voidtreckerexpress | And all my walls began to shake

Entry tags:

And all my walls began to shake

Who: Ran (both closed and open prompts)
Where: Various
When: In the few days after departing the Winter Faire after this log and after new arrivals
What: Ran deals with the aftermath of learning about Shinichi
Warnings: N/A?

A. Closed to Ai - The night after the fair, after carrying him back to the train, Ran had holed up in one of the quiet rooms with him, talking. Exhaustion -- mental, emotional, and physical -- had seeped in, and she'd slowly drifted off as they spoke. At some point he'd woken her up, encouraged her to go to bed, and she'd stumbled half-asleep down the darkened hallways to her cabin, crawling into her bed for full rest.

In the morning she awakens still wearing the same clothes she had the day before, her hair mussed, dark marks beneath her eyes. Climbing down the ladder to her bunk, she catches sight of Ai still sleeping. She pauses a moment, a small furrow between her brows -- then grabs her gi and goes to change. She'll return in a few minutes to put last night's clothes on the bed.

B. Open - Ran will slowly seek out a few people who Shinichi has indicated know about him over the next few days, so feel free to reply as though she's found them if your character is one of these. Alternatively, they (or anyone else) can find her in the gym, spa, or kitchen:

Gym - Ran is most often here, attacking the practice dummies and bags with unusual focus and fervor -- sometimes to the point where she looks as though she could have well killed one if it had been alive. Indeed, she has snapped one of the bags from its chain again, and one of the dummies is looking more than a little worse for wear.

Spa - Find Ran in the sauna, wrapped up in a towel and trying to listen to birdsongs. She may get awkward and leave, though, if someone male enters.

Kitchen - Ran stress cooks. Though it's not her team's turn to prepare food, she can likely be found in the kitchen either puzzling over one of the new recipes or trying to make something good out of what basic ingredients are available. Again, much focus, and possibly more mess than she normally makes.

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The fact she's not there now would be obvious, Haibara thinks.

But in some small way, there might have been a little self-sabotage involved in the way she worded it. Still, Ran saw through it, so it didn't matter.

"I was a biochemist, in charge of developing the APTX-4869. In other words, the drug that turned both Kudo and I into children."

She pauses here. It's not that she needs to give Ran time to respond, there isn't really... anything to respond to there. But just that she needs to collect herself to answer the second part of Ran's question.

"My sister also worked for the Organization. But they killed her. I refused to work with them any more, they were going to kill me in response, and so I took a chance with the APTX-4869 and escaped." A slight pause before she continues. "Turning into a child is a very rare result, and the drug usually results in death. They're not aware of the possibility, but I had figured out the truth behind Kudo's case. That's the only reason he and I are still alive."

Really, Ran should have realized what she was potentially opening.

But she hadn't.

She'd hypothesized that Shiho had been involved in developing the toxin, yes. But not having been the creator of it.

The rest is important and needs to be addressed, but for the moment her mind can only cling to that fact.

"How . . . how could you make that?" Please tell her there's a reason. Please tell her that Shiho hadn't wanted to, was forced, coerced. "Why?"

Or that she has remorse.

Ran's chest is suddenly, impossibly tight.

Haibara sighs. She knew this kind of reaction was coming. "There's a lot of 'why's involved. I was involved with the project because the Organization raised me to take over my parents' work." She crosses her arms, tapping one finger against an elbow as she gathers her thoughts. "I did want to complete it. Not for the organization, but because it was their lives' work."

"And if you want to know why I developed a poison, the answer is that it's not meant to be one. The Organization decided to use my work a tool for their killings because in its current form, it doesn't leave behind forensic evidence. Not that I was in any position to object."

"Not that it absolves me of anything. I've worked with the list of its victims. I know exactly how much blood is on my hands."

So not a poison . . . but something that was found convenient to be a poison over the time it was being developed.

It's relieving, at least, in the intent. But it's still taken lives.

"What . . . was it supposed to be?"

"An end to mankind's long search for immortality." A simple answer, if a little vague. A very Haibara answer.

She could get into a more technical description, but she doubts that would sate any curiosities here. So she waits for Ran's next question.

Or her judgment. Haibara knows she deserves it.

Something to achieve immortality . . . That's something from fairy tales that Ran read as a child. Something from history books -- emperors who squandered resources, lives, and their own morality on their insatiable quests for immortality. Those stories had always been illustrations of the fallibility of humanity, warnings against those who would dare reach for something that was forever out of their grasp.

And yet here it was, something else that should only belong to stories cropping up in modern life. Again there's that disconnected sensation for Ran -- a paradigm that doesn't quite fit inside of her own, splitting like a double image.

"Is that even possible . . . ?" The words are soft, both rhetorical and not.

She shakes her head quickly as though to clear it, tries to ask what presses next.

"Why didn't you stop when you realized what they were doing with it?" It sounds like she has regrets, the way she talks about her hands having the blood of the victims. Obviously she got out later, but . . . after cost.

Significant cost.

Haibara clutches an arm a little tighter, arms still crossed. "I didn't approve of their use of it, but even I was ultimately expendable..."

She trails off for a moment, eyes losing focus for a moment as she thinks about Gin. Handcuffing her and leaving her until they decided what to do with her, or the time he shot her on the rooftop after reverting to her usual age, or all of the time spent together at the Organization - most of it traumatic in its own way.

"...The point is, I had no room to negotiate while they had both me and my sister under their thumb."

