Chapter Fourteen:

CONTENT WARNING: Discussions about suicide?

Erin flinched awake with a jolt before she had even really drifted off.

It was a familiar kind of response, her body convinced that it wasn't safe enough for her to be vulnerable and off guard, her mind too turbulent to give up on consciousness. She was deeply exhausted, having barely slept the night before. What sleep she had managed had been summarily ruined. There was a burning in the back of her throat that didn't bode well—the last thing she needed was to fall sick, but it was actually more of a surprise that she hadn't already.

It was mid evening, and a brilliant orange light that leaned closer to an eerie red due to the smog of the city washed her room in dull, bloody tones. She'd been trying to nap for the better part of the afternoon, and amidst a haze of weariness the hours had flowed by like mud, leaving her disoriented and groggy.

She groaned and lifted an aching arm to her forehead. She might have been running a mild fever.

For a moment she considered curling back up amidst the duvet, but her mouth felt like sand and her lips crackly as paper. She really needed some water, and she knew that she probably should eat something too, though the sandwiches in her fridge held no appeal to her at the moment and her stomach twisted at the thought. Still, she forced herself up and stumbled across the room to collect her cup.

The water tasted faintly metallic and was not nearly as cold as she might have liked, but she sipped at it all the same, and stared at the inky shadow that stretched from her feet across the room and up the door like it wanted to escape from this place as much as she did. She was learning though, that there were some things which could not be run from and trying only brought you back round to them more tired than when you had first left. And usually, the absence only ended up making things worse.

Eventually there was no more water to drink, but she could not find it in her to move and just stood there, bathed in the vermillion light as it slowly shifted into a deep violet.

Then she heard the buzz that indicated L wanted to talk, and it was like the string of a kite, slowly bringing her back in to Earth.

"We cannot locate Naomi Misora. She was at the police station early yesterday morning and left with Light Yagami. However, her trail goes cold shortly afterwards. Do you have information on where she went so that we can retrieve the body?"

Erin's eyes slid closed. "No. He specified that she not be found. It… only came up in passing afterwards."

There was no crackle of static implying he had any intention of continuing the conversation.

"Can I have my sleeping pills?" She asked, half expecting the request to be to an audience of none but herself.

"Tomorrow," L replied to her surprise. "We will have the prescription filled for you so it's ready by tomorrow."

She wanted to ask what had happened to the freshly stocked one she'd had on her when she crossed over. She wondered if she could trust the medication that they'd provide her. She wondered if she, of all people, had any right to think about trust.

With a sigh she moved to the chair in the room and slumped into it. "Will you arrest him?"

"There is not enough evidence. At this time our own video surveillance of him would serve as an alibi. There's nothing that proves he is Kira."

"What about the Death Note? Couldn't you go get it?" She pressed her arm over eyes as she asked, already knowing why that wouldn't necessarily work. They would have to prove the Death Notes ability, for one thing. And for another Light could deny it to hell in back without any other further evidence. "Shit. You just have to trap him enough that it convinces Ryuk he's lost. They made a deal: If Light ever gets caught and it looks like there's no way out, Ryuk will take his life."

"How do you recall him losing?" L asked, and it caught her attention how he didn't ask whether Kira had lost or not. Honestly, looking back on the information she remembered giving L, it wouldn't be surprising if he thought Kira had ended up winning. Then again, perhaps he was not willing to entertain the thought. Or perhaps he'd had the thought, but he wanted her to deny it.

"Oh. That's…" right. How had that whole fiasco gone again? It'd had so many elements and moving parts, and both Matt and Mello had died. And Matsuda had played on honestly huge roll in the moment and also Aizawa, and there'd been that other Kira wannabe, and Near. Something about replacing the Death note with fakes? "Honestly it was very chaotic. There was a lot of passing around of Death Notes, and pages from the Death notes which makes the previous user forget ever having had anything to do with the Death Note… Oh! At one point you almost had him cornered, but he had faked one of the Death Note rules being that if a user didn't write in the Death Note for a certain period of time, they too would die. And you decided to test that rule which was what prompted you to—"

"Die."

