Re-edited on October 29, 2006.
Disclaimer: Detective Conan is not mine. It's late and I'm tired, insert disclaimer here please.
A Study In Shinichi
by Shimegami-chan
"'Truth is arrived at by the painstaking process of eliminating the untrue.' Can anybody tell me who originally said that?"
"Oh--I know! It was Sherlock Holmes."
"That's correct, Akari." Sensei smiled and set the book down on her desk, scrawling the author's name on the blackboard in neat katakana. "We'll be discussing him for a few moments today now that we've finished talking about the Brontës. Tomorrow we'll be looking at some Japanese authors, so this is the last class on foreign works, all right?" She paused. "Some of you may already know that all the Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the turn of the twentieth century. You may get a chance to study them in high school. They're famous worldwide, although Doyle-san was originally from Britain."
"Sherlock Holmes is the guy on all the mystery TV shows," one of the bigger boys said enthusiastically.
"No, that's Kaitou Kid!" the girl beside him argued.
"No, he isn't!"
The teacher sighed. "How many of you know about the difference between private and police detectives?" Most of the class stared back at her blankly, with the exception of a few teenagers who sat in the back row and a scattered few near the front. "Well...a private detective has no jurisdiction, and takes whatever cases he chooses. In most respects he's like a policeman, only he just finds the criminals who are hiding so that the police can catch them. Holmes was like this; locating criminals whom the police were having trouble figuring out."
"Like Kogoro-san and Shinichi-niichan!" a young girl from the back piped up.
"Exactly, Ayumi-chan. Like Mouri Kogoro or Kudo Shinichi." Sensei smiled and the brunette beamed back at her.
"Oh! That high school detective guy who died?" Another boy, Daisuke, looked intrigued. One teenager at the back of the class with dark hair and thick glasses groaned and put his head facedown on his desk.
The teacher shot the spectacled boy a disapproving Look before turning back to Daisuke. "Have more respect, Daisuke-kun. Kudo was a friend of mine."
Another boy, looking very intent from the seat beside Ayumi, regarded the teacher with a awed look. "You knew Kudo-san? He was the best detective!"
"Who was he?" a girl, Hikaru, asked.
Sensei leaned against her desk, a tiny smile on her face. "Kudo--well, Shinichi, when I knew him--went to this very school years ago. He was in the Soccer Club and did judo too. When he was in high school he started learning to become a detective--and his father was a mystery writer, like Doyle-san. Shinichi used to help the police solve a lot of cases, and he put a lot of criminals in jail. Probably hundreds of them over the years."
"He's Conan-kun's cousin!" Ayumi added for effect. Mitsuhiko, who sat beside the boy in question, made a sweeping gesture at Conan's desk. Several of the children looked impressed as Conan tried to hide a wry smile and a blush.
"What happened to him, sensei?" Hikaru asked curiously. "If he's so famous, where is he now?"
"That's a hard question." The brown-heaired teacher smiled sadly. "A few years ago he disappeared, and never came back. Nobody knows what happened to him."
Well, hardly anybody, anyway, Conan thought ruefully. Usually he read during this class, but hearing his name so many times had snapped him quickly out of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was probably for the best, as much to his chagrin, the constant spacing out in English class had been leading his classmates to brand him a nerd during these first few months of junior high, which was a laughably far cry from his experiece the first time around. He missed those days of soccer stardom and fan letters, he had to admit.
A hush stole over the class as Sensei fell quiet for a moment, finally shaking her head and picking up the book. "All right, that's enough off-topic, let's get back to studies. Now--Doyle-san's most well-known character is, as I said, Sherlock Holmes. Has anyone here read any of those books?" It didn't come as a surprise when Genta, Ai, Ayumi, and Mitsuhiko raised their hands, along with two of the girls in the front of the class. "All the stories were told from the point of view of Dr. Watson, Holmes' partner and friend. I'm going to read out the rest of the quote from Doyle-san's The Sign of Four. 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, hum--how--" She stumbled briefly over a few words where the ink on the paper had blurred.
Conan raised his head and finished loudly, "'...however improbable, must be the truth.'"
The teacher looked slightly surprised that Conan had spoken - although he was the top student in the school, he barely said a word in class - and beamed at him. "Wonderful! Thank you, Conan-kun!"
Mitsuhiko and Genta looked envious, their own mouths open to finish the quote, but didn't have time to act as the bell rang to end classes for the day. "Well, that's it for today." Sensei smiled, bowing her head.
Immediately the room erupted into chaos as some students chorused "Good-bye!" while others leapt immediately from their desks and exited the room. The teacher turned her back on the room as she meticulously erased the words from the blackboard and lined the erasers up neatly, leaving things in perfect order for morning classes. When she turned around, only one student remained, the tall boy with dark, spiky hair and oversized glasses. "Hey there," she volunteered, throwing a quick glance at the open door.
