God's Dice

Disclaimer: Please see Chapter 1 for full disclaimer

Chapter 25: Could You Forget It All?

"Wait!" Mimi's face scrunched up as if in immediate pain as a result of her words, her face turning away from me just slightly. "That's not what I meant!"

Still the words of her own condemnation slipped beneath my skin, unable to be retracted. If history had taught me anything, it was that people's quickest and first responses tended to be the ones which spoke the loudest for the truth. "You knew?" I echoed back.

She shook her head, "No, that's not how I meant it to come out."

"But that's what you said. You knew that Ren was going to kill himself." I was undeniably just as surprised as she was to hear those words fall from her mouth. What exactly was I supposed to do with this sort of information? This wasn't quite the response I had anticipated, and yet still there was a part of me which felt that I should have seen something like this coming. After all, more often than not things tend to be just as simple as they appear from the outside. Usually this makes them rather dull. But this…

"No, I…" She trailed off, "It's more complicated than that."

I flicked over one of the robot action figures without breaking my stare on her, "It's not complicated at all. You knew what was about to happen, or in the very least what sort of state he was in and yet you allowed it to be carried out. It's really that simple. You are aware of the fact that assisted suicide is illegal in the UK, correct?"

Her eyes, once full of pain, suddenly hardened on me, "Near…"

I was in no mood to pander to her despair, though. The only thing that mattered now was the truth she was holding from me. "Talk."

She finally released a heavy exhale, the single action seeming to be its own response to my escalating levels of how fed up I was with her. "It's not… I didn't…" She swallowed in order to try and better gather her words together. "Yes, I knew that something was going to happen. But I didn't know that he was… that this was going to happen."

Her vague explanation moved my interrogation back to my original question: How could she not have known something as disastrous as this was about to occur? Even if it was just an inkling of a feeling, why would she not have gone to him immediately?

"You had all the opportunity to get help, though. You even stopped to question Mello and I about it, yet you refused to be honest about the true nature of the situation at hand." In the back of my mind I could hear myself practically screaming to tell her that it was that very decision of hers which ultimately was the reason I'd become the target of everyone's animosity. Still I held the words back, for what good would that serve other than spreading the guilt around?

She shook her head, "I couldn't do that. I didn't want anyone to know."

My head ticked to the side by just an inch. Now we were getting somewhere. There was something in her choice of words which set off alarms in my head. At the end of the day Mimi was proving to be quite horrendous at hiding anything when under the pressure of an investigation. Though, I suppose that was partially the point of such endeavors in the first place...

"What exactly didn't you want anyone to know?" I questioned, my words coming out slow and careful, practically relishing in this moment.

I could practically see her hesitation in the way her fingers moved through her hair at a quicker rate. She must have known that I had backed her into a corner, for she finally responded, "I didn't want anyone to know that our bond had disintegrated down to the point that I couldn't even feel when he needed me." Well this certainly made things interesting.

Despite the dim lighting from the moon filtering into the otherwise shadowed room I could see her eyes welling with tears from putting all of this into words. Something humane in me told me that I needed to back off this assault into her personal affairs, and that Mello had been right about it being too early for me to question her.

But at the same time her vulnerability also seemed to entice me onwards, as though for this transient moment I was being allowed the chance to gaze through the cracks of someone broken down by the very system I'd been working so hard to understand. I needed to make use of this window of opportunity while I still had a chance. As it stood the truth lay just beyond my reach. Just a bit further and I could take hold of it!

"The limits of your bond were that low? Why?"

She exhaled again, her eyes falling to her lap as she practically muttered beneath her breath. "Because… Ren didn't love me. He didn't even want to be with me. At all." The tears brimming within her eyes finally spilled over, creating rivers down her cheeks, catching the moonlight in a sort of despondent radiance. "We were soul mates! We were destined for one another, and bonded together with a connection! And yet the longer it went on the less he wanted anything to do with me."

This time I almost couldn't stop myself, "Well, you did force your will onto him, effectively roping him into said bond without his consent." It'd sounded like more of an appropriate justification for his actions in my head.

If she even heard me, though, she made no move to react to it. I figured she'd become lost within her explanation. "He kept… avoiding those issues, avoiding what we had, and avoiding me. He never even wanted to deal with it, or work through it or even make an attempt to find some sort of solution." There was perhaps an unconscious level of bitterness to her voice which led me to wonder… She'd indeed felt him to be in trouble, but hadn't been willing to go and fight, instead allowing it to continue because in her mind he'd made no efforts to fight for her. She let this happen, perhaps out of spite. More and more this did sound like assisted suicide.

