Who: L Lawliet What: Sneaking into Sally's room, finding things he shouldn't, having realizations and utlimately becoming very confused. When: Monday afternoon. Where: L's room and then Sally's, right across the hall. Status: Completed.
The day had arrived. Sally was gone, off to play guitar, she had invited him along but he had smiled and pointed to his file and told her that he had to solve this before he could do anything else. L was no stranger to lying, but this was the first time a lie had burned as it fell from his lips. She had smiled and kissed him and danced away with Cat, and as soon as she was truly gone, he began.
Though earlier his heart had been racing, his mind had been spinning, but now he was perfectly calm. Investigator instincts had kicked in. Slipping the file beneath his mattress, he unfolded those long limbs and stretched out, then walked across the hall, nonchalant and cool and completely non-suspicious. He didn't close the door behind him, but rather left it only very slightly open, allowing himself to be able to hear foot steps, if footsteps came. He knew Sally's gait and Cat's as well, in fact, he knew most of the sounds made by most of the people who came through B hallway on a semi-regular basis. He would be able to distinguish between the wandering footsteps of the nurses and the orderlies and those of the person who absolutely could not find him here.
He looked over the table by the bed, searching briefly through the drawer and running long fingers beneath her pillow. Carefully leaving everything exactly how he found it, he finished the bed area by sweeping his fingers beneath the table to see if anything was taped underneath; there was nothing. He moved on.
Her dresser seemed promising, not only because he knew of the box there but also because people so often kept things in their dressers that they didn't want anyone else finding. It seemed an illogical place, but what sort of options did she really have? How many hiding places were in this hospital that he hadn't already found? And if he knew of them, how many others did as well? Also, there was something to be said for secretly wanting your private things to be found. Or was that just a rationalization? He wasn't sure.
Removing the box from the place where he knew it was at, he sat on the floor, knees to chest, and set it in front of him. As he reached for the lid of that small box, his fingers trembled slightly. This was it; this would make his trespass complete. It had to be done. It must be done. He must do it. And so with fingers that were now steady, he lifted the box lid off and reached in, removing the first thing he touched; a thin, folded piece of notebook paper. He so carefully pulled it out flat, eyes glancing over a song that he knew, if only from sight. It was by the Beatles. It was not in Sally's handwriting. Thinking that seemed rather straightforward, he reached in again, removing the hospital bracelet - yes, she had told him about that before, not long after she got out of solitary.
He sighed, pushing through momentary trepidation and thoughts regarding the futility of all this, and reached into the box again. Pulling out a folded rectangle of paper, or papers, he laid them out flat and began reading. He had not seen this before. He had never seen this before...
It appeared to be a journal entry, folded up and hidden here to be carefully kept from prying eyes. From his prying eyes, and from the eyes of the other's mentioned, no doubt. He read it carefully, eyes moving over the words quickly but their meaning wasn't lost on him. A dull ache began in his chest, the pain and confusion behind her words ripping at his core. He had been vaguely aware that she was experiencing some difficulties, but though he sensed their presence, he had not known what they had related to or how to help, or, most painfully, why she wouldn't share them with him. Part of him knew why, or at least guessed why; his reactions to the last few crisis had been less than helpful. But he was so used to being the cool head in a crisis, and he knew he had failed her, and the pain in his chest grew sharper and more pointed.
His eyes stopped their back-and-forth movement, re-reading a few of the words again to make sure he had caught them correctly. What was this proposition? The only Frank that it could have possibly come from was Frank Montrose; the one Sally had taunted in the courtyard, that great slobbering beast, a man only insofar as his outer shell, a monster lurking inside. That man, that beast, had propositioned Sally through Cat. A flush crept up L's cheeks, fingers trembling slightly again but this time with a completely different emotion. He had not seen fit to waste time on the man before, but now a feeling very like hatred but with a good bit of rage was pulsing up through him. He had felt like this one other time, when Alex had hurt Sally, and he had gotten Vincent to take care of him, and Sally had been upset. This would require something far less obvious. He forced himself to move on, reminding his spinning mind that revenge would best be plotted in the quiet comfort of the night, in the solitude he found in his alcove.
His eyes continued moving but there was no comfort in her words, the next raw confession hitting him hard and causing him to stop again. A new emotion coursed through him...but what was it? He wasn't upset with Sally about going to Vincent for what apparently amounted to little more than a bit of physical pleasure, as it had been before their relationship began he had no say in it. But he was still bothered somehow...but it wasn't that Vincent had been there for her in a physical sense, but rather that he had been someone that she would talk to, that she would share things with. He felt suddenly as though he didn't really know anything about Sally that anyone else didn't know, that the things she had shared with him in confidence had been shared with several different people, and he felt rather useless to her. He was not as physically affectionate as she so apparently craved, and he could not be counted upon in a crises, and now, apparently, he was not be trusted with confidential information, so much so that he was reduced to sneaking around like a rat to discover something, anything, about the woman that he loved. He set down the folded papers, looking up, almost getting up, ready to leave and be done with this. This was beneath him so entirely...but how else was he to learn? Asking wouldn't help, not at this stage. He sighed, and he kept reading.
Now she was talking about Dagmar...the new man that she could talk to. Though this seemed more rational, in a way, because he was a doctor and L talked to him as well. Not really about anything personal, yet, but regarding cases and the like. Still, her words about him confused L. What was the cliff? And how could she have been stronger? She was so, so strong already...did she not see that?
