Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note nor any of the characters contained therein.
Summary: Those who came before us, even the ones we never met, had a hand in shaping us. Tales relayed, true or not, help form our ideas of ourselves. Pre-canon. Rated T, just in case.
Litany
My father was raised Catholic, or so he said. His mother emigrated from Russia to Europe and eventually met his father, a Frenchman living in Belgium. Apparently his father was something of a libertine before his mother put a bit more structure into his life. They traveled the world together, even after having children, but they always seemed to return to Europe. My father told me that they were a happy family, if somewhat strange. His parents never failed to indulge their children's intellectual curiosity, no matter how it manifested.
He said that one night while they were in Italy and he was staying at a schoolmate's villa, his older brother rather forcefully discovered the volatility of the chemical compounds he'd combined, nearly leveling their home. His brother died in the blast, as did his older sister, who had been napping after a long night of composing music in her room above his workspace. My father's parents had both been injured – they each experienced partial hearing loss, and his father sustained burns trying to find his children in the smoking ruin of the house. Worse than the injuries, however, the loss of his two siblings severely crippled his family. He was eleven at the time.
It shocked him to see how differently his parents behaved after that. Rumors swirled around them, including the ugly idea that his brother might have been building a bomb and fancied himself some kind of revolutionary, but no proof of this was ever found. They never returned to Italy, the memory of their loss there imposing a kind of banishment on them. The family spent time in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Netherlands. My father then spent a few years away in Amsterdam, trying to escape the protectiveness that had grown over them all like a scab.
While still in his twenties, my father was told that his mother had cancer, and he flew from Mozambique to Brussels to be at her side. It had metastasized so effectively that it was difficult to tell where it had started, but the doctors suspected that her bones had been the epicenter. By the time she had admitted her pain to herself and gone to the doctor, it was too late to do much more than keep her comfortable. She remained like that, gradually weakening, losing weight, unable to stay awake for long due to the drugs that kept her from crying out in pain, for almost three months. Her death came quietly, two days after Christmas, as he held one of her hands and his father held the other.
He said that his father seemed aimless and distracted after that, forgetting to comb his hair or dress properly. He made plans to stay in Belgium to help his father, postponing his work on his doctoral thesis on anthropological genetics. His father protested half-heartedly, but my father was stubborn. They stayed together for a few weeks, talking quietly some of the time, but more often numbly going through the motions of daily life.
One evening, his father encouraged him to get out of the apartment, telling him that he was too young and vital to be spending another night indoors with an old man. "Go live a little for me – tell me your tales when you return," he'd said. My father wanted to tell him that he wasn't old, that he didn't mind staying in, but he did not want to vex his father by arguing. So he went out to enjoy a meal and a few drinks with old friends, intending to return quickly but staying out past two in the morning.
When he returned to see flashing lights and smoke, he did not need to be told, but police gave him the story anyway: his father, a chronic smoker, had fallen asleep in front of the TV wearing his robe while holding a lit cigarette. They guessed that he had spilled some whisky on the robe, which would have accelerated the flames. Luckily for the other tenants of the building, no one else had been home when the fire started – a downstairs neighbor had come home from her nursing job and smelled smoke. The neighbor from across the hall was never found, and it was later discovered that he had been wanted by the ICPO for weapons trafficking and murder – there were those who said that he had killed my father's father for discovering his secret, but my father was convinced that, rather than an accident or murder, his father had committed suicide, though he did not tell the police that.
I actually prefer to believe that my grandfather discovered the fugitive's secret and confronted him, only to have the fugitive fight with him and die in the struggle, with my grandfather deciding to let the man burn in his place and going off to reinvent himself elsewhere, though I expect that this is wishful thinking on my part. My father finished settling his parents' estate and liquidated their assets before returning to complete his doctorate. It was when he attended a scientific conference in Paris, in his thirties, that he met my mother.
My mother's father was a soldier with the UK Armed Forces stationed in Japan. Her mother was an idealistic and rebellious young woman who'd run away from home for a tryst with a foreign man, and someone who, by all rights, should have attended and would have excelled at University, had her family not been so poor. My mother's parents were really only together for a few weeks, though that was time enough to conceive a child. My mother never met her father.
A few years later, when she was a little girl, her mother tracked his family down in England, confronting his parents as well as the wife and child she'd suspected he had, only to find out that he had been killed in action. Though she did not believe this when they told her, my mother's mother eventually procured enough evidence to prove it to herself. After chancing everything on such a long trip, on which she'd had to spend all her savings, she vowed never to return to British shores again, returning with my mother to Japan to pay back the debts she now owed to family and friends for her "foolishness."
