Title: Its Rider Was Named Death
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: Strong R to NC17
Notes: Oh, you know. My usual introspective rambling.
Its Rider Was Named Death
i. conquest
I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.
"I did it because I was bored."
Despite what Ryuk tells him, Light knows that the notebook was delivered into his hands — that his destiny is indissolubly chained to that of its slim binding. A weaker part of him wants to drop to his knees and press his forehead against the ground, and whisper thank you thank you thank you, but Light has never bowed for anything and never will. All his life, he has felt his fate waiting for the moment to surge forth and save him from a life of incomprehensible boredom, and the plan appears fully formed, elegant, and with all the clarity of prophecy. He will be a saint, an idealist, a revelator, a revolutionary — because the Death Note is indeed a revelation, and revelation without revolution is meaningless.
He is given a nom de guerre. Kira, killer of the wretched, the wicked, the impure — passing judgement in his room with the door locked, his toe tracing spirals in the carpet, blowing on the surface of his tea. If he allows his bangs to fall forward and hide the grin in his eyes each time he turns a page, it is only Ryuk who notices.
On the outside, nothing changes. He doesn't have to lie to his family. They do all the deceiving for themselves.
He goes to school. He spends hours at the library, cross-legged on the floor with a semi-circle of books around him. Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, philosophies, histories, biographies of men who have tried to repair the world before him and failed. The covers are buckling from overuse, and some of them are underlined, or have strange schizophrenic handwriting in the margins — but the Death Note, tucked away in his backpack, is the most precious one of all. He studies at home. He watches the news reel in. Plane hijackings, mass extinctions, bioterrorism, muggings, riots, murders, rapes. It is repulsive, and he knows the world will thank him, that men are too weak and stupid to fix it themselves. Though he doesn't truly love or hate any one of them, he recognizes who and what they are.
He swears he will not be a god of indifference. If they must lose their autonomous existence and submit to him, it is clear they never deserved free-will in the first place.
No revolution goes unopposed.
When the enemy comes, as a single high-contrast letter on a television screen, he cannot stop himself from shaking and shattering one of the glass frames on his desk and killing six men whose guilt is questionable. It takes a full minute before he is calm enough to understand that the unfurling in his gut is not fear, not anger, but exhilaration, the realization that something has been absent and is not anymore. He imagines traps and false-doors swinging open at every step, and what a wonderful game this could be, what a wonderful trial, the best way to prove himself worthy of his own future. If there is some omniscient eye watching him, then let it watch. Light will not falter, and in the meantime, he will have to find a way to look back.
ii. war
When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, "Come!" Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a huge sword.
The deaths of the FBI agents, Light has to admit to himself, were mostly just theatrics. Look what I can do, L, you lovely iconoclast, blasphemer, dissident, he thinks and knows he will raise these stakes higher and higher, because when L's fall actually does come, he wants it to be long and graceless and lethal.
His opponent counters with the boldest move of all.
"I want to tell you, I'm L."
L's eyes remind Light of voyeurism and two-way mirrors. If he's not careful, attentive to the double meaning of every word, every gesture, he might be dragged into a full confession.
(Maybe he'll get the chance, one day, but it will be on his own terms, and just to watch L's mirror-window-eyes widen as he learns exactly how he has been defeated.)
Tennis leaves them breathless and sore, but both prefer the intimacy of chess; watching each other's pawns drop away in L's hotel room at three, four in the morning, as they shove aside index cards and post-it notes and bundled documents to set their coffees down. With the speed of their reasoning, the faultlessness of their strategies, these games could take less than an hour, but the real pleasure is in drawing them out until the sun is sieving through the curtains and Light is finishing his homework on a piece of hotel stationary, half-an-hour before his morning class.
The best games are the ones that run through several nights, and it doesn't matter that the other detectives are always knocking against the table or shoving the pieces aside to set down a laptop, either one of them can recreate the board from memory. Besides they do plenty of knocking and shoving and toppling themselves, on their feet, only leaning over the board to make a move while they pace and argue about psychology (which Light pretends to abhor) and philosophy (which L pretends to abhor) and Kira (by then, they are too far gone to pretend).
It's distracting, their beautiful little Kriegspiel, their personal war. Distracting enough to make him temporarily forget about his golden world, but for now, Light allows himself to be overcome by the joy of it. He reaches across the board, his sleeve catching on the mane of L's knight (white, of course, he who makes the first move wins), and places his hand over the detective's wrist.
L does not pull away. He does not even look surprised. Wary, perhaps, but respectful, impressed by the imaginativeness of this new attack.
Light is so pleased with himself that he hardly notices when L moves him into check.
When L topples his Queen, his Misa, Light feels like there are spiderwebs settling across his face and shoulders. Light needs to show him how easily he can change the rules.
He takes himself to the very edge in the intolerable stillness of the prison cell. His senses are dulled. The room looks as if a veil has been dropped over it. The dust of ages over the dust of ages. To compensate, his dreams become hyper-real, hallucinatory. He dreams of a boat, of waves climbing its hull, seagulls in the updraft, of the great flood, the great deluge that will sweep away the wicked, and knows that the Death Note is his ark, his tool of justice and salvation.
