Disclaimer: yeah I still don't own it. Lyrics: Bloc Party's 'Hunting for Witches'
Note: Woo, actually got some positive feedback for this thing! So dark!Matsuda gets a provisional pass, right? Excellent. I should be writing my NaNoWriMo story. I'm so tired and bored and frustrated. And I just ate an entire candy necklace in ten minutes. I'm rotting on the inside, I just know it. I want to read I, Claudius instead of writing. I want to watch TBBT. I want to be good enough at writing real people to write the massive love-triangle TBBT story I conceptualised. I am so full of self-loathing atm.
Wrong place to rant. Enjoy the chapter! The slash starts here.
x
Chapter Three - Descent
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All reasonable thought is being drowned out
By the non-stop baying, baying, baying for blood
-
Ide stands behind the one way window and watches them. Otoro is talking fast now, eager to tell Matsuda anything he wants.
"How'd you know about her, guy?!"
It always goes this way.
"Okay, man, okay! I tell you what I know, but it ain't much!"
Matsuda always works it out. Which pressure points to push. How to cause pain without causing pain. Terror without touching.
How had it come to this?
-
Once upon a time there was a boy, and his name was Light. Reads like a fairytale, Ide thinks bitterly.
Once upon a time the boy called Light seemed to think he ruled the fucking world. Once upon a time, the boy called Light thought he was smarter than everyone in the world put together, and acted accordingly. And maybe he'd had good motives and maybe it was just what power did to you, and maybe Ide blames him and maybe he hates him and maybe he doesn't.
None of that really matters. Ide, he put the Kira case behind him years ago. It left its scars, the way it was always going to, and it left a current that passed through them all at the most random moments, shocking them, stunning them, turning them. But afterwards, everything always reverted, always fell back into place. They had been hurt. Light, the things he had done, the things he said, he'd cut them deeply. But they were strong. They healed after every slice of the knife, they brought their heads up, they went on.
Almost all of them, anyway.
-
Matsuda emerges from the room, his eyes still half shadowed. The door shuts behind him, and as it clicks closed, Ide sees Otoro crumple onto the table.
"I think you went too far," he says, quietly. "What did you say to him?"
"How'd you know about her, guy?!"
Matsuda doesn't answer.
"Did he say anything useful?"
Matsuda is walking towards the door. This time, he doesn't forget his coat. He pulls it on, heavy cloth against wet clothes. It's a long way home.
"Matsuda. Did we get anything from him?" Look at me, damn it, don't act like you don't know me, you piece of –
"No."
Ide cuts off his internal diatribe and focuses again on Matsuda. His shoulders slump. "I'm sorry. Nothing - ?"
"Nothing." Matsuda is holding the tape recorder in his hand, and his knuckles are white. "Absolutely fucking nothing." On the last word, he throws the tape recorder down with such force that it shatters. Pieces of plastic fly off in all directions, tiny pieces of metal scatter under the chairs and tables, and the tape crunches under Matsuda's foot, some of the thin brown ribbon clinging to the wet underside of his boot.
Ide is silent. He looks at the shattered tape recorder, and then, he looks at Matsuda's face.
"Come home with me tonight," he says, and he tries to make it sound the same way Matsuda does when he says it, all command and set-in-stone decision, but it comes out pleading, it comes out desperate.
Matsuda doesn't protest. "I'll drive."
It's still raining. Ide can't remember the last time he saw quite this much rain all at once. It's mad. It's like the deluge come again.
That, Ide thinks, would mean that they were the impure ones. They were the ones that had sinned, that were going to get swept away by the flood, that were going to perish in water and leave the way open for the new world.
With Matsuda so close to him, his brow furrowed, his eyes dark, Ide thinks that that's probably the right way to look at things.
-
A long time ago, in a kingdom not so far away, poison seeped from the grave of an angel. Light had been beautiful on the outside, startlingly handsome and undeniably captivating, but on the inside he had been rotting. And when he died, all that rot and all that decay came pouring out, and latched onto the first innocent mind they could find.
"The HELL do you think you're doing, Matsuda?!"
"I'm getting the job done! Isn't that what you've always wanted me to do, huh? Be better at this? Get things done?"
"Not like this!"
"Then like what?! LIKE WHAT?
Matsuda Touta was a casualty of war. He hadn't died that day on Yellowbox, but something had begun eating at him, changing him, and as far as most people were concerned, the Matsuda That Was was long gone, and now there was just – him. The steely faced man in the driving seat, with iron in his soul and a heart hardening into diamond.
Ide's the last one left. Aizawa quit, once Matsuda started acting out, starting trying dirty tactics, and everyone let it go. Aizawa could never have let it go. Ide remembers, all too keenly, the day he had left – the fight, the shouting, the blows.
"NOT LIKE LIGHT!"
Dead silence. "Say that again."
"No. I'm quitting."
"SAY IT AGAIN! I FUCKING DARE YOU!"
"Put your gun away, Matsuda. This is through."
Mogi's still there, in body, if not in spirit. He does his job. He's there for the same reason Ide is – well, half of it, anyway – to make sure Matsuda doesn't get carried away. That's what they are, now, that's what this shit has reduced them to – little more than nannies.
But Ide, he has another reason to hang around. It's stupid and delusional and he knows that one day it'll probably be the death of him, but –
"We're here." Matsuda's voice breaks through his reverie. He's right. They're outside Ide's block of apartments.
They walk in silence up the stairs, and Ide's mind is blank. He unlocks the door to his apartment, while Matsuda hangs back, polite, respectful, patient. The door opens. They go inside. It closes. It locks. Matsuda's patience is gone and he crushes Ide against the door, smashing their mouths together, fingers already working down the buttons on his shirt.
It'll probably be the death of him, but –
- Ide knows Matsuda is still in there, somewhere, and he can get him home safe.