Quick note:
Flashbacks to A and B are in italics.
It's no good. There are just too many similarities.
A small knock resounds against the door. Roger sighs, rubs the bridge of his nose under his glasses, and calls; "Come in."
Eighteen months. Eighteen months since A had died. Eighteen months since B had gone to prison.
Matt slinks through the door A slinked through the door, a little red boy a little blue boy with crimson hair with auburn hair and bright green eyes and pale blue eyes.
Roger gestures for Matt to sit. He does, clambering onto the seat. Roger takes a deep breath, studying the burgundy azure child.
He wears his usual outfit he always wore the same outfit; a black-and-white striped shirt under a tan-and-fur vest punky black net sleeves under a discoloured, faded blue shirt, a pair of baggy cargo pants tucking into a chunky pair of boots a baggy pair of jeans tucked into his favourite brown leather Doctor Martens, and his trusty orange goggles resting over his eyes and his brown leather collar, with matching cuffs around his wrists.
"What's up, Roger?" Matt asks innocently, his German heritage barely noticeable in his speech his Yorkshire heritage was always noticeable in his speech.
"Matt…" Roger sighs, "You are third in the rankings you are first in the rankings. How do you feel about this?"
"I feel fine," Matt shrugs "I feel fine" A grinned,"I don't want to be L anyway, I wanna be L when I grow up, so it doesn't bother me."
"Y'know, if you wanted to, you could be number one…"
"I don't want to," Matt says sharply.
Roger nods, as the door flings open.
"What the hell!" Mello bellows "What the hell!" B bellowed. "Where'd you put my chocolate, you twit?" "Where'd you put my jam, you buggar?"
"Calm yourself, Mello," Roger raises his hands "Calm down, Back-up…" "Don't call me Back-up!"
Mello's hands ball into fists B's hands ball into fists. "He hid my chocolate!" "He hid my jam!"
"You stole my smokes." "You stole my blades."
"Smokes?" "Blades?"
Matt stops A froze and stares stared uncomfortably at the ground. "Smokes? I think you heard me wrong." "Blades? I think you heard me wrong."
"He didn't!" Mello yells "He didn't!" B yelled. "Matt smokes!" "A cuts!"
Roger gapes at the boy in shock. Mello is small, slim B was small, wiry, with shoulder-length blonde hair with messy black hair resting on the shoulders of his loose black shirt over matching jeans matching his loose black shirt and jeans, his icy blue eyes as cold as ever his cursed red eyes forever deathly.
Roger stands, walking around his desk, and crouching in front of Matt. Roger stood, walked around his desk, and crouched in front of A. "Matt, smoking isn't good for you…" "A, cutting isn't good for you…" "You'll smoke yourself to an early grave…" "You'll kill yourself…" "You need to stop, immediately, do you understand?" "You need to stop, okay?"
"It helps…" "It helps…" "I'm scared, Roger…" "It's all too much, Roger…"
"What are you scared of?" "What's too much?"
"Becoming L." "Becoming L."
"What?" Mello explodes "What?" B exploded, "You're third; you're not going to become L anyway!" "You're first; if anyone's going to succeed L, it's you!"
"Yes, third! And I don't even try!" "Yes, first! But it's so much stress… I can't do it!"
"So you don't want to be L?" Roger muses. "But then, you have no purpose here…"
"Don't say that, you mad old coot!" Mello grabs the elder's front, rattling him. "He has a purpose, you don't just tell people that they have no purpose!"
"But surely, that is your purpose?" Roger mused.
"Don't say that, you stupid old moron!" B grabbed the elder's front, and rattled him. "You can't give a child that sort of responsibility, and you certainly don't just tell someone what their supposed purpose is!"
"Yes…my apologies," Roger detaches himself from Mello. "Of course Matt has a purpose; who else would dare to drag you away from your studies?"
"Yes…my apologies," Roger detached himself from B. "It is wrong of me, but there is no need to be worrying; I am confident that L will be around for a long time to come."
The room falls silent as a bleep rings from an old Nokia on the table. Roger slowly takes up the phone, and swallows hard at the message alert. A text can only mean one thing; a former Wammy's resident has died.
Who is it? X? Y? K?
'Beyond Birthday is dead.'
Roger's shoulders slump, then straighten. "Matt, Mello, follow me."
Matt and Mello wait patiently, respectfully, as Roger personally carves a B into the stone. They are stood at the back of Wammy's house, outside, where twenty-six stone slobs have been set into the wall. A number of them have writing on them, in no evident order, and now, the second slab had a large B in the top.
"I shan't keep you waiting any longer," Roger sighs, putting the chisel down. "I'll finish this later. First, I want to tell you about two boys, who you may remember; A and B."
