Day 56: Twin Pines Restaurant (late afternoon)
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.
He pulled a newspaper -- the local rag -- out of his bag and started flipping through. Red Grooten would be right at home. Maybe his best weapon wasn't crappy little silver souvenirs, but a typewriter. Drop a tell-all off with the right people. Just enough juicy little details to freak out the locals. No prisons, no sci-fi, no patient mistreatment. Imply the Institute was dumping trash in the park that might include hypodermics with sedative residue.
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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. Smaller was better, anyway. Use only the people you could trust, and no one would leak anything. S.T. may have believed that murder was bad PR, but Mello was sure he was all for cutting the figurative head off the Institute and getting the hell out while the body was hitting the floor.
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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 fun around here?"
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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.
"I wouldn't mind blowing some shit up, though. Between the two of us, we ought to be able to manage that. As long as you don't object to it having a purpose in addition to fun." Half a grin, gone almost immediately; S.T. would have to work harder than that to offend him more than the Institute had done. "And I am an asshole, but I'm not ungrateful."
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Basco Fiasco, more accurately. That's what one of them had called it, and then the next day it had been everywhere. S.T. hadn't argued, since it put most of the blame right where it belonged, and the Groveler's campaign had tanked in New Hampshire. He'd given them all the finger. Then he threw the cameras and the microphones out of Debbie's MGH suite. Apparently that still didn't make up for bringing a Globe with both of their faces above the fold the first day instead of flowers, but if he couldn't be in bed with her, neither could the press corps.
"Explosives are easy." Getting to the lab had thrown out more traffic snarls than I-93 during rush hour, but as long as they got their hands on the goods he could do production on safer ground. "Call me after I've managed to not die playing basement chauffeur for the hero brigade." Mostly-hero brigade, but as long as Two-Face was acting like a good guy S.T. would give him the benefit of the doubt.
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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?"
This wasn't the first time S.T. had seemed more aware of the media (and slightly bitter towards it) than most people. "And what is it you do where you come from?" This wasn't something he often asked, not wanting to answer it for himself, but he was curious how S.T. was using his particular set of skills. Pacifists who knew their way around explosives and had, from the sound of things, ended up under scrutiny weren't a dime a dozen, not even here, where the atypical was typical.
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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.
"We -- GEE International -- take on the toxic overlords from our radical digs in a Cambridge office. Someone spills something, and then someone spills it to us, and we pack up a truck and I go take a look. Sometimes all aboveboard -- permits and papers and uniformed coffee-carriers. Sometimes I don't ask."
"When," not if, "we find them turning legal limits into inside jokes and insider trading, we might go a little bit further. Block up a pipe, after it leaves company property. Take a few samples, first."
Then came the fun part, if you were Sangamon Taylor. Sure, the spy-movie stuff was fun. He didn't argue that. Though he hadn't been able to take the smell of the damn suit (wet, not monkey) being in his closet for a good month or so. Then he'd had a few beers and worn it to the GEE picnic. (Which was a glorified term for food-truck Chinese from hacker land under perfumed clouds of Eau de Shit, better known as the Charles.) But the later part he actually got to do something with his degrees. Double-check the toxic cocktail, and then explain it to his adoring public.
"Once they've worked up a good self-righteous rage, we haul them in front of the cameras. Cancer's a buzzkill, man, and everyone knows it. Lawyers, too, but the cameras are more important."
Some time during his five-minute version of life as a Toxic Avenger, the food showed up. S.T. ignored it for another thirty seconds, to prove he could, and then inhaled deeply. The smell was possibly better at clogging arteries than he was at pipes. Or at least it seemed that way. He took another breath. A monk that could live on sausage fumes alone. Yeah.
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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 forced to worry about anything as mundane as having enough food to survive in years, and whose memories of the time when he had been were unpleasant, to say the least, had to show, if only to himself, that the gambit wasn't working.
One bite, and he had to concede the idea was a good one, if fat and something he could chew could taste this damn good after only days (it could still be counted in hours, really) of deprivation, but he put the spoon down deliberately. He owed S.T. an answer of his own, even though the question hadn't been asked, and he owed more than his standard description of himself as the guy who made shit happen.
"I was supposed to be a detective." Half a shrug, self-consciously indifferent. "Then the world went to shit, and I had to find less conventional ways to serve justice." Oh yes, because justice, not revenge, is your motivation, the bugs said. Mello ignored them, but frowned, and maybe answering them was part of why he went on. "The system was totally fucked, so I stepped outside it."
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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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Instinctive to use the past tense to refer to his world, by now, and Mello had caught himself doing it before. This remained unacceptable; not even two weeks here, and he was already resigned to it on some level? It was worse than having consciously decided; it was insidious, creeping in past his defenses, which were considerable.
Not as considerable as you'd like to think, came the almost-expected murmur from the back of his mind. Mello frowned into the soup bowl, and took another bite.
"So no. I'll never feel at home here." He knew it had just been a figure of speech; he was also perfectly aware that his rejection of it was more for his own benefit than S.T.'s, and that S.T. was probably sharp enough to pick up on that. "The other side could cheat there, too. Hell, they could cheat in ways you'd have to call supernatural. But not like this." Not so that Mello could throw everything he had into the fight and still not feel he was getting anywhere. Was wasting time deliberately really any worse? "Hm, maybe you have a point about fun, after all."
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