I'm sorry for not updating my other stories for so long. Real life has been very hectic and work even more so. This is short and makes absolutely no sense, unless you're fresh from a fever dream or have been roaming the outskirts of vicious small towns.
Black-and-white zigzags coat the laminate floors Light skids on, streaks of binary moralities slipping from his vision when he glances below. The faster he runs, the louder L's screams get.
He's been in this hallway before. Yes, he has. A smiling man is here, singing about death and justice. His face is blue. When Light passes him by, the man whispers every bad thing he's ever done into Light's ear, and Light pukes, last year's bento lunch dribbling down his shirt. He runs faster. The bullets inside him are laughing.
Chintzy stage curtains start telling him Kira is closer. They are red tonight and hide every wall from him, making him feel like he'll be trapped backstage forever.
Strobe lights start to go off, and Light sees flashes of a face he doesn't know coming closer with every exposure. Melted flesh then dark then blonde hair then dark then blue eyes then dark, dark, dark.
(He is righteous. He is going to get out of here.)
He makes a turn, steps over a corpse, and enters a room.
A crow swoops from above, scratching someone else's name on his face.
Misa's torso is here, corset crippled and lolita lepered. Her chest leers at him, swaying to a heavy metal song Light can't hear anymore. It tells him to go fuck himself in pig latin.
"yrros os m'I," Light says.
The torso fossilizes, dates itself to a period before Christ. Thighs and the stump of a neck sprout. She will be Venus de Milo again before the night is over.
Light blinks and Kira is in front of him, hand down his pants, palming and twisting and pinching. He's the brightest in Japan, he deserves this, no one else can fuck with death this good, and then Kira's gone and Light is in the hallway again, flaccid and shoeless. His socks are grimed from jogging through empty subway cars. L is still screaming.
The hallways are filled with gods now. Izanami flicks his nose. Osiris throws a bucket of cockroaches at him. They crawl into his ears and up the grooves of his back, laying eggs and starting civil wars along the curve of his neck. Santa Muerte peels a strip of flesh from each of his arms, and laughs at the black stars lighting him up inside, tombs and wombs colliding into each other and absorbing the white of his bones.
A snake on a skateboard rolls past them, doing ollies and flips.
Light follows it. They go down and downer and downest and reach Hell, or at least the basement.
Light bends over and kills the snake, twisting it into a hangman's noose. As he bites into its head, his teeth cut into its venom glands and he poisons himself.
"selppa ekil etsat uoY," Light says. Kira breathes hot air on his neck. Light starts running.
He takes a right after ninety years. The door he faces has eyes that were once sharp but dull once Light tells it he killed Raye Penber. It swings open when he tells it the time.
This room is his.
Sayu is here, both of her. They are trapped in glass cylinders. The one who loves Light Yagami is waving a sheet of math equations at him. The one who loves Touta Matsuda is wearing a bulletproof vest and radioing in for backup, hair pulled into a high ponytail and a thick moustache growing under her nose.
Light ignores both of them. He lies down on his bed, ruining the sheets he had made. (Not his mother, never his mother, he had made his own bed, he had cut his own umbilical cord, he had saved the world with a fucking notebook.)
A slew of porn stars pop their heads from his bookcase and ask him if he wants anything to drink.
"ytsriht ton m'I ,uoy knaht oN," Light says.
They nod and hide themselves again. Light tries to sleep, but L won't stop screaming.
Finally, he gets up. One of the Sayus is four and showing Light the drawing of him she drew in Kindgergarten today. He has red horns and is holding a pitchfork, impaling a frog wearing jeans with x's for eyes. The other Sayu is fourty-four and is cradling her newborn boy. His name is Hikari. She will be retiring from the force in a decade.
Light says goodbye to one of them and leaves.
Kira is waiting on the other side of the door. He swings an axe into Light's neck. It cuts shallow. Kira presses his mouth against the wound and asks it if he's still bored. The wound says not anymore and Kira hacks at its edges until it's all Light is, just a gaping wound of A+s and justified murder.
There is a snapping sound and Light is back where he started.
L is quiet. He is sitting cross-legged. Someone else's mouth is on his face.
"?yhW .seye s'asiM evah uoY," asks Light.
The mouth grins. It has too many teeth. All of his molars have cavities, tiny black holes that Light gravitates towards. His hands are in L's mouth before he can register it, fingers dipping into those curved spacetimes and then –
L is biting down hard. Light screams in pain and ecstacy and pain again. A month passes. L lets go and the two sit down. The recliners are from Ikea.
Watari is showering L with champagne, jerking a bottle of Chardonnay up and down and spraying L in carbonated gold. Another old man wearing glasses hovers above them, his gauzy dragonfly wings moving in slow flaps.
Watari empties the Chardonnay and then smashes the bottle against L's head. Silver spoons begin spilling from L's mouth and casino bells squeal try again, try again, try again.
Watari looks disappointed. He tells Light that this isn't L, his voice distorted and pitched seven octaves too high.
L disagrees, and the spoons rust, bronzing as they hit the floor. He uncrosses his legs and Light hears the sound of a fire extinguisher going off.
The room melts into pastels and cell bars. Light's hands are handcuffed together. He is wearing an orange jumpsuit. Beside him, L's back is arching and his body is heaving, hips dipping and grinding against something invisible. Most of his face is burned off in pretty pink scar tissue.
L is saying 93312639 over and over. Light doesn't think he should know these numbers, so he tries not to listen. He gives himself a heart attack, making the lawful arrest a cardiac one. The handcuffs fade and a happy panic rises in his chest. L's feeling it too, and he spasms harder. As L dies, he kisses Light's eyes shut with an open mouth, rotten teeth falling on Light's face.
Someone screams swerve and he's sitting with L in the room again, except now the recliners are a loveseat from La-Z-Boy. A steady fog rolls in, smelling like sugar and piss.
L is screaming again. His eyes are padlocked on Light's, his voice ripping gashes into the wallpaper and making the strobe lights come back. L creeps closer to him with each flash of white, climbing over the chair and across the space between them with shaking erratic steps, his piercing scream and the absolute terror in his wide eyes making all the warmth in Light's body pool into his belly.
Light stands up. L snarls and howls and chases him, hands like shinigami claws reaching to steal half of something from him. Light turns to run, slipping on creamed corn ebbing from door.
He flings himself out, but not in time. L's caught his leg and is dragging him back in.
He kicks hard, right foot then left then he's backstroking in his elementary school's pool. His university entrance ceremony suit is weighing him down though, so Light starts to sink.
Water fills his lungs at first, then engine oil, then black coffee, then tennis balls.
They bounce him into a hallway where the floor zigzags and a smiling man is singing and Kira is leaning against a mirror at the end, waiting to start again.
So Light runs.