(no subject)

-----

"Stand aside, please, I'm a doctor!"

Chaos. Pure, grainy, cheaply recorded chaos. The cellphone trembles violently with its owner's hands, and frightened shouting in Spanish from all around threatens to drown out the wails of a child. The dirty sidewalk is no place to treat the wounded.

The seven people bleeding out on the ground may not be alive to care, soon. The child screaming at a young couple's side is unhurt, but rightfully frightened.

Several someones pass in front of the camera. The owner moves to the side, and a loud male voice blares out, 'Are they alright? Are they alright?' when no one answers. The owner continues to move, and a frilly sleeve is pushed out of the way.

There's a man in a white labcoat kneeling over one of the bodies, pressing a cloth flat against a puddle of red.

'Hey, are they going to survive?' the phone owner repeats. The doctor snags the cuff of someone standing too close, and orders them to keep pressing down. They step forward with shaking hands and kneel also, and soon the doctor stands and moves on.

Someone's voice is rising and falling hysterically. There's shouting about police, and an ambulance. The camera turns to look, but it doesn't seem that either have arrived, and when it looks back several people have begun to grab shirts from the store's open sidewalk display, following the doctor's example.

The doctor is wearing a large woman's hat with a tag sticking out of it, now, conspicuously snatched from a knocked-over shelf. He's facing a direction that would normally let the camera see his profile, but the hat is big enough to hide all but his neck. He slows as he reaches a body that stares vacantly away--it's not the first he would've reached, but it is the first the camera has seen--and moves on.

Finally, there's the body that no one seems ready to approach, curled up and with its back to the crowd. Broken glass litters the ground around it, and when the doctor pushes it onto its back, he kicks a gun further out of reach.

Someone passes in front of the camera. "Hey..." The owner complains. No response, and the owner moves around. "Hey, why's he helping that fucker when there's people here who need help?"

The doctor's back is to the camera. It's impossible to see what he's doing until he glances towards the crowd, loops the hat's strap tightly around his jaw, and starts CPR.

No one stops or helps him. The camera continues to watch, eventually panning over the wounded, and the unhurt victims still milling around. Someone shouts about the police again, and more people are kneeling over the wounded victim's bodies, pressing down more cloth. The child has climbed into a sitting woman's lap, face buried in her hair.

One of makeshift medics calls out to the doctor tearfully, but they are ignored.

There's an outcry. The camera snaps back to the doctor, who's lifting his head from the shooter's chest, pushing down arms that have begun to move sluggishly. More shouting, with more than a couple of screams. The crowd is starting to shuffle back, and the doctor throws up a blood-soaked hand, shouting urgent assurances. The camera glimpses part of his face, and he's young, and very clearly aware of the new dangers--both from revived shooter, and the crowd.

"He's not armed!" Triple checking. The doctor kneels on his wrist, shifting the man to check underneath. Quadruple checking. "He has no more weapons! He's unconscious!"

The shooter's eyes are glazed but open, and the confusion in the crowd eddies and swirls. Before anyone can do anything, there's armed men in uniforms of the law shoving through the crowd, taking control of the situation. The crowd's din reaches a new high, and the man with the camera is forced back. It becomes impossible to see anything else, as people move back and shake the camera every which way.

There's only a glimpse left of the doctor left in the clip, and it's from one last ditch effort. The phone gets held high in the air, and it shows a white coat turned to one of the uniforms, hands forward, bloody, and earnestly reassuring.

The clip cuts out.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dead_black_eyes

It's too much of a clusterfuck to take in so early in the morning. That is, it would be if the clip's viewer adhered to a more typical schedule. L has never once been accused of this; he's been up for two nights straight, and strung-out on stimulants, his piercing attentiveness misses nothing.

His task force can't say as much. Operating poorly on too little rest, they have stolen a few hours here and there in attempts to keep up with their relentlessly obsessive boss. They no longer joke about L not being human; it is no longer funny. He has no family to go home to, no hobbies to pursue in his free time, no frivolous distractions to take some of that focus away from the case he's shouldered. He doesn't mourn it, maybe doesn't know enough about such matters to mourn it, and for that the police detectives working under him feel pity along with their obligatory respect for him. It's a strange dynamic, especially considering none of them are sure when he might be monitoring what's said out of fear that Kira is among them. The sentiments aren't spoken of openly, but exchanged in uneasy glances, frustrated sighs.

