Disclaimer: The characters are the properties of the Death Note franchise and the concept of salt blight, the meteorite fall in Tokyo Bay, the tower and Salt Fall are from Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro.
Author's Note: Hello! Zen is here again with another stressbuster...I've been reading Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro and aside from being an eerie, poignant and very fun read (I hope it gets an English translation soon, or else I might just do it myself) it gave me a really strange drive to write a crystallisation scene of all things, so here I am inserting the salt blight premise into Death Note, satisfying that writing itch.
This is a bit of an odd story. I'm hoping it captures the slightly eerie feel of Shio no Machi. It's been suggested to me that this might count as body horror but we'll have to see.
Without further ado, I hope you enjoy Part 1. This will be a two-parter! Best, Zen :D
A part of L would later say that nobody was responsible for what happened to Light but Light himself.
That Light had, somehow, engineered all of this, in that same meticulously perfect way he engineered every part of his perfect life - including, L maintained, the rise then escape of Kira.
After all, if Light hadn't insisted on opening the curtains they wouldn't have seen the meteorite falling into the Tokyo Bay. Light had sealed his own fate through his ridiculous assertions that they both needed to get more sunlight, that it was morning, that they had worked through the night, and that, despite what L might think of it, Light valued his circadian rhythm, thank you very much.
L was being childish but he had never pretended to be otherwise, and something about being able to blame one man's actions, one man's errors, and a human being that was comforting in the face of the alien, the inexplicable and the slow disintegration of the world he had known.
Yes, Light should definitely shoulder part of the blame.
The other part of the blame was a long dark corridor that L didn't dare walk down, because thinking about it never gave him any answers, which meant that it was endless and therein down an endless, spiraling corridor madness lay (he was not to pursue it).
He knew the truth, of course. There was nobody to blame but the salt blight and the strange forces Salt Fall had unleashed it upon the nation. Once the blight had struck there was nothing L could have done - nothing any of them could have done - to stop it, especially in those early days after Salt Fall.
Rain washed down the window in a thick blue-grey sheet. He watched it flow down the road, swirl through road grit – salt – and wash it down a storm drain.
And yet he wondered.
Watari called it survivor's guilt. It was an odd phrase. Surviving had never occurred to L to be a crime. It wasn't an injustice that needed to be brought to book, and he wasn't convinced that, whatever this feeling - of emptiness, of transparency, as if he had suddenly become a very surprised and sad glass jar – was, it couldn't be better described simply as losing, even if he wasn't entirely sure what it was he had lost.
Sometimes the feeling gnawed at him, as if a grain of salt had lodged in his thoughts and started slowly crystallising the corners of his mind and he said as much to Watari when he thought the man would tolerate hearing it (again).
Watari told him that it was only human that L should think that way, and for a sour moment L would entertain the thought of what it would be like not to be human at all, but to be cold, ordered and regular as a column of crystal, if only for a moment of peace.
"It's alright to be scared, Light. It's only human."
Those times, L would go and stand before the remains of Yagami Light. He had been covered in a sheet and tucked into the corner of the room as if in anticipation of a miracle (L knew better than to believe in miracles), and L would lift the edges of the sheet to look at that face one more time.
It was usually enough to shock L back to his senses.
When the light cleared there was a new shape on the Tokyo skyline.
Tall, white and slanting like the streak of tear, a spire of crystal reared over the rooftops of Tokyo Bay. It was tapered to a jagged point. It radiated a cold, blue, belligerent glow like moonlight but from no moon that had ever shone on Earth and reminded L of a broadcasting tower.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as if to the pull of a strange gravity. L closed his eyes, blinked away spots. "The news."
Light tore his eyes away from the spire. "What do you reckon it is?"
"Newsworthy, hence the news, and, at the present, also a distraction from our main task, so we'll satisfy our curiosity - then move swiftly on."
The task force had not arrived yet and likely wouldn't start trailing in for another twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, L had thought, would be adequate time to grasp the situation in Tokyo Bay. Then he could turn his attention back to the problem of Kira and forget, at least for the day, about the tall white spire glinting in the distance between the skyscrapers.
"Ryuuzaki."
He kicked off from his desk and drifted his chair to see the news-stream running on Light's screen.
"…one of many that have fallen across the whole of Japan. While we await a statement from the IAU as to how they failed to predict this meteorite shower, Hanaoka Announcer is at Yahagi Gakuen High School with our breaking news story."
The footage switched to a woman in a tasteful suit, standing in front of a pair of school gates with the crystal spire of Tokyo Bay glinting tall in the background, looming over the buildings, and between her and the gates was a mass of figures. They were students, arriving for the morning, and not one of the students was moving.
