Ficlet Eight: Brat Prince
Author's Note: This is another of those stories that came to me on the bus to school. I knocked it around a bit in my head and ran it past Kokoro-kun, and it never came to anything until now. It's slightly far-fetched and more than a bit ridiculous. But I wanted to write it.
Disclaimer: I disclaim the title of this story. It does not belong to me, nor does the original bearer of the title 'brat prince' have anything to do with this story. (God Forbid.) I also don't own L; any original characters (AKA, the rest of the cast) are of my own invention.
ON WITH THE SHOW!
Grace Anderson, Ph. D, was delighted to get the call from her old friend Sean Wellmar. Having built up a successful psychological practice only to pass it off in order to retire briefly and take some well-earned rest, she had underestimated just how dull 'rest' actually was, when you got right down to it. Unwilling to admit defeat in her attempt at relaxation, she had still balked at returning to the daily grind of active practice.
She was perfectly happy, then, to take up child psychology under the authority of an old family friend, whom, she had heard, had taken on the directorship of a British orphanage. Fancying a change of weather from southern Georgia, she looked into renting an apartment and crossed the Atlantic for a couple of years. It didn't take her long to get settled in, and she took a week and a half to learn her way around her new hometown before driving to her latest job.
Arriving early on a Wednesday, she was met literally at the door by Sean, who was still definitely the family friend who had taken her to movies and playscapes when her father hadn't had the time, but was looking a little run down.
"Grace, you're looking well!" he greeted her with a smile and a slap on the back.
"You too, Uncle Sean." Although they weren't actually related, she had fallen into the habit of calling him that as a child, as he was around so often. "So, shall I get right to work, or are you going to give me the tour?"
He did take time out of his day to escort her around campus, familiarize her with the indoor layout, and brief her on the kids' daily schedules, which quite consumed the morning. After lunch, they went over the files that the last resident counselor had left.
Grace eyed the file cabinet with a look of disgust. "Why don't you tell me the high points so I know what to look for? That way I won't just have to start with 'A' and read everything."
Wellmar snorted as if he wished he had someone to give him the short version, but obliged, listing a few names and adding brief descriptions of what he'd been told.
"Ok," Grace muttered, making notes on a legal pad she'd found. "That doesn't sound too bad—come to think of it, Uncle Sean, why are you suddenly looking for a counselor? Did the last one get married, or something?" That had happened at her office, and she'd spent a week alternately cursing the girl for dumping her patients without any warning and empathizing over the chaos of wedding plans, depending on who was listening.
"Ah," said Wellmar. "You see…no."
"I thought that list sounded too good to be true," Grace scolded. "There's always one or two real hard cases, aren't there?"
Wellmar actually covered his face and sighed. "Oh God. You have no idea. Tim Kiger claimed that if he didn't get out, he'd…what was it he said? Oh yes—'someone will get shot. It might be me, but it'll probably be him.' Strictly off the record, of course, and he was very drunk. But I don't blame him."
Grace leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and gave him her best un-amused-parent stare. "Start talking."
Wellmar heaved another sigh. "The operative words are probably 'unholy terror'."
"Name?" Against her will, Grace found herself reaching for the filing cabinet.
"See, that's the thing. No one really knows. The paperwork was muddled when he was transferred here—when we called the other place and asked, they said it was just as messed up when they had him. He'll answer to L."
"L?" Grace inquired skeptically. "Just an initial?"
"When he answers," Wellmar specified. "When anyone works up the courage to deal with him."
"Violent?"
"No. Worse. Smart."
"Smart."
"Impossibly so. Let me give you an example." Wellmar took his face out of his hands and extended them to her as if his example were written on his palms. "Tim was scared silly of him because—get this—he claimed that the child could read his mind."
"This Kiger needs some help of his own," Grace inserted sarcastically.
"No, really. L would say things in chorus with him—unprompted. I heard it myself. Very creepy."
"Things…like catchphrases? Common sentences?"
"Full sentences. When I finally got a straight answer out of him—which took a while—he said that Kiger should strive to be less predictable."
"That sounds like a quote," Grace noted.
"It is."
"How old is this kid 'L'?" She was betting on ten, eleven maybe. Children younger than that didn't use words like 'strive'.
Wellmar looked her straight in the eye. "He's six. Until last year, we thought he was dumb in every sense of the word, because he never spoke, didn't react to things, and slept through the day if given half the chance. Then we had a really bad thunderstorm that took out the power. The children panicked, so we had to take roll, and we found out that there was one child missing—L, of course. It took us an hour and a half to find him: he was reading some adult novel by flashlight in the library. Since the main lights were off, he hadn't even noticed the blackout."