Genius, madman, child. I wonder which one we'll have to put up with today.

"Please rewind," L dictates crisply. "To a minute and forty-two seconds in."

Everyone is weary. No one immediately jumps to do so, but Soichiro Yagami, chief of the NPA, doggedly rises to his feet and reaches for the remote. Watari would be handling this, ordinarily, the man who seems to arrange the mundane details of life that L is too important to see to himself, but the man is old as well as human, and it is his turn to get some sleep.

"I don't speak Spanish," Aizawa grumbles. As the member of the task force who is the quickest to anger, he is the first to voice the shared restlessness of the other Japanese police working on this case.

"I took a couple semesters in college," Touta Matsuda volunteers. At 26 years of age, he is the youngest operative, excluding L himself, of course. He's met with icy, unimpressed silence.

"It's quite all right," L replies, overriding the awkwardness of Matsuda's attempt at helpfulness. "I am fluent in Spanish, and will translate the parts that are in fact relevant." the room's uncomfortable deflation is practically palpable; this is a common phenomenon. Part of what makes L so unrelateable is the knack he possesses for making highly difficult things look insultingly simple.

Mogi isn't a man of many words, but he breaks his observant silence as Soichiro presses "play." "There was coverage of that shooter while he was on his rampage. His face was visible and his name was broadcast on the news. Witnesses say that he collapsed and had no pulse. So... that sounds like a Kira killing, doesn't it?"

"Yes. It does," L agrees, reaching for his coffee, which has so much sugar in it that it's more of a paste than a drink. "But without exception, Kira's victims... the ones that we have seen... have all died. Attempts to restart their hearts have been unsuccessful. Autopsies have shown no evidence of blockages."

"So the logical conclusion is that this wasn't a Kira murder," Soichiro offers. L raises a hand, pointing a finger in the older detective's direction.

"It's fine logic, but that being said... does it make sense that this wouldn't be the work of Kira? He can kill from a distance, with a name and a face, both of which were available to him at the time the shooting was happening. It would be out of character for Kira to pass this one up."

"Maybe it means that Kira's heart attacks don't always kill," Aizawa said, sitting forward in his chair and lowering his head.

"I don't think so. He had no pulse; by all accounts, apparent and otherwise, this victim was dead until the doctor intervened."

"So... You want to take the victim in for questioning?" Matsuda asks. He is met with another dead silence, broken only by a heavy sigh from L.

"The doctor," the task force leader corrects tersely. "I think that at this point, the doctor is who we want to focus our attention on. He hid his face, whether to avoid Kira or Kira's pursuers, but that doesn't mean we can't still find him. Please wake Watari, as I believe we should proceed with this course of action immediately.

"Ryuzaki..." Matsuda says quietly, "he's only just gone to bed, not an hour ago..."

"Wake him," L repeats, leaving no room for dissent.

Edited Date: 2015-01-13 07:40 pm (UTC)

From:

evowhisperer

The news didn't report it as a Kira killing. They had no idea what they'd inadvertently witnessed, nor the minor miracle that it was for the shooter to be awake and alive the next day. Caesar was relieved that he'd successfully passed as an innocent doctor off the street, but it made it extremely hard to check up on his patient's status.

Footage from TV was useless. Hacked notes from the hospital were unhelpful: 'confused' and 'groggy' was sparse information at best, and it told him nothing of how the nanites were actually helping their host.

It wasn't enough. When nanites' self-purging timers eventually ran out five days later, the news reported that he'd died of a second heart attack, and Caesar only had theories. Had the nanites accidentally triggered a 'return to starting condition' protocol towards the end? Had they worked perfectly, and the man just hadn't been able to survive without their forcing hand? Had the removal of the nanites' infuence been too sudden, should he have programmed in a release-and-engaging protocol to wean the host from them? It was impossible to tell. Cesar hadn't even kept a control group for himself when he'd impulsively forced the pill capsules down his throat, so as far as Caesar knew, the nanites were still in there, beating the man's heart in a cooling corpse.

