Secrets Kept

Elisa had wanted to talk with him, and there was no real question as to why she wanted to talk with him. He'd left her with some particularly cryptic words, and he suspected she... well, he was pretty sure she thought he knew her secret.

Which he sort of did. Kind of.

More accurately, he didn't quite know, but he had a fair amount of suspicion, and was constantly rolling between two or three different possibilities. He hadn't been around her enough to decide which one, and he hadn't run into Tomomi yet either (and he was a little bit too unlike his father to seek Tomomi out just for that).

Probably whatever secret Elisa was keeping was harmless, but that didn't mean Jude hadn't headed to the fountain, waiting for Elisa to show up for their meeting and... what, ask Jude to keep her secret?

Elisa had, in five quick words, shown her hand. She didn't know what he knew. She didn't even have an idea. But she did have a secret--she'd effectively confessed as much--and that helped cement his decision to act as he had.

"You were inconsistent," Jude said. "And you did a bad job hiding it. I imagine other people noticed the inconsistencies just from being around you, considering I was at a disadvantage, having not been here very long. If you were trying to keep it secret in the long term, you should have done a better job."

Jude's voice wasn't quite as friendly as it usually would have been. There was a coldness to it, a detached clinicalness. Jude was doing his best to keep himself emotionally away from the subject, to let himself dissect it with ease.

He felt like his father.

He really was his father, wasn't he? She was scared. Maybe not terrified, but at least nervous. And that was him. He'd done that.

"No," Jude said. "I don't see any point in doing that." He'd thought about this much at least, figured out what he'd do given the options. "I want to know why. All the logic in the world won't explain the why you'd choose to do things this way."

Curiosity? That was... well, maybe the worst answer she could have given him, and Jude took a moment to attempt to reorient himself. Maybe she'd misunderstood.

"You lied to people out of curiosity?" The cold sort of dialed back a bit there, as pure, simple confusion came out. It sounded... cruel? To go out of your way to set this whole thing up out of curiosity...

He was making her cry. The phrase just like your dad seemed to loop in his head, drowning everything else out.

He was supposed to be helping.

But the part of his brain that handled things that weren't emotions was in charge, and it was currently shoving Jude's empathy into a locker.

Because he knew now. More or less.

"Then why the lie?" Jude said, his brain unspooling all the implications and connections. "Why go up on stage and act like you're new? Why not just not mention things, and avoid lying to people when they ask if you've met?"