Ficlet Nine: Liar Liar
Warning: Liar Liar is much darker than anything else in this collection to date. It contains major character death, violence, and slash. I'm keeping the rating at T, because I simply don't have the guts to write an M-level fic.
Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note, or any of the characters who appear in this story. I reserve the right to throw the word 'love' around in the affectionate usage of the word, though.
ON WITH THE SHOW!
"The only way to kill a god of death…is to make them fall in love…" –Rem, Episode 12: Love
Light looks away, he thinks, for no more than a moment, but when he looks back, L is gone. He's just vanished. A moment ago—wasn't it?—he was bent over the captured Death Note, staring at it with all the intensity he usually reserves for things like strawberries and background details on CC TV videos, and, truth be told, Light himself.
But now he's disappeared, and Light feels a twinge of worry. Not fear—he has the situation too well in hand to be afraid—but he does not want to underestimate his adversary. That would be foolish. He's reversed L's surveillance back on him, keeping track of the young detective as often as he physically can, lest L escape through some loophole created at the last minute. It could happen.
Turning to his computer, he accesses the internal camera feeds. Everyone else has left for the day; Light had assured his father that he would catch the bus home, and just wanted to stay for a few minutes to check up on the last few bits of data. (L had said nothing to this, part of his attention focused on the Yagami men while the thrust of his focus remained on the Death Note.)
Light pages through camera after camera, caught between cursing L's paranoia for installing so many cameras and expressing his reluctant respect for someone else willing to go to extremes. He spends several minutes staring at screens empty of any form of life before giving up and conceding that it is probably the easier course to just get up and look for the man.
Pushing the rolling chair away from the computer, he closes down the surveillance program and stalks past Rem, who is haunting the safe the Death Note is locked in, without a word or glance of acknowledgement. He wanders the hallways for a while, checking the kitchen, the car park, the bedroom the two youths so recently shared, and several bathrooms before heading upstairs to the roof. Light recalls seeing, at the end of the Higuchi debacle, L staring around at the phenomenal skyline visible from the roof where the helicopter had landed. He'd been trying to hide it, and mostly succeeding.
He realizes how flimsy this supposition is when he opens the door to the roof only to be confronted by a blast of wind and frigid rain. The year is growing older, and it's getting chilly. The weather is changing.
Light hadn't noticed before now. He's spent so much time inside that building, where windows are in short supply. Grimacing as the chill bites into him, he turns to close the door and head back inside, but stops.
Dimly visible through the dark and sheeting rain, he can see the flash of a white shirt.
Rolling his eyes privately, Light calls, "Ryuzaki? What are you doing out here? It's freezing!" He knows L hates the cold.
The young detective doesn't move, as if he hadn't heard. It is perfectly possible.
"Ryuzaki!" Light calls again, and upon getting no reply, he curses to himself and steps out onto the roof fully, letting the door swing closed behind him. He picks his way across the roof carefully—it will be awash soon, and is increasingly dangerous with each second either of them spends out here.
"Hey," he greets his enemy? friend? rival?, reaching out cautiously to catch him by the shoulder. Light restrains the impulse to throw L off balance—he is standing very close to the edge, and the view from whatever cameras must be up here cannot be of very good quality, impeded by pouring rain.
Instead, he pulls him back a little bit, repeating himself above the noise of the rain, "What are you doing out here?"
Dark eyes, still not watching him, blink a few times before turning to look at him. It's a slow gesture, as if L were moving through mud. He tips his head on one side to look up at Light questioningly.
"I am…" the young detective starts, then trails off as if losing his train of thought. "It's not important."
"It's got you out here in the rain and the cold," Light points out.
"Yes," L says softly, as if this is a revelation. "How long has it been raining?"
"How should I know that?" Light snaps involuntarily. "I just got out here! Don't tell me you didn't notice."
L says nothing, and it takes a moment for the younger to realize that this is in obedience to his request to not be told that L had not, indeed, noticed.
"Yeah, right," he snorts. "I don't believe that."
One shoulder—the one restrained, as if to make a point—lifts in a shrug, and the dark-haired man turns his face away, but makes no effort to move further.
Light releases a frustrated sigh, fed up with the infuriating, brilliant, contrary detective and the fact that he's right about everything and I don't know how he knows. Soon, he comforts himself. Not long now, and it'll all be over.
"It's almost over, isn't it," L says abruptly, still looking out over the city in the rain.
