title: four winters
rating: T (mostly for angst, and one instance of foul language)
word count: ~3k
summary: a pocket watch, a fire, and four winters in L's early life.
author's notes: this was written for the wonderful death note holiday exchange on tumblr. head over to to check out the oodles of wonderful fic and art posted over the last month.
Four Winters
Four
Winchester
Since coming to Wammy's, L often wonders if he did indeed burn on that night in Abbotts Ann. He pictures his body surrendering to the fire, while his soul stumbles out into the snow, disoriented. If this is L's afterlife, then it is ash-grey, noiseless, and shaped like a ramshackle Tudor estate.
Le monde sous le monde, L's father might have called it, intending more meaning than L was privy to.
Wammy's is a hodgepodge of peeling wallpaper, broken furniture, and faulty wiring that occasionally erupts in ferocious, orange sparks. The hallways are lined by oil paintings with cracking varnish — portraits of beloved hunting dogs, pheasants, and fields of poppies in half-bloom. There is something about the poppies L finds unsettling, beyond their dreary symbolism. They remind him of a fresh injury, swollen and red. They remind him of a house set aflame.
L is forbidden to leave the grounds, unless in the company of Roger or Wammy. He is too valuable a commodity to risk losing. L lives in a small world of windows and books, where time has been partitioned into single frames. It is winter now. The sky is the same anxious white as a blank page, and skeletal rose bushes tap eagerly at the windowpanes. Stray cats find easy targets in half-frozen mice that convene in the boiler room.
This season marks the end of his first year at Wammy's. It is still four months before a tall, blonde boy called A arrives in the backseat of Roger's Mercedes Benz. An additional two until Beyond Birthday materializes out of the rain like a specter. The grounds are desolate, and filled with the sort of silence that precedes a message of great importance.
Wammy finds L in the reading room, flipping through a photo album Roger had uncovered in the basement. At the turn of the century, Wammy's had been called St. Theresa's. There is little about the sanatorium in the town's records, but L suspects more patients had come here to die than recover.
He finds evidence of the building's history everywhere — initials carved in the windowsill, the groove of an elbow worn into a writing desk, an orderly's slipper flattened beneath an area rug. L feels a strange compulsion to attach faces to these artifacts, so that he may know whose sorrows he is repeating. Time, L understands, sometimes leaves splinters that cannot be removed.
The radiator is broken, and L has carelessly let the fire wilt into a cluster of yellow embers. He has a quilt pulled over his shoulders, but the fabric stops at his ankles. His toes form a cramped knot to compensate.
Wammy has just returned from town. His earlobes are bright pink. He smells of exhaust fumes from his ancient Land Rover. L looks up, and his vision blurs from the unexpected transition between grayscale and color.
Wammy removes his hat and shakes snow off on to the rug. No one at the orphanage is particularly tidy. L can tracks anyone's movements by the trail of used wine glasses, spent pens, and discarded clothing they leave behind. Wammy still has a stroke of brown hair that runs diagonally across his head. There are thick green veins sliding across his hands. He is holding a small black parcel, weighed by a heavy object.
"This is for you," he says. Wammy is not particularly keen on pleasantries, and has little patience for those who do not speak in a clear, succinct manner. L rarely talks at all, so their forced closeness is agreeable enough.
"Christmas is over," L says. He, Roger, and Wammy had celebrated in a vague, uncomfortable way. There had been a small tree with minimal decorations, and mulled wine. L had received a number of impersonal gifts, and Roger had gotten drunk and swapped war stories with Wammy, leaning against the mantelpiece as though speaking filled him with a sense of vertigo.
"It's not a gift," Wammy says, and drops the pouch on to the coffee table by L's big toe. It settles with a deep clunk. "Perhaps it's too sentimental of me. It took ages to track it down. But it is your inheritance, after all."
L knows what is in the pouch, but he doesn't reach for it. His left hand remains frozen mid-way through a page turn. Even now, at ten years old, he has learned to recognize moments such as this, when the world trembles, unsure of whether to tip in one direction or another.
"I don't want it," he says, and turns the page.
"Yes, you do," Wammy tells him.
L will one day be an excellent liar, but he isn't yet.
Wammy leaves, and L removes the pocket watch from inside the pouch. It is brass, with a mother-of-pearl face. The matron of the orphanage in Abbotts Anne had pawned it, and the oil slick of a stranger's thumb is smeared across the glass. The watch's hands are trapped in the space between seconds. L flips the object over, and runs his index finger over the engraving that remains as mysterious to him now as he had three years ago.
Le monde sous le monde.
L hears the watch ticking through his memory, like a countdown.
Three
Abbots Anne
There is little to say about the orphanage in Abbotts Anne, other than it is cold and the walls are interrupted by cracks that look like great ruptures in the earth. L has lice when he arrives, and a nursemaid shaves his head with a series of disposable razors that leave shallow, parallel tracks across his scalp. L is shown to the dormitories, and the suitcase is wrangled from his tiny hand.