It is only when Light knows he is going to break, beg for L to come crouch in his cell so Light can hold his frail wrist, and wonder about how wonderful it would feel snapping in his hand, and say everything he has ever wanted to say about righteousness and floods and how some things must be blotted from the Earth before they can be replaced by something worthy, does he plunge himself into the darkness of not-remembering, and suddenly all he can feel is —
iii. hunger
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand.
For all Light's intuition, all his insights into human psychology, he cannot figure out why L lets Light fuck him. It is the only time Light sees something other than a bastardized version of idiot savant in L's eyes; a muted mixture of shame and fear and embarrassment and lust.
It's all hugely comic, in a way. Light knows that L thinks he is Kira. Light knows that L thinks Kira is fucking him. Still, he shudders every time Light's fingers graze the back of his knees, the pulp inside his elbow, and the underside of his chin. Maybe he gets off on that sort of thing. You never know with L. All his beauty lies in his remoteness.
Maybe Light doesn't find the idea as repulsive as he should, but somewhere he knows that he will never find this again, never find another mind so structured and complex and beautifully attuned with his, and it will never last, and he has to stop himself from coming and clinging and pleading for L to take him when he goes. L terrifies him and infuriates him, but that is more than anyone else has ever done, and that may be worth every slice of cake he has to watch L swallow in four bites or less. I found you I found you I found you, now don't let me go.
Light tries to enjoy knowing he has the upper hand for once. That L has probably never done this before, never wanted to do this before, and Light can feel his heart beating like a mouse trapped in the palm of his hand. With an arm naively covering his chest, it is hard to believe that this is the same L who crouches, surrounded by computers, and controls the world's most powerful police forces with the same delight as a child playing a game of strategy.
It is to L's lack of experience that Light attributes his habit of mentioning the case just as Light's mouth is nipping at the elastic skin where L's thigh meets his torso.
"I admire him," L says, "The absolute mad logic. It's interesting."
Light resists the urge to bite down, hard, but L tastes like Earl Grey tea and taffy and too much will make Light gag. "It's terrifying, Ryuuzaki. What are you talking about?"
When L replies with a quite mhm, it doesn't truly like he's agreeing.
"What?" Light says.
"I didn't say anything."
(Sometimes, if it's dark enough, when L's short declarative sentences fill the room, Light has trouble deciphering whether they're L's thoughts or his.)
"I know. I meant, what happens next?"
That night, Light dreams of L, dark-haired, loping, wild — a crow, a spider, a totemic animal of cold and damp and claustrophobia — clutching a pair of scales. On one plate, Light's heart rests in a ring of its own blood. On the other, a black feather, curled in upon itself.
iv. death
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come!" I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hell was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
Light spends so much time willing himself to forget L that the moments when he actually does are filled with reverential silence. And silence, that just reminds him of the condemned blackness in L's eyes, once he'd realized his fall was imminent. L, beneath a little mound of earth, with its meaningless cross, undocumented amongst the dead — L, who left nothing but uninspiring successors in his wake.
And if sometimes, Light pulls his knees to his chest and dangles a pen between his index and middle finger and feels a tremor altering the rhythm of his heart, it is only in epitaph. It's right, that it is L's greatest enemy, L's murderer, who mourns him more than anyone else. Light is the only one who could have ever realized the extent of his greatness.
On the last day of his life, Light straightens his tie in the rearview mirror of a black car. It does not cross his mind that his end might be so close. The gods of this world are the gods of resurrection — Osiris, Odin, Jesus — but the world is changing. Light's great power lies not in his ability to return from death, but to avoid it.
All humans, without exception, will eventually die.
Then, there it is, bullets inside of him and his name scrawled across a yellowed page, and the blood loss is making him feel as if he is hovering with his arms outstretched, but it can't be true. He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to die, and he won't, if he can just will himself to keep breathing, hold on to the sensations of cold and pain. He doesn't want to die on the floor of a warehouse, lying in pigeon droppings, watching a florescent bulb flicker on the rafters overhead. Death is supposed be about bringing everything to a close, and there is a half-full cup of coffee in his sink that needs to be washed, and a dog-earred book on his nightstand that needs to be finished, and he was in the middle of a letter to his sister, and there is a world full of murderers and rapists and thieves, and please no I can't die here like this.
"We killed some boredom, didn't we, Light?"
His skin feels like it is dissolving. When his heart begins to sputter and skip, he realizes he is not thinking about his revolution, but L, L, L, L, if he has been watching, if he is laughing, if he will taste like tea, if he will stare at Light as he grinds his teeth on a hangnail, There is no way you could have won, but it was fun, wasn't it?.
L had not cried and begged for life. Light wants to know if he was just as afraid when his stomach contracted, soft tissue tightening, when the blood in his body stilled, when consciousness began to leave him and was replaced by placid calm.
When humans die, the place they go to is Mu, which is nothingness.
fin