Day 53: Breakfast

[thatdamnedninja]

With sigh that toed the ambiguous no-mans-land between soft and explosive, Yuffie collected a plateful of waffles with all the toppings. She was sure that, if nothing else, it'd making a pretty satisfying splat if-when?-she launched it at somebody's face, and that was all that counted

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[windsome]

... Uhg.

That, Yukari found, was the only good way she could summarize how she felt that morning upon waking up. Simple and to the point, and not to mention the first word to slip out of her mouth when she was forced awake, thanks to a nurse rather noisily coming into the room she was asleep in (and god, it hadn’t been a full twenty-four hours yet and she was already getting sick of seeing them). For some reason Yukari had felt as though she didn’t get nearly as much sleep as she needed, though her immediate thought following that one was along the lines of ‘probably because I was up all night-’

Only, she couldn’t have been if she wound up rolling around in these sheets again, face in a pillow, and desperately wanting at least five more minutes. Maybe she had just imagined the whole thing; that wouldn’t have been weird, right? Yukari hadn’t thought it was unusual for her mind to come up with all sorts of strange things when she was already in this indescribable situation as it were, and really, while some impossible things were already happening, there was a line to be drawn-even for her. Crazy announcements after the lights flickering off and the doors just unlocking like that and being able to wander around so freely-Yukari was desperate to get out of the place already, but man, did her subconscious have to reflect that in the way it did?

Dreams really sucked sometimes.

Before long, she had been ushered out of bed and into the hallway once more, and eventually, the cafeteria. But instead of heading for the food line, Yukari simply wanted to sit down, instead; she normally wasn’t one to skip out on meals-especially breakfast-not only did it feel too damn early, she was still feeling entirely too unnerved to feel any hungry at all. She took one step in the direction of a vacant table before the accompanying nurse nearby stopped her.

“Kara, you should get yourself something to eat.”

A beat; that still wasn’t her name, but if today was going to be anything like yesterday, arguing would be useless. “I’m not hungry. Can’t I just sit?”

The nurse paused, too, before reluctantly nodding. “I’ll go get it for you. How does that sound?”

Not really what she wanted, but Yukari hadn’t been in the mood to object. So, she murmured out a ‘sure, fine,’ before collapsing down in the nearest empty seat and resting her elbows on the table; it didn’t take long before she rested her head on her arms as she waited. But after that, then what? Dammit, she just wanted to go home already, not spend another day here.

[for kaito!]

[flashyaudacity]

Going to bed last night instead of going out had been, Kaito thought, a good idea. Sure, he hadn't gotten much (or anything) done because of it, but he woke feeling refreshed. It was actually kind of nice not to do anything at night sometimes: between running around as Kid and dodging police at home and running around dodging detectives (whether as Kid or not), he had been getting tired. Worn out. This place may have sucked, but the break from the old routine that it afforded (only sometimes!) wasn't that bad.

Even if the new routine was pretty dull, at least during the day.

Kaito was in good enough a mood upon waking that he decided to chat with his nurse on the way to the cafeteria-it was just smalltalk, really: asking what the weather was like, which rooms would be available today, or even cracking a joke that had elicited a brief giggle from the woman. She let him see to gathering his breakfast on his own, after letting him know that she was so very pleased to see him in high spirits.

A few minutes and a tray full of waffles later, Kaito was heading for the nearest table... only to catch a glimpse of someone he hadn't quite expected to see again, at least not here. After he'd gotten back home and tracked her down to make sure she was alright, on the other hand...

It seemed that the rumors of Takeba Yukari's release had been greatly exaggerated.

She looked like she might have had a rough night-she wasn't sporting bandages, but she didn't have a tray and she was resting her head on her arms. If that didn't say "I want this morning to go away and leave me alone," he wasn't sure what did. Undaunted, he veered towards her.

"Hey, Yukari!" he greeted, giving her a friendly grin. If she really was down, maybe he could raise her spirits. He took a seat across from her, setting his tray down. "I'm glad to see you're alright."