That would make for a strange coroner's report. Caesar chuckled at the dark image, and then tried not to think about it.

If there was one good thing that came of this mess, it's that it rekindled what had before only been a passing interest. Mysterious heart attacks, somehow caused by Kira, but leaving the body undamaged. It wasn't like cancer, which required active DNA therapy. It wasn't like brain damage; the only thing that these hosts theoretically needed was to be alive again.

'Alive and functioning normally' protocols had been in the old program libraries. It was one of the ones that had seemed useless, since none of it would help someone greviously injured. Here, though, most of Caesar's work was figuring out placement and delivery.... All it took was a few adjustments.

It felt good.

The news was suddenly both fascinating and frustrating. Kira and L, the two new superstars of the media. Depending on who you asked, both were victim and oppressor, and it was nearly impossible to get details on the actual deaths they were in conflict over. Caesar followed it anyway, adding it to the flood of his newsfeeds...

... And then, one day...

Applause. The talkshow had a generic sitting area, with a potted plant between the two men. Caesar's TV is top of the line, but he can still pick out pixellation that his own monitors never have.

"Dr. Montenegro, what was going through your head when you developed this cure?"

Spanish. It was from a national Argentinan station.

"Well, Fabio, the first thing I thought was to wonder: Kira can't be doing this by magic. He's human, just like you and me! So I thought to myself, Rogelio, if man can kill these people--it's our job to save these people."

Caesar leaned back against a worktable's counter, arms folded and ears listening. The crowd was applauding, and both men waited to be able to speak.

"That's amazing! Truly, a doctor through and through. But Dr Montenegro, I'm sure some of our viewers have been wondering: does this mean you're against Kira's actions?"

"Against it, in favor of it--does it matter?" Montenegro lifts his hands. "Whatever Kira does, if one man has a weapon, then sooner or later, others will too! This is planning ahead. This is protection of my family! I have a wife and daughter, Fabio, as I'm sure many of you do, too. They've had their vaccinations and regular checkups. It would be foolish not to think the new diseases to be just as dangerous as the old!"

Applause. Fabio-the-host looked surprised and impressed.

"Diseases? So your hospital has really found the actual cause of death?"

"They have." Montenegro was stroking his beard. "It's a lesser known genetic condition, and one of the rarest known causes of stillborn infants. When Kira infects his victims, it rewrites key parts of their genetic code's protein sequences, like Mad Cow disease! All it takes is a few harmful vectors to spread to a key part of a patient's body. We'd never noticed it, because we'd never known to look."

"Now, let me say for the record, none of this is contageous!" Cries from the crowd die down, and Montenegro lifts his hands. "None of it's contageous. It stays within the host, and we know for a fact that it's curable."

"For a fact?" Fabio asks, as he's clearly supposed to. The crowd is cheering, and Montenegro waits for a chance to speak.

"Yes, Fabio, for a fact! In fact, the reason why we didn't come forward to you with this sooner is because it's very difficult to test. Obviously, Kira's the only one who can test this for us, and it was very difficult to prove... Then, just this last Thursday, we had the opportunity."

"This Thursday?"

The screen behind them is a projector. Photos of a damaged storefront, and the shooter on a hospital gurney beside them.

"Few people are aware of it, but this man was nearly Kira's victim!"

Shock. No applause is being requested, but the people at the corner of the shot are exchanging glances. Caesar is surprised, himself: he hadn't expected anyone to notice when the man had survived.

"He would have been, had he not been brought to my hospital's Emergency Room. We knew his condition immediately, and we were just in time."

"So you saved him?"

"Yes! We saved him to stand trial for his crimes. And he would have, had he not died of a preexisting condition several days later!"

Applause. Montenegro lifts a small plate made of blue plastic, with a white pill inset at its center. A pharmaceutical company's logo is printed near the top. 'Hippocrates', says the stylized text. The applause grows louder.

The host gestures. "Ladies and Gentlemen, these are truly remarkable times we live in. For you see..."

Cesar turns back to the workdesk, listening to the show with half an ear: he doesn't need a sales pitch, and he'd rather get the details of the medication directly from their databases, anyway. In a few seconds he has five different windows open, each with search terms to dig into what he's just heard. He's turning on a second computer, planning to direct it at the pharmaceutical's first security walls, when he hears it.

