Narrow Bridge
The wind wisped her hair about wildly, negligent of the way it stung and flecked her eyes with tears. She'd forgotten how long she'd been there, staring out over the city as if it's symphony would miraculously usher forth all of the answers she was looking for. There was only one answer, and it rested still out of her reach, hanging there ephemeral in the cold autumn air just by her lips.
"L..."
She remembered their first meeting; the strange exuberance he showed her and no one else. Companions in arms, they'd made it through the meat grinder of that case, and although he'd been nothing more than a voice on a phone, she'd felt that she knew him better than she sometimes knew herself. And that had never left her, that feeling, the comfort that comes from seeing someone for who they truly were.
And if it was true that he was working on the Kira investigation, he obviously needed help. The whole situation with a number of seemingly indecipherable mass killings reminded her too much of that first case, of a child with dead eyes and a deader soul. L had to be thinking the same thing, especially looking at the messages left by some of the victims. The victims were messages in and of themselves. Her fiancée had been one of them.
They had never even thought about children. He was still too young, was still full of ambitions and dreams of what a place of note in the Kira case would bring him—bring her, the wife of a twice decorated FBI agent. Raye had gotten a purple heart for his service that she'd just hurled rather epically to the frozen ground some yards below. All of the agents had gotten them, and the honor of it only served to mock everything he'd died for.
The narrow way stretching to either side of her and up a small mesh platform looked like the path to the gallows, no matter how fervently she told herself it was just a slatted metal bridge, barely wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side. She'd almost jumped the first time she found the place. She'd had her shoes off before two voices from the back of her mind bellowed, "Stop!" one was Raye's, the other may have been L, she'd only ever heard his real voice briefly. She's climbed down, slipped her shoes back on and warmed in a small coffee shop a few blocks down. A new determination laced through her blood with the sugar and mindless caffeine, and not the smallest sense of release. She was no longer the fiancée of an FBI agent, she was the widow of one.
Only then did the bridge span miles.