Always that question.
0o0o0o
A thousand preemptive answers tumbled through L's mind, and all of them fell into bitter ashes on his tongue.
What are we, really? That was always the question our rules couldn't answer.
'We're L and Light,' the detective offered acridly, before admitting that might not be true anymore. The moment when 'Light' became 'Kira' and the moment he'd started personally switching the former out for the latter were vastly different.
I told you I had overdosed, on nights without sleep and too much sugar. All to explain the way I burned up around you, when your mere presence was the drug I'm addicted to.
Who are they, who have they become since they set each other on fire and treated the burns themselves?
A detective and a suspect. Two people who never should have had the chance to fall, let alone matter so much to each other.
Is it a last fling, or true love? Or just a drug that they injected through their veins so they could close their eyes at night, a knife set on the stove and used to trace old scars and ink on the skin?
Or was it love; somehow, between two people with no chances and no options left?
L wanted to say all of that, all of the begging, wanting, hoping words that hovered between the spaces of his thoughts.
But you can't do that. You can't explain that what you had was never love, though you tried to make it feel that way. It was intoxication, it was cold and heavy addiction, it was puppet threads pulling you together underneath the water instead of following the red strings under your own free will.
Maybe he could have offered up those stuttering words to Light with a prayer that he'd understand it, but not to Kira. To Kira, all he could say was 'I love you' and hope Light was still listening.
0o0o0o
'I love you…'
The god could feel Light struggling, begging to be let free, to answer that he'd always felt the same way. Oh, that love and longing and pain at the silence was all the better to crush, push him down, snap another few holding lines in the web.
Instead, the god hummed and smiled like L's answer was amusing, cute, infantile.
L pretended he didn't care, or he didn't see, or that the careless reaction was normal. But the god saw the hurt in his eyes and the way he pulled back like he'd been burned.
The god saw all of that and loved it, loved it and the way Light fell a little bit further into his own hell.
I'm going to take everything from you both, the god promised.
0o0o0o
L wrapped the raw confusion and pain in a thousand strings and buried it deep. Emotions had no place in L the detective's analytical skills. They were fragile things that never held up to the test of life, right?
What L had analyzed: When Light had touched the Death Note, he had changed back to Kira somehow.
What L suspected: Kira had returned and intended to kill him.
What L hoped with a desperate sort of prayer: Light, his Light, was still somewhere and retrievable.
What L knew, after years when he hadn't needed to lie to himself: Light was gone-as good as dead, but not quite there yet.
Hurting and unreachable.
Lying monsters do nothing but hurt, but in that moment, L wished his mind wouldn't tell the truth. He would have rather had it covered up, to slowly peel the bandage off the wound later, see what happened. It would be slow and painful-more painful that this quick stab-but this stab was through his heart.
Lies sometimes kept people safe, but in the end, truth prevailed. L never wanted to see the truth again.
0o0o0o
'Are you okay? You look worried, Ryuzaki.'
A cool hand touched the lines that had started to appear at the corners of his eyes, and he flinched back. He remembered when Beyond had done that, wiped away the tears in a pause between biting at his neck and given a smile like, 'Did I really do this? Did I really make the great detective L cry?'
The same smile Kira wore. He must be crying again.
'You know…' Kira leaned closer, his breath tickling L's neck, 'I wondered. From the moment we met, I tried to imagine what it was like to be you.'
The tone of his voice was purring seductiveness now. What was it about people connecting pain with pleasure on such a primal level?
'I never imagined that I'd find out. You, Ryuzaki, always think you've won, always think you're a cut above everybody else, always think you are some god removed from this world who deals out justice with the flick of a hand.'
'You are a child, Ryuzaki, a child who's guardian angel is gone, a child who never fit in to the extent that all they could ever be was a brilliant mind behind a letter.'
Kira remembered, every confession that had spilled from L's lips to Light, and he carved them into torture tools hewed from something more intimate than bone.
Kira knew how to hurt him in the way Light never would have.
With words, words, words; words and his famous lies that weren't quite lies anymore.
'You are a child, L, and you never grew up.'
Last time he'd heard his name in that honey-sweet voice, it'd been a plea for more, harder, please, L. Light had used it like a prayer, Kira, as a weapon.
And it hurt. So much worse than he ever would have admitted. So much worse than he had ever been prepared to feel at Light's hands.
'You are a child dependent on me; addicted to me. Without the promise that I'd break our deal another time, you'll be left hanging forever.' Kira laughed and pushed his chin up for a kiss. 'A junkie without another hit, that's what you are.'
Maybe it was the way Kira knew that this would cut deeper than any physical wound ever could. Maybe it was the fears he'd held onto for forever and a day given voice, and Light's voice at that. Maybe it was just that kiss, too hard around the edges and without a hint of Light's warmth.
Kira had kissed him wrong.
'What are you, then?' Too loud. His voice was too loud, and it cracked and broke like he was crying. Maybe he was.
Kira tilted his head. 'I don't know. Why don't you tell me?' Line delivered, challenge set, smile just in case he'd switched the glasses right.
He shouldn't tell. He shouldn't take the bait, because Kira's offerings were always burned with poison.
He'd always return, try to best him; he'd always act back. Answer back, turn back, run, desperate and ruined, back to his drug.
'You are childish,' L whispered. 'You have problems with accepting that you could never have been anything more than a good student without the power that was never yours.'
'You need to think you're a god so you never see that you're just as human as the people you killed. You need to think that you were chosen, that you are special, that you were the only one who could bring justice upon the world, or you fall apart.'
