Disclaimer: My name is King, I can't bring myself put here what I really want to say atm, and I don't own Death Note.
Devil's Trill
IV: Tartini
'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
CH31
Scam
"Suspect apprehended!" Soichiro Yagami radioed out, and shortly after this Light Yagami was shoved and dragged across the roof where his hair was disheveled by the awaiting helicopter.
The officer manhandling Light to the airsupport was someone Light vaguely remembered, but that didn't ease the man's bruising hold on his shoulder and forearm nor did it make him drag Light towards the chopper any gentler.
Light too was caught.
And if his white pajamas and scared expression made the officer doubt himself for one moment, the small blood drips on his pants, and his slippers, red and soaked through with blood that wasn't his sealed his verdict and the officer that happened to be right on the other side of fire exit when Soichiro had caught Light but the Yagami boy somehow broke out and barricaded himself in the stairwell.
Twenty minutes have passed since the hospital was invaded.
The man simply grabbed Light and wrestled him upstairs.
He radioed out that he re-apprehended Yagami, and men have confirmed it, though the static interference was high. Something was jamming, or at least attempting to jam everyone's signal.
But now, all he had to was push against the semi-struggling Yagami boy and the wind of the main rotor of the helicopter; it was all that was between him and justice.
Otherwise, the roof of the hospital was completely clear.
They were by the chopper now. The pilot waved them in.
The man pushed Light up to get inside; pushed and shoved him up more like, because the skids raised the cabin high above the ground, and Light was shouting at him and cursing him, but the rotor roared in noisy, whistling pitch, and he didn't care anyway.
And then Light bowed down, as low as the man's grasp on him would allow, and then there were two swift and loud pops – loud enough to outscream the roar of the helicopter.
And the grip on Light's forearm loosened and fell away.
There was someone under the left stairs thing, right behind the busted chair, Matt knew there was someone, and that someone would definitely shoot him if he were to take a half-step more into the open.
He noticed the slight movement out of the corner of his eye by a miracle.
Well, actually it wasn't a miracle at all.
It was that Matt was a genius. The Matt was The Genius. A total, undeniable unbeatable god of gods of spotting things and shooting them.
He switched his semi-auto with a pistol and it took only one well-aimed shot to do away with the freakin' camper.
"Boo-yah!" he shouted and ran left, right, right, up, left again, shot some moron wondering around like it was a picnic or something, and almost shot a friendly while he was at it. The friendly told Matt something about his mother.
Matt ran for the roof, picking up some dead idiot's automatic on his way 'cause he was running out of bullets; he was almost there and then, and then--- and then something beeped, signaling Matt really should pay attention to it rather than the total waste of his life that he was busy with at that moment. Something to the left of him, something he should have been paying attention to- fuck fuck fuck!!!Matt then looked at it. FUCK!
What is this shit!!
No fucking way! Fucking again?
Shit shit shitshitshit!!
"Mello! MELLO! Mello for fuck's sake where the hell are-"
"What," Mello mouthed around a toothbrush, dragging his feet into Matt's room, "if you got another NVP… or MVP... or whatever the fuck, I still don't. Fuckin'. Care."
Matt only let the sleepy and irritated blonde finish up his tirade because he was busy staring at him and rubbing the crust away from his bloodshot eyes to make sure he in fact actually saw Mello there, standing in front of him, surrounded by the various boxes and wrappers from collectibles Matt got a long time ago from the Star Trek con and never cleaned up. That Mello that he saw was the real Mello and not an all-nighter-spent-playing-COD-induced hallucination. But it was Mello, there; the blonde was even standing on something that looked like Master Yoda. There. In front of Matt.
He slowly lowered his controller and heard his Specnaz being sniped. What the hell…
"What."
"Well... y-you're… here," stuttered Matt.
"Yes, genius. I'm here."
"Here. In... in Britain."
"Yes, I'm also still on planet Earth, you fag. What the fuck's the matter with you?"
