warnings: explicit sex, injuries, botched canon, and mythological/supernatural/religious elements that are not present in dn canon and which i shoved in myself.
notes: hello, it's been four and a half weeks and absolutely no one is at all shocked. i hope you're all doing well and that the wait didn't cause you to totally forget this fic/lose any and all interest in it. i've been plugging along on it as always, but i got sidetracked by some other projects. here we are at last, anyway! you might be pleased to note that this chapter actually does this fic's summary and listed main pairing some, ahem, justice.
everything about shinigami culture and the upstairsmen is stuff i made up myself i don't even think i've read most of how to read? i'm the worst researcher. if i deserve any award superlative it's that. that said, calikarcha, gukku, and armonia justin beyondormason are actual shinigami listed in how to read, as are midora and the king. i made up the rest of them. some names in this and in future chapters, however, are taken/adjusted from biblical sources. yes, big fun, i know.
thank you for reading/reviewing/absolutely everything, as always. i love you guys and i hope this chapter is semi halfway decent? here's a totally half-hearted recap summary to ring your bells.
previously on nights: L, to everyone's loud and insistent displeasure, reunites with his team of professionals, integrating in among them his team of sketchy weirdos, and everything is going slightly awry until B tracks down light in his cell - who has been imprisoned, along with misa, at L's behest - at which point things go extremely awry, and wedy puts a stop to it with a tried and true method and a few bullets. elsewhere, syd is trying fruitlessly to reach beyond in japan and compare notes on the supernatural, ryuk and rem have gone off looking for answers of their own, and everyone's least favorite probable shinigami-killer is lurking at the edge of every other scene.
chapter twenty eight - evangelization.
"Our father who art in Heaven. Our father who art buried in the yard. Someone is digging your grave right now. Someone is drawing a bath to wash you clean."
- Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain
Very rarely is there an all-encompassing, underlying principle to a situation that ties everything up, makes all the pegs fit in their holes, clicks all the loose puzzle pieces together to reveal an answer, a truth. This revelation, however, comes very close.
Quillish remembers the fresh-faced Japanese nursing assistant who'd explained the results of B's physical to him in the cold January of '87, repeating blessing after enthusiastic blessing at the wonder of his survival. Should be dead, by all accounts, she'd said. Kiseki, she'd called it, which in essence translates to miracle.
As Beyond twitches back to life on screen, live and kicking as he's ever been and shouting expletives at the surrounding audience, Quillish thinks that it isn't quite the word he'd use, though the same forces seem to be at work. So many cuts and bruises through-out his childhood, so much blood spilt and re-spilt, caution never learned. They had, silently but collectively, assumed then that it was simply a precocious daring natural to a child brought up by nothing but a dreary urban landscape and his own small, sharp mind.
This suggests something else. This suggests an innate singularity and otherworldliness of the sort that has always been palpable in B's presence, but never quite believable. But only the fool denies his own eyes and holds fast to his disproven principles. B had not died. The bullets had gone in and they had come out again, forced jerkily away by his spasming flesh.
The phone rings.
At Quillish's side, Mello, the second choice who has carved out his path to the front, starts at the noise. He seems more shocked by it than he had been by B's survival and subsequent self-regeneration, which he'd watched disinterestedly from Quillish's office chair as one would a television rerun, already dully familiar.
"I think it's L," he says, pointing at one of the monitors, when Quillish doesn't immediately answer, and surer than clockwork, there the boy - man, now - is, ear to a pilfered cellphone and looking directly into the camera lens, as if he can see Quillish and is impatient for his attention.
"Hello," Quillish says flatly in greeting, nodding to Mello as he plucks up the receiver.
"Watari." L sounds winded, but not half as surprised as he'd be justified in being. "I'm going to need you to prep two more rooms for medical care and containment. Preferably as far away from each other as possible. I assume Doctor Nishikawa is en route?"
"Roger that," Quillish says, already flipping through the auxiliary feeds. "Would you like Amane to be moved as well?"
L opens his mouth on screen but nothing comes out for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head. "She stays where she is. Best to take one hurdle at a time. I'll check in on her once this situation is taken care of, but at the moment priority rests only with immediate threats."
"And at present I assume B is at the top of the list?" Quillish cradles the phone between his ear and shoulder, two hands pattering across the keyboard already, sending out orders to the taskforce and requesting another team of guards to be sent from the Tokyo police headquarters.
On screen, L disappears from one camera feed, emerging on another which Quillish absentmindedly enlarges. In the background, there's another gunshot, echoing both from the low-level microphone volume of the cameras and, more clearly, from the phone.
"Well, Wedy's just shot him again, but that doesn't seem to do much good in the long run, so I'd like to have him contained as soon as possible." He's so blase about the entirety of it. It's a stark contrast to the pale panic he'd exhibited in look and manner when he'd thought that B was dead, and Quillish notes that keenly, but doesn't remark of it. "We've got straightjackets on hand, yes? Send Mello down with one, and have him bring some more tea while he's at it. Everyone is very thirsty and terrified, so it'd be appreciated."
"Of course," Quillish says, typing out a message to send directly to the monitor in front of where Mello's slumped and viewing the proceedings with a look of bored juvenility. His small start when the words pop up on screen is vaguely gratifying, but his response is promptly sent.
Tea, got it. Straightjackets, where?
"Any interest in back-up?" Quillish asks L loosely, searching with one hand through the database of available operatives that could be brought in for support, and typing a response to Mello with the other: 5th floor storage. Key is in the desk drawer, labeled '5.' Code is the square root of 2704, with a zero on either side. Please hurry.
Mello's already up and rifling through the drawer by the time L responds with a stumbling, "Excuse me?"
Quillish can't tell for the moment if he's genuinely confused or if he's making a tasteless pun, but the latter hardly seems likely given his expression, wide-eyed and uncomfortable on the screen. Quillish can't say he wasn't expecting this, but he'd at least foreseen a longer period of development.
Well, regardless, B's presence is fulfilling its function.
"Sorry," Quillish says, maintaining professionalism, "that was poor word choice. I meant to ask if you'd like to call any of your on-retainer operatives to help out with the situation. No reference to Beyond intended."
"Right," L says, regaining his balance quickly, "right. Put in some calls. I'm not sure yet, but the option is appealing. It's only the matter of revealing the identity of Kira to more people than strictly necessary. In the meantime, since they have no immediate means of killing or harming us - other than bodily, of course, which neither Light nor Misa seem particularly disposed towards - I think it would be best to regulate the issue of dealing with them to the back-burner, and before anything else get B sorted and stored somewhere secure. Do you think he'll talk?"
Quillish hums conversationally, even as he continues his sprawling search through their databases. "About the nature of his ability? Do you think it's especially likely that he even knows?" He tracks Mello's progress on the camera feed. He's running in the halls but Quillish is willing to let that slip on account of emergency supernatural hijinks.
"He was a smart boy and he's grown into a smart man. I think it's likely that he knows something, and I'm starting to have my own suspicions, as well. Among other things, I'd also like to ask exactly how he found out about my disappearance, escaped jail, and evaded capture for so long. Any theories?" L's walking down a long hall now. Quillish doesn't recognize it, but the feed is labeled B28.
"I'm afraid I haven't need of any," he says, with as little intonation lent to the words as he can manage without mirroring L's speech patterns. "I know how he did it. I helped him."