[windsome]

It didn't take long before Yukari's mind began drifting off elsewhere entirely, especially since she hadn't been distracted by watching everyone else around, going through what had to be some morning routine like it was the normal thing to do. She might have questioned it, too, if she hadn't been thinking about everything else.

It didn't last, however, when her line of thinking had suddenly been interrupted by someone calling out her name-- her actual one, this time, which was enough for her to jerk her head upwards to face whoever it had been.

-- Oh, just some guy. That was her first immediate thought, but after giving him a scrutinizing expression, Yukari had to wonder-- how did he know her name, anyway? She couldn't recognize him at all, but he greeted her so casually, as if they were supposed to know each other somehow.

... Kind of like yesterday, when that girl sprung up on her somehow knowing her name, claiming she had known her and had spouted out all sorts of ridiculous nonsense regarding the institute. There was a notable pause between Kaito's greeting and Yukari's response, because all she wanted was something that made sense-- that is, something that would make sense to her, and she was dreading the thought of repeating yesterday's events all over again.

With any luck, Yukari thought, perhaps this conversation would go a whole lot differently. After all, she couldn't give up on finding out what exactly was going on just because she wasn't looking forward to possibly coming across another weirdo.

"Hi," she began, simply and slowly, and it wouldn't have taken a genius to figure out she wasn't entirely sure how to continue this conversation. "I've... been fine, I guess."

Except not, Yukari mentally added, but she wasn't about to be a downer on someone she didn't even know.

[flashyaudacity]

Kaito glanced down at his breakfast, and picked up a fork and knife to cut into his waffles. Yukari had reacted kind of strangely-she was usually quicker to greet him in reply-but maybe it really had been a rough morning and an equally rough morning. Maybe she really wasn't as fine as she claimed.

Then again, she was still here... While he was glad to see her, he couldn't deny that she'd be a lot more 'fine' if she was back home... Her real home, not whatever it was that the people here claimed was home.

"You may have already heard, but your roommate posted a note on the bulletin board a while ago," Kaito continued, looking back up at Yukari. "Said that you'd been 'released'. But since you're obviously still here, I guess she was wrong."

With that, he speared the piece of cut waffles with his fork and ate it.

[windsome]

"Huh?"

She hadn't meant to sound so audibly confused, but the single word slipped out before she could even think of it. What roommate? What release? Yeah, Yukari sure wanted to be released, but so far any staff member who talked about it insisted she needed to stay.

"I've never--"

"Here, Kara, your breakfast."

The nurse interjected, suddenly swooping in from seemingly out of nowhere, but then, Yukari hadn't exactly been paying attention to her surroundings either. With a bit of a startle, she looked up at the woman, uttered a half-hearted 'thanks', and then waited for her to smile sweetly at both her and Kaito before walking off. The nurse was probably happy to see that Yukari was finally with company instead of feeling miserable on her own somewhere, though Yukari wasn't feeling the same way the nurse had.

Although, she couldn't deny the waffles looked really good. Maybe the only person she was trying to convince was herself when Yukari had claimed she wasn't hungry.

"Anyway," she continued on, once the nurse (or anyone else who could overhear) were out of earshot. "I don't know if you're just thinking of someone else, or-- something," because it would be difficult to say he was mistaking her for someone else. He had her name, he had plenty of time by now to see her face... but Yukari still hoped this was just some misunderstanding. "but I've never been here before, and I know we've never met. I still don't know what's going on here."

[flashyaudacity]

And here Kaito had been thinking that Yukari was just surprised her roommate would say something like that, right up until she said that she hadn't been here before now. That they hadn't met. That she didn't know what was even going on.

That had... not been what Kaito'd expected, at all. He set his utensils down on the tray.

"You..." he started, not quite sure where to go. Had she been brainwashed? Had amnesia forced upon her or something? Surely she wasn't just purposely blocking things out; he could understand forgetting the crap that went on at night, but forgetting her friends? (At least, he thought they'd been friends, or at least nearly there...) "You don't remember?"

