SAMHAIN WALTZ
Summary: Three Halloweens, three birthdays, and three moments between L and Light as the physical world and spirit world cross.

Rating: T

Spoilers: Everything.

Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.

-

Samhain 2003

Come Samhain, the two opposite planes of existence, they overlap. The daoine sídhe, the eidolons - embodiments of the metaphysical, ethereal - they prance throughout the Earth on this October night. Children, they are also wild spirits, they cloak their beings in wily disguises. They are Liars for the night, they are Ghosts and Ghouls and Convicts. Shrieking, giggling a "trick or treat!" as they bound through autumn evening, and in their fabrications they make a profit: chocolates, caramels, peppermints. They dance with the faeries, skipping around in circles before the flickering candlelights of Jack-o-Lantern pumpkins and the glowing moonbeams, and those who observe, they can no longer tell who is which.

L Lawliet was born on such a dusk, when the veil between the spirit world and the human world was at its thinnest.

Of course, L, analytical and rational, has never been a prisoner to superstition. Though Quillsh Wammy was from Britain and told him all the folktales, he has never believed in gods or spirits or demons. Ignored and rejected, despite the notion that he himself was truly somewhat otherworldly in mannerism, a coincidence that he was a master of impish deception and metaphorically he always wore masks and hid in an alias. Always with the intention of a trick and the purpose of winning a treat. He is fully aware, even rather enchanted by Halloween customs, yet he considers this an issue of practicality: he likes candy fiercely, and during October there is always an excess circulating throughout the economy.

As for birthdays, he doesn't celebrate them, and celebrations are unimportant. He recognizes as a mostly-irrelevant fact that, from what his calender clock tells him, he is now 24 years old.

On this dusk, he is in London. L has had a lousy week, with the FBI backing out of the investigation and the twelve agents murdered by the crazy sociopath. The room is dark and L kneels in front of a single computer, focusing with intensity on the monitor. Teeth grind together, high level cognition becomes him and he really only has one thing on his mind - one highly complex thing that is entertainment, true justice and obsession all synthesized together into the reason that he is alive and the reason that he will die.

The annual anniversary was always in danger of going by unrecognized, but Quillsh, he's a gentleman and he has made the effort every year to carve a pumpkin and light a candle inside the gourd. In keen peripheral vision L sees the spectrum radiating gold-orange by the door frame, a grinning face that flickers with the light of a faerie. At his side is the purple and black striped bowl that the English man has sent him, filled with brightly colored candy corn, in which the detective periodically digs his hand into, sometimes to taste the sweets and sometimes to just feel Halloween running through his fingers.

Yet in the isolation of his dark penthouse, under the safety of shadows and masks, a thousand feet above the ground, he only cares about one single trick-or-treater.

"Is there anything that you want today?" Quillsh inquires without risking to call him by his true name, and what L can see of his shadowed face through the monitor is wrinkled in mild concern. He is not here, he is in Tokyo. The old man, he's away, because of the case. He's gone on L's birthday but neither really think much about that anyway, not anymore or ever before, really. Formalities, they were only formalities. L, multi-billionaire, he can afford to buy anything he wants and does so on a regular basis. There is nothing Quillsh can give him, but each October he asks anyway.

L's eyes, they are still meticulously scanning the stack of papers scattered like candy wrappers on the ground before him. One hundred and forty-one people who could have directly received information from the Japanese National Police Agency that would explain why the murderer knew precisely what was going on within their operation, down to the day it happened. The logical deduction was that somewhere inside... somewhere in this clue...

Agent Haley Belle, eight families. Agent Raye Penbar, four families. Kitamura family. Yagami family.

Yagami Soichiro,
D.O.B. July 12 1955. Age 48.
Occupation: Detective Superintendent
Head of Special Investigation of Felon Serial Killer.

Yagami Sachiko
D.O.B. October 10, 1962. Age 41.
Occupation: Housewife.

Yagami Light
D.O.B. Febuary 28, 1986. Age 17.
Occupation: 3rd Year Student, Daikoku Private Academy-

"I want Kira."

The 24-year-old's voice rumbles softly but with conviction throughout the room and into the microphone. Quillsh is silent as he waits, across the world, for his companion to finish his thoughts and translate the complex cognition into English words.

