notes/warnings
+ sorry this chapter is late.
Velocity
He physically recoils from the screen. What the fuck is Mikami doing in the third world? Mikami was an evil fucking murderer who killed literally thousands of people and…ow.
His cognitive dissonance is reaching a point where it is causing him physical pain.
He doesn't know how to be sorry.
He doesn't know how to be sorry.
He takes a knife from the floor and sets it on the mattress beside him. If he cut his own heart out, maybe this would stop. If he stabbed himself in the eye, maybe he would be able to forget who he was. Or who he is. He can't survive as both people.
He can't do this and nobody should be making him.
"Thirty-three," he tells Shadow, voice barely a whisper. The fence is lower in that area. He's memorised the layout of the whole town because he has nothing else to do.
He drags the greasy sheet over his head, fingers knotted in the material, and wonders how long it would take him to starve to death.
It doesn't matter.
There is no escape.
"Each bar used a different installation company," Naomi says. "And the security cameras are made by two different manufacturers. Phillips and Grovolt. They are both legitimate, long-standing manufacturers."
L tilts his head. This isn't really a lead at all.
What is the connection, then? he wonders. How are you doing this, Mr Shooty?
"He must be getting to them after installation," L says. "We need to investigate any insulators, electricians, or other technicians that the bars have hired over the past few months. We need to find the common link."
"The common link is that you're all stupid," Wedy announces. "Seriously, at least pretend like you're thinking. In the third world, security installation companies contract their workers from a very small pool of skilled labourers. The same worker could easily have installed for three different companies at different times."
"Do I want to know how you know this?" Naomi asks.
"I'm a professional," Wedy answers, icily.
"You are awesome," Matsuda enthuses.
"Look into the workers," L tells Naomi, even though he knows she'd have done it anyway.
He isn't having much more success himself. Wedy found exactly the same bullets and trigger device in the clothing store. It doesn't make any sense. The store has no political connection, but the timing of the shootings at the bars suggests a strongly political motivation.
So is he looking at an original and a bad copycat? Or a single perpetrator with a more sophisticated motive?
"Ooh," Matsuda says, leaning over his shoulder. "I didn't know that Bureau got elected. I thought that horrible Crowhorn guy was going to stay mayor of Doolan forever."
"That's a fairly unreasonable assumption," L tells him, with embarrassing amounts of affection.
"Hmm," Matsuda says. "Ah. So they're only attacking regions where a new Mayor has been elected, right? The ones that just elected the old Mayor back in are safe."
"Right," L says.
"And the connection with the clothing store is…um…"
"If you have any breakthroughs, please let me know," L tells him.
Aiber buzzes through the intercom.
"Mr Shooty just struck again," he tells them, without a trace of humour. "The parking lot on Whiffle Street. Four people are dead."
Six hours drags by. It starts to rain. Kylie talks about the cat they saw and how much she loves cats and also goats and chickens and did she mention that she lives on acreage so she could totally get like a dozen cats.
Teru has missed his late-afternoon jog. He probably won't have time to eat dinner, even though he always has home-cooked eggplant on a Wednesday night. He hates things interrupting his schedule. He hates that he's so useless that Stanton has to come up with stupid exercises like this just to keep him occupied and out of the way.
He hates the thought that maybe there are children who are getting kidnapped right now. He hates that he has to wait for someone else to tell him what to do.
He radios the base again, even though it's a useless venture.
"With all due respect, ma'am," he says, gravely, "we have good evidence to believe that the kidnapper will strike here tonight, and soon. I would recommend that we go closer to the house."
"The owner doesn't consent to a police presence on his property," Stanton monotones.
"But his children are at risk," Teru says, losing his all-too-slippery cool. "Don't you understand? Even you should be able to understand. The last two kidnapping victims turned up dead. Lives are in danger. Children!"
"No."
Teru wants to throw the radio. He feels angry and trapped all the time. The only difference is whether it's Daniels kicking him in the shin and threatening his career or Stanton crushing his fucking humanity with her stupid useless devotion to the goddamned rules.