L stops, his figure slowing in the hallway, the scraping sounds of his shuffling steps ceasing quickly in the background. He responds with the silence that Quillish expects, sound drained, cold and angry and processing through the information at lightning speed. L, the supercomputer; L, the boy genius. What's impressive at eight isn't half so at twenty-five. He's growing old, getting frail. And, worse than that, predictable. Quillish knows the tirade that's coming, the quiet storm, the icy orders and lazy scorn. Little tantrums and a lot of noise, things he should have outgrown by now.
Quillish likes knowing the formula, though. He likes entering a program and watching the results spurred to life across the screen. This is a lot like that.
Except it is not like that at all, because L doesn't do any of what he expects.
Instead, he sighs, breezy as you please, says, "Oh," and hangs up the phone.
Ryuk - trailing dodgily after Rem through the the tiny slip of a doorway where worlds meet and the bright frenzy of time stagnates into a dank forever, or whatever - finds the Shinigami Realm more active and, well, alive than he's seen it in a full thousand years. Give or take a few hundred.
"Hey, guys!" he calls buoyantly to a roaring group of maybe half a dozen that charges past them, led giddily by Armonia Justin Beyondormason, the King's technical right hand who normally spends more time cataloguing his library of precious metals than seeing to his King. The task is left mostly, by process of bored elimination, to Midora. He's not known to have left his cove of bejeweled seclusion in years, really, but here he is, directing the advance of a cackling band of his fellow court members towards the throne room.
One member of the group, a yapping little terrier sort of death god from the lower ranks, yells at him, "Come on, Ryuk, you'll miss it!" before turning back around to gasp his way after his fellows.
Ryuk grins, pushing off of the craggy cliff face they'd arrived on, but Rem's long grey fingers catch his arm. "Wait," she says, low and dull as ever.
Ryuk rolls his eyes. "For what? Come on, we're gonna miss it!"
He thrums, dead old bones feeling more excited to be in this place than he remembers ever being. The human world, full of its technological mysteries and deliciously fresh fruit, provides an endless sequence of distanced entertainment, but he is not a part of it and plays no solid role in the action. Here is where he is from, swamped in the dark essence he was born within, blah blah blah, the purity of death, whatever - folks like Armonia can wax on about it all they like, but he's never been much interested in learning the past of his species when they barely even have a present.
Not so, anymore. Something is happening, and all Ryuk has ever really wanted is that.
Rem, however, does not let go of him. "We don't even know what it is," she whispers, deep and dark like this place. Jeez, he'd sort of missed this place.
"So?" Ryuk says. "You wanted to go to the throne room anyway, right? That's why we came here, isn't it? Actually," he continues, scratching his chin, "how did we come here? We shouldn't be able to leave earth without being summoned, unless - "
"Unless the Note isn't of Earth anymore," Rem finishes for him, heavily. Her one eye closes slowly, and Ryuk can tell she is thinking and hopes she's doing it well, because this really is a tangle they've gotten into. "Misa's Note was stolen, and likely not by a human."
Ryuk grins. Damn, he loves a good tangle.
"Okay, but what about the other one? It's still locked up in the headquarters, I'm pretty sure. Light still had his memories last I checked, anyway."
Another group of their noisy neighbors appears from over the cliffside, chatting with dogged interest about the council that the King has called, requesting that all beings native to Death's lower reaches, and thus all creatures that he has dominion over, appear in his court or else be turned over to the Upstairsmen.
"Maybe," Rem says, letting go of Ryuk finally to spread her wings and join his journey upwards, "we were, in fact, summoned."
Ryuk grins wider. Maybe, maybe. Who cares, though? As long as something interesting happens, which is inevitable if the Upstairsmen are involved, he'll be happy as a bottomdweller.
Light's first thought when he wakes is that everything is whiter than it should be, the world fading in around him with one pale shade after another, crisp sheets melting into bright walls melting into shiny linoleum.
His second thought is that his nose is broken.
Sitting up, he processes his surroundings just enough to realize that he's in a different room than he had been, hooked up to an IV and plastered with crinkly medical tape. Every version of L is gone, along with the frantic blur of his father, repeating his name over and over as if on loop, that had hovered just out of the reaches of his conscious mind.
He blinks, scans the room quickly and finds the outlying grey of the camera pointed directly at him. He imagines L on the other side of it, studying him as he'd always done and had been unable to do for nearly a month there without the inevitability of Light watching him back just as hard. Jesus, he must be enjoying a long awaited power-trip right about now.
Light's facial bones ache, his ribs stinging as he moves, but he ignores any and all discomfort in favor of positioning himself as casually, appealingly, as possible, so that when he speaks, there can be no mistake as to who it's aimed at.
Facing directly into the camera and leaving room for alternate interpretations of his words - whether innocence or guilt is presumed - he says, "I'm ready when you are, asshole."
One, two, three, flatline. A buzzing, low and screeching through him, but then breath. Then a ba-dump. Ba-dump, ba-dump. Jagged lines on the heart monitor and he gasps, lungs flaring open, hungry to fill his empty places, all empty places and emptying; in out in out in out; he's going to die and has died and is undying, heh, that's funny, sounds like untying and that's what this feels like now. His eyes open and he sees the wide open sky, birds frozen mid-flight, stars blurry - but it's all on the same level, not spread out like the universe, hurdling and lashing and blundering through space and time, is supposed to be.
As his vision focuses, he realizes that what he's looking at is a ceiling, speckled with dust and small marks. Not the universe.
Why not? What separates the plaster and paint from the macrocosmic scope of tumbling eternity, and where does this separation begin and end? What separates him from the ceiling, the stars, the scratchy white material latching him up and keeping him locked to the mattress that he's on.
He jerks, trying to get loose. The lock is so tight and he is the key but where is the keyhole?
He needs to fill his empty places.
"L," he croaks, voice hardly above a parched whisper. He shot me, he thinks, even though it had been Wedy with the gun, Wedy and her brand new bullets. Bang, bang, bang. Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. His heart is beating and why is there only one of those? He swears he's had two hearts all of his life. Only one is in him, but he has two.
"L," he says again, and laughs.
So, cat's out of the bag. Is he the cat or is he the bag? Which one of those things can die? He is not that one. If he takes Schrodinger into account, he is both the cat and not the cat. He is both alive and not alive and he has always been both of those things and has never been either.
There is no one in the room. Well, him, yes. And Death, maybe, but that's just a quaint little tickling sensation behind his ears, whispering wordless truths to him like lullabies. Orange soda and a whole rotting microscopic universe inside of a cell outside of forever. It's manifesting in the body of a beauty queen, but what it really is is much older than that. It's in him.
He doesn't know what it is.
"L." He lurches forward, tautly restrained body rattling into action against the skin of his white casket, nipping at the air, at the camera across the room that sears him with its eyes. He's watching, he's watching, he's got to be watching. Couldn't be far away. World would go wrong, if that were the case.
World has never gone right.
"Come and find me," B tells the camera lens and it doesn't blink, stares head on at him without response. But it hears.
L hears him, and B waits.
Misa opens her eyes to a dim, comforting light, like the first rays of morning kicking up over the horizon after a 6 AM work-out, muscles still breathing heavy with life, exertion, heart beating up a storm that teaches her, if only for the moment, how to love herself. That sort of thing only comes in small, slippery waves. She tries to hold on, but then the sun rises and daylight is cold and everyone is gone away and she only has her hands, the job, and long hours with which to put them together and try to make something beautiful.