"... like tiny mineral agents, all working together!"

Caesar freezes.

"Wow! You know, doctor, they almost look like tiny machines!"

"That's because they are!" The projector behind them is showing a blood sample with a magnification number in a corner. The magnification is wrong, and Caesar's mouth is dry.

"Chemical micromachines, carrying out simple pruning tasks. We've been developing this technology in the international community for years, and..."

There they are. Broken nanomachines--they've already fallen apart at this point, and they look far more primitive than they were when they were active, like broken shards of an elaborate sculpture. Caesar can see the edge of a white blood cell along the right side of the image, and the photo has shrunk it so that the nanites fit the size scale that the talkshow is claiming.

A strange calm settles over him, and he abandons his computers, walking right up to the LCD monitor. The faces continue to speak, but none of it's anything important. Caesar folds one arm, nibbling the edge of a thumbnail.

He should've realized someone would pick up on his nanites. It's just his luck that it's a dishonest doctor, promising a cure that's literally impossible to deliver. Caesar can barely deliver, and he's the one sitting at their source... This is cruel.

Should he say anything?

And say what? 'I have the cure, but I'm not going to share? You should also all know that I have impossible technology that could revolutionize the world, and I'm not share any of that for your own good'? And he would refuse it: human nature was as predictable as a covalent chemical reaction. He'd decided when he arrived that if it came own to it, he would either destroy his technology or flee to the nearest new dimension. With his dimensional disruptor out of commission, his only option now would be to destroy it.

Caesar avoids thinking about that option. He'd like to think he's not superficial, and that he would put the needs of the many over his own selfish desires, but he knows he would likely spend the rest of his life trying to recreate the one thing he'd never achieve. It would be a slow torture, always reaching, but never finding.

Simply put, it's something he intends to prevent from the start. No one will ever know.

Caesar turns back to his computers, mind churning like a beehive. Perhaps there are grains of truth in any of the man's explanations, perhaps there aren't. Couldn't there be some way of exposing him without giving away everything he's trying to keep safe? Perhaps. He needs to do more research, first, and then perhaps a grocery run. This might take a while, and it's not like people aren't going to find out he's a sham when he can't deliver. In fact, if he waits long enough, people will find out the truth regardless. It would be simple, and probably even relaxing.

... He's not sure if he likes 'relaxing'. It takes too long, and it couldn't hurt to at least look into discrediting him. A hack like that probably hasn't covered even half his bases. Maybe Cesar can point out something that even a student with a good textbook could notice.

Wouldn't that be an insult?

---------

It's not quite a day later that an untraceable email arrives at the talkshow's public inbox. The pharmacy and a local news station get the same email, too. It has a screen capture of the talkshow's blood-sample presentation, with a little circle drawn digitally.

'Those pictures are doctored. They shrank the basophil.' Basophil--the white blood cell on the right.

The circle is around a tendril on the left. 'This looks like an activated platelet, but it's not.'

'It's actually a virus.'

Edited (.... I'm not even gonna keep apologizing in this edit thing, at this point.) Date: 2015-01-14 07:31 am (UTC)

From:

dead_black_eyes

Aizawa furrows his brow, arms crossed as he watches over L's hunched shoulder. "Do you think he'll take the bait?"

"If I didn't consider it a likelihood, Mr. Aizawa, I would not be using a human life as a betting chip."

"But Ryuzaki," Matsuda cuts in, "isn't that 'doctor' just another death row inmate whose execution was scheduled for today?"

"Yes," L replies. "But that doesn't change the fact that he is being both brave and useful, especially after Lind L. Tailor's onscreen death.

"What do you think we can expect, now that this course of action has been set in motion?" Soichiro asks quietly, as Watari busily refills L's dwindling coffee mug.

"A move from someone," L answers, beginning to drop sugar cubes into the black liquid as he speaks. "Whether that's Kira or the actual healer who revived that shooter, someone will respond to this, probably in a highly visible manner. Either Kira will be insulted that someone tried to stand in his way, or someone who is due credit for this technology will see another man claiming it, and try to do something about either the misplaced glory or the potential for the spread of misinformation."

"Do no harm," Mogi says with an understanding nod. "Any real doctor would be disgusted by this report."

