Ficlet Four: Challenge
Author's Note: I enjoy fifty-sentence challenges, and randomly decided to do one of my own when the first sentence below popped into my head and actually had a ring to it…Le'letha's Big Muse Strategy™ is to play Solitaire and let her mind wander. All prompts below are of my own extremely haphazard invention, except for three which my brother suggested—he really wanted 'yellow' in here for some reason.
Warning: Contains spoilers, I suppose, for the existence of the heirs and certain real names, as well as pre- (Raito/L) and (Matt/Mello) slash hints that can be interpreted as just friendship if you like. (I wrote them as pre-slash, though.)
Disclaimer: I have no right to put my fingerprints all over this wonderful series, but I will anyway. I also don't own the poem L quotes in one prompt…anyone who recognizes it may challenge me to a scenario if they like. What I do own is three tickets to the May 20th showing of the Death Note live action movie! (spazzz…)
ON WITH THE SHOW!
1: Ending: L watched Kira die (you can never prove this—he is too good to let you—but it is so) and although he knew that Raito-kun had been dead ever since he picked up that notebook, it still hurt to watch the light fade from his eyes.
2: Alien: A leading law enforcement official was once heard to remark that the mysterious detective L could be a three-eyed unicorn from Alpha Centauri for all he cared—the man (whoever he was, if he was a man) got the impossible done.
3: Mirror: Near considered L to be father and brother and twin to him; and if he ever shared his theory, anyone who saw the two together would have been forced to admit that he had a point.
4: Simple: "It's really quite simple," L said fairly cheerfully, and Watari couldn't suppress a shudder; whenever the child said that, it was inevitable that whatever it was (this time) was really quite not.
5: Mistake: Finally tired of the inevitable double-take that involved a first encounter with Mello, the blond devised a foolproof strategy to immediately resolve the boy/girl question, and most people subsequently retreated quickly wondering if the boy was always that aggressive.
6: Alone: L's habitual reaction to an excess of human contact was to disappear, sometimes for days at a time, and more than one fight broke out between him and Raito because L couldn't deal with the constant presence.
7: Snow: The child informed him absently that everything had a pattern to it, and if you could see the pattern you could see the rest of it too; Watari joked that if the little one ever got bored of being a detective, he could predict the weather—L looked thoughtful before announcing with the greatest of confidence that it would snow on Wednesday.
8: Smoke: Raito was fairly sure that most of the detective's odder quirks were merely smokescreens to distract from how clever he really was, but he never quite worked up the daring to confront his companion directly.
9: Revenge: Near took quiet pleasure in constructing Mello-proof productions that stubbornly stayed up even when all the obvious supports were removed.
10: Proof: The boy was Kira, he knew that beyond a doubt in a way he couldn't put into words, but he scrambled for proof because he was helplessly fascinated by the person behind the murderer.
11: Order: L dealt with orders he didn't like in a variety of different ways—he would pretend he hadn't heard, stare at the other person until they panicked, or get revenge; luckily he rarely bothered to exert the effort involved in payback.
12: Language: Quillsh Wammy despaired of arguing with the tiny genius almost instantly, as it was extremely disturbing to hear the mix of cutting irony and reasoned rhetoric from the body of an eight-year-old boy.
13: Honesty: "You are feeding your children to the wolves," Near stated serenely as L outlined their three roles in his long game of justice and vengeance; L looked him straight in the eye and said just as calmly that yes, he knew.
14: Night: "But I do sleep sometimes," L replied indignantly when Raito asked him what he did all night instead of sleeping, "or think, or play memory games, and sometimes, when I listen to you, I can hear what you dream," and honestly didn't understand why his companion promptly whacked him with the nearest pillow and ordered him not to do that anymore, blushing.
15: Cold: Watari doubled the amount of attention he paid to L when the ten-year-old mistakenly decided to fight an elevated fever with a substantial dose of cold medicine far too high for his meager body weight; dealing with a wildly hallucinating L was not something he wanted to do more than once a decade.
16: Heat: Everything was war between them, and the room temperature was a constant source of struggle; Raito wanted it left at a reasonable heat, while L insisted that he hated the cold and stubbornly transformed their room into a furnace on a regular basis.
17: Pride: He hated to ask L for help during their interminable data searches, but it was a fact that the elder man could read many more languages than Raito could.
18: Understatement: "…I learn quickly…" said L meekly, a comment which had to be in the running for the Understatement of the Century award.
19: Barrier: Mello and Matt ended up on the run from various authority figures so often that they resorted to turning Mello's room into a fortress, complete with entertainment and supplies and internet access, and it wasn't until weeks later that Matt realized that he and all his stuff had somehow moved into Mello's room, as if he'd never intended to leave.
20: Water: Well aware of the trouble L got into on a regular basis, Watari put his foot down over learning to swim; the child would never be good at it, but hopefully he wouldn't drown either.
21: Rule: It was an unwritten philosophy at Wammy's House that it was that it was the height of rudeness to try to learn someone else's true name, and even the closest of friends never thought twice about it; who they were now was more important than who they'd been.
22: Law: Between the two of them, L and Near assembled a fantastic, sprawling construction that filled the entire room and incorporated fifteen different mediums—and never noticed that, to do so, they'd forgotten not only the law of gravity but three different precepts of geometry.
23: Number: "Go away, I'm counting the stars," the child told him, and Watari looked down at the boy sprawled on the hallway floor and up at the four stories of the house above him, then down again, and decided not to ask.
