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笑,....... 竟然让我找到这东西
看来讲英文的小鬼头也喜欢写同人.....
个人觉得还好,看得懂的看看,
纯属娱乐
希望不是某位的译文......应该不会
30 nights of wonder
source: http://community.livejournal.com/30_nights
“Kudo-san, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Shinichi immediately felt his chest grow cold. The doctor was speaking in that tone. He slowly clenched his hands into fists and held them stiffly at his side, attempting to stare down Haruno-oishasan, who stared back at him evenly with the utmost professional detachment. After a long moment, the doctor sighed and adjusted his glasses, choosing to gaze at the dismal medical charts on the clipboard in his hand rather than at the coldly glaring detective.
An abrupt sound from the waiting room behind him caused Shinichi to quickly glance around. His fiancée had stood up from her chair and was gazing at him apprehensively. The worry lines etched across her forehead and her wringing hands said it all. “Shinichi…” The name escaped her mouth with a quiver.
“It’s alright, Ran,” he quickly responded. She had been about to walk over to him; his reply made her stay put.
“…How about we talk in the hallway, Kudo-san?” the doctor suggested calmly.
As Shinichi turned back for a brief moment at his question, Haruno saw that the detective’s eyes were unfocused.
“Ran… I won’t be long…” Shinichi made sure that the young woman nodded and sat back down in her chair before he gave the waiting room one last glance.
Sonoko was peering worriedly at Ran out of concern for her friend’s anxiety and was gently touching Ran’s arm in womanly support. Satou was curled up in Takagi’s arms across the room, resting her bandaged head lightly against her boyfriend’s shoulder and gently linking her fingers with his, studying his bandaged hands. And the children… Ayumi had buried her tearstained face in her hands; Mitsuhiko was tightly clutching his knees to his chest with a violently pained expression on his face; Genta was looking intensely uncertain and bewildered as he solemnly fingered the hem of his shirt.
The detective, his fists still clenched, trailed Haruno down the white corridor. It took everything in him to repress the furious shudder that threatened to overtake him. The place reminded him of the sterile colorless walls of Agasa’s basement laboratory, and of the one who inhabited that lonely, quiet domain… This corridor, however, held all of the hustle and bustle of a normal hospital, with nurses carting IVs and crisscrossing the hallway from one patient’s room to the next. Shinichi quickened his pace until he walked alongside the doctor.
Haruno peered at the detective out of the corner of his eye, always professional. “I see that your wounds have been attended to, Kudo-san?”
Kudo-san shot Haruno a look that rattled his nerves. Absentmindedly, the detective’s right hand went to the pad of gauze that had been secured over the ugly fresh abrasion on his forehead, though this was not the only place he had been bandaged, according to the nurse’s report. There had been other bruises, cuts, and scrapes, but they were all hidden safely under the detective’s dark blue suit.
The doctor continued calmly, “I believe you’ve already received painkillers, correct? However, if they begin to wear off and you start to feel uncomfortable, please inform the-”
“Tell me!” The detective interrupted him in a hissed undertone.
The doctor raised his eyebrows slightly. “Why don’t we wait to talk until we get to-”
“Now.” The detective’s eyes shifted to the white linoleum floor. After a long moment, the doctor turned his own eyes back to the medical charts in his hand. He sighed. Dealing with the distraught family members of critically injured patients had always been the worst part of his job. But this detective, the great Kudo Shinichi that he had read about in newspapers for several years now, was not even a relative of the patient. As far as he knew, Kudo was only a co-worker and a neighbor. How else could they be related, when Kudo had no siblings and was engaged to the woman he had left behind in the waiting room?
The doctor and the detective had taken several more steps down the bustling hallway before Haruno actually said, “Would you prefer the good news or the bad news first?”
The age-old question seemed to only infuriate Kudo more, though Haruno had thought he would be glad to hear there was anything that could be called “good” news. The doctor continued, “The good news is, she is still alive at this time.”
A great deal of the wrath in Kudo’s expression evaporated at his words and was replaced by relief. However, the darkness descended back onto his face as Haruno quickly added, “But, the bad news is, she is only alive at this time.”