It was disappointing, but Kaito would make the most of it. If she didn't remember him, then he would just have to reintroduce himself-with a proper introduction this time.

He grinned, even if it was a little shaky, while reaching to his pants pockets to palm one of his paper flowers. "If you don't remember me, I'll just have to fix that. Kuroba Kaito," he said, pausing to reach a hand across the table as if he wanted a handshake. Instead, however, he produced the flower with a flourish and continued, "Magician extraordinaire, at your service."

[windsome]

Yukari wasn't sure what to make of the hand he offered across the table, and she was just moments away from lifting her own until, suddenly, the paper flower appeared in his own in a simple, yet somehow still flashy manner. With her brows raised in surprise, she actually was kind of impressed with this trick of his.

Not to mention, he was coming across as a whole lot friendlier. Yuffie from yesterday was definitely a lot more forward, and there was just something about it that Yukari didn't take much of a liking to.

Kaito, was it? She fished in her memory for one more attempt in remembering if she really had bumped into this guy before in one way or another, but try as she might, in the end Yukari had no recollection of him. It was nothing short of way weird, and she was beginning to feel like she fell right out of the loop on something.

"A magician, huh?" Yukari forced through a small smile; it wasn't every day someone claimed to be a magician. If his stint just a second ago was anything to go by, though, then maybe he actually had the skills to back that up. "And I... well, I guess you already know my name."

And by then, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the foot that sat right in front of her; man, waffles. She hadn't had those in a while. Yukari didn't like admitting defeat, and that included the stubborn side to her that was still insisting she wasn't hungry (despite how much of a lie that was by this point), but that didn't keep her from slowly reaching over to grab the fork beside the plate, starting the meal off by tentatively prodding at the food. If that nurse saw her doing this, she had better not comment on it later.

Yukari hadn't continued on right away, but once she did, her expression went from awe to incredulousness. "Are you sure you've got the right person?"

[flashyaudacity]

The introduction had gone well, in Kaito's opinion, even though it might have been better if they'd both started from scratch. He'd just started in on his waffles again when Yukari raised her doubts once more.

It was understandable, really. Kaito could only imagine what it would be like if he had no memory of anything that had happened here and Hattori or Kudou walked up and starting talking like they already knew each other. His imagination involved a lot of freaking out.

"Pretty sure, yeah," Kaito confirmed. "But if you want to start over completely, we can try that. I mean, even if I know some things about you, you don't remember anything about me. And you've gotta admit: giving you a crash course on that to get you up to speed would be pretty awkward."

He glanced down briefly, frowning, before looking at Yukari again. "But... There are some things you probably should know, about what you can run into around here, since I'm betting you don't remember about that either. It's... pretty important."

[windsome]

Yukari had settled from prodding at the edge of the waffles to letting the fork hover where her hand was in favor of glancing up from the table, giving Kaito yet another one of those confused and slightly surprised faces that were getting an awful lot of practice lately.

"'Know some things'? Like what?" If he hadn't gotten her full attention before, he certainly did now, admitting that. And she had sounded a bit defensive about that; whether Kaito were earnest in saying he knew her, Yukari couldn't tell (no matter how impossible it should have been), but a part of her didn't like the idea of a stranger claiming they knew things.

If they were something like the dumb rumors from school, she was going to... Okay, she couldn't quite come up with anything on the spot, but chances were it would come to mind when it happened.

Either way, Yukari had leaned over the table by some, obviously interested in squeezing some answers out of Kaito. This was herself he was talking about, after all-- not to mention it would simply bug her into forever if she didn't know exactly what he was referring to.

"No, I really don't know a thing about this place," she affirmed, doing her own glancing off to the side in mild annoyance. "I had some lousy 'explanation' before-" and she used that word in the loosest way possible, "-but I'm not buying it. Stuff like that just doesn't happen..." She trailed off, directing her attention back at Kaito. "Anyway, go for it. As long as you've got something that isn't complete bogus."

[flashyaudacity]

Okay, this? It was already getting awkward, and Kaito hadn't even answered her questions yet. Maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut from the beginning, instead of saying that he knew anything at all about her.

