Everlong
Hello
The afternoon sky was violently orange. Grey clouds in the shape of feathers hung low and behind the skyscrapers of Tokyo. Despite the wind flowing with her pigtails and through her skirt, this scene barely moved.
She was silent as she stared at this non-moving orange sky. There were cars below her feet. They were little red, blue, and silver cubes, speeding and stopping along big concrete mazes of highways. She wasn't sure of the noise they were making—they whizzed past like bees, or honked like desperate elephants, or died like flies.
What she was sure of—she paused when she listened to this—was the stirring of her heart. It beat relentlessly, awkwardly, mechanically, in her bosom. She touched the lace that covered her cleavage and wondered at the speed of the beating. Does a heart truly never tire of beating, she wondered…
It was the 14th of February, the day of hearts. On this occasion, she had with her a tiny chocolate heart, which she kept next to the patch of skin that covered up her real one.
She stepped closer to the edge. Her chunky black shoes, with their intricate silver buckles, made a slight noise as she did.
She's here, and they're there.
Showtime.
Without a word, Misa Amane took another step and silently dropped.
No-one saw the moment of the drop, but they did see her in mid-air; and when she landed on her head and her skull cracked open at one of the odd ledges of the building, they fell silent. Further she dropped, her brain embracing the sweet open air of a boring afternoon in Tokyo. Her lifeless body, with all its unfeeling broken bones and beautiful dress, landed on warm concrete.
Irresistible candor, her death…
The only thing that cried during the moment of her death was a parked car with a sensitive alarm, which did not hesitate to beep and wail and moan in honour of her passing.
When she opened her eyes, she felt strangely… light-headed.
A pair of brown leather boots greeted her waking world. When she looked up, a shadowed figure with round, blank, shiny eyes looked down on her.
There was… smoke, wasn't there? Soft white lines gently encircled the face that she saw. A spark of orange, enveloped in ashes, blinked down at her like the curious eye of a passerby.
Blink. Blink. Look, mother, I don't exactly know what that is…
His mouth moved. Flash of white.
I've waited here for you
Ever long
"You waited for Misa-Misa," she said. Her voice felt strangely weightless. Not that words have any actual weight, perhaps just sound. Perhaps just soul.
He shrugged. "I've got nothing else to do, ever since January." He knelt beside her and touched her. His hand was gloved. She was sure that it should have felt warm, but she felt nothing during those moments.
She expected him to take her by the hand and help her up on her two feet, but he decided to be a bit cheekier this time, apparently. He put her small body on him, and suddenly, he was carrying her in his arms.
"Your legs were broken pretty badly," he muttered secretly to her, as if to explain why he was doing what he was doing to her.
Misa chose not to react to this. She wasn't able to feel anything, anyway. Her skin felt like cracked ceramic. Her insides were outside. Her eyes were glass. Her lips were two plums ingrained on a frozen face.
Where are you taking me? She wanted to ask, but it would be senseless. For the moment, he wasn't moving from that spot of concrete in front of where she landed. He was quietly watching the ambulance, its red lights rotating to infinity. There were men in white pushing a gurney with a silver body bag inside the back of the vehicle.
She heard his voice again. Strangely apologetic, he asked, "I'm sorry, do you want to see the rest? They're just policemen now. They're talking about the cause of your death. The shape of your body when it fell… blood spatter, the height of the building, weird statistics like that."
She didn't answer. Instead, she watched two detectives talking amongst themselves with mute voices. They had serious looks on their faces. One mouth moved, Aizawa-san wa…
Her glass eyes closed. "Misa doesn't want to hear the rest," she said, in that same weightless voice.
"All right." He turned his back on the scene and floated upwards.
Without her death distracting her. Misa allowed herself to have a better look at the guy. All she saw were stripes and curious round eyes. Kind of like a Cheshire cat, except that he lacked the suspicious nature of such a cat. And while cats landed on their feet each and every time they fell, Misa doubted that cats can fly.
He let her down on the exact same ledge as before. Not feeling quite as broken as she did before, Misa stood up when he put her down on the ledge.
