In the light from neon heart on the VACANCY sign which stutters outside the window, the entire room is flushed with pinks and purples. Tawdy shades of it, too — Beyond imagines that he could lick violet shadows from the tips of his fingers and taste dollar-store icing.
He is, himself, a black shadow on the cheap sheets, his left arm extended off the edge of the bed so it hangs at an unnerving angle, his wrist and its narrow fingers sloping downwards.
He wears jeans with rips at the knees and a dark shirt which is too large and slips to show the knives of his collarbones. His boots are unlaced beside the bed, thick leather not quite broken in. If he walks too long in them, they blister his ankles.
His expression is absent in the same way that water is lacking in an empty glass.
In his mind, he looks like an editorial model, but in reality, he looks like a still from a documentary about boys who never quite make it in the industry, living off ramen and Benadryl while they rack up living expenses they'll owe to their agencies for the rest of their lives. Never quite good enough for film, destined to live instead in grainy pixilated digital that will be viewed a dozen times on an obscure streaming site and then forgotten. He is twenty-six, which is younger than he realizes.
You can book this motel by the hour, but Beyond has bought a whole night, which is just as well, because Misa Amane is late.
One of Beyond's favourite party tricks is that he can count time perfectly without a watch. No one ever wants him to do this, as it isn't interesting in the slightest, but he has a naked way of yearning for attention which makes it very difficult for onlookers not to encourage him anyway, the same way you'd indulge a child who won't stop telling you that it can hold its breath for three straight minutes, honest, just look. So he does that now — ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. As the minutes turn over, he is more and more certain that Misa has changed her mind about him.
People do that, often enough that he expects it. They kiss him and then decide they don't want his hands and his lips and his charcoal hair after all, not if it comes with all that crying. They hire him and say he's their best employee and then change their minds after he does something necessary, like rearranging all the stuffed animals so they won't be lonely without their best friends. Or they leave him beside the subway tracks, holding a Hello Kitty suitcase while his elder brother L vomits beside him from the sight of all that blood.
Never mind that this has been going on for nearly a year — the love motels, Misa slipping out from the bland little home she shares with her obnoxiously boring husband, their hands under fluorescent lights and the gas station breakfasts after all restaurants have closed and they're hungry and can't wait until dawn. Anything can end at any time.
If he could walk away from himself, he would too, but he's pinned to this body and its broken mind like a moth on a corkboard and he resents every minute of it.
There's a knock on the door. He sits up so suddenly it makes him dizzy, then sways to his feet.
His face goes through several different expressions, without any input from himself. It settles on undiluted joy.
His movements are suddenly jerky and pliant. He runs to the door. Here, the light spills onto him — his skin is pale enough to catch any colours you throw at it and so he is the same saccharine pink as everything else. When he flips the deadbolt and opens it the ugly lights from the hallway ruin the effect, but that's only for a moment because then Misa's through, kicking the door shut behind her.
"Beyond!" She flings her arms around his neck and he spins her, laughing. "Misa's sorry she's late. Light came home early Misa had to call herself and pretend to be a friend in a crisis! And then the taxi driver took three wrong turns, I think he was trying to run up the meter, and Misa was so angry, but I'm here now!"
She talks about herself in the third person whenever she's scared someone is angry with her and he never wants her to be scared of that except sometimes when he does. She's perfect and he loves her. He wants to slit his own throat and pour all the water which will come out into the cup of her hands so she can drink and be fed forever. He wants her to promise that she'll never leave him, not on pain of death, and he wants her to scratch him with her pointed nails and scream at him that she'll never come by again so he can stop being terrified that she will.
She's wearing the pink stockings with hearts on the thighs which Light hates and a skirt which barely covers anything. Her honey-coloured hair is in thick pigtails fastened with velvet bows. There's a rosary around her neck with Mary on the cross instead of Jesus, a dime store sacrilege. He kisses her on the throat as she talks and then she's laughing, too, as he carries her to the bed with her ankles locked around his waist. All the fear gone from her voice because she knows he loves her forever and ever.