She doesn't feel beautiful now. She feels weak, sleepy, drenched in sweat. She pushes herself up, trying to get her bearings; squinting at the light source, a thin wire hung from the ceiling burning with a low watt bulb.
L is beside her.
He's in a slate grey sweater, legs crossed agura-style, knees hanging awkwardly off the sides of the plastic folding chair at her bedside. He's got a small china cup and saucer balanced on one thigh. Studying her concertedly, his expression doesn't change even as he holds the cup out to her.
"Tea?"
Misa just stares at his hands, the offering, then shakes her head. Leaning back against the cold wall behind her, she says after a moment, "Water?"
He nods, turning briefly to signal in the opposite direction, from which a camera watches them, blinking its rhythmic red light. "It's coming," he says. It's already more hospitality than she'd gotten the last time he'd held her captive.
Captive? L had been the captive. Why, again? Her head is all muggy and she can't get her thoughts in order. She feels like she's missing an important item, her keys or her cell phone or some other essential like that, but she can't quite figure out what it could be. Just out of her reach, like the sun, setting just under the horizon, suddenly only visible in radiating, darkening waves, then snuffed out.
"Where are we?" she says, even though she knows. It's familiar. She'd never seen her surroundings when he'd held her originally under suspicion of being Kira, but the drafty, empty, cold air is something she'd grown intimate with, and even if its not the same place it's the same situation. What she really wants to say is, "Why are we?" Why back to this again? Hadn't they been proven innocent? Isn't the whole world different now, L chained up in a hall and them back to their lives.
She and Light, a life together. The best question is, "Where is he?" but she's afraid to ask that.
"Back at headquarters," L says simply, wasting little time, as if knowing that she knows. "And yes, before you worry yourself, he's fine. A bit banged up, but alive and well as ever he's been." He scratches his chin.
Her mind catches on the phrase banged up, skipping over the assurances of good health. "What did you do to him?" she asks quickly, voice hoarse and wispy. She wishes she were louder.
L rolls his eyes, but it's a familiar gesture and almost comfortable, their rapport, slowly and unsteadily built up over the course of their respective confinements, still not dissipated even in these drastically altered circumstances. He is a familiar face, after all, and distinct in his particularity of actually having a face, unlike the ranks of helmeted guards that have been handling her for the past several hours, days even. She's not sure how much time it's been. Too long away from Light, certainly.
"The assumption that I'm at fault is warranted, I'm sure, given history and its tendency to repeat," L murmurs, chewing on his thumb between the words, muffling them slightly, "and I am partially responsible, if not wholly, but the threat is contained, and locked down just as well, if not better, than Light and yourself."
There's a knock on the door then, before Misa can reply, and L stands stiffly to go and answer it. Some veiled guard or another hands him a glassy pitcher and a stack of plastic cups, and he balances it all uneasily against his chest as he makes his way back, pouring her a cup of water on the way, and handing it off when he's back at her side, folding up into his chair once again.
She drinks deep, forgetting for the moment about her worry, draining the cup and holding it out for more in a matter of second, then sipping greedily from the second serving. She coughs, sputters slightly, droplets falling from her lips and off her chin, getting on the off-white material of the shirt she'd been provided with. She feels as if she's been asleep for a long time, even though she'd dipped into consciousness for long grey hours spent staring at the ceiling and counting off wrong turns on her fingers and toes.
Shouldn't have called him to the diner. Shouldn't have gone to Takada's. Shouldn't have sent him out for milk. Shouldn't have let him out of her sight. Maybe if she'd made him stay he'd still be with her now.
She can't finish her second cup of water, so she just holds it in her lap, staring down at the ripples that form when she shifts.
L says, "I have a problem." He clears his throat, shifting his head to tip it in the opposite direction. "Actually, you have a bigger problem. Light, too. The two of you are up for mass murder and since he kidnapped me and tipped his whole hand, I have no interest in proving his guilt or yours to the general populous with showy manipulation tactics. I just want you gone. Off my plate. Light's done for, there's no other way about it, but since I could feasibly knock you down to being charged as an accessory, there's a lot more leeway there." He scratches his chin casually. "But here arises my problem."
"What, the fact that you're crazy?" Misa snaps, knocking the cup with the force of her words and sending a cool spill across her lap. She rights it, barely taking notice. "Light's not Kira and neither am I! How many times do we have to go through this?"
L blinks, opening his mouth and then closing it again. "I was going to say it's that you know my name, but this willful ignorance is also a bother. I can turn the cameras off, if you want, but it's only Watari watching, and there's really no need to play dumb now, not after all that happened back during my imprisonment with the two of you. Even if you deny it until the end, I can and will have you executed. Better to take your chances with bargaining than to hold fast to a truth that we both know is baseless and empty, don't you think?"
Misa sits fully upright, the cup falling completely off of the bed and bouncing crinkled onto the tile floor. "I don't know what weirdo genius reverse psychology thing you're trying to do, but I'm not falling for it, okay?"
She hears her voice reaching a helium pitch, nothing like the voice inside her head that repeats its slow sweet prayers, and she thinks the words that come out are all wrong but she doesn't know why. It's like there are two of her but only one of them can talk out loud.
"Evidently," L says slowly. "Although I think, were it a manipulation, this would only qualify as regular psychology."
"Shut-up," Misa says, because she doesn't know what else to say.
L's eyebrows raise, moving at inconsistent rates so that his expression is slightly slanted. "Sorry, can't possibly." He stands then, pushing himself off of the chair with something like a brief flash of pain, but then it's gone in an instant, face blank and wondering again.
He paces back and forth a few times; once, twice, again and again; then moves back to her side to tug his chair over to the opposite end of the room, into the far corner where the camera is mounted. With quick precision, he climbs up, hands moving in white streaks across the machinery, dismantling it with a few tweaking metal sounds. Stepping off the chair, he sets something metallic and wiry down on it, another tiny part of the world that Misa doesn't understand.
The tiny parts add up. Her head hurts.
L says, "Honestly, Misa," and something in her throat quivers; it's rare that he says her first name, even rarer that it's in such a curious and emotive tone, far and away separate from his flat voice of interrogation.
She wonders for a moment whether he'd taken away the camera for her sake, or for his own. Then she starts crying.
She doesn't mean to and she doesn't understand and she says, "I don't understand," and L moves closer, ducking down beside the bed and frowning at her, evidently confused, but maybe less confused than she is. She wipes at her eyes. "Honestly, I don't know. I don't know how I know your name or why we took you with us, we just did." She breathes deep, sucking back her tears, feeling gross, glad Light can't see her like this. "It had nothing to do with Kira, though." She wipes her eyes, the sting in her sinuses tapering off.
She wants to say something else but she can't think of anything, feels embarrassed and a little annoyed that she cares how she looks in front of him, but it had been so important to be a wall, stony and impregnable, before. A wall between he and Light. She knows why they took him, why the bedsheets and the shampoo and the gas station coffee, but she doesn't like to think of it in clearer terms, to pinpoint the words and emotions, play back hazy hate-fueled mornings, the smell of sweat that isn't hers filling the room.
"Hmm," L says, "this again."
Misa pulls her blankets up, covering most of her torso, trying to hide in some way that she doesn't really understand. "What? This what?"