Startled, Light tightens his grip on the other man's shoulder, and he's reminded anew how very unhealthy L really is. Through the sodden white shirt, he imagines that he can see every bone in his ribs and spine. It's not far from the truth. His eyes are sunken too far back into his head. How long has he been doing this? Light wonders, not about L's latest stunt of standing in the rain, but of his life in general.
"What do you mean?"
L turns, suddenly, away from the city below, which looks very remote now, cut off from them by the rain and the darkness. As Light loosens his grip on his shoulder, L brings his own long fingers up to replace it, brushing them over the spot where Light had touched him before placing both hands on the younger man's shoulders. With a deep, regretful sigh, he shifts so he can look Light straight in the eyes.
Caught by surprise, Light lets him do it. "Ryuzaki?"
"I wish…" L says, tapping one palm gently against the corresponding shoulder. "I wish…you understood."
"Understood what? What's wrong with you today?" Light is genuinely confused. A sliver of worry bites into his stomach, along with a whisper: he knows!
The tapping palm leaves his shoulder, tracing down the line of his arm to take his hand while the other hand holds him in place determinedly. L wraps his long fingers around Light's, pulling him closer and taking advantage of the young man's confusion to tuck his head under Light's.
Completely involuntarily, Light's free hand slips around the young detective's too-thin waist. A flush of surprise at the peculiarly intimate embrace coloring his cheeks, Light demands, somewhat more quietly, to know what is going on. While he is not particularly embarrassed by the contact—they have played this game before, casually and offhandedly, neither meaning it to come to anything; and Light was the one, apparently, who introduced L to the concept of the restorative hug—it is unexpected. And more than slightly awkward, coming as it does from a man he expects to kill before the week is out.
"I wish you understood," L repeats, the whisper brushing against his throat not unpleasantly.
"So," he replies, "make me understand."
L's hands tighten, and a peculiar hitch, for just a moment, comes into his breathing. Locked together as they are, Light can feel it as if it was his own, and abruptly this little interlude becomes a lot more interesting. Something has scared L beyond all telling, something has hurt him that he cannot admit to. Out here, alone, in the rain…are you crying, L? Do you even know how?
"Will you let me speak, then?" L asks.
"I'm listening," Light whispers in his ear.
L sighs, and says nothing for a moment, resting against Light as if the other is the only thing in all the world holding him up. And then he begins, with "I know. No—shh!" For Light has twitched away from him, all ready to pass it off as offense instead of what it really is—fear—no, worry.
"I know," L repeats, alone, in the dark, hidden in the rain. "I knew, but I didn't know how—and then you didn't know. Oh, that confused me, Light." The simple, unadorned name hints at the intimacy telegraphed by the embrace, the secrets.
"Oh…" he draws it out in a sigh, "how that confused me. And then, and then, and then, it was you, but it was you." He is making no sense, and he knows it. "Why did it have to be you?
"That sort of power, Light…the power to change things, yes? From life to death, order to chaos and chaos to order…to set the world aright."
Light draws breath to speak, to deny it all, despite the fact that nobody can hear them and nobody can see them and nobody ever will. L pulls back, just a bit, enough to meet his eyes and move his hand from Light's shoulder, a whisper-thin touch across his lips that silences him as sure as any gag or shout. Long fingers trace the lines of his face, down to his throat, where they brush gently against his pulse point before resting on the junction between neck and shoulder.
L's eyes are intense, holding Light's hypnotically. This is no game. If it is, it's a game of life and death, and no one leaves the ring alive. L's eyes are fearless, on fire. It's a fire that has sparked itself in Light's as well, and L will fan the flames for all he's worth.
"To make it work, Light, as it never has," L continues, whispering. In Light's ears, it's a shout, a shout that somehow overpowers the pulse of his blood in his ears, the breath scorching through his lungs.
"Can you imagine? That power, Light…I can turn the world upside down and hold it in the palm of my hand if I must, but so can you. Can't you, Light? Isn't it something?" Those dark eyes flare, and Light draws an audible breath helplessly. He has seen that look before—reflected in his computer screen at home, in the dying spark of the television turned off after a productive trawl through the news channels. It's the look in Light's own eyes; it's power.
They both know it, both tasted that. Light sees legitimacy, the ability to order directly and be obeyed without question—to dismiss those who are useless and use those who can be used; the authority wielded by the master puppeteer. L sees power, exhilaration, the ability to get things done where no one else can—the freedom of autonomy.
