Author'sNote: I couldn't resist having a go at writing some of L's back-story, and it will probably grow into the back-story for other characters as well. This is so my co-writer and I can have shared head canon for our Furious Angels AU (and likely anything else we write for Death Note), hence it being posted here. Any events we think of for this will be posted here as written - we currently have a few more in mind - so they may not be in chronological order. But this is definitely the start.
Cantus firmus: a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition. (According to Wikipedia.)
This chapter is named for the song Tintinnabulumby Adiemus. There's bells, as well as a kind of industrious questing feel to the piece.
Cantus Firmus
Part One: Tintinnabulum
In which one Quillsh Wammy discovers a new purpose in life.
Quillsh Wammy was an inventor of note, and one of the more notable things about him was how prolific he was. Barely a month went by that he could not be found at the patent office in the city closest to the estate that had been one of his earliest purchases.
The inventor was all of a block away from the government building that housed the patent office, having just left. Three feet from his poorly parked sedan, the ground itself seemed to jump, the air striking him with what it took him a moment to realize was an explosion. By the time he gained his knees and could peer over the back of the car behind his, the sounds of stone grinding on stone and metal and glass were nearly finished. The outcry of human voices had just begun.
The building he'd just left was in ruins, fire and sparks and dust and smoke clogging the air.
Quillsh Wammy felt himself no hero, but did feel himself to be entirely human. Being uninjured, he stepped out from behind the row of cars and made his way toward the destruction, seeking out the voices in the debris.
"Hello!" He called out as he stumbled forward, coughing when the smoke and dust became too thick. "Call out, I can try to help!"
There was nothing. A few people ran by, a man half-dragging a woman with a bleeding gash in her leg, a few of the front desk clerks. The explosion must have been on an upper storey. It was the third such attack in the city in the past month - even though security had already been tightened and the police had announced the capture of a suspect after the second.
Wammy paused as the breeze rolled away the curtain of smoke and he caught a good look at the front of the building. There wasn't much left of it. Some of the papers that fluttered down through the air were on fire, and he could barely breathe for the scents of smoke and several kinds of dust, most of which probably shouldn't be breathed. And blood. Oh god he could smell blood and -
Gas. Gasoline. There had been cars in the street. Parts of the building had fallen that way, and the cars must be damaged. On top of that, there was likely natural gas leaking from the building now.
It wasn't safe here. He could hear sirens; crews equipped to deal with these dangers were on the way. He should get out of the way. Wammy turned -
The smoke cleared just enough for him to see that he was standing a few feet away from a car half-buried by debris. The front was utterly crushed, as far back as the front seats. That explained the gasoline and blood smells. Wammy gritted his teeth, resolving not to dwell on the thought of what had happened to the driver and passenger, and moved to turn away.
There was something in the back seat. Someone. A small child, dark-haired and still as stone.
The sense of urgency that had faded at the sound of approaching authorities returned twice fold. Wammy immediately reached for the door, all too aware of the scent of gasoline and the sparking of wires nearby. "Hello!" he cried, pounding on the still-sealed window. "You, b-boy! You have to get out of there!"
The child slowly turned his head. His eyes seemed far too large, even for such a young child. He neither cried nor spoke, his pale lips set in a thin, small line. There was a large envelope of some sort in his lap, and he held it with both hands.
The door was dented and wouldn't open; Wammy cast about for a moment, then snatched up a length of pipe and struck at the window until it shattered, and quickly knocked clear the glass about the edges. "Come on, boy, before it catches fire!" He reached inside.
Strangely unhurried, the boy handed him the envelope, then reached down to undo his seatbelt.
All Wammy could hear was the sparking of downed wires and the trickle of gasoline. "Hurry!"
The child took his hand and crawled half out of the window before Wammy lost patience and simply grabbed him, dragging him the rest of the way. Between the adrenalin and the boy's size, he seemed to weigh nothing, and Wammy managed to run a block away and around a corner before finally slowing and setting him down.