"Hi," Conan replied genially, his lips twitching slightly to hide a smile. Something in his face seemed to be amused, though Sensei was sure she was the only one who could read it.
"You look like you're expecting something, so thanks for the help with the quote," she said nonchalantly as she placed the books in her satchel.
"If you'd told me you were using my leatherbound anthologies for your 'discussion,' I would have told you that the ink on page 16 is smeared. It's one of Holmes' most famous quotes--easy to fill in." He looked smug.
"Sorry." The older woman blushed and handed the heavy tome back. "I knew you'd let me. I was glad to see you talking in class, by the way."
"I had to--didn't want you messing up Holmes. And why would I want to talk in class? You know it's hard enough for me having to watch you teach, and then pretending I barely know you. Did you have to tell my life story?" He raised an eyebrow.
"I'm sorry, Shinichi." Ran raised one hand in a gesture of apology. "They asked, and I didn't know how to react."
"It's fine, I'm not mad. I was just nervous of what you might say." Conan's smile was slight, but genuine. "Someday, the Detective Boys are going to figure out the connection--they're getting older, and smarter. I'm not looking forward to that." He calmly shut the windowless door to prevent any eavesdroppers.
"It can't be helped. I'm just glad you're getting older." Ran smiled and leaned down to kiss him gently, brushing bangs away from his face. Shinchi blushed and kissed her back, one hand curling into her long brown hair. "That way, someday we won't have to hide anymore."
"Someday," Conan agreed, seating himself on her wooden desk to minimize their height differences, something he was still very conscious of. Ran smiled. The man-turned-boy - having recently passed through puberty for the second time around - had been more affectionate than usual lately, and certainly more affectionate than he had been before they had come to be in their current relationship. However, that had been before - before she had discovered "Conan's" true identity, before they had begun secretly dating, before a shy now-almost-thirteen-year-old Conan had proposed to her at the same restaurant where his parents had gotten engaged years before. Shyness was a thing of the past now, Ran reflected as they shared another kiss.
"By the way, great lesson choice. You certainly got more of my attention this time than Jane Eyre did."
"Hmph, what an unromantic attitude." Ran tried to sound offended.
His deduction skills were, as ever, right on the mark. "Don't be silly. I know you chose Holmes just to see what I'd say, am I right?"
"If you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth."
Conan was inwardly pleased at her quick learning. He squeezed her hand tightly. "See? I've been trying to get that kind of thing to happen for years. I'll lend you the rest of the Holmes books later. I'll bet you've never read A Study in Scarlet - it's the one where Holmes first meets Watson! There are some inconsistencies with the later stories, but it's really a chance to see master deductive reasoning in action. Well? What do you think?"
"Sure, why not?" She grinned. "It'll be part of my ongoing Study in Shinichi."
The boy laughed and kissed her again on the nose, despite his smaller stature. She blushed at the gesture. "Very cute, Ran. So how about we stop with the student-teacher jokes now, and go back to my house?" Hopping off the desk with the leatherbound book under one arm, he turned to smile warmly at her. Ran nodded and gathered up the last of her things, following the boy through the hallways, stopping in the entrance area for him to change his shoes. From the back, she thought, he was looking almost like he did back then...seven years before. She wondered, as she did so often, what he'd look like at eighteen, at nineteen, and beyond. Already he was like some kind of strange miracle before her, twenty-four and still wearing a teenager's face. Sometimes she felt like she was doing wrong by him to feel this way even when he looked so young, but Shinichi dismissed this, claiming that it was all psychological. Besides, even if he looked young, he'd been thinking like an adult pretty much since the first time he opened a mystery novel.
As he led Ran out of the school and to her car, he was already removing his glasses and hooking them to the collared shirt he wore under his navy blue uniform. Once seated, the rest of the illusion disappeared, and he was leaning against the passenger side window and looking like a man just released from prison, thankful but spent. As they pulled out of the parking lot, Ran cast a devious look at her young fiancé.
"A Study in Shinichi...now there's a subject I'd like to major in." she said with a muffled giggle.
"Oh, please," he growled, dismissing her with a wave of his hand, but he couldn't conceal the embarassed smile quickly enough to fool her. As though a social curtain had been lifted, the two lovers began to laugh, and the personalities of Conan and Mouri-sensei were forgotten until tomorrow.
Just for tonight, they could be Shinichi and Ran.
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A/N: If they ended the series like this, I'd be pretty disappointed. :P
A few new pieces of evidence surfaced since I first wrote this story back in 2002...such as the Apotoxin's effect on Chris Vinyard. She doesn't seem to age, or at least hasn't as of this edit (Oct 2006), so it's pretty safe to say that without an actual cure, Conan is stuck in first grade permanently. Ah well, it's still a good 'what if' scenario, I think!