He taps his lip thoughtfully. Always thinking, haywire and baseless, but usually right. "Memories, gone. You gave it up. He must have had you give it up, which means he probably gave it up, too." He scratches his chin. "Same old tricks. He's just as tired as I am, clearly. Past that point of thinking up some clever, destroying plan. Huh." He stands up, body straightening, arching for a moment like a bow before he settles back in the slump. His body language means something but she doesn't know what.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she tells him, even though she's forming some idea. Pulling words from previous conversations - remember, remember, remember - the surety and the fear that had counterbalanced the confused emptiness. She can feel hollows where the knowing had been, but it's all gone now.
L nods, turning to go, seemingly caught up in something new, far off and away from her, and it's dragging him in its direction. "No, you wouldn't," he mumbles.
He's almost to the door when she says, loudly and clearly, speaking to make herself heard, "L Lawliet."
He stops, briefly frozen mid-stride, then turns on his heel to face her again, head tipping sideways. His eyes are wide and his interest seems to have drifted rather sharply back to her. "Yes?"
"That's your name," Misa says. She doesn't know what she's proving or what she isn't. Mostly, she decides, she doesn't want to be left alone again.
He blinks at her, as if trying to readjust something in him. "Yes," he repeats, slower this time. "Are you threatening me?"
"No. Maybe. I don't think so." Misa pulls the blanket tighter around her, the fabric stretching cooly against her bare arms. "Can I have some breakfast?"
"It's the middle of the night."
Misa takes too long to process the words, and when she does she has too much trouble rationalizing them with the world that she'd been stolen from, that by the time she's organized her thoughts enough to decide to edit her request to include dinner, he's already shrugged, turned back to the door, and called back to her, "I'll have Watari make you breakfast as soon as possible."
"Catastrophe!" the King bellows out at the crowd before him, which clogs the golden glow of the throne room with its greying aura, rotting and cackling at once. "Catastrophe Englo!"
A creature constructed entirely out of moon rock raises its craggy hand near the back of the audience. "Present, your Majesty," he hisses, voice reverberating up into the hollow ceiling, bouncing between shards of sunlight and dips of starless night.
"Catastrophe," the King commands, waving his tiny hand, whether gesturing forward or backward it's hard for Rem to tell from her mid-range position in the audience, "bring me the scriptures."
There's an awed silence from the crowd, swelling slowly into a low grumble of discussion, spreading out in all directions around the throne room.
"Scriptures," Ryuk stage whispers to her. "Cool!"
Rem grunts her assent, gesturing his line of sight back up to the raised platform of the court, where Castastrophe Englo, Royal Historian to the Throne, is muttering lowly into the King's scrunched ear. The spectacle, hushed and uneventful as it is, is drawing rapt attention from every bright and beady eye in the chamber.
"What?" the King grunts at Catastrophe. "Speak up!"
"I," Catastrophe stutters, bowing lowly, silvery hands clasped above his head imploringly, "I can get them back, I just - it's not - "
"He lost the scriptures to Calikarcha in a game of dice two centuries ago!" Gukku, a notorious truth-sayer and scoundrel of the realm, cackles up from the front of the crowd, prompting a wild chorus of, "Truth, truth!" from a number of the surrounding attendees, some of them in approbation, but the majority deprecatingly so, truth being a highly undervalued commodity among death's populous.
Shinigami do not, as a general social rule, lie, but they also place little stock in the truth. The lack of distinction between the real and unreal, facts and falsehoods, makes directly seeking and spreading either a disreputable practice. Words in this realm are not chiefly used definitionally, to communicate and to describe, but rather as an act of recreation, made routine by a millennia of practice. The state of things doesn't need to be said, it simply is.
"Truth, truth, truth!" the crowd bellows, a choir of voices varying in tone and volume, language and frequency. Someone scaly and frowning by Rem's knees whispers it silkily along with the group.
"Silence!" the King cries tinnily, but it's drowned out by a few hundred other voices. It's only Midora, rolling across the platform, lizard-like and hissing her loud laugh, that quiets the room. "Silence," the King says again, puffing himself up. "Out of my sight," he says to Catastrophe, who is already scrambling away. "Now, where is Calikarcha? Bring him to me."
There's more murmuring, the whole room rustling with the gleeful unease of a mystery. Leaning over towards her, Ryuk says, "I saw him around pretty recently. Before I went down to the human world and dropped my note. Should I say something? I wanna say something but I don't want everybody looking at me. Rem, will you say it for me?" He tugs on a fleshy strand of what Misa calls her hair. Rem winces, shrugging him off.
"No." She doesn't want to speak. She wants to listen. She wants to know what's happening, but with this bunch of clowns there's no telling how long it'll take them to get anywhere. She can't stay here for that long. The tragedy in the world she's set aside, Misa's tragedy, is nothing that she can spare her attention from for longer than strictly necessary.
She just wants to know what it is, down there, causing havoc. She wants to know what it is and what to do about it. How to save her from it. That's all.
"He's not here," Armonia Justin Beyondormason pronounces idly from his space at the right of the King's platform, sprawled lazily against the butter-glow of the marble steps, examining one of his jeweled claws and shining it with spittle from the mouth of his assistant, Lethargia, who is a lazy, singing, rabbit-eared being of the lowest caste. "Calikarcha demurred," he continues, when the chamber falls to a hush and every bit of attention is his. "He said that his bones were achey and that they needed resting."
Hanging there, the King's little hands begin to shake erratically, as if taken by a sudden storm of emotion. Hard for him to handle, as feeling is a little-experienced phenomenon among the royals of the Shinigami World. "Resting!" he shouts.
"Resting! Resting!" the crowd hoots and howls back, taken up in the same storm of emotion, if manufactured for the thrill rather than stemming from true shock and outrage.
"What shall be done about this?" the King asks, shaking with excitement, evidently egged on by the sentiments of his subjects. He looks side to side, eyes falling on Midora. "Well?"
She shrugs, grinning her alligator grin. "We could send him a strongly worded letter?"
The excitement momentarily drains from the King's figure at the prospect of such an eventuality. He hangs dejectedly. "Letter?" he asks. Notoriously old and traditionalist, the King is widely known to loath all systems of writing. He'd luckily stocked up on years before Death had become a Note and hardly has any need to write in his. It is widely disputed, in fact, whether or not he even has one.
"I think," Armonia says in his hollow and echoey voice, rising above the various suggestions of the general populous, "that we should destroy him utterly. His eyeballs would make beautiful rubies."
The King stares at him long and hard, as if insulted, but slowly his expression melds into one of joyous approval. He claps his tiny hands rhythmically, the sound echoing through the throne room. "Destruction," he pronounces. The crowd echoes him.
Rem rolls her eyes. Things never do change, no matter how many millennia go by. Maybe that's why the human species has only gotten more massive and uncontrollable, while creatures of their deathly ilk have dwindled steadily in number for a grim forever. This room, glinting and gold, used to be an infinity larger than it now is. They used to expand endlessly on in all directions.
Now, what they have here - save maybe Calikarcha, and other stragglers like him - is all there is.
Rem's not sure if she's relieved or not. Maybe dying out is the best thing that can happen to Death.
"I disagree."
The crags of white-gold in the ceiling are filled, round and echoey, with the thrum of her voice, spreading out to every being in attendance. Rem hadn't expected her words to be so loud, but there they are, out in the air and confronting her, drawing the eyes and snapping teeth of her fellow Shinigami. Next to her, Ryuk's face is wide with excitement. He gives her a thumbs-up, then ducks down and away, out of the line of general sight.
