London Fall
by Parizaad
A/N : Welcome to the 'meh' fic. Covers L's birth, past etc. There is NO rape/non-con but there is (are mentions of?) prostitution, drug abuse, swearing etc. Therefore read at your own risk. I have was fairly fucked up when I wrote this, high on no-sleep, too much tea and a very dark playlist on repeat, which is perfect L mood. Lol.
I went along with it anyway because I'm always doubting anything I ever write. Feedback would be adored!
Me no own Death Note. And happy reading!
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There was a cigarette lit between thin painted lips. A little of the red lipstick smeared on the front of her teeth as she opened her mouth and closed it around the piping again, inhaling and exhaling with a monstrous ferocity. A elegant gloved hand brushed away a heavy dyed blond curl on her wrinkled forehead, heavily caked in white makeup.
"Hope it a girl." She rasps finally, drawling. Smoke pooling out of her mouth.
Three more woman beside her nod and the fourth snorts. The woman with the cigarette shoots her an icy look. She looks down then, shrugging and continuing to stuffing finger biscuits in her pink-painted mouth. Crazy Gale was like that. But at least she was pretty. At least there was good money from her.
Twenty minutes pass by like that, quiet save for the munching and inhaling. The biscuits were finished and Crazy Gale was wiping her front, biscuit crumbs falling into her big bosom and she is frowning. The screams in the next room have lessened to whimpers and curses.
"How longggg?" Crazy Gale whines. Jiggles her foot impatiently.
The woman with the cigarette no longer has a cigarette in her hand. "Shut ya' trap." She is snarling, patting her bonnet. "Babies take long. She's gone give Helen a helluva time." Then she's laughing.
Crazy Gale frowns deeper, her pretty dark eyes narrowing. "B-But how do you know it's a girl?"
"Good for business. Hopin' for the best thata all."
Crazy Gale pulls on her hair, wavy and dark brown. She looks like she might say something more but the woman's screams and groans in the next down have suddenly stopped. Instead there's a slight rumble of a child crying.
"Fuck." The woman with the lipstick on her teeth stands up." Ya'four stay here. I'm gone check real quick."
With her magenta gown swiveling and pooling at her feet, she races to the worn door, pulling at the rusted door handle. It's locked.
"Open up Irene! Open the hell up!"
The child is no more crying. Two woman are having a hushed conversation, the other clearly panting. The woman fumes at the door stopping her rumbling as they pay her no avail. Crazy Gale is beaming like she's found more sugar and the other woman are looking expectantly at the door.
The door finally creaks open and the woman with the cigarette wrinkles her nose. "Why it smell like death huh…Oh!"
A wire-thin woman with a beak-like nose shoots her a look. "Bitch I was deliverin' a babe not makin' a one." Letting her in, she closes the door behind her largely ignoring Crazy Gale's boisterous, cheery inquiries. The woman with the cigarette claps her hand together not bothering to reply to her biting remark, her blue eyes trained on the red-haired woman in bed.
"Helen?" She whispers, threading carefully around her. The woman, Helen is looking down at her bare breast where her baby sucks at her nipple, drawing milk. Her long red hair are matted with sweat and her chest is still heaving, her light eyebrows drawn together in concentration and her gray eyes are dark and clouded over.
"Eugenia, quit…your…yapping and hand me a cigarette" Helen speaks with a surprisingly heavy voice, wheezing, her English betrayed by an Irish accent. Completely antithetical to her beatific, gentler looks.
"Here. " Eugenia, the woman now equipped with a cigarette, grins setting herself in front of her, trying hard to peek at the baby but Helen's hair fall all over the babe as Helen greedily inhales ash and smoke, at the half-lighted thing. "So…it a boy or a girl?"
Helen mutters a low-sound of pleasure as she inhales and leans back, groaning in Irish at the cigarette like it's a found lost love. It's a sight, sure is. A new mother with her suckling baby puffing like a chimney in winter. Helen, flicks the ash over the side of the bed, pulling her long wiry hair out of the way, tucking it behind her neck. "Fucking missed this. Hmm. Momma couldn't be inhaling this junk while you were growing inside of me could she, baby boy?" She bounces the baby slightly, chuckling and inhaling away. Eugenia has her eyes trained on the raw, pink thing sucking at Helen's nipple, wrapped up in a threadbare cotton cloth. The baby has a film of black hair on its tiny head.