Msquared nod in unison. "They were the original Wammy's one and two, before Near and me," Mello chimes.
"Yes. But that should be all you know."
"It is."
"Well…" Roger takes a deep breath, "B had a gift…no, it was a curse."
It was a disturbing scene. A family; a married couple, and their young son, seated on a sofa in front of the television. The child, a pale boy with dark hair and red eyes, stared at the cartoons on the screen. His parents were laid across the sofa, leaving little room for the child, and appeared to be asleep, the mother's head laid against her husband's chest. If not for the sliced necks of the parents, and multiple stab wounds, and the blood staining the scene, they would have looked like a normal family.
"Beyond," Roger crouched beside the boy, "did you do this?"
"Do what?" the boy asked, genuine confusion in his eyes.
"Did you kill your parents?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Their numbers ran out."
"Ah yes… the boy with the eyes of a Death God."
Beyond nodded proudly.
"I apologise Beyond, but I have to make sure you're telling the truth. What's my name?"
"What?"
"Tell me my name. If you really do have the eyes of a Death God, you can see my name and remaining life span, can't you?"
"Yes," Beyond nodded again, "Roger Ruvie."
"Spelt?"
"R-O-G-E-R-space-R-U-V-I-E."
"Beyond, how would you like to live in a home for gifted children?"
"And just like that, you let a murderer into Wammy's house?" Mello snaps.
"We taught him that murder was wrong. We gave him the Fixed Timeline Theory; his parent's would have died whether he'd killed them or not. He doesn't have to kill for the numbers to be right."
"This is a house for gifted children," Beyond announced.
"Yes…" his new room-mate eyed him warily. "I'm Alternative. You're Back-up, I presume?"
Beyond scanned him room-mate from the ground up. Black boots, jeans tucked in, blue shirt, black net sleeves. Then his face; angular, blue eyes, brown hair. But, his name…his name is different to what he usually sees.
"Almost," Beyond says.
A stiffens. "Uh…you're almost Back-up?"
"No. You're Almost."
Without warning, Beyond was pinned to the wall by his throat, A snarling.
"How do you know my name?" he barked. "No one here knows my name, only me and Roger! It's aliases only, who told you my name?!"
Matt and Mello share a look. Aliases only.
"That's my gift, y'see," Beyond said cheerily. "I can see peoples' names, and when they're going to die."
A blinked, releasing Beyond. Beyond rubbed his neck, then carried on talking. "What's your gift?"
"Uh…I'm clever…uh…and…my tongue," he spat out the muscle, and licked the skin just below his chin, " and I was part of the circus…I'm an escapist."
"Whoa…" Beyond gasped. "That's amazing!"
"A little different to your gift though," A paused. "Hey, Back-up…"
"Beyond. Beyond Birthday. I know everyone else's name, so it's only fair that I tell everyone mine."
"Beyond…do you think you could tell me…"
"Roger says I can't tell anyone when they're going to die."
"I don't want to know that…I want to know…my name."
"Your name? Almost."
"Almost who?"
"You don't have a surname. It just says Almost."
"I'd wondered," Mello interrupts the story, gazing at the first slab.
Roger smiles. "They had so many plans for the future…"
"Hey, Almost."
Almost smiled up at Beyond. In the confines of their room, they could call each other by their real names. "Yeah?"
"I think you should change your name to Angel," Beyond rolled onto his stomach, peering over the edge of his bed at Almost, who was playing with a jigsaw puzzle on the ground.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you are one. You always look after me, and make sure I do all my homework, and stop me from calling people by their names instead of their aliases. You drag me away from studying to eat, and go on kitchen raids with me, and hide the mess afterwards."
Almost laughed.
"No really; you're a Godsend. Some sort of angel, sent down from Heaven."
"Sent from Sleepy Hollow, actually," Almost said, "That's the nickname for my home-town. Sleepy Hollow, East Yorkshire, fifty miles from the sea."
Beyond smiled. "I thought you travelled with the circus."
"I did. Baron Kelvin said he picked me up in Sleepy Hollow. He's the one who called me Almost; because I could escape almost anything."
Beyond nodded. "Do you like your name?"
Almost froze. "No."
"Why?"
"Because Baron Kelvin gave it to me. He was a pervert, and he killed other children as part of some ritual re-enactment. The only reason I'm still alive is because I could escape the cages. So he… he had one built, especially for me," Almost curled up, crying hard. "That was why he called me 'Almost', not something like 'Escape', to taunt me. I could escape almost any cage. Any cage except that one."
Beyond silently slid onto the floor, and wrapped his arms around his trembling friend. "It's okay; he's gone now. He's not going to hurt you anymore."
Almost leant against Beyond, snivelling. "D-D-Do you think, that if I change my name, it'll change the name you see?"
