Act 4 Scene 1 Epilogue

Conan awoke with a start, heart pumping madly, skin drenched with sweat. The hotel room didn't help either: it was stifling hot, the kind of heat that sticks to you and makes your skin crawl, as though it was covered with small insects. His mother stirred in the bed beside next to his.

"Another dream?" she mumbled, only half awake.

"Yeah," he whispered, trying not to wake his dad too.

"Want to talk about-"

"I'm fine," Conan interrupted. He rolled out of bed, grabbed a keycard, his cellphone, and a pair of flipflops. He'd fallen asleep in his baggy gym shorts and a loose T-shirt. Exercising before bed usually helped him sleep dreamlessly, but this one had broken through. He stuffed everything into his pockets as slipped out of the hotel room.

Outside was hot and sticky too, but at least the air was moving. The blacktop was radiating the heat it'd gathered during the day. That dream though... it'd been cold. Snow was piled up higher than a person was tall in some places. It was the kind of cold that was dangerous to fall asleep without a fire to warm you, or at least other bodies.

He'd been climbing down the side of a mountain, when the snow beneath turned into a river, sweeping his body along with it. Snow was in his nose, in his mouth and throat, crushing him from all sides, suffocating him. He'd awoken at the moment he realized he was dying.

He stopped and took a deep breath, trying to shake the feeling of being crushed under tons of snow. These dreams... they were pieces of someone else's memory. From what he'd been able to gather, that person was female, had lived a very long life, and enjoyed taking hallucinogenic herbs, then running around the mountains battling "evil spirits" while high. The drug taking was highly ritualized, and people actually came to this woman hoping she'd get high and hallucinate something amazing for them. Or rather, that's how Conan saw it when he woke up, and was his rational self again.

You should sleep and remember me.

Those words felt like a curse now. Okiagari, whatever the hell it was, had done something to him while he'd been in hibernation with it. It had removed all of his scars, as though they never existed. They'd gotten an x-ray, and found all of his old healed broken bones looked like they'd never been broken. If it could play with Areku's memory, it likely could play with his too. Perhaps it could have changed other things about him, about his personality.

He shook his head again. He couldn't go down this path. He had to think about something else, anything else. His phone chimed, telling him that it'd found some free WiFi and was logging on. The distraction machine, as his father called it. Perfect.

He checked the time. 2AM, so mid-afternoon in Japan. Haibara should be out of school by now. He tapped on the Skype app, found her username (msmadscientist). She was online. Probably on her laptop in the lab.

"Hi, can I call?" he typed.

"k, give me a sec" popped up a few seconds later.

The WiFi he was connected to was named "Sandy's All-Night Laundry." Sandy. As in the sand-man. Cute. He walked briskly to it, then sat down on the sidewalk in front of the building, his back resting on the building itself. It was still too hot to be inside, especially in a room full of industrial dryers.

Skype's call-chime sounded, and he answered.

"Hi Haibara."

"Kudou, isn't it the middle of the night in California?" she scolded.

"It is." He chewed his lip. Now that he had her on the line, he didn't know what to say.

Seemingly sensing his conversational ineptitude, Haibara began to fill the dead air.

"Mitsuhiko confessed his undying love to me the other day. It was terribly cute."

"Did you answer him?" Mitsuhiko was still a 3rd grader in Conan's memory. That was five years ago, and he and Haibara were in middle school now.

"I turned him down. I just feel wrong dating one of them. Of course, I couldn't say that I'm actually 25 years old, and would feel like a lolicon dating a real thirteen year old. Instead, I spouted some BS about how he was like a brother, yadda yadda..."

He winced. Poor Mitsuhiko. He'd been carrying that torch ever since he met Haibara.

"It might be okay if it was you though," she continued.

That banished the dreams from his thoughts all together. "What you mean?" he asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

"I wouldn't feel like the balance of power was off. Besides, you're the only person on the entire planet that I know of who has gone through what I have, who knows what it's like, who I can talk to about all of this. For example: Have you started getting zits again? I had forgotten how insanely aggravating they are. I'm quite pleased though, that I know what I do now about how to treat them. My previous 13 year old self would be insanely jealous."

"Zits, clumsiness, and my voice can't figure out which octave it wants to be in."

She cackled maniacally. "I can tell."

He let her laughter slowly die off. "Say, If I were to come back to Japan someday, do you think..." stupid he felt so stupid change the topic idiotidiotidiot-

"Yes," she said, as though she could read his mind. "Of course I'd date you, dummy."

