Title: The Cure

Author: holmesfreak1412

Fandom: Detective Conan/Case Closed

Pairing: Kudo Shinichi & Miyano Shiho

Genre: Angst, Drama

Rating: T (for minor sexual imagery)

Language: English

Summary: She's the cure… The cure that makes it worse

Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the Detective Conan Franchise. Rights for the characters and the plot that connected them in the first place all belong to Aoyama Gosho. This story, however is mine. And so are the cameo original characters that will appear in here.

The Idea of the APAH capsule belongs to FS and her awesome fanfics "Ghost at Twilight" and "Encounter in Venice".

Author's Note: Oh right, this took rather long but here it is: the epilogue! You just tell me okay if indeed I did exaggerate when I told everyone I don't expect a happy ending to come. I have an inkling that I may have. (And it seemed to have scared a lot of readers, without reading the even more controversial installments)

My health is rather awful these days so any unusual idiosyncrasies, please blame on an ailing mind. The same can be said to misleading rambles in the more introspective parts.

…

…

The Cure

..

Epilogue

…

…

Five Years Later:

Time, like a doctor had washed its hands upon everyone, especially to those who have it but never did have anything worthwhile for it to be used. Kudo Shinichi is one, having his youth still, his accomplishments the talk of the country; and yet no longer the man who he deemed he used to be— the man to be regarded in this highly fastidious world as someone successful. Miyano Shiho did tell him once— that in life there are two things that are the hardest to contemplate: age and failure. The former had been understandable at the time, an in-joke he had always thought to be amusingly absurd and yet must have been true, in the literal sense. Shiho, as her name had told him once has always been derisive of decrepitude, perhaps one of the reasons she is not as apprehensive as he in their shrinking. But considering it now, he realizes there is more to it than just dreaming Peter Pan's elusive fantasy. Like every brilliant scientist before her, Shiho is afraid that her youth will be wasted, that indeed once she got old enough, she would come to realize that something was missing, just as a physicist is forever relishing the thought that they couldn't make a good enough breakthrough in the days that they could still be glorified.

In some way, that brings us to the latter, as though they are one and the same which they are. Perfection after all is the consequence of eternity which simply is not anything likely to be awarded to one, to anything in its lifetime. One will never be able to see apes turn into man or the rest of these other cliches come true. And so failure becomes a reminder of death itself.

One might say, that Kudo Shinichi should not be a man to be worried of these things, clichéd as they are. Those people, in fact are just ignorant of his inner devils, only seeing what he prefers to show them. Only the white outlines he has applied in his blackwash as he endeavored to keep secrets rather than tell lies. His superiors marvel that after being always the last man out in the office after the past three years, he never took as much as a dayoff. Not knowing any better, they mistake it for devotion. But the real thing is, he is only concerned of the fact that once he permits himself to relax too far, he will come to realize just how cold his bed is now; how amidst all these layers of pseudo success, he is and maybe always will be a failure.

For he knows well that love lost is a special kind. It serves as a reminder that one just doesn't have all the time in the world, that everything cherished can disappear in only a single flick. It makes one think that in all the depredations of age, the disappointments of a promising youth, the heartaches of a shattered love life, death is the only escape from time. That death, after all might be a greater doctor than time itself, who refused to make things any different even as it flows. Always, in his universe, it is eternally tea-time, dire and unchanging. And like the Mad Hatter himself, getting off with one's head might be the only escape. It might be the only cure.

And yet, he knows, that is but a wrong way to think.

For it is, of all things a blind way to face life. Imagine, Shiho told him once that life is like a mirror, the apt simile he thought to be something as shrewd and simple as whatever one does to it is exactly what it will do back to you. Smiles and it smiles, the sort of thing. And he took that seriously. People always tells him to look forward, to the future and he invariably did just that. He tried to forget the past and shape his future, all the time always looking forward. In the end, it didn't do him much good as it should have. By trying hard to forget one, he lost himself and another, who he just took for granted in a way that he never realized how important she is in his life. From this, he can identify with the complaint of how things seemingly turn against one without explanation. Just as one is coming grips with everything that he thinks he wants, everything is slipping away instead. Through this failure, the world started passing him by, just as he thought he is in simultaneous motion with it.

The future after all, is but a reflection of the present. One spends time facing a mirror with the future behind their backs, backing away every step while looking in one's own reflection, which is the present. Yes, one might argue that turning around to get a straightforward direct look is a lot more practical. Those who did, without even realizing it, would have lost the key to the perspective they once had, which were themselves. It will be the one important thing their future will never find. In Shinichi's case, by trying to forget the past and shaping his future, he no longer regards what he himself needs. One should learn from their mistakes by looking at what has been wrong in the past and yet they seldom ever did. So things just never change. In this, he fails to see what it is to be learned: that all along his cure is not to be depended on time's healing powers, to the promise of the future. It is something that is in the present and all those years obstinately staring ahead had eluded him that fact.

