Boys Don't Cry

Independent Investigation Part 1

L had been growing increasingly melancholic. He didn't want to eat, he refused to sleep, but he didn't want to work on cases. Day in and day out he stared at anything that wouldn't move out of his penetrating gaze. Ultimately, he wasn't very good at hiding that something was very wrong.

Knowing that L needed to do it himself- he needed to ask for his own help or solve his problem- Mr. Wammy turned his attention to the burning question: who had parented L? He had parents, everyone did.

In his personal file and the sealed box that held his initial belongings lay the sprout of the entire answer. His name was written as L. Lawliet, the L simply a placeholder for his lack of classical nomenclature. "LAWLIET" was scratched in now faded sharpie on the back waistband of his Sesame Street printed underpants. His surname was going to hold the key, if it really was his.

Searching through medical and census records, he found a boy known for three years as (Male) Lawliet. No death record, born on October 31. It matched up from what L had told them. A little more digging revealed their apartment number- now abandoned. The building was in between ownerships.

He went there the next day, an old custodian of the structure let him in. C2.

It smelled stale and lightly perfumed. It hasn't been touched since a small family with a small child lived there. Crayons laid on the coffee table. Black mold hadn't yet invaded from the hall, but he left his mask on and slipped plastic gloves over his hands.

Walking through, it was obvious. A small family, but no wedding photos. The child was in fact a toddler. The training potty in the bathroom said it all. The skin products were all for women. A single mom. The latest production date on each was 1983. Given that the splash guard had been left on the potty, the child was a boy.

His nursery was yellow and cheerful, crayon drawings taped on the wall less than three feet off the ground. The window was cracked through, the white curtains and the pebble laid in the middle of a cheap playmat. The sinister frost had done away with any insects that may have begun squatting. His crib still held the indentation of a small body beside a red and blue pacifier. Mr. Wammy picked it up gently and placed it in one of the plastic bags he'd brought along before pocketing it. He also collected a pink teddy bear in a bigger bag, and carried it.

In the kitchen, there was a highchair in the corner and a booster seat still sitting in the chair. The bread had decomposed into a black lump in the bag, and Mr. Wammy feared opening the fridge door for the same reason. Nothing would be wrong with missing THAT detail.

It gave him deep sadness to think about the shell of such a happy life. Returning to the bedroom, he collected the picture depicting a grown woman with brown hair and blue eyes and a boy with darker eyes. The top read "I Love you MOMMY!"

On the shelves in the living room, there sat a few never-opened cookbooks, romance novels, a few miscellaneous storybooks, and one nicely composed family photo album.

Picking it up, it was in fine shape, not even mildewed. The pictures were of good quality, showing a dark haired woman and her son. One picture in particular was him sitting, his waving hand a blur as his pink onesie wrinkled with movement. Big, deep, dark eyes and baby-fuzz of dark hair softly coming together. A smile danced across his lips, still unremarkable even in infancy. The rest of the baby's features bore the same conclusion. It had to have been L.

Rachel Lawliet was his mother.

Flipping through, there were predominantly pictures of L captioned lovingly.

"Baby coming home!"
He was in her arms, a newborn, as someone took a picture from above. She was beaming through her ponytail, gleeful.

"Boy meets "Bear"!"
He was about a year or so old, his hair growing downy and thicker and a green pacifier stuck out of his mouth, as he held the pink teddy in front of him. It looked so new, as did the child.

"Christmas 1982"
He sat under a fake tree, peeling the red paper off of a present with his thumb and forefinger in green footed pajamas. "So, it was just a habit," Mr. Wammy deduced. The boy's hair was beginning to reveal it's uncomfortable thickness and very obviously darker.

So on and so forth. Mr. Wammy wished quietly that it didn't have to be this way for L. He wished that he could have grown up as a- albeit a very odd- student and lived the life he was meant to lead. The one he had now was distorted and growing rapidly, steroidal. Would he have chosen to live to his potential or live happily with Mum and a maybe a school friend?

He took the things with him from the home and left it.

Later, he continued to look over the albums in the hotel room, because the town was a ways away from Winchester. They held Rachel's pictures of her days as a teenage flower child, roaming Britain through her adulthood. No strong indications of male activity, but no girlfriends held frequency in the pictures. Rachel photographed a lot of the scenery herself, except one of her and her mini-cooper with the background of an older billiards hall and a formal picture of her and few select family at what appears to be a funeral. She was visibly pregnant in the latter.

Laying back in the darkness on the bed, he couldn't shake the feeling that something was immediately wrong back at the orphanage, but fell asleep under the blankets smelling vaguely of other people's bodies. It's how hotel- and orphanage sheets before L bumped up their bank account- sheets smell.

Dreams didn't come often, but he could have sworn he was looking onto a street below within intense dramatic feeling. It ended as readily as it came, the picture turning black just in time for the precursors of dawn to lazily sneak up into the sky. He went back to sleep and woke formally when it was daylight.

Upon arriving back, L was unusually quiet, and very observant. His eyes flitted with vigorous energy, like an animal about to be beaten, before he spent the rest of the day in his catatonic state as usual.

Mr. Wammy cleaned the artifacts gently, washing the bear in warm water and special soaps designed to clean rayon and like sensitive fabrics. When all was done, he set them inside a partitioned compartment in his preexisting box of items. Even the album, and even the drawing.

Then came whether or not to tell L. After heavy consideration, he resolved to adhere to L's ignorance/disinterest and not to tell him until he asked about it. It may be as long or as short-lived as he chose- it was his history, after all.