"It's highly possible that he's not a real doctor," L says, and every man in the room, save for Watari, stiffens in surprise and disbelief. "His lab coat was new and crisp, and as it happens there's a medical supplies store very near the site of the shooting. I pulled the store's inventory records, and there is in fact a lab jacket that was unaccounted for. Delivered with the shipment, placed on the shelves, but not sold, so... presumed misplaced, or stolen."

"Any security footage from the store's surveillance cameras?" asks Aizawa.

"Negative. Unfortunately, none exists. The only footage of the mysterious savior is what the media cameras glimpsed."

"Ryuzaki," Watari says, "Not to interrupt, but we have received a forwarded email from the television station that aired the interview. You told me to alert you if and when this happened."

"Yes, that is correct. What is the message, and are you able to determine its original source?"

"I'm afraid not," the old man replies. "It's untraceable, but the message is..."

He reads it in a clear, crisp voice. L's head tilts so far to the side he resembles some kind of owl, moreso than usual.

"So he figured it out," L said quietly. "And gave us another clue, but... maybe not the clue we needed at this moment."

Almost immediately, Watari receives another notification, and when he speaks again, his voice is somber. "Ryuzaki, I've just received word that our 'doctor' has died, reportedly of a heart attack."

"Turn on the news," L says, mouth set in a hard line as Watari complies. It is all over the news, and this time, the concept that Kira was involved is being entertained left and right. Sakura TV, alone of the channels, has a special message that they want to air, and when they do, it is conveyed via a low, scrambled voice.

I AM THE SECOND KIRA. I SUPPORT KIRA AND AIM TO HELP HIM, AND I WILL CUT DOWN ANYONE WHO STANDS IN HIS WAY. ONCE HE HAS PASSED JUDGMENT, ANY ATTEMPT TO REVERSE THAT JUDGMENT IS AN ACT OF BLASPHEMY PUNISHABLE BY DEATH. DR. MONTENEGRO'S FATE DOESN'T NEED TO BE YOURS; IF YOU DON'T TRY TO TAMPER WITH KIRA'S JUDGMENTS, AND JOIN ME IN SUPPORTING HIS HOLY MISSION, YOU WILL BE SPARED.

From:

evowhisperer

The flight from Argentina to Japan is twenty three hours long, and most of those are spent with snatches of footage replaying themselves in his mind. It took him twenty minutes after seeing the 'Specials' to actually start packing for the trip. It'd taken him 0.2 seconds to know, without a doubt, that there was no going back.

Dr. Montenegro was dead. Caesar could have prevented it. He didn't.

... Join me in supporting his Holy Mission, you will be spared.

Spared. As though it were a gift to be allowed to survive. In a way it might be, if one assumed that being gifted with nanites was equivalent to survival. He knows he can't release more nanites than he already has, so that sort of 'Salvation' isn't an option, but there's other ways he can help. If he can find the way Kira kills--the real way, not the one manufactured for daytime TV--then he'd be removing the serpent's fangs.

Japan is cold at this time of year. Caesar's had enough experience with travelling that he knew to bring a coat, but he stands out in other ways: He's tall, even back home. He's latino.

He zips his coat up and pulls the collar over his mouth and nose, buys a hat, and starts looking for a hotel. At least he still speaks Japanese, or this trip would be a lot more difficult than it needed to be.

A new base of operations isn't difficult to set up, and within hours Caesar already knows his next stops. He takes his time: after all, he's closer to Kira's home territory here, isn't he? The news is significantly louder in gushing about Kira, here, and Caesar notes that he's started watching a lot of Sakura TV. Conversations about Kira tease the edges of his hearing when he leaves his room. It's enjoyable, in a twisted way: it's like he's in Kira Central, perfectly placed to continue his research. It wouldn't do to be hasty, when there's already so much at stake.

The first real stop is the farthest morgue in the city. New bodies of prisoners arrived earlier that day, and the schedule Caesar hacked from their servers was easy to adjust. It wasn't that he outright dismissed the guards, he just--rearranged them. Better that than the alternatives he brought with, just in case.