"Rem?" the King says, squinting like the old man he is, out into the throng that surrounds her. "Rem, that is your name, yes? You were on loan to the human world, correct?" She nods, but whether he sees her or not it doesn't seem to matter, for he continues on without pause. "And yet, here you are, in court where you should be, whereas Calikarcha is well within reach, and still absent. It's worthy of destruction."
Rem feels the grimy air whistling around in her throat. She bows her head. "Yes, Majesty. I do admit he is at fault, but I also believe that his punishment is a small concern in comparison to what is going on in the human world now, and that issue should take precedence in the court." She can feel the taint of interest spiking up around her, and she uses that to push forward, her voice gaining volume. "Is that not why you called this convention in the first place?"
The Shinigami titter excitedly around her. The King frowns, studies her, and then very suddenly and with his eyes bugging disproportionately to the whole of his body, says, "Yes! Yes, yes! An Abomination!" He looks around, nearly in a panic. "Catastrophe!" he yells, a rehash of his opening line. "Catastrophe Englo, the scriptures!"
"Lost, Majesty," Midora reminds him lazily, a smirking tilt to her voice.
"Lost!" the King proclaims, as he remembers.
"Lost, lost, lost!" The crowd takes up this new chant with excitable ease.
"Lost," Rem agrees, steeling herself to speak as loudly as possible, breaking through the din, "but not strictly necessary. Why read the scriptures that the Upstairsmen have written when we could simply - well, not to be indelicate - ask them directly?"
This causes complete and utter silence. Midora smiles. The King's eyes go even wider. The beings around her are sharply still, motionless and poised with shock and horror and, perhaps, even sickly pleasure. Rem thinks for a moment that she has made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Then Armonia, utterly casually, and without a glance up, says, "Bad idea."
Someone from far behind her growls back, "Good idea!"
Chaos flares up, noise and motion, a whirling tide of gleeful disagreement, the general populous of the realm energized by the prospect of having something to rant and riot about. All decisions of their species used to be decided through strange competitions: roaring the loudest, counting the fastest, killing the prettiest humans, or the ugliest, or the strangest. As their society fell slowly and soundlessly to ruin, the number of social issues needing deciding tapered off, and gambling and games became simply a matter of sport, used to fill the endless years, rather than one of lawful importance.
With the noise level as it is, the court looks to Rem to be shaping up for the first roaring competition in a number of years, voices banning together on all sides - a yes here, a no there, and a lot of undecided howling for howling's sake - all rising in a fever pitch that she hadn't quite intended -
And then it stops.
Even in the throne room, brilliant and bright as it is, the realm of the death gods is cold, but a sudden shaft of sunny warmth beams down from outside the leaky crevices at the top, heating the bloodless arrangement of unliving bodies with an intrusive glow. Up is in the air. They are the Below, and the Above is encroaching swiftly.
This is what Rem had wanted but she is suddenly petrified.
The whole chamber is silent, frozen stiff with a fearful awe. Grandeur, sick and suffocating, descends like an sheet of melting snow. The quiet is mounting, overloading the room, the pitch of emptiness ascending sharply into a whistle that doesn't register to the ears, but sends the bloodless, bony, maniacal dark in every being in attendance spinning in horror of the approaching light.
The locked doors at the end of the throne room open. The King grits his teeth. Six pairs of wings and four pairs of eyes, all interconnected, enter, laughing harmonically though they have no mouth. This is the closest Rem, and she assumes most of her fellow Shinigami, has ever been to an Upstairsman.
The Wings say, in a voice like a thousand hymnals all playing at once, "Greetings, lowly creatures! What seems to be the problem?"
Armonia Justin Beyondormason, from his seat to the right of the throne, mumbles, "Shit."
Mello is alone with upwards of a hundred camera feeds.
Watari is in the process of getting the doctor and two assistant nurses that they'd flown in earlier this evening - or rather, yesterday, as it's past midnight by now - settled into their accommodations, after their respective examinations of Light Yagami and B, and treatment of Wedy's injuries, who is now asleep in a suit on the 19th floor. The burly Frenchman is naked in an armchair by her bed, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. He still has red marks on his back from the violent, tearful, laughing sex they'd had earlier. Mello had tried not to look, but he had.
Half of the Japanese investigators are asleep in their rooms on the 15th floor, except for Matsuda and another who's name he can't remember, who sit on the sofa in the main suite, watching a late night game show on the enormous television. All stayed the night except for the chief, who had gone home to visit his family. Apparently he is Kira's father. Apparently he's upset. Go figure.
Kira has spoken once in all of the time since he'd woken up, and Mello doesn't think that he was the intended recipient for the message. He'd written it down on a notepad that Watari had given him, because those had been his instructions, but even though he'd held him up when he'd been sick and delirious, Mello still doesn't think he's going to be comfortable reciting it to L. Even in someone else's words, it's hard to directly call your life's inspiration and childhood idol an asshole.
Comparatively, B has been yelling L's name, and a lot of semi-related nonsense, for the past half an hour. Mello's had to mute him. He feels bad in part, but also somewhat self-satisfied. It's nice to have the beast corralled, even if by someone else.
L had been talking to Misa Amane, the apparent Second Kira, in her cell. Then he'd walked very close to the camera, played around a bit, and disappeared. Screen gone silver with static. Mello had thought about calling Watari about it, but had ultimately decided to wait and see if it would come back on.
It hadn't.
Instead, L emerges a few minutes later in the hallway outside Amane's room, and looks directly into the camera to say, "Watari, please have someone come down and fix the camera in Misa's room." The he continues down the hall.
Mello dials half of Watari's number before pausing, hurriedly deleting it, and dialing L's. He can hear his phone ringing in the video, but L doesn't answer it, just pulls it out, raises his eyebrows, and looks back at the camera. "Can't talk now. Busy. Call again if it's urgent."
Mello doesn't call again.
He instead watches, hunched over in Watari's large sunken roller chair, as L flits from screen to screen. Down two halls, a series of left turns, and to the third door on the right-hand side. He punches in the door-code, swipes the key card, and enters one of the two medical cells currently in use. It's not the one with Beyond Birthday in it.
Mello's eyes shift to Light's camera feed. He watches him sit up in bed, roused from a thin sleep, as L appears as a dim shape in the corner, growing quickly larger. There's only a second for Mello to process what's happening before L reaches up, covers the lens with his hands and pulls. Then the screen goes blank with static.
Mello sighs, rolling his eyes, and dials Watari, this time positive that he has something to report.
The door opens.
Light has been counting up and down from one hundred, he has been devising plans of escape and rewriting biblical scenes with new words, inserting new characters; Mary Magdalene recast as a different kind of whore, still repentant, but not half so cooperative. Something is whispering in him and he thinks he's got hunger pangs but those might just be bruised ribs. He hasn't had any visitors in this cell who weren't unresponsive nurses comes to change his bandages and adjust his IV. He'd insisted they take him off the pain meds, had struggled ceaselessly to retain his newfound coherence, and he'd won that battle, if not the whole war.
The quiet has made his mind lonely, and sent it seeking for company. He'd thought he could hear dead things whispering to him at some points, and had whispered Ryuk's name into the bright abyss above him, but gotten no response.
Then the door opens.
