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"This isn't going to work," Ran says plainly, setting a file filled with neatly stapled sheafs of paper on the table between them.
They're at a fancy restaurant. Not the one on top of the tower where they'd shared their first date, though, because they'd both agreed it had a few too many bad memories clinging to it, especially when they were supposed to be celebrating their anniversary. But it’s still a pretty nice place, and they’ve been sitting at their table for ten minutes and no one’s screamed yet, so Shinichi had been about to chalk it up as a win.
He probably shouldn’t do that now.
(Sadly, this date is still in their top twenty. Shinichi had even been less than fifteen minutes late this time.)
He doesn't look at the folder. "Have you ordered already?" he asks, and somehow he manages to quash down his desperation enough that his voice doesn't waver.
Ran just looks at him, her lips pressed together in a firm line.
Shinichi swallows and flips the menu over, pretending to be engrossed in the wine list even though they both know he can’t actually drink any - it mixes badly with the permanent cure Haibara had cooked up for him.
Even so, he stares at the menu unseeingly, the words lifting themselves off the page and floating in the air, vanishing into the fog that’s threatening to overtake his peripheral vision.
Ran sighs, but allows him to stall, the look in her eyes unreadable.
And when did that happen, anyway? When had Shinichi stopped being able to read her?
The click of the gears in his watch is abruptly deafening, the incessant tick, tick, tick echoing in the stifling silence of their private room.
Ran gives him ten minutes before she breaks it.
“I want a divorce,” she announces plainly.
Shinichi’s world shatters, but his watch keeps ticking.
”W-what?” he croaks, throat suddenly parched. He grabs his glass of water from the table and downs it in two gulps, but it doesn’t help.
Ran just looks at him. They both know that she doesn’t need to repeat herself.
"But - I love you. You love me. We - we love each other, don’t we?” Shinichi stutters, words tumbling from his mouth in an avalanche of unadulterated desperation. “We can make this work. I can - we can - we can work this out. Whatever’s wrong - whatever I’ve done wrong - "
This feels...wrong. Like their roles are reversed.
"I do love you, and it’s not necessarily something that you’ve done,” Ran says evenly. “It’s just that I thought I could learn to live with your quirks, and I was wrong."
Shinichi doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know what he can say.
“I…” he tries, but his voice peeters out before he can even really start the sentence.
“I knew who you were when we got married,” Ran continues, as if he hadn’t said anything. “And I would never ask you to stop being you. But when you leave me waiting for thirty minutes, without even a text, on our anniversary… ”
…Maybe he’d been a little more than fifteen minutes late.
“I’m here now!” he argues.
Ran just looks at him. “But for how long?” she asks, and she seems to age ten years before his eyes.
Shinichi’s words catch in his throat, an icy blade ripping through his lungs and splintering into his bloodstream.
“You’re here with me now,” Ran agrees placidly, her gaze boring into him like a diamond edged drill bit. “But what if Megure-keibu calls you? What if someone in the hallway screams? What if Hattori texts you to say that he’s in town?”
“I’ll know he’s in town before he texts me,” Shinichi argues, latching on to the one part of the sentence he can refute. “Corpses start falling from the sky whenever he’s around. It’s not like they do that normally.”
Ran sighs. “That’s my point, Shinichi .”
For all that her voice is gentle, soft, understanding, there’s a core of hardened steel backbone just beneath the surface.
Shinichi blinks rapidly. “…What do you mean?”
His voice sounds weak, even to his own ears.
Ran squares her shoulders and stares at him until he’s forced to make eye contact.
Then, she takes a deep breath and says,
”I’m sick of being second best to a corpse.”
Her words are precise and measured. She doesn’t sound angry, but Shinichi feels flayed to the bone anyway.
“You’re not - ” he tries to say, but Ran silences him with a single look.
“Why were you late tonight?” she asks pointedly, but doesn’t bother waiting for a response.
They both know that he was working on a case.
He’s always on a case.
Shinichi’s eyes drop to where his hand are folded together in his lap, knuckles pale with strain, and Ran pushes the folder across the table towards him.
“When I married you, you promised me you would make an effort. You promised you would meet me halfway. That was five years ago.
“I want a divorce,” she repeats.
Shinichi feels like his world is falling apart around him. "But - "
"Shinichi," Ran cuts him off, not unkindly. "I've been living in Sonoko's Tokyo apartment for the last two weeks, and you didn't notice."
Shinichi freezes.
He can’t breathe.
That's not -
He's a detective; he would have -
He should have noticed.
But then he realizes...
Ran's phone charger, missing; the bed cold when he wakes up, the sheets barely ruffled; too much food in the fridge, because Shinichi's still been shopping for two even if he's been the only one eating at home; Ran's winter coat, gone from the closet, even though it's barely fall...
The signs were there.
Shinichi curses himself for becoming complacent. For believing that there was no way that Ran would…
"We can - we can try living apart for a while, taking a break - " Shinichi tries, desperate.
"Like my parents?" Ran asks, her voice faintly reproachful. "It didn't work for them, and it won't work for us, either."
"We could try, ” Shinichi insists.
"We can't," Ran says simply, definitively. "I promised myself that I would never do that to myself. Just like you promised you would never make me wait for you again."
Her words feel like a dagger to the stomach, digging into his intestines and twisting, practically guaranteeing that the wound will go septic.
And the worst part is, she's not angry. She just sounds - resigned. Maybe faintly disappointed.
Actually, no, the worst part is that she's right. He did promise her that. It had even been in his wedding vows.
And he hadn't kept them.
Shinichi's throat closes up. "I - "
"So this is me," Ran says, standing up, "not waiting anymore."
She doesn’t look back at him as she leaves, the doors silently swinging shut behind her.
The ticking of Shinichi’s watch echoes in the empty room, the sound louder than it has any right to be.
(It’s exactly as loud as it’s always been. He’s just actually noticing it now.)
Shinichi eyes the folder for a long minute, mind churning as he goes through every interaction he’s had with Ran in the past few months with a fine-toothed comb. It doesn’t take him long to come to a conclusion.
This had been coming for a while. The signs were all there. He just hadn’t noticed.
He’d thought that she’d always be there, waiting for him to get his shit together.
So he never did.
Shinichi’s shoulders slump, and he starts to search through his pockets for a pen.