He was in and out, pausing and visibly reacting at the sight of a body in the process of being autopsied, and staying still next to Kira's victims. He holds up a little device in both hands, tapping buttons until they give a satisfactory answer. A surgical mask and plenty of warm clothes hid his identity. Then he returned anything he moved to its original position, and left.

The data lasts him several days. The next morgue is in a different part of town.

Again, fresh prisoners.

From:

dead_black_eyes

If L's beleaguered Task Force was run ragged before, they are absolutely beyond the point of worn-out now. The only exception is L himself, and perhaps Watari, though the others operate under the suspicion that the elderly British gentleman is simply very adept at keeping a stiff upper lip and concealing his exhaustion and stress. The robotic, driven obsession is a trait unique to the detective; in the last short while, he's encountered a prime suspect who fits his psychological profile of Kira at his university, been faced with the appearance of a "second" Kira he'd deduced to be allied with but motivated differently from the original, and he is still running with the micro-robot theory for how Kira killed and how his victims could be revived (if only temporarily). It's a punishing to-do list, but the only indicator of how it affects him is the growing piles of high-sugar, high-calorie foods Watari stacks near him while he works.

"Ryuzkai," Soichiro asks. "Do you really think that my son could be Kira?"

"He claims to know nothing about the machines that were found... though he admitted to sharing my interest in them. It's likely that he saw through my suspicion of him and decided that showing no interest in them at all would be even more suspicious..."

"It sounds to me like you really want to pin it on this kid," Aizawa says, narrowing his eyes under his bushy hairline. "The evidence just doesn't support him; what we have is embarrassingly circumstantial. I wouldn't think that someone with your reputation would latch onto it this way. None of us are 'the great detective L', but we're no gumshoes, either."

"Aizawa..." Matsuda says fretfully, glancing L's way, waiting for the hammer to drop at the insubordination. It does not; in fact, L's demeanor doesn't change in the least.

"And what would you suggest, Mr. Aizawa?" he inquires.

"You should really be trying harder to find that doctor. The one using the machines to heal that heart attack victim."

"You believe that we are not? Since the broadcast in which the Second Kira announced himself, all we can do is wait for him to reveal himself at this point. While that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to pursue other leads."

Aizawa huffs impatiently. "Maybe, but I just feel like there's more we could be doing while we are waiting for a move."

"Kira started off experimenting," L muses. "I think it's more than likely that this doctor fellow would want to experiment, too. Especially considering that the shooter expired a few days later of a heart attack... I think he'd be looking for a more permanent fix. And we have an advantage in tracking him that we don't have when tracking Kira; Kira strikes unseen and from a distance and so we can't easily predict where he'll strike without lives being on the line, but when Kira's victims are already dead... well. There's one place most of them end up, isn't there, Mr. Matsuda?"

"The... morgue?"

"Since Kira's killings have grown more concentrated in Japan since I called him out as being himself Japanese, I've had Watari put cameras in all the major ones, and redirected the bodies of Kira's victims to the most major ones. While we are confined, for the moment, to watching and waiting, I don't believe we will be watching and waiting very long."

From:

evowhisperer

Caesar is not a detective. He's not a cop, security specialist, or even a very good common thief.

He doesn't see the cameras. They record him for several visits, always at major morgues, always with no one on the ground ever coming close. Occasionally Caesar will take samples of fluids and tissues, storing them in a well-padded case. Usually he sweeps the bodies with a phone-like device, lingering over the heart.

Then comes a time where there's a victim that's in the process of an autopsy. The body's organs have been emptied through an opening along their front, each one packaged and ready for testing. After freezing at the sight of the caved in thorax, Caesar lifts his phone, looking around. It takes him to some refrigerators by the wall, which he starts opening one by one, obviously searching.

It's not an in-and-out night. Caesar's watch beeps, and he grabs a packaged liver, unwrapping it with forced calm.

From:

dead_black_eyes

Conversely, L is all of those things to the point where it makes a difference, and he's very good at the skill sets that accompany them. A few strings pulled, a character created, several books read and videos voraciously absorbed, and he was ready to step into the guise of a new temporary profession. It's one that suits him uncannily well, to the point where it actually disgusted some members of his Task Force, but he insisted on taking the role himself, rather than sending a proxy, just as he had when it came time to confront Light Yagami at his university.