This is the moment he'd been waiting for in the hours since he'd woken up. He'd mostly given up the hope for an answer to his challenge, but here it is.
The door opens and L is standing there and L looks at him for only a moment, doesn't even meet his eyes, before he turns and charges to the corner where the sole camera is mounted, and swiftly tears it from the wall with a single jerk and a grunt of exertion.
He's wearing grey and green. He looks all wrong. The arch of his back has deflated into that familiar forced slump and Light wants to jerk his posture back into honesty. Light wants to hit him in the head with a metal pipe. Light wants to yell at him, tell him he's wrong, tell him how he's going to die and then show him.
L turns back around to look at him, dropping the scrap-heap of machinery on the ground next to him. It makes a loud clanging sound. Light's skin is tingling. He says L's name, but he's not sure it comes out and he's not sure he'd wanted it to, anyway.
Fucker, he thinks, as L takes heavy steps towards him, and Light puts his arms up, bracing for a hit, and is stalled more by confusion than anything else when L lurches forward, takes his face in his hands and says simply, "You're Kira," while looking deeply, probingly, into Light's eyes.
Light doesn't know what to say to that, but L doesn't seem to be looking for a response, just continues on swiftly with what sounds like a pre-planned speech:
"I know you think you're not, but you are and I don't have time to skip around the objections and the heartfelt confusion. You're Kira, the original, the ultimate, the god of the new world, et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole speech that goes with it but I can't remember it right now. With or without your memories I am going to prosecute you as Kira, so you might as well restore them, because isn't it better to go down for the cause you've staked your life on knowing what it is, than defiant with clueless innocence?"
Light blinks at him. This is not what he'd been expecting, and he's trying to form a proper rejection for L's brilliantly idiotic theory that he's somehow given up his memories, when he's shaken roughly by the the grip on his head. L does seem to want an answer this time around, so Light dubiously says, "Yes?"
The warmth of L's palms on his cheeks is suffocating. Light is mostly stuck deciding where to punch him and how many times. Should he bleed? Of course he should bleed. Light has done that and more for him. But first -
"Right, so I want you to tell me exactly what you did in the twenty four hours prior to your capture, so I can figure out what you did with the Notebook, and how I can get it back, because this whole memoryless schtick is not going to get you far with me this time." L jerks Light's face again, pulling him closer, seemingly for no other purpose than emphasis. His knees are digging into the mattress, making dips and shadows. "Did you really think that if you threw out your awareness of the situation it would diminish my resolve to have you captured and killed? Did you think you could look at me with your pretty, clueless eyes and I'd let it all go?" He shakes him again. Light coughs. His's fractured facial bones ache and maybe that's what L wants.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Light spits at him, trying to shake out of his grip, but that's mostly a lie, because he knows what's happening, knows that for whatever reason L thinks that he is not himself, but the other him, the him that is helpless and afraid of himself, afraid to be the killer that he is and has to be. He knows what L is talking about, and he says what he says because it can be interpreted as consistent with a lack of memory.
And maybe, if L already believes it, that's what he wants to go for. Just for the moment. Just to see what will happen.
L's fingers hurt. They're digging into his jaw bone, one thumb harshly jabbing his lip, and Light hates him and Light missed this.
L says, "Did you think I'd love you too much to watch you hang?" His eyes are dark and raging, mouth thin, he looks on the edge of a panic attack, a ferocious act of destruction - this is a man Light knows and knows well, a man who would kill him with his bare hands in a cell if he gave him a reason to, and a man that he, for half a moment, almost wants to.
Kill me if you can, he thinks, jerking back, out of L's grip, for a view of his internal struggle writhing itself into the external, and L follows him.
"Did you, you stupid little child?" he demands of Light.
And Light almost grins, because he's not the stupid one, not here, but instead he lets his expression cave in, eyes watering, and he grits, "Yes," and tries to turn away. Heartbroken. In love with a man and not understanding the violence that's being enacted on him. Light hasn't had occasion to put his acting skills to good use around L for a long while, but it's with tickling, gratified ecstasy that he does.
And L falls for it. Light can see it in his face, right before he dives for him again. Light tries not the laugh. Death is laughing with him, just as silent, but taking up the whole room. L is going to brutalize him and Light is going to act the beautiful martyr, and then he'll be sorry, so sorry, and he'll understand what he's done, what he is and exactly how Light is going to purify him of his sin, his horrible ugly dark dirty sickening awful awful awful -
L kisses him.
He grabs Light's face and, sharp, shy, adoring, and destroying, presses their lips together. His hands are feathery, almost petting, sifting through Light's grimy, sweat-stiff hair, caressingly, desperately, reverted to the frail beast of a man that Light has known and unknown, has carved into his insides like a brand. He doesn't, he doesn't want to - wants to punish - but he kisses him back.
Grabs him close. Pulls him on top of him, arms grappling, legs wrapping, letting L push him down, forehead resting against his. L is shaking a little. He takes off his own shirt, worn material thrown over his head and onto the floor, pressing his hard cock into Light's lap through his jeans. Foreign material, much nicer than what he usually wears. Light claws his back. Not sure if he'd left marks, so he scratches again, harder. L winces and kisses him more viciously, sadder, faster, depleting himself, pouring it all into and onto Light.
"I'm sorry," he murmurs, breathless, coughing onto Light's neck, chest. Disgusting. Light pulls him closer, hips jabbing up, desperate for the contact and hating it and loving the fact that he hates it, because this is familiar, this is true love at it's truest, it's ugliest, stupidest, most pathetic. He's going to die with this in mind. Whatever kills him he's going to blame this, even if he's 90 and hasn't seen L in years. He'll call it delayed activation of a slow-acting poison. He'll tell his grandchildren about it, and warn them all to throw themselves into their jobs, into justice, into empty passion, and not into other people, because other people suck the life out of you and eat it.
"I'm sorry," L says again, "for what you are. What you have to be." Light thinks for a mortified moment that he's crying, but realizes it's just spit. "There's no other way to be, I'm sorry, I can't undo it, I can't stop it."
"Shut up," Light tells him, but softly, confusedly, playing the dazed victim that he reverts to without knowledge of what he is. What he, in L's words, has to be.
"Okay," L says, and takes off his pants.
He struggles with pulling them down his legs, has to shift half off of Light, then falls over, and Light tries to catch him instinctively, and feels stupid, but goes with it because it's in-character, it's what this version of himself would do and so he does it. Helps L strip himself until he's completely naked, arm jerking the IV bag off of its hook, and Light curses and rips the tubes out of his arm. It hurts but the burn low in his stomach hurts more and pressing himself on top of L's body, feeling him through his clothes, is the only way to relieve it.
"I don't mean to," L says. Light doesn't know what he's saying but he doesn't stop him this time, wants to hear what he'll tell the clueless version and won't tell the real, the true, the right version - the version that L really loves, and wants, and is doing this to. "I didn't mean to," L continues, but stops, breath shiftily sharply, when Light wraps one heavy palm around his cock and squeezes.
It's been way too long. Everything's been way too separated. L's been too far away. L keeps touching him and everything keeps splintering.
"I missed you," L says, pulling his hair, and Light feels the sentiment reflected in himself, rolling around in his chest, a dull stone of emotion that he has to choke back. L pulls him against his lips, slurring his words between their mouths. "I didn't think I did, but I did."