Behind them, something finally caught. Fire roared to life, and the people - so many people all around, suddenly - all cried out again.
Pressed against the side of a building, Wammy thought of what an illusion the solid brick protection was. "It's the war all over again," he breathed aloud; he could all too clearly remember the blitz of the second world war, filled with the same scents and cries - only now the people ran toward the disaster, not away, not to safety. He hadn't been any older than the boy he'd just rescued when his mother had lifted him up and set him on the train to the countryside with a tag around his neck saying where he was to go, and then she'd stood on the platform waving goodbye, and that was the last he'd ever seen of her. He'd still been living in the attic of a farmhouse the next year when he'd received word of his soldier-father's death...
"He wants it to be a war," the little boy said clearly, his English slightly accented with something - French, or perhaps Welsh. Or perhaps he merely had some developmental speech issue, Wammy thought distractedly, before he quite realized what had been said.
"Pardon?"
"He wants it to be a war. But it is not. It is only him." The boy reached up and pulled at the manila envelope, which Wammy belatedly realized he still held tucked under his arm, and forgot to ask what the child was talking about. "Where is the police station?" the boy asked, holding the envelope up before him in both hands again - not hugging it, but rather as though it were a shield.
Of course. The boy would need to contact his... remaining family, Wammy thought, almost guiltily realizing that it was likely his parents who had been in the car. The child had probably seen them die. At least it had been quick.
"Th-this way," Wammy said with a small, tight smile, laying his hand on the child's back to guide him. "I'll take you."
"It is not necessary."
Wammy blinked. "I'd rather see you safe." The child's articulation was beginning to strike him as odd; he couldn't be more than five years old. Six, if he were simply small, but not more than that.
The boy raised the envelope a little so that it hid his mouth, staring up at him. After only a moment, he glanced away. "Very well."
The police station was no better than outside - masses of people rushed back and forth, the telephones were ringing more quickly than they could be answered, and everyone seemed to be shouting. Some poor secretary shouted as someone bumped into her and she dropped a large stack of papers. The papers scattered, and a few others fell, slipping on them.
Wammy looked down at the boy and reached to take his hand. "It might be best if we wait a bit," he said, pushing his glasses up his nose a little with his other hand - he was sweating, and they were slipping, and that did nothing to reduce the sense of chaos. "Off to the side?"
The boy followed his suggestion and tugging, and they managed to find a bare space of wall in the lobby, where they stood patiently, waiting for an opportunity to approach the desk. The silence between them - the only lack of sound in the room, it seemed - stretched on for many minutes.
"Well, this does seem as though it will take a while," Wammy finally said, looking down at the boy again. "My name is Quillsh. What's yours?"
The boy looked about the chaos as though hoping for some immediate escape or attention, but did not pull his small hand away from Wammy's. "L," he said, after a moment.
"El?" Wammy smiled. "One of the earliest names for God. Your parents are ambitious."
He regretted the joke immediately; the boy looked up at him, still oddly expressionless. "My parents are dead."
"That too," Wammy muttered, shoulders sagging.
It was another hour before things settled enough that they could even take seats to wait in. Wammy sat down tiredly, and L crouched with his feet on his seat, still clutching the envelope. Wammy had long since given up on trying to hold a conversation with the boy - he seemed perfectly capable, only reluctant, which was no surprise given that he was (Wammy now realized) severely traumatized. It surprised him a little that the child did not seek closeness in any way, but it wasn't as though he actually knew L, so he did not press the matter. But he did remember a peppermint left in his pocket left from a recent restaurant dinner, which the boy accepted when offered, and after that Wammy thought there might be less tension between them.
"What is in your envelope?" the inventor finally couldn't help but ask, after observing the way the child so carefully held it for so long.
"It is information for the chief of police." L did not look up as he spoke - unruly hair hiding his eyes - and Wammy thought he knew why as the boy continued. "My father was bringing it here."