She laces her fingers around the back of his neck to pull him over her. He straddles her, black jeans around her velveteen skirt which is rucking up around her hips, and puts Mary against his lips to pray.
"Don't break it — I only bought it yesterday."
"It's pretty."
"Prettier than me?"
"Nothing in the whole entire world is prettier than you." He loves it when she gives him opportunities to say this. Her lips taste like strawberries.
"You're just saying that to flatter me," she says, which is true — he is — but he hates Light for making her feel like there's anything wrong or unusual with that. Husbands, in his opinion, should flatter their wives as frequently as possible. If he had married Misa he'd tell her she was beautiful until the words became cheap to her.
He purrs low in his throat and slips a hand beneath her skirt. He wants to see those hearts and the shape of her body. She makes a soft noise and arches her hips upwards, into his own, then catches his wrist.
"Hold on," she says. "I want an equal exchange," so he sits up again. She comes up with him, hands still around the nape of his neck, then presses her strawberry lips to his throat. The skirt has a zip on the side and she's undoing it as she rises. He breathes out. She smells like coconut shampoo and he loves her he loves her he loves her her loves her.
The light from the neon heart is pouring all over her. She's an aching shade of red, the way blood looks when you see it through a haze of soap and water.
Two fingers along his collarbone, she pinches it and then twists as if to break. It hurts but only a little, only in a way that he wants. Her laugh is a high bright sound that he could die in. Fluting and false, everything about her is so fabricated and that's what makes her realer than anyone.
She pulls off his shirt, then hooks her fingers around the back of his binder and takes that off, too. It catches around his shoulders, it always does, but she's good at this. The air feels cold from the shock of breathing so much of it all at once. His lungs fill, hungry. She kisses his breasts and he exhales.
Her skirt is lying in a pile around their hips now, twisted to the side. She presses against him and he glides his hands beneath her shirt, along her soft body, the shape of her ribs, and god, he could love in these moments forever. They're the only times he ever feels like a complete person. Without her he's a book with no pages. Not even enough to be an absence. He finds it difficult to believe that there was a life before her even though he lived all the moments. She's making gentle noises now, he's quiet because he wants to hear, she takes his hands and presses it between her legs and he shuts his eyes and demands of himself that he stop thinking.
#
Afterwards, their hair still damp from the shower, they walk through the quiet of the city. The streetlights cast a muted haze over everything - the stars above look like the light from a dusted-over bulb, and he prefers that, really. Nothing to interrupt them. Not the moon or the galaxies.
There is something wonderfully cluttered about the stores here — cheap lit-up signs, tackly LEDs still scrolling the daily specials. No safety lights. If you look inside, you can see the shadows of neatly arranged furniture, thin tables with the dishes still set up. There is construction ongoing which no one has made even the slightest attempt to organize, so they have to navigate between rough concrete and plywood hoarding and the raw bars which hold up the scaffolds.
He'd brought her a selection of three comfortable shirts and sweatpants and she's wearing those now. Her hair is down, spilling over her shoulders. Her fingers are laced in his, and she walks too closely, bumping into him every few steps.
"Do you think —" he starts, but she squeezes his hand.
"I don't want to talk about him."
She's squinting down at her shoes. They're heels — he should have thought to bring her comfortable shoes, too, but he doesn't know her size.
"Okay." He does want to talk about Light. Wants to worry the thought of him like a cavity. God knows why he married her — he doesn't appreciate her, doesn't understand her, diminishes her in his own eyes and in the thoughts of everyone he speaks to, doesn't sleep with her except on special occasions and buys her pointless and generic things on her birthday.
He understands perfectly why Misa married him, though. Beyond and Misa have one thing in common. They are not meant to be alone. Something in them is damaged and without someone to love them they start clawing themselves open. Better to be loved in a meagre way than not at all. Better to cling to the first person who agrees to hold your hand and beg them to care for you, carve yourself in any way that seems necessary to become more palatable to them, then to wake up with that yawning emptiness, your days without purpose, nothing to do but whittle away your own bones.