He cuts an odd, angular figure in his fake wire-frame glasses and white lab coat, which is, purposely, the same brand and color as the one that had been stolen from the medical supplies store in Argentina. He can pass for Japanese from behind, with his shaggy, straight dark hair and slender frame, but his skin tone, round eyes and prominent nose speak of the western world rather than the east. He's noticed a pattern, because this is what he excels at, even if Caeser was trying pointedly to avoid revealing anything like that. Always afterhours, recognized by none of the normal employees, always collecting negligible samples, and tonight, L intends to speak with him.

He unlocks the otherwise deserted lab and enters, too quickly for Caeser to hear and hide. At first, he behaves like he doesn't notice the other man, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and glancing along the rows of drawers. He begins to pull one open, examining the tag on an unshriveled toe with pink-painted nails, but he stiffens, glances up, and exclaims loudly when he "notices" he's not alone in the lab.

Altogether, it's a very convincing performance. He slams the drawer shut, looking glaringly like someone caught in a very dubious act.

"What are you doing here? It's after-hours, and... you don't work here. I would have seen you."

It smacks of someone desperately trying to change the subject, divert the scrutiny from himself.

From:

evowhisperer

Caesar almost doesn't bat an eye. Almost, because he does react, and when L turns around, Cesar's face is still pale, and there's still sweat at his temples. His (swiftly regained) calm is a lie.

"Dr. Yamanaka asked me to come in late." The words are fluent, if accented. "I'm double checking results, away from the day crowd."

Caesar's eyebrow arches, and his eyes snap briefly to the drawer L just pressed shut. This scene playing out before him stinks of something worse than the roomfull of corpses, and his stomach turns.

"What are you doing here?"

Edited Date: 2015-01-22 10:15 am (UTC)

From:

dead_black_eyes

L bites his lip, hollow-eyed gaze lingering on the tells in Cesar's expression. He stares just long enough to hint that he doubts that Dr. Yamanaka had anything to do with Caesar's presence here tonight. But inevitably, he has to go on the defensive when the young man, fairly, turns the scrutiny back on him.

"Not what you seem to think," he responds, rolling his eyes. "People just love that mortician stereotype, but I work here, like you, and like you, I have a good reason to be here afterhours. But it's strange... I know Dr. Yamanaka, and he never said anything about someone coming in tonight. Since I usually work the graveyard shift, he usually keeps me up to date on these things."

From:

evowhisperer

"Actually, your shift was canceled. There must've been some confusion in sending out your notification, or you'd have known that before coming here." He puts his hands on his hips, curling the one with liver juices so that it doesn't actually touch his coat.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable, unflapped, and unconcerned. Clearly this is all just a regular mistake, and can be resolved with just as little fuss.

From:

dead_black_eyes

L's nonexistent brows shoot up; admittedly, he's surprised and maybe even bizarrely impressed by the audacity it takes to tell a stranger when he works or doesn't work. "I never did receive a notification," he admits. "They never do these things last minute, the... cadavers can wait, obviously, but the thing about death is that it's always occurring and we only have so many drawers. Especially lately."

The implication is an obvious one.

"If you got the notification, perhaps you can show me. It would help me plan my workload more efficiently, since I was going to do a lot tonight and hearing that my shift was canceled is not good news."

From:

evowhisperer

"Sorry." Audacity? This is the man with the cojones to storm Providence armed with nothing but a strong magnet and a cellphone. He doesn't miss a beat now, grimacing.

"I'm afraid that might not be possible: I left my laptop at my regular office, and last I checked the computer here wasn't accepting my access code. Perhaps you could log on, and I could sign into my inbox from there?"

He has to get out of here. If this man had kicked up less of a fuss he might've considered finishing his collection, but at this point he just wants to leave.

From:

dead_black_eyes

He nods once, accepting the apology, and therefore elevating himself as the one in the morgue who has some actual authority.

"Not accepting your access code...?" he echoes, sounding remarkably surprised. Maybe too surprised. Imagine that. You can't get into the computer in a place you don't belong.

Let's see where this is going.

"Sure," he replies easily, with just the barest hint of a smirk. "That's probably happened before at some point. Just show me your inbox once I've logged into the database; it'll help me a lot."

More than you might know.