"Listen to me," he begins.
"No," Stanton tells him. "We do what we can do, and what we can do is governed by federal protocols."
Fuck the protocols, Teru thinks, viciously. Fuck you.
He hangs up, fingers shaking. He wants his old superpowers back. He wants to be able to protect people and that is all he has ever wanted. He feels tears burn in the corners of his eyes, and fists his hands against his face.
Kylie touches him gently, one hand on his arm.
"I don't actually like Stanton all that much," she admits.
Teru remembers what Berkshire said the other day.
"I'm sure she's all right," he chokes. "Deep down. I'm sure."
How is he supposed to listen to good people if there aren't any good people to listen to?
Out with the old, in with the new.
That was what his mother always used to say. And that was fine, when he was the new. But now he's just…old.
Gregory sits at his computer, surveying his handiwork through the closed-circuit television. The pancake parlour is barely a few blocks from his apartment. If he opened the door, he could probably hear the screaming from here.
It used to be his favourite place to eat. What a pity it had to undergo a change in management.
Gregory used to be great. He used to be a consulting computer technician, and he charged fees like a CEO. He once repaired the diamond-studded laptop of famous supermodel Grianna Jones. And when he came to the third world and found people like himself, he adapted.
But he's getting older. More rigid. He can't adapt any more, and so he's going to drag the world down to his pace.
Gregory surveys the local news channels. Everyone is talking about the invisible gunman. Mr Shooty, they're calling him. L is on the case.
Good. He wants to be big. He wants to be noticed. He wants to go out with a big goddamned bang. He wants to die and he doesn't much care if he ends up in hell, as long as the degeneration in his brain stops.
Dying resets everything.
And fame overshadows everything else.
But with L on the case, the chances of being caught before his big finale are skyrocketing. Gregory needs to pick up the pace, and soon.
That's fine. He's planned for this, too.
"Hawthorne and Hawthorn," Naomi says. "That's the common factor. Or at least, it could be. They're a popular subcontractor, and they're hired to install roughly eighty percent of security systems in the area."
L isn't really listening. He's still busy staring at the updated list of shootings. There have been two more, a dessert restaurant and a local lobby group headquarters.
The thing is: there is a connection. But the connection is unnervingly broad.
Change. The bars were celebrating new mayors. And each affected business has recently undergone either a change in ownership or a change in direction. That's it. That's all. And that is terrifying, especially if the perpetrator has had access to eighty percent of London homes and establishments. Everything changes, all the time. Mr Shooty will end up just killing everyone at this rate.
"So what will you do?" Wedy asks, keeping up with him as always. "Where do you think he'll strike next?"
"The shootings are become more frequent," L says. "We can't risk guessing the next target."
Wedy stares at him.
"What?" she says, sounding genuinely confused. "That's what you always do."
Yes. Last time they worked together, L would have pitted his wits against Mr Shooty. He would have estimated the pattern, with around seventy percent accuracy, and bet everybody's lives on his own cleverness.
"That's not how we always do things," Naomi tells her. "The way I see it, this criminal could pretty much wipe out the population of London overnight. We need to warn people."
"If he is controlling the devices remotely, that may still put people at risk, though," L muses.
"Do you want me to rob all of the houses?" Wedy asks snidely, hands on her hips. She looks impossibly like her mother. "Because that is going to take a while."
L considers this as if it is a genuine offer.
"Wedy, how many fellow thieves owe you a favour?" he asks, quietly. "And how many more can we buy with our current funds?"
"Are you fucking serious?" Wedy complains. "Probably about eight or so. My people are expensive."
L nods.
"Naomi and I will figure out which buildings to prioritise," he says. "Please make arrangements with your fellow thieves."
"Associating with thieves is going to make you look even worse in the eyes of the police," Naomi points out.
"I don't care," L tells her.
He can't care, not when so many lives are at risk.
And in the dead of the night, while Teru sulks and Kylie dozes, the kidnapper comes to the mansion. He picks the front door, rolls under the sensors of the alarm, silently opens the door to the twins' bedroom, and shoves a dirty rag over both of their faces in one fluid movement.