It was like if Hattori and Kudou had said they knew things about him, he reminded himself. Only with a little more guarded suspicion and lot less "shit, they know that I'm really Kaitou Kid, don't they!?" Unless Yukari secretly moonlighted as an wanted thief as well, in which case there would have been a comparable amount of "does he know I'm so-and-so?"

"Just, y'know... things," he answered, though it didn't really clarify much at all. "Like you're from Iwatodai, you look good in pink, you know how to use a bow, some of your friends from home were here-I don't know if they still are; I haven't seen Iori in a while."

And then there was the much more substantial thing he knew about: her dad. But that was a whole 'nother level of awkward... and really needed more explanation before he could even begin to try telling her.

"Whatever 'lousy explanation' you got about this place was probably on the right track. What you really need to know, though, even more than what happens after lights-out is what can happen during the day. They feed us all this crap about not being who we are-like your nurse calling you 'Kara' when she brought your breakfast over. They can be pretty convincing about it sometimes, or at least good enough to confuse us."

Really good, actually; he still couldn't quite figure out if his dad had been a fake or the genuine article. He hadn't seen the man again, and he wasn't sure whether to be grateful or disappointed about that.

[windsome]

There was a long moment before she could stop staring at Kaito as if he had grown a second head; Yukari hadn't been completely floored, as those were pretty typical things only someone she was sort of acquainted to could easily find out, though the mention of Junpei didn't go unnoticed. Not to mention, he talked of her home town like they weren't in it anymore-- but it'd make sense, because Yukari was pretty sure she had never heard of some institute like this in Iwatodai. She knew the city pretty well, and she liked to think as much, too; "Landel's" was an unusual name for something, too... That was definitely a more western name.

"... What was Junpei doing here?" she had muttered, mostly to herself. After all, up into recently he had been living in the same dorm as her, and she was fairly certain he didn't have any need to go to a hospital, much less the loony bin (Yukari would, however, often insist he probably deserved to be in one-- but that didn't mean she had to go to one, either!).

Nonetheless, Kaito had continued on with more to say, and even went as far as confirming that everything she'd heard so far (from those who weren't the staff, at least) was true. "I'd ask if they actually thought we were supposed to be someone else, but knowing that I woke up here with no recollection of ever coming here in the first place... Yeah, I'll take it there's something going on all right, and I don't believe these 'nurses' for a second. But..."

... But, she had nothing. Just a bunch of everything she could hardly wrap her mind around.

"I don't even understand how you know me in the first place. You say I don't remember, but remember what?"

[flashyaudacity]

"I know you because we met almost three weeks ago," Kaito explained, doing a quick mental estimation of how long it had been. "We'd both only been here a few days at that point. Afterwards we made a few attempts to figure out what was going on and to get out past the walls together, but never really made it very far. I only saw you maybe once or twice recently, up until your roommate said you'd been released the other day."

He paused, setting aside his breakfast as he tried to decide how to word the next part. There was a lot that needed to be said, but just telling Yukari wasn't the same as her having experienced it herself. "But the part I want to warn you about is that they bring in visitors once a week, people we recognize from home but that claim to be part of these fake lives they've invented for us. And it seems like that person can be almost anyone."

Just saying that wasn't enough to prepare her for seeing her father come back from the dead, but that awkward feeling was coming back (and stronger, too). He picked up the fork from his tray, twirling it around his fingers and making it vanish and reappear out of sheer nerves. If Yukari really didn't remember, then this was going to sound totally crazy. He even believed it and it still sounded crazy.

"I don't know how it's possible, but I heard from you before that some of the patients were actually dead before they wound up here. I know it sounds nuts, but after a few weeks, well..."

He fell silent for a short moment, but then started again, "You and I had-have-something in common. You told me before that your dad died years ago and I know what that's like, because mine died too. But that first week we were here, we were both visited by our fathers."

[windsome]

She, too, fell silent.