"I want to know who he is. I want to know how he does it. I want his method of murder and I want to interrogate him. And..."

L pauses here and he smiles at Quillsh through the monitor, an upward curve of his lips that suggests a thousand things. It isn't as though the older detective can see – L's software never runs a video feed coming from his side, and likewise he can hardly see his elderly proxy's face, which is shrouded by the darkness of his high-collar coat and low-brim hat. But he doesn't need to. Their disguises are irrelevant now beside their determination, and Quillsh knows that L's determination is almost of something beyond this world in nature.

"I want to see his face when I tear off the mask, when he knows I've beaten him."

-

Samhain, 2004.

Watari, he does not bring a Jack-o-Lantern this year. They are still residing in Tokyo and L has already revealed his face to the NPA, and most importantly, to prime-suspect Light Yagami. That was more than daring enough already for a man who lives behind masks, and it would be ludicrous and – possibly, definitely – detrimental to give Kira cultural hints as to the origins of the enemy he wants to silence more than anything. October 31 is just another date this year, another indicator of how wretchedly downhill the investigation has come as the days tally up to count the case's incompletion.

Quietly, L ponders the date when at 11:53 AM he actually takes notice of it as something besides a neutral piece of data.

So, I am 25 now.

He supposes that this is quite an accomplishment. This is the halfway mark to fifty, which is the halfway mark to one hundred, which is the age he would prefer to die at on the rare occasion that he thinks about it. But these days, such trivial details aren't worth the precious seconds that it requires to contemplate and L has never been much of a daydreamer. Contrarily, what he is thinking at 11:54 is that this data means nothing to him. In fact, he wonders briefly if he has been wearing masks too long, so long that they've become plastered to his skin, absorbed into his face to the point where one could not remove them without serious cosmetic surgery. Perhaps this indicates that L Lawliet has in fact already been exterminated by Kira.

Yet, L thinks as he scratches his head, the only thing that separates this year from any other year is that the case is more immediately apparent. It's closer. It's never more than six feet away.

Light is looking at him curiously through eyes the color of milk chocolate candy. The adolescent's slender hand is gripping the ring of steel around his slender wrist that the detective had tethered there so long ago. The chain that connects them – physical, ethereal, spiritual, it is Samhain today, the world-veil is thin and L cannot tell – has been binding. It is the promise between two cloaked liars, and such promises are obviously obsolete.

We are innocent. We are pure.

We are friends.

Antithetically, they dance a facade in the masquerade of contest. Today it is the holiday that cherishes disguises. L's brain feels worn for a moment, and he isn't sure if it will be day that they are at the climax of their untruths or if today they will be more honest by revealing their costumes. The truth eludes him. It flew off on a witch's broomstick the night that the third Kira, Higuchi, died of a heart attack. It vanished like a magician's illusion when the Death Note's rules demanded that all of L's suspicions were thoroughly misplaced.

"Ryuuzaki," Light starts, almost slowly and very delicately, as those he is choosing the precise words and tone of his voice down to intonation prestigiously. "I would like to say good-bye to Misa now."

But it is not Amane that the eighteen-year-old is saying his good-byes to as he hesitantly tries to avoid his almost-ex-captor's stare. L watches him through Halloween-dark eyes and he understands something that not even skilled cryptologists could decipher.

Light Yagami has designed a mask especially for L's aesthetic pleasure. In this sense, the adolescent is not even a liar. He knows L knows, and L knows that Light knows he knows – Light knows that as well. The truth is fully established even if no one dares to speak it out loud. The circumstances have merely come down to a game of cat-and-mouse and the first to stumble would be the first grave to be dug. It is a twisted, nefarious form of trick-or-treating, and Yagami has just played a very good trick.

"Yes..." With a small nod, L surrenders his own half of the age-old deal.

He reaches into his pocket and unlocks the handcuff that has assured their companionship for over three months, the days that Light wore the most beautiful disguise. Now he's changed into something more frightening for Halloween night. It thrills L, really it does. What he always wanted was to have some kind of assurance that he wasn't delusional and that Light Yagami definitely was Kira, and now in his mind there is no doubt. No, not just assurance, he wants Light to be Kira. Yet all he can think as he unceremoniously tosses the chain to the ground that releases the guilty juvenile, and watches Light-

-stand up, a sloppy second where his true self flickers crimson in his cinnamon eyes under that fair semblance

young

righteous

uneasy

and leaving him as though things were only at surface value-

All he can think is, This is not what I wanted for my birthday.