She was now almost sure that Uncle Sean was pulling a harmless prank on her, so Grace played along: "Seems I've got to meet him. Where do you think I can find him around now?"
"Well, you know the study I said was kept unused except for impressing possible donors?"
"Yes. Why would he be there?"
"He likes the other children about as much as they like him. Since we don't use it, he lives in there mostly. Reading."
If Grace had bet on her assumption that Wellmar was making this impossible kid up, she would have lost the money. When they had left the counselor's office and gone down to the second floor where the study was, Wellmar stood aside and beckoned her in with a sardonic smile and a "Try not to lose your temper."
"Hello?" Grace called as the door closed behind her. Surveying the room, she took in the wall-to-wall bookshelves stuffed with classics, nonfiction, reference texts, and a scattering of modern novels; the comfortable chairs; the desk; the fireplace with adjacent rug; and, under her feet, what resembled the debris of a preteen Hallowe'en party.
"Anyone home? I'm Grace." There were books on the floor, stacked haphazardly. One or two had been left open. Pieces of paper held places in others. There were also newspapers littering the floor, along with one or two magazines.
The child in the chair made no move to answer her, nor even acknowledge her presence.
Trying to avoid staring directly, Grace noted her impressions: small, scrawny, overlong black hair that hadn't seen scissors or brush in a while; a shirt too big for him, bearing faint stains of chocolate, perhaps icing.
There was a large book propped up against his knees, which were drawn up onto the chair. He didn't take his eyes off it to look up and notice her.
"Can I see what you're reading? Is it interesting?"
No answer.
Grace tried a few more questions, trying to find something he'd respond to. As it turned out, the common ground was annoyance.
"You," the child said, in perfect, clipped British English, "are interfering with my enjoyment of this book. Go away."
No, six-year-olds didn't talk like that—at least, they didn't use that level of vocabulary. It was made all the more surreal by the fact that the boy had the remains of a preschool lisp, which she thought he was trying very hard to correct for. "No. How old are you?"
"Six. Go away."
"What part of no didn't you understand?"
"The declarative negative."
"Someone so intelligent shouldn't be so rude," she told him, offended despite herself. She'd been spit at and kicked. She'd been sworn at by hulking, surly teenagers. She had kept her cool regardless.
This brilliant little devil child had totally infuriated her in four sentences and a word.
"And I'm not going to stand here and be insulted," she finished.
Grace had turned on her heel and stormed towards the door before realizing that she was doing exactly what he wanted her to, and had therefore lost. She reversed her steps.
"The door is in the other direction," L informed her, still reading.
"Why," Grace demanded, "does anyone put up with you?"
"They don't," L replied coolly, meeting her gaze for the first time. He had very large, matte black eyes. "They have more sense than to bother me."
There was absolutely no way to reply to that. She had lost this one. Badly.
"Told you," Wellmar said glumly as she turned around to give the far side of the door a poisonous glare.
"He's a nightmare!" Grace shouted a week later, ten minutes after storming out of the fourth fruitless effort to get any sort of cooperative response out of him. "Why hasn't something been done?"
Wellmar eyed the jar of pens readily available on her desk—whether he was worried about her knocking them over or throwing at him was debatable. "Like what, Grace? I hope you have some ideas, because we haven't found anything that works."
"Well, for starters, why doesn't he go to class?"
"Because," Wellmar replied patiently, with a growing tinge of sarcasm, "last time I saw him, he was reading a collection of annotated Rudyard Kipling essays. The time before that, it was the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Before that, I think it was something about Oliver Cromwell. Do you really think it's a good idea to put him in a class of five and six year olds learning to write legibly and play with papier-mâché?"
Grace actually couldn't argue with that. "It wouldn't hold the intellectual stimulation, of course, but he's completely maladjusted socially. He can't exist separately from the rest of humanity like he does now."
"He's only little, Grace—"
"And learning very, very fast. We've got to at least get him interacting with other kids. Older children, maybe."
Wellmar shrugged helplessly. "What do you suggest?"
"Getting him out of that room, to begin with. Does he come out at all? I haven't seen him."
"I imagine he's avoiding you," Wellmar pointed out dryly. "Apparently he drags himself away from his books to eat occasionally. I talked to Nancy Holland—you know, the woman in charge of the cafeteria? Her people think he's cute, so they feed him whenever he shows up."
"Oh, that's where he gets the sweets."
