Black Organization was weakened when its head died. A war broke out between many organizations, syndicates, and cartels to try to take its place. Rumor has it that the struggle unceremoniously and decisively ended two years ago. The victorious entity in the power struggle was more intelligent, secretive, and infinitely more dangerous than its predecessor. Law enforcement had tried and failed to identify, much less infiltrate, it.”

“You think your asset is with the new shadow organization?”

“Just a hunch.” She admitted. “Because there couldn’t be more than one organization so secret that not even my agency, with its infinite budget and network, could not know.”

“Is she in danger?”

Jodie paused. Considered. “I would have said no before. I believed that she had eliminated the threats to her life when she put out feelers to us.”

She saw the shock on his face at the revelation.

“Eliminated?”

“We still don’t know what happened to her. The only clues we could follow are the trail of bodies left behind.”

Shu hunched closer to her. “Are we sure it’s her?”

Jodie smiled bitterly. “As I’ve said, we have no idea what was done with her. But you and I both know that when the Black Organization puts its hands on you, it changes you.”

Shu let out a breath. He did know how much the Organization could change a person. He let that poison touch his life. And for what?

 “The Kaitou Kid is right,” Jodie continued. “She’s the same person, but she’s no longer the same person they took from her home all those years ago.”

“Is she in danger?” He asked again.

“Before today, I would answer no. But knowing that the Bitch knows about her means that the remnants of the Black Organization know about her.”

“The remnants?”

“The Black Organization may have been cut at its knees, but it still has many loyal supporters, trying to find a replacement for its former leader, hoping to bring it back to its former glory. She’s doing what the FBI, the CIA, and the PSB should have done five years ago,” she told him. “Burn the organization to the ground. Have you heard of the Malta massacre?”

Shu leaned back and tried to recall a short news article he had read a couple of months ago.

“An office building in Malta burned down a while back. The firemen found about a dozen unidentified people in the building.”

“It was not just an office building,” Jodie told him succinctly. “And the people there are not office workers. It was a hideout for the Black Organization. About half of the dozen people who died were high-ranking officers. They did not die by fire as the news reported.”

“She did that?” He was unable to reconcile the sweet, innocent teenager he knew all those years ago with the portrait of a person Jodie was painting. “Alone?”

“She did that,” Jodie confirmed. “But we don’t know if she did it alone. And we didn’t know that the building was a front for the organization until after we received a tip not to allow the local law enforcement to force open the vaults inside.”

“And what did you find?”

“Information.” She replied. “Enough to justify the budget of my agency to my superiors ten times over. And Malta’s just the beginning.”

Earlier, he pulled off another heist of the century but once again failed to get the elusive Pandora.

He felt exhausted and without hope. He felt like a poor imitation of his father.

As the large stone he had stolen once again failed to respond to the moonlight, he felt every day of the last couple of months he had spent to perfect his heist. Every one of those days added to all of the years he was playing at being the Phantom Thief.

He let out his frustrations in what he thought was an abandoned playground, earmarked by the city to be torn down so a newer, safer, and more advanced one could be built in its place.

He was still in his Phantom Thief costume, but he had long lost the iconic hat and monocle because of the sudden, but wholly unexpected, interference of Snake and his henchmen. The white cape wrapped around him had also seen better days.

 And like an idiot, for half a second, he had let his guard down and stopped being the Phantom Thief. At that time, he was simply Kaito.

 He had shown his true face. And guess who walked in to see him at one of his lowest points?

 None other than his only friend the love of his life his best friend.

 Aoko had finally done what her father was never able to do: learn the alter ego of the Kaitou Kid. Or was it Kaito’s alter ego?

 He didn’t even know who was more shocked: him or Aoko.

 Worse still, he was so distracted with thinking how he could convince Aoko that he was not actually the Kaitou Kid, he did not even realize that the real danger was coming.

 The men in black came.

 He and Aoko, distracted as they were, were immediately caught and incapacitated.

 They injected him with something that caused him to black out.

 When he woke up, he found himself chained on a chair in what looked like a warehouse.

 And Aoko was nowhere to be found.

 His captor, a lone man dressed head to toe in black formal clothes began asking him questions about Aoko: who she was, why were they together, what were they up to.

 He refused to answer in the beginning, but the man heavily implied that Aoko’s safety depended on his cooperation so he tried to answer them the best he can.

 But his answers did not satisfy the man, so his torture began.

 “What are you doing with her?”

 “We met by coincidence.”

 A slap on his face that made his ears ring.

 “What are your orders?”

 “A burger would be nice.”

 A kick on his stomach that made it hard to breathe.

 “What’s your next plan of action?”

 “What? Like, as the Phantom Thief?”

 “We don’t care about the Phantom Thief, you idiot!”

 A knife against his throat released a line of blood.

 The man hurt him, and he prayed like hell that it was only him that was hurting.

 (He must believe that she’s still alive and healthy and unhurt; as to think otherwise was unthinkable.)

 Kaito’s captor reached into a bag and brought out brass knuckles which he slipped into his fingers.

 “I will ask again,” the man said. “What is your friend doing with her face?”