There is no struggle.
In a warm, safe police station several miles away, Sergeant Stanton does nothing.
"So," Anthony says, brightly, dropping another pilfered camera into their lead-lined bag, "tell me. Is L involved in this venture? I bet he is! When am I going to get to meet him?"
"You want to meet him?" Diane asks, sceptically. She's one of Wedy's better protégés, and she is colloquially known as The Invisible Man. She's a super-thief. "He'd put you away for sure."
"No way," Anthony replies. "I want to work for him, and I'm talented."
"You can meet him once you've passed my tests," Wedy drawls. Wedy is a supreme thief, and she is so sick of all of their bullshit.
This is why she had to be with Matsuda, isn't it? He's inane and dense and deer-looking, but he is absolutely devoid of bullshit. He's as honest and as genuine as Light was evil. Sometimes the inevitability of their whole relationship exhausts her.
"You haven't even told me what the tests are," Anthony complains.
Wedy has tests for anyone who wants to get near L. L is one of her people, and that makes him valuable. Wedy assumes that all of her important people are objectively valuable. She is confident in the validity of everything she feels.
"That's the point."
They split up again, and ransack several more houses. Wedy carefully blocks the barrel of the gun with a specially-made polymer before tampering with it. She stays out of range of the camera the whole time. Even if Mr Shooty is controlling the units remotely, even if he knew what was going on and he wanted to stop the thieves, he'd have no idea when to set the guns off.
Wedy has to admire this guy's tenacity. Whoever he is, he is dangerous. L needs to figure him out real soon.
It's impossible.
Impossible.
All around London, the cameras are going down. The size of Gregory's feed is decreasing exponentially. Someone is fucking removing all of the fucking security cameras.
He slams his hands against his desk, hard enough to drive splinters into his skin. He doesn't care. He grabs the shotgun from under his chair and climbs out the window, onto his own roof.
He won't let it end like this.
Gregory wants everyone to know who he is. He wants everyone to know what they did. He needs them to know the evils of change.
Out with the old.
In with the new.
Starting with you.
"The bullets are confusing me," Naomi says, flicking through the samples of ammunition.
"Bullets confuse me, too," Matsuda says, frowning.
Naomi resists the urge to pat him on the head.
"I mean, the labelling," she says. "These are high-quality bullets. And they're all engraved with the name of a maker."
She slides a magnifying glass over one of them to show him.
"Victorian Institute of Velocity," Matsuda reads. "Why is that confusing? That's a proper manufacturer, right. Even I know that."
L lifts his head, looking both sleepy and intensely focused. He's deep into this case, and Naomi loves him so much. She wants to do this forever.
"But Velocity is a manufacturer of standard bullets only," he says. "They do not make high quality bullets."
"Exactly," Naomi says, pointing at him. "So someone has gone to the trouble of engraving all these bullets incorrectly. Why?"
"It's like the opposite of a knock-off brand," Matsuda says. "Or is it part of the change thing? Is Velocity an old brand, or a new brand?"
"It's fairly old," Naomi tells him. "Not the oldest."
She's in her element now. 'Guns' is her favourite topic, and knowledge of firearms is her true power.
"What is Mr Shooty thinking?" L says, curiously. "Does he identify as someone of superior quality who has been incorrectly labelled? Or did he come by the bullets unknowingly? If so, that might give us a clue as to where he bought the ammunition. Which is, in fact, fairly useless."
"These bullets look like Caddingtons to me," Naomi says. "Probably Caddington thirty-eights or thirty-nines."
"Is Caddington an older company than Velocity?" L wonders.
"Newer, by about five years," Naomi says. "They were never really in competition."
"How do you keep all that information in your head?" Matsuda asks her, sounding awed.
"If he did it on purpose," L says, pressing his upper lip, "then he wanted someone to see. Why? What were we supposed to notice?"
"Maybe…his name is Victoria?" Matsuda suggests, trying valiantly to keep up.
"I'm not sure that makes sense," Naomi tells him, gently.