"So… you didn't take off to Japan to go and save L and The Boyfriend in the middle of the night… 'cause… you're here."
"Why the fuck would I do that. We're breaking them out on their court hearing. Which is in October. It's August you dumbass. What the hell."
"What the hell," Matt repeated, stunned, and turned to look at his side monitor that was tapped into the hospital surveillance in Japan.
That set up alone took skills, man. Skills.
"What?"
"Well... they were being thrown to jail like five minutes ago 'cause The Boyfriend blabbered or something."
"So?" Mello was annoyed Matt caused a scene just to tell him this. It didn't really matter if the freak and the lovebird were being thrown into jail. Mello and Matt had anticipated it and actually expected it. It wasn't a big deal. It changed nothing and was virtually insignificant.
"So... um, well... you and me... we're in Japan right now. We're wearing pretty SWAT tutus an' rescuing them."
"What?" Mello groaned and shoved Matt away to get a look at the monitor for himself.
"I know, right, 'what'! What the fuck? We're both fuckin'... here. That's- not us..!"
"No shit we're here," Mello said dryly, puzzled as he switched the feed to Matt's TV and subsequently killed his COD screen.
"Then who the fuck're those clowns, man?"
"-sir! Don't kill him, sir! Yagami-san, stop! Don't kill that son of a bitch!" Matsuda's shouting came through the ringing in Soichiro's ears after a few dozen words. Slowly, the fog centered around L's twitching form cleared, and Soichiro could see Matsuda. He could see and hear Matsuda's pleas to stop – to stop what?
Matsuda recognized L, recognized the violin, recognized the last capoeira kick he'd seen him pull before Soichiro shot him.
Matsuda also saw Soichiro. And his gun.
His gun was aimed at L's head.
He was going to kill him.
"Yagami-san, we can't kill him, we need him alive! Stop, put the gun down..! It's over...!"
Oh, what would Soichiro give to put a bullet in L's brains, and it would end this, end all this madness-
Politics.
Though he really didn't care, he imagined how much shit he was in already just by shooting this precious Japanese asset.
Disgusted, Soichiro lowered his gun, planning to kill the son of a bitch when Matsuda wasn't looking, but face to face. It would give him more satisfaction.
"Cuff him," the chief grunted.
If only it wasn't for Matsuda's courtesy. Soichiro didn't want to see that bastard, not really. He didn't want to see his face, his clueless and wronged face, his wounded pride – because the scum wouldn't even recognize what he was shot for.
The bliss of lost memory.
He didn't deserve it.
He deserved to know what kind of garbage he was.
And yet, Matsuda's cruel fingers hooked around the rim of the black mask, and Soichiro prepared to take one last look at that shit's face, before he would put a bullet right between those black eyes.
The mask came off, and for a brief moment the familiar face under the mask fooled the men into secure thinking that the man revealed it was as bad as all the world said he was.
But that moment came, and went.
Not only it wasn't L, it was much, much worse.
It was an FBI agent.
"You goddramn idiots! What the hell are you doing?!" shouted a hysterical Misora Naomi.
---
Soichiro didn't move.
Everything, even the tiny flakes of dust froze in time and stayed still and suspended in the air, white as snowflakes.
"What the hell are you doing here!" shouted Matsuda.
But she screeched, squirmed and jerked around, and Matsuda dove down to do something – something for her.
"Who the hell is this!" The Japanese officers rushed towards them and aimed their guns at Naomi, and subsequently at Matsuda, and she covered her face and screamed again.
"She's FBI, we know her!" vouched Matsuda when Soichiro stood frozen and speechless.
"She's FBI? She's what?"
"We're-" Naomi harked out, her voice breaking, "yes we're fucking FBI, we're all wearing fucking... gah! –ing American SWAT u-uniforms, who the fucking hell else did you think we were you fucking idiots!"
"What the hell are you doing here!"
"Don't give me this shit you f-fucking crooked asshole!" Misora started, fury and pain boiling out and over when Matsuda tightened his belt around her bleeding leg, "We're grabbing L and getting him to the States where you assholes can't let go of his murdering ass for a pile of fucking money!"