A few more hours, and finally they were able to approach the front desk. Wammy was about to introduce the boy and explain his circumstance, but L cut him off, setting the envelope on the counter in front of the secretary. "This is for the chief of police," he announced clearly.
The woman raised an eyebrow. "I'm afraid he's very busy today," she said in a patronizing tone that made Wammy scowl.
"It's from the boy's father," he said, drawing the woman's attention. "Who died in the explosion. It's vitally important that it reach the chief of police."
L abruptly looked up at Wammy, but with how wide he kept his eyes, it was difficult to tell if he was shocked or not.
"Oh." The woman scowled right back, but took the envelope and added it to a stack on the corner of the desk. "Will that be all?"
Her attitude seemed intolerable; did she not realize what he'd just said? "The boy needs to contact his family, do you understand? The explosion-"
"Sir, if you don't lower your voice-"
"Forgive me, but-"
"You'll need to go back out to where emergency services are set up. We're not prepared to deal with this here."
Wammy led L from the lobby and into the still-crowded hall. "I'm sorry," he found himself saying, though he didn't look down. "Not surprising to easily become emotional after today's events, I suppose..."
"Quillsh is very kind to help," the boy said so softly that Wammy nearly didn't hear.
At that, the inventor did look down, as they paused on the steps of the police station. "I'm glad to be of any help I can, El," he said sincerely. "When I was your age, something similar happened to me. I'd hoped that the world might have outgrown this sort of thing..."
It hadn't, and he knew that; he'd only let himself ignore that fact for far too long. But what could he do about it, after all?
L eventually tugged on his hand, and he realized that he'd been staring without seeing at the pavement for a few minutes, it seemed, and the child had only been staring at him. "I see my aunt," the boy said quickly, pulling his hand free.
"Oh?" Wammy raised his head. "Wait, I'd like to -"
"Do not worry," L said, taking a step back. "I will find my way home."
"Wait -"
But the little boy was already well out of earshot. Wammy saw him run up to a woman a few hundred feet away; she reacted with surprise, but smiled, and took his hand, and led him away.
When Wammy returned home to his estate that evening, it took a full two hours to explain to Ruvie why he'd not called. Ruvie had seen the news and had been, Wammy surmised, terrified, if the angry speech he received was any indication. It took until well after dinner before he'd convinced his housemate of the full chaos of the situation and his concern for the boy he'd rescued.
"Of course I'm glad that he saw his aunt and that he still has family," Wammy finished, "But I rather wish I'd gotten to say goodbye. Perhaps I can find him again. I'm sure his family could use some monetary help, given the circumstances."
Ruvie snorted. "You always were the sort to get into other peoples' business."
"Oh come now." Wammy waved a hand in minor exasperation. "We've certainly the means. What good is it if we do nothing with it?"
"Where does one stop giving, then?" Ruvie countered. "Help one victim, why not help all of them? How would you justify doing otherwise? It's a quick tumble into poverty from there, I assure you."
"We've both been there." Wammy shrugged with the air of someone unafraid to face such a circumstance again.
"The idea is to not be there again. Quillsh, it's important to consider things carefully. Don't do something dreadful just because of what happened today."
"I wouldn't call it dreadful," Wammy said quietly, but the conversation was over.
A week later, there was another bombing - but three days after that, there was an announcement. Obviously the first suspect captured, while a madman, was innocent of the bombings - but they would now cease, for the true culprit had been captured. His name had been handed to the police in a file from a hitherto unknown private detective known only as "L", who had left no contact information, only the file that had mysteriously appeared on the police chief's desk.
Wammy knocked over his chair in his haste to rise, babbling to Ruvie about the boy he'd rescued again. "The envelope from his father! He even told me his name was L, I thought he meant the Hebrew word..."
This time Ruvie could only roll his eyes. It seemed this new obsession would be inescapable.
