a/n: I really didn't feel that this had the presence to stand up to my oneshots in Crows at the Perch, so it's by itself instead. Yesterday (the fifteenth) was my birthday, and I felt I should do something to appease any blues I might have had. Which...amazingly enough, I didn't have any Birthday blues; it's a holiday miracle!
Anyways...happy birthday, Beyond. And I don't own Death Note.
-0-
Helios's carriage ripped torrents of yellow into the fading sky. Late afternoon was Backup's least favorite time of the day. He enjoyed the morning; waking up an hour before dawn to pore over his studies gave him a feeling of immense accomplishment. And the alert feeling would last until about three o'clock, and his mind, while still at an exceptional capacity, would tire and want rest.
He didn't like giving his mind rest. He despised it. He treated it like a deformed baby, oftentimes, loving it only when it did something spectacular, and then wanting to incinerate it later because compared to L's, it was nothing special. It had to be defected; otherwise he wouldn't be a Plan B. He'd be the one who came back to the House three times a year, who traveled the world, looking over gruesome pieces of evidence and satisfying his own egotistical and selfish interests by catching only the most elusive and heinous of killers.
Dreaming…dreams were repugnant. He chose only what was real, like the bloody puffs of numeric smoke that wafted motionlessly above all of their empty heads. The taste of the real was sweet dust; rewarding and vacant.
And only meant for him.
Backup didn't like the way that people were telling him to relax, that it was time to celebrate the day of his birth. The day that he slithered out of his sow of a mother's womb was more like it.
Tired in body, but sharp in wits, B sat on the steps outside the west wing of the manor, reading over memorized pages of Crime Scene etiquette in his brain, and trying to ignore the sickening smell of cake batter rising in the kitchen oven on the other side of the building.
Mostly everyone had already retired to their dorms or to the sacred library, the place where their hard work would explode like a bomb and merely create a ripple in their path of striving to become L. The corner of B's pencil thin mouth twitched slightly as amusement tickled his throat; he may not have been smarter than the detective, but the pride remained out of the fact that all of those library books were already safely imbedded into the deepest corners of his brain.
The nano-sized amount of mirth ended when his sensitive nose picked up a spiked scent.
Dry pale-painted mouth then pursed in poisonous annoyance. They were squirting jam into the cake.
B cursed the simpletons silently, running his nails scathingly through his already shredded cuticles.
Drawing in a deep sigh, he wondered if it were any other day, perhaps he wouldn't be so on edge. Perhaps if he hadn't seen him step out from his black limousine, if he hadn't seen him walk up the expertly carved cement stairs, stepping over the threshold of the earth into his realm, B's realm…
Discreetly, B reached up and violently tugged several strands of his hair to keep his mind fresh. He was running in circles again, feeding his pain body, giving power to the cloud that L unconsciously held over him. He needed to stop.
L would never have this problem gnawed at the back of his medulla oblongata, even as the noise and static dulled inside of his skull.
Inside of his chest, his heart pumped twice as fast suddenly. It took him but a few moments to realize that L was coming his way.
In a dream he had once (and he looked back upon the moment of sleep with distaste), his heart was pumping, raw and bleeding outside of his chest, hanging on by a few fragile arteries. L was in front of him; the same. Their hearts, ripe with the smell of copper, rose and joined each other, creating a single blood pumping muscle. They were joined forever.
B's eyes turned downward for a second, giving the hard years old cement a knowing look. L didn't know it, but their hearts were one.
His heart stopped fleeting beyond his control, and he turned around to find the most fundamental person in his life standing behind him with his hands behind his back.
"Evening, B."
Backup smiled a nasty smile; like a toad infested with warts. Don't even, L. Go ahead and call me Backup like you should.
"So L has chosen to grace me with his presence today. No other gift can compare."
"Seventeen." L stated simply.
"Yes. Now I am."
L pulled his hands from behind his back, revealing two plates of perfectly sliced cake with two tiny forks in the center. He sat down next to B on the steps, giving himself ample room between himself and the other body, and offered a plate to his understudy.
The twisted smile disappeared, and narrowed red-black eyes stared at the offering with distrust.
"Why such a stare, B? You adore jam. And it's strawberry; something that I can also appreciate."
Not replying, B took the cake and stared at it instead. Such a flawless culinary delight; his mouth began to water without his permission. But something held him back from dissecting the cake for the jam inside and devouring it. Tense, he looked back over at L, who was sitting normally for once obviously to mock him, and he was quietly, softly eating his slice, probably relishing in more things than the taste of the cake.
"I did strange things when I was seventeen." L said offhandedly. "It was a useless age. Eighteen is preferable, for then you get to leave."
Personably, jovially, he glanced at B, ignoring all signs of distaste written on the younger man's face.
"Then again, what's one more year, am I correct?"
That bastard.
L was staring at his fork, held delicately between his thumb and forefinger. "Come now, B. Is that glare really necessary?"
The look on B's face lingered for a second, and then dissipated. He resisted sighing. "I suppose not."
"Hmm…" L said lowly, agreeing with his substitute, smiling a little.
His cake still untouched, B stared out at the House property. "I've never felt that birthdays needed to be celebrated."
L nodded. "They don't, really."
B turned his gaze towards the detective once again, this time looking up at those numbers above his cranium, and immediately felt a little better. Somehow, those figures always seemed to cheer him up. L caught him staring again, and they watched each other unblinkingly, owlishly, a ruby glint in one pair of eyes.
"I guess it can't hurt if they are though." B outwardly conceded, falling from the space above L's head and back down to his face that he modeled his own after. He had to admit…the underhanded bastard had a beautiful face, in its own right. Beautifully ugly, to be exact; B's favorite kind of aesthetic.
"Of course it won't hurt." L said, gently placing his fork on the center of his plate with a 'clink'. "Happy Birthday, dear B."
He rose, then left.
B could hear his shuffling all the way up those stairs to the third floor. Taking comfort in those numbers, he tightened his form of sitting, set the plate on top of his knees, and stabbed his fork into his cake, ignoring his realization that jam should really just stay by itself.