Day 51: Lunch

[sanguinario]

Edward was glad to wake up to a period of respite. While he had been conscious during breakfast, he'd requested to remain in his room for extra "sleep", which had consisted waiting until the room was vacated to ingest the vial of Venom's blood. The vampire had lost his chance last night, but that might have been for the better; this way he wasn't

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[quarter_english]

L's eyebrows were obscured by his thatch of dark hair, and when he raised them, it had the disconcerting effect of making his eyes appear even larger than they already were. This owlish look could communicate, with variations in the tilt of his head and the set of his jaw and mouth, a gamut of emotions from surprise to disdain. At the moment, his expression was one of cool tolerance: an invitation for the person on the receiving end to state their business.

Mello might have scheduled this meeting. Why hadn't he bothered? A snap decision? The lack of communication from him over the previous few days had led L to believe that Mello hadn't made any strides in the investigation--nothing worth discussing, at any rate. What was the impetus now?

--If he wants to talk about visitors, he must have had one yesterday, L thought, and wondered if the visitor in question had been a parody of someone he knew. Not Watari. Maybe Roger?

He sighed, then extended his hand, relaxed and empty, palm up: an elegant gesture indicating the chair across from him. "Please stop hovering." He sounded more amiable than he felt. "Take a seat," he added, as an afterthought.

The bite of salad disappeared into his mouth. "I can only assume that you aren't asking me out of idle curiosity. Who was your visitor?"

[swornandbroken]

Mello set his tray down, then sat, completely forgetting to sprawl this time, mouth slightly downturned in dissatisfaction, though not set in the scowl he'd allow himself with anyone other than L. I don't do anything out of idle anything, he thought.

"Near," he said, and stabbed a chip with the plastic fork. "The imitation was close to perfect, but it wasn't him." It had been so close that Mello still wasn't a hundred percent convinced it hadn't been the little twit, but he wasn't about to give that away if he could help it. The idea was patently absurd, and he was certain that the main aim of visitors at all was psychological torture: the emotional response they'd evoke. Mello had fallen for it, enough that he inwardly simmered with embarrassment and rage, thinking about it. You can see how they're toying with your emotions, and it still fucking works. That's always been your weak point. L's known it all along. That's probably why he never picked you.

With a conscious effort to keep from hunching his shoulders, he popped the chip in his mouth, and focused on reporting the pure facts after he swallowed. "He claimed he'd never been here. Tried to tell me I was too smart to throw my life away on delusions, by which he meant the real world. He used the same name for me the staff uses. When I asked how they found him, he said he was in the public record." There. Dry, if strained, but unclouded by emotion. Except for the death grip his hand had curled into, in the sweatpants fabric at his knee, which L couldn't see. Mello unclenched his fist finger by finger, and tried to keep his expression blank.

[quarter_english]

L spoke around his latest bite of salad. "It's more likely that it was him, regardless of what he now claims. I was told that he was here in the past, and my source has turned out to be reliable." He paused to swallow. The raspberry vinaigrette was tangy without being fruity enough to make the salad taste like anything but salad; the greens weren't to his taste. He picked up one of the pommes frites with his fingertips, then dragged it through the dressing that had pooled on his plate, but did not yet raise it to his mouth.

"That is to say... there's a small possibility that my source was lying, but it would have been weird for him to choose to lie about that one thing, particularly when he knew that it was something I might check with other patients. No, not just weird--almost pathological, and I don't believe that was his psychology. Everything else he told me was accurate."

Mild frustration began to settle in, and L recognized that it was prompted by Mello's continuing failure to use Occam's razor when intepreting the Institute. It would always be simpler to suggest that a person was delusional, or (in light of the ongoing experimentation) a victim of brainwashing, than to assume that the person in question was in some way a "perfect imitation." Easiest of all would be to assume that Near had been acting, for his own reasons. There was no point in asking Near's age; if it had been anything other than what Mello had expected, Mello would have mentioned it already.

L frowned, then bit off half of the piece of potato.

"To answer your question: no, I haven't had a visitor." He waited a beat, chewing, before adding, "What have you managed to discover so far?"

[swornandbroken]

Mello had heard Near had been here before, from L, in fact, the intel originating with the previous-or-whatever-the-hell version of Matt. If L had independent corroboration of it, Mello had to believe it. No one in the chain had any reason to conceal something like that, and he would have trusted L's assessment of the validity of the claim, anyway.

"I just don't understand--" he started to burst out, but checked it.

"I don't think this was the same Near," he amended, aware he wouldn't usually couch it in such uncertain terms. It was a feeling he couldn't explain rationally. Near had always been the thorn in his side, the goad pushing him to do more, be better. There were myriad things he could have thrown in Mello's face to needle him. He hadn't done any of that; he'd stuck to the Landel's party line, in which everything Mello knew was real, at his core, so deeply he'd never even questioned it, was consigned to the land of psychosis. He took a bite of hamburger as he tried to find the words to elucidate all this.

"I know him." Better than I'd like, he thought, unbidden and unwanted. "And as far as he's concerned, I'm more useful to him out there than stuck here." He couldn't help the bitter twist his voice took at that, at the idea that Near was getting away with thinking he was using Mello for information, instead of the other way around. "The Near who came to visit me tried to tell me that it was all a delusion." Another glance around, and he leaned forward and lowered his voice. "The competition, the danger he was in, all of it. As if we were normal. As if we could live like normal people."

And yes, he did betray some strain on that last part, but there was nothing to be done for it now. If L didn't know that Mello would have chosen it all--Wammy's, the countless hours of pushing himself to his limits, the rivalry with Near, everything--over again, in a heartbeat, he hadn't been paying attention. And Mello doubted L was ever lax with his attention.

"The only thing I can conclude is that the visitors are a charade put on, I don't know how, to try to break us. I don't know what anyone else's experience has been with them. It's worth looking into, but I don't want to make it a priority." This begged a question Mello hoped L would ask, so that he wouldn't have to try to steer their conversation that way, and give away his own reasons for his interest.