But L is staring at Matsuda reverently.
"It makes perfect sense," he says, grinning. "That's exactly what he did."
Teru is roused by the faint sounds of distant screaming and far-off house alarms. He is always woken by even the quietest of noises. He hasn't been able to sleep properly since he got out of hell. He keeps seeing the faces of the men and women he killed – murderers and thieves and rapists and bullies – and trying desperately to understand.
"We have to go," he says, shaking Kylie awake. They shouldn't be sleeping on the damn job at all. "Quickly!"
"Wait," Kylie says, fishing her radio out of her belt. "We need permission."
"No," Teru says. "We can't. She'll refuse."
Kylie considers this for a moment, and then nods. Teru hates her for taking so long. The children are being attacked now and they are still so very far away. He feels so helpless in this world. He feels like he used to feel at school, powerless and alone and angry.
"Okay," Kylie says, ruffling her short blonde hair and grinning at him. "Let's break the law."
Anushka would really like to sleep, but someone in the next street over keeps screaming at the top of their lungs.
"FUCK YOU!"
"I WILL KILL ALL OF YOU."
"IT'LL HAPPEN AGAIN. NEXT TIME IT WON'T BE JUST THE DAMN SECURITY CAMERAS. NEXT TIME IT WILL BE YOUR WHOLE GODDAMNED HOUSE."
She does what any sensible police officer would do. She gets up, puts on her uniform, and picks up her phone.
"Is this L?" she asks. "I'm pretty sure the criminal known as Mr Shooty is in my neighbourhood. Tell me how to beat him."
And, miracle of miracles, this time she doesn't get the answering machine. This time the mechanical voice on the other end definitely belongs to a human being.
"I think I've figured out a way to slow him down," the voice tells her. "I think I've figured out what he wants."
Gavin looks briefly at Garth. Garth shrugs and clutches his teddy bear a little more tightly. There is a weird-smelling rag near Gavin's right arm. More importantly, all the alarms in the house are going off, and there is a man he's never seen before dancing violently around the room. Their father sometimes hires entertainers for them, but never at this hour of the morning. Besides, the man is wearing a mask. He looks like a robber.
"What's going on?" Garth asks.
"I dunno," Gavin tells him.
The man gyrates quickly out of the room, swearing and cursing and using words that Gavin is definitely going to have to try out sometime when father isn't home. And whoever he is, he's weird. Even weirder is the stripy grey cat currently clamped around his leg, with teeth and claws sunk deeply into his flesh.
"I wonder if things like this ever happen to poor people," Garth comments, shaking his head slowly.
[Hangman] – dude what the fuck are you doing?
[Hangman] – there were goddamned bullets in my damn security cameras.
[Hangman] – I thought we were friends.
/JustGregory timed out.
There's a girl. She isn't approaching him. She's standing on the roof of a nearby house, fists clenched, like maybe she understands.
Gregory shakes his head, hard. Nobody understands. Everybody celebrates anything new, from a new mayor to a new goddamned shoe manufacturer. Nobody cares about the old.
And here he is, officially old. His beautiful plan is unravelling before his very eyes, and there is nothing that he can do. Well, nothing except shooting that nice girl, who he now sees is dressed suspiciously like a police officer, complete with suspicious-looking gun in hand.
"That was brilliant," she says, admiringly, and maybe he'll let her keep talking for a bit longer. "It must have taken you months to set up. Bullets in the security cameras – who'd have ever thought of it? Only you."
Gregory smiles weakly.
"I wanted to be remembered," he says, resisting the urge to wipe at his eye. "I wanted people to say 'good old Gregory'."
He isn't telling her anything she doesn't already know. They're practically neighbours. They used to run into each other at the little fish-and-chip shop down the road. Her name is Anushka, and she's still new. Still bright and shiny in this world.
"You're not good old Gregory, though," she says, sweetly. The hand on her gun hasn't relaxed even slightly. She means to shoot him. Gregory is suddenly uncertain whether he has the energy to shoot her first. "You are Viv, aren't you?"
