"I," Shinichi announced, collapsing onto one of the stools in Haibara's lab, "am going to quit my writing class."

"Are you," Haibara said, not looking up from an experiment. "This is the class you took because, and I quote, 'It can't be that hard if my dad spends all his time avoiding it and still gets books published'?"

"I was being facetious," Shinichi mumbled into his arms. "But yes. That class. Quitting it. Definitely."

Haibara snorted. "Kudo, you're more than halfway through the semester and passing that elective, why would you drop it now?"

"My classmates are idiots and I don't want to workshop another writing piece. If I have to read another thing they wrote, I am going to pull a Kid and start causing some chaos."

She finally looked in his direction. Shinichi looked back, feeling a little dead on the inside and letting it show. "Okay," she said, "I'll bite. What did they do that's so bad?"

"Necrophilia, Haibara. Someone wrote necrophilia."

Haibara blinked at him. "Ah."

"But you know what the worst part was?"

"There's worse than necrophilia?" Haibara asked wryly.

Shinichi gave her another dead-eyed look. "It was poorly researched necrophilia. Don't get me wrong, I was extremely uncomfortable to read it at all, but when you're reading and you realize the character is interacting with a corpse that has supposedly been in a field for most of a week in the middle of the summer..."

They both made disgusted faces. "I'll admit that's pretty bad."

"And no one seemed to realize there was anything wrong with the body being pristine? If you're going to write something like that, at least commit and do your research! But I don't care what kind of sicko you are, no one is going to be getting intimate with a week old corpse and finding it attractive. The smell alone would be horrific, not to mention the flies, bloating and decomposition and any damage done by scavengers! And then when I pointed this out everyone looked at me like I was the sick one!" Shinichi threw his hands up. "I'm not the one who chose to write about necrophilia in the first place! I'm just pointing out some glaring flaws with this scenario! At least have your corpse be a recent one! Or preserved! It really isn't that hard!"

Haibara snorted. "It's your own fault for taking a creative writing class. You shouldn't have expected accurate research from undergraduate students."

"How about any research? Any at all?"

She shook her head, a tiny amused smirk on her lips. Shinichi knew she'd probably hold this over him later, but honestly this was the sort of thing he could only vent to her, Hattori, or his father, and Haibara was closest. She, at least, could appreciate the horrible breach in research methods that would lead to such a horrendous mental image of how the human body decomposed.

"I can see why you'd be fed up with them in this case. Although out of curiosity, what did they think of your story?"

Shinichi's jaw clicked shut, his face going faintly red. "...My writing is too clinical, reads like a police report, and apparently no one can connect with the characters as they're too unrealistic."

"I thought you said you were going to write a mystery short story based off one of your older cases?"

"I did!" Shinichi grumbled. "And they thought it was unbelievable that someone would just happen to stumble into a murder scene and be able to solve it! They said this. To me. Do any of them realize who they're talking to?"

Haibara laughed.

"It's not funny!"

"No, it really is." She grinned at him. "And you were so sure that this class was going to be your cakewalk course this semester."

"It should be so easy in theory!" Shinichi let his head thump back on the work counter. "If I tell my dad about this he's going to laugh his head off. Then probably strong-arm me into a writing workshop in the name of family bonding."

"To be fair, in theory you should be able to tell a story well. You have the flair for dramatic timing and plenty of examples of good writing stored in your brain. And none of them would involve necrophilia."

"I'd agree wholeheartedly, but that feels like it would be jinxing my life into that statement so that it has a 'yet' tacked on."

Haibara's grin widened. "Yet."

"I hate you."

"No, you hate short-sighted university students trying to write edgy fiction with no concept of reality or how horrifying their attempts at edginess would be if reality applied."

"I think hate for that and hate for you can be mutually exclusive."

If Haibara wasn't in the middle of an experiment, she would probably pat him mockingly. Instead she just laughed at his pain. "So are you really going to withdraw from the class or are you just being extra melodramatic?"

Shinichi sighed. "I'll admit that it's pretty tempting. I have read more bad writing—and produced bad writing—in the last few months than I have in my entire time in school. If there is one benefit to being the son of a novelist, I can at least edit other people's works. But at what cost?"

"I think you'll live."

"...It's only one more month of my life. I don't think they can get much worse than necrophilia."

"And that sounds like a challenge to the universe."

Shinichi blanched. "I really hope not."

"Look at it this way Kudo," Haibara said, measuring out some liquid, drop by drop. "There's always a chance your terrible luck will strike and the whole class will have some practical life experience to draw from."

"I'm not sure why I thought talking to you about this was a good idea."

"Because I'd find it funny instead of horrifying?" she quipped.

"...yeah, probably that." They sat in silence for a few moments. "But, Haibara, necrophilia!"

Haibara laughed and Shinichi kept ranting because Haibara really was the only friend that had the same dark sense of humor he had sometimes—and wouldn't let him get too caught up on technical details either. He probably wouldn't drop the class. He was going to make his next writing piece something...informative though. Because research was so damn important and he was going to teach these innocent university students something about human mortality if they were so damn keep about writing its after effects.