"I assume so."
Grace thought for a moment. "What if you actually needed to use that study?"
Shrugging, Wellmar answered, "He'd just creep back in when the visitors were gone."
"Getting him out is the first step," Grace dismissed this, waving her hands as if she could swat all her problems away. "Let's tell him we need the room—get him to stay in one of the single rooms. Maybe he'd feel less out of place in one of the older classes?"
With a shrug, Wellmar agreed to give the idea a try.
It failed.
Miserably.
In fact, it never even got off the runway.
It just sort of exploded in the hangar.
"L, we need to use this room," Grace told him, standing in the doorway of the study-cum-lair. "We have visitors coming next week."
The boy looked up from a ragged notebook that he'd been scribbling in. Books lay open all around him on the rug. "Since when?"
"It's been planned for days. Come on. Grab some books—we've got a room set up so you won't have to bunk with anyone."
"You wouldn't subject anyone else to that," L said drolly, and Grace barely stifled the impulse to jump and gasp—she'd been thinking the exact same thing. She suddenly had a lot more respect for the departed Tim Kiger.
"And no," he added.
"What do you mean, no?" Grace exclaimed, off balance.
"We've had this conversation before," he noted. "It means you're lying."
"About what?"
"The visit." Said in a tone indicating of-course. "There's no such thing."
"And how would you know that?" she demanded.
With a long-suffering sigh, made all the more eerie for the childish pitch, L closed his notebook and trotted over to the bookshelves. Shoving the sliding ladder over a bit, he climbed up several steps fearlessly—Grace made an abortive move to stop him—and retrieved a folded piece of paper from where it had been stashed between books.
When he'd gotten back down, paper tightly clenched in one little hand, he clambered onto the broad desk by way of the adjacent chair and unfolded the paper with all the concentration of a magician performing his latest trick.
Grace's eyes nearly fell out of her head when she realized it was a copy, painstakingly reproduced in the odd, printed-looking characters that she'd seen L use, of the master calendar in Sean Wellmar's office. Scanning the daily blocks, she spotted a note that had been added, she knew, only last night.
"This is from the director's office! How did you get this?" she cried, cursing herself for not backing up the lie—and for digging her own grave by saying that the mythical visit had been planned for a while.
"I have a key, of course," L replied coolly, dark eyes mocking her. "And a book on lock picking. And one on alarm systems."
Grace gritted her teeth and resisted the temptation to knock the arrogance right out of him as he added, "And I learn very, very quickly."
"Did you lose a key to your office recently?" Grace demanded of Director Wellmar when she had calmed down enough to speak.
He thought for a moment. "Why, yes I did," he recalled. "I knocked it into the radiator by accident. I figured the work crews would get it out when they checked the system before winter. Why? Oh—don't tell me…the brat has it."
"Little fingers," Grace muttered, and it sounded like a curse. "Little fingers and insatiable curiosity. I'd get that lock changed, if I were you. My God—I bet he's into all the files. Doesn't the kid sleep?" she demanded of no one.
"Surely he must," Wellmar answered anyway.
Grace paused and considered. "Maybe that's it."
"What is?"
"Well, how hard can it be to pick up and move one sleeping little kid? You said the serving staff feed him—can you talk them into dosing whatever they give him with that medicine—" She clicked her fingers, thinking—"the one that always sends kids to sleep?"
"Grace! We're not going to drug a child just because he's being a little brat!"
"It's perfectly harmless…parents use it all the time."
Wellmar folded his arms. "Grace, you're a professional; you can't suggest things like that. What is it about this kid that's gotten you so riled up?"
She bit her lip and glared at a wall. "He scares me," she admitted. "If he were a teenager mouthing off and breaking into confidential files like this, it would be one thing. But he's so little—and it's eerie."
The director resisted the temptation to pat her on the shoulder. "I would dearly like to see him act a little more normally. Why don't we just skip the medicine and move him out anyway?"
Grace shrugged. "All right. But you'll need to have someone on hand to change the locks to something more secure."
"I can do that."
Four days later, at three in the morning, Grace shifted uncomfortably outside L's commandeered room. She was accompanied by one of the night hall monitors—Reimart, a stocky young man—and a woman who worked in the kitchen. This last had been more than willing to talk to Grace when she had come calling about the boy.
"Poor baby," she had chipped in insincerely—she didn't feel sorry for the brat at all! "Sounds like he's up at all hours of the night."
