Window shopping--no, that was too lofty a word to be used with this quaint town. Looking at things all day (yeah, that worked much better) was all well and good until the chilly air became less than bearable. With the sun sinking into the earth, the shadows grew across the sidewalk and made pockets of frigid air. The redhead groused with each
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Coffee would fix a lot of it. People bitched about it dehydrating, but it did more good than harm. Caffeine didn't make you piss that much. If it did, MIT would be exporting dead hackers instead of boy geniuses.
A good candidate for the title was looking morose at one of the tables. S.T. walked over, cane squelching with each step, and set his shopping bag on the floor. "You mind?"
He sat down before the answer, but with the chair angled away; if Mello didn't want company, he just needed to say it. S.T. just wasn't going to stand while he made up his mind. If it was going to be Revenge of the Zombies tonight, he could use a breather ( ... )
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He wasn't absolutely certain the Institute's level of attention to detail was sufficient to include giving the prisoners clothes specifically designed to annoy them, but between his own damn hoodie and the pacifist hippie being forced into something that looked like a CPA's weekend wear, he was starting to think it was all part of humiliating them by inches.
His plans had shifted since the last time he'd talked to S.T. One of Mello's bullets still had Landel's name on it, but he was willing to wait to deliver it. Explode the fuck out of everything, and make sure you're in a position to walk out of the rubble was never going to fly here, and the military had made large-scale rebellion all but impossible to organize. People were too scared of consequences now. ( ... )
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It was nice to be useful, even if most of his contribution was playing taxi and not dying.
The waitress came by. S.T. ordered a hangover cure -- coffee, OJ, and a breakfast combo. The smell of coffee was so strong that, if he closed his eyes, he was swimming in a pool where someone couldn't read the difference between caffeine and chlorine. It was giving him a contact buzz, which was eating away at the pounding.
"You?" Mello'd asked about his night, so the converse was fair game.
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"Worse than usual. Tried to make it up to help S and R, but my group got waylaid by... I don't even fucking know what it was." He could argue to himself, now, that he hadn't really been frightened, that he'd known all along the thing wasn't going to hurt him and Mordio. He knew it had been a different story there in the dark, with the Institute convincingly vanished from around them and the whispers loud in his ears.
"I've had enough of being jerked around by this place for a dozen lifetimes."
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He hoped someone had made it up there. Javert probably had. Old guys were. Steadier nerves, no imagination. Javert'd be pulling people out of torture chambers forever and never bat an eyelash. Night guard for the good guys.
"What do you do for fun?" Even heroes needed hobbies. One of these days he'd talk them into putting up a badminton net at kiddie play time and he could spend an afternoon mentally painting Landel's face onto birdies with the kind of detail those tourist traps used to put names on rice grains. And then slamming them into the dirt.
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Mello had spent every moment since waking up at Landel's with something to do. The impossible, more often than not, but no, that was just the bugs talking.
"Here? Heh, that assumes fun is possible. Back home? Target practice. And I used to take my bike out on the PCH." He'd done that maybe twice, but S.T. didn't have to know that, and Mello frowned, hyper-aware, as always, of the possibility of someone feeling sorry for him. "Fun's for people who don't have shit to do. I haven't been one of those people in more than a decade. Why do you ask?"
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"Dude, you need to get out more. Nothing says even a child-prodigy workaholic serial career junkie can't have a few hobbies. If you don't find any you're going to keel over from a heart attack by the time you get to my age." Or land in the E.R. with ulcers and heartburn so bad he thought it was a heart attack. Either way, that was the fast track to burnout. S.T.'d been there, though not quite as bad.
"Even here. The location is shit but some of the people aren't bad." He shrugged. "Besides, networking. It's not all corporate doublespeak. Get to know the right people and you do less work."
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It wasn't as through he didn't enjoy things, it just seemed pointless to do anything for that sole purpose, when there was so much that needed doing, and so fucking few hours in the days here that he could spend doing it. All that enforced wasted time. The point about networking was a decent one, but Mello had yet to see firm evidence to contradict his belief that the only person he could really count on to get shit done was himself. The Institute's vagaries had a way of making people unreliable when they wouldn't otherwise have been.
"Besides, the only fun I'm interested in is making Landel and Aguilar pay for what they've done. And I intend to savor the hell out of that when it finally happens, so don't think I'm deprived. I wouldn't do things differently even if I could." He took another sip of coffee. "What do you consider ( ... )
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Angry beat depressed every day. If he pissed Mello off, he'd survive. Unless the kid was hiding freaky superpowers to go with the IQ score.
"If you don't enjoy anything, why bother? Me, I'd rather fight for shitty beer and my soul intact." He didn't get much chance to really let a crusade rip here. Saving the planet took a back seat to saving their own asses, and the planet seemed to be doing O.K. for itself, if he had anything like a theory of evolution that could bullshit zombies and leprechauns.
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Mello couldn't actually envision what he'd do in a world where Kira had been beaten. Doing nothing was appealing, but he knew he'd be able to stand it for about a day; S.T. was obviously wired differently. Mello had walked away from the only thing he'd ever wanted with all his soul (intact or not, and if it wasn't, it was a price he was willing to pay). Walked away, the bugs said, because you knew you'd lose if you stayed and fought for it. Because by your twisted logic, opting out of the race was the way to win it.
No. All the rules changed that day. And Mello had adapted, in ways the twit would never be able to. That wasn't surrender, and it wasn't opting out. It was recognizing that the board was bigger, and the game more complex, than anything anyone could win without getting their hands dirty. A lot like the one he'd been involuntary dragged into ( ... )
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"Hero brigade, huh." A fitting enough term for people who'd voluntarily attempt whatever challenge the basement represented. Opening the doors he and Matt had seen on that very same night Mello'd just mentioned fell firmly into the category of a waste of his time at Landel's, a distraction, because obviously they didn't lead to escape. Wherever or whatever the way out was, he was certain it wouldn't have a sign pointing to it like that, and increasingly sure it wasn't something that could be found, but something he'd have to create himself. "I've been down there before. What do they think they'll get out of it ( ... )
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If he'd been talking to Tess, or Bart, or anyone back home, it would be an excuse to work on his ego. Torch their houses, piss on their yapdogs, teach their kids to swear. Sandblast their names from every billboard, corporate HQ, and amusement park/opera endorsement they, let them rot in their well-deserved ignominy. Mello wasn't stupid. He wouldn't take it seriously. But that didn't guarantee he wouldn't think S.T. was serious. So he went with the sanitized-bio version. Bitchy, but legal. Also true ( ... )
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Small-town middle-of-the-road food or not, that soup smelled fucking divine, but Mello held back from diving into it (he almost literally wanted to, after that pink glop), for a very different reason than S.T., who looked like he simply wanted to savor it. Another nuance to Aguilar's game. He was the sort of person who'd claim the prisoners received perfectly adequate nutrition--there was one who probably knew how to work the press, much more cynically than S.T.--while inwardly counting on the menu to demoralize them further. And Mello, who hadn't been ( ... )
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GEE had some earnest Master's degrees in Economics kicking around after they didn't have the stomach for the stock market. They had big plans, that basically amounted to taxing crap. Might work, might not. People said they didn't want to bathe in poison, and then they bought hairspray by the case.
"You must feel right at home." He stopped sniffing his food long enough to cut off a chunk of pancake and dip it in the slick of melting butter on the top of the stack. "I take it that's why you don't have a problem with killing people."
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