He doesn't make any sense. Light can't even tell if L's talking about him as a whole or the him that he's pretending to be, doe-eyed and naive to the blood and glory, the things that make him what he is. He is a god and he is a prisoner and he is loved, suffocated by the hands on his body. He has drowned and been resuscitated again and again, and L is always the one standing over him as his eyes focus blearily, water-logged and gasping for breath.
He thinks errantly about the man who had beaten him bloody. The other L who is not an L so much as an debased imitation, a poor reprint on cheap canvas. The real thing is on him and under him, attaching like a parasite. His heart is going to sink out of his chest any moment now. L rubs his hips up and Light's body bows down and he's so hard, and angry, and full of desecrated grace. He humps L's hip, feels his bare cock pressing back against the seam of his pristine hospital pants, getting them dirty, wet, so good and disgusting the way it's always been. Light feels himself defiling and being defiled, and he doesn't know which he loves more, or hates more, or which emotion to assign to what.
"I - " L starts, and Light arches on top of him and comes.
L cuts off, gasping, laughing, obviously feeling it as Light presses down, hips canting dizzily, and there's a moment of shame, a pubescent instant of sexual performance-related fear, but it disappears as quickly as it had arisen, fading out with the heady afterglow. He can feel L pressing up and against him, clambering for pleasure, fingers digging into his shoulders; satisfying and petrifying, it's comfort and calamity at once. His body is taut under Light's, moving in stunted jerks, and it shouldn't be hot, shouldn't make Light slump down into him, pulling him up and as close as possible, but things are the way they are and they happen the way they happen and he is stuck with these writhing emotions, this degrading love.
He doesn't want it.
He shoves himself up and away, the euphoria of orgasm fading back into the hum-drum heartbreak of reality and he doesn't want any of this on him. The sweat is cooling on his skin and he climbs up onto his hands and knees just as L's about to come, staunching the flow of pleasure the way one would blood from a wound. L's body is mid-arch but nothing much happens. He takes heavy, separated breaths and Light looks down at him and is disgusted.
Disgust is the easiest emotion.
L opens his eyes, blinks up at him. Light stares back, swallowing dryly. The inside of his hospital pants is slick with semen and he feels dirty, used and discarded, even though he's the one who'd done both the using and the discarding. L's brow cinches with recognition and Light scrabbles off the bed, feeling sick and dizzy. His bandaged nose aches and he feels spent.
L sits up, breath still uneven, eyes glassy and the sides of his face slick with sweat. He looks feverish, defunct, like a device long left unused suddenly put back into action. It's only been a few days since they'd last seen each other, but several hundred battles seem to have come and gone in that time and here they are at the end of the war, kissing and fucking and casting each other aside, just like old times.
Similarly like old times, L sees it, him. The real him.
He's naked and he's hard, cock pink and erect. He says, "You remember everything." It's not a question.
"Of course," Light says, trying to maintain a veneer of control, but his hair's a mess and he's got medical tape all over him and he'd just come in his pants like a complete twelve-year-old and L is there and L can see everything.
"But Misa," he starts, frowning minutely at Light.
Oh. Oh, so that's where he'd gotten his bright idea. Not such a bad extrapolation really, but that's always the way of it: L is not really bad, just wrong.
"That - Misa's different," Light says. He doesn't know how to explain it concisely. He doesn't know how to explain it at all. "That just… happened. It's nothing to do with you and me." Don't talk about her with your cock hard, he thinks, same as his mind sprints through a hundred different permutations of all the conversations L could have had with her.
"I'm not talking about you and me," L says, rolling himself over his heels and up onto his knees, "I'm talking about the Kira case." His voice is condemning, even though he still looks slightly shell-shocked, as if the twists and turns of reality haven't settled in yet.
"They're not separate," Light snaps, taking steps forward without meaning to. Closer, closer.
L scoffs, turning his head sideways, as if facing away from Light will keep him a figment, transitory and untouchable. Even after they'd just been touching all over, touched so much that L's cock is still hard in front of him, the news of Light's retained identity doing nothing to decrease his arousal.
"Don't be naive," he says.
But isn't that just what he'd wanted? Light clueless, innocent, knowing not his own power nor what he truly is. Maybe because that's the version of him that paws at L's feet, begging for scraps of affection, in comparison to the real and wakeful, the Kira parts, which rip devotion from him like long and seething strips of skin.
Light smiles an ugly smile. "If I'm not mistaken, my naiveté just about made you come." He gestures lazily, as unconcernedly as he can, at L's cock, his nudity, all the things to be ashamed of.
L doesn't seem ashamed. He tilts his head, swallows. "Just about, but not quite."
Light wanted to get away, didn't want to be dirty and dirtied, but here he is again. Little white room, little else to do, and utterly nowhere else to go. He likes how it looks, L's body pale and sticky with sweat, ugly mop of hair drooping with the heat coming off of him in slick waves. He needs it but he'll never ask for it, so Light snarls, "Want to fuck me?"
L blinks at him, as if surprised, but pleasantly. "Yes," he says, almost soft and almost quiet, but not quite.
Light takes a step closer. "I want to kill you," he says. Another step.
"Yes," L repeats, slightly louder this time, and maybe he knows Light won't do it, could never do it. Just like how L's accusations and imprisonments of him inevitably end in them fucking at awkward angles in windowless rooms, Light's murderous schemes always devolve into violent sex and embarrassing fantasy. There are patterns and then there are things imprinted in one's bones.
They kiss again and Light flattens L to the bed. His cock heavy against his stomach is sleazy, gross, all the wrong things.
"You betrayed me," Light says.
"Yes." L doesn't seem able to say anything else.
Light threads his fingers through his hair, pulling at his scalp, grabbing him close and kissing him in the rudest, most inconsiderate way possible. L coughs against his mouth. It's sort of foul but it's satisfying, warm, all the things he'd had to go without recently.
"You sold me up the river," he says, slipping his hands down to unbutton his own pants. The material is sticky, nauseating, uncomfortable against his skin, but then it's off and L's scrambling to help him.
"Yes," he's saying.
Light kisses him again. It's just a peck because everything else is so tiring. His cock is soft and it's not going to get harder. Underneath him, L bucks against the curve of his ass, grinding, hands wrapping him up at an uncomfortable angle, almost a hug.
The penetration is uncomfortable, and yet he feels loved. L's face pressed to his neck, L underneath him and struggling to breathe, L, L, L, and the rest of the world a fine white noise in the background. It would have been nice to be aroused for this part, but the distance is almost better. He can see everything from here, watch and catalogue and understand the act - sex, filthy and full of longing, but still just sex.
He lifts himself, thighs trembling with the exertion, up and then down again, feeling the press and letting his whole body roll with it. It burns, not quite smooth or stretched enough, but everything burns lately. His head is throbbing and his nose, ribs, jaw, and every other place the other L who is not L had hit, ache in alternating lows and highs.
"But you couldn't stay away, could you?" Light asks, silky, testing, drawing his hands up to grasp at L's shoulders, dig curved nail dents into his neck.
L gasps a guttural, "Yes," and Light's not even sure if he'd heard the question, or if he's just saying yes to everything, doing whatever it takes to serve his penance - or at least to get off. Ideally, those two things would be inextricable.
Light jerks himself down, taking L deep, and grinning at the quiet wince of pleasure that L's breaths out against him. "You ran away and then you ran back. Took me prisoner. You love me as your prisoner, don't you?" He fucks himself on L's cock and L quivers underneath him, body strung tight, eyes wide, watching, petrified with need.
