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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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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Trying wasn't all that mattered either. None of that kindergarten everyone-wins New Games bullshit. But no-shows never won, and if you worked yourself into paranoid catatonia you weren't going anywhere.
Mello wanted to be convinced. S.T. could oblige.
"Either your crusade will still be there when these bastards let us go, or it won't." Or they'd flush their extra specimens down the drain, but Mello knew that was the option that they didn't talk about. Especially over a plateful of pork sausages. There was recycling and there was recycling. Mystery meat and Soylent Pink.
"Life's too short to spend it all miserable." He'd have said sober, but chemical relaxation might not be his thing. "Go be a fucking teenager for once."
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