Disclaimer: Not mine. Still. I KNOW SHOCKING ISN'T IT. After all this fanfiction they still haven't gifted it to me. Tch, some people.
Note: I clearly am full of angst today, amirite? Idk I just love Rester, Lidner and Gevanni so damn much. I love the taskforce too, OF COURSE (what do you take me for), but I've had a lot of exposure to them through IC and War Paint. The SPK, however (apart from OC) have always danced tantalisingly out of my reach, and now I am spamming my ff account with my fangirlyness of them. So I give you: angsting naked Lidner. Except my recent Red Dwarf obsession means I keep typing it 'Lister'. Apparently, Halle is now a Scouser.
Vindaloo'd for your pleasure.
x
Suspended
Prompt: 46. Fire
Lidner shrugs off her clothes. Usually, she takes them off slowly, fold or hangs them, or, if needs be, places them into the washing bin. Never, never does she simply shrug them off, leaving them in a crumpled, desolate heap in the middle of the bathroom floor. She has turned the shower on before she realised she needs to undress, so the tiled floor is moist with condensation. The clothes will take up the water, and be un-wearable until they've been properly laundered.
Lidner could care less. She steps into the shower, and the water falls, clear and hot, against her skin. Her eyes are half-closed, cast downwards. She holds herself ramrod straight on a daily basis so at a glance there isn't anything different in her posture today. And she's always tense, always so, so tense, so the definition of clenched muscles in her shoulders is nothing new.
She feels different, though. She reaches up, turns the dial, eases the water temperature higher. Steam fills the bathroom and she doesn't have to see, although really, what she's seeing is absence, because there won't be a flash of black and shards of gold slicing through the white. There'll just be nothing. With enough steam, though, maybe she can hope, maybe she can imagine-
She doesn't even know who the other boy was, the one she sent all the cars after. His face flashed up on the news, moments before his body was pumped full of metal, and it occurs to her now, under a jet of angry water, that it was her fault.
What job was she even meant to be doing, anyway…?
She turns the water up again. Now, the water is scalding, reddening her skin, and she feels it, she knows she can feel it, but the stimulus isn't reaching her brain and she forgets about it all too quickly.
Death is so final, she thinks. Something so vibrant, tangible, alive…disappearing into nothingness in the blink of an eye. Because a body isn't a person, and ashes in the flames coming off a church aren't even a body, and Lidner knows she's going to have nightmares about that, but at this stage she has nightmares about so much that it barely seems worth mentioning.
Her shower lasts twice as long as usual, partly because she kept forgetting what she was doing and partly because, halfway through, her senses suddenly rushed back to her and the heat became overwhelming, she had to fight her way out and gasp long, cold breaths of air from the room around her. The heat has spread over the bathroom now and is cloying at her, even as she tucks a towel around herself and scoops her hair into another.
She thinks she'll start crying eventually and that it'll be stupid, because she barely even knew Mello and it's just so absurd for her, a grown woman, an FBI agent, to be having this kind of reaction over a maladjusted, overemotional boy barely out of his teens. Lidner does cry, eventually, and when she does she realises that rationality never really had much to do with Mello, and it's fitting that it should have left her, now, too.
She sleeps like the dead and if she dreams she doesn't remember it. And then, there's the preparations for Yellow Box to be taken care of, all the last minute changes that came about from Mello's actions. It saved their lives, really, and that has to be taken into account in the plans, but Lidner knows it won't hold off the inevitable for long.
She'll take every day she can get, though. She still has a job to do. After that, after it's finished, after Light Yagami is in the ground - in a cell, she corrects herself - then, then she can mourn.
Lidner exhales. It's not over yet. She adjusts her focus, fixes her gaze, checks her gun. It's not over yet.