 “What?” Kaito, ears still ringing from all the blows he had suffered and a few hits away from blacking out, thought he misheard the question.

 That was apparently the wrong answer as the man pulled back his hand, about to hit Kaito with the brass knuckles.

 Kaito involuntary closed his eyes and braced himself for the blow.

 Which never came.

 Kaito opened his eyes to see his captor clutching his neck. The man gurgled in pain before falling to his knees and finally to the floor, prostrate.

 In horror, Kaito watched as blood gushed out from the man’s neck, coating the floor and the tips of Kaito’s white shoes.

 And standing behind where the man used to be was Aoko.

 No.

 Not Aoko.

It was a ghost; but instead of wearing white, she had on a black catsuit. She looked like a cat burglar to Kaito’s phantom thief.

 And she was holding a bloody knife, which she almost carelessly threw away.

 Kaito blinked. Maybe the blows to his head were making him see things.

Because the woman standing before Kaito was supposed to be dead.

Sure, after all these years, they never found her body, but the police were convinced that a dead body left the Detective Agency because of the amount of her blood left behind.

Yet here she was. A ghost.

Ghosts don’t grow older, he told himself. But she did. She no longer looked like a teenager. She looked like an adult. The soft curves of her youth and was now all sharp angles. And her eyes were no longer innocent. They looked like they have seen things that they shouldn’t have. (Like him.)

As a teenager, she exuded innocence and hesitance, as if she still wasn’t sure of her place in the world. Now, she was power and confidence, looking as if she owned the place which served as Kaito’s prison.

“Mouri-san,” her name came out from his lips like a prayer.

 The woman gave a smile so bitter Kaito tasted ashes in his mouth.

Kaito swallowed involuntarily. He was not one to scare easily, but he was man enough to acknowledge that he was feeling afraid now.

He was not unfamiliar with death, and this was not the first time he dealt with a killer. But one look at the ghost and he had the sixth sense that if she wanted to, he would be as dead as the man lying on the ground near her booted feet.

Fortunately for him, his death was not on her agenda.

(Yet.)

“I haven’t been called that name for a long time.” She grimaced as she approached the still-warm body and kicked away the gun tucked in his waist.

Which reminded Kaito of the dead man in the room. “Y-you killed him,” he gasped in disbelief.

“You’re welcome.”

 “You killed him!” He felt numb and unable to do anything but restate the obvious.

 “Is that judgment I hear?” She asked him, eyebrows raised. “From a thief?”

Kaito ignored her and, instead, renewed his efforts to free himself so he could look for Aoko.

“Your friend was more appreciative of my rescue.”

 Kaito froze.

Aoko.

Just the reminder of her name grounded Kaito.

 “You know where she is?” Kaito asked. “Is she hurt?”

“She’s fine. She immediately deduced that it was either her life or her captor’s,” the woman who wore Mouri-san’s face but who seemed to be possessed with the spirit of a serial killer, continued. “So, she was grateful that it was her who came out of that hostage drama alive.”

Kaito had removed his cuffs and was about to remove the ties around his waist.

“That’s why I took so long to come to you.” She smiled, and Kaito was reminded of a sweet, gentle girl he once knew. “But I figured, you would gladly endure a couple of hours of torture if you knew that I was rescuing your friend.”

“Thank you,” he told her gratefully. She indeed made the right decision.

“For what?” She asked. “This was my fault. They thought your friend was me, so they took you.”

Kaito’s eyes widened. Were the men in black who took him not from the same organization as Snake?

But he refused to be distracted. He won’t believe Aoko is alright until he saw her for himself. “Where is Aoko?” He asked. “Can I see her?”

“You can,” was her answer. “But as of the moment, I don’t think she wants to see you.”

Kaito, finally free from his bindings, stood up. He was felt woozy for a moment, but he persevered, driven by his need to see his best friend.

“She said never wanted to see your, and I quote, stupid lying face for the rest of her life,” she told him.

The statement brought Kaito more pain than any of the punches in the face he endured earlier.

“But that was after making me promise to bring you back safe and in one piece.” She smiled at him sadly. “She’s waiting for you outside.”

Kaito, with all his innate grace and agility, almost tripped and fell in his haste to go to Aoko.

She, however, did not move. “I apologize that you and your friend were roped into my problems.”

Kaito wanted to assure her that all would be forgiven as soon that he sees for himself that Aoko is okay, but it seemed that Mouri-san wanted to fill the silence with her chatter.

“I promise that I will do everything in my power to make sure that this incident will not be repeated ever again.”

Kaito was almost too afraid to ask how she would do that. Because he read the promise in her eyes: she was ready to take more lives to ensure his and Aoko’s safety. He felt assured because of her promise, but he also felt fear. Not for himself. But for her. Because he knew she would keep her promise. Or she would die trying. Literally.

“What happened to you?” The whispered question escaped his throat, almost involuntarily.

 She didn’t answer but started walking away. He had no choice but to follow.

Right before she led him to Aoko, she asked him, “I trust that you won’t tell anyone that you saw me?”

Kaito nodded his assent.