He hears his old name as if it is a physical presence, a shock to his entire system. She knows him. She knows him.
"Yes," Gregory rasps. "That was me."
"You were somebody important," Anushka says, sympathetically. "I know the feeling. I used to be important too. Back in the first world, I was a lawyer. Now I'm just a constable."
Oh. That's why she's here. Kindred spirits. Gregory – no, Viv – loosens his grip on the shotgun.
"Tell me," he says, quietly. He's all out of anger, and this wasn't what he wanted. "Tell me more about it."
Anushka talks for a while. She was never a lawyer, of course, she just borrowed the personal history of some guy in Southwest who she barely knows. Anushka has read everyone's files. She doesn't mind bending the rules. She embellishes her story in places – because she doesn't actually know how her colleague fell from grace - until it's the exactly the sort of tragic tale that Viv wants to hear.
Everyone knows that Nocks replaced Viv. The fact that the invisible gunman is the jilted hacker makes so much sense now. L is a goddamned genius, and Anushka owes him a favour.
"And by the time my legs worked again, I had been disbarred," she finishes, dropping the gun out of her palm and catching the end of it between her thumb and forefinger. "That's why I came out here tonight. I wanted to tell you that you are not alone."
And Viv is sweating and fidgeting and staring into the distance. She's giving him what he wants. This is amazing. Anushka wishes she could work with L all the time.
"I'm trying to understand," she says, a little more loudly. "Why did you kill all those people?"
Viv shakes his head.
"I did it to try and redirect a breaking world," he tells her. "I thought that if they could see change the way I see change – terrifying and monstrous – then they would understand. I knew if I killed enough people I could change minds. That's simple behavioural modification, you know?"
"I know," Anushka says.
That is what she wanted to hear. Now she has enough evidence to arrest him. She signals to the hidden police officers waiting on the street below, and then clocks Viv upside the head with her shotgun in one fluid movement.
Nobody shoots people on Anushka's watch and gets away with it.
L squats on one of the office chairs and spins around, grinning.
"We diiiiid it," Matsuda chants. "We solved our first case as a proper team. Yaaaay."
"Triiiiilobyte," Connor says, mimicking Matsuda's tone without actually engaging with anyone in the room. "Yaaaay."
Naomi glances at Wedy, noting the tiny frown currently blemishing the thief's usually-perfect forehead.
You're worried too, she thinks.
Aiber claps both L and Matsuda on the back.
"There's many more to come," he says cheerily. "It's great, getting to work with you guys without horrible evil genocide-murderers in our midst."
"Quite," L says, smiling at him.
He glances at Naomi, clearly seeking her reaction, and Naomi feels even more uneasy.
What happened to you?
"There aren't any looming cases," she says. "I suggest we try and collect information on the local police force."
"Already broken into most of their homes," Wedy announces. "I can give you my files. Nothing particularly useful, though, as far as I'm concerned."
"Sounds good," L says, still smiling.
"I'm so glad to be naming cases again," Matsuda says. "I feel like it's my own little slice of fame."
"I'm glad to have you naming cases," L agrees, turning towards him. "I mean, I can't say I'm overly fond of some of your chosen names, but I am glad to have your input in general."
"This is so not the L I remember," Wedy mutters, right next to Naomi's ear.
"Yeah," Naomi breathes. "I'll talk to him."
It's about time they get things sorted out.
tbc
a/n
+ thank you for reading
+ I'm sorry this chapter is so late. I'm having some real life issues at the minute, and I can't make any promises on the timing of the next update. I'm still motivated to write and wanting to write, I'm just really short on time and energy right now. but I promise I will definitely keep working on this fic and updating when I can. please bear with me.
+ to the people who are sending me anonymous messages berating me for not updating in time, please don't. if you need to complain, please at least log in so that I can respond to you and have a chance to apologise/explain myself etc. that said, if you are unhappy with any aspect of this fic, please feel free to browse ffn and find other, better, different fics to read. I am doing the best I can here. I appreciate all of my readers, but I understand that this fic isn't for everyone.