By contrast, my mother had loved the place – she told me that some of her first clear memories as a child were of England, of green rolling hills dotted with sheep, of stone buildings and cobbled walks, of tiny warm shops with friendly round people serving hot pasties with gravy and scones with clotted cream. Though her nostalgia would draw her back one day, she settled into her life in the Japanese countryside. My mother attended public school, but her mother supplemented her education at home, gradually acquiring a fairly large library. I suspect that her mother had started obtaining these books for her own study, but upon discovering that her daughter's intellect matched if not surpassed her own, she made her daughter's education more of a priority. I suppose it would have been the ultimate rebellion against the old traditions that dictate that a woman should marry and serve a husband rather than embark on a career and life of her own, and certainly my grandmother would have wanted her daughter to be as self-reliant as possible, given her own experiences.
My mother's zeal to learn and sharp wit were things she inherited from her mother, though she did rebel in her own way, occasionally allowing her passion and idealism to overwhelm her pragmatism. She told me she once planted camellias where her mother had intended to plant beans and was scolded, though the flowers defiantly remained there years after she'd grown up.
It was not enough for her that she had taken her university exams two years early and even garnered national attention for her excellent scores – no, my mother was quite ambitious. Though she began attending university in Tokyo at the age of fifteen, she had sent applications abroad, unbeknownst to her mother. She so impressed the admissions board at Oxford that they sent a man to meet her, and after several phone calls following this meeting, she received the good news by mail: she had earned a scholarship that would cover most of her expenses at Oxford. Her mother was not pleased.
They argued constantly in the months prior to my mother's departure – about money, about keeping secrets, about the "complete folly" of going halfway around the world for an education that mightn't be much better than the one she was already receiving. But they were both stubborn, and my mother earned enough money to pay for her one-way flight to England, and her mother stuck to her vow never to set foot on British soil again.
Once she began attending Oxford, my mother wrote home at least once a month, though it took over a year for her mother to begin writing back. She told me she felt very alone at first – despite already being quite fluent in English, it took her some time to overcome her shyness in an institution filled with strangers, but she began to make friends, and her successes bolstered her confidence. My mother was surprised to encounter some racism among her fellow students and even some professors – the war was long since over, and she considered such willful ignorance to be absurd and pointless in the extreme. Thus she enjoyed defying others' expectations of her, speaking in a very crisp, posh south English accent, as well as mimicking assorted regional British accents for the amusement of her friends. She got to be quite good at imitating speech patterns and accents of many kinds, sometimes doing impressions of professors – a talent that nearly got her into trouble on more than one occasion – and playacting in an informal improvisation group. Some of her friends encouraged her to take some courses in Drama, but she said that didn't interest her – she felt that there were too many other things she wanted to study.
In order to afford books, and room and board, my mother needed to work, and she was lucky enough to find a job near university grounds at the kind of shop she remembered from her youth. She had no experience, but learned quickly, as she always did, eventually becoming as proficient a baker as the proprietor. She used to joke that she'd made so many friends at Oxford because of how good her birthday cakes were – students she barely knew would approach her and tell her when their birthdays were in hopes that she would bake one for them – and while I can personally vouch for how delicious her cakes were, I imagine she made friends for better reasons than that.
During the summer prior to her final undergraduate year, one friend offered to pay her way so that the two of them could travel through Europe together. My mother balked at first, saying that it was too much money and too big a favor, but the idea of seeing other countries entranced her. She decided that she would pay her wealthy friend back afterwards as the opportunity was too good to pass up.
The two young women spent almost a week in France, starting in Paris and moving from there down to Aix-en-Provence before following the Mediterranean coast into Italy. Not rushing themselves, but never lingering in any one place long enough to develop set habits, they then took a boat down the shore to Greece, stopping at most of the Ionian Islands and visiting the city of Kalamata before heading on to Crete. My mother once told me that every island has a personality, and she felt privileged to meet so many of them. After soaking up the sun on several shores, they returned to Italy to visit Rome, which my mother described as beautiful and intimidating, much like her companion. A mere two days later, they were in Austria, stopping over for a night at a hotel in Schwaz with the intention of proceeding to Germany next. When my mother awoke, however, her friend was gone. The only trace of her companion that was left behind was a scarf on the bed.
Though naturally a calm sort, my mother was nonetheless distraught to find her friend missing – she felt that she must have met with foul play. She contacted the local authorities, who seemed somewhat unenthused, and conducted her own investigation, steadily learning to speak German, in an effort to find and help her friend. She did not have enough money to get back to school, or anywhere else, so she took a job in the hotel kitchen to pay for her room and earn the money she would need, her baking skills paying off in spades. She said they called her Fraulein Kuchen there. All my mother was able to determine over the course of her investigation, according to two separate witnesses, was that someone matching her friend's description was seen getting into a green car a block from the hotel with a man wearing sunglasses and a dark suit. These events pre-date the common use of personal computers, not to mention the expansion of the internet, so my mother had limited resources at her disposal. When she had earned enough money to buy a plane ticket from Innsbruck back to Oxford, she left, still agonizing to herself over the fate of her friend. She nearly missed the beginning of the semester.