Tonight, long since he left his office, Shinichi quits his job, something he thought he should have done long before and in a sudden whim, begins to imagine himself as being just plain Kudo Shinichi, perhaps writer of detective stories, sometime-consultant to the Force but never full time. Like his father before him who he venerates so much as the most successful man he has ever known, able to keep things within his grasp and never letting them slip away, by being the man he should be not only to his wife but to himself. He watches the sun set in Beika, always his favorite time of the day and suddenly comes to think whether he can ever love the night the same way. Whether it can be warm enough to deceive oneself that one is better off sleeping alone.

Arriving home and telling the empty house just that out of force of habit, he sees his weekly mail piled neatly on the basket, sorted without a doubt by his housekeeper who came and went during the days. He browses it quickly, noting with dismay that it is but the usual correspondence— credit card notices, bank statements and nothing that resembles a letter from Ran who he last heard to have been teaching Karate in Osaka. Discouraged for some reason as if not used to its regularity, he almost walks away when a pink envelope that is laid neatly on the side catches his eye. He surmises his housekeeper has separated it from the rest for his benefit. Taking it with delicate fingers to peruse it, he notes that it seems to enclose a card of some kind. There is nothing written in the outside save his own home number, postal code and a series of random routing number in a neat script below. Shinichi remembers Idesaki's promise to send him a postcard, something the disbarred lawyer boasted to certainly awaken the Sherlockian in him. The guy is in London now, have wed well with a beautiful medieval scholar and is currently trying to make a degree in archaelogy, something Shinichi found to wholly unusual but befitting his friend just fine. Idesaki, to his credit never did ask him about the thing with Shiho, as always foreseeing that he himself is not really ready to articulate it. Instead the guy just always advised him to moved on. It was a benevolent advice and yet Shinichi knows now, that while he certainly can, he shouldn't.

So Kudo Shinichi, before opening it, takes it into the lamplight for further study. It is not that he is the paranoid nut that he always had been. He only wonders whether this much of a small action as opening it prematurely might render him more of a failure again. Like the butterfly effect, he cannot afford any storm in Japan just because a beautiful insect is fluttering its wings in the other side of the world.

Then the routing-code gets on his attention: 39-041-232839

39. The country code for Italy.

041. The area code for Venice.

The last, a phone number.

It is from none other than, Miyano Shiho.

Hands poised and fingers sweating, Shinichi runs once again into a long untreaded memory lane. How, after meeting Amemiya Shouko, the beast is once again unleashed. How in all his desperation, he had been willing to risk everything including the sliver of respect she still had for him, if only to make sure he wouldn't lose her completely, only to find out that as time had taken its own toll with her, the prospect was to be inevitable. That day, he had erected a wall between them and she was then, willing to keep it standing. In a way, to his still treacherous relief, it wasn't much as for his inability to be the man he should be or him being no better than a junkie. It was the fact that someone, much better had just come to reclaim her.

It was funny, he had thought, how once again he was the butt for another science joke. The irony of life: catastrophe happening all over again just as he was about to take comfort to the consolation that lightning wouldn't strike in the same place more than once. But it struck again, as it would do to everything that was also made from heaven. Through there, when Shiho was living the normal life she fully deserved, she thought she had lost the man she loved so much that she, even during those days with him, who only aimed to make her his, clung to the memories of the elusive man. He was her solace, when the present was too unbearable and the future uncertain. Always the man, Shinichi had failed to be.

In his case, the thunder of the gods did strike him the other way, as a house higher than most was always susceptible to those modes of destruction. Once again, through a biochemical fluke he was aggravating a woman's pain. Maybe unconsciously, deliberately too. And it was always the same— two women he deemed he loved. One, who he loved so much not to disappoint. The other, with whom he wanted to share the pain, to fill the void inside her, only to realize later that she never wanted it filled.

Nobody could replace this man in her life. As Shinichi was introduced to him, someone, in retrospect now, he should have known to be actually really him, he wondered how this guy who started everything through his clumsiness, could be any different to him. What trait, what attribute had set this man apart when at the back of his mind, they obviously came with similar reasons. It was to get her back right? When the withdrawal gets too much...

Stop, he told himself, as he always did. Because for all the guilty reasons he should enumerate to have brought his steps here— nature, the damn drug etcetera— Kudo Shinichi, still wanted to believe he loved her despite knowing it to be futile once told to his audience of two, it being reduced to the flawed enzymes of the body as if Cupid himself was born out of a chemical reaction. He didn't believe that. He just couldn't. And yet there was the remaining truth that in all appearance, he loved himself more. Wasn't it just that? Like she had loved her man more than him when she tried to resurrect him through their relationship.