Well… all but one part.

"What about the note he left?"

She rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, her gaze traveling briefly up to me before they fell back onto her lap. "The note…" She murmured, "I don't know for sure, but I think that something inside of him believed that by letting himself throw away the divinely generated bond that had been created he was in effect betraying God." She gave a small chuckle that lacked any sort of true heart behind it, "Ren didn't even believe in any of that, though. It makes no sense."

No, perhaps he didn't, but it was easy to deny any idea of divines until one finds themselves questioning their design. There was an a level of fear of the unknown which existed the more one allowed themselves to doubt. I myself could attest to that much.

Still, everything was beginning to make sense; the pieces beginning to align themselves to form the picture hidden around her broken form. "So, he saw himself to be a criminal, after all." There was a certain smugness within the statement.

The words I'd said to Ren on that fateful night hadn't implanted the notion that he was somehow the kind of monster criminal who spit in the face of what was supposedly God's gift to man. That sort of idea had been within him long before I was consulted. However, it wasn't entirely unlikely that my words hadn't been the ink on the paper declaring his guilty verdict as a criminal. From there it would have only been no leap at all to determine himself to be worthy of the same fate which was being wrought by the false god.

Kira had had absolutely nothing to do with Ren, or his ultimate decision. What I'd failed to realize that night was that I had not been speaking to Ren about the mindset of a mass murderer, but to where he himself stood within his own contrived reality. Of that much, I was guilty.

But ultimately at the end of the day I was not the one responsible for the fact that when he'd allowed himself to fall there hadn't been a proper net waiting to catch him.

"I know what everyone's been saying." Mimi suddenly cut into my train of thought. "That you're the reason that this happened to him." Why was she bringing this up? "I just thought you should know that I don't blame you." The weak smile she offered me held a tinge of mercy to them, which alluded to why she was stating it. In her mind, she was pardoning me of any guilt I was shouldering.

"As you appropriately shouldn't." I commented frigidly, utterly astonished by her vanity to think herself the possessor of my peace of mind. Did she not know anything about how I worked? Or even reality, for that matter. "What do you plan on doing about this quandary?"

She looked up again, our eyes locking. "Nothing. What could I do?"

"Clearing up the misunderstandings by telling them the truth of what happened between you two would probably be a good start." I flicked over one of the other robots, though at this point I'd all but lost my mental grasp over what each one represented in this altercation.

She shook her head, "I won't do that."

Again her word choice left her entirely readable to me. The use of the word 'won't' was what gave her away. It wasn't that she couldn't tell anyone the truth, even if doing so meant sparing me of their assault, and she consciously acknowledged that. No, instead she was refusing to say anything, for no other reason than because her silence meant preserving to everyone in the institution the outward image that her and Ren had had a perfect relationship. How utterly repulsive.

If Mimi had provided me with a good reason for wanting to keep the truth a secret from people, I would have been willing to understand and put up with the animosity I was receiving. But this… This was just selfish. I could practically feel my blood boiling the longer I considered the fact that what she was subjecting me to was having to silently condone her lies. For who would ever believe my word over hers? And she knew that fact well.

"You're a coward." I heard slip from between my lips before I had a chance to even consider grabbing it. Once that was out, I figured there was no reason to hold anything else back. I began gathering my things into my arms again to prepare to leave as I spoke, "You'd rather let someone innocent take the fall merely so that you can preserve the fictitious image of what you two had. You wouldn't let Ren just leave the relationship like he wanted, instead keeping him tied by some false obligation to the divines, and look what ended up happening. Now you'd rather do the same thing to yourself instead of learning from what's happened."

Once all of my belongings were gathered I stood up; despite her stunned silence I could feel the heat exuded off from her eyes staring at me. I suppose her anger made sense. But it only seemed right that someone break the reality of things to her, and after what she'd freely admitted, it might as well be me. "I'd originally wanted to speak with you in the hopes of gaining a thorough understanding of what it was you were going through in the face of this tragedy, what your thoughts were, and how you personally felt. However, although I appreciate you answering a small fraction of those sorts of questions, after hearing your take on the events leading up to Ren's death, I think I'd rather go through my life never getting another answer rather than hear anything else from you."

Her greed and her utter delusion with not only her own life but those of others infuriated me like seldom else could, and made me want nothing more than to destroy her down bit by careful bit. We, as successors fighting to be L, were supposed to work for justice no matter the costs, not submerge the truth because it didn't fall in line with what we'd envisioned.