"It a boy huh?" Eugenia is baring her teeth. "How he gone feed himself here? I ain't keeping him for free. A girl woulda been different story."
Helen chuckles again. She could've been beautiful if her eyes weren't so darn freaky, Eugenia thinks grimly, dark smears permanently under her eyes and a droopy cloudy gray.
"I'm the mother, I'll pay. I will feed him until he can himself. " she shifts the baby closer to her pale breast.
Eugenia is standing up. "That okay then, as long as he don't interrupt in work." A beat. "What you gone name him?"
Helen flicks ash again, "Thinking about it."
"G'd riddance then. Welcome to the shuckin' world nameless b'by boy. It a bad, bad place. Woulda wish soon you momma had made sure thata condomn wassa intact. " Eugenia laughs, tips her flowery hat in his direction and saunters away. Stops at the door abruptly.
"Done feedin' him? The girls wanna see."
"Heck," Helen is plucking the baby away, wiping at his tiny, still mouth. "Why didn't you say so earlier? See him all you want. I've been keeping him company for nine months, five hours hours, forty minutes and approximate five seconds, we both need a break." Helen was always good at useless things. Numbers, memory, words. Eugenia rather she working over a man that was worth some pounds.
Eugenia walks over, plucking the babe from her arms. The baby is surprisingly quiet. Pale skin. There are dark eyes moving behind slits of his eyelids, shadow beneath them. Only the tiny feet move, soft and barely there.
"He already be lookin' like you 'cept the hair and freck'les" Eugenia declares remorsefully. "Woulda be better if he look like his pops, at least you'd know which one it was."
Helen waves her hand, as if dismissing her, aggravated. "He only has a goddamn mother. Take…" A fown, "…L away."
Eugenia touches her index finger to the pale cheek. "L?"
"L is his name. L Lawliet, son of Helen Lawliet." This time, Helen is taking a long drag from the stub of the cigarette left. Buttoning up her plain yellow shirt. It's like she's trying to convince herself when she says, "L is a good name. Unique." A reason there must for such a bizarre name. It's not a name. It's a letter.
"L." Eugenia says no more.
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London it was. Gray, beaten down London with sunken streets and scabbed alleys. Mud stains on sweeping hems of ladies' maroon and brown gowns, locomotives cluttering down slippery alleys, rainwater tipping off of bowler hats of young men who had forgotten their umbrellas. That autumn was a bleary one, soaked through. This autumn was not any different from, say, the London autumn of maybe a hundred years old. Times may change but the ever infamous English weather did little.
London it was. The capital of the British Empire whose sun did not simply set. It was the gloved hand of Queen Victoria. The midnight gong on Big Ben. The skin of cream on cold tea. It never represented the whole of England, like most literature does mistake, but perhaps just maybe it did.
London it was. Snaking across its gutters and less glamorous marble cut was a cluster of prostitute rings. There was one such ran by Eugenia Gerald, a half-white half-black bastard daughter of some servant and gentry man, also popular among customers and anyone who'd ever ask as, Eugenia Ruby.
31st October, 7 p.m. One night in London, the birth of L Lawliet.
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For the first two years of L's life he slept in Eugenia's room, bundled in an empty open drawer and when he became too big, a cot was arranged by Helen. He hardly slept but he hardly ever cried, staring at the ceiling and rubbing his heels together all the time. Eugenia burned white sage for him once, that boy, she had said, has demon dark eyes. Hollowed more than hell's pits. Crazy Gale had laughed about it for days.
L couldn't sleep in his mother's room. She was popular among the customers after all.
But she came some week once or twice, on free mornings, residue of glitter around her stormy eyes, bringing scraps of paper and charcoal. Writing numbers and alphabets and watching him knot ribbons with his slight fingers and open them again, arranging them longitudinally. There were always those pages tucked under his thin sheets. L would often be left alone and Eugenia would relate over dinner how he stared at them for hours and would fold a cross over her chest as if warding off evil. All the others pretended not to hear while L poked at his mashed potatoes. He seldom ate, but showing an uncanny fondness for sweets, however.
"M-mother." He says one day, the timbre of his voice expressionless as she looks up from the page she was scribbling on.
"Yes. I am your mother." Helen cocks her head to a side. "What else can you say?"