The detective stopped in the middle of the hallway, forcing the doctor to pause, and stared at him with a look that Haruno couldn’t read. “What do you mean?” The words came out differently than the doctor had expected: Kudo had spoken in a hoarse, panicked whisper.
“I mean that…” Haruno braced himself. “…I don’t expect… She does not have very long to live, Kudo-san. Not with the injuries she’s sustained.” Though the hallway was still filled with the miscellaneous noises of a hospital, all Shinichi could hear was silence and the doctor’s words echoing in his head. Seeing that Kudo was unresponsive, Haruno appended, “There is always a chance that she will pull through… I’ve seen cases similar to hers where the victim ends up living comfortably for several more years… but I’ve never seen anything this… bad that… Frankly, Kudo-san, I’m surprised that she even made it to the hospital without going into cardiac arrest. She must be a strong woman to-”
“She is.” Kudo was looking at the ground again. Suddenly, a single raw laugh escaped his lips. “No… no, she isn’t.” He seemed to reconsider once more. “…Yes… yes, she is strong.” The detective’s intense blue eyes were suddenly penetrating the doctor’s. “And she’s going to live.”
The doctor felt a surge of pity. The colleagues of critically injured officers that he had been forced to talk with before were usually more realistic than Kudo. Perhaps the detective had never lost a coworker in his department before. “Kudo-san, I can tell you believe in her strength,” Haruno spoke, hoping he sounded consoling (it wasn’t his forte), “but do you know the extent of her injuries?” No, of course he didn’t. Haruno had not told him yet. “Come with me.”
Haruno then continued to lead Kudo down the hospital hallway. A long period of discomforting silence passed between the two men, one a fifty-three year old veteran physician, the other a twenty-one year old hotshot investigator for Tokyo’s Beika district police department. Finally, after turning off onto a short, oddly silent corridor, they arrived at their destination. Haruno paused with his hand on the door handle, feeling the detective’s blazing eyes on his back. With a sigh, the doctor cracked the door open the slightest bit and poked his head inside.
Shinichi wanted nothing more than to slam past Haruno-oishasan and charge into the room. But the doctor was still holding the medical charts, her medical charts, and suddenly Shinichi realized that he needed to know what he was about to see before he actually saw it. If only – and had it really been just seven hours ago? – if only he had known what he, and her, and Satou, and Takagi, were about to face… What then?
Haruno withdrew his head from the room and quietly pulled the door closed once more. He turned around and stared at the detective. Kudo was still clearly angry, but he looked more introverted than before. Their eyes connected. Haruno adjusted his spectacles in a professional manner. “Her foster father, Agasa Hiroshi-hakase, informed me that you, Kudo-san, would be extraordinarily anxious to know about her condition. Agasa-hakase is with her right now. …Not that she’s awake presently; she is unconscious at the moment, but… I usually don’t release the conditions of a patient this soon except to family members or spouses.”
Shinichi understood the searching look that the doctor was giving him. “She’s… I… we….” How could he ever explain his relationship with her when he had never fully figured it out himself? “I’m… her friend…” How weak, how lame that sounded. “I… We’ve been through a lot together, before…” Even that did not cover it. Nevertheless, Haruno nodded slowly. Agasa-hakase, Shinichi thought, must have said something incredible to get this man to talk to me.
“Do you really want to know the extent of her injuries?”
Shinichi did not say anything for a long moment. Finally, “Yes.” What was the point in waiting anyway, when, in the meantime, she might… no, she wouldn’t… not now…
Haruno adjusted his glasses once more and peered down coolly at those blasted medical charts he had kept so securely in his hand. “I’ll explain this in the least technical way possible, Kudo-san. Let’s see… First of all, there is the severe strain that was put on her neck by… what was it…?”
“Rope.” The detective clenched his hands even tighter into fists.