I finally moved to leave the room, offering Mimi one last statement. "I may have played a part within this, but ultimately Ren's fate is no one's fault but yours. If you continue the way you are you're going to find that you become lost within your own deceptive veneer. Hopefully you have some image or means by which to save yourself."

I didn't give her any room to respond as I went on my way without even the slightest bit of guilt trailing after me about the power of my words. Mello's words flooded my ears, telling me that I had no idea what my words did to people. But at this point I could find no reason for it to even matter.

Frustration flooded through my veins, although the further I walked the less it became focused on her and instead on myself. How absolutely foolish I'd been to even allow myself to be concerned with either her, or her current situation. I should have seen this coming… How could I have not seen this coming?

'Because they hid it rather well…' I told myself. But as I made my way through the dark halls of Wammy's towards my own room I could only sigh in defeat. 'This was not quite what I'd expected to find tonight.'

Where could I possibly go from here?

All I wanted was to push the aftershocks of this tragedy away and be rid of it. All I found myself wanting was to forget that I had ever mistakenly allowed someone to infiltrate my mind and be any sort of guide for me and my understanding of soul mates. That amount of control was proven to be dangerous, and not something to be given out so easily.

As far as I was concerned speaking with Mimi had proven only one point to me: the only person worth giving out that level of trust to, that I should allow myself to be so blindly guided, was Mello. Which in itself said a great number of things about my current state.

For as I finally reached my room and I closed the door behind me, it felt as though a wave of weariness swept over my being and I couldn't help entertaining the thought that… perhaps I'd like to forget myself, and the rest of this troublesome world for just a bit. All I needed was long enough to collect up the pieces of the scattered puzzle that was my confidence, and my sense of self.

"Why are you still up?" I said after what felt like a lifetime of standing in my room with my back against the door. Through the still space I could feel the familiar rustling of Mello's thoughts that alerted to his conscious state, rather than the calm melodious rhythm of his dreams.

He shifted from where he had been lying on the bed to sit up, "I told you, you're so damn loud when you're awake."

I sighed, "You heard my thoughts from that distance?"

"Obviously I couldn't hear any words, but I damn well felt your agitation." There was a moments pause where even the tone within his mind shifted, "What was that about?" He asked, just a bit quieter. Was that concern I heard? No, certainly not. Not from Mello.

Still, I could barely find the strength or the ability to move from my spot against the door, as though I hadn't realized until this moment how much my world had been shaken by all of this otherwise inconsequential information. "Nothing. It doesn't matter." If Mello really wanted answers that bad then he knew where and how to get it. Honestly, I didn't think I had the words to even begin explaining it. "Suffice it to say, though, that I'm done caring or wasting my time over all that's happened. I've wasted too much time and mental space concerning myself with factors which do nothing but distract, and haunt, and ultimately destroy."

Mello was quiet, his gaze just as much curious as it was concerned as he mentally went over what I had said. I could feel his confusion and ultimate unknowing due to the lack of proper pieces, yet somehow still he seemed to understand what I was alluding to. I could only hope to be so fortunate.

God forbid Mello and I ever have the same miscommunication, or levels of mistrust that Mimi and Ren had held with one another. Sure, he and I fought and not a day went by that he didn't remind me how much he loathed me. But that didn't mean I didn't understand him, or that he wasn't learning to rise above that through our connection.

Something in my chest said I wouldn't have it in me to handle the same sort of betrayal Mimi had done to Ren.

After the moments of silence Mello finally got up from where he'd been sitting up, crossing the space between us to take my hand and lead me to the bed. Somehow I didn't quite have the words to tell him that I probably wouldn't be able to sleep for at least a while longer. But I followed him nonetheless, because the familiar spark of electricity through my fingers when he took hold of me seemed to validate that he and I weren't the same.

In the next second, I found myself suddenly pushed down on my back against the mattress forcefully, Mello's body pinning me down as he appeared above me. "Mello!" It wasn't fear, but surprise and some level of uncertainty which ran through my unconscious utterance.

"Shh." He whispered into my ear, the silky strands of his fine golden hair caressing against my face as his nose trailed ever so lightly across the skin by my ear. "I can hear your thoughts." He told me.

"I know."

I could hear past his vague words to the true meaning lurking within his own mind. Like the warm comforts of a fire on a winter night his thoughts assured me that I didn't need to say anything about what had happened because none of it necessarily mattered, and even if it did then he would find the answers himself and deal with it because he was better at human nature than I. Either way, in that moment I was thankful.