Ran could wonder if all of this is true. It's fantastic, certainly, and otherworldly in comparison to everything she knows.

But . . . Shiho doesn't have any reason to lie to her, either. It's not as though she's attempting to paint herself in the best light. And that little tightening of one hand tells Ran that the conversation is costing her to some degree. She's answering despite it.

"What was it like in the Organization?" she asks quietly after a moment. It's not a question aimed at causing further discomfort -- though she suspects it unfortunately will. It will help her better understand what kind of person is in front of her . . . and possibly help her to better understand the Organization itself.

"Terrible. I was a part of its Internal Division, so I didn't have to deal with outside threats much, but that just meant I had to deal with all of the criminals inside the Organization instead."

She considers her words a bit. Thinks about the people she worked with - not Gin or Vodka or Vermouth, but the other scientists, often working under her. "Not all of them were horrible people, but the criminals who made it high enough to earn a codename were both willing to murder and hungry for power. I had one myself, so the lower ranks didn't bother me much, but... You have to live with the fact that there are people around you who would kill you if given the order to, or a reason to. And the higher-ups would kill you if they thought you were a risk, or useless."

....Like Akemi.

Does that mean that in order to earn a codename, Shiho was willing to murder as well?

It can't be. Shinichi trusts her, doesn't he? She's taken care of the children -- Ran knows she has. She fusses over Agasa-hakase, too; Ran's seen that. And that time at the docks . . .

But it's hard to reason about that when every thought feels electric, charged. When each new bit of information is a disruption, uncertainty that's hard to process.

When she's trying so hard not to be afraid.

Ran closes her eyes, tries to block it out, ask the question she really wants: "How much of the person I knew is real?"

The question is a request for some measure of certainty -- some steadiness in all that she's been given.

Haibara expected more concrete questions, questions about the secrets she had been keeping, that Kudo-kun had been keeping. But this reminds her that there is a cost to keeping secrets in the form of trust lost as well.

"Except for the bit about me being seven, it's real. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm terrible at acting."

This admittedly feels a bit better than the concrete questions that Ran had been asking -- not because she doesn't want those answers, but because they hit something more, something deeper. It feels like she's hitting more of what she needs. Maybe she's needing to lay the base of some measure of trust again before she can deal with the rest.

And with it . . . maybe some sense of familiarity, solidity in all that's foreign.

"I'm doubting everything right now," she says softly. "Even my own perceptions."

"These are rather sizable revelations. It would have been easier to go back to ignoring them, but the truth is like Pandora's Box. Once it's out, it can't be put away again."

A small nod.

And a breath.

"If you could take it all back . . . would you?"

Again, it's a question that tries to create solidity, certainty . . . in spite of the fact that she'd like to hope she knows the answer. She needs -- wants -- to hear it.

"If I could save my sister, I'd take back or redo whatever I needed to." Said... just a little bit more harshly than normal. But it's Haibara, it's not too far off from her usual tone. "Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. We're not given second chances."

She pauses. Then, a little more gently, "I try not to dwell on those thoughts."

It's not what she was hoping for, and Ran's brow furrows in a wince. The anxiety that she's facing likes the security of certainties, and the idea that Shiho would go back to the Organization, do it all again, runs counter to what she would hope for -- someone who renounces the Organization, doesn't believe in anything it stands for, wants to put it as far from herself as possible.

But.

That's not quite what's being said here, is it? She tries to cling to that, tries to hear it, eyes slipping closed, silent for a few moments.

"I told you that I'm doubting all of my perceptions," she says softly. "Unlike Shinichi, I didn't know you before. You say that the person I knew is real, that you're not good at acting . . . but can you understand that given how much I've just learned has been kept from me, given being told how much I should be afraid of everything I'm learning, it's hard to just fall back into the same kind of conviction? I want to believe. But when you say something like that, about being okay with redoing it . . . it scares me."

A breath. "Maybe I didn't ask the question the right way -- or the question that I really want. Would you want to go back now?"

"I think . . . I'm trying to get a sense of who Miyano Shiho really is. Because even if she can't act, I only ever got pieces. I think . . . I need to understand in order to go back to the conviction that I had."

Haibara is silent for a couple arguably tense moments. She realizes what it is Ran's looking for, but she can't.... quite bring it in herself to come to her own defense.

But at the same time, she can't bear to be... associated with them, either. The two feelings wage war for a little while Haibara contemplates what to say.

In the end, neither side wins. She simply... talks, and lets the words come out what may.

"Miyano Shiho was a scientist. She wanted to follow her parents' footsteps, but she was forced to work with criminals to do it, even she didn't approve of it. But her sister had struck a deal to get her out of the Organization, so all she had to do was keep going, one day at a time, until the day she could leave with her sister."

"When her sister died, that path was ripped away from her. She refused to cooperate, and ran, and from that Haibara Ai was born."

"So no, I wouldn't go back to them. They are antithesis to everything I stand for. And with Kudo-kun, I've even chosen to stop running, to fight back, as best I can."

"Does that answer your question, Mouri-san?"

"Yes." The word is soft. "Thank you."

It was more than she'd expected, in truth. Ai has never been prone to pouring out her words, to explanations, and definitely not to speaking about herself at a personal level. The vulnerability of it, knowing what she's being given, helps -- perhaps just as much as the story itself. She tries to give her thank you due gravity; it's important for Shiho to understand that Ran knows what has been given.

"I'm sorry . . . both for your parents and your sister. They took a lot from you."

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And all my walls began to shake

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