"Be killed, yes. You would have finally figured out the truth beyond a shadow of a doubt. Um. Yeah. Anyway…" And she grimaced because there was no way she could say this without making herself seem like an even greater risk factor to L. But she spoke anyway, the words messy and probably near incoherent to anyone but L who specialized in sifting through vast amounts of information. "So, your successors found out. It was a lot. And. Um. Not all of them survived. But they managed to lure Light and the current acting Kira out and they'd swapped out the Death Notes for fakes, so when Kira tried to write down the names, nothing happened. But that was proof enough, and then Light confessed. Not gracefully might I add. Like barking dog. And then Ryuk killed him while he tried to run away… If I remember correctly, Light was gloating while thinking they were all going to die. Yeah. When I said ego was a theme, I meant it."

She rolled her eyes flippantly to hide how nervous she was about dropping yet another bomb on L.

The sound of the speaker cutting in was particularly damning. "I see."

She tried to scour the modulated tones for emotion. Did she hear fear? Concern? Grief? Was he proud to hear that his successors had managed to fulfill his dying mission? Or did he see that as a matter of course, as logical as the sun rising with the dawn? Then again, perhaps there was some part of him that felt bitter for having lost, that childish desire to win he had spoken of making him reluctant to admit his defeat and that someone else had surpassed him.

No. No that was unlikely. In the end, justice had won. The only thing he might have felt bitter about was how long it took, and how much damage Kira had done in the meantime.

She kneaded at her forehead and stared into the darkness of her room, at the faint glow of the clock on the bedside table. She thought about all the other things that she knew that L probably would have preferred she didn't. How many different ways could she have just torn everything out from under him? Not that she would have wanted to. Erin might have been negligent, selfish, irresponsible, and a massive hypocrite but she liked to think she wasn't strictly cruel. Then again, she wondered if L saw it that way. Did he think her silence had been cruel of her? No. No, that would imply that he had taken her actions personally, and he wasn't that much of a fool. None of what she had done had been personal. It was just her being incapable of handling anything that even remotely spoke of burden.

As usual.

She wondered if she could be given some leeway on account of being told by an extra-dimensional death god that she was dead.

"I swear, if I ever see Light, I might try beating the shit out of him." Hypothetically. She was under absolutely no illusions about whether she would ever be getting out of this room. Well. Actually, she probably would be on account of L moving around a lot. To that point she wondered if the case would get wrapped up before L ever opened the investigation headquarters. Not that it would matter. Until she died, L was definitely not going to let her within eyesight of anyone other than maybe Watari. From his standpoint there was far too much at stake to gamble on her ability to keep things secret.

Case in point, she had crumpled for him in a matter of days.

"I would not recommend that," L returned, and she was startled that he was even entertaining her idle joke. "I can only foresee that ending poorly for you given your physical capabilities versus Light Yagami's. Furthermore, that would cause him, a suspected serial killer to have enmity for you. It is never wise to draw the ire of volatile individuals."

Well, since they were humoring an impossible reality anyway… "ha! What's he gonna do? Kill me? I'm already dead."

"You have made statements to that effect several times but have also implied that you are looking to die. That you will not be allowed to pass on until you have stopped Kira. However, your medical reports show no anomalies."

There he went again, she thought with amusement, asking questions without actually asking them. Prompting her into speaking. But she had already told him pretty much everything she knew—which was not a lot. She could see why he was dissatisfied with the amount of detail he had been provided. "Yeah. Best as I understand they had to grab someone just as their life span ran out, because they can't mess with living people so much… unless it to take their life span. And now I'm kind of suspended on zero, but not actually dead until it gets filed. I'm not too sure, Ilmort's… prone to weird ranting." She turned her words over in her head, wondering what exactly it was that L was trying to dig up. Chances were there was nothing specific, but he was seeking out as many tools as he could so he could be better equipped to deal with any eventuality that might come up.

And in what manner did your 'life span' run out?"

What a question. Honestly, Erin had kind of assumed he would have been able to piece that together just based on her arrival here. Also, it seemed strange that it would be an important detail to him. Again, maybe he was just trying to cover all his bases. Maybe she was a fool for trying to figure out how L's mind worked to begin with. Well, actually to that point she could see how he might find it suspicious if she had perished of a heart attack. That would have made her pretty damn suspicious too. "Car accident, best I can remember" she informed, shrugging awkwardly, trying not to think too deeply on the memory.