So that day, Wammy set out to find the child.
And there he encountered a problem. There was no record of him in emergency services, given that he'd left with his aunt, and the city was too large to simply find the woman. Wammy soon found himself in the city library pouring over records of the third bombing - lists of the dead and injured, newspaper articles, anything he could find.
"But how can I even go to anyone saying 'I need to find the son of the people that died in this place on this date?' That's all I really know," Wammy sighed into his tea, sitting across the table from Ruvie. "There's a record of two crushed bodies found in a car that burned, and I believe it was in the proper location, but there was nothing left to identify them by. They were never claimed. I don't understand why the family wouldn't come for them..."
Ruvie had no response, other than to pour his friend another cup of tea.
It was only luck that allowed any progress. It was two months later that Wammy was in the area of the bombing again, delivering another patent to the relocated office down the street. He stopped in a coffee shop in the building next door, only to find himself greeted by the woman that had led the boy away.
She must have thought that he was having some kind of fit, from the way he sputtered at her before he could find words. "You're L's aunt! Is he doing all right? He went over to you so fast that I hadn't the chance to say anything!"
If she'd thought him having a fit before, her expression now said she thought him addled. "I'm sorry?"
"The boy! L!"
"Sir, I've no idea what you're talking about -"
"He lost his parents in the bombing, the third one -"
The woman's face suddenly lit up. "Oh! Little boy, five or six, black hair!"
"Yes!" Wammy exclaimed, elated at the recognition - but increasingly concerned.
"I remember! Was he your boy? Oh goodness..."
She'd no idea who he was. He'd asked her if she could lead him to a restroom and she'd never seen him again.
Wammy entirely forgot about why he'd entered the coffee shop, thanked the woman for her time, and left.
"So the boy lied to you," Ruvie sighed when Wammy related the incident in the sitting room that evening. "He obviously doesn't want to be found, Quillsh. Stop obsessing and move on."
"You don't understand," Wammy exclaimed, raising his voice a little. "His parents are dead and he said he'd find his own way home. He's out there somewhere by himself, Roger! At his age! Who knows what could happen to him!"
"Quillsh!"
"What would you have done if you lost your parents at that age and had nobody to take you in? That nearly happened to me -"
"I'd have found a museum with a nice entomology department and tried to live there. It'd have been quite nice until someone hauled me off to an orphanage."
Wammy stopped cold and stared, snapping his mouth shut - and a smile bloomed on his face like spring after a long winter. "Roger, you are a genius."
By contrast, Ruvie's expression froze over. "No. No, I am not. Quillsh, you wouldn't."
"I would. Neither of us is immortal."
"I am. Completely." Ruvie was beginning to look ill.
"And it's not as though either of us is likely to have children, unless you're planning on becoming pregnant yourself."
"You'd be more likely." The other man outright glowered, but the anger didn't last, quickly erased again by despair.
Wammy went on as if he hadn't heard the comment. "Besides, if his father was this detective that solved the bombing case, we owe that man for his sacrifice, don't we? The city owes him but we're the ones with the means and the information to actually do something..."
"That doesn't mean you have to -"
"I am going to find that child," Wammy announced triumphantly. "And if he truly has no other family who'll take him in, I'll adopt him. I'll start asking about orphanages in the morning."
"I detest children." Ruvie huddled in his robe as though trying to hide from the inevitable horror presented. "This is the beginning of the end, Quillsh. Next it will be 'well he wasn't here but I found this wonderful boy and he was so unhappy' and after that it will be 'but we have so much room, it's a shame not to' and in twenty years the house will be full of squalling brats."
"Oh, don't worry so." Wammy settled into a chair - he'd been pacing - and picked up his newspaper. "We'll hire people to mind them."
Ruvie covered his face with his hands and may have wept.