He swallowed nervously, his mouth suddenly feeling very dry. "Really?" His voice squeaked. Stupid adolescent body sabotaging any attempt to be cool.

"I've been hitting on you for years now. You didn't notice?"

"Really?"

"You're really dense sometimes, you know that?" She laughed again. "But, anything like that'll have to wait until you get back."

"When I get back," he repeated.

"Now that that's settled," she paused, sucking in a breath. "Why are you awake?"

He sighed, the cold memory surfacing again. "I dreamt that I died."

"Well, that's new. Was it one of those dreams?"

"Yeah." he picked at a pebble on the sidewalk beside him, and tossed into the street. He didn't want to think about that dream anymore. "I think I saw Areku last week. He was a little kid, following around his big brother everywhere. It was adorable. How's he been doing, since he started school?"

Haibara sighed heavily. "Not good news on that front. The other day, he got lost when trying to walk to the bathroom. He called Professor Agasa in a panic. We got a cat-scan done, and his brain looks like it went through a blender. There's parts which are inactive – which is really bad, according to the doctor. Other parts of his brain have been picking up the slack, but sometimes he gets confused, or words get stuck, like dealing with a malfunctioning computer. They want to test him for syphilis. Forgetting half a century of memories appears to be disastrous for the brain. He said that he didn't think he'd ever lost so much time before, but how would he know?"

Conan swallowed nervously. "Should I get a cat-scan too? I haven't had any problems like that, but Okiagari did stuff a bunch of someone else's memories into my head. That can't be good."

"If you were going to have problems, we'd have noticed them already."

He sighed. "I suppose you're right." He made a mental note to ask his parents to take him to a doctor, just in case. Areku had woken up only a couple months ago, the last time he'd talked with Haibara. It'd been even longer since he talked to Hattori. Not that he was completely out of contact with everyone in Japan, but some goodbyes had been more traumatic than others. Like Kogorou, the man who simultaneously become Conan's adoptive father and his unknowing sock puppet, the man he'd regularly drugged, lied to, and manipulated.

"So, if I come back..." he paused, not sure how to go on.

"You should. Of course, I say that for selfish reasons."

"Right. How about progress on the antidote?"

She made a halfhearted laugh. "Same as last time. Agasa still doesn't have the money to get the equipment or lab rats I need. Almost makes me miss my old lab."

"I'm not sure I want to go back now, anyways," Conan said quietly.

"But, I am going to finish it," she added hastily. "Just in case there's any of the poison out there, waiting to shrink someone else. It may have to wait until I have the backing of a university though."

He hummed some sort of agreement. The fact that it was the middle of the night was making itself known in the form of a massive yawn.

"Kudou..." Haibara said, snickering, "Get some sleep. You're a growing boy, for goodness sake!"

"Right. Thanks Haibara," he mumbled, a smile creeping across his lips.

They said their goodbyes, and he started the long meander back home.

The End

Author's Note

This has been a fun little adventure. I see a lot of people writing stories like this one. Detective Conan has been going for so long, with no end in sight, that to relieve the tension, we write the end for Mr. Aoyama. So many of us, writing the ending, fixing the flaws that we see in the series, whether consciously or unconsciously, that's what we do. But we don't stop there. We go down the roads not walked, paths that the original author would never think to take. We blend it with other series, just to see what would happen.

This is art. Fanfiction is an artform. Don't ever let the claim that fanfiction isn't art go unchallenged.

Art, at its core, is simulation. It can be simulating seeing a sunset, or falling in love, or the feeling of nostalgia. Some simulations are more skillfully done than others, some simulations are of unpleasant things, some simulations show us ugly parts of ourselves and our societies that we'd rather ignore, but these all are still art.

Fanfic writers and fanartists and fangame-makers and cosplayers and role players and filk singers and fanfilm makers and AMV editors and conlangers, we are artists. Our art derivational, and many of us are amateurs and hobbyists, and many of us will never earn a dime from our works, no matter how well-loved or well-known they are, but that doesn't make our art lesser.

Don't let the presuppositions of the categorizing of what is worthy of the title of "art" make you love your art any less, or your ambitions for it any smaller.

Odd. I started out talking about how much fun this fanfic was to write, and ended up composing my manifesto.

サヨナラ! (Farewell!)
dreamingfifi