They were frozen, still, caught as if in slow motion in the middle walking, talking, gesticulating, with bags slung over shoulders, thumbs on phones, hands bent in a half-toss as a ball was thrown between friends, and as the news reporter spoke, the camera moved in closer and L heard Light's breath snag in his throat.
The students' faces gleamed. Their hair, their skin, their eyes, their fingers shimmered with a cold blue-white glow in the sunlight, and where most had frozen with eyes squinted shut as if against a camera flash, some students' gazes were wide and stretched with terror and their mouths stopped in screams, hands half-risen to their temples as though they had tried to cover their faces.
"…it is yet unknown whether there is any link between this event and the meteorite but eye-witness accounts suggest that this incident here occurred at the same time as the impact of the meteorite on the artificial island under construction in Tokyo Bay. Inoue-san, if you could tell us again what you told us earlier - "
The camera swung to an old man with a cock-eyed spitz dog. A microphone was thrust into his face. L listened only half-heartedly as the reporter had him regurgitate his morning and scanned the students in the background again.
They were made of the same crystal as the tower in Tokyo Bay.
He glanced up and met Light's gaze. Light nodded, mouthed, "No doubt about it."
"...and then there was this great flash of light - like they say they saw with them bombs in the war! - a great white flash, and when it was gone, they were all like this." He gestured at the students, a trembling hand-sweep. "Not one of them moving. I thought they had all turned to stone! But they aren't stone. They might as well be, but stone they aren't."
"What have they become?"
The old man hesitated then to L's astonishment and Light's disgust he shuffled up to the nearest student-statue, licked his thumb, swept it against a hand being waved in a high-five then touched it to his mouth.
"Salt," he said at length, as the reporter hung back and watched from a stunned distance. "It tastes like table salt."
"There's more," said Light, clicking around the screen. Videos from different news channels were playing on different windows alongside an NHK live update feed. "Another twenty one schools reporting the same thing as at Yahagi Gakuen – it's mainly reports from Tokyo Bay area at the moment, but it's all the same: Every student outside at the time of impact - crystallising in an instant."
"The light," said L, remembering the white flash that had blinded him the moment Light had dragged open the curtains.
"Anybody of school age caught directly in the light." Light shuddered and L didn't need to hear it aloud to know what Light was thinking. Perhaps the only thing that had saved Light from the same fate as the students at the gates of Yahagi Gakuen was the pane of double-glazed glass in the window. "The ones on buses and trains and those that had just got indoors weren't affected, but people have been finding more 'mysterious salt sculptures of students' everywhere, all over Japan..."
He suddenly started and surged to his feet. "I need to use a phone."
"To call whom exactly?" At Light's expression L conceded that perhaps now wasn't a good time to be deliberately dense. "Your sister. Of course. Yes."
Light called Sayu's mobile first. He drummed his fingers on the table-top, tried to remember her school route. She took a bus to a private middle school. Today was a Wednesday. Wednesdays, like Mondays and Fridays, she had morning circuits with the rest of the volleyball ought to have taken an earlier bus.
"The chances that your sister was indoors at the time of the impact are eighty four percent." L stood quietly to Light's side, digging his hands into his pockets. The cuffs jangled. "Light-kun shouldn't worry so much."
"You and I both know, Ryuuzaki, that wherever those numbers are coming from, they're not coming from anywhere with any habit of honesty."
Sayu was busy.
Light threw down the phone and tried their home number.
Busy as well.
"The most reasonable explanation would be that your mother thought to call your sister just before Light-kun did." L watched Light pace back and forth, stalking between the limits of the chain. The cuff slid up and down L's wrist and it hurt but he didn't say a word. "I should imagine it is quite unusual for anybody to think faster than Light-kun, but given Light-kun's circumstances perhaps it isn't surprising that thoughts concerning his family's safety came second to his own. He has, after all, been doing all that he can to protect his own skin for the past few months in an environment that has detached him from his family - "
"Not another word, Ryuuzaki, if you know what's good for you. Mum?" L pricked his ears but it turned out to be the answering machine. "It's Light. I saw the news and I want to know if Sayu's safe. Call back this number - " When L looked as if he wanted to protest Light ignored him. "- and leave me a message. Please – and I'm fine. There's no need to worry about me. I wasn't outside."
Light lowered the phone. He breathed, slow and deep, as if to taste the air and savour it seeping into his lungs, taking a moment reassure himself that his body wasn't crystal like the students in the streets.
He returned the handset to Watari and the old man took the phone with a gentle pat to Light's shoulder.
