Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note. If you were by some chance looking to buy the rights to it, go somewhere else. After you read and review this, of course.
---
He walks in, she says hello.
He catches himself remembering the way things used to be, and he knows she's doing the same. The shock of the pain would never dull. Time's supposed to heal, but it can't dissolve the shrapnel underneath the skin. Nothing can.
He brings the cigarette to his mouth, and recalls the way he'd stop as soon as he got that look. Back when he'd known what it was to be complete. Before his life had been stolen. Before all beauty, all meaning, all trust and belief and love had been ripped out from underneath him by a goddamn notebook. She has to ask him to stop, and he does reluctantly.
Her eyes start to water and she bites her lip, holds back tears like she always, every fucking day and every fucking night. She can only show as much weakness as he does, and he wears his mask perfectly. Despite it all, she still has to be a star, and stars are light. Stars don't make things darker. It's not allowed.
She remembers again how the man that had been her Light, her God, had held her the first time, and the promise he'd made. She still can't see why, why he had to die. He was only looking for a better world. He only wanted to make it all better.
…but she knows that ideal killed too many others. And she knows he'll always remember the last day he ever saw his light. Set out to find hers, to find him and kill him, to prove that after all this boy was good enough for the one he'd followed. To avenge him. To find the last piece of him even if that was in his murderer, because the chains of love are broken ones and cold ones. Cold as ice, cold enough to burn you if you hold on too long. If you hold too tight.
It ended as the greatest kind of tragedy, beauty ripped down and destroyed by knives made of lies and hatred and oh yes, the same kind of cold.
The cold that's everywhere.
The violence of nature shocks them both, as they watch it played out, as they watch it burn down their lives. And they'd both prefer anything to it, anything else. So they run to each other. Two shattered halves, but their jagged edges will never allow them solace again.
And as they withdraw into themselves, they find their own edges cutting into them, and they recognize the taste of blood, their own but not really theirs. Never theirs, because they'd given themselves to ghosts. So they release, fall, crash. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Isn't that just life? Yes. C'est la vie.
If only they could sleep a little longer, stay alone in those dreams. Alone, because truly in their minds they're only a part of one true whole, and when they're together it's still one whole, separate and perfect and safe. When they wake up they remember the other part is nothing more than a memory, nothing more than a few scars on the world and on themselves, and once again they can feel nothing but the cold.
Neither loves now. Neither really even lives. At least they can understand that.
---
Author's Note: This one was really, really hard to write. In terms of holding on to myself, not in terms of difficulty of composition. I can't imagine how it'd be to lose someone you love like that, to have your other half ripped away from you, but I partially wrote it as catharsis. My cousin and godmother were murdered five days before Christmas, and I've been writing more since then, I think. It's the best means of coping I've found, and anyways, I've had more inspiration. As one friend put it, damage breeds art.
This story will be dedicated, then, to her husband and his girlfriend.
I'm sorry.