And now it was Jack, and the physical contact issue again. L wasn't entirely sure how this other man had accomplished such a thing, knowing exactly when and what Sally needed, unless he always went around offering physical affection to women. The detective wasn't entirely sure what to make of it, which was fine, because the next lines pushed it from his mind, not forgotten, but placed back for later consideration, because somehow, unknowingly, he not only made her feel young but also 'dumb'. Another sharp pain running through him, only this time through his gut. What did she mean? What could she mean? He had never thought of her as anything less than perfectly intelligent. She wasn't a savant, but neither was he, and she kept up with conversations and she understood when he talked about his cases. How did he make her feel dumb? What could he possibly do to make her feel that way?
The next paragraph was no better. Her scars didn't make him uncomfortable, it was her fresh cuts that accomplished that. The scars made her....Sally. He did love them because they were a part of her. But the new cuts worried him because they not only symbolized that something was wrong but also that it wassomething he either couldn't help with or that she wouldn't allow him to help with. He wished that he could stop reading, that he could leave this room and seek the solace of the night, away from these words and from the realizations that they were bringing. Of course, that was not an option. Of course, he would keep reading.
As he read, he discovered the closest thing to an explanation for anything that he had come across thus far. Sally talking to Dagmar, apparently, because he could take her words and give advice, all at face value. L was not able to do such a thing, in her mind, everything had to make logical sense for him to understand it. He knew that she was partially right, but he also knew that, if he didn't understand something, he would question it; perhaps it was the questioning that was the problem. But Sally was such an emotional being, and he was not. He never had been. Dagmar related to her and she to him because he was also a highly emotional being. They were in the same boat; L was floating somewhere on the other side of the ocean and probably in a different hemisphere.
His stomach was churning, and as much as he would like to blame it on the nervous energy from being here when he was not supposed to, reading things he was never meant to see, he knew that was not the case. He had no idea what he felt anymore. The part of him that felt things was overwhelmed; overtaken by her words,pummelled by her confessions, and completely shut down by an inability to understand. And after all that, what could she possibly mean by saying he was out of her league? Perhaps so, if his league was comprised entirely of the cast-offs, hermits, and shut-ins who possessed the emotional understanding of a rubbish bin and hers was full of beautiful, intense people who spent their time touching each other and talking about things that made no sense.
He felt quite bitter.
He began reading the final two paragraphs very quickly, wanting this to be over as quickly as possible, because what else could this accomplish but a rather thorough job of proving his woeful inadequacy in every conceivable way? But yet again, he was forced to slow down, only this time, because he had actually done something right. And this was one of the most confusing things of all...what was it exactly that he did? It wasn't evensomething he could manage consciously.
He finished it with a sigh, wanting to stop there and just go ache and contemplate and sort things out into their proper places again, but he kept looking, because he doubted he would be able to convince himself that this was a good idea the second go-around.
He found the sketches, but those he had seen, then the Polaroids, four of Jack, two of Sally, one of himself. He thought that he had probably seen everything of importance in the box, and so he carefully began to sort things into their proper places and prepare them to be put away. It was then that he noticed a flash of unfamiliar handwriting, not the same as the Beatles song and not the same as Sally's. Carefully, he picked out that last note, unfolding it carefully and taking it in.
It wasn't long before he realized that it was a note between Alex and Sally, discussing, of all things, what it was like to kill someone. The content seemed a secondary concern when juxtaposed with the person who the note was from. His blood ran like ice, the words bouncing off of his head and, though he absorbed them, added another very difficult thing onto a very large pile of already-overwhelming events. Why was Sally talking to him? And Cat...that must be who wrote in pink at the end, right? Her words rang with a ridiculous falsity, seeming suddenly sinister. He had never liked her, always suspected her, but this proved it. A false sense of security, a false sense of bravado...
And he heard footsteps, but not Sally's footsteps, an orderlies'. Still, he needed to finish here. He refolded that note and placed everything back in the box exactly as he had found it. Standing up, he began to place it back in the drawer when he saw a flash of some strange color, some strange texture. He reached in, picking up a leather journal, unlike anything he had seen Sally carrying around before. He wondered briefly what sorts of things it might contain, whether or not he would have to read through pages and pages like the ones he had already seen, curiosity motivating him, along with a strange drive to know what exactly it was that he was doing incorrectly.
But upon opening it, he was surprised. It was a song. Obviously not written from Sally's own perspective, but it was powerful, painful, gut wrenching. He was vastly intrigued. L flipped carefully to the next page, the beginning of a story, each word handwritten by Sally. For the next several minutes, he was pulled into the world of this girl, this Lottie, yanked into her perspective by the murder and then slowly eased into her story with her smooth but straightforward narrative, her drawl almost ringing in his ears. He found himself not wanting it to end, and when it did, he stared at the final words for a few moments, a whirlwind of confusion and more emotion that he had probably felt in his life combined. Slowly, he placed the journal back into it's spot and set the box on top of it, scanning the room once more to make sure that everything was in it's right place, and then shut the drawer.
He walked back over to his room, turned around and walked up to the C floor, to his alcove, even though it wasn't dark. Solitude was worth the risk. It would be awhile before he straightened all of this out into any sort of sensical thing. For now, he just needed to think.