24: Pillow: Raito didn't think L knew how to laugh until a truly spectacular spontaneous pillow fight had erupted between the two of them, leaving Raito conqueror of the bed and L curled on the ground at the limit of the chain with two fingers pressed hard against his lips to hold in mirth he couldn't articulate, eyes glowing with a spark the younger had never seen there before.
25: Yellow: "No, we don't have any plans to paint the kitchen right now, Matt, and if we did, it certainly wouldn't be that horrible shade…oh, what have you two done now?"
26: Traitor: L knew, knew without a doubt when Raito touched the notebook again that the brilliant youth he'd come to care for was gone and what was going to happen, and he knew (had always known) that there was nothing he could do about it—he just didn't expect the betrayal to hurt so much.
27: Identity: It had only been an idle question that he didn't expect an answer for, and Raito was left gaping when the stranger who had suddenly replaced the man at his side winked at him and sauntered out of the room; it took a few seconds later for him to reconcile his subconscious impressions and his thoughts and blurt, "Deneuve is a woman?"
28: Noise: Near didn't hate Mello the way the blond hated him; however, he acknowledged ruefully, shaking his pale head to dispel the ringing in his ears Mello's random visit had left him with, he often wished his fellow student and rival wasn't quite so loud.
29: Sleep: Some days he was just so tired, in a way sleep couldn't dispel and sugar couldn't stave off, but he had never known another existence than the one he was living, and couldn't conceive of any other way to be.
30: Retreat: Watari had found most of the places in various residences that L ran to when in a fit of sulking, but he'd never managed to locate the nest of sheets and pillows and clothes the child had made at the bottom of an extensive wardrobe.
31: Travel: Packing L and his computers up and moving somewhere else got easier with practice, but the biggest problem was always L versus the seatbelts.
32: Game: "Probably for the same reason you do, Raito-kun," L replied thoughtfully to his companion's question about why he liked tennis, "in that even if you are forced to work with a team, in the end it's just you and your opponent who matter."
33: Name: It had been so long since he had heard his family name spoken that he doubted he would answer to it anymore; the little Lawliet child almost didn't exist any longer.
34: Enemy: Matt could have been one of L's heirs, but after seeing how Mello reacted to being set against Near, he turned the detective down for fear of losing his best friend to the blond's desire to succeed.
35: Letters: "I…you…L, why?" one of the men unfortunate to be put in charge of the strange orphan boy demanded after a particularly spectacular incident of Not Fitting In; the child promptly informed him that monogrammatical sentences would not be tolerated, leaving the poor man very confused until he replayed the outburst in his head several times.
36: Insult: Matt heard all the slurs against his devotion to Mello, but only once; anyone going up against one of them was promptly sworn revenge on by both, which usually resulted in the pair being given plenty of space from then on out.
37: Outgrow: L's powers of perception developed far before his mastery of human language, and the dialect he developed all by himself, for himself, persisted until he was about fifteen, used mostly to air his theories to no one, muttering under his breath; it was replaced by a Babel composed of fragments of living languages.
38: Easier: The task force welcomed the pseudonym 'Ryuzaki' with relief, as most of them had been forced to bastardize 'L' into the syllable 'Eru', and it was getting on the detective's nerves as much as theirs.
39: Touch: L disliked physical contact, accepting it only when necessary and (with more willingness) from his heirs; he was therefore surprised to realize that not only did he not mind the occasional touch from Raito-kun, but he had actually initiated the contact himself from time to time.
40: Hands: "You have very long fingers, Ryuzaki," Raito remarked during one hard-won not-looking-at-the-computers break, and L tilted his head to one side and stared at his hands before splaying his fingers out next to Raito's, acknowledging the difference with a faint sound of vague surprise.
41: Sick: Mello had ruled that sickness was covered under the bounds of camaraderie; therefore any time minor illnesses made the rounds of the House was a quiet one, as both he and Matt ended up in bed too miserable to make trouble.
42: Curiosity: "Raito-kun," L asked in all innocence, "why does Amane-san still insist that you are in love with her?"
43: Holiday: L showed up at the House pretty regularly for Christmas, more because it was impossible to trace two people among the holiday traffic than for the religious connotations, but he was prone to appearing at random moments throughout the year as time allowed—it was, after all, the closest thing he had to a home base.
44: Jealousy: Mello loved L dearly, he really did, but that chocolate had been his, dammit, and there was no way he was going to let L get away with stealing it just because he was L!
45: Blanket: Disturbed by the thunderstorm breaking above their heads, Near sought refuge in the familiar playroom only to find that L was already there, watching the storm; they exchanged glances in the split-second of lightning, and L moved so that the pale boy could sit with him, blanket wrapped around them both.
46: Slip: "L," Raito said, drawing his attention to something minor but interesting, "do you know—" and then registered the half-hidden glance shot his way, full of suspicion, and sorrow, and fear, but not surprise.
47: Cut: "Absolutely not," the little one said irritably, glaring at his guardian from behind his scruffy, overlong black hair and over the book he was reading, "I'll cut it when it starts to bother me, and not before, so put those scissors away."
48: Prophetic: "'Eye to eye, and head to head,'" said L softly… "No, it's not important, Raito-kun."
49: Disturbance: "Mello," L said tartly, leaning over the balcony to catch the attention of the boy and his red-headed shadow, "you may do as you like, of course, but not to the extent that Roger feels the need to drag me out of my study to shout at you."
50: Mutual: Raito noticed that L was spending more time than usual watching him and chewing on his fingers, but when asked, L only replied, "You confuse me, Raito-kun,"; Raito gave him a dubious look and told the detective that it was only fair—he confused him too.