"What money! We're transferring him to jail, not letting him go..!" yelled Matsuda.
The confusion set in heavily.
"Why the fuck are you doing that!"
"Because Light confessed!"
"Fucking BULLSHIT, YOU WERE TRANSPORTING HIM OUT AND FREE! If not, then WHY TE FUCK DID YOU MORONS OPEN FIRE AT US!" her voice cracked.
"We thought you were Mello's people trying to save him!"
"What?!"
"We've been expecting them for weeks!"
Misora shouted again and cursed everyone present, their wives and husbands and mothers in livid English, and swung L's violin at them, but they were well out of her reach. So she smacked Matsuda, and the violin's bottom snapped, and one side came apart from the other, but otherwise remained largely intact. This pissed her off even more.
"We thought... you were L!" offered Matsuda for Soichiro, still shouting because Naomi was shouting, and she just hit him when he was helping her, and shouting kept the world from coming apart, it seemed. "With… with your freaky fighting, and with that stupid violin!"
"Let go of that thing for god's sake," was the first thing Soichiro hissed, and Naomi glared at him from under a mop of sweaty black hair, messed after her mask was ripped off.
"I fucking can't! That cunt, that fucking son of a bitch cunt, bastard son of yours fucking glued it to my hand!"
She shook her gloved palm with the violin in it to prove her point. She probably didn't have time to even try to peel it off yet; it was stuck to her black glove, and shiny, clear rock-solid instant glue drips were smeared all over it; it probably soaked through the fibers of her glove and fused with her skin.
What in the world...
Whatever was happening, it still meant Light with L in tow were still at large.
The idea that Light – his son, being in charge of… of this, of everything was as sickening as the idea of holding onto L when Soichiro still thought Naomi was L.
Soichiro tried the radio, everybody on the 10th floor tried their radios. Nobody replied. The radios were dead.
Everybody's cellphone had no signal.
Even the telephones on the floor had no signal, for god's sake.
When Misora ran away from Soichiro, she slammed into a fire exit, because it was locked.
"Sir... sir, the south doors are locked, too."
"What the hell do you meant the doors are locked!"
Every single firedoor was locked, and the elevator was still not working either.
They were trapped.
The few men who knew what really went on had no way of letting the rest of the police force and FBI know not to shoot at each other, and to let them know the suspects were not apprehended.
They could do nothing.
At all.
Light had them strung up like marionettes on strings; he made them into his fools.
It was sickening, really.
"Maybe someone else'll catch them. I mean, it's just Rait-"
"Don't say his name!" Soichiro roared, and Matsuda cowered away before he went on.
"-it's just Him. He's basically pulling his own weight and L's weight, too, because L right now is like... well, luggage. He can't help much. I mean, Ra- He managed to trap us here and all, but then what? He and L hadn't communicated at all, and L's amnesiac. Somebody else'll catch them, don't worry sir."
"You don't know that little shit, Matsuda."
"He probably just figured out it was FBI and not Mello, maybe he even," Matsuda paused, "knew Mello wouldn't come. He just took advantage of it."
"You don't know him, Matsuda- I don't even know him, and he's my-! I don't know how deep this shit goes."
---
When the door to the 10th floor was finally opened by a rather grim-looking technician surveillance woman Soichiro knew, before Matsuda or anyone else could tell her what went on, she said:
"We know."
It was too late.
"They're gone." Matsuda said, stunned.
"Yes. Come with me, Soichiro-san."
"Why?" said Matsuda for the chief.
"Because your," she paused icily, "son is on a videocall. He wants to speak with you."
"What?" said Matsuda.
"I have no son," deadpanned Soichro as they ascended the fire stairs. Everything was quiet – too quiet, and as they went down, they met people, some masked FBI agents and some police officers they knew, staring at them with blank, dead eyes as these people greeted them from pools of blood.