Huge dark eyes regard her, thumb in mouth. "Mother." He says clearly then, tufts of black hair falling into his face.
Helen stares at him for a long time. He has her nose, her mouth, her eyes, her skin. But his hair are black and thick like drawn by inky brush strokes. She leaves the room earlier than usual.
Eugenia claims L never had a first word and could swear he stayed up most of the night, talking to himself in hushed broken whispers with rustling papers. Helen does not remark on this. One night, a man stumbles into Eugenia's room, tearing noises from her and groping her and a two year old L merely turns over in his cot. Three years old and Eugenia shifts him to a small den-of-a room, far from their business. So much more convenient.
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L happens to wonder into his old room, padding barefooted. He is only allowed outside during daytime which is fine. He doesn't like the men anyway. Crazy Gale is sitting, knees drawn to her chest, flipping through a magazine. The pages of the magazine are shiny and taunt and vibrant and three year old L regards them with huge black eyes, Gale catches him and giggles in return. She leans forward, her silky side-braid falling over her creamy shoulder and her mouth shaping into a huge 'O' as she pinches his thin cheek, clearly misapprehending.
L merely blinks. "The book." He reconsiders, rising on his toes, nuzzling his head of feathery black hair against her shoulder. "Please."
Crazy Gale giggles some more, holding her magazine out. There's a tall woman with light hair on the cover, but L is interested in the words and numbers looping in on themselves. Red and black and yellow. Nothing like the inky pages pressed inside the cold sheets of his cot.
L thumbs the article gently, eyes and fingers skimming over the bright words and Gale watches him, her bright smile sloping into a frown.
"You can read!?"
L does not look up from the word, 'exquisite', filing it away. "Yes. I can also multiply numbers…" He murmurs, filing away another word, 'editorial board' as Gale's eyes widen in shock and then she's doubling over with laughter. L looks up then, furrowing his brow.
"Pardon?"
"Pardon?" Gale imitates him, still laughing, mouth wide open. "I'm twenty one and I can't read shit and you?"
L blinks as she is pulling out a yellow crinkly box from her discarded satchel.
"Want some fruitcake, L?"
L does not hesitate. "Yes please."
Every other day, Gale brings her a book or two. Thinner books at first then novels as he turns four and L reads them to her over spans of weeks and months. Crazy Gale has her eyes closed, leaning against a sofa or a wall, munching away on cake or some other sugary product and she presses some biscuits or fudge pieces in L's hands as he reads. It's an arrangement that suits them both rather well.
L pockets a few pages of the particularly loose books when Crazy Gale is not looking. He burns oil with a wick he fashioned out of Eugenia's melted lipstick and a thick bunch of threads picked off dresses in a small glass, left over by Gale once she was tipping over herself, a swooshing bottle in her hand, half of her blouse torn. The glass smelled faintly of his mother when she returned from work, sometimes. L liked tea with lots of sugar. He hated alcohol albeit it burned good and quick.
L would hunch over in a worn closet, knees drawn to his chest, the oil burning away, tasting words in his mouth and undoing numbers in his head. His mother is a stranger but her words are not. There is a particular scrap he never fails to look at every night, in it is something slipped by his mother.
A coarse handkerchief with a faded initial at the end. One can only make out a cursive, pretty, dark, 'L' and he rather likes it. It used to smell like his mother before it dulled into his sweat and oil and paper. He still likes it very much.
One day, sitting outside on the steps with Crazy Gale watching over L, he sees a strange man. Many men hog these parts namely for 'carnal pleasure' which they pay the woman for, and yet, this man in broad daylight is someone entirely unusual. He is standing by, checking his stopwatch, paying none any avail. He has a large white mustache and narrow eyes.
L does not mask his interest and the man is smiling in his direction. From the corner of his eyes he can see Gale nod off on her chest.
"Hello." It's the man.
"Hello, sir." L looks up, then his eyes travelling to the books in his hand. "Are these for me?"
The man looks mildly surprised for a moment. "It is true then." He murmurs, then follows up with, "Quite right, L. I suppose you saw the titles and deduced that a grown man as me wouldn't be carrying around this in a place as such as this and deducted my obvious fixation with you from the very moment I walked in?"
L smiles, tracing his lower lip with his thumb. "That is right, even though you had made it obvious you wanted to be revealed and acknowledged by me. " He is more interested in the books. Crisp new titles, his eyes follow them with childish want. "Thank you this, Mr…?"