Afterwards, on his bare cot, with the glowing lunar eyes of orphans watching from the darkness, L cries. He cries until his lungs ache and his ribcage seizes. He cries until the tissue in his throat threatens to rip apart. He cries until his reasons for crying become lost in an ocean of primitive grief.
It's over, eventually. L imagines himself shrinking, transforming into a curled creature in a watertight shell, impervious to the outside world. The skyline of pitched roofs and steeples on the other side of the window is unfamiliar from this angle. Clouds churn, occasionally broken by the blue blink of an airplane, straying from its flight path.
L composes himself. He takes off his shoes and socks, and feels better. The other children in the room remain motionless beneath their quilts, reluctant to break the bubbles of human warmth around them. L grips the cold white sheet between his toes, and makes a concise list of what he needs to do.
1. He needs access to police records regarding the deaths of his parents.
2. He needs to learn the identity of the man in the Chesterfield coat.
3. He needs to get his suitcase back. Or rather, he needs to get the pocket watch back. Everything else in the case is incidental.
L is a practical child. There is only so much he can accomplish, penniless and a ward of the state. But there is a secret in the watch, something his father had trusted L would figure out, and he hasn't. For a moment, L thinks he may cry again, but that time has passed. He wrestles the grief down, sends it somewhere deep in his stomach, where it pulses tediously like an old scar.
The other orphans sleep, bunched together in a clump by the radiator. A boy slightly younger than L takes the nightwatch, sweeping the room with radiant, mirrored eyes.
The boy eventually speaks, as L picks the lock with a bobby pin he'd found in the nursemaid's clinic. L has only ever imagined these techniques, but the muscles in his fingers seem to work instinctually. The doorknob wiggles, and the boy whispers, "You shouldn't go out there. You'll be punished."
The boy has a voice like something kept in the back of a cupboard, and dusted off only occasionally. L snorts. His knuckles are violently purple. His scalp itches. He feels the extraordinary invincibility of one who has lost everything.
The door swings open, and L steps out on to the cold tiles. The soles of his feet go numb. L has to look down to make sure his is still attached to the floor and not in danger of drifting away before he is ready to do so.
It is a second floor hallway. The gas lamps on the street burn level with the windows, dividing the hall with chutes of yellow light. The offices are at the building's opposite end. He finds the door, and presses his ear against the wood panel, listening for the pad of a nun's loafers against the floorboards. He hears nothing but the asthmatic huff of a rat, maneuvering through the walls.
The lock yields easily, and L pushes the door a fraction of the way open. There is a steel desk in the corner, accompanied by an uncomfortable office chair with torn upholstery. The suitcase rests upon it. L feels his pupils quiver.
He slides into the room, and unlocks the case. It falls open with a familiar sigh. A wad of his underwear drops to the floor, and the scent of bleach tickles the edge of L's nostrils. He pulls out his collection of unwashed shirts and the jeans he'd ripped last summer, tumbling from the oak tree in the churchyard behind St. Swithen's. He unravels his mother's raspberry pink scarf, and shakes out his father's tweed driving cap. The pocket watch isn't inside.
"Fuck," he whispers. It is a new word for him, and he likes the round, dirty feeling of it in his mouth. He pulls open the desk drawers, sifts through piles of Rolodex cards and brittle stamps. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
L feels an odd, swaying heaviness. He listens to the rhythm of the wall clock above the desk, and tries to will time into pausing, into tripping over itself, into running backwards. L imagines his house repairing itself beam by beam, while the smoke alarms wail in reverse. He imagines his mother brushing a stray lick of fire from her braided hair. He imagines his father taking the pocket watch out of L's hands, and strolling backwards into the kitchen, while the redness fades from his eyes.
The grief locked away inside of him, knocks and knocks, begging to be let out.
Two
Abbotts Anne
The man in the Chesterfield coat flees L's burning home, but L does not follow.
He's too transfixed by the relieved crack of the roof as it collapses. Flames thrust out of the windows. The chimney tumbles brick by brick into the crater of the living room. L's mind buzzes flatly, like the sliver of space between two channels on the television, unable to complete one thought or begin another.
Finally, he calls out, "Mum! Toddy!"
His mother had sent him out earlier that evening, forcing her fingers through a tangle in L's hair. She'd been wearing an embroidered yellow dress L's father had bought her in Tangiers. Her hair swayed heavily against her shoulders, gathered in black braids. The dress was not suitable for the weather, but she was wearing her pink pearls and had matte powder on her cheeks. L thought it was better that he not mention it.
"Your father and I need to talk," she'd said, buttoning his coat. "Go play in the woods. Find me a lavender sprig for my hair, will you?"