Another surge of pity came over the doctor. He had overlooked the fact that Kudo-san had been there when the woman had been… With more sincere sympathy, Haruno continued, “Yes, that’s what I was told. The trauma that was caused by the tightening around her neck is actually only moderate, but I believe that some permanent damage has occurred to her recurrent laryngeal nerve. This is what carries voice signals to the different voice box muscles that are responsible for such actions as breathing or vibration for voice use. Therefore, it is most likely that she is going to experience some form of vocal cord paralysis. We’re not going to know the extent of the damage unless we… until we do a laryngeal electromyography, but anything from noisy breathing to swallowing problems could become a lasting symptom.”
Kudo-san was staring at the back of the charts fixedly, his eyebrows furrowed in an effort to absorb the doctor’s words. Haruno hoped that the detective did not believe the vocal cord paralysis to be the worst of the damage; he was just getting started.
With a quick scan of the medical charts, the doctor continued, “While checking out her basic condition when she first arrived, I noticed that there was extensive damage done to the cochlea in both of her ears. …She is suffering from inner ear trauma, which I believe was caused by a singular, intense exposure to an elevated level of sound. I heard there was… an explosion…?”
Kudo did not seem to recognize that he was being asked a question at first. Finally, he blinked and numbly mumbled, “Yes.”
“Is it possible that the victim was nearby when the explosion occurred?”
There was another long pause before Kudo answered, in the same dazed tone, “Yes.”
“Experiencing a certain high range of decibels, even for such a short incident as an explosion, could have lasting effects on her auditory range. …She is most likely going to have some level of hearing impairment, which we will only be able to check for if… when she regains consciousness.”
Kudo was now staring at Haruno-oishasan with a deadened expression on his face. Haruno continued to trudge through the list of injuries. “Also, during a secondary test of her condition, it was discovered that her eyes were exposed to… some solution containing a high concentration of sodium hydroxide. I don’t know if you have any knowledge of sodium hydroxide, which is more commonly known as-”
“Lye.” Haruno blinked at the detective’s whisper and adjusted his glasses professionally. Kudo began to recite, “It’s also called caustic soda, because it is a caustic metallic base. It’s used as a catalyst for the transesterification of methanol and triglycerides in the manufacture of biodiesel, as drain cleaners, and as other things. It… can cause heat burns or chemical burns when… exposed to skin or…”
Well, Haruno-oishasan thought. The hotshot did know his stuff after all; no wonder he was so famous, and no wonder the police took him on board at such a tender age. The doctor’s surprise faded away into pity once more as the detective slowly looked up at him and added, “She taught me all of that.”
Haruno-oishasan didn’t know what to say to this, so he turned his eyes back to the charts. “It appears that she tried to rinse the sodium hydroxide out of her eyes with water at some point, which is the best possible thing that she could have done-”
“She would know to do that. She’s worked with chemicals more dangerous than that before.”
“-but it is still probably… not enough. …Her eyes are undeniably going to be scarred. Sodium hydroxide burns eye tissue so easily. She is going to experience at least mild to moderate vision loss.”
There was a long tense pause. Kudo continued to stare at Haruno. The doctor no longer saw any of the intense anger that had been there before. The detective seemed to have surrendered to his desolation. Suddenly, his mouth opened slightly and remained that way, like a baffled gaping fish. Then, surprising the doctor, he cried out hoarsely, “Why…? How…? Can’t you do… anything to…”
“I’m not finished yet, Kudo-san.” The doctor’s terse statement made Shinichi’s chest grow cold once more.
“…But… What else could there possibly…?”
“I told you, Kudo-san; her injuries are multiple and grievous. …And I’m afraid… that this last bit… might…”
“…What is it?”
“…You are aware of the gunshot wounds she received to her lower back?”
Immediately, the livid fire in Kudo’s eyes lit up once more; his slackened hands tightened again into rigid fists. “Yes,” he growled darkly, “I am.”
Haruno almost left right then. Let Agasa Hiroshi-hakase tell this angry hotshot detective, “friend” of the patient, the worst bit of the news. But Haruno was a professional; he would not give in to his apprehension of this young man’s wrath, no matter how much he simply wanted to thrust the medical charts into Kudo’s hands and quickly retire to his office for a comforting cup of tea.
