OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD
Why you all so happy?
Because our lives suck.
-It Sucks to be Me, Avenue Q
"You know who I hate?" No one answered Nathanial, but he was used to that. Hell, he spent most of his time talking to a radio named Humphrey (or was it Humbert?), and when he didn't talk to the radio he talked to corpses whose money he had conveniently swiped.
"I hate L. I hate him. Hate. Double hate. Triple hate. LOATHE!"
This got their attention. He was actually somewhat shocked by this because when he told Humperdink, the radio hadn't even bothered to make a bloop of approval. Naomi actually managed to look up from the spoon she had been using to examine the ominous space of air behind her. Matsuda's jaw dropped (lower than it already had been: it had been on the table before; now it was on the floor). Mogi managed a blink. Or maybe that was just the breeze—but Nathanial swore he had moved.
Nathanial looked around to make sure Light Yagami wasn't in hearing distance, or at least wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention. Coast was clear; Captain-san looked like a coma victim.
"We have orders."
This time Matsuda fell off his chair in horror, Marcus took a swig of the nearest hand sanitizer (they had ran out of all other forms of alcohol), Naomi dropped her spoon, and Mogi blinked once again. Mogi blinked twice.
"Apparently Headquarters has heard of our success…"
"But what have we been doing?" asked Matsuda, struggling to get back into some sort of sitting position after throwing himself so gracelessly onto the floor.
"And they want us to break into the Kira Castle, bust out L, and kill people or something. But the bust out L is the important bit."
Before Nat really hadn't minded L, but now, oh now, the jerk was going to pay. He ruined the strike. Now they had to go back to doing nothing if they wanted to keep striking. There was no way he would ever go back to having Light glare down his neck for lack of victims.
"What about the local soldiers? I mean, weren't we not even supposed to be stationed here?" Matsuda asked again, once more believing that logic would somehow solve his problems and not kill him off in a suicide attempt.
"Fuck L." Matt ground his cigarette into the dirt beneath his heel. He spit on top of it as if to reaffirm the crude statement.
"I thought he was dead," muttered the dark-haired woman softly, not appearing to look at any of them and simply watching the walls of the tent with a blank-eyed expression that spoke of death and the dying.
"Well, he's not. Or perhaps he is. No one cares. Or at least, no one sane cares anymore."
"I say fuck him. Who the hell cares, anyway? He's a goddamn bastard who deserves to rot in hell, and well, Kira's fucking prison is close enough." Matt crossed his arms in defiance, his fourteen-year-old (fifteen-year-old? How long had they even been out here?) pride tingling behind the safety blanket of his mask.
The room was enveloped by silence as they all thought back on what they knew of the detective and what they thought would be worth saving. In the end all that was left of their musings were the words of the raven's reflection locked upside down within the spoon.
"You humans. Sometimes you sound just like Shinigami."
The Death God cackled.
"So I guess he's not dead, then. It's been a long time, hasn't it? Since we've heard anything, I mean. After Kira—well, he kind of disappeared too…" Matsuda mused, leaning back against his arms and staring at Mogi.
The two sat outside, staring at the red sky and wandering back through memories to the days when the police system was competent. Mogi said nothing in response, preferring to let Matsuda reach the conclusions for him.
"I guess we all just assumed that Kira got him. It seemed so obvious. Everyone else is dead—why should he have lived? It was a miracle you and I got out, but then again I guess we didn't; we'll have to see. Later. When this is all over."
When this is all over. When we're all dead. When it's our turn for our bodies to litter the ground. When Kira finds us.
"I always thought he died first, you know. I just assumed—no, not assumed. I hoped he died first. After all, I think of all of us he was the one who deserved it the most."
After all, in the end it was all L's fault.
"Fuck L." Matt kicked at the earth beneath his feet, finally alone with his own thoughts. Only the shadow of his captain lingered in the tent. But Light Yagami wasn't important—not like that bastard L, not like Mello and Near.
Not like everyone who had abandoned him. Goddammit, why did it keep hurting? L should have been dead. Hell, Matt had prayed the bastard was dead. Where most people asked for blessings or for prosperity, Matt had asked for L's death. He had assumed God had been listening that time. After all, L wasn't so fucking different from the rest of them.
"It's not fair, it's not fucking fair!" Matt let out a cry of outrage before collapsing onto the ground. Life wasn't fair, but this was beyond unfairness.
It should have been him. Anyone could see Near was a fucking robot. And Mello, ha, Mello. Mello was a whore, always had been—he relied too much on his goddamn emotions and look where it got him. Probably dead. After all, Matt had been praying for his death as well.
He was the best option. He was the most stable—maybe not the smartest, maybe not the cleverest, but that had never mattered. He was supposed to win. He was supposed to beat both of them.
Of course he had known, later, when they began to be separated off, that he wasn't in the running anymore. And that was fine for a while, because Mello was second too and second wasn't so fucking different from third. It was okay because L was wrong, and he'd pay for it because he was too fucking stupid to think.
But now it didn't matter, and Mello, that bastard, had left him.
"It should have been me. They didn't deserve it. No, they fucking deserve each other. All three of them, L, Mello, Near! They all should have a fucking love fest together." He looked at the calluses on his hands. He worked so hard, and for what? What good had it done him? They left him, they both fucking left him.
He had always thought, he had always assumed…
(That's the problem; you can't fucking assume anything.)