"Jesus, it's a blood-bath," somebody at the back of their procession muttered, and nobody said a word to them.
"He told us exactly where you would be, he had us come and get you. We are stalling because we're trying to triangulate his call, but he manually redirected us to fourteen proxies so far." She sounded appalled and dubious, like such a thing wasn't even possible. "Try to keep him on for as long as you can."
She showed him his seat in front of a monitor and a camera.
Soichiro preferred to remain standing, still as a hollow statue, and feeling every bit like one.
Instead, Matsuda took the seat.
The monitor clicked on.
There, against a tiled wall of some place Soichiro guessed was a bathroom of some kind, sat his son.
He wore a green T-shirt with a panda picture on it and letters WWF – it was as if this person in fact wasn't his son, as Soichiro had never seen his son wear something so down-to-Earth as a regular T-shirt.
He had a bruise on his lip and a gash on his cheek, but other than that, he looked relaxed and smug, even.
"Hello," he said pleasantly.
Soichiro said nothing.
"Raito... what the hell? Why?" said Matsuda.
Soichiro let Matsuda do all the talking, because if he himself opened his mouth, he was sure it would be to scream a cry of anger as he smashed his son's smug face on the monitor with a chair.
Light, whose sole focus was on his father's shaded figure in the background, shifted his gaze to Matsuda, who was right there in front of him, pretty much blocking Soichiro. It was like Light just realized Matsuda was there at all.
"Wouldn't you rather know how I pulled this of?"
"Luck," barked Matsuda. "You screwed up by telling L was L, and picked up on the FBI being here and improvised because it was your last resort. It paid off. Where is L?"
"Oh, L is right here." He smiled pleasantly again, and went on in his sweet, honey voice, "And... did you really think after all I went through just fighting him off at the beginning, and then hiding him from you, I would just... screw up and spit his name out? Just like that?"
"What?"
"You're naïve, Matsuda. And the rest of them, well, they are just stupid. Get it? It was just after my last cast was removed. Suspicious, right? I called his name so that a very suspicious warrant for our transportation to jail would get issued. So that the FBI who are already suspicious of Japanese corruption would move in and try to extract us."
"...so that we would think the FBI is Mello's rescue team."
"Oh, there is a lot more to it!" Light rolled his eyes and smirked, and Matsuda had an urge to slap the monitor's projection of Light's face. "I knew exactly when they would move in, what stairs they would take, what cameras they would scramble, and how many of them there would be. Fifteen. They would break up into five and ten. Six to hold off the first floor. Nine would take each subsequent floor up to tenth. I put together my own signal scrambler on the 10th floor –"
"How did you-"
"Yeah, about that. Who in their right mind gave me a computer?"
"We monitored everything you did on that-!"
"You gave me a computer. It's self-explanatory."
The camera photage - even something as small as Light waving "Mello" in was a reassurance clue for police to pick up, that the SWAT were the enemy, that the SWAT were Mello's people.
It was all an carefully constructed show.
Right from the smallest tedious detail of the exact duplicate of their clothes lying around, making it look like they changed into SWAT uniforms, and right up to programming the elevator to skip the 10th floor, right to knocking out Misora Naomi and gluing L's violin to her hand.
Why?
"So that someone would radio out that a 'suspect was apprehended'," Light explained, toying with the sleeve edge of his green panda shirt flirtatiously. "So that I could cut off communication, and I would be walked to the helicopter, no questions asked... so I could steal it, and get away." He added a little 'running away' motion with his fingers as he moved his hand across the screen for a demonstration.
This, all of this...
It sounded good in theory, but it was a terrible joke of luck that Light even got as far as killing – yes, Soichiro's son was nothing short of a filthy murderer, killing the first five guards who took them from L's room.
It was a long-shot Light would be able to take out the helicopter guard.
And then, according to his sly and grin of an inflated ego, actually fly a helicopter.
