A/N: Originally I wanted this to be a oneshot, but after consulting Josephine Falnor (my eternal lover), I decided to make it into a chapter story. Not sure how long it'll be. Maybe three or four chapters. But one can never be sure. This idea came to me while writing the *cough* NEW CHAPTER *cough* of Second Chance. Vampires and fun stuff. I think I'm obsessed with BB being a vampire, since in another story I am in the process of outlining and writing, he is also a vampire. The setting is like a polar opposite of this AU though. Guess who our little stars are? Your favorite couple, BxL. Our most beloved little queer boys. (Get it? BE-loved? Like BEyond? .... Oh, okay. I'll shut up now. :3) Queer in both senses of the word, of course. Oh, and for all you LightxL fans, there might be some in here. MIGHT be. If I figure out how to work it in. Probs not.
I know full well that L's name is L Lawliet. I made his name Lawliet Layne. At first it was Lawliet Lane, but my Microsoft Word always did this thing where a window popped up about "Lawliet Lane" not being a real street. Dumb shit thought it was an address. So yeah, it's Lawliet Layne. Deal. I can't have Beyond give him cutesy nicknames if his name is just plain old "L".
Enjoy! :3
Disclaimer: Sadly, I own no trace of Death Note.
Warning: Some highly graphic sex, bloodplay, and Beyond Birthday. Nuff said, yo.
& & &
Graveyards are, for some reason, among the most feared and avoided places. They are creepy, that's for sure, but there is nothing truly dangerous about them. Besides tripping and falling, there is not much physical peril that can pertain to "hanging out" in a graveyard. Despite this, rowdy teenagers find that graveyards are perfect for dares or hazing. The fear that young people will feel from being inside an area where so many dead people are will make them even more frightened than if there were actual material danger. I am not afraid of death, or by people who are long gone. I do not believe in this "life after death" nonsense. You are born, you live, and you die. I, personally, enjoy sitting in cemeteries for hours on end, reading or studying. They pose no danger.
At least, that's what I thought before I met him.
When I first saw him, it was some night in the middle of autumn. October 21st, I believe it was. Chilly, but not enough so that I needed a jacket. I rarely wore jackets anyway. I liked to stick with my plain three-quarter sleeve shirt and faded jeans. They were quite comfortable. I didn't get cold easily anyway. It was late enough for the sun to have just finished setting, but there were magenta clouds lining the navy sky. I had been studying for an essay test in my Criminology course. When I looked up, I looked at myself.
Well, technically, he wasn't me, but at first I thought I had been looking in a mirror. Ebony hair, spiking in all different directions adorned his thin, angular face. Pallid skin, a tinge whiter than my own (if possible) expanded on all visible skin he had. Wide, unblinking eyes, with dark circles underneath rested on either side of his face, each placed neatly and symmetrically above the cheekbone. After processing that I was not looking in a reflective surface judging by the fact that I didn't see the bench I sat on nor the fact that I was sitting and he was not, I stared at him. His eyes were crimson red. He wore a pair of tight-fitting black pants and a zippered, formfitting grey and black striped hoodie. Burgundy orbs fixed on me, I found myself unable to form words. I wanted to know who this man was, but vocalization was out of my reach at that moment.
He stepped closer cautiously, as if he was afraid. His eyes flashed as I blinked, and he stopped short as I dropped my textbook onto the bench. One foot was in midair. Why was he so skittish? There was nothing to be afraid of. If anyone should be afraid, it should be yours truly. You would be kind of freaked out if some mirror image of you was slowly creeping towards you in a cemetery. In this case, the cemetery didn't bother me, but the man before me did. He made tingles rush up my spine. And not the good kind of tingles like the ones you get when you get a good grade on an essay or a compliment from a professor. He made ice travel through my bones.
I let out a silent exhale, and was relieved that I could use my lungs and throat again. I hadn't even realized that I had been holding my breath. Looking intently on the frozen man once again, I called out, "Who are you?!"
And he was gone. He hadn't run away that I'd seen. He just... disappeared. I shuddered visibly. I had most likely been hallucinating. I picked up my book and continued my studies, though I felt like I was being watched.
& & &
I have something to say. I believe myself to be insane. Ever since that mirage of myself popped into my line of vision in the cemetery, I have been exceedingly paranoid. I jump at the slightest sound, and I imagine things when alone. I think that any sound is the sound of an enemy. Maybe this is mad cow disease. That makes no sense, since I only eat suger-laden foods. No beef has entered my system for years, and the last cow meat I consumed was by no means from an industrial farming business. In industrialized farms, calves are fed milk that is made up mostly of cow blood. If cows eat other cows, they develop mad cow disease, which is transferred into humans. I hadn't eaten meat in years, so mad cow was out of the question.