L pulled the thumb from his mouth. "Just in case Light-kun is having any difficulties remembering the priorities of the day, I should like to remind him that the Kira investigation will continue as per usual."
"Ryuuzaki, even Matsuda would be able to see that, right now, there is a bigger case out there than Kira - "
"Maybe so, Light-kun, but as I have been contacted about neither the meteorite nor the children, none of this is our case to be concerned with."
"But - "
"Kira, however, is our case, and Kira may make use of this incident as a prime opportunity to further his own agenda. Whilst the rest of the world may be distracted, we cannot afford to be."
"What happened out there -" Light pointed at the city beyond the window. His finger trembled, " - may be a mass murder brought about by a weapon unknown and beyond human knowledge and you are expecting me to believe that you don't have any interest in investigating the perpetrators at all?"
"That would be assuming that there are any perpetrators to the start with. On the contrary, Light-kun. Considering the similarities to the Kira case, I am very much interested. However - "
"This isn't about the Kira case, at all." Light's eyes burned. "This is about you. You're just trying not to think about what's happening. You want to have an excuse to run and hide, so that when somebody comes to you for help you can tell them that you're busy with the Kira case and close the door in their face!"
"Supernatural mass crystallisation triggers are not my area of expertise or anything that fits even remotely within my line of work. I am a detective, Light, not a scientist," L jammed his hands into his pockets and gripped the fabric of the lining, "and unless there is a doctorate in advanced inorganic chemistry tucked somewhere about your person, there is nothing that you or I can do about a pillar of salt one kilometre high in Tokyo Bay that'll be satisfactory to anybody. As much as it pains me to say to it, in this situation, we are both powerless, which is something I have accepted and included as a realistic factor in my decisions - and you would do well to accept in turn."
For a long moment Light studied him with a sharp, sharp gaze that made L feel as if he was being re-examined, re-assessed, and the childish part of him stirred with ugly resentment that his prime suspect of all people would dare to do that.
Light snorted and looked out of the window. "It's not like you to admit defeat."
"It was never our game to win or lose to start with. Investigating that tower is none of our business." L hopped into his chair and turned on his array of monitors. "Catching Kira, however, is, and meteorite or no meteorite I intend to bring him to justice. Light-kun ought to wish the same unless," a sideways glance he knew that Light wouldn't miss, "he somehow benefits from hindering this investigation?"
Light coloured and hurried to take up his usual seat. "Of course, I don't!"
He dropped into his chair and began closing the video feeds of the breaking news, returning the screen to where he had left off his work before sleep.
There. Everything as per usual.
L settled back and was about to comfortably snap open the first of the day's biscuit packets when Light muttered, "You just want to avoid thinking about the possibilities of the supernatural."
L closed his eyes, opened them, then very deliberately swivelled his chair until he was facing Light again. "Well, since Light-kun is in the spirit of discussing the supernatural why don't we begin with 'divine punishment'? Kira is undoubtedly familiar with the concept, so what about Light?"
"'What about Light' indeed," Light ground out before his swinging fist collided with L's face.
And despite what the media came to dub the Salt Fall, after the rest of the task force arrived and helped untangle the chain from between their chairs, everything, for a time being, continued as normally as it could in the extraordinary circumstances.
Souichirou, Aizawa and Mogi had quickly agreed with L. No use thinking about a problem they had none of the expertise or equipment to solve. Misa had gone to sleep late and slept through the impact, her curtains thick enough to block out the light, and L had left it to Light to explain what had happened and console her through the initial disbelief, horror then cold tears of shock as she absorbed the images on the news footage Watari allowed her to see on a laptop.
"Aliens!" she cried, throwing her arms about Light's neck. "It's got to be aliens! Why don't they destroy that tower? All of those kids! All of those young and happy and beautiful boys and girls! It did that to them! That thing turned them into salt, I know it did!"
"They haven't proved a link between the Salt Fall and the crystallisation yet, Misa."
"We don't need proof. We just need to get rid of it." She sniffed. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot. "Everybody knows that that horrible crystal-tower-thing did it. Don't you think so, Light?"
"Yes, justice would be much swifter if only we could enact it without gathering the evidence and necessary information beforehand to make sure it's an informed decision," said L dryly, stirring the sugar paste at the bottom of his teacup. "I'm sure Kira would approve."
Light glowered over Misa's head and, as L had gleefully predicted, opened his mouth to snatch the bait.
L sipped his tea and marvelled at how resilient people's habits and routines could be in the face of extraordinary change, and when they closed the curtains over the windows for the night he tried to take comfort in that fact (and failed).