“…Several of the bullets have penetrated… the lumbar and sacral levels of her… spinal cord. …Anything higher, in the thoracic level or the cervical level, and she would easily lose all control of her hands, arms, or worse, her diaphram, in which case she’d need a ventilator just to breathe. But, as the gunshot wounds are to the lumbar and sacral levels, loss of control should only occur to her body… below the waist: hips, legs, anus, ankles, toes…”
“What are you trying to say?!”
“…She has parapalegia, Kudo-san. Full paralysis of everything from the waist down.”
There was complete silence.
Once again, the anger in the detective’s eyes melted away. It was replaced by quiet dispair.
“…Paralysis?”
The doctor nodded. “Yes. Paraplegia, vision loss, hearing loss, vocal cord trauma. Not to mention the extreme blood loss from the bullet wounds. Luckily, we had enough blood of her type in stock to complete a transfusion, but… Can’t you understand, Kudo-san, why I told you… she does not have very long to live? So many of her sensory functions have been significantly weakened or lost completely that… Even if she wakes up soon, you see how hard it would be for her to come back from all of this? She’ll need a lot of surgery for her various injuries, she’ll need rigorous rehabilitation after that, and she’ll need constant attention and care for the rest of her life. Depending on how advanced her sensory injuries turn out to be, she may have a difficult time just communicating with anyone. Even if she remains optomistic about this whole ordeal, I just can’t see-”
Kudo suddenly gave a strangled sob. “She’s not… She’s not optimistic… She’s the most pessimistic person I’ve ever met… Do you know… She’s tried to kill herself before, several times? …It’s been… at least two, maybe three years since she last tried, and she’s stronger than that now, but… Do you know why?! Do you?!” Haruno stared at him, at an utter loss. “Because she thought it would help! She thought that, if she was dead, the people around her – the people she cared about – would be better off! She’s tried to kill herself to… protect others before… including me…”
Haruno continued to stare, then adjusted his glasses. “Honestly,” he spoke softly, “I’m afraid that, should she awaken soon or not, she will not live through the night, Kudo-san. I’ve informed you of her condition, according to Agasa-hakase’s request, and now-”
The doctor hurriedly stepped to the side as the door to the patient’s room abruptly creaked open. Agasa slowly stepped out of the room, the door shutting behind him with an almost imperceptible click. He was staring down at the floor at first, but after a long moment of breathless silence, he looked up at Shinichi. The detective had never seen hakase look so sad and heartbroken in his life; there were dried lines of tears down his cheeks, and the eyes behind the glasses were moist with the tears that had yet to fall.
Slowly, Agasa-hakase turned to look at Haruno. “She’s still asleep,” he whispered unevenly, “…She looks… peaceful enough at the moment…”
“Has there been any change in the monitors…?”
“No… no…” Agasa shook his head, rubbing his left eye behind his glasses. “…Her heart rate is steady, and… almost normal…”
“Are you finished for now, Agasa-hakase?”
Agasa sighed a shaky breath. “Yes… I’ve… I’ll go wait in the waiting room right now… But… But if anything-”
“Of course, Agasa-hakase,” the doctor gave a small formal bow, “I will inform you immediately. I assume you know your way back…?”
“Yes, I do.” Suddenly, Shinichi felt a large warm hand on his shoulder. Once more, his eyes connected with hakase’s. In a low whisper, so Haruno-oishasan could not hear, Agasa whispered, “Don’t… let this get you down, Shinichi-kun… You did what you knew was right, just like you’ve always done… This was all just an accident… She’ll… She’ll pull through… She knows how much we all care about her… She’s a strong girl… She won’t…”
“I know,” Shinichi managed to whisper before his voice gave out on him.
Agasa-hakase patted him several times on the shoulder. Shinichi guessed it was more for the professor’s comfort than his own. “I know you know,” Agasa whispered, “…Now, go on in. She’ll… want to see you, you know…”
Agasa seemed not to have given it thought that she was still unconscious, but all Shinichi muttered back was, “She’ll probably hate me for… seeing her with her hair messy or something…” A dry laugh escaped his lips.