Beyond rests his chin on Almost's hair. "I don't know."
"We should find out when we're older," Almost relaxes. "I could give myself a surname!"
"What surname would you have?"
"Birthday."
"But that's my surname."
"Yeah. We'd be brothers then, wouldn't we?"
Beyond grinned. "Angel Birthday."
Roger laughs as he talks. "They were inseparable. Like you two."
Mello rests a hand on Matt's red head. "My little puppy."
Matt scowls. Roger laughs harder. "Just like A was B's little puppy."
"Merry Christmas!" a young Linda screamed, forcing a small parcel into Angel's hands. "We all saved up to get you this."
"You shouldn't have," Angel announced to the room. Linda watching him expectantly, he opened the parcel.
A thick brown collar, with matching leather bands for his wrists, sat in the paper.
Linda clapped, giggling, and handed Beyond a leash. "Because A is B's puppy."
Beyond watched Angel worriedly, expecting his apparent puppy to break down in tears as memories of Noah's Ark Circus came back.
But, even though horrible memoirs were flashing through his mind, Angel laughed, fastening the collar around his neck. He used his teeth to fasten the cuffs, his unnaturally long- and talented- tongue proving useful for buckling as well as unbuckling.
He shuffled backwards, sitting against Beyond's chair, on the floor by his apparent master's legs. Beyond leant down as Linda ran off to unwrap her presents, "Are you alright?"
"I'm just fine, B," Angel grinned. "It's pretty funny, I think. On a weird level, I am like your puppy. And I reckon that, if I had to be anyone's puppy, I'd want to be your puppy, 'cause you're awesome."
Beyond laughed. As Linda shot him a half-expectant look, he clips the leash to a loop at the front of Angel's new collar. "Does this make you my bitch?"
"He wore those collar and cuffs every day, and a year later, I and the staff got him some brown leather Doctor Martens, just to match."
Roger smiles with nostalgia, then his face turns stone cold. "Beyond wasn't worried about A's cutting. He believed that numbers he saw above A's head were right; he thought A would live to a ripe old age."
"No!" Beyond screamed. "It wasn't his time, it wasn't his time, it wasn't his time."
Roger strode up to their room, "Are you trying to wake the whole house up? It's ten o' clock at night, Back-up."
"It wasn't his time," Beyond's chant was whispered.
Roger followed his teary gaze. There Alternative was, laid on his bed, his blue sheets now purple, the cuffs and net sleeves discarded on the floor, an ugly red line running from his left wrist to the corresponding elbow, still with blood dribbling from wound.
"H-h-he's dead," Beyond choked as Roger rushed to Angel, checking for a pulse. "He's dead, get off him. He's dead, Roger. Roger, he's dead!" he screamed the last phrase, then gazed down at Angel's body.
He gathered up the net sleeves and cuffs, and began to put them back onto Angel's corpse. Roger tried to stop him, but eventually left him to it, Beyond saying that "A would have wanted his sleeves and cuffs. He felt naked without them."
Beyond straightened Angel's body out, then rolled him onto his side to look like he was sleeping. He knelt by the bed, tears flooding down his face for the first time in his memory. "I guess you really are an Angel now."
"Distraught and alone, Beyond's mental health deteriorated, and he…" Roger pauses, "That's a story for another time. Anyway, he committed three murders in the space of eleven days, before he was caught by L. He sentenced to jail for life; all eighteen months of it."
"He's dead?" Matt asks.
"That's why there's a B on the memorial plaque," Mello smacks Matt upside the head.
"They were like you two in many ways," Roger says, Msquared only just able to hear him. "Please, don't follow too closely in their footsteps."
They nod, but are unwittingly lying, as they are both condemned to die before the age of twenty-one, as Beyond would have told them; 502209- Mello's number, as he would live to be the oldest- is not a long time. Matt and Mello will die on 26th of January, in just six years' time, Mello aged 20, and Matt aged 19. But that doesn't matter right now. Not to Roger, not to Matt, not to Mello.
And certainly not to a little boy with red eyes, miles and miles above their heads. He stands alone, between two pairs of gates. He ought to head for the black gates, where a red man beckons him. But, as he steps in their direction, the other gates, a golden pair, swing open, and something blue can be seen, walking through the clouds.
Beyond Birthday runs through the gates of heaven, his murders forgiven, and into the open arms of his puppy, his best friend, his room-mate. White wings sprout from his back, as he snuggles into his circus escapist, his Yorkshire lad, his Angel; Almost.
A
Almost
He couldn't escape death,
So he's an angel now;
Angel Birthday.
B
Beyond Birthday
He had a hellish curse,
And without his angel, he lost his mind,
But now he's an angel too,