In the evening there was a message from Yagami Sachiko on the answering machine. Watari brought the phone to Light, and as he stripped another banana and added its skin to a pyramid he was constructing L pretended not to listen but, in fact, found himself leaning slightly towards the other desk.
Sayu was fine. Light let out a breath of relief – fine, if not more than a little shaken. One of her teammates had stepped outside to wash her face under a tap and been caught in the impact flash. By the time they found the girl's statue half of her face had crumbled into blue-white chunks of salt into the washbasin.
School had been cancelled for a day over the crisis and Sayu had been home before lunch.
Sachiko added that Sayu had been very relieved to hear Light over the phone and that, whatever the circumstances were, Light was welcome to return whenever he was ready to do so.
The following morning there were curious additions to the information – or 'speculation' as L insisted it be called – that had been gathered about the crystallisation phenomenon.
A nineteen year old boy who had been held back in high school had come forward as the sole survivor of his football club, who had been out jogging pre-lessons. He had turned nineteen only the previous day.
A newborn baby had crystallised in its mother's arms when its older sister had opened the hospital room window to let in the sun.
The cut off point of those affected by the crystallisation was eighteen years old. The cut off point was so sharp that a university student who had turned nineteen only moments before Salt Fall was left unscathed.
It was remarkable, unsettling and from whatever angle L could consider it, alarmingly deliberate.
"Sounds as if Light was kind of lucky to be cooped up here with Ryuuzaki! If he'd still been going to university he would've been on his way to morning lectures like all of those other kids," Matsuda seemed to repeat with every macabre story that the news uncovered from Salt Fall, following it with a nervous laugh that tended to drop the task force into a fraught, uneasy silence once it was gone.
It was less than ideal. The Kira investigation was distracted. L found himself eating through an entire packet of koalas in his frustration but he couldn't blame any of them either. In the dark of the night he sometimes thought he could still feel that strange, electric prickling, that shadowy itch in his skin, like the tug of an alien moon, that he had felt on the day of Salt Fall.
He knew Light could feel it too. He caught Light glancing out of the window during the day, eyes focusing on the distant glint of the spire in Tokyo Bay as if hopelessly drawn to it despite how far away it was, before turning away with a shudder and roll of his shoulders.
The government released a statement that the tower was under investigation with its possible links to the 'All Japan Youth Crystallisation Event' to be one of its highest priorities. It was implied that once they understood the crystal composition and how the crystallisation had occurred they would be able to reverse the process.
Their optimism was precious really.
"But a little too late for your sister's volleyball associate."
Misa glowered over the newspaper that Watari had brought up for her. "Don't be so mean, Ryuuzaki."
"No, he's probably right." Light sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's one thing reducing a complex multicellular biological organism to a block of crystal, but the reverse, to go from the simple, crystalline, comparatively low-energy organised state to a flesh and blood human again, is likely impossible."
"Oh," said Misa simply. She bit her lip, looked down at the hands on her knees. "When you say 'likely' impossible, how impossible is 'likely' impossible?"
"Well, it would be like this, Misa." L leaned forward, pulled Misa's neglected slice of baumkuchen towards him then claimed ownership with a stab of his fork. "Say a man was cremated, burnt to a crisp, or charcoalised, if you will. Decrystallising any of those students would be like packing those man's ashes into a mould and trying to bring him back to fully-functioning life."
"Oh."
"That is the magnitude of impossibility we're dealing with here, and as Light implied it would require a significant decrease in entropy. Likely huge, so it's probably completely and utterly impossible by all the known mechanics of the universe."
Misa snapped. "There's no need to rub it in!"
"Ah, like salt in a wound?"
Light groaned and buried his face in his hands, but L could see the reluctant tug of a grudging smile at the corners of his mouth.
And L allowed himself an inward smile and thought that, for now, this was just fine.
The Kira case would continue.
This strange life of theirs would continue.
The mystery of the Youth Crystallisation Event would be solved. The crystal tower in Tokyo Bay would be dismantled. The world would keep on turning, moving on from the candle-light vigils at the school gates; the packing of crystallised boys and girls into the back of vans to clear the roads and for use in study; the grieving parents campaigning for the remaining statues to be covered when the rains came and, when the council attempted to strip the statues of their clothes for being 'fire hazards', allowed to keep their dignity.
But so long as that tower stood and L could feel that strange pull that pushed and probed at his skin as if with millions of tiny fingers he couldn't shake off the thought that there was still something more to come.
It was like hearing a knowing smile in the voice of a distant and unseen singer.
Once the task force had gone home, Light turned to him, his face lit up blue by the monitors, and L wondered if it was intentional that Light was looking so young (of course, it was) as he asked, quietly, "Do you feel it?"
