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It's like a scene from a film noir, the boy thinks almost-absently as he waits in the shadows of the doorway, and brushes damp hair from his eyes. He's soaked through to the bone – plain t-shirt and oversized jeans hang limp and heavy against his angular frame – but it's summer and so he doesn't really mind, just leans his back against the door-jamb, and listens to the wood creak slightly beneath his slender weight, all the while peering out through the haze of falling water, at the alleyway beyond, and a window glowing yellow. The stone of the walls has been stained dark by night-time's hand, and the rain seems to have faded that which was already pale into a homogeneous pall of grey, even the light spilling from the one flickering street-lamp, which hangs from a building a little way to his left, and the window's too. Somewhere he can hear a woman lamenting to herself in Greek, at least, he supposes it's a lament, from the fragments of words he can catch, and the tone of it, but it's more like a murmur from this distance. Mostly it's just the rain streaming down in a noisy clatter, somehow utterly disproportionate to the size of the droplets. He wonders how it can be so loud, and does it have to do with the narrowness of the alleyway, or the height of the buildings (whitewash dull and cracking), or perhaps the stone with which is constructed. Either way it's much noisier than any rain he's ever experienced, and, really, he grew up in a land prone to precipitation, so he ought to be pretty much an expert by now. This is rougher, though, and it makes his blood pound unexpectedly in an answering beat, and he wonders how he's taken this long to get out here, get out here and put his body to work as well as his mind, get out here and do things, and why it all feels so natural despite its unfamiliarity.
Most of all, though, he wonders what's keeping Watari.
The boy brushes his hair from his eyes again and then automatically wipes his hand down his jeans, before realising that they're just as wet as the rest of him and therefore the action was pretty much counter-intuitive. Watari, of course, is the reason why this is the first time that the boy's out here in the world. "Wait until you're fourteen," he'd said over and over again, ever since they'd met, back almost before the boy remembers (his own big eyes mirrored at him from a teacup filled with warm water, the tall man dabbing at cuts on the small boy's face, child wincing beneath his touch but not moving an inch, until he leant in to sniff at the strange texture of the man's suit), "When you're fourteen you can come with me. Until then you'll just stand out too much." Rational argument. It worked every time, thought the boy with a wry smile, because Watari, after all, knew that, (a) he was completely right about the weirdness of a boy wandering around on his own in far flung places of the world (which was just a further evidence in favour of the boy's own argument that people discriminated against age more than anything else that existed) and, (b) that the way to the boy's obedience was either cake or reasonable argument. Preferably a combination of the two.
And so he'd been forced to sit at home/the orphanage/one hotel after the other, while Watari and various others got to go out and do the 'real' work. It didn't really matter how often the boy told himself that there was plenty of real work to be done behind the charmed curve of computer screens (he liked how they lit up a room with their own light and left him feeling like a moon circling in its own orbit); it didn't matter how many heads of government he'd spoken with since he was seven years old (even if he did find it vaguely amusing to imagine what sort of expressions they'd have pulled if they could have seen him sitting there with his head titled sideways, thumb scratching at his headset, a slice of Chocolate Bavarian balanced precariously on a plate held between his two feet, and a milk tooth missing in his smile); it didn't matter how many cases he'd solved. He knew all that and, deep down, he even understood that it was what he was best at – he worked well in the isolation of large, echo-wafting rooms – but... but there had to be more to life than that.
And now the boy is fourteen, and he stands in the shadows of a doorway in Greece, and the rain is pouring down as though it were punishing the very ground for doing something unforgivable, and the boy with it, and his face and hair stream, stream, stream with water as he studies the dark shadows of the Athenian night, and the pale glowing window.
And where the hell is Watari?
Too many minutes have passed. The boy can feel them acutely, the seconds ticking away on his carefully-tuned internal clock (Greenwich Mean Time, add, subtract, transmute from one language to another, what's the difference, time can be bent and it's as deceptive as judging someone by the age of his face). He can feel the minutes ticking away with the same speed as the water, rushing in wild eddies at his feet, even though he knows that it's just him being subjective, because of course time cannot change beneath the wings of his whims but... Watari is never late. Never. Watari has never been late in just about as long as the boy can remember, because that isn't what Watari is like: Watari is punctual. Watari is beyond punctual. His internal clock is even more finely tuned than the boy's, tuned like tiny silver cogs that sing and whir. He must have gotten into trouble somehow but that... is almost as difficult to imagine as it would be to imagine Watari running late. Because Watari, well, Watari doesn't run into trouble. Or, at least, he runs into it frequently but then he runs back out of it again, utterly indifferent to its machinations. Watari is...
The boy pauses, and narrows his eyes as he gazes into the damp streetlamp-lit space before him. He's never thought of it before but, now that he's finds himself standing here, in a back alley of Athens, a fake passport curved against one slender hip, a wad of Greek bank notes in the other (soft paper, such soft paper, as though it's begging to be touched), and a knife concealed beneath his shirt ("I know you can shoot, lad," Watari had said with a gentle lift of his left eyebrow. "Nobody's questioning that. What I am suggesting is that a knife would be markedly less problematic were you to have an unscheduled run-in with the local authorities...") it all seems to be so much more important than it used to be.
And here he is then, just him, him and the night, and him and the rain, and – what is Watari doing? Had the man he'd been trailing actually spotted him (impossible, surely)? Had he had some kind of actual accident, the kind that could happen to anyone just because they happened (unlikely)? It's...
It's the first time the boy has realised that he views the older man as some kind of... superhero. No. No, superhero is wrong, because he's never really been one for the comic books, himself. More like some kind of... well, detective, really. Which Watari is, of course, in amongst a few hundred other things, but a detective like... like a detective out of a black and white movie. Humphrey Bogart with his hat and his trench coat, Watari is all that and so much more. The boy had never imagined that one day Watari might... actually find himself in trouble, although, of course, that was preposterously naïve, because the percentages of them encountering danger in their line of work are, of course, mathematically extremely high and...
And what would he do then? What would he do without Watari?
The boy puts his thumb to his mouth and catches it against his lower lip thoughtfully, nervously. He would be in a right mess, that's where he'd be without Watari. And the man isn't immortal, and he isn't getting any younger, and he isn't—
There's a low, low cough, like a mouse with a chest cold, and the boy turns his head sideways to see a figure standing beside him, water streaming from his hat, collar pulled up around his face, and the shadow of a smile showing beneath his moustache.
"Watari," whispers the boy, eyes enormous beneath his shock of black hair. "What happened?"
The older man's eyes smile a little, but his face is serious. "Nothing bad," he says. "I'm just running a little late."
"You're running late?" The boy realises he's abruptly angry, though he isn't sure why, and mutters childishly, "But I was worried! I thought..." But he trails off as he realises that Watari's smile has managed to twitch itself all the way from his eyes to the rest of his face, and the older man ruffles the boy's hair briefly, before peering out through the rain at the building that hisprotégé has been observing.
"Any movement?" he asks.
And, for the first time in his life, L realises that you can't stay angry long when the reason you were angry in the first place was because you actually cared too much.
He straightens his shoulders a little, and starts to recount what he has seen, and the rain pools at his feet, and at Watari's, and he tries to be worthy of the day when he himself will be the protagonist of this story they're living.