"Losing yourself isn't always such a bad thing, at times." He told me, his smooth words slipping into my mind, working to expertly replace my own thoughts and rational. For but a moment, pinned down beneath him, I was willing to let him take the control. For perhaps he knew better, or even knew best about these things.

"Isn't it?" I asked, trying to turn to meet his eyes, but he avoided me, the trail of his nose and warm breath instead trailing to my jaw, following the line to my neck.

"No, it's not. You can't really understand the visceral desire to want to forget yourself, and forget all your obligations and all the things that need done. You're too perfect for that." He was speaking from experience. But from what exactly, I couldn't seem to discern though the mixture of our minds together. What I could read, though, was that he was establishing a dichotomy between the two of us and our experiences, yet it was one that he was ready to construct a bridge to connect us. How generous of him.

"Tell me?" From my lips came the logical request, to tell me about the experience so I would know. My mind spoke the truth buried in my center, 'Show me?' It was a request to guide me through the trials.

I wanted to help construct that bridge, rather than just be an overseer. I wanted to finally be together on one plane, rather than standing at equal levels with one another, but simultaneously in total opposition to one another.

I felt him grin against me and at the same time felt the warmth of his hand slip beneath my shirt to rest upon the skin at the junction between my side and hip; it was as though in that moment he found himself needing even just a bit more physical contact. Why? What was going on in his own mind that I couldn't read? "I'll tell you someday." He said quieter, hearing my curiosity to know what secrets resided in the shadows of his mind. There was definitely something lurking within him… but even so close I couldn't ever seem to grasp onto it, as though he was purposefully hiding it.

Why?

A cold chill of fear shot through my body as I found myself suddenly wondering if we were somehow unconsciously following in Mimi and Ren's footsteps. Was Mello learning how to properly hide things from me?

"Do you want to?" He asked, tearing me away from my concern. Did I what? Did I want to know what was truly on his mind or did I want to forget myself for but a moment or two? "Forget." He said, answering my unspoken questions.

His form pulled back just a bit, looming just above my face till I could swear we were sharing the same breath. Looking at him in the soft, diffuse lighting of the night, taking in all of the flawless features that composed him I found myself without that shared air; without words. William Blake once wrote that the nakedness of woman is the work of God, and yet lying beneath Mello, his thoughts controlling mine and his every sense clouding my own until I no longer knew where either one of us began and ended, I couldn't help thinking that this was the work of God. And if that was indeed the case, then how could I do anything but find out what was in store by His supposed predetermined fate?

"Yes." I said in barely audible exhale of what air was left in my lungs, but the smirk that appeared across him said that the message was heard. And yet… there was just an ounce of nefariousness within the expression, as well. More and more it was that fact which was beginning to grab my investigative attention; entirely replacing the mystery of Mimi's experience.

The space was suddenly closed between us as his lips pressed against mine, guiding in nature rather than being in any way forceful, while at the same time transmitting to me a level of passion that kindled a fire within my belly that I'd hardly known existed before that moment.

I found myself pushing back into him, my thoughts a muddled array of dissatisfied words and questions that were drowned out by his own dominance and the intoxicating taste and aroma of chocolate.

I felt his grip tighten over the bare flesh of my side, his dull nails trailing lines across my sensitive skin, releasing an involuntary shiver from me that pushed my body further against his. Almost immediately he pulled back just a bit again, though his teeth nipped lightly on my bottom lip as he did so; through the space of our mixing thoughts I heard his words. "Don't. Don't start something you won't finish." Start? Had I? What exactly? I hadn't been the one deciding the control over the situation. Funny how he could take and give up responsibility so quickly.

His crystalline blue orbs met mine. "So, you want to forget, do you?"

'I figured that was what was happening here.' I mentally responded. It'd seem to make sense, and so far it was having hell of results… If this wasn't even beginning the process of forgetting then what exactly did he have in mind?

He chuckled lightly, "True, but it's not enough." His look then immediately hardened on me in determination. "If you really want to forget yourself then let's leave Wammy's."

A/N: Ooh leaving Wammy's? I wrote that whole last section out and couldn't help but think to myself, "Jeez, Soul, where have we seen this scenario before?" True, but I suppose we'll have to see what Mello's got in mind next chapter. Clearly he's got something on his mind. Any ideas? Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter. I know I've been complaining a lot about the way my writing is coming out lately, and I apologize for being whiny about it so I'll try to stop doing that, but I'm glad you all are sticking with me despite how dull or uneventful this may be starting to come across. Regardless, please be sure to let me know your thoughts on the chapter!

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-Forbiddensoul562