The smallest hint of a smile graced Agasa’s face. “Go on in. I’ll… go sit with Ran-chan, if you want me to.” Shinichi gave a brief nod. Then, Agasa-hakase patted Shinichi’s shoulder once more, turned away from the detective and the doctor, and slowly padded down the silent corridor.
Haruno waited until Agasa-hakase was out of sight before asking, “Kudo-san…?” The detective gave the doctor a cold glance. Haruno simply held the door to the patient’s room open for him. “I’ll give you as long as you need, but should any of the monitors begin to-”
“Yes… I know… I won’t be long…” I promised Ran, Shinichi thought, that I would come back soon.
Haruno nodded, gave a small bow to Kudo, and, after the detective had softly stepped into the room, quietly shut the door behind him. Dealing with the distraught hotshot had worn him out, maybe even worse than actually seeing all of the afflictions the young woman had somehow managed to accumulate. Haruno sighed. Perhaps he had time to go to his office and make himself that quick cup of tea…?
After the door clicked shut behind him, Shinichi stood in silence in the dimly-lit room for an everlasting moment. There she was, laid out under the crisp white sheets of the hospital bed like a rag doll. Her short strawberry blonde hair – which looked redder than usual under the strange hospital lighting – lay fanned out across the white pillow, her hands lying limply at her sides. There was an IV and a simple chair sitting next to the bed, and at least five monitors surrounded her on all sides, beeping gently as they traced her heart rate and other vital signs. She was covered in bandages and gauze, for the various scrapes and bruises that all of them had suffered.
Chillingly, he could see the dark bluish-purple imprint that the noose had made around her neck, and though he had seen such a mark on many a corpse before, he almost gagged as a phantom sensation swept across his throat. Her eyes had been wrapped in white bandages, and Shinichi stared at her immobile face.
He stepped forward, closer to her bed. He had not forgotten the doctor’s blather about the sodium hydroxide, but it was not right for them to have her eyes bound so. If she awoke, how would she know she was awake if she couldn’t open her eyes? Perhaps she had been awake already and had fallen back into slumber because she could only see darkness.
When he got to the bed, he ignored the chair and gently hefted himself up to sit on the edge of the mattress to her right. His hand reached out without hesitation, but paused just before his fingers could skim the bandage. The muddled, jumbled thoughts in his head were distracting him; he fought them away just long enough to gently take the white material between his forefinger and thumb and pull it up to her forehead, revealing her closed eyelids. Luckily, the bandages had not been extraordinarily tight, and when he laid his hand back on his lap, the cloth remained lying loosely on her forehead.
For a long moment, he just stared at her face.
Suddenly, he found himself talking.
“Miyano-san…? …Shiho-san… I… I…”
He started to choke, but swallowed it and continued, turning his eyes to face the beeping monitors.
“I didn’t know… that… they would recognize you… as Sherry… not after all this time. …But I should have known better, huh? …You were right, like always… You knew… that some of them were still out there… looking for revenge… looking for you… But I… I didn’t listen…did I?”
He paused for a long moment, then glanced at her eyelids. They were closed in an unalterable sort of way. He felt a shudder pass over him.
“I… I… I’m s-s… I…” He blinked, his vision blurring with the water accumulating around his eyes. Suddenly, he sucked in a breath and tried to talk without his voice quivering.
“Mitsuhiko-kun called me this morning. He wanted me to ask you at work today if you would help him on the sixth grade science fair project they’re starting next week. I didn’t think about it until just now. I asked him why he wouldn’t just call Hakase’s house and ask you himself, but he didn’t seem to be able to come up with a logical reply, so I said I would, to keep him from hyperventilating or something. Not that he really needs help, you know, but… you know why. Huh… even though all three of them have known about us for years now, they’ve never really stopped thinking of us as Conan-kun and Haibara-san, have they…? Especially Mitsuhiko-kun...”