If one had thought she couldn't look any more perplexed, well, they were wrong; she hadn't been floored before, but Yukari definitely was now, so much that her mind drew a complete blank for a long, long while. If she had noticed the vanishing trick he pulled, she didn't show any semblance of it.

Her father. Nobody was supposed to have known about him-- no one outside S.E.E.S., that is, and she trusted none of them would have ever spoken of her family without her consent (not that she would have allowed it, either). If this had been eleven or so years ago, sure; everyone knew of her father thanks to the "accident" at Port Island, but as the years went by Eiichiro Takeba's name had went all but forgotten, and the incident itself never crossed anyone's mind (anyone her age, presumably, didn't even remember it).

Her first thought went back to Junpei-- what if he had mentioned something about it? But-- no, no, that wasn't right. Even he wasn't stupid or inconsiderate enough to do something like that.

So then... how did he know?

If that wasn't bad enough, Kaito had mentioned they were... visited by them?

Impossible.

"Yeah, you're right," Yukari responded, once she was able to gain her bearings enough to say as much. "You're totally, completely crazy sounding."

It was funny how before she was only trying to convince herself she wasn't hungry, but now she could say, without a doubt, her appetite had been effectively nuked. The aroma of breakfast had gone forgotten and ignored despite their blatant placement right in front of her, and Yukari finally set the fork she held down, using her now free hand to brush it through her bangs. Did they really have to wake her up this morning?

"Look, I..." I what? She spoke before she knew. "God, I don't even know anymore." And it didn't take long for Yukari to look suddenly exhausted. "I shouldn't have asked."

'Ignorance was a bliss' had never felt more appropriate.

[flashyaudacity]

As predicted: awkward.

"No, I should have thought better of answering. I'm sorry; I shouldn't have said anything to begin with," Kaito apologized. "I just..."

Just what? Didn't want her to go through meeting her dad unexpectedly for a second time? There wasn't even any guarantee that she would get visited by him again, and if she didn't remember anything, she was bound to still be in denial over what she'd heard about what went on here. To tell someone in her position that her dead father was around...? What had he been thinking?

"You don't have to believe me or anything; I don't have any actual proof that they visited... I just didn't want you to get caught by the surprise if you end up seeing him," he tried to explain, though the reasons seemed flimsy even to him. If he'd been in Yukari's shoes, he wasn't sure he'd even be taking it as well as she was.

[windsome]

"Seeing him?" Yukari's dubious frown deepened more than ever; Kaito thought she was taking it well, considering? Not really. Her irritation was beginning to surface more and more, now that her confusion over how he knew her at all in the first place was being replaced by visible annoyance.

Society had said all sorts of things about her father, but no one had ever tried to make such a ridiculous claim, regardless if the current situation then was completely off the wall or not (and the things she had been through were definitely that, to put it lightly).

"In case you haven't noticed, I'm not some little kid who thinks her dad's actually going to walk back into her life at any moment like nothing ever happened." She gave up on that ages ago. She accepted what happened and what he did. Yukari had to put her hands on her lap, under the table, just so Kaito couldn't see her clenching them.

"If you say yours is gone, too, then... Fine, I understand that. But stories like these aren't the way to handle it."

[flashyaudacity]

"I didn't say that you were," Kaito defended. "That's why I said you don't have to believe me. It was hard enough for me to accept my dad's death eight years ago, and if someone had told me before a few weeks ago that I'd see him alive again... I wouldn't have even considered that he could be right." Heck, even just hearing that dad had been murdered when he'd chased Kid's ghost that first time had come as shock enough; if the Kaitou Kid he'd found had actually been dad, or if Jii had said he was alive... Kaito didn't even want to imagine what that might have been like.

He glanced away, but then turned back toward Yukari with a serious expression. "But it's not a story-at least, not one that I made up. Like I said, I don't have proof that you might see him in the flesh, but I can at least prove that the doctors here will claim that he's alive. I know where patient files are stored; if you'd like, I could take you to find yours tonight."

He was leaving out the part where the last time he'd gone with someone to get files, Hattori had gotten attacked by a giant spider, but... That was probably a detail that was best to exclude right now.