"Oh, he is!" the woman—"Call me Susannah"—agreed. "I was in here at three in the morning setting up for breakfast one day, and he came wandering in. When I asked, he said he couldn't sleep, and was there any cake left?"
"Someone needs to make sure he sleeps from time to time," Grace had commented. "If you see him up that late again, will you remind him?"
Susannah frowned worriedly. "Oh, he doesn't listen."
She patted the other woman's hand. "I'm sure you'll think of something. It's not healthy."
Grace was fairly confident that the seed was planted, and that the woman had probably added something to the next snack she'd handed out to little L.
The hall monitor cracked open the door, shining a low-level torch around the room, keeping it low. "I don't see him," the man whispered after a minute.
"Doesn't he sleep in here?" Grace whispered back.
Reimart shrugged. "I've never come looking. He doesn't make trouble."
She managed not to laugh, but it was a close call. Only her reluctance to wake the child stopped her.
The man continued to move the torch's beam around, taking a few steps inside. Grace followed close behind, as did the woman. A few seconds later, the kitchen lady gasped quietly.
"Look," she whispered, pointing.
Grace followed Susannah's finger up the tall, deep bookcases that lined the walls to a shelf close to the top. Her mental picture of the room had that shelf marked as empty.
Right now it was not.
"What is he doing up there?" the hall monitor demanded, carefully not pointing the torch at the sleeping boy. "Isn't he scared?"
Grace recalled L's fearless ascent of the ladder the day he'd shown her the pirated schedule. "I don't think he's scared of anything," she growled.
"Well, he's definitely asleep," she added. "Otherwise we'd be hearing about it by now."
"I'll get him," Reimart volunteered, handing the torch to Susannah. "Keep it low."
The bookcase ladder was a length away from where it needed to be—L had evidently scrambled, heedless of life and limb, across the shelves to get to the one he was currently snoozing on. Reimart put his hands on it and pushed it gently to the left.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Moving the ladder disturbed a connection. When the link was severed, it tripped the fire and burglar alarms, setting off two distinct, discordant sirens that screamed the length and breadth of the campus.
Unsurprisingly, it woke up everyone within five miles. Dogs barked, children screamed and cried in terror, teachers and supervisors shouted and ran around, phones rang off the hook—and that was before the respective emergency services showed up.
In the ensuing chaos, L had time to deconstruct his booby trap, hide the remnants, and make himself extremely scarce. When he ventured out to see the mayhem he'd unleashed, he also managed, although no one would find this out for a very long time, to steal a police radio out of one of the haphazardly parked cruisers that littered the driveway and lawn.
Three days later, everything had been sorted out and almost everyone had been pacified, with the exception of Grace, who could still see, in her mind's eye, the look on that little boy's face as Bedlam erupted around him. Black eyes wide in the darkness, light from the alarms reflecting off them, the child had been grinning with absolute delight, the fingers of one hand pressed against his mouth as if suppressing laughter.
"You did that," she snapped without ceremony, storming into L's den with a face like thunder.
He looked her straight in the eye at once. "You tried to drug me," he retorted. "Fair's fair."
"I never!" she cried.
"Not directly," the boy shrugged. "But you did."
"Ridiculous," Grace denied. "You can't prove that."
A little devil smile appeared on L's face. "Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?"
She wasn't. He must have seen in her eyes, because he went on, "Just leave me alone, Grace Anderson. Let me read, let me learn, don't bother me, and I'll be out of your hair soon enough."
Grace let out a sigh that was more like a hiss. "What in the world are you, L?"
The boy put his head on one side, bird-like, and seemed to consider the question. For a moment, she thought she was actually going to get an answer. But then he said, "Bored," cheerfully, and went back to his book, unwrapping a peppermint almost absently.
They were almost civil to each other for the next two years, until L vanished into intricate spider's webs of his own design amid genuine fire and smoke.
She never saw him again, of course.
Author's Note: L, by his very nature, must have been a little devil child… It is, of course, a ridiculous story. I had this image in my head of little L setting off a booby trap rigged into the fire alarm. In my mind's eye, he was sitting on high watching it all. So I gave him a bookshelf…mostly because I want one of those sliding ladder things. The last two sentences are based on that tidbit in "Another Note" that states that L met Quillsh Wammy at the age of 8, during a string of bombings in England that became his first major case. I actually don't own a copy of "Another Note", but that factoid stuck with me.
I've now finished my summer job. Hooray. I don't mind working with little kids—I enjoy it, on the whole, but I hate not being able to stay up until oh-dark-thirty, since that's when I write best. Thus why I've been fanfiction-dead recently.