He has L, at least. His elder brother who is tired of him but still makes him breakfast and helps him practise for interviews after he's ruined his latest job. Before Light, Misa had no one. So how can he blame her for holding onto something that makes her feel manageable. Maybe if B had gotten there first, things would have been different, but he hadn't, so she has this boy with golden hair who thinks she's stupid because she cares about clothes and television shows. He wants desperately for her to leave him but he knows she won't.
She presses her thumb into his palm. "Hey. Come back to me."
He looks down at her. She's smiling at him.
"When you're thinking about bad things, your lip curls up." She points to the space on her own lips, just above the canines. "You look like a wolf."
"I like wolves. When we were little we went to the zoo and I saw one eat an entire rabbit in one big gulp. It was kicking but it didn't scream, and you know how they're supposed to."
"I like wolves, too. But I'd rather you be a boy. Just a regular, human boy."
"I'm here," he tells her. "I'm back. I promise."
"Okay." Then, out of nowhere, she laughs, throws her arms wide, and falls backwards. He has to lunge to catch her, but then she's in his arms, cheeks flushed, eyes glimmering in the streetlights. "I had a dream that the whole world had ended and it was only me and you. They'd died in some terrible calamity. I don't know what it was, except that I'd done it. I didn't care. We were walking through the streets, just like this, and I was so scared and so happy. There are too many people in the world. I get tired."
She is so warm and the night is so cold. He kisses the top of her head.
"Come with me," he says.
She stands up and he goes for the scaffolding. It's no more difficult to climb than a tree. She kicks off her shoes and follows him up. Their hands on the rough metal, the cold air around them.
He doesn't bring them far — she's stronger than him and she could go further on a normal day, but she's got those heels. Still, anywhere that's not meant for you seems high enough, especially in the night. He sits down, cross-legged, on the plywood and she sits next to him, drops her head onto his shoulder. The stars don't look like anything. You can barely see them, there's so much smog. Below them, everything is in dull shadows. If you squint, and pretend very hard, you can make it feel like there's nothing there.
Her hair is wet on his neck and it's not very comfortable, but he doesn't mind.
"I want it to be like this forever," he says.
She doesn't say anything back. Just nestles in closer to him. It's an impossible dream, but he'd kill the whole world if it meant he could live it. Just the two of them for always. None of the fear and the persistent low-level panic which follows him everwhere. Beyond and Misa in a dead world. When he looks at her, she's shut her eyes. Her breathing is perfectly even, but she's not asleep. He shuts his, too. Pretends she said, yes, always, it will be. Just for a little while, he can imagine they'll be here in the morning.
#
When he gets back home, Light is on his sofa. He freezes.
L is there, too, of course, because this is his house and he's only letting B borrow it. He's tapping away at something on his laptop while Light leans over his shoulder. They look up as he walks in.
"Where were you?" L demands, which isn't very welcoming. Light, for his part, looks at him on the same way people look at puppy dogs with three legs. Like he's already writing up the inspirational posters. Beyond is aware that Light thinks of him as a sort of personal project that L has taken on — the mentally disturbed younger brother, hardly a year out of prison, who should probably be put down but they've decided to spend the money on dog food anyway.
Misa is convinced that the two of them are having an affair. She is furious about this. Beyond is fairly certain that they would like to have an affair, but are too frightened to do it. Light is a pussy. It isn't that he's a good person — it's that he cares a lot about his image of himself as a paragon of virtue and cheating on his wife would get in the way of that. God knows why he married her in the first place — he clearly hates her.
L just knows he wouldn't be able to get away with it, with Beyond always in the house.
In which case he should celebrate when B goes out, instead of getting huffy and paranoid. If he really cared, he could have gone looking.
"Skinning cats," Beyond says, to see him flinch. Light's expression falls away immediately, replaced by a truer one of disgust. Beyond strongly prefers Light when he's not hiding away behind that stupid simpering oh haha look at me the golden child who just wants the whole world to hug and get along persona. "If you nick 'em below the throat the fur just peels away. Hey, Raito-chan, did you know that humans are one of the few land-dwelling mammals which have the skin attached to the fat?"
"Goodnight, B," L says, very sweetly, so B grins with teeth and slips past them into his bedroom.