There wasn't actually much to remember but it had been very painful and waking up in the hospital, the next immediate memory, had not been any better.

"You claimed earlier that you wanted to die. Was that true at the time as well?" L asked bluntly.

Erin's eyes snapped open, having drifted shut during the conversation as she had focused. She realized that she spent an unfortunate amount of time while talking to him trying to picture his face and gestures, which was easier when her eyes were shut. It was that or she was staring very pointedly at the place where his voice originated from in order to convey her own sentiments. But now she was too surprised to think about any of that. Amused too, because she had spent some time recently wondering whether he was suicidal, but now their positions were flipped. "Ugh. No."

Boy. Not a conversation she wanted to have with him. Ever. Not really a conversation she wanted to be having at all, really. She sat forward in her seat, discomfort tightening across her shoulders, and struggled to bite back the need to explain herself to him. The silence was loud and filled with that familiar expectancy, as if he was waiting for her to continue. Except that only made her feel more on edge, defensive like a cornered cat.

"What about you?" She blurted, and then her face lit on fire because nope. Nope. That was crossing the line. They were not that close, and he was only asking her because it was pertinent to the case. But she had no business prying into his brain, none at all, and also: She had already decided that was stupid. Stupid and super freaking not relevant and so, so very not her business. "Don't answer that," she said immediately. "Pretend I did not say anything. Seriously. I'm still grappling with this being technically real and all the stuff fans theorized about you is based on, like a super limited view of you and our own imaginations. It's really weird. But probably even weirder for you, I bet. Especially someone like you who lives and breathes on secrecy and anonymity."

Wow, if she hadn't already wanted to die before, she sure as heck did now. This was so messed up. Also, she thought with an emotional clarity that kind of surprised her: not cool. If he was going through some stuff, she should have respected that, and not launched it at him because she was feeling thrown off and was lashing out. It wasn't even the kind of thing that was okay to bring up out of curiosity.

"Hoo. Sorry. Seriously." The grimace that laced its way over her lips was growing to be an inordinately familiar expression.

"Was there something that this other version of me had done which gave that impression?" L inquired after a moment, and once again he shocked her with the distance with which he could discuss this kind of thing. As if he had removed himself entirely from the equation and was simply observing a puzzle that he needed to solve.

If she went and filled the bathtub and tried to drown herself in it would that save her from this conversation? At the very least she wouldn't have to hear his voice. That reminded her: Ilmort had said that she was immune to the Death Note, but did that mean she was immortal? Could she die? She wasn't so sure she wanted to find out, given how her first death had gone. She really didn't want to go through that kind of feeling again. But she continued to wonder.

"So. Um. Not specifically." She started, haltingly. "Outside of your lifestyle choices, I think the melancholy when you decided to test the Death Note was maybe what made people think that. Um. There are a lot of discussions about whether you knew at that point that you'd been backed into a corner, and I mean, haha, I can tell you from personal experience that they aren't kidding when they talk about the five stages of grief when you find out you're gonna die. Ugh. I think mostly a lot of people kind of, um, turned you into a bit of a martyr. People are weirdly obsessed with tragedies. Just look at Shakespeare. I guess. That could also be conjecture, I only heard that from a friend. Also, hey, I'm not a shrink. Super not. So I can't really tell you. I mean, there were a lot of moments where you seemed pretty happy? I dunno. I don't know how to look for that kind of thing in a way that is actually useful or legitimate. I mean. You're always isolated to some extent. Ugh, as far as I can tell your usual interests involve investigations and sweets. So. That didn't change. Um. Sorry. Listen Um."

Wow. She'd ended up speaking faster and faster and saying the first thing that came to mind because embarrassment and discomfort had chased all logical thought from her head. Mostly she was deeply bemused because amidst her rambling she had realized that he was trying to profile the fictional version of him. Or, well, the version of him that she knew. Maybe he was trying to use her impression of what she thought she knew of him to further figure her out.