Shinichi felt a dry laugh escape his throat. “…It’s funny… Being around them, I often find myself being Edogawa Conan all over again… and I’ll wonder… if I made the right choice… In the end, though, I know that I did, but…You know… I’ve never been sure… Why… did you return to being Miyano Shiho? …Haibara Ai had a perfectly good home and many friends and… Even though I know you still live at Hakase’s, and you still talk to the children… Why? You don’t go out with the other lab techs after work, you’re not dating anyone, and… It’s not that I’m not glad that you work in forensics, so that if I need help on a case you’re right there, but…”
It was almost easier to talk to her now and say exactly what was on his mind, knowing that she wouldn’t cut him off with some biting remark or sarcastic observation of his ‘obviously deteriorating intellect’.
Except…
He missed those biting remarks and sarcastic observations.
“You know… we haven’t really been talking much lately, have we, Shiho-san? …Ever since… Ran and I got engaged, but… I know that you don’t resent her for being so like your sister… and yet… I feel like… maybe… We just don’t talk like we used to. …I know we talked a lot more before you completed the antidote, but even after that, we still went out to lunch sometimes when days at the department were too slow, and we still went on camping trips with Hakase and the kids, but… Lately, all it has been is a quick hello in the hallway as you head off to the forensics lab and I head off to the main offices… I really hate that. …And… I miss…”
Suddenly, his voice cracked. “…You know, hakase was in here just now… He’s really worried about you… We all are… Ayumi-chan, Mitsuhiko-kun, and Genta-kun are all in the waiting room… Their parents brought them as soon as they heard… They’ve been there for several hours now… Satou-san and Takagi-san are there, too… They’ve already been bandaged up… Satou had the worst, but it was only a slight head wound, no permenant damage… And… Ran’s waiting, too, you know… Suzuki-san’s there with her, to keep her company… Ran got here only a few minutes after we did… She cares about you, you know, Shiho-san? Ran really cares about you… You’re like… You’re like a… You’re really important to her… I mean, with that antidote, you gave me back to her, so… I…”
His hands were trembling violently now. He trailed his shaking fingers through his hair. He knew he was rambling, but the words would not stop pouring out of his mouth in a flood of confusion and uncertainty. Her eyelids had not flickered, not even once.
He needed to leave. He had told Ran that he would come back soon.
But he didn’t feel like leaving just yet.
He didn’t want to leave her unconscious in this room all by herself, or maybe worse, with Haruno once the doctor returned. In his opinion, Haruno-oishasan cared more about being right in his diagnoses than about helping people wth their injuries. “Shiho-san… wake up… please… You have to wake up… You have to… The doctor… he thinks that… you’re injured too badly to wake up, but… you aren’t… you can’t be… Shiho-san… Please… wake up… Wake up…”
Suddenly, the heart rate monitor skipped a beat.
Shinichi froze, his chest growing colder than it ever had before.
The beeping returned to its regular, monotonous pattern.
Fat, hot tears began to streaming down his cheeks.
His hands grasped at the bedsheet. “Shiho, you have to wake up! You have to wake up now! You can’t die! Don’t you understand?! We all care about you so much! What would the children do without you?! You’re one of their best friends, their Shiho-neechan. And Agasa-hakase! Do you have any idea how much he loves you?! You’re his daughter, the closest thing to a true family he’s ever had! And… and…
“What about me, Shiho? I care about you. I know… I have Ran to talk to, but I can’t really talk to her about my cases without her getting frustrated… and I know I have Hattori-kun to talk to about those things, but he lives all the way in Osaka, so I don’t see him just every day… You’re my best friend, Shiho. You really are. When I first met you, I never imagined it, but… You understand me better than anyone else I’ve ever met… And after we took the Organization down, I thought that… you had been set free… to live a normal life without the constant fear of them overtaking you… I… You can’t die, Shiho, you just can’t… You have to wake up… You have to… There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be awake now… You… can’t… die… Shiho…”
His hands had released the bedsheet during his plea, and he found himself leaning over her body, the back of his fingers gently rubbing up and down her soft cheek – something he’d never even done to Ran. His eyesight was blurred, and heavy tears hung on the tip of his nose and chin.