All along, it wasn't about what the damn drug could do. Like the usual stimulant, it was more like what he had had believed it could do. Amazing what the powers of suggestion could do. When just one wouldn't think there was a cure, there just wouldn't be any. The reverse of the placebo effect, to everything the great Hippocrates told us. There never was a cure to those who failed to acknowledged there was any. The basic fact of life and he had failed to see it all along.

From that point of clarity as he sat before the man, Shinichi wondered if anything would have been different had the implications had not been imagined the way he did. For after all, it was what separates us humans in the tree of evolution, from the animals that we think were inferiro. Imagination alone. It is what makes us powerful. It is also what makes us the most destructive, especially to ourselves. Shinichi then turned to ask himself: was the determination that there was a cure what made this man different from him? Did he use the powers of imagination in the rightest way possible and after such, he had come back to reclaim her back again, after two years of unexplained absence? With some agony, Shinichi tried in vain to deny what he knew then.

He was too late.

Like leaving Eden once one realized they were there.

But then as Kudo Shinichi started to talk to the man himself who always was the omnipresent third party between him and Shiho, he realized with relief that this might be after all, what real love could be.

For in the geometry of love, everything was always a triangle— its topology all a tessellation of those three sided polygons suspended above everyone's heads. The reality that for every Shinichi and Ran, there would be Shiho and that for every Shinichi and Shiho, there would always and forever be this man. And APAH. For eternity until with one segment's surrender, the triangle would finally collapse, in its place leaving two points in space, separated by the smallest possible distance. Maybe this time, like a pair of beautiful binary stars, finally reunited.

But still, far from the certainty of this reasoning, he still asked the man before him.

Do you love her?

The stranger's answer was delivered without hesitation, a soft sad reminiscent smile on his face as he told him:

Yes. Firm and steadfast

And yet the man seemed rather relieved he was the only one around to hear the admission.

Shinichi could well understand why. There always was something in that woman that prevented one from saying those three words straight to her. He himself couldn't remember in all this nebulosity whether he had confessed at any time to her in the past. Although, thinking of it now, anything uttered in such frenzy might never be considered much of a confession. Even if she had heard it. Not at all.

And then in a dawning epiphany, Shinichi realized he may never have the chance to tell her so.

Yes, the stranger repeats. And deprecatingly, Shinichi thought he may never have any chance against that.

And yet he still couldn't stop himself from asking:

If you love her so much, why did you leave her?

The look that had crossed the stranger's face, which he couldn't begin to describe, told him there was nothing more shameful than what he had just said. For it was an imperative. For a cure. A way to separate himself from her. And yet Shinichi still couldn't see the logic behind it. Why? When he, Kudo Shinichi just couldn't, why could this man?

And most importantly, why after all this time, he had come back?

The stranger told him.

And Shinichi realized, there indeed were several reasons for this man to be different.

For he had learned his lesson, long before it could be too late.

There always was a cure to those who looked for it.

It was the case for this man.

Until now, Shiho hadn't known but apparently at the same day there commenced a row over his ensuing guilt she thought to be immaterial and his departure afterwards as to his retaliation, she made it seem like this couldn't be helped. And that they might as well die this way. Deciding it should not be so, the stranger acted against what the weaker side of him was crying out for him to do which was to just agree with her,. He flew forth overseas at his older brother's courtesy and in there with the help of another friend, had undergone a very risky, high-odds operation.

He had deemed to replace his APAH-infected blood with entirely another blood group and marrows, aiming in theory to obliterate every trace of it from his bloodstream which he remarked was even more potent in its poison than any leukemic cell could ever be. The point was for him to come out a new man.

He almost died.

Confronted by the dangers, the stranger recalled thinking of it as a win-win situation. He was an optimist. At least, if he died, by his own device she would come to know he had tried.

And he did live, then wouldn't everything be better?

Not for me, Shinichi thought. And yet again, he knew it was the wrong thing to say.

The stranger, obviously noticing his misgiving, clarified his point once again. "It would be better, don't you think?"

Shinichi could hear the double-edged note in it.

Coming upon an understanding he said: "Yes of course. I think it's for the better."

And it was and still is.

He had refused the stranger's offer to introduce him to the doctor who had given him the operation, telling him only in the vaguest manner possible that he thought he could have a cure to be devised on his own.

For trust in one's physician, as the great Hippocrates said, is much more of a curative than any herb itself.