Returning to campus, she was somewhat relieved to be on more familiar ground, but she was not prepared for the shock when she saw her friend merrily attending classes as though nothing had happened. When pressed for information, this friend told her that she had "met some guy" and thought she'd left a note for her when she'd decided to "bail" to go party with him – apparently they'd been in Heidelberg for a week before her friend had returned to England without giving my mother a second thought. Needless to say, my mother was livid – she never forgave her, becoming much more cautious in choosing her friends, particularly among the well-to-do. It was for this reason that she was immediately wary of my father, who, though not especially wealthy, had inherited some money from his parents and was used to a somewhat more comfortable lifestyle than she was.
Years later, after my mother had completed her doctorate at Oxford, her thesis refuting string theory got some attention from the physics community at large, and she received an invitation to attend a global science conference in Paris with a professor who was trying to convince her to stay on at Oxford as a professor herself, though she said that this did not interest her. At the time, she was saving up for a trip back to Japan to visit her mother, which she had not been able to do since arriving at Oxford as an undergraduate. She had soaked up so much knowledge, so fast, she told me, that she felt a disconnection within herself, and letters and phone calls would not be enough to counteract that.
My father first saw her participating in a panel discussion on recent theories in physics, and he told me that he quite enjoyed the way she calmly punched holes in everyone else's arguments – apparently there was just something about the manner in which she left these primarily older men red-faced and sputtering as they scrambled to rationalize their theories in response to her challenges. She would occasionally quirk an eyebrow as if to say "is that all you've got?" That the bright young upstart physicist should be female and beautiful and imperturbable to the point of iciness tickled my father – she was the antithesis of the blustering men she was debating. He said he knew he loved her "by the end of her fifth sentence" even though he had not met her yet. I recall my mother scoffing at this from the breakfast nook once.
The first memory my mother had of my father is markedly different. She spotted him later that day, laughing with colleagues, flanked by comely women and waving a glass of whisky around as he spoke. She pegged him as shallow and loquacious and sought to avoid him, nonetheless still encountering him moments later when they nearly smashed into one another in the milling crowd. Though her demeanor toward him was short and sharp, he persisted and did manage to amuse her with tales of the punctured pomposity of some of the scientists attending the conference. He told her a bit about his own field, and was surprised at her interest in anthropological genetics, considering many scientists' tendency to focus only on their own fields.
They spent more time together over the next several days of the conference, even ducking out of one presentation to dash through the rain to the Louvre – only to find it closed. Apparently they found this quite hilarious, though I cannot see why. My mother found herself liking my father quite a bit, despite her initial impressions. Toward the end of the week, my mother revealed that she was saving up to fly to Japan and see her mother, and my father impulsively offered to pay for her trip there. This shut her down cold. A lifetime of having to scrape together what she could combined with a bad experience with someone who "threw money around as if to taunt those without it" made her particularly disinclined to accept what she saw as charity at best and prostitution at worst. She was certain that he could not possibly want nothing from her.
Though it is true that he already knew he wanted to see her again – in fact, by this point, he told me, he'd already decided that she was the only woman he would be willing to marry – he had truly only wanted to help her. After a heated argument over the relevance of money and the importance of controlling one's own destiny, my mother stalked off, for the first time genuinely considering taking the professorship at Oxford. When she checked out of her room the next morning to return to England, there was an envelope at the front desk for her. Inside it was a round trip, open-ended ticket to Japan in her name along with a note that simply read "Be happy." No signature, but she knew who it was from. She nearly tore it up, and she tried to call his room, but my father had already left. One look at the professor who wanted her to return with him to Oxford, and who was now regarding her with a lasciviousness she had not noticed before, and she knew that the one person she most wanted to see was her mother. And so she took the other direction and went to Japan.
She said that her return to the land of her birth nearly stopped her heart with emotion as snow-topped mountains popped into view, followed by green hills and spiky cityscapes. Looking down through the window as the plane descended, it was as though she had kept her homesickness a secret from herself. Her mother's stern face in the midst of the airport was a more welcoming sight than even she could have imagined.
In her time there, she and her mother laughed as they had never done before, and her mother seemed to soak up every story she would tell, even the ones my mother had already described in her letters. The house felt smaller to her, but my mother did not feel confined. The yard was as green as ever, and the camellias she had planted were now overtaking their corner of it, the bright pink blooms practically shouting in greeting every time she walked outside. Compared to everywhere she had lived since, the air smelled different, the water tasted different, and despite her long absence, my mother felt completely at home.