Rem the Shinigami's pale features cause her yellow eyes to contrast deeply on top of a skeletal body. L knows that she is watching him, ever so silently, as Light walks out the door to his freedom and to what L is afraid will be Kira's win. Something that has become unhinged in the detective's overloaded mind right then made all thoughts of his loss dissipate and suddenly he is wondering why he still does not believe in gods, not even when one is standing like a confession right before him.

-

Halloween 2005

Light, he only knows about Halloween because he is a well-rounded genius. Even so, his knowledge is more or less limited. Trick-or-treating and donning a brightly-colored costume as one treads through the crinkling leaves – these are not customs in Japan, so he gives himself a quick lesson through Wikipedia when the NPA is not watching (and they are always watching, even if they aren't suspicious anymore, they watch because they want to know his thoughts. Now that L is dead, it is Light that they look to for direction).

This year, he has told Misa to focus on American criminals on October 31, because he is knows that there is a significant increase in murder, theft and rape on the more wild holidays. True, these crimes were generally associated with alcohol and substance abuse, but Light doesn't particularly feel as though that excuse merited forgiveness. Additionally, he wants to spread the public perception that Kira is an ethereal judge, a spirit on a holy crusade, so increasing output on a night that embraces the supernatural is more than appropriate. If the police don't accept that, then at least they will be inclined to think that Kira is from America. Ultimately, the scenario is a win/win situation, and Light thanks the gods for commercialized Western holidays.

"Hey, darling!" Misa, she giggles like a young witch as Light closes the door to their private apartment rooms. "Guess what!"

"What?" Light, he is not interested, he neatly hangs up his coat and he wants to take a shower before he makes the coffee that will probably have him charting graphs for the NPA all night in addition to doing generous amounts of homework from To-Oh University. Living a double life as student and detective would have probably been a headache enough, but Light, he lives a triple life by being Kira, or even a quadruple life by playing the part of Misa's boyfriend, even if she was privately aware that the act was only a facade.

"One-hundred and fifty-five names in the Death Note so far tonight! Misa has been working hard all evening."

He nods to encourage her, but still does not glance her way. "That's great."

The model smiles in a way that deserves photographs as she tries to capture his attention. "So now, Misa has been taking a break, and she had this idea..." Her voice trails off as she sees Light head toward the bathroom without so much as a brief visual assurance that he particularly acknowledges her existence. "Light! Come on, you have to look, or I'm not going to write names for a whole week!"

Light does look then, he looks because he wants to snap at the woman who lacks a true passion for Kira's ideals and tell her to stop acting like a stupid child because conducting Justice isn't a game. But when he actually looks her way, the girl who sits in only undergarments on the couch, he sees a slimy orange mess on the coffee table, pumpkin slime and seeds everywhere, sticking to the scalpel, the wood... She has carved a face into the gourd both through amputation and slicing the skin off for pale undertones-

Large, looming eyes, sunken in

bags of sleepless discolor hanging like curses underneath

the long nose and the thin lips

wisps of hair falling haphazardly-

-and placed a small candle on the inside, illuminating the whole thing with a flickering vividness. It laughs, while wearing a mask of blank indifference. It knows a billion things, it processes data with all the mercy of an emotionless machine. It knows how to exterminate Light Yagami. It knows how, and it almost did.

"It's Ryuuzaki, Light!" Misa, she's cheerful, she's proud of her artwork. "Ha, I saw pictures of these things online when I was writing names. I thought he was the perfect face to put on the pumpkin, don't you think? Misa was gonna do you, but Light's face is too handsome to go on a scary Jack-o-Lantern!"

"Hyuk, hyuk," Ryuk the grinning Shinigami chuckles as he leans downward to admire the holiday traditions of the humans that entertain him so much.

Light, he tightens his lips to keep the curses inside as he strides over to the unwelcome eyes staring at him. (Staring, it was always staring, why the hell couldn't the bastard just admit that he had lost and leave him alone?) He licks his fingertips, opens the orange lid by its prickly green stem and annihilates the flame of the candle that is perched inside – saliva sizzling as it smothers the spark of life to a halt. A brief stream of smoke mourns the death, and then it is gone, gone, like Ryuuzaki is. Like Ryuuzaki needs to be.

