Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or Matsuda. Just a big ol' bucket of angst cookies.
Note: I'm sorry for the update spam, anyone with me on alert. Idk it's like half seven in the morning and I can't sleep. So DEATH NOTE YAY. Whatever. Okay so yeah Damascus, I do love this. Angsting Matsuda is where I began in this fandom. We seem to be reaching a close now, I think maybe one or two, perhaps three tops, chapters left to go. More of a retrospective look at this one than in the others, but hey, got to keep trying stuff out. Hope you enjoy :3
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Damascus
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He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
-
The water tower stretches up, up into the encroaching dark, and maybe it's just Matsuda's imagination that makes it seem sinister, but he doesn't think so. Grass and flowers are growing on the patch of earth where Matsuda thinks that, if there's any justice or rightness in the world, nothing should ever grow.
But he's long since stopped believing, or hoping, for any justice. He's long since stopped trusting himself to recognise it, too, because the last time he thought something was good and right and just –
Misa shouldn't have died. He doesn't care about what Aizawa says, about her perhaps being worse than Light, because she killed without reason or concern – he doesn't care at all. All he cares about, really, is that he liked Misa. He liked her. Maybe even –
No, those are dangerous thoughts. They were dangerous ten years ago and they're dangerous now, even when they're all dead and buried and Matsuda is the only one left alive who cares enough to remember.
He was the one who told Misa that Light was dead.
The one who told her...no. The one who let her know is better, because he never really told her. She just...worked it out. Because of a kiss that should never have happened, and the slow, sad fact that if Light had been alive Matsuda would never have let it happen.
Misa threw herself from the top of the water tower on Valentine's Day, 2011. She did not tumble or struggle, but made a simple, graceful arc, her body loose and folded like a toy's – like a doll being dropped from a cabinet by a little girl curious to see if its eyes will smash when it hits the pavement.
And it does smash, this little porcelain doll that was the only woman Matsuda ever –
No, it's still too dangerous. Too awful, too painful to even think.
She smashed into pieces, bound together by skin but inside – broken. Shattered. Bones in different places, all wrong, wrong wrong, and blood and such ugly bruises. Her body was crumpled and defeated and chewed up and spat out, and really, it was just like everything she'd been feeling, everything she'd been in her heart, had suddenly come out and manifested itself. Like she hadn't fallen from anything at all, but she'd simply been walking along, quite calmly, when all of her desperation and her pain inside just overflowed and she fell to the ground – a little broken doll.
It rained. Matsuda remembers that. And he remembers the call, and he remembers rushing out, and almost crashing because he'd had too much to drink (not that there was a reason, other than the usual ones, not that he'd been busy or spending the night with anyone. Just another February 14th spent alone in his apartment), and then arriving –
He remembers standing, without his coat, in the pouring rain, looking at Misa Amane shattered on the stone in front of him.
After that, he had two bodies to dream about. Two people he'd –
It isn't like this for the others. All they have to deal with – all they've ever had to deal with – is the fact that they trusted a man who turned out to be a bad guy. Matsuda, oh, now Matsuda's got so much more to worry about. He's got to worry about the fact that he thought Kira was right, that he shot one of the people he looked up to the most, that he caused Misa to kill herself...
Matsuda must live with the fact that everything he has done has brought pain and torment and death.
For Matsuda, that's a wall. For Matsuda, who could never fight back in school because he didn't want to hurt someone, for Matsuda, who gets upset when he sees a man slap a woman on television, for Matsuda, the fact that he was the one who – who – who made this happen...
For Matsuda, there is a reason he climbed that water tower a month later.
But he was too afraid to take the final step. Too afraid – afraid of falling, afraid of hitting the ground, afraid of the sickening swoops of air and the sound of his own bones breaking. So he'd climbed back down the tower, and gone back to his life.
He stops, with one foot on the first run of the ladder leading up.
He steps back.
He's kidding himself to think he's grown a backbone in the last nine years. He wouldn't be able to step off now anymore than he had been able to all that time ago.
Misa...it had been simpler for Misa. She had been so honest about everything that it didn't need to be complicated. She loved Light. Light died. She died too. That was all there was to it.
Aizawa had said once that he couldn't understand Misa for doing what she did. Ide had asked him what if all his family was killed, and Aizawa had shrugged, and said, "It would be the worst thing in the world. But if I were to die the only thing that would happen was that they would not be mourned enough."
Aizawa thought Misa should have stayed alive. Should have kept fighting. Should have rebuilt her life...
But Matsuda understands. Matsuda understands how one person can become that important to you, how you notice everything they do, how their smile or their presence becomes the defining feature of each day...and when that's gone, when it suddenly leaves, how horrifyingly bleak and empty the world is. How suddenly you realises how little there is to live for.
Matsuda can understand why Misa killed herself. And he can understand what she saw in Light, too.
He kind of wishes she hadn't, though, even if it is for a stupid, selfish reason. Even if it is because –
No.
It starts to rain.
Matsuda reaches to pull his coat more tightly around him, but he doesn't have it. He remembers vaguely taking it off in the town, remembers sitting down for a moment, remembers –
He doesn't remember picking it up.
And now, the rain is starting to soak through his shirt. He starts to shiver a little, but he doesn't move. He's tired. And he doesn't want to do this anymore. He just – he just –
There's nothing. Really, and truly, and honestly, there's nothing, and there's been nothing ever since Misa cast herself from the tower, the princess going in the wrong direction. All of the others, all of the ones who lost so, so much, they've been able to find something to hold onto, or build up something new. But Matsuda...
He's been hanging on by a thread and he doesn't even know how. For ten years, he's been in a funk he can't shake off, head clouded with thoughts that won't fade. Sure he's been bright, and sure, for a while, it looked like he was getting better, but...it never happened. That moment when everything just went away, it never came.
And Matsuda was stuck where he was back in Yellow Box. Empty, ashamed, angry, lost...and tired. So very, very tired.
He tilts his head up against the rain and there's warm droplets on his face, too, salty and hot and sad. He looks up at the ledge Misa stood on, lets his eyes follow the path her body would have taken, lets them land on the spot she would have fallen to...
And he falls, then, falls to his knees next to that spot. All the tiredness of ten years starts pouring out of him, all the pent up sorrow, and he starts to cry. Though he's cried before it's been nothing like this, these wild, hacking sobs, shaking shoulders, leaning forwards with his hands dug into the soaking earth, mud oozing around his finger tips.
When Light died, he'd lost the man he'd admired more than anyone else alive, after the Chief died.
When Misa died, he'd lost the only woman he'd ever loved, even if he'd never had a chance with her.
And now...
Now, he's just tired, and he's just empty, and he's soaked to the skin and he's covered in mud –
- and he wants this to be over.