It didn't matter if they were dead or alive, it didn't matter if God didn't believe in answering prayers, it never fucking mattered.
"Third. Always third in the running, third to the title, third to L. And look where it got us." He was laughing now, because it was fucking hilarious, what it all came to.
Nothing mattered because everyone was dead or as good as dead; they had all died the day they looked at him and decided that he wasn't good enough. Not good enough for their little club of achievers, their do-gooders, their nobodies, their corpses. Because that's all they were now, just some fucking corpses.
"Goddammit! It should have been me, I should have been L…"
And now here he was, trying to find them so that he could spit in their faces, spit on their graves. (But he hadn't found them. Instead he found Yagami, Yagami with eyes far colder than the glare of L's computer screen, colder than the feeling of betrayal as Mello turned from him at those orphanage gates…)
He'd show them, he'd show all of them. It didn't matter if they were dead or alive, if L was a corpse or corpse-bound. It didn't matter.
(When Matt stood to leave the tent he failed to notice the golden eyes that watched the anger in his steps and the betrayal etched on his fragile heart.)
Naomi gripped the spoon in her trembling fingers, rising to leave the suffocating tent, just like everyone else. Everyone who knew the name was more than just a letter, everyone who had been touched by his far-reaching shadow. They all longed to leave, to get out, to find a place to think.
Naomi walked past Matt's bitter cursing, past the silence of Mogi and Matsuda, past the blank, scarred face of Light Yagami. When it was just her and the horizon she stopped, looking past the sky for the freshly dead that they had been too lazy to bury. The shinigami floated behind her, jack-o-lantern grin on its pale face.
The realization came with the spoon she had dropped on the ground, back in the tent when all the mismatched dots had connected into a constellation. "It's like the spoon."
(The spoon dug into her hands, marking the lines where it had touched…)
"Eh?" The god of death twisted behind her, dropping down so it might rest its feet on the ground.
"Everything's just a reflection in the spoon." She looked over toward the Shinigami, whose grinning expression hinted at misunderstanding but eyes said something far darker than stupidity. Her death was a being with raven's feathers and a heart dangling from its ear.
"It's twisted and warped into a deformity of light, flipped upside down until we barely recognize what might have been, the truth of that fragile reflection." Her smile was bitter and she felt for just a moment that perhaps she understood the being that was staring back at her, a black notebook hanging delicately at its side.
"Like L. We all thought he was dead because that was what the reflection told us. We all saw his corpse in our heads and we thought, good, at least he got what he deserved. But we never thought to turn around and look at the L sitting perfectly healthy at our feet—because he's always been there. We just never bothered to look."
She raised the spoon to her face, watching as the gray eyes were flipped and stretched, blinking back at her slowly. The smile was gone from her face.
"It's all just a twisted, warped, upside-down reflection. That's all."
The dark, cracked fingers of the Shinigami reached down to pluck the spoon from her fingers. He brought it up to his ever-smiling face. "Huh. I look the same." It cocked its head to the side, and the heart dangling at his ear twitched ever so slightly.
"Here, come look." It motioned for her to stand behind him, to see the perfect reflection within the bent silver. "You see? Just the same."
"Just the same," she repeated softly, unaware of the numbers that hovered above her head, ticking away into oblivion.
Two things. Firstly, SMORS IS FINISHED. WOOHOO. Now it's just a matter of… editing, rewriting, and posting the next 20k words.
Secondly. We recently had a semi-might-have-been-a-flame-but-really-wasn't review. We're going to count it as a flame anyway and use it as an excuse to declare a flame competition. The winner gets a complimentary piece of… self-produced fanart….? And the glory of knowing that they are more brutal and bloodthirsty than everyone else. It's the sentiments that count!
For example:
"Dear Author,
This story, while containing an interesting premise, is botched to the point that there is very little purpose in reading past the first eleven chapters of pure hell. Your summary is vague and conveys none of the actual details of the plot. After reading twenty chapters, I've come to realize that this is because there is no great overarching plot—there is, rather, madness. You introduce your story with an Evanescence quote (WHY?) and proceed to give the reader a vague scene that doesn't even seem to connect to any other portion of the story. You then allow Light Yagami to whine in first person for a good ten chapters of unnecessary drama. For nearly twelve chapters, the reader is left yawning over the injustices of Light Yagami's petty life. Misa is not that dull: I don't care how much subjective narration there might be. I feel as if you began this and then halfway through decided to abandon your original plot, stayed up till four a.m. rewriting the story halfway through, and then became existentialist—all without understanding Sartre in the slightest.
Your imagery is ridiculous (Sayu is eaten by a dragon. Let me repeat. Eaten. by. a dragon.) and your dialogue is often over the top and serves no great purpose. I find myself distantly amused by the melodrama with which you present your argument, an argument supporting general chaos and the purposeless of the universe. The holes you attempt to dig yourself out of also make me giggle. By the present chapters the reader is left so confused and bewildered from the senselessness of the prior chapters that no one has any idea what is going on—and not in a way that can be enjoyed, or that at least serves some greater purpose.
What potential your universe might have held has been ripped into shreds by your over-emphasis on characters who don't matter (Mello and Near—does anyone give a damn?) and your brief introduction and dismissal of characters who were said to be integral (L disappeared after chapter five… Is he back yet?). I only am left with the feeling of vague disappointment that someone like Silver Pard didn't have this idea first."
ONE TWO THREE FOUR I DECLARE A FLAME WAR