[Detective Conan] Zero's Future

"Zero-chan, you got into another fight behind my back."

"Don't call me Zero-chan! No one calls boys that! Call me Zero!"

An Shiji Mirai stuck out her tongue playfully, and Rei Furuya bashfully turned his head away. Because of his blond hair and dark skin, nobody wanted to play with him. When everyone was excluding him, An Shiji Mirai stood in front of him and said, "Are you missing an organ or something? Is your cerebellum underdeveloped, or is your brain not fully formed?"

After that, An Shiji Mirai solemnly promised Rei Furuya that she would protect him.

"Why do you want to protect me?"

"They're picking on you because they're jealous. You're the one who's special. Mom says special things are treasures, and treasures need to be protected."

Special... For the first time, anyone had described him that way. Rei Furuya stared blankly. From then on, An Shiji Mirai became special to him, too.

Later, the two of them became friends with Hiromitsu Morofushi and helped him emerge from the darkness. When An Shiji Mirai was ten, her parents suddenly vanished without a trace. To find out what had happened, she chose to attend the police academy. She and Rei Furuya and Hiromitsu Morofushi all got in, where they also met Jinpei Matsuda, Kenji Hagiwara, and Wataru Date. The six became friends.

"I'll bet that Furuya and Mirai will get together after graduation."

"Morofushi, go ask that blond jerk when he's going to confess."

"Exactly. You can't make the girl confess, can you?"

"Zero said he'll do it at graduation."

On graduation day, everyone waited excitedly for Rei Furuya to confess.

"Thank you for shining so brightly, for being the star in my ordinary days."

"Actually, Zero made my life complete."

They had thought they could stay together forever, but Rei Furuya joined Public Security because of his excellent grades, and was also assigned to Zero's division. Not long afterward, his first mission was to infiltrate the Black Organization with his childhood friend Hiromitsu Morofushi. That meant the two of them would have to cut off all contact.

An Shiji Mirai never told her friends that, to investigate what had happened to her parents, she had joined the Black Organization long ago. Vermouth was her mother's friend and someone her mother trusted, so with Vermouth's recommendation, An Shiji Mirai joined the organization at sixteen and received the codename Moscato.

Thanks to her formidable hacking skills and the fact that Vermouth had brought her in, no one ever suspected her. Even if they had, the organization would never let a computer genius like her go. An Shiji Mirai didn't meet her two childhood friends. The three of them worked in separate divisions: intelligence, operations, and so on, as if they were strangers...

"Why are you in that organization!?"

"I'm investigating what happened to my parents. Zero, I have to take this risk."

An Shiji Mirai had expected to get a lecture, but instead Rei Furuya chose to embrace her. He was angry that she hadn't told him about something so dangerous, but the thought of her facing all this at only sixteen made his heart ache.

"Mio Sakura Toki, pleased to meet you."

"Toru Amuro, pleased to meet you."

Amuro... An Shiji. Mio... Zero. They had first met beneath a cherry tree. They had heard that catching five cherry blossom petals would make a wish come true. "We'll never be apart!" Later, Rei Furuya left without a word, which was the reason she chose her alias. Both of their aliases carried a part of the other.

"You're not someone without a future, Zero. I'll always be here."

"A future without Mirai isn't the future I want."

Theme: May we live in peace and good fortune