L tapped the end of his fork against his front teeth. How much was it worth seeing Light's indignation if L denied that he felt anything at all and feigned ignorance?
But under the cold, brittle glow of the monitors he was suddenly reminded of those faces they had seen on the news, white-blue and crystallised, fixed in their final moments in gargoyle masks of terror.
He lowered the fork from his mouth. "Like something trying to get under your skin."
Light nodded and then said nothing, apparently lapsing into thought as he returned to scanning the day's list of mysterious deaths for any pattern that could correlate to Kira, but he was drumming his fingers, rolling back his shoulders, stretching his hands when he thought L wasn't looking as if worried that he might be stiffening up.
"It's alright to be scared, Light. It's only human."
When the words slipped out of his mouth, L was just as taken aback as Light, if not more so and he regretted the sentiment in an instant. What did it matter that for a brief, mad moment L had been struck by the thought that Light was closer to the age of L's successors than to L himself? He couldn't afford to forget who was sitting beside him. Mistakes like this could cost him and with an adversary like Light would be made cost him dearly.
But if the old saying said to keep friends close and enemies closer, then if they happened to be both they needed to be kept closer still.
So long as they were together, they would share the same fate.
Light's face glowed blue-white in front of the monitor. "I'm not scared. Why would I be?"
"No, of course, you wouldn't be. How silly of me. Think nothing of it. I am quite clearly speaking nothing but absolute rubbish."
"If you say so." Light gave a small laugh that was too composed, too well-timed, too planned to ring true in L's ears. "But if you are scared, Ryuuzaki, it's perfectly understandable."
"No, Light."
The fans of the computers whirred between them and the city beyond the windows crawled with colours in red, gold and green. The lights filtered in between the curtains and glimmered on the floor like beetles.
"I don't think either of us understand what it is to be scared at all."
'Salt blight'.
It was a simple enough name for a very simple condition.
It began at the extremities, toes and fingers turning hard and stiff with the give of a stick of chalk, then extending up the body, skin, muscle and bone eaten up by glittering white crystal and joints melting together.
The first girl who went to hospital was examined then given an important choice.
Would she rather crystallise standing upright or sitting down?
"Light-kun, have you ever heard of what happened to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah?"
"Only so much that they were cities punished by the Christian God in the Old Testament. Sayu would think that those were names of more giant monsters from the movies. Why, Ryuuzaki? What's brought this on?"
"I was thinking of Lot's wife."
" Lot?"
"A man who escaped the destruction of his hometown with his family. God told him not to look back, which seems an easy enough instruction, but surprisingly difficult for humans in all mythologies to follow. Orpheus, to pick another tragic example. Lot and his daughters did well enough but his wife turned and looked."
"What happened to her?"
" She was punished for it, and transformed into a pillar of salt."
"I think I now see why this is relevant."
"I thought you might."
" So she was punished - for daring to disobey God, and perhaps because when she looked back and saw her hometown being destroyed she felt anger?"
"And for a moment she may have lost her faith in God. It would be understandable if she did, but I sometimes feel that there is more to the tale than that. Perhaps God wasn't punishing Lot's wife at all but Lot himself, and it wasn't a punishment as such, but a reminder that despite being the sole survivors of the disaster they had neither been chosen nor favoured by God, and shouldn't expect such luck in the future." L remembered a church with a rose window and pews empty but for pigeons. "It was God checking Lot before he could become too arrogant, or deluded in thinking himself untouchable now that he had escaped once what should have been fate."
Light looked up and L wondered if he had gone too far.
"...are you saying that Youth Crystallisation Event happened in order to humble us of all things?"
"To humble the present ruling generation and to make space for a new generation uncorrupted by the same arrogance and sense of entitlement as yours? Perhaps, if you were so inclined as to make a story with a moral out of all of this."
"Humble us...Why would anybody do that to us? And who?"
" I don't know, Light. Most likely nobody. In fact, in all likelihood, this is all simply a random, irrational, unintelligent event with neither rhyme nor reason behind meteorite fell because it did. The Youth Crystallisation Event happened because it did. It's all astronomical phenomena and tricks with physics and chemistry, and nothing more. There is no guiding reason for why this is happening to you and nothing will stop it happening again."
"Then what's the point of all this, Ryuuzaki? Why tell me about Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's wife?"
"For the same reason anybody tells stories, Light. Reality is nonsensical. Nothing happens for a reason except one construed in hindsight. Stories, on the other hand, make perfect sense. Anything that occurs in a story is justified. Ultimately it's comforting for things to have meaning, and this is what stories do. They make reality make sense when all sense seems impossible."
Thank you for reading and perhaps I'll see you for part two!