Months passed, however, and there were no leads. No orphanage in the area had even a record of a well-spoken, possibly accented boy with dark hair being brought to them within the given time frame, and foster programs had no leads, either. Wammy cast his net further and further, on the supposition that, based on the boy's accent, his family might have been visiting the area at the time (though there were far too many hotel rooms and vacation houses abandoned after each of the bombings to trace anything that way). But he never found so much as a whisper of anyone even remembering such a boy.
In the end he'd promised Ruvie that he wouldn't bring home every stray he met in this effort, but the further he went, the more wearing the experience became. There were so many children that needed so much more than the institutions that housed them could provide.
Donating was, Wammy found, a wonderful way to encourage orphanages to pass along information to him.
Eight months after meeting the child, however, something else happened that provided a possible lead: another mystery was solved by the detective L. A string of bank robberies in Germany were brought to a halt by a similarly mysterious file, this one (Wammy discovered upon investigation) mailed from a town in France. There was no information available there, however - there had been no return address, and no one in the postal offices in that town remembered such a boy. It hardly mattered - the town was a train stop, so needn't indicate a place to search at all.
But it did serve to convince Wammy of three things: that he must widen his search to include mainland Europe; that the boy did not want to be found; and that the strange child might actually be the detective L.
Ruvie assured him that he was quite insane at that point.
"There is nothing worse," the sister that led Wammy down a dim sterile hallway said, "Than a child that believes himself to be intelligent."
The wrinkles around the woman's mouth said that she rarely smiled - rather perpetually scowled - and her eyes seemed permanently narrowed. Between that and her attitude toward children - treating them as prisoners, so far as Wammy could discern - he'd developed an intense dislike for the woman within the first twenty minutes of interacting with her.
It had been nearly two years since he'd met the child, and Wammy had refused to give up his search, despite Ruvie's frequent attempts to dissuade him. Visiting orphanages had only reaffirmed to Wammy the need to find the boy, rather than the repeated failure to do so causing despair. While many such institutions were perfectly fine, he couldn't bear to imagine the owl-eyed boy in a place such as this, where his articulate speech alone might get him disciplined.
"This one was brought in a few months ago. He'd somehow set up a bank account and had his own apartment and utilities and grocery delivery automatically paid from it, can you imagine? We don't know if he ran away from home or was abandoned or if his family died. I wouldn't be surprised if the disrespectful creature was cast out, but he does match your description. We call him Jean."
"Jean?"
"He will not give us his name."
She slid open a small, screened window in the door of what seemed suspiciously like a cell. The building had once been an asylum, part of a hospital complex, now an orphanage attended to by a group of nuns. The religious paintings and statuettes did nothing to convince Wammy of the wholesomeness of the place when the "problem" children were still kept in cells such as this.
"He makes it a practice to skip mass; we keep finding him in the clock tower," the sister explained, her French accent only slight. "Sister Marie nearly had her hand crushed in the gears trying to get him out. He's been whipped for it but only does it again. Some sort of learning disability, I fear. And he refuses to eat anything but sweets. Had his own groceries delivered and that was all he ever had them bring; that's what put people on to him." She wrinkled her nose. "Willful little thing. The ones like him usually go straight from here to a prison when they're old enough, if you take my meaning. Or to a proper mental hospital."
She stepped aside, and Wammy peered through the window.
It was December, dark and raining outside even this early in the evening. He couldn't see anything at first but the shadow of branches high on the wall, waving in the breeze outside. Then he began to discern the splintering hardwood of the floor and the flaking paint on the walls and the shapes of the room's furnishings - nothing more than a simple bed and a chair.
The boy inside the darkened room sat in the chair with his feet on the seat, his arms around his shins and his face on his knees. Wammy could see nothing but the badly-cut mass of black hair that nearly reached his shoulders, but his heart leapt - the position was so like how the boy had sat in the police station.
He cleared his throat. "Ahem. Ah. Hello?"