She did not want to admit to her mother that a man she'd only just met had paid for her trip – she had every intention of tracking him down and paying him back – but her mother finally wrung it out of her. She braced herself for a diatribe against the folly of trusting men, but her mother surprised her by saying "I do not need to tell you to be careful, but I suggest you trust your heart. It may not always lead you to pleasant places, but you will learn what you need to know and be who you need to be. If I had not followed my heart, I would never have met the person I love most." My mother asked if she meant her father, and she said "No. I mean you, my dear."
Thus emboldened, my mother began searching for my father in earnest, looking into his background, calling up colleagues in his field. She had to go to a library in Tokyo before she found an old newspaper article describing the explosion that had claimed his two siblings, and she eventually found his parents' obituaries. Discovering his family's tragedies changed how she saw him – she wondered how he could still smile after losing so much. She also took note of his numerous degrees, deciding that he was brilliant, if unfocused. The more she investigated, the more she came to see him as a complete person, and though she took everything "with a grain of salt you could tie a horse to," in the vernacular of the English baker for whom she'd worked for so long, she found herself wanting to see him again, and not merely to repay her debt to him.
Eventually, she spoke to a colleague who knew that he was in New Zealand, and after conversing with her mother on the subject, she used the open-ended return of her plane ticket to fly there. Arriving was easy enough, but finding him once she was there proved somewhat tricky. She called around to local universities and spoke to several anthropologists, occasionally disguising her voice for the sake of increased compliance, and after four days, she finally had a location. It took her two more days to get to his camp, including two hours of walking from the nearest dirt road, leaving her rental parked near a rock she hoped she'd recognize again. He looked quite a bit different with his sleeves rolled up, covered from head to toe in dirt with his hair sticking up like a madman's, but there was no mistaking his voice when he called out to her "Aha! So you've found me."
My mother found this infuriating, as if he'd been counting on her to want to track him down, and she marched up to him and said "I should slap you." He replied "Slap away – the honor would be mine." She did slap him then, smudging dirt to leave a red mark, but he continued to grin at her. "Why are you smiling at me?" she asked, her jaw clenched as she glared at him. "I can't help it," he said, "It's just so good to see you." My mother stared at him for several moments and then burst out laughing, telling him, "You might be insane, you know." My father looked surprised. "Might be?" I can see this conversation between them as if I was there, although obviously I was not yet conceived, let alone born. I do not know what, if anything, was embellished in the retelling, but it was a cherished story my parents told to remind themselves of how they came to be together, of how tenuous the link to their future happiness had been.
My parents loved each other – of that I have no doubt. They loved me too, though I confess I sometimes felt like an intruder. However, I had no trouble finding things to do on my own when they were occupied with each other. I suppose you want me to tell you about my childhood – the places we lived, the things we did, how my grandmother came to break her vow. But the fact is, I have only told you of my parents and their parents because they are all dead and cannot be harmed anymore. As you already know, my mother's mother, the only grandparent I ever met, passed away just over a year ago. And as you also know, my parents were murdered in front of me seven months, two weeks, and three days before that. If my father's father did fake his own death, then it is possible that he is out there somewhere, but as I mentioned earlier, this is likely my own wishful thinking – an unnecessary boyish indulgence, I realize. Being dead, none of them can be hurt by the truth. But I think a better question might be . . . why do you want to know these things, Mr. Wammy?
Author's Note: This was my attempt to shade in some of L's origins – it was something I started when I was writing my longer fic, Turn of the 8th Day, as a way of centering my characterization of L. As such, it could be considered to be linked to that fic, but it has no real role in it other than as background. I was going to include an explanation for L's name in this (there was only a hint of that in The Pull), but I may do that in more detail elsewhere. As I have done in my other fics, I have left the exact years of these events vague, so whether you use the canon timeline from the manga or from the anime, things should still fit.
The title, Litany, refers not just to L's recitation of his lineage as told to him by his parents but to his remembrance of them as a kind of prayer. Not that L himself would literally see it as prayer, just in the sense that invoking one's predecessors' experiences is a way of connecting one's origins to oneself, reinforcing one's own identity. Such family stories being uniquely personal, I imagine it would have taken some time before L would have been willing to tell any of them to anyone, hence the one-year-or-so gap between his entry into Wammy House and his divulging parts of his past. I just liked the idea of a young L spewing out so much information to a possibly flummoxed Quillish Wammy. While writing, I imagined hearing it playing from a tape recorder in a half-lit room with some background hiss, with one or more youngsters listening avidly – not that they would ever have kept such a recording, even locked away in an enormous safe in a basement somewhere . . . ;-)