"Ye - " he starts to says, but doesn't finish.
Light is choking him.
He doesn't know when he'd decided to, but he moves and he's touching his neck and it feels like a good idea, like salvation, skin smooth under his hand, throat easily manipulable. "Shut-up," Light tells him, hard and angry, so much emotion that he'd kept somewhere else, locked away in his cell with him, and it's coming out now. "Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up."
L's hips cant up into him, back arching, sweaty and pale and losing air, giving it to Light, giving Light everything.
Light feels him hot inside, and his head bows, muscles straining and exhausted but powered by a righteous, seething rage. "How could you," he says, tripping over the words, hair in his eyes, in L's eyes, and L in Light and Light on him, telling him, telling him, "how could you do that to me? You left me, you stupid stupid stupid - "
L makes a muted, hoarse sound, and comes. It's hot, flooding, filling Light and making feel more like the owned than the owner - here in his building, in his cell, with his wires and his bandages and his medicine, his body all around him and in him, the dominating force of this moment and all moments. L comes inside of him and Light, still not aroused but body flushed and thrumming with something else, says, "You stupid fucking asshole," and collapses on top of him.
This is all fine, this is routine; love and hate and the boiling point between them where everything gets swirled up sickly and devastating. Light will take his hands off of L's neck and L will wipe his brow and touch his hair and they will lay, trying to pick up the scattered bits and pieces of their egos, not looking one another in the eye but consumed by solidarity. L will get them coffee and something to eat and they will talk about things - Misa and the man who isn't L, the who's and the how's and mostly the why's. They will insult each other and they will worship each other and it will be fine, or as fine as it's ever been. It will just be another day in the life.
Or it would be, except before any of that can happen, the power goes out and somebody, shrill and distant but far-reaching, screams.
The King bows and the entire court bows with him.
Rem ducks her head down, pulling Ryuk with her, who seems too engaged in the goings-on to be paying any mind to appropriate social behavior. She doesn't like him too well, but she'd rather not see him turned to a fine white dust before her eyes, if only for convenience's sake, and Upstairsmen, she's heard, can do that sort of thing at their leisure.
"Rise!" the Wings order, voice screeching but rhythmic, and emanating from outwards, the very highest depths of the sky, rather than the Wings themselves. They glide over top of the crowd of coyly lifting heads, parting the mass to land before where the King hangs atop his raised platform. "The backs of your necks are unfit to be looked upon by the realm above!"
The King blinks, unsurely, sliding his eyes sidelong to Armonia, who is hunched with his chin in his hand and gives nothing but a shrug in response.
"Quite," The King says, almost awkwardly.
In the old retellings of retellings of the gospel of the underworld, the relationship between the Upstairsmen and the lower beings - once referred to as the Downstairsmen, but that term has by now faded out of use - was once one of great violence and terrible destruction. A war waged between the light and the dark, gods and ungodly beings, pretenders to thrones and weapons forged in the cold crush of infinities, biblical glory and ruin and all of that theatrical nonsense.
The truth has always been more subdued: a polite contention, both sides as necessary to the governance of the universe as the other, but both resentful of one another. Sometimes the darkness holds the power, gliding its way through the upper ranks and grinning smugly with sharp teeth, but for the last few millennia, the light has been the reigning authority.
Which means, of course, that when the Upstairsmen pass through, they do it with the condescension and self-importance of royals among peasants, and the Shinigami have little choice but bow in subordination, until such time as the scales tip once more and they have their turn with regality. But that time is not now, and to younger breeds of death god, the Upstairsmen are a mighty and terrifying force, never to be questioned, always to be feared.
Armonia Justin Beyondormason is not one of such a class. He is very old and unendingly impatient with nearly all beings, whether located upstairs or downstairs or in the human world, and so it is he and not the King - who is bound by the mannered dictates of his sovereignty - who finally asks, "To what, Temelechus, do we owe this fine and wondrous pleasure?"
He speaks very flatly, pointedly doesn't mean a word that he says, but his saying it is enough to spare him outright wrath.
The Wings fan out, whipping the stagnant air of the throne room into thin currents, as if turning to face Armonia. They say, "To the utter stupidity and thoughtlessness of one of your number! A great catastrophe has been caused on earth by this fool in his quest for amusement, and I have been sent in order to oversee the restoration of balance!"
"Hmm," Armonia says, uninvestedly.
Rem leans over and whispers as quietly as she can to Ryuk, "Is it talking about you?"
Ryuk shrugs, but he's grinning fanatically. "Don't know, but gee, that'd be cool, wouldn't it? I'd be famous!"
Rem blinks at him. "You'd be immolated from the inside out."
"Well, yeah," he says, "but famous."
She can barely find it in herself to be surprised by his indifference to the threat of destruction. Ryuk is too young to understand the madness and desecration that the Upstairsmen, in all their supposed holiness, are capable of.
"An Abomination has been created and released to terrorize the earth below, and this cannot be tolerated!" Temelechus pronounces.
"Absolutely not," The King agrees, enthusiastically, cluelessly. The gathered Shinigami population nods along to varying degrees, or else just sits back observing with tittering excitement, livened up by the prospect of trouble to view and enjoy.
Armonia admires his glittering nails once more, demurring, and so it is left to, if anyone, the common folk to ask the question that is likely on the minds of most. Slowly and stuntedly, Midora raises her hand, stretching it to its highest reach and then whipping it around for attention, until finally the Wings turn slightly, facing her as well as they can do without a body.
"Yes?" Temelechus prompts.
Midora rolls into a sitting position, clearing her throat. "Well, I don't know about anybody else, but would one of you big-wigs like to clear up for me what exactly an Abomination is?" She scratches her claws idly against the skin of her head. "If it's not, you know, too much trouble."
The King's eyes go wide, as if that were very much the wrong thing to say, but Armonia chuckles quietly to himself and Rem appreciates Midora's forthrightness. Her fellows seems to share this opinion, because confusion is echoed, shared like a meal among them, and the growing howls and demands for answers - sourceless and untraceable, but most certainly present - force Temelechus to sigh heavily and explain.
"It is a disservice to your kind that you do not already know this, but such can only be blamed on poor rule," it says, swishing vaguely in the King's direction. "Alas, it is a lesson all must come to learn, so as not to repeat the mistakes that have been made." It turns, wingspan fanning out, its general front pointed toward the bulk of the crowd. "An Abomination is, like the Nephelim that comes from the intermixing of the creatures from above and the earth, created when a creature from below breeds with a mortal! One among your number has betrayed your kind, rejecting the ancient dictates of your world, and mated with a human being! And now the offspring of this unholy coupling is reeking havoc across the earth!"
Midora says, "Oh," very quietly, eyes wide, and Rem finally understands what has been happening down in Tokyo.
tbc.
end notes: it is a law of death note related things that nothing can ever be good (or even halfway good) for more than half a second so inevitably tragedy has to strike. also there's a plot that's got to happen i guess. don't ask me i just work her. thank you for reading! sorry if the prose was so/so this time around i had some trouble with this chapter but then i feel like that about every chapter it's an enduring thing. either way i hope you guys enjoyed it. as you might have noticed i've gotten awful at replying to reviews but i really do appreciate every single one so much you have no idea.
see you next time!