It is so tempting.
"You and I are so similar, Light," L breathes. "We could rule the world, either of us."
"How long have you been working to create a world of justice, L?" Light finally manages to speak through the fire burning inside him. A mocking question, but a real one. L has nothing to lose by speaking this way. He knows…
"You can do in days what takes me months," L admits, and it's honest. For just a little while, just for tonight, they can be honest—there is no one to see and no one to tell. They're alone, above the world, in the darkness.
"But," he goes on, fingers slipping behind Light's neck in a full embrace, "I can give you in weeks what will take you years."
"Power?" Light tests.
"Authority."
It's a devil's deal, and they know it. Light laughs, softly, a dark, humorless chuckle. "And what's to stop me taking all that myself?"
L smiles, as he only ever does when nothing's funny. It's slightly eerie. "It's not that simple, dear Light. You need me."
"Do I?"
The eerie smile stays. "Oh yes. You'll see."
Light is tempted, oh, so tempted. Freedom, power, the world, and L—all his, for a word, and a promise; a life spared, a world forged. L as ally, L as his.
He needs that.
And that's when, Light thinks, his new world really begins; in the rain, in the dark, hundreds of feet above Tokyo—with an embrace, and a bargain, and a kiss that seals it all and only intensifies the fire in his blood.
It's not a game anymore.
It's a victory.
They lay their plans in secret, with caution and with care.
"Rem…" Light muses openly, tapping a pencil back and forth as he thinks. It spins between his fingers, point and eraser striking the bed by turns. He's sprawled out on his stomach across the bed in their shared room, plotting—but with L, not against him now. "Rem will be a problem."
"How did you plan to deal with her?" L asks, curiously. "She protects Amane-san, yes?" Light confirms this, watching with amusement as L assembles puzzle pieces that he has no way of having. "So if I continued to pursue her, she would have killed me?"
"Yes. And Watari. And that would have gotten rid of her, too."
L puts one finger to his mouth and waits.
"Shinigami aren't allowed, technically," Light specifies, "to protect people."
"Gods of death exist to kill."
"Right. If they kill to save the life of someone they love, then they die too."
"Very neat." Light wonders how he could have missed this streak of bloodthirstiness emerging from his consort, before realizing that it normally emerged as indifference to any suffering his actions caused.
"So…" L bites at his thumb thoughtfully, free hand wrapped tightly around his legs. It's gone three in the morning, and L has filled the cameras and bugs that haunt even this room with reruns compiled from weeks of records. They are off the air.
"Could you use the Death Note to control one of the task force, make them investigate Amane on their own?"
Light thinks it over. If he hadn't been saving Rem as his secret anti-L weapon, he might have done just that to get rid of the threatening Shinigami. "It should work."
"Then she'll kill whoever we send after her…can we do that? What happens if two Death Notes affect the same person? Wait—let me think about this."
Light waits. He has not, of course, told L everything about the Death Notes, but for someone working on limited information, the young detective is filling in the blanks very quickly.
"We know from the tapes Amane sent to Sakura TV that even if a death is scheduled for a later time, that person can be killed before by another Note. We know this because she chose petty criminals as examples, lest the original Kira" accompanied by a nod of acknowledgement at Light, who smirks "kill them first."
L's logic is sound, so Light agrees.
"Therefore if the time of death is set later, it is almost guaranteed that Rem will get to him first, thus precipitating her own demise."
"I like 'precipitating'," Light puts in.
L pauses for a few beats in what Light is sure is either a sigh or a laugh. He has it narrowed down to one of those two, anyway. "Feasible?"
"I like that too. And yes. So who do we send?"
His consort dismisses that with a wave. "Details."
Light broaches the subject cautiously. "L…what about Watari? He knows you better than anyone—I'm surprised he hasn't noticed already."
"I've had a lot of practice lying to him, Light-kun," L snaps. "I know what I'm doing."
"But…" Light prompts him.
The dark-haired detective scowls, biting more forcefully at his thumb. Light resists the urge to snatch his hand away. "I already figured that out. I can drop out of sight at the same time."
Light abandons his pencil, dropping it on the floor. "I'm listening."
"We'll need to plan it out to the second—that you can set the time of death is essential. I will be the catalyst."
"You?"
"Yes. I am capable of faking my own death—a collapse, at least. If you keep everyone else away—send them running for ambulances and the like, they should be fooled. We then have instructions in the Death Note along the lines of 'takes his employer's body and drives away in car, before committing suicide in a way that ensures the body will not be found'. Presumably, I'll be able to escape the car and hide somewhere while the investigation collapses."