"Look, remember how we said my information was a limited resource? I mean, it's also filtered through a pretty specific lens, and that gets kind of warped too, you know? So. I dunno. Just forget it." She considered telling him what had made her think that in the first place, when she'd been locked up in the cell; about how she'd been thinking of how reckless his investigation methods had been, and how self-destructive he had looked to her. She mulled it over for a long moment, taking the space between her rambling and L's response to parse whether she had any business criticizing his investigation methods.

When he did reply she was only half listening, still trying to decide. "I am aware of how human bias tends to affect the quality of their understanding of the world around them. However, I would find it useful to analyze this other representation of me. If I can determine the difference between what you believe was the future course of events, and what is happening it will be easier to subvert a negative outcome."

"That's a lot to cover," She drawled into the darkness of the room. "So. I just thought it was always a really dangerous gamble that you revealed yourself to Light. I wish I could recite how you explained your choice, but I'm so not that good. You can probably theorize about your motivation better than any attempt I could make. It's just. My dude, you were going to university with him. And you knew! You knew there was a second Kira walking around who he was somehow communicating with and that this one didn't need a name to kill. Sure, you did manage to capture Misa because of that, but like…." She thought then something very mysterious and foreign to her.

L had considered Light his equal, and even a friend. He'd spent weeks observing this brilliant kid with a strong sense of justice who very well could have been his perfect rival. Maybe L had been lonely. Maybe he had been drawn in, like a moth to a flame. For all she thought of him as a shark, as a dragon, as being perpetually inscrutable and removed, he was still human. Fallible. Maybe he had done it because he just couldn't resist the base urge to be with others.

No man is an island, was it?

She did chance a glance in the direction the voice came from then sad, and tired and thinking about how he had lost Naomi Misora, who she recalled he had worked with before, who had been terribly bright and competent and who he had respected. She thought of Beyond Birthday and she thought of A. And then Erin felt something akin to sympathy.

"Hm. I had considered that would be a strategy I could employ in the future if necessary. I agree it is eminently risky, but it would be just as risky for Kira to kill me following that. If he, did it would result in a similar situation as you proclaimed my successors staged. Of course, based on what you have said, Kira manipulated the situation in a way that removed this counter measure. It is unfortunate you do not have a more effective recollection of events."

Yeah, she agreed, even if it was kind of rude of him to say. She almost snapped back that well maybe he should learn how to make better friends. It wasn't always about people who you could play chess with and not be one hundred percent certain of whether you would win. Sometimes it was about people you could trust not to murder you. The scoff slipped out involuntarily. "If you start comparing me to an insect, I'm getting violent. 'Back up' or no."

"That would be inadvisable," He retorted immediately.

She rolled her eyes. She didn't need him to tell her that. She was only joking anyway… she paused and squinted at the voice suspiciously. In the end she opted to not say anything because this whole conversation had been weird, and she rather did not want to dwell on it too long.

"Even if my information is trash, I am trying to be helpful. So, if I asked for something besides a sandwich to eat, how likely are you to accuse me of a maniacal plot to set this entire place on fire and expose your location to the public?" When in need of a conversation change, she found being dramatically facetious was the least awkward way to go about it.

Again, her question was met by a beat of silence, and then the static trickled through the air. "Watari asked if you have any preferences."

If Erin smiled, well that was between her and the navy shadows sitting with her in the quiet of her room. "Bless him. Um. I'd kill—not literally—for some chicken. And gravy. Anything warm. Soup would be fine too. Doesn't matter what type. Wait! Wait, I'm in literal Japan, would it be okay to ask for ramen?" oh she had so many options, and honestly, she really did want something warm. She wanted comfort food, and she wanted to try new and exciting things because she didn't have a lot of time left.

She blinked back the tears beading in her eyes, but it wasn't too difficult. "I'm not picky. Also. Um. Thank him for the tea for me, would you?" Whatever she might have felt towards L, complicated and messy though it was, and even if Watari did also hold equal responsibility for the fact that she was being emotionally manipulated and detained, she did feel some form of gratitude towards the older gentleman.

It was probably not a healthy thing to feel. After all, she could tell that it was a clever tactic: the whole good cop bad cop cliché. On one hand you had the computerized voice of L haranguing her at every turn. It was natural human psychology to perceive him as strange, alien. Without a face, without body language, or even a proper voice it was hard to form an empathetic bond. This was ruined by the fact that she did have a face and a voice for him, and had messy preconceived notions of who he was, but the theory remained. Contrast that to Watari who, admittedly, had only presented himself in his foreboding disguise, but was also a polite grandfatherly type that had given her tea and food on several separate occasions and was also the only actual human contact she had been exposed to in several days, it was no wonder she'd have more congenial feelings towards him.