She looked at him. Her memories were a jumble, perhaps owing to the suddenness of her fall. "You are… Light?" she asked. She stepped towards him, trying her best to put on a very sad face. "I died for you, you know."
He shook his head.
"Then, I didn't die for you. I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too," he answered easily. He took out the cigarette from his mouth and threw it over the side of the building.
Misa watched the cigarette in its descent towards the ground. It still had embers at its lit end. She imagined it landing on the head of one of the detectives, and she imagined the ruckus that would follow when the dying embers set the man's hair on fire.
Something inside her broke. She giggled.
She looked at him again. He was smiling at her.
"You're not Light… Light never smiled at me like that, I think… so, who exactly are you? Are you Misa's angel?" she asked.
Again, he shook his head.
She pouted, leaned forward to look at his face closer, and squinted. The guy didn't move, but merely looked back at her. This close, she could make out a pair of human eyes behind those cat-goggles. "I've seen you before, though. You must be dead, too."
"I guess so… I doubt that you'll remember me, though," he said.
"Let Misa try," she said. She didn't know exactly what she was doing, but for some reason, she had the impulse to remove those brown gloves from his hands. Underneath were soft hands with pale, translucent skin—blue and green lines showed themselves on his wrists.
She threw the gloves over the ledge. Weightless, they seemed to float away with the wind.
"This is weird," he laughed, as she held his two hands with her own, which were still covered with lace. She still couldn't feel the warmth of his hands, but she found the softness very comforting.
"I think I know your name now. It's Mail, isn't it?" she asked.
He nodded. "You weren't supposed to know that, though."
He was right, of course. There was an easy naturalness to what she did before, but she knew that she would never be able to do that if she were still alive.
"Mail," she repeated. What a strange name. She pronounced it mai-ru, but she imagined M A I L floating above his head teasingly. Twitching letters, begging to be written down on a love letter of some sorts…
"Heh, you can't do that to me anymore," he said. He put his hands in his pockets and stared at her.
The sound of the wind filled the empty air between them. Nothing was tense when she looked back at him silently. She looked away, and stared at the sky. It was still orange, but one of the silent corners of this canopy was getting darker and darker.
"The sky over Tokyo is beautiful when you're up in a building. The clouds and the wind seem friendlier and happier from up here—it's not like the suffocating, stuffy world of commuter trains and scramble line traffic below. I wish he could have taken me up to a place like this… this is the kind of place where you feel alive."
Without warning, she said all of these things. Her thoughts were like a steady train, and there was no sense in stopping it inside her mouth. After a while, she felt silly. Of course, no good would come out of contemplating about life and complaining about a neglectful boyfriend (whom she loved so, so, so very much) when she's already dead.
But with this guy, everything seems to be easy and natural. "It's good that I brought you up here, I guess," Mail replied.
She smiled at him.
Pan up to the sky. A red balloon floated upwards and sideways, in a journey towards nowhere and nothing in particular.
"You waited for Misa-Misa," she repeated.
It would burst into a bloody mess someday, she thought.
"I had nothing to do," he repeated.
(It's not hard to wait for somebody as cute as you.)
His hand found its way to her porcelain-like face. Later, the space between their faces (which never made it to Kira's mind) and the space between their lips (sticky plums and tobacco-dried) was sealed.
No shiny red balloons in this sky anymore. As hands gripped and arms snaked and intertwined, the violence of the orange sky softened into a cool, gentle darkness.
- end -
Notes: Go Matt / Misa. An excuse to let them make-out! Wahaha. I've finished all the chapters of my other fic, which was driven by dialogue, and I wanted to work on being more descriptive and artistic with words… I hope I'm getting better. I seem to like to end my Death Note fics with the word, "darkness". I guess at the end of the day, I'm just a hopeless emo kid. Will you still love me, even if I'm emo? Hu hu hu.
"Everlong" is a rather beautiful song performed by the Foo Fighters, released during the mid-90's. You can listen / watch it on Youtube if you have the time :)