"And then we'll meet up afterwards?" Light finishes, disturbed. The instructions almost precisely mirror the strategy he used to dispose of Naomi Misora. But he has had no indication that L knows about that, so he says nothing.
"Exactly. I can give you the name, and you know his face perfectly well."
Light smiles, pulling himself up from his sprawl and moving to embrace L. "Perfect," he says, satisfied.
They manage to distract themselves for a while after that.
"Light?" L says later, nestled against his lover's body.
"Yeah?"
"Do you plan to bring back Misa? At all?"
The question makes him laugh before he actually thinks about it. "I'd just as soon not—she is quite irritating. But I need her Eyes, L. You have no idea how useful that is."
"I think I have some idea," L points out, miffed. "Light…she hates me, even without finding out that I've stolen her boyfriend." There's a significant amount of sarcasm on those last three words, almost as if they're in a foreign language, repeated by rote.
"If you bring her memories back, how are you going to stop her from killing me? As you point out, she does have the Eyes."
"Not right now, she doesn't," Light corrects him. "But I'm almost sure that the minute she comes back in contact with a Shinigami, she will."
The enthusiasm in L's voice drops even further. "Oh yes. Another Shinigami."
"Sorry. And I'll get control of Misa before you ever come in contact with her. She's been devoted to making me love her since we met. If my complete lack of interest didn't stave her off, I don't imagine you will. Besides—if she does anything against you, she dies too."
"Which will do me a lot of good," L mutters against him sulkily.
"It might stop her from trying in the first place."
L's plan to vanish goes off without a hitch.
Several days before, L gave Light a name to go with the face of the elderly gentleman, using a page torn out of the back of the Death Note. (The otherworldly book immediately renews itself, leaving no evidence of the stray sheet.)
Ten seconds before the time written in the Death Note, L collapses while in the same room as Light, Mogi, and Chief Yagami. Light makes the appropriate fuss, crouched over his friend defensively and sending the older men scurrying.
If he didn't know better, Light would have actually thought something was wrong. L is very, very still. And suddenly it is all out of his hands. Watari arrives, a hollow look in his eyes as he bends over the little detective. Quietly, he gathers his charge into his arms and, with an 'Excuse me', leaves the room. Light catches up with his father and Mogi and tells them to cancel the ambulance.
"Is he…" Soichiro asks anxiously.
Face white, trembling, Light shakes his head in a no, as if too choked up to answer. "Watari's taken him," he manages.
They hear nothing else from the old man, of course. Light spends a lot of time for the rest of the day hunched over in a chair with his head pillowed on his arms, as if distraught.
He is actually keeping a careful eye on the time, and as the appointed second sweeps by, Light releases a hefty sigh that quickly turns into a muffled sob.
When Light sends Misa to collect the Death Note he'd buried months ago, she does indeed make the trade for the Eyes in exchange for another half of her dwindling lifespan.
"I don't remember his name!" she burbles at him as they walk through an empty park, shadowed by Ryuk, who has been placated with apples from both of them. Rem is still haunting the Death Note back at headquarters.
"What?" She interprets it as surprise. He had forgotten that he'd asked her to kill L the moment she regained her memories. In retrospect, it's a blessing she doesn't remember: she could have destroyed their alliance with the stroke of a pen.
"It's all right, Misa," he assures her. "You don't have to."
She sniffles away the last of her conjured tears. "Really? Did he already die?"
Light smirks. "Everyone else thinks he did. We set it up that way. L's working for me now, Misa."
Misa gapes, the expression a mix of awe and horror. "How did you do that?"
Ah, Light thinks, and then says it for good measure. "Now, there's the part you're not going to like."
That's an understatement.
She hates it. She hates it with a passion so enthusiastic and a vocabulary so comprehensive he's almost impressed.
The mood is not helped by Ryuk's chortling at this latest turn of events.
"Look, Misa," Light finally snaps, "deal with it. Otherwise we'd both most likely be dead. He would have caught us, you know." A blatant lie—Light had things under control before L threw that monkey wrench into the works.
She bites her lip and stares at him in rage, one foot still trembling from where it repeatedly stomped the ground.
"But I love you!" she wails, regaining her voice.
He resists the urge to sigh. "The minute he ceases to be useful, Misa, then we'll see. For the time—if any harm comes to him, I'll assume it was your doing! And then there will be nothing keeping me from returning that harm to you."