All while having L in tow. L was a liability. It was nearly impossible to do without someone dragging him down; something as meticulously planned as Light's plan needed precision, and with someone clueless and uninformed, it was ridiculous Light even pulled half of it off, let along the whole thing, without any help.
Or did he not bring L along?
L wasn't in the camera.
Matsuda was about to ask where L was when a tech person tracing the videocall shook his head in frustration for the fifth time, and restarted the system.
Matsuda still needed time.
"Is that what you called us for? To show off? What do you want, Raito?"
"Oh I can't say now, I am saving that part for a little later. In, say... four minutes. You'll see, it's really good. For now though, I'm just having a nice conversation. Don't you like talking to me, Matsuda, dad?"
Soichiro did not acknowledge Light's word choice.
"Where is L," he grunted, his words short and sharp.
"Eating something, probably." Light shrugged. "He bitches a lot, so I just left him alone to do whatever he wants."
"He's not there, is he?" Matsuda quipped, suddenly boastful about having something at least to their advantage.
"No, he's here."
"You're lying. There's no way you could've dragged a deadweight amnesia patient through that whole plan of yours without getting him killed. He's either dead, or still here."
"Oh, yeah. About that. There he is. –Ryuzaki! Get over here, they don't believe me!"
"Raito-kun does not need to shout."
L's jean-clad feet came into view first, indicating that Light was indeed sitting on the bathroom floor. L's jeans were a new pair, not the torn and ragged kind he usually wore, but they had to do. They were also tighter, and not as baggy.
L plopped down next to Light, with a tub of ice-cream in one hand, and a rather large scoop stuck to his table spoon in the other. He licked it with the flat of his tongue.
"Raito, what are you going to do with him?" Matsuda said to Light, disappointed.
"Me? Oh, noth-"
But L interrupted Light, and Light gave him an unamused sideways glare.
"Hello Matsuda-san!" L said owlishly, "I believe I owe you a toffee."
"What?" mouthed Matsuda without using his vocal cords. This... this man was what the whole thing was about, this clueless amnesiac who enjoyed blissful oblivion due to memory loss, this sitting duck who could in no way escape the police because he didn't know how... and yet there he was, on the other side of the screen, virtually untraceable, enjoying ice-cream and telling Matsuda he owed him a toffee.
"What?" said Light for Matsuda.
"Ah, you see, it was a mental promise. Once Matsuda-san vowed to catch me or Mello at the beginning of our joint investigation, I decided I would give Matsuda-san a congratulatory toffee if he actually succeeds, and as Matsuda-san did manage to catch me in a race, he deserves his toffee... to be perfectly honest, it was going to be a minty at first, but I ate the minty and so I changed the prize to a toffee-"
L rambled on.
A/N: now you will tell me what went through your head as you read this chapter. 8D
Who saw this coming.
Now who saw the end of this chapter coming.
THANK YOU FOR THE REVIEWS: fouloldron, Behan, Cakeat, Jabba, DNLover02, Warratah, Nooo!, Bling Justice, PaperMasque, Huehuetecti, Jetta, Canderjack, Darkling Days, Yoshiluvr, Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, Sev, Ellan54, ArtistOfLight, Dark green Poop, Keyinei, Rin5o, Altair718, Nardaviel, Anemone Kurosaki, iRoteLveOnUrArms, fan-fan31, s3v3n-d34d1135, Empty Melodies, yenillor, Sovoyita, and My Favorite Crooked Smile!
I LOVE YOU ALL FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER!
One person kinda saw stuff coming, for which I feel very proud.Canderjack said, "that's not L that just got shot. Just because you can see black hair under the helmet and he's carrying the violin doesn't mean it's L."
I LOVE YOU TO DEATH. TOFFEE FOR YOU! By the way, the congratulatory toffee thing goes all the way back to CH10. ;D
Now, if you want to know how it ends, since this is a cliffhanger and all, you will review.
Or else I won't update next week. D:
-blackmails you to review-
Press the magic button for….
CH32: Devil's Trill, pt 1.
I LOVE YOU.
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