When Misa sends him a look of hurt displeasure, Light hastily reprimands, "Don't be stupid, Misa. That thing's a fire hazard in an apartment."

No more is said about the subject.

To regain Light's approval, Misa, the model of a thousand costumes, goes back to scribbling names in the Death Note. Light turns the shower water on a burning hot, and he knows that Ryuk is standing right outside the curtain and watching him. The steaming water must be scalding him, because it his heating his skin to an angry red, yet he hardly notices. He thinks, anyway, tomorrow he when he examines the night's victims with the NPA like usual, he would drop the suggestion about a link to American residence while admitting that it could very well be purposely misleading. That was careful and hardly suspicious, yet why did it matter anymore? Who suspected him today? Not since Ryuuzaki-

"Go away, Ryuk!" Light snaps out loud.

The Shinigami does not say a word, he cackles a gurgling noise from his long throat and steps back. Light ignores his presence and the particularly annoying attitude that he's displaying this evening, and the adolescent dries himself and does his work right in the safety of the bedroom. (Safety? From what? Misa's stupid pumpkin?) Paperwork surrounds him, time eludes him and...

..and... then...

There is long, eerie howl – it soars toward the Moon, pale as death, suspended in a purple-black sky. The spidery trees, caked with cobwebs, whisper passed him as he pumps his legs at great, fearful speeds but he can not slow down, the Ghosts, they want him. At least, they must be Ghosts because they are dead, Light knows they are dead because he knows he killed them. Yet in truth they are corpses who defy logic like only a nightmare can. Skin deteriorating, eyes sunken in. Outstretched limbs fall loose and the smell of death and maggots fills the atmosphere, sinking into his nostrils and stinging his throat as he breathes gasps of autumn air from running.

Raye Penbar's skin is the color of chalk, a bloodless face because he has been dead for over a year now. The eyes of the sickly distorted Naomi Misora are bulging like a fish's, her body like a sponge that had soaked up too much water, cheeks swollen and lips a cold blue – so she must have chosen to cast her body into the river when Light had sentenced her to suicide. Together, the pair advances, along with all of the others and the drum-like chant that seems to arise from the soil itself:

"Kira. Kira. Kira."

Light's heart pounds, and his eyes become wet with both impending fear and the chilly air whipping against his face. The parade of disheveled, decomposing carcasses follows him, so many of them swarming like moths to Light, vengeance with empty, dead faces.

He has run to a graveyard.

When he sees the tombstones scattering around him like a perverse city, monuments of rock and granite under the winding trees, he inhales sharply in anxiety – but for him, there is no where else to go but forward. The ghosts are after him anyway and if he stops now he is doomed. There is no turning back.

The mangled, upright corpse of Kiichiro Osoreda, blood still dripping from the poltergeist where the bus brought his life to judgment, steps from behind a pillar right in front of his path. Stepping, stepping, a mad drug-induced grin sprawled on his cracked skull of a face. Broken fingers that jut out every which way on his flattened palms stretch forward in the adolescent's direction.

Startled, Light halts and scrambles behind a large gravestone, closing his eyes and praying that the procession of the dead will pass and let him be.

When he opens his eyes again, a tall man is waiting for him just a few strides away. Dark hair, glinting eyes and grim expression – it is Lind L. Tailor, a face that Light never forgot in any nightmare. The man that Light had killed because he thought he was L, the man who had become the gatekeeper to a doom that he had been too hasty to avoid.

Light steps back until his shoulder blades collide with the cold cement of the gravestone, his breath as silent as the dead and eyes quivering with a dance of terrified life. But Lind L. Taylor just watches him, curiously, from in front. Unmoving, but blocking an escape.

Suddenly, a white hand explodes out of the ground below him.

"Ahhhh!" Light screams when he sees it erupt into the air. The bony thing, it wraps around his ankle, grabbing him with a grip of winter. Desperately, he throws his weight forward and kicks the leg, trying to dislodge the thing. Finally he shakes it off and begins to dart away.

