notes/warnings
+ still probably a load of rubbish.
Bang
L presses his chin into his knee. It's not particularly comfortable, but there aren't a lot of other positions he can maintain. He barely fits in the crate as it is.
The university receives a daily delivery of food for the cafeteria, by truck. According to all documentation, L is just another load of neatly-stacked 500mL cartons of milk. He's sealed the crate from the inside, screws he can remove in a hurry when the time comes.
No one examines the contents of a delivery truck too closely. It was M who had come up with the idea.
M has started to cough, according to the latest text message from Watari. L bites his lip.
"Is this the most demeaning thing you've ever done?" Rae asks, poking its head through the side of the crate. L flinches at the sight of it.
Five years. Is it honestly not going to leave him alone?
"I dried a serial killer's feet once," L says softly, barely a whisper, such a bad memory. "No more talking. I need to be careful."
Rae is quiet for almost a minute.
"Well, you do know the names of the driver, the inspector at the checkpoint, and the two women who are receiving the shipment," it says thoughtfully. "I'd say you could get out of any situation with no trouble. Oh, but wait. You're too scared to use the note. What a pity. Mail will just have to die."
L gives it his most withering look. M is not dying.
He hasn't brought a disguise, only a fake ID. No one knows his face anyway, he's always been very careful. The others board their flight in three hours, but there have already been warnings it might be delayed. He's on his own.
That's all right. He can work alone. He prefers it, even.
Which is just as well, because the police are refusing to cooperate. They're not hindering him, per se, but they've essentially said their hands are tied. The rest of the country doesn't trust him, so neither can they.
"No one is going to be listening for voices in the back of a van," Rae says disparagingly. "We won't be there for half an hour. Can't we talk about something?"
L regards it for a moment.
"I suppose. What do you wish to talk about?"
The Shinigami plops down next to him, so that exactly half of it is visible beyond the wall of the crate. L edges away as much as he can, repulsed by it now that he knows what it wants. It never bothered him when he thought it was just an impartial marionette made of bones and feathers.
"You're a very accepting person, aren't you," it says sardonically. "Happy to sit silently in a crate for two hours. Happy to let good people die because you're frightened of stopping the evil ones."
"I don't let good people die!" L snaps. "I bring justice, as much as I possible can, and I do things the right way!"
He's yelling by the end and the truck stops dead. L freezes.
"Whoops," Rae says, grinning. "Now what have you done?"
He hears the front door open, and feels the weight of the truck shift slightly under his feet. He has splinters from crouching on the rough wooden crate floor. Damn that Shinigami.
Footsteps, and then the back of the truck is slammed open. Sunlight floods through the cracks in the wood. L doesn't dare breathe.
A rational person will not look in the crates. The truck driver has no reason to be suspicious.
"Oy," he says gruffly. "Show yourself!"
"Here I am," Rae says brightly, next to L's right ear. It feigns a wave with one massive, bony hand in the general direction of where the driver is probably standing
L doesn't respond, of course.
"Rats," the driver snarls after a few long moments drag past. "I'll have to get the whole thing treated again on the weekend."
They're plunged into darkness. A moment later the motor starts up, and L breathes again.
"If you only wish to encourage me to use this notebook, then I'll ignore you," L stipulates, after a good fifteen minutes of baleful silence. "If you really want a conversation, talk about something neutral."
Rae crosses its arms behind its skull. The Shinigami is lying on the floor, with only it's neck and head visible to L.
"All right," it says calmly, apparently thinking. "Hm. Why do you keep the idiot around?"
It's a fairly obscurely-worded question, but L knows exactly who Rae is referring to.
"Matsuda is a part of the team," he states simply. He pulls a boiled sweet out of his back pocket and chews on it.
"I can see that, but why? He is deficient in both intelligence and common sense, surely."
L wiggles his toes. He's starting to cramp in inconvenient places. He'll need to be able to move quickly when they arrive.
"I'd be interested to hear what you think about Matsuda, actually," he says.
"What I think?"
"Well, yes. Being a member of the royalty of your kind, I presume you would think of him as... entertainment," L tells it. "Or do Shinigami kings not have fools?"
"You consider him to be a jester?" Rae asks, with a mirthful snort. "That makes sense."
"No," L replies. "I just wanted to know if you did. Why do you think I keep Matsuda around?"
He starts to pick the splinters out of his feet. It's difficult, in the low light. A challenge. There's a tarp next to him that he could squat on instead, but he'd prefer to have his bare feet as close to the ground as possible.
"Well, I think it coincides with my own theory. You're frightened of being too successful," the Shinigami says dismissively. "Therefore, your team consists of two competent agents, a psychopath, and a clown."
L remains silent.
"But Touta Matsuda is by far the most useless," Rae continues. "He's a risk to everyone around him. He clearly can't be trusted to follow an order, he thinks he knows better than you, he makes grave mistakes even when he's apparently trying to do what you've told him, and to be honest, I'm wondering whether he's actually a double agent."
L snorts.
"You think Matsuda is betraying me? And here I thought you were fairly knowledgeable about humans."
Rae shrugs.
"Don't say I didn't warn you," it tells him, and then grins. "You know how to get rid of him, anyway."
"I am not," L pronounces carefully, "getting rid of anyone."
It's the eighteenth time he's had to say it in the past four hours, and Rae is starting to get on his nerves.
Eight minutes later, Watari sends him a message.
M stable. 3 minutes.
L nods. Watari is tracking the progress of the truck. They're about to arrive. He pulls the screwdriver out of his pocket and starts to neatly disassemble the top of his crate.
"What are you doing?" Rae asks with interest. "Trying to get caught?"
L hoists off the lid and stands up in one graceful movement. The roof is just high enough that he can stand in his usual posture without grazing his head. All around him are stacked crates identical to the one he's been travelling in, and a few larger cartons and packages covered with tarp.
He pulls a cap out of his pocket and jams it onto his head. He grabs his own tarp out of the crate and drops it on the floor.
"I see," Rae says, surveying the place. "Very clever."
L nods. Then he picks up the empty crate and hoists it over the others, placing it down gently as far from the door as possible. He repositions the lid on top, so that it doesn't look out of place. Then he squats down against the wall, away from the entrance, with one knee up and one knee down and an arm thrown over his head. He's already worked the position out - his body will throw a shape that looks conceivably like a bundle of perishable goods.
He pulls the tarp over himself with his free hand and waits.
The door opens. He hears male and female voices - the driver and the receivers. The driver is still grumbling about rats. They each grab one of the frontmost crates.
Exactly as predicted.
L waits twenty seconds, pulls off the tarp, throws it to the back of the truck, and hops out.
"Oh, no way," Rae sneers. "That was far too easy. They didn't even look back."
L nods. He has a gun strapped to his stomach, and a cap that says "Idia pathology courier". Students are milling past. No one pays him much attention as he ambles around to the front of the cafeteria.
He's in.
M sends him a message that says still alive. One corner of L's mouth curves up slightly. A girl with pigtails and too many books bumps into him and says 'oh, sorry' before rushing off. Everyone around him is busy, bustling. The campus is huge, the buildings stretch seemingly up into the sky. The walls are marble, shiny and cold. There's litter on the ground, skittering around