And Kudo Shnichi believed, that he could be his own doctor. Not time. Not fate. And certainly not Shiho who he knew could get hers should he just be the man, finally.

And so, a week later, the couple left for Venice, where as her boyfriend had acknowledged, they had to take on where they had left off. The only consolation gotten from that was that they had parted with considerable enough amiability. He and Shiho. The stranger too whose name he didn't think to be any important to divulge, even to himself. Although sometimes, he does wonder in all the cold nights that have passed, why didn't he put as much of a fight?

But then deep inside, he has always known why.

After which, Shinichi has begun to fall from Ran's life altogether. Entirely. Shortly afterward, without prior consent, she filed a divorce which settled in court without any grievance from either parties. The alimony payments agreed upon without any preamble. To this day, Shinichi thinks it Ran's own way of softening the blow for herself, the fact that she was the one who broke things off not him. After all, this only would tell that the problem lay on his end of things, not hers. She called him five years ago at work for the last time. Her voice brought back an ache he never expected. She told him he should never expect he would ever hear from her again until he figured out for himself where they stood. Finally she left her number and told him to call when things were different.

It was the second love lost.

To hear Ran said it herself somehow shunned Shinichi's sense of possibility, more than how the migraines that was never eradicated could ever do to him, the coals and diamonds of his future stripped by his own ape-like disposition. From there, he should have realized what was the cure all along, for him just to believe. Trust. And yet he hadn't. So things were never different. To him at least. Until now.

Opening the envelope from Venice, from Shiho, he can immediately guess what it is.

A wedding invitation.

Yes, his attendance is requested. To a ceremony she had once missed when he had conducted such years ago.

It barely takes a moment for Shinichi to process what he is being told. She trusts him enough to invite him after all those years. She, of all people believes in him.

This time, things being nothing different doesn't sound as bad as it has been. No matter how time had weather its passage between them, she always is and will be his partner and best friend.

Looking at the picture of the smiling couple he had helped to reconcile— her design to make him see what he is missing, Shinichi turns to wonder how she have known, even when he didn't. He has to act as her man did, carving his future with the past past and the present in every step of the way. After all, Scrooge would never have been the man he had turned to be had it not for all the three spirits.

He fishes for the telephone and calls Ran, a number he never though he have committed to memory and never imagined he can form with his fingers.

And a voice he had never thought he'd hear again.

Hey. It's me Mouri Ran. I'm not available for the moment so please do leave a message. I'll get back to you as soon as I can

Then a beep.

Kudo Shinichi finally can understand how it felt.

"Ran." he says, into the hum of silence on the other line, feeling his own hands trembling. . "It's me Shinichi."

The hush in the other end is haunting. It might have overwhelmed him, had he not known what to say.

"I'm leaving Japan tomorrow. I'd be gone for a while. I don't know how long. I'm not sure..."

Shinichi imagines Shiho on the other side of the world, fluttering like the butterfly in Peking when there is a snowstorm in America, except that the hurricane he is in now, is that of a manifestation of joyful confetti. She is probably sitting up in bed now, rising from the arms of the man she fully deserved. For the first time he felt they are really like binary stars. Here they are, far away from each other and yet so close as they have ever been for years. He wonders whether they someday, she can attend his second wedding too.

"When I get back from Venice." he tells Ran before the machine can cut him off. "I want to see you."

Then he places the phone back to its cradle. There will be things to pack, papers to arrange but those are the least of his worries for now. For in Italy, the sun is rising.

(The End)

Thanks everyone for patronizing. The dare by the way is for me to make a fic that I myself can't imagine the next part. I don't know about you but I believe I can't (because I have another perverted thought in mind. FS had guessed it!)

For self evaluation, I guess this is not the kind of fanfic a seventeen-year old should be writing about. I may stay away of it in the future

Lots of songs inspired me while writing this particularly Girls' Generation (Baby Steps), SHINee (Obsession and Get It), Super Junior (Angel), Ailee (Heaven), Taylor Swift (Eyes Open and I Know You Were Trouble), One Direction (More than This), Rihanna (Unfaithful and Take A Bow), Taeyang (Wedding Dress) and JYJ (In Heaven). The content of such provoked my rather disarranged way of thinking about life. And yes, I'm promoting Kpop.

No words will be enough into thanking FS who stayed all the way in the making and whose fics started this in the first place. Worry not, I'll stay away from this kind of homages the next time.

And to my readers, I guess this will be enough: see you around. Although it will really be nice should you speak out now that it's finished.

Another thing, to my little obnoxious sister, you win and you shall have your SHINee album (It's Dream Girl!) in no time. (Just gimme time to order it okay? I don't have my own credit card you know that)

Signing out:

holmesfreak1412