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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[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.

[windsome]

... She was getting awfully sick of talking about this.

He was utterly convinced, wasn't he? At least he wasn't expecting her to believe him, because if there was one thing she couldn't do, it was that. But then, what was the point? To "warn" her?

Sheesh, what a weirdo.

Her frown was still there, but Yukari was slowly getting over her urge to bite his head off. When she could set her emotions aside, she knew arguing about it wasn't going to get them anywhere. Just like everyone else, Kaito was hellbent on not straying from his story by any.

"Patient file?" Not only was that something Yukari was unfamiliar with, but it was a good way as any to place the topic on something else-- or so she hoped. She could deal with the lies being told about herself, much as she wished they weren't there in the first place, but any about her family as a whole were a different matter entirely.

[flashyaudacity]

Kaito almost let out a sigh of relief when Yukari didn't comment further on what he'd said. Claimed. He still had his own doubts about their fathers, but the first step was convincing her that people who had at least looked and acted like their dads were around. He could share his worries and his doubts after she didn't think he was totally wacko.

"They keep records about us, in relation to the lives they claim are our 'real' ones. Personal history, medical history; stuff like that," he explained. "We can't get at them during the day, obviously, but we can at night."

He hoped that she'd at least remembered last night, so that he wouldn't have to convince her about the doors unlocking and the nutjob on the intercom as well. "You don't have to decide right away, but if you want me to show you where they are, just leave a note on the bulletin board sometime before dinner."

[windsome]

At night? Yukari looked thoughtful, and the first thing that came to mind wasn't to immediately reject the idea. She hadn't seen much of "the night", though, whatever much that entailed, so much that she had already convinced a part of herself that it was nothing more than some farfetched dream. Or something, at least, because it felt a little too vivid, but it still didn't change that Yukari ended up waking in the very bed she was assigned to come morning.

If there were things Yukari knew she didn't do, it was neither sleepwalking or passing out in the middle of a dark hallway, especially when there were things to look into.

Yukari went back to swirling the fork around in her food, despite the long gone appetite; she may as well pretend to look interested in it, whether it was for Kaito or whoever else would inevitably bother her about it later. The other hand, by then, was being used to prop up her chin, akin to a bored student in a classroom. She wasn't bored though-- far from it-- just heavily engrossed in her thinking.

"Let me think about it," Yukari responded, with a hint of skepticism in her voice. He was awfully quick to offer to help her out... Regardless if he had, somehow known her before. Of course, she really had no idea how willing the people here were to go out of their way for anyone else; anyone could talk about all sorts of things easily, but actions were something else entirely. "I'll let you know my answer later."