hadriel_logs | Event Log: Keepsakes

Who: Everyone participating in the event!
What: The event log for the Keepsakes event!
Where: All around the city
When: October 15th-October 19th
Warnings: A bunch of random crap.

Well, Hope and Delight are messing with the door again, but at least this time dragons aren't involved, right? This attempt goes a bit better - sure, no one gets sent home, but if everyone will just look under their seats, they'll find a FREE [INSERT SOMETHING YOU MAYBE DIDN'T WANT AT ALL HERE]! Awesome! So nice! Yup, throughout these few days people will be finding things from home - something they loved, something they used all the time, something they hated, something they totally forgot they even had. All sorts of cool stuff!

Well, they might not actually find it. Their neighbor might, or a complete stranger. And who knows where it could turn up? At the park, half-buried? In the Silent Hill zone, kept safe by a horrifying monster? Or hey, maybe in somebody's underwear drawer. Awkward. Better try to find your stuff, or find the owner of whatever weird crap you found. It could be something important.

► This log covers October 15th-October 19th.
► Feel free to make your own logs, as well
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you somehow manage to die in this event, please let us know here, and also what the hell?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Uncanny is right. Mello doesn't step any closer, but he does crouch to the floor, unable to take his eyes off the bag for long, except to shift his gaze to L himself.]

When was this?

[L's eyes are also fixed on the bag, but he's aware of Mello's gaze. It prickles into him like a candle, benign for the most part, but still capable of causing pain when it's too close.]

Nineteen... eigthy-four? Eighty five?

[As is pretty typical for L, he doesn't say "when I was five, or six." He keeps it objective, impersonal. It was 1984 for the entire world, not just one abandoned orphan.]

Common conjecture is that, like most of the children in Wammy's House, I was orphaned. That's not exactly the case.

[There is a lot of mythology surrounding L, and not many facts were known, even to those who hoped to follow in his footsteps. Mello was unique among the children of Wammy's House in meeting the man as himself, and even that was just the one time. He doesn't know L's exact age, but he can estimate he's somewhere in his 20s based on appearance, and quick mental math places him as likely a very young child in 1984.

What L is disclosing to him now, this tiny clue of truth about himself - it feels to Mello like he's bestowing a great honor upon him, just like it felt when he was a child and L chose to recount for him those three stories, that of the LABB Murders that he wrote down for Near to find after his death and the other two that he didn't document. Mello shifts to sitting on the floor, one knee bent with his arm laid across the top of his knee. There's an uncommon note of gentleness in what he says next:]

Parental death is the most common way of creating an orphan, but it isn't the only way. Sometimes it's ... something else.

[Abandonment, mostly. Is that what L is telling him, that he was abandoned by his parents, and that's how he came under Watari's care? Mello swallows down the uncomfortable lump in his throat and watches the other man closely, gauging L's reaction to what he's said for confirmation that his guess is correct.]

[It likely wasn't something L ever meant to impart, to Mello or Near or anyone else, but Hadriel has a way of forcing certain dark things out into the open. He would have preferred to take this to his grave, and back in their world, he had, but now he's said enough that it would be strange not to say more, or acknowledge what Mello guesses and understands on his own.]

She might not have wanted to be a mother, but she definitely didn't want to be my mother.

[Sometimes, it really is that simple.]

The last time I looked her up, she was living in northern France with her husband and two children.

... Shit.

[It's a murmured curse, almost under his breath, and he briefly presses a hand to his mouth as he allows this confirmation to wash over him. Like the other children at the House, Mello assumed the famous orphan L became such in the same way as he and the other children there did. Abandonment seems much more cruel than having your parents stolen away by untimely death, and while there may be some justifiable cases where abandonment is understandable - economic or physical inability to care for a child, for example - simple lack of desire to raise one child in particular, as Mello takes what L tells him, is inexcusable, in his opinion.]

I didn't know. [Of course he didn't; how could he know?] That's - that's horrible.

[For all the ways Mello has felt unwanted over the years, he never once doubted that his own mother loved him very much, for the short number of years they had together.]

[It might be funny, if the mood wasn't so solemn. Because of course Mello didn't know; none of them did. To think of L that way would be to humanize him, unacceptable when he was supposed to be an idol they might someday attain the title of, if they were diligent and smart enough.]

It is what it is. I'm sure you're aware that it happens often enough in our world.

[L sounds tired as he normalizes his own private, personal tragedy. It could have happened to anyone; therefore, it's not a horrible injustice that has left a deep and damaging scar.]

[L wasn't just a faceless finish line for Mello - he only met the other man as himself once, but it was more than most were given, a glimpse of L as a flesh and blood person. And like then, being given this tiny scrap of who L-the-person is feels to Mello like a rare gift, despite the discomfort this revelation carries with it. He nods to L in acknowledgment of what he's said.]

We can't change the past. All we can do is learn from it.

[But what is there to be learned from something like this? That human beings are capable of exceptional cruelty? Mello already knew that.]

I won't say anything, of course - not even to Near. You can trust me.

[Mello isn't a trustworthy person, mainly by nurture, if you can classify the training he received at Wammy's House as such. But L is an exception - he's important. And so is keeping his secrets.]

[L doesn't comment on the first thing Mello says, because in his mind, the past doesn't always hold lessons. He likes to think that if he can learn from mistakes, he does, on the rare occasions he makes them, but the only thing he learned from being intentionally lost by the person who was supposed to love him was that sometimes, the world is cruel in ways that have no reason behind them. That sometimes, there is no logical explanation.]

I doubt very much that it would interest Near. My methods always interested him more than I did.

[It's something L knows innately, even though he wasn't present to witness Near's cold reaction to news of his death.]

Event Log: Keepsakes

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