Not one for impractical or meaningless conversations, L came back with something completely off topic. "We were discussing organizing a meeting between myself and a Shinigami. You said it would not be possible, but it would be invaluable to the investigation."

"Yeah, I have to agree." With some distance she could see how deeply useful that would. No, she still had no way to get in contact with Ilmort… but wait. "Oh! So, I said I couldn't call them here, but there might be a way that's faster than waiting for it to show up. No guarantees or anything because, in case you couldn't tell, I'm an entire disaster. But last night before the whole… thing. Um. I had pulled myself into the Shinigami realm, in my sleep. I think I told you about that?"

"You did. And you mean to say that you want to try to do so again."

"I can give it a go?"

"That's a reasonable avenue. However, if there is something which is opposed to you then there is a chance that they will be able to interact with you again. There is some danger to you if this entity can affect you outside of the Shinigami realm."

Ah. That was not something which the young woman had thought of. She should have. That should have been her primary concern. How had she ended up coughing up the corpse of a butterfly? "That kind of might make it even more important for me to get in contact with Ilmort. Even if they don't know what's going on, they will probably want to know. And they could always ask their… Superior? The king guy. It said it was going to undo my 'crime' which directly goes against their objective."

Where she found this resolve she did not know. Perhaps it was because she had seen the cost of her hesitance.

"Do you know how to go back to the Shinigami realm? Is it something you are confident that you can control?"

"Absolutely not. But if I'm going to be waiting around, then I might as well give it a shot, right?"

People always talked about how brushes with death changed people. She wondered how this impossible interlude, this unnatural gap between her life and her death would alter her. No one would know, besides her. In her world she was already gone, with no way back, and she had only ever been an anomalous Frankenstein's monster in this world. It was like there were two separate versions of her, and even though they were the same person, by all accounts they did not align. Not really. Not in any natural way.

And the chasm between the two would only widen as this world made her into a thing that fit within its borders.

A less dramatic individual would have argued that she was merely adapting, as humans do. That it was natural. She would have told them to talk to her after getting expelled from their own dimension by pain of death.

"It would be beneficial if you shared the contents of your dreams for now. I understand keeping written records is a tool people often employ. I'll have Watari deliver you a notepad."

Where did he find the time to think up this farce amidst investigating Kira? It'd not even been a day. "You want me to share a dream diary with you?" She clarified, trying to stem the mounting horror.

"No. That implies we would both be participating. I want you to report on your dreams so I can better understand your subconscious and unconscious mental activity—these entities you claim to be in contact with."

There he went again, slipping in an idle reminder that he did not fully believe her, but was studying her situation like she was mouse in a maze. It was irritating and made her want to grab Ilmort and shove his whole wriggling, foul, and deeply upsetting visage in L's face just to watch the detective freak out. Unfortunately, she doubted she'd even get that from him now, not when she was giving him plenty of warning. He'd already seen the impossible butterfly after all.

And as far as her dreams went. Well. He was just going to live with the fact that she was not going to be open about everything. Sure, she was willing to report on anything relating to the Shinigami and the Butterfly Thing. Heck, it wouldn't even be that bad reporting on the usual kind of nonsense dream. But if she felt something was personal enough that she didn't want to share it with L, emotionally clueless L, then. Well. In this case, at the very least what he didn't know wouldn't kill him. In fact, he had to know that she would probably mince words on some things. He couldn't force her to be completely open and honest, and he would know that.

So maybe he was just trying to get her into the habit of recording things so that she could give him more accurate details about the Shinigami realm. He was too busy to care about all the little things that went on in her head.

This assurance made Erin feel a bit better and less inclined to read L the riot act about invading people's personal boundaries. It's not like he was trying to pick a fight.

"Cool. And by cool, I'm being polite. May I ask questions about the investigation? Like. Are you and Watari the only ones that know about me? Maybe you'll find it bizarre that I'm hung up on privacy when I'm literally under surveillance but here we are. I just want to know what kind of access everyone else is going to have to all of this."