L was screaming at himself to stop, to tell Light that he didn't mean it, that he didn't know where any of it had come from.
You know where it came from. You've always been thinking this. You just didn't want to believe you could.
'You are nothing but a human, Light Yagami, a human who borrowed power as a ticket to a game he never should have played.'
Stop. Stop, stop, stop!
Why are you doing this?
'If I'm addicted to you, then you're addicted to your own deluded world you've built inside your head. You are childish because you're still playing a game you should have given up a long time ago.'
Why, L wondered, as he broke the only good thing he'd had for so long, why do human beings find so much pleasure in corrupting beautiful things, in their own destruction?
0o0o0o
Did L really think that?
That he didn't know he was nothing but a human with a notebook, with a shinigami's death sentence hanging over his head every day?
That he didn't know he was nothing but a dice roll in the gods's game, that he'd proved there were a thousand other people who would have done the same thing, given the Death Note?
That he hadn't played this borrowed-power game of lies and words and fire and love and hate for him, for him and his vulnerability and another chance?
That he didn't know he was Kira, and that he wished he was dead instead?
See, Kira whispered. Some people barely need more than an invitation to turn into ugly human monsters.
I see, Kira.
I know.
I just hoped that it'd be different. That L would be different.
I guess I was wrong.
0o0o0o
Kira looked deranged. He looked like Beyond. He had brown eyes.
'He' was not Kira at this moment. He was Light, the Light L wanted to run to and hold and kiss and apologize for everything he'd said.
'He' was Light, and his eyes were blank and bitter and destroyed.
L had ruined everything.
'Interesting…'
'Is now the time to also say that I used you? That I never loved you? That you are nothing to me, Ryuzaki?'
L forgot how to cry in that moment. He forgot a million things, like what it had felt like to burn and dance and fall.
Light was telling the truth now, and how easily he'd swallowed all his lies of 'I love you' before now made him sick.
How many times had he repeated it back?
'I guess it's over now. Now that we don't have the chain. You have no excuse to come running back.'
L was breaking, broken, and all of Light's spun-glass lies shattered and stuck in his skin when he walked.
'Go!' Light screamed. 'Leave!'
Light…
Light aged decades in a second as he stared at the man he had once loved.
'Just go.'
L did.
0o0o0o
Light held until L had completely disappeared from the room.
There was a crack in the shell he'd used since forever, and water was seeping through and freezing, spreading the fracture wider.
Hairline cracks, like spiderweb lines, like ink; they're all connected.
Humans are made of mirrors, mirrors that, if they reflect something enough, start to take a permanent shadow of where it always stood.
Humans are made of mirrors, and their delicate balance with every other paled reflection can be shattered with a word, a glance, a night.
Humans are made of mirrors, and no reflection can ignore the crushed glass all over your heart.
This had been their bed, Light thought dully, and he'd woken up that one time with L's peaceful breathing.
Did it still smell like him? It'd only been a few hours since they were here together.
It did.
Oh God, it did, like rain and smoke and burnt sugar. It smelled like nights and sharp edges. It was him, all of this was what he had been, what they had been, and he was standing in the wreckage with the shattered pieces at his feet.
Endorphins from the words on his palm fading when salt water fell on them.
It was only fitting for someone like him to end alone like this.
0o0o0o
L had thought wandering was random. How did that explain the way he kept ending up back in the places they had haunted, the solitary confinement cell, the hallway it'd become more than single nights?
How did he explain how he finally fell asleep huddled in the pillows of what used to be Light's bed, losing track of for how long he cried?
How long he had screamed at himself to wind back his clock, to swallow back words even if they cut his throat going down?
To stop breaking beautiful, precious things?
To stop cutting all the strings that held him together?
To just stop reaching out for fire that looked beautiful, because it hurt. Why couldn't he remember that it'd always burn him?
0o0o0o
L…
L, I am Kira.
I thought you should know, before both of us are dead.
0o0o0o
Angel, Light...
What have I done?
0o0o0o
The god looked at his handiwork and was impressed. Not even he had predicted how far the cracks would spread.
It was the most interesting thing, how deeply these two could hurt each other.
Even more interesting was how each of his pawns broke. Light usually held it inside himself, inside a steel shell, before he released it all in a screaming fit, crying and holding desperately onto every memory of happier times. He took everything and used it as fuel, then guttered out.
He fought when it was convenient for him, and then he gave up.
L was quieter. He kept his poison under his skin, and it bled into his bloodstream, killing him softly.
He refused to cut it out, to let go. He'd rather suffer.
Blood and bruises, there two were. L would make you hurt forever, but you'd have to find another way to die. Light was a bloody explosion of crimson and the shell ripping into your stomach before it was all over.
They were drinking the other's poisons right now, weren't they? L, who had resigned himself to quiet, gnawing pain, had to deal with stretched seconds of white-hot agony that he had no defenses against. And Light, who had hardened to milliseconds of supernovas inside his skull, had to force himself into lie awake throughout the night, simply aching and unable to taste the sweetness of ever ending the pain.
The red strings between them were frayed with a poisoned knife, and it was seeping along the cords to their hearts.
Kira watched his masterpieces, his two broken mirrors, and laughed at the world.
You never should have been together. You are an angel and a demon. You are human mistakes. You are firewood, burning each other to ashes, and yet you are barely matches in my game.
0o0o0o
It wasn't supposed to end like this, not really.
I thought they would have had a different ending in mind.
But this is what would have happened, with Kira, with them.
:: Hearing laughter that isn't yours, and you love the way it sounds like it could have been
-LyingMonsters, the one who simply lets the workings decide how they move