The boy on the chair raised his head - not fully, just enough to look up through the observation window at Wammy with too-large eyes. Then he raised his head a little more, and tilted it slightly, curiously.
Wammy nearly couldn't speak. It was him. It was the same boy. "Y-yes," he said quickly, perhaps a little loudly. "Yes, that's my nephew! Thank goodness!"
"Bonjour, mon oncle," the boy responded, though he kept still as stone.
"Huh." The sister seemed unimpressed, but fumbled with the keys and opened the door.
Wammy licked his lips. "Gather your things," he said with as much authority as he could muster, still in English. "I'm taking you home."
"I have nothing," the boy responded in English, and the sister actually jumped in surprise.
"Ah, well, then, if you'll just come with - not even shoes?" Wammy glanced at the rain hitting the window and again at the boy's bare feet. He was only wearing plain institutional pajamas, as well.
"I don't wear shoes."
"We thought that he might be less inclined to go places he oughtn't without them," the sister said, though her formerly strict tone seemed to carry a little doubt now, as though she feared punishment for how the boy had been treated now that he'd been claimed.
"Well, find him shoes and something to wear," Wammy said as sharply as he could. "And a coat. I've certainly given you a large enough donation that you can replace them quickly."
"Oui, monsieur," the sister nodded. "If you'll come this way?"
Wammy wasn't sure if he was disgusted or grateful that only money was required to remove L from his effective prison without any further questioning.
He rather desperately wanted to talk with the boy now that he'd found him, but he'd created the story of being his uncle for a reason: if the boy truly was the detective L, and wanted to remain hidden as such, revealing his name wouldn't be appropriate. And the boy had played along beautifully, right down to responding to the name "Robert", indicating that Wammy's suppositions were likely accurate.
But the taxi ride back to the hotel was too public a place to exchange such information. While the boy did not sleep, he slipped feet from his ill-fitting shoes and perched on the car seat just as he had the chair in the room in the orphanage, and stared out the window without comment.
Still, Wammy couldn't entirely hide his delight, and when the car stopped, he rushed to open the boy's door to help him out before the cabby could. L regarded him strangely before pushing himself out of the car on his own, ignoring the offered hand.
The first entirely private moment between them was in the elevator on the way up to the room that Wammy and Roger occupied. After a moment of silence, L turned to Wammy. "I do not wish to be adopted, Quillsh."
Wammy wasn't sure if he should be surprised or not that his name was remembered, but he was able to respond immediately. "Do you want to go back to that orphanage?"
"No."
"Do you have any other family you can go to?" He asked, smiling a little. L seemed no taller than he had when they'd first met, though that might have something to do with what he'd just learned of the boy's eating habits.
"No."
"Then this is as good a solution as any, isn't it? Inventive as it is to live on your own, I don't believe that society is prepared to accept it at your age."
"It is logical, but I do not wish to be adopted."
"Ah." The inventor thought he finally understood, and he smiled more widely. "You needn't be. You may leave whenever you wish and may list us as your guardians whenever you need, but there need be nothing formal about the arrangement. I only don't want you trapped in a place like that again - It's difficult to work from such a place, isn't it?"
L considered for a moment, but finally nodded. "All right."
When they entered the suite, Ruvie's immediate response held nothing of the elation of Wammy's reaction - only resignation. "Oh my god, you found him."
L looked up at Wammy with the most innocent expression imaginable. "Is this my aunt?"
Disclaimer:Death Note (manga, animation, novels, etc.), its story, and characters are the property, copyright and trademark of Taugumi Ohba/Takeshi Obata/SHUEISHA Inc./Madhouse/DNDP/VAP, and no ownership or claim on said property, copyright or trademark is made or implied by their use in the work(s) of fan fiction presented here. This fan fiction constitutes a personal comment on the aforesaid properties pursuant to doctrines of fair use and fair comment. This fan fiction is non-commercial, not for sale or profit, and may not be sold or reproduced for commercial purposes.