Ah hell. She was feeling so very terribly vulnerable now, because if she looked at it from another angle that could be interpreted as her saying she was consenting to L, and only L, having access to her thoughts. And that was super not it. It was more like she acknowledged she didn't have much of a choice, and if she had to be put in this position than she wanted the number of people poking around in her head to be as limited as possible.

"Aizawa-san and Yagami-san have been informed that your case is classified, and all reports on you have been removed from police databases. I have not yet disclosed what you have revealed to me to them. I don't think it will benefit their investigative abilities, especially in the case of Yagami-san."

Erin's mind snatched up that last bit and ran with it, trying to chase down L's strategy like a dog chasing after a car. "Yagami-san would try to take himself off the case. He did before. And you think you can use him against Light if you need to. Light is using his father to access the case, and now that you are aware of that you can make use of it, the same as you did by airing the broadcast in a specific location, but claiming it was…nationwide? By controlling what information you provide to Yagami-san you can isolate proof that Light is Kira. He's bait."

There was silence, and she wondered if she had hit the nail on the head, or if she was wildly off course.

Either way, she decided to continue, spinning the thoughts like fine strands of sugar. "… but if Light realizes what you're doing, he'll just abandon the Death Note and make it look like he was being externally controlled or possessed again. Unless you're tailing him… in which case you could grab the Death Note when he abandons it. Oh! And then you could swap it out for another fake, like before, and trick him into using it openly again!"

Childishly she wanted to clap, because she had the feeling one gets when you snapped the final piece of a puzzle into place. "Brilliant" She hissed into the darkness. And then she immediately started to scour the idea for flaws and weak points.

"But how would you bait him into using the fake Death Note in front of you?" was the first question that came to mind. She had no idea where to start with that one.

"I cannot inform you what methods we are using in our investigation," L came back, and it was a little quieter and less sharp in a way that made her think he was mumbling a bit. "And it would be better if you did not try to find out too much."

Fair. Entirely fair, she reminded herself, slumping back into her seat and tilting her head up to look at the ceiling. She was such a dreadful risk factor to him and the investigation, and the only saving grace was that he had her contained. Well, and the fact that she absolutely loathed Kira, but that was not something he would place any faith in at all. "Well. Just be careful. Light isn't opposed to using his family members if he needs to. He's reluctant and it's basically a last resort, but I think the further he goes the more ruthless he gets. Kind of a 'steeped in blood so far, returning is as tedious as to go over' type deal, you know?" She was sure she'd butchered that quote, but figured it got her point across well enough.

In fact, she found it suited her own situation well enough. She wasn't going to think too hard on whether or not she was steeped in blood. That was something Light could carry the burden of all on his own because she'd not held a gun to his head and told him to go-a-murdering. But she knew the feeling to be so far in the thick of things that there was no point in looking back.

A yawn overtook her, so great it left her blinking back dampness in her eyes. "Could go for some Macbeth right now. Blame you. So macabre around here." That was rich coming from a dead person, but she thought it was funny.

That probably said more about how overtired she was than anything else.

A/N: I KNOW! I'm as baffled as you are. This is unprecedented. Ho boy. So. There were parts of this where I kind of was like 'wow, what a soft and gentle chapter'. Then I read it over, and. Well. I'll leave that to you guys to decide. As always, its super discussion heavy without much in the way of events… I worry that's boring, or that I'm writing in a way that's hard to follow. Mostly I'm trying to bring home that Erin is an unreliable narrator. I hope the shift in their dynamic isn't too jarring either. I tend to think that really extreme situations kind of make people jump a lot of steps in their relationships, but in a super weird way. There are awkward gaps in the foundation of their relationship that leaves them so far from being friends, but things have happened in a way that makes it so they know a lot about each other. Things I also worry about: Accidentally mixing up L and Light's name. They both start with the same letter, and I know its gonna happen eventually. Hopefully I catch it when it does. Also, I worry that I'm accidentally repeating things I've already covered in previous chapters. It's hard keeping track of what's in my head, and what's been vomited into a document. Anyway. This is getting way too long. Have mercy, be happy!