Lind L. Taylor, the only convict to die by accident, suddenly advances. His ghastly intangibility has hardened into muscle, dead skin hanging off of his impossibly iron limbs, and he captures the young genius's arms to arrest his break for sanctity. Twisting them, he pins them behind his slender back, so painful that Light grimaces, despite the fear distracting him. The man shoves the youth back to the loose earth before the tombstone, where the hand is moving with sickly animation. He is forced to watch as this moon-pale body digs itself out of its own grave. Light, he shakes his head in frightened declination of the no, no this cannot be sort, tousled brown hair falling over eyes wide with terrified curiosity as the hands (for there are two now) push against the ground to lever up its upper body, further and further until the head will find freedom from the confines of death...

Of course, Light, he already knows who it is.

Ryuuzaki's face is covered with mud and his spits out dirt. Charcoal eyes latch onto the trembling, breathing body, and he grins something wretched, as though he plans to rip and tear through his flesh like a child who has just opened his bag of Halloween candy. After another minute of retrieving his legs, he crouches down with the veneer of a spider.

Again, Light tries to make a break for it, but the criminal who holds him only restrains him more tightly, to the point of where he is certain that his bones are about to shatter into a thousand shards. Lind L. Tailor kicks at his knees and he falls to a kneeling position, down to the eye level of his worst enemy. He cannot get up.

"Kira..." Ryuuzaki smiles, stretching up his body until it looms above him like a witch's curse. His hands are coated in black, black mud that in the darkness could be called death for all Light can deduce. They wipe the mud off of his face, only smearing the mess but leaving patches of pallid skin to reflect the Moon.

The antagonist steps forward.

Again.

His hands, even dirtier after their previous task in the proof of their damnable sin, they lower down to Light's scalp. They land on his hair, holding his skull still as regardless of Light as he tries to shake them away.

"Agh! Go away, leave me alone!" Light shouts, but the shout wasn't loud – instead, a choked whisper. "Stay back!"

"Light-kun..."

The dirty hands are like ice against his face.

"Kira... I want you..."

Ryuuzaki leans forward, almost a face of childish excitement, a perverted and maniacal joy.

"...for Halloween."

The fingernails, ragged and uneven, they begin to dig into his cheeks, each, right in front of his frozen ears which don't want to believe what they are hearing:

"Take off the mask now, Light Yagami."

And then he realizes that Ryuuzaki intends to rip off his face. The sharp razors of keratin, they claw into the skin, under the skin. Blood, Light's warm, red blood, it drips out through the painful gashes, beads of crimson trickling together with mud. The adolescent jerks his head back, but he can not escape the hardened criminal holding him prisoner and he can not escape the bedeviled detective in front of him who vowed to send him to his execution but was deprived of the opportunity. The surface tears deeper, stretching bright gashes.

A dreadful, wracking sob escapes him. "It's who I am, Ryuuzaki! It's not a mask!"

Ryuuzaki, he looks startled now. Something has intrigued, even surprised him. When he blinks, the white eyelids barricade his dark-as-nothingness eyes, blocking it out if only for the most split second. The muddy hands retract their clawing bite and he holds Light by the chin. The corpse, it leans forward, the tip of his nose is millimeters away from the other and his eyelids are pulled into a frown. Studying. Thinking. Analyzing.

"Y-you're dead! You aren't even real!" Conjuring some frenzied confidence, Light says, "Don't think I don't know this is only a dream. You're nothingness."

Ryuuzaki lowers his face until it is inches in front of Light's. His voice, it rumbles in a way unbefitting of decomposed vocal chords:

"It's true, isn't it. Yet here he is, dreaming about me."

His cold hand constricts around Light's jaw, pressing inward with such vigor that his teeth are forced to part. Then the dead man tips the youth's head to one side. Hunkering down further, L's vacant eyes widen again at the trail of blood that drips down Light's neck.

"Not a mask..." he murmurs.

The face comes forward and Light becomes rigid. His impulse is to struggle, but a faint voice of rationality assures him that such a tactic would result in his shoulders dislocating considering how Lind L. Tailor holds him. Nonetheless, sharp chills grate into his spine as the man he killed advances, pale lips meeting softly against his skin and Light, he is certain that L means to bite him like a bloodsucking vampire.

He does not expect a tongue, warm and soft, to brush against the gashes. To lap up the bloody mess like a kitten. The muscle is heated with a life that unnerves the brunet moreso than the dead fingers, it tastes his cuts and it dams the crimson that trickles down his skin.