Maybe I was suffering from a suppressed form of Paranoid Schizophrenia? I would hope not. As far as I know, Schizophrenics cannot become detectives. Darn. If my mind screws up my chances as a world-class detective, I will go insane. For real.
Despite the rather eerie phenomenon that had occurred in the churchyard, I wasn't going to just give up my favorite study spot just because I went a little loopy there. It wasn't the poor place's fault, anyway. My beloved cemetery had nothing to fear. I'd gladly protect it to my death!
I really was crazy, wasn't I?
Ah, well. Some of the world's greatest artists were delightfully out of their minds. Edgar Allen Poe, for example, was obviously so far off his rocker you could hardly see him. Van Gogh, the painter, was also quite the loony. I suppose it's quite fitting for me to go a little off the deep end. I was, to be honest, a freak. I had no friends, no social life at all, and I never found it appropriate to attempt at obtaining friends. Oops?
Anyway, due most likely to that very lack of sociability, I sat in the cemetery again merely days later (I believe the date was the 25th of October), poring over a thick volume of case records having to do with Schizophrenic killers or murderers with other severe mental syndromes. Fun.
I suddenly saw something in my peripheral vision. A big, black something was what blocked a part of my line of sight in a blurry form. The black thing was approximately four or five feet from me. I looked up and was met by bloody red circles. I felt a wave of goosebumps travel my body. Absently looking down at my arm, it was (as expected) littered with tiny growths.
"Hello." The raspy voice startled me. The blood-eyed man's voice was nothing like mine. So he wasn't a hallucination. Well, at least I'm not mad. It would be highly inconvenient to be insane. But I supposed that even though the voice of my previously assumed to be mirage was different than mine, it wasn't necessarily existent. Maybe my mind had produced a rather obscure, dark side of me that I didn't know existed.
"Hello," I replied. One cannot ignore their own mind. I knew that this was most likely not the best idea; indulging your own rapidly decreasing sanity level is definitely not something you should try at home. To this day, I regret doing that. Knowing that he existed past the barriers of my rather fractured mind led to me writing this right now, and although it seems silly, it's both the worst and best thing that's ever happened to me in my life—meeting him, that is.
He moved closer, and I didn't tense. He was imaginary, what did I have to be afraid of? He was simply a product of my tattered sanity. He sat beside me and I sighed. For a figment, he smelled real. He sounded real, too. And incidentally, he felt real. He smelled like some sort of crushed fruit. If I had to put a finger on it, I'd say it was processed strawberry. It was a pleasant smell. And lord, did he sound real. He sounded like the crisp ding of a cell phone ringtone. He sounded like the heavy breath of someone about to get caught. His voice was hoarse and gravelly, but it was a soothing tenor, not quite as deep as my own. It was more feminine than my own, but his tone's gruff resonance confirmed his masculinity. As he brushed against me with his clothed arm, I sighed.
He was real.
This didn't come as much of a shock, but I was slightly relieved. Being mentally ill would really cause some troublesome hurdle in my criminal justice career. I can completely understand how they do not want psychotics working around the police system, but if I had been crazy, I should be an exception. Why? Well, because I would have gone crazy by accident. It's very different than actually being crazy.
You see, when someone is actually schizophrenic, unstable, and dangerous, they are either born that way or traumatic experiences pushed them to go insane. I was most certainly not born a psychopath. I go to the doctor regularly, and two of my minors in school were Abnormal Psychology, the study of unexpected or unintentional behavior, and Psychopathology, the study of mental illnesses. After two years of extensive studying mind-oriented anomalies, I'm pretty sure I'd have known if I was insane. Furthermore, I could only recall one incident that happened to me that would be identified as "traumatic". My parents died when I was a toddler. Seeing as I could not remember my parents at all, it hardly counted as traumatic—let alone upsetting enough to make me go crazy so many years afterwards.
Snapping back to attention as the simultaneously raspy and smooth voice spoke again, I looked over to meet his blood-red eyes as he stated blandly, his tone somehow seeming forced in its even pitch, "My name is Beyond Birthday. What is your name?"
"My name is Lawliet. Lawliet Layne," I replied. I closed my book politely, not wanting to seem rude by reading when someone was talking to me.
"That's a nice name. Do you study at the university nearby?" He gestured towards my Abnormal and Dangerous Mental Illnesses textbook.
"I do." I looked him in the eyes and the lopsided grin he was sporting dragged a small upturning of my own lips.
"Would you like to be my friend?" His tone was serious, as though he asked this of everyone he met. I cocked an eyebrow at him, and he added tentatively, "Please?"
And that was the beginning of what I'm going to fondly call my life from then on.