Of course he wouldn’t tell anybody of her existence. 

He knew how sometimes keeping secrets could save lives.

No, he wouldn’t tell just anyone about her. He would just tell one detective who had spent the last five years looking for her.

Kaito, after all, was not just a thief. He was also a stupid, lying face.

Just ask his irate, unforgiving best friend.

The worst part was that he did not even know the devastation he had wrought.

After believing that he had finally brought down the Black Organization, Yusaku Kudo whisked Shinichi off to Hawaii to force his son to take the time for his wounds to heal. Let the professionals clean up the mess the organization left, Yusaku had said.

Shinichi was forced to rest for a few days (he really did need that time to heal). But when the days turned into weeks, only the promise that a cure for his condition was only days from completion bought his cooperation.

(He wanted, no, needed to see her.)

Professor Agasa followed the Kudo family to Hawaii about a month into Shinichi’s convalescence. The professor handed Shinichi a pill that promised to give him back his old body, this time permanently.

A transformation and a pain beyond imagining later, Shinichi was back into his seventeen-year-old body. He wanted nothing more than to rush back to Japan, but his father insisted on more vacation days. They needed to make sure that the cure was permanent, his father said.

Just as Shinichi was getting stir crazy and planning to run away from home, his father flew in Ai Haibara, who was tasked to study him and the effects of the pills that changed his body. There are people out there who had suffered just as he did, his father told him. He should let his friend study the long-term impact of the pill to help them.

(I know I don’t have any more reason to hide, Ai told Shinichi. But I still don’t know whether to take the cure. Maybe seeing you would help me decide one way or another.)

He was in Hawaii for no more than six months when he finally had enough. Over the objection of his family, his doctors, and his friends, he went back to Tokyo.

He went back to hell.

He wanted nothing more than to see Ran. He missed her. So much. He needed to see her, to hear her voice, to touch her hand.

There were nights back in Hawaii when his longing for her felt like actual physical pain.

(It’s better if you do not contact her yet, his father had said. We're not sure if the cure is permanent. You might get her hopes up, only for it to be dashed again.)

(There’s no point in telling her about Conan, his mother had said. Professor Agasa explained to everyone that Conan’s back with his family abroad.)

He did wonder whether she was thinking of him while he was away. (But of course, she was. He knew her well.)

She had no way of contacting him because both his phones, Conan’s and Shinichi’s, were destroyed along with the Black Organization.

He was only buoyed by his parents’ promises that they were keeping in touch with her and that she was alright.

He knew that his radio silence for six months may be unforgivable, so the moment his plane touched down in Tokyo, he made a beeline to the Detective Agency.

(He knew full well that she would forgive him for anything. Not because of him, but because of her. Her heart and her love are boundless.)

The Detective Agency, however, was closed; visitors discouraged by the loud, yellow tapes that wrapped around its entrance.

An inquiry at the Poirot Café revealed the worst.

A very hesitant Azusa Enomoto revealed to Shinichi that the morning after Shinichi left for Hawaii, a prospective client went to the Detective Agency only to find Kogoro Mouri very near death, and his wife and daughter missing.

A quick call to Heiji Hattori told him that the Sleeping Detective was in a medically-induced coma, so severe were his injuries.

And Ran.  

Ran and her mother could not be located despite the joint efforts of several government agencies, the power of the Suzuki Group, and the efforts of numerous private detectives.

They had no clue what had happened to Eri Kisaki.

Ran, on the other hand, was believed by many people who investigated the incident to have been killed in the attack, based on the amount of blood spilled in her room.

But no one knew what had happened that night. Or why.

(If only the Great Sleeping Detective would wake up, some people thought. He’s the only person who could solve what had happened to his family.)

Through conversations with the police, with Shuichi Akai, and with Rei Furuya, Shinichi was able to piece together that in the six months that he was in Hawaii, Renya Karasuma and his right-hand man Rum were killed, execution-style, while in prison.

Gin, Vodka, and their other cohorts, on the other hand, were released one after the other when the cases filed against them were dismissed on technicalities (lack of jurisdiction, absence of witnesses, mishandled evidence, they said).

One by one, the members of the Black Organization were freed from prison until it was only Vermouth left.

It became glaringly obvious that the Black Organization was not as destroyed as they originally thought, but everyone was clueless as to who was pulling the strings behind the scenes. So, the powers that be decided to dine with the devil herself.

Over the loud and angry protestations of Agent Jodie Starling, the authorities made a deal with Vermouth, which lead to her release.

(Ai Haibara’s sojourn to Hawaii in her seven-year-old form suddenly made a lot of sense, Shinichi thought bitterly.)

Shinichi never forgave his parents for keeping secrets from him.

And Sonoko Suzuki never forgave him for going missing when Ran needed him most.

Five years later, Shinichi was still torturing himself about what could have been had he simply told Ran the truth. Maybe that would be enough for the Mouri family to protect themselves.

If he had an inkling of what was happening, maybe the Sleeping Detective Kogoro Mouri would have been able to save his family.

If only Shinichi did not lie to the other half of his soul, maybe the love of his life would not be missing for five years and counting.