Misa squeaks in fear—he has never really shouted at her before—and promises to obey. She does not promise to like it.
Light presides over the destruction of the task force very cautiously. Using his free sheet, he sends Ide to investigate Misa, asking awkward questions seemingly on his own, independent of the task force.
Rem leaps into action, ending the man's life two hours before the time written on Light's sheet, and he is rid of two possible threats in a single stroke. No one sees the Shinigami's Death Note fall, and Light secretes it away quickly.
When L's system mysteriously collapses, no one is in the room, and it is a good hour and a half before anyone notices that all the data has been deleted. Privately, Light thinks it was very carefully lifted.
Over the next month, several things happen.
Light announces that he wants to rent an apartment closer to school, and his parents sigh over their son leaving home. When he favors a location with two bedrooms, they smile.
He does invite Misa to move in. She will definitely be sleeping in the other bedroom. Exclusively.
Mogi and Matsuda both fall prey to apparent random chance; one in a car crash, the other to an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.
At that point, Aizawa requests permission to resign in order to be with his family and Soichiro Yagami grants it without resentment.
Despite the fact that Kira continues to practice his own form of arbitrary justice, the task force folds up completely.
Light, as a responsible young man not officially connected to the police, takes custody of the Death Note.
December:
On the bus back to his apartment, Light strikes a deal with Ryuk, who has decided to follow Light instead of Misa, on the grounds that Light was 'more interesting'. He does this by talking into his cell phone, pretending that there is another person on the line.
He gets off a few stops early to stop by a grocery, and leaves a bag of apples in the park in exchange for Ryuk going away and leaving him alone until tomorrow morning.
L hates Ryuk, and sulks fiercely when forced to be around the Shinigami. Light has definite things in mind for the afternoon, involving L, and they do not include cajoling L out of a sulk.
When a Shinigami-free Light finally gets back to his apartment on the last day of the semester in a very good mood, he is only partially surprised to find a fire burning in the small fireplace and Misa trying to cook.
"Hi Light!" she chirps, abandoning whatever's on the stove in favor of bouncing onto him and kissing him. He averts his face just in time and what would have landed on his mouth hits his cheek instead.
She pouts briefly, and yelps as her largest pan of three overflows. Steam billows, and the smell of burning water intensifies.
"Turn the heat down, Misa-san," L informs her from the door of the master bedroom. There's a headphone looped over one ear, wires dangling from it—a sight which Light finds quite amusing. "You're smiling," the older man observes.
"Kira supporters," Light explains briefly. "There's a real influx of support from the young adults. And, of course, last day."
"Of course." L untangles the headphones and tosses them back into the room, where he keeps his laptop, before skirting around Misa to welcome his lover back properly.
The sound of a metal spoon hitting a saucepan interrupts them, and they both look over to see Misa stirring whatever it is with a bit more vigor than necessary, a look like thunder on her face. She is very deliberately not looking at them.
Light rolls his eyes, smirked, and drags L off to the other room, closing the door firmly behind them.
"Why is she cooking?" he asks, safely out of earshot. "And…what?"
L considers this for a moment, thumb to mouth, examining the ceiling as if there were an answer written there. "I believe she has been reading more magazines."
Light groans with feeling. "Not another one of those 'enhancing femininity' ploys."
"I believe so."
"Oh well," Light shrugs, dismissing Misa completely, "let her do what she wants—as long as it doesn't interfere with us, right?"
L doesn't bother to answer, resuming the kiss the blonde girl interrupted previously with enthusiasm. Light practically purrs with delight, enjoying the kisses and caresses that put everything else out of mind for a little while.
When one of L's hands moves away for a second, he doesn't even think anything of it, distracted as he is.
He hears the sound first, oddly enough—the cough-spit of a silenced gun. And then it rips through him, agony like he's never known before splitting his mind and soul in half. Staggering backwards, Light gapes in horror, fireworks going off behind his eyes as he struggles to see through the pain.
When he does, it almost hurts more than the gunshot. The pleasure in his lover's eyes has been replaced with dead cold, unaffected by the man writhing in agony before him, indifferent to the blood that has spattered across his body. L holds the gun in the confident grip of someone who has been taught to use a weapon, and his eyes are flat with hatred.
L…
Light's legs collapse beneath him, and the impact sends another wave of red-hot pain through his body. Involuntarily, he cries out in agony.