“You can’t… leave us to be with Akemi-san yet, Shiho… We all still need you… I still need you… Shiho…”
Suddenly, Shinichi felt the faintest twitch of her cheek against his fingers. His heart leaped, and he checked her eyelids for movement. They were flickering, very softly, almost unnoticable unless he was looking for it. His fingers paused their gentle rubbing, then twisted around so that he could cup the left side of her face in his hand.
“…Shiho?”
Her closed lips suddenly opened the slightest bit, as if she was about to speak, though no sound came out.
“Shiho, wake up! Please! It’s Shinichi! You have to wake up! …Shiho!”
Abruptly, her eyes opened.
In horrified shock, he flinched, and his hand almost drew away from her face. So the doctor’s words about sodium hydroxide had been true. Her eyes had been scarred in the most terrible way. Despite the hundreds of gruesome murder scenes he had attended, nothing had prepared him to see his best friend’s blue-green eyes with… such damage that he couldn’t even describe.
She inhaled deeply through her mouth, but when she did, it was raspy and strained. Her body flinched violently, and instinctively, her hands flew up from her sides to reach for her neck, needing desperately to tear away whatever it was that was impeding her breathing. In the process, her fingers skimmed Shinichi’s suit jacket, and suddenly, her fear had found another unknown enemy to be alarmed about.
Shinichi almost stumbled off the bed as her arm flailed out against him, her hand striking his face. He wondered, for a split second, if she had done it out of anger because he had been sitting there with his hand on her cheek – she wasn’t always very receptive to touch – but then he realized that it was far worse than that. She simply didn’t know that it was him.
She was squinting directly at him with those horribly scarred eyes, but it was like she couldn’t see him; she knew something was there, but what that something was, she didn’t know. In a quick movement, born from the defensive instict she had developed as a fugitive from the Organization, she got herself halfway propped up by her left arm, the bandages he had brushed to her forehead falling around her neck like a cloth necklace as her right hand swung back again to strike at the unknown enemy once more.
This time, Shinichi was ready. He moved his head aside as her hand came flying past his face and neatly grabbed her wrist, holding it securely. “Shiho! It’s me! Shinichi!” he hissed in a whisper.
Regardless of his imploring, she cried out a strange animalistic noise in surprise and began to violently try to jerk her arm out of his grasp. Shinichi held onto her wrist doggedly. “Shiho! Listen, it’s me!” She paid no attention to his words, continuing to struggle. Finally, in a mixture of panic and desperation, he yelled loudly, “SHIHO!”
Suddenly, she stopped. Her squinting eyes widened, giving him a better and unwanted view of the scarring. Her arm relaxed. Then, the wheazy voice that came from her mouth rasped, “…Kudo-kun?”
“YES, IT’S ME!” he shouted. She was staring at him, but her mouth was open in confusion.
“Why… talking so… quietly…” She rasped. No, Shinichi thought, the doctor said… her ears… the explosion. Suddenly, a terrified look shot across her face, and she began to try to jerk away from him. “No…! No…!”
“IT’S ME! IT’S SHINICHI! It’s… it’s not the voice emulator… I promise…” He wasn’t sure if she heard his last words or not, but she paused in her flailing once more and squinted at him dubiously. After a long moment, she gave a slight jerk of her arm, and Shinichi released her wrist cautiously. She started to draw her arm back to her side, but stopped, then slowly reached out towards him. Shinichi held his breath as her soft fingertips came to rest on the side of his cheek. Her fingers did not stay on his cheek, however, but began to wander over his eyes, his nose, his lips… All the while, she stared at him with those scarred, blurred eyes.
“Kudo-kun…” she whispered. With her fingers still on his face, he nodded. “What’s… What’s…” Without warning, the arm that was propping her halfway up shifted as she tried to brace herself in a full sitting position. With horrified detachment, Shinichi watched as her body jerked slightly to the side in a command to her legs to bend at the knees and slide up under herself so that she could sit up straight. Her legs did not respond to the command. A raspy gasp escaped her lips as she almost fell back onto her pillow, one of her hands catching onto Shinichi’s jacket’s collar desperately.