It is too cold for lavender to bloom, but L searches anyway. L's father — with his clandestine, nocturnal work — often scares him, but L feels an unwavering affection for his mother, who whistles and grows roses and reads him passages from mystery novels in a grave tone one does not normally reserve for children.
L rushes forward, but a second explosion tosses him back into the snow. His blood stalls from the combined shock of heat and cold. For a moment, L thinks he hears his mother's voice, encoded in the hiss of evaporating snow, whispering runrunrunrun.
Finally, he does.
He heads into the forest on instinct. His backpack is damp, heavy, and L runs until he can feel his spine sagging from the weight of it. The bare trees form a complicated net over his head. L runs until he can't breathe, until his knees threaten to snap apart, until he feels like the darkness has become too dense to penetrate any farther.
Eventually, he leans against a tree and takes several long inhalations. The cold invades with cavalry, mercenaries, reinforcements. A badger's eyes watch from beneath a rotting trunk. He digs the pocket watch out of his backpack, and listens to it mark the seconds until he can regulate his breathing again.
Everything you know is gone, it whispers, in its peculiar ticking voice.
One
Abbotts Anne
L's parents have been whispering lately.
L wakes to find mysterious visitors sipping cold tea in the kitchen, while his father pours over maps of a fractured post-war Europe. His mother shreds documents, and casts furtive glances out of windows, eyes unfocused, searching for something that will trigger the future. A man in a Chesterfield coat knocks three times and waits on their porch, while L's mother and father argue about letting him in. Once, L catches a glimpse of his mother fastening a shoulder holster beneath her blazer.
Christmas is spent with the radio turned down, listening for the crunch of an unwelcome boot in the snow. L sits cross-legged on the sofa with their plump orange tabby wedged between his thighs, folding spare bits of wrapping paper, while his parents swap paranoid whispers through the half-closed kitchen door.
His father sounds drunk. He repeats, "We have to get him out of here," again and again. His mother responds with a drawn-out sigh, and L pictures her pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. She is wearing her enameled ring, and looks radiant and crimson in the Christmas lights blinking through the window.
They remerge eventually, and Toddy happily kneads his claws into L's jeans. L watches his tail sweep across the cushion, leaving fine white hairs trapped in the upholstery.
"I have something for you," L's father says, hooking a finger around his tie and pulling it loose.
"I don't want it," L says, without meaning to. He does not entirely understand his response, only that it answers a question that has not yet been asked.
His father frowns, and pulls a small black pouch from the inside pocket of his jacket. L knows what's inside. He has a sharp memory of watching his father turn the object over and over in his hands, staring in rapt attention as if it were whispering instructions that might derail the oncoming future.
"You don't even know what it is," his father says. Across the room, L's mother pours herself a glass of red wine. Her dress sways around her calves as she drags the needle back on the record player, and fills the room with static. The wine whirls against the rim of her glass.
"It's a pocket watch," L says, digging his toes into the mass of wrapping paper at his feet. The sound makes him oddly tired. For a moment, he considers tipping over and pretending to be asleep. Whatever his father is about to say, L doesn't think he wants to hear it. He yawns without covering his mouth.
The pocket watch is heavy, and its back is engraved with a logo that fizzles somewhere in L's subconscious, like something he can't remember if he'd dreamed or truly experienced. It is a compass rose, with all directions labeled S. Beneath the compass rose are the words le monde sous le monde, the world beneath the world.
L does not understand what that is supposed to mean, but he's heard his father whisper it in phone conversations with unknown parties, switching between English, French, and the mannered Russian of the Soviet Union. L's mother turns away when his father kneels to present him with the object. Her braids beat against her lower back.
"You have to take it. It's your Christmas present," his father says, folding L's fingers over the cold curve of the watch face. "Keep it with you. Don't let anyone know you have it."
"Liam —," his mother begins, and L's father waves dismissively at her.
"Don't," he warns, and she doesn't continue. "He's old enough. He'll find out sooner or later."
"Find out what?" L says, dropping the watch onto his lap. He feels its steady tick travelling into his kneecaps.
No one answers him.
Zero
Winchester
Four winters later, L still does not understand. The traitors who killed his parents are in covert jails throughout the British territories, and the man in the Chesterfield Coat is dead. L has gone for several successful months without thinking of his house swallowed by flames, although there are moments when his grief revives without cause or explanation, and L has to force it back down into the hidden chamber beneath his heart.
He looks down at his distorted reflection in the curved glass, and lets his index finger trace the inscription — le monde sous le monde, the world beneath the world.
L does not know what that means, only that he is there. It is the crumbling stairwells of Wammy's House, and its persistent ghosts, breathing against the nape of his neck. It is the lonely network of orphans, pressing their foreheads against cold windows and squinting into the darkness. It is the nodule in his brain where he has locked the memory of his mother plucking a rose thorn from her thumb. It is the odd place that exists just beneath the crooked English towns of his youth, and it is winter, and the snow is falling with the certainty of a watch, racing into the future.
End.