He's helpless as Misa responds to a cry definitely of pain, barging into their room despite a thousand warnings to the contrary. She stops short in the door, mouth opening in the prelude to a scream, eyes wide.
Misa turns to run.
Someone has taught L to use a gun, taught him well. His expression not changing, L turns, lines up the shot, and fires, all in the time it takes Misa to get halfway around.
The bullet takes her through the right temple, and she finishes her turn in a lazy fall to the ground, propelled onward by the force of the shot. She's dead before she hits the ground.
L watches her fall, head slightly cocked in the same expression of flat curiosity he's worn so many times. Once sure of his shot, the man turns back to look at Light, who is in too much pain to rise—for all the good it will do.
"You—" Light hisses in pain and fury. He can't think, isn't sure whether to scream or shout or cry. "You son of a bitch! How dare you—L, L, why?"
"Because you have killed thousands," L says, and it's so cold. "Because you would have killed thousands more."
"For justice, L, to put the world how it should be!" and didn't he believe this, hadn't he said…
"Because you are wrong," L continues, implacably. "Because you would have killed me. Because you would have killed Watari, who, by the way, is still alive."
Through the pain, through the betrayal, Light still finds the strength to spit at the man holding the gun on him.
L isn't done. "Because you would have continued to kill. And when my heirs rose against you, as they must do, you would have killed at least one of them, and I cannot let you do that."
Light has never been this helpless in his life, and he is horribly aware that he never will be again. Even with medical attention, the chances of him surviving the shot still lodged in his intestines are low, and L isn't likely to be calling the paramedics any time soon. "One murder to save thousands, so how are you any different from me, L!"
"I'm sorry," L tells him, and how unfair is that? "I don't want to kill you, Light."
But he will anyway, and Light knows it. "For a while there, L," he spits, "I almost thought you loved me."
The façade falls, for just a moment, and the merciless killer is gone. "For a while, Light," he says, just for them alone, "I did."
No, Light shouts among the chaos that is overwhelming his mind, I was so close! L…
L levels the gun again, and this shot takes him straight through the heart.
It's the last move in a long game, and although L has been in control ever since Light accepted his gambit on that roof in the rain, it hurts, worse than anything.
But he knows what he has to do. He has set it all up in advance, because Light—Kira!—stopped watching him as closely when he thought the young detective was under control. From the moment he fired that first shot, the clock has been ticking.
L has seen thousands of crime scenes since he began working as a detective all those years ago, and he knows how to plan the perfect murder.
He cleans the gun of fingerprints first, using a thick cloth that will not transfer fingerprints like some of the thinner fabrics will. Then he retrieves a heavy pair of gloves from where he had stashed them earlier under the bed, carefully avoiding touching the blood on the floor. Re-suspending his emotions—he should not have allowed himself to feel those last seconds—he manipulates Misa's right hand so that she is holding the gun, firing it into the wall just past where Light's—Kira's—body lies.
Her prints are on the gun now. To an outside observer, one that had heard the gunshots, it would appear that she fired the first shot, crippling Light. She then fired again quickly, missing—the spurious bullet in the wall. The third shot remained the same, only the shooter changed.
The fourth shot would appear to be a suicide—a shot through the temple.
A double murder, transformed into a murder-suicide.
Still very aware of that clock, L retrieves the three Death Notes—Rem's, Misa's, and Light's—from their respective hiding places. Light—Kira—trusted him, as he was meant to, and he knows all he needs to. He had even engineered the absence of the Shinigami, by turning uncooperative when Ryuk was around.
L is not sure if Shinigami can track Death Notes, but he is absolutely sure that weapons like these should not be allowed to exist. Casting them into the fireplace, which he had lit earlier that day, claiming to be cold, he prods at them with the poker until they have completely dissolved into black, noxious ash.
Time is ticking…
Moving absolutely efficiently, still wearing his gloves, L strips off his bloodstained clothes, replacing them with a fresh set. He stows the ruined garments in the same bag he got the gloves from, along with his laptop, the gun, and another set of clothes that don't look like they could be Kira's.
Pocketing his cell phone as well, L scans the room, ignoring the two bloody bodies.
He has no other possessions. At first glance, the room belongs to only one person.
L skips over Misa's body in the doorway, emerging out into the corridor with clean feet to finish what he started. In the kitchen area, Misa's abortive attempt at cooking has burnt black.
