Mission - Pancakes / Backdated to the morning of April 3rd

[oncedevil]

Who: Tony and anyone awake at Willow Ridge after the Kidnapping Incident
What: Demon be hungry, so that means pancakes for all.
Where: Willow Ridge kitchen
When: Morning of April 3rd, after Nathan's rescue
Warnings: Possibly some recollections of violence, but otherwise only pancakes. Maybe eggs. We'll see.

Dressed in jeans and a light T-shit, one could almost forget just the night before he'd been barely able to walk under his own power and bleeding all over himself. Quite the change, though watching closely it was still evident Tony was a little tender and sore. Moving stiff and careful while he cooked.

As it turned out, healing was hungry business. Fortunately Willow Ridge was equipped with a well enough stocked kitchen, and Tony with a little skill instilled by Hajime. Despite his best efforts, he still couldn't really use chopsticks with any kind of efficiency. Fortunately pancakes only required a spatula.

Stacks of them, in fact. The first attempts, under-cooked or over had already been eaten, but now he was on a roll. Why not ask him why he's cooked so much, or join in to help devour the abundance? Surely, he figured, the others would wake soon and they'd be hungry as well. Though likely Tony was far over-estimating their hunger by comparing it to his own.

Comments

[dead_black_eyes]

"Yeah. Trust me, if I was upset, you'd know."

Still waters run deep, and with the kind of white-hot hatred Lazarus had for his uncle, there's probably some truth to this.

He accepts the napkins, nodding sadly at Tony's assessment. "Complicated's a word for it. We're trying to move forward as friends with the understanding that whatever our Others did, that doesn't have to be us. But my detective was trying to catch a killer, and his prime suspect was her boyfriend... that's essentially what it came down to, I think."

[oncedevil]

"Alright, if you're sure."

He just doesn't want L mad at him, but he'll believe him. He's not got up and left or shouted at him or anything, so maybe there's some truth to it.

"Yeah, exactly. Just because we're remembering bits of their lives doesn't mean we gotta be like them unless we want to, yeah?" Tony still clings to that hope, desperate to make it true. He doesn't want to be a demon, doesn't want to be a monster, and his Other while powerful is a terrifying man. He doesn't know nearly enough about him to trust whether he was "good" or not.

Hell he doesn't know himself well enough to make that distinction.

"Huh, a killer? Yeah that... that is complicated."

[dead_black_eyes]

Tony's seen L mad, and he's seen him furious at that. There's something distant and dispassionate about him today, but "mad" is far from the word for it, and his body language is no different than what he usually affects around Tony.

"I used to want to be like him," he says softly, "but from what I'm remembering lately I can't say I really have the stomach for it. He wasn't a good person," he says bluntly. "Even if he was a detective who caught bad people, he was like... a monster that chased other monsters and just happened to be on the right side."

[oncedevil]

He has, but that doesn't stop Tony's unreasonable insecurities. If he feels he's done something wrong he'll tear himself apart over it, especially toward someone he actually cares about. Reassured, but still worried based entirely on nothing but his own anxieties.

"I remember when I first met you, you'd told me about how your Other helped children. That... not so much the case, after all?" It's hard to say who the people were that they were before with very few and very sparse memories of them. Easy to get the wrong impression at any point in time. "...Heh, boy do I know how that goes." Except his is a literal monster. He's still not sure how to feel about that.

[dead_black_eyes]

Lazarus lowers his gaze, thinking back to that day and those words. He had been so convinced. He'd clung to it like religion. He had needed that conviction to carry him through weakness and dark moments.

It's kind of huge that he doesn't need it anymore, actually.

"Not so much the case, but maybe it doesn't matter. That's still important to me. That's still what Willow Ridge is going to be for someday. That's why I started using my name again."