"Wammy. Quillish Wammy." He sets the books down. Smiling. "Someday I will explain this, L."
L feels the cool leather of one of the bounded books up the length of his hand. "I am sure you will, …"
When Crazy Gale is awake, the stranger is no more and the books are stashed away. L's expression has not changed, staring at the narrow street, hearing the clutter of umbrella and frills of dresses and women laughing.
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L's face is pressed against the mesh doors of his mother's room, she had brought him there. It's cold and blurry and seems to bite his skin. It's raining outside but L can make out his mother.
It's her long red hair, tangled up in the fingers of another woman. It's a woman L has never before seen , and knows his mother is showing this to him intentionally. She is tall and thin like his mother, pale skin and rich clothes, long coat, pretty green dress. She is kissing his mother. And her mother is muttering her name, "Linda, Linda…" Over and over.
He has seen men kissing his mother and the other women here but none of them seemed to return back the gesture. The few torn pages of a dictionary defined 'kiss' as a sign of affection yet L saw none in them except in this one. His mother must be crying as she lets her go, L thinks, biting his thumb and sinking his incisor in the soft flesh of his inner nail, drawing blood.
The woman turns away, walking away, briskly, into a car. L notices only that she has pressed something into his mother's hand and as Helen looks at L through the downpour, small pale hands against the mesh, she walks in, picking him up. L stills, her body is cold and wet. But she is pressing the thing into his hands now, chanting, "Do you understand L? Do you understand?"
It's a handkerchief. New. White and brazen but now dripping with rainwater. L hates dampness. But he holds it up, in his peculiar fashion of distrust, from the edges of it as his mother cries. Similar prints on its edges.
L. Wammy.
Next day, when his mother has her wrists slit against her red bedsheets, and when the women howl and Eugenia's face ashen, he knows he is something discarded over ages. A discarded remnant of his unknown father. A discarded name of a love his mother never found. Him, a discarded copy of his mother.
L only stares out into the rain. It's been raining for days.
.
"Bastard child of bastard momma. Both born in this p'lace. "
"I see." It's the man with the white moustache.
"Why you…?"
"I had promised Helen that I would take care of him."
"A'ight. But-"
"Name your price."
"…Well when ya put it that a way-"
L sits patiently, legs drawn in his usual fashion, eating strawberry cheesecake the stranger has brought. Eugenia parallel to the mustached man with the squinted eyes and crooked glasses. He introduces himself as Mr. Watari, an alias, for surely it was his real name that he had given L that day.
"Please pack your belongings, L. We shall be leaving."
L licks his finger thoughtfully. "I have no belongings, Mr. Watari." The handkerchief and balled up pages in his jacket pocket are a comfort, if any.
"Good then." He is smiling, crinkles across his eyes. And so L takes his hand and steps out into the streets. He thinks maybe never to forget a face may be just a curse as Eugenia waves her hand, strangely orange-palmed as the rest of her, and Crazy Gale hiccups and cries into her pretty dress. L did try not to touch the hem of her dress and mutter a good-bye.
has an apology written all over his face. L does not know why, it is not as if he has caused any remorse. L was never a normal child, not in his environment, not in his speech, not in his mind. But has dampness at the corner of his eyes and L thinks that maybe his daughter or granddaughter, whichever, had done something similar like his mother. The woman's faded initials as his name, L looks out of the glazed windows, act as his insurance. He is also a remnant of a guilty consciousness and L cannot help but smile as its irony as he looks out at the rolling gray trees and a yellow-white sun behind puffs of smoky clouds as if bellowing out from his mother's red mouth.
London is ugly.
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The gates loom, and L stares up at them. He will never admit to be comforted by the presence of 's large hand gripping his and the new warm coat surrounding his shoulders. They are in a new city, that is for sure. Rolling countryside. An orphanage.
"There are many children like you here L. You can learn and study here all you want. You have a sanctuary here and I am you guardian, as of today. "
L barely hears it over the gong of the bells.
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L looks at Light, soaking through the rain. Light is beautiful, with his mind working like a well-oiled machine and the cloak of social acceptance surrounding him like a color. Red maybe. Hair plastered to his face and amber eyes glinting with calculating shrewdness.
"Ryuzaki."
And L thinks he finally understands his mother's plea. L finally feels a breaking heart.
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