He had suggested that she try to cook, in fact, but not so she could impress Light—Kira, he reminds himself. All he wanted was…the gas jets.
Gas jets, with a little nudge, would start leaking very flammable gas into the atmosphere, and, before long, it would encounter his little fireplace fire.
If there is any fine evidence left in the apartment by the time the fire department puts that one out, he'll be very surprised.
Pulling on an old hooded jacket of Light's, and wearing shoes for the look of it, L slips away from the perfect murder scene, vanishing into the city.
Several streets away, he pulls out the cell phone and dials a very particular number. He waits, still keeping a tight leash on his emotions, as it rings.
It routes him through to a menu, as it should.
"Override," L tells the computer. "Override emergency, code 311079." Only two people in the world know why that number is the emergency code. "Override."
The menu processes the unusual request, and starts ringing again in earnest.
A minute later, he hears the line open, and a very welcome voice say, "Hello?"
"Watari," L says coolly, thankful that Kira believed the false name he'd given him to write down. "It's me."
The gasp of relief is audible, even through a cell phone. "Are you alright?" his guardian asks urgently, tripping over his words in his haste.
"I need to get out. How long?"
Watari can probably hear the note in his voice that means that L is maybe two blows away from cracking completely. "I'm in Taiwan. I can be there in two hours."
"Tell me where you're landing," L orders curtly.
"Two hours," Watari reiterates, and hangs up.
L stands very, very still for a long moment, holding onto the phone like a lifeline.
Two hours and five minutes later, Watari waits anxiously at the door to the small private jet. He'd called ten minutes ago to inform L what gate the little plane was at, and had gotten only a curt, "Acknowledged," in return before the boy had hung up.
He has passed beyond worried, and is frantic out of his mind for the young detective. When L had come to see him, after the capture of the Death Note, and outlined his plan, Watari had been convinced that it wouldn't work, and that L would be killed instantly.
L had shrugged dismissively and said that he was likely to be killed soon anyway.
When he'd gotten back in contact two and a half months later to say only that he needed a gun, Watari had been torn between relief that he'd survived, and horror that the child was going to be forced to kill.
Now, he turns away from the shadowed gateway to pace. When he turns back, L is standing in the doorway, as pale as death and twice as haunted.
Watari makes an abortive rush to him before remembering that this is not, and has never been, a child you can pick up and comfort. Instead, he settles for resting one hand very gently on L's thin shoulder.
L drops the bag he's carrying on the floor carelessly. It makes a heavy thump, as of metal hitting metal. Apparently it is of no consequence, because L ignores it. Instead, he shuffles over to one of the chairs and curls into it, face buried in his knees.
"L?" Watari inquires softly.
One hand works its way loose and gestures, indicating that the plane is to leave.
Biting back his concerns, the elderly man moves forward to the cockpit to give the pilot his marching orders. Satisfied that the plane will take off as soon as humanly possible, he moves back to the main area.
L has vanished again.
Watari experiences one unbroken moment of complete and total horror, and then he hears a noise from the adjacent bathroom—the door has been left slightly ajar, and is, in fact, still swinging slightly.
It sounds an awful lot like someone trying to throw up and cry at the same time, so Watari just closes the door and lets the boy deal.
L doesn't come out until the plane has been in the air for almost forty-five minutes. He is pale to the point of sickly, his normally wild hair hangs limp and matted, and his eyes are suspiciously red. He is also shaking, as if he can't stop.
"What happened, L?"
The boy turns away, closing his eyes as if in pain, and curls up on the couch with his back to everything.
Watari curses everyone that has brought L to this point, Kira first, last, and in the middle of the list. Not even the crippling childhood nightmares that plagued L for years had brought him this far down.
"L?"
No response, but Watari needs answers, so he takes steps he rarely, if ever, resorts to.
"Lawliet!"
L jerks visibly at the sound of the name, shivers increasing.
"Talk to me," Watari reiterates. "What happened? What did you do?"
When he speaks, L's voice could have been exhumed from the grave. "I made him love me," says L, without emotion. "And then I killed him."
The Kira Murders continue for a week and a half after the locally mourned murder-suicide of an up-and-coming actress and her boyfriend.
Then they stop forever.
Author's Note: I'd be extremely interested to know if, up until that first gunshot, you believed L meant what he said… I may, quite possibly, now do the story both Kokoro-kun and LittleBrick requested—the companion story to 'Echo'. In other words, how L and Mello may have met. I'm not sharing the title yet.