L does not withdraw his head along with his tongue. His mouth is next to Light's ear, and very softly, he says, "My deductions were wrong. I expected all lies to taste sweet, yet the essence is merely familiarity.

"But that's fine..." L turns Light's head forward again. Black eyes, they glitter like beetles in the moonlight, large and ominous and otherworldly. "I'm never going to let you go..."

Light hisses, and suddenly, the graveyard is gone. There is only a blurry moon, spreading like ripples in a pond around a dark sky. His head, it is full of fog and mist and now he is faint. As his conscious returns to him, the voice, it trails along behind:

"...didn't you know you're my favorite?"

Light wakes up in a start, and he shrieks out loud. The first thing his eyes see is Ryuk standing there, looming over him, eyes bulging and face cut into an eternal smirk. When the shock reduces into anger, he is able to understand that he is laying safely on top of the blankets on his bed. Papers are scattered about, he must have fallen asleep while doing the work that To-Oh required of him at the times he played the part of a hard-working student.

"What the hell are you doing, Ryuk?!" Light demands with a snarl, recovering his composure only slightly.

Ryuk just cackles, retreating into the shadows of the room and standing with his back arched like a gargoyle. The pair of bulging eyes still glow with ethereal red which illuminates through the darkness, but the youth that the Shinigami haunts is less than disturbed. He is thinking that he needs to have another talk with the damned god about social etiquette while inhabiting the human world, because some things were fine when you were mostly-invisible but other things were definitely unacceptable - such as amusing oneself with voyeurism after being asked repeatedly to avoid invading the personal space of others. For God's sake. Literally.

Quite pissed off, Light slips out of the bed and storms across the bedroom. If he can't sleep without being disturbed, then he would put restlessness to good use and work. He shuts the door behind him and treads down the twilight hallway. His head still hurts and he intends to make an entire pot of coffee and put the whole thing to good use as he finishes the paperwork that stupid dreams had stolen him away from.

The kitchen was black, except one flickering light. One flickering face.

He stares.

The other stares back.

It is the Jack-o-Lantern of Ryuuzaki, candle lit once again inside the pumpkin shell and burning vividly, as if it had never known death at all. The spark of a soul fully in tact, and the smirk of a detective who chose to defy Gods and all of their laws about mortality.

The youth called Kira's skin freezes. For this moment his knees are wobbly and his fingers are shaking, strings of panic are pulled in his frantic thoughts. He is here and he is watching, always watching, he was always fucking watching and following him like a funeral procession.

"You bastard, just die already!"

Light, he doesn't realize his fierce thoughts would come out in words that rang as hollow as an echo. For this moment, rationality has diminished, everything spiraled together and he couldn't have told the difference between this fantasy and reality if he had been calm enough to realize that he should have been questioning it in the first place. Something stirs in his throat - it is a bubble of laughter, soft at first, but then an uncontrollable heaving in his chest rolls off of his tongue.

"Ha, ha! You know, I don't even believe in superstitions!" he taunts to the pumpkin.

It is a glowing caricature with a ghoulish smile, and if it were not an inanimate object it might seem as though it were laughing too. Light's laugh deepens to the point of mania and the Jack-o-Lantern, its candle flickers in response and suddenly it's as though both the human and the phantom are completely deranged.

But among those who wear masks, it's almost a confession. A confession to what is the only mystery.

"Hyuk, hyuk," Ryuk gurgles to himself as he watches the boy standing before the orange tribute to Samhain. "Humans are a riot."

-Fin

Author's Notes

1. Samhain: the original Halloween, a pagan Celtic holiday that celebrates the end of the harvest season, the coming of the winter and the start of a new year. Because of this, it is seen as the day when the spirit world is most compatible with the human world - hence how Halloween is said to be a holiday of the dead. Traditions of dressing in costumes and carving vegetables (pumpkins now) carried over, even through the rise of Christianity when the holiday became All Saint's Day and eventually, the Halloween we know and love. :-)

2. Daoine Sídhe: celtic spirits

3. L dies on November 5, 2004. This is only a couple of days after his 25th birthday. Aw.

4. Today I carved a pumpkin! I put L's face on it! It was going to be Ryuk, but after hearing the sexiness that is L's dub voice, I was inspired to do my favorite detective instead.

Thanks for reading. :-)