Shinichi’s arms instantly went to grab her, pulling her up towards him. Her legs, like plastic appendeges on some child’s grotesque play costume, moved of their own accord, sliding heavily towards the opposite side of the bed. She gasped hard, as if someone had struck her in the back with something heavy, and Shinichi thought, the gunshot wounds… her spinal cord…
Her arms went around his neck in panic, and he held her tightly to his chest, feeling his nose pressing into her hair and her ragged, disjointed breath on his skin. For a long moment, they stayed still. The tips of her strawberry blonde hair tickled his nose, but he did not brush it away; he held her closer.
Then, with a start, he realized she was trembling. “Shiho?” he asked, his voice directly in her ear.
She abruptly pulled away from him, and her body clumsily fell back to the matress, despite her stubborn attempts to keep herself upright. She stuggled, desperately trying to right herself and slide her legs back to their former position. Shinichi stared, frozen and not knowing what to do. His ears were filled with the sound of her pained hisses and gasps; she was dragging those highly sensitized gunshot wounds across the mattress.
“Shiho, you have to stop moving,” Shinichi barely managed to get the words out – who knew if she heard them? – and raised his hand to place it on her shoulder in a calming gesture. She was already ceasing her movements, however, and with one last gasp, her head hit the pillow.
Once again, he froze, his hand in the air, watching her breathe. She was gulping in as much air as her bruised throat could manage, and her fingers closed tightly on the bedsheets at her side. Her wide scarred eyes stared up at him. Finally, the raspy voice escaped her lips once more. “…What’s… happened to me…?”
Kudo Shinichi broke down crying.
This was not how it was supposed to be. She was not supposed to be this way. At one time, she had been this afraid and confused and in pain, never knowing whether or not there was a black Porsche parked just around the next street corner, but that time was not now. She was supposed to be free of gunshot wounds, free of uncertainty, free of terror. Lying there, gasping for breath and wide-eyed in confusion… it was pathetic. She looked so pathetic right now. What had happened to the great Miyano Shiho: genius toxicologist, queen of all things sarcastic and witty, endurer of a blackened past?
His fists were clenched in rage as the scalding tears streaked down his cheeks in a flood. He was so angry, so full of wrath. Not at her. Not at the doctor.
If only… If only… he had known what he, and her, and Satou, and Takagi, were about to face… What then?
Could this all have been prevented?
Sitting there on the edge of the bed, convulsing in his wretched sobs, he did not notice her staring at him with a look of disbelief on her face. It was disorienting enough to awaken to such a strange, restraining dream as this – why couldn’t she see anything, hear anything clearly, and what was choking her, and why couldn’t she move her legs? – but now, why was Kudo-kun crying this way?
One of his clenched fists was resting on the mattress, not far from her right hand. She knew it was there, without seeing it, so she moved her hand to rest it gently on his. It had been her objective to get his attention, but she suddenly found herself unable to speak. Pure adrenaline had kept it away before, but now, Pain had wrapped its wickedly grasping tendrils around her abdomen – such a strange contrast to the nothingness that she felt below her waist – and was sending the most horrendous pulses up her back. Her eyes had started to throb and burn as well, and she wanted to scratch at them and pull the cotton out of her ears.
Her mind plunged into a sort of sickening vertigo. She knew she was about to go unconscious; she felt the tugging at the depths of her mind. She had been drugged to sleep before, but this was worse; there was nothing to physically fight against. She felt her agonized eyes begin to roll upwards, so she closed her eyelids. She breathed in one last raspy breath.
The last thing she felt before she was pulled under was the drop of a hot tear on the back of her hand. |
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发表于 2007-9-25 12:51:11
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发表于 2007-9-27 16:29:19
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O~~~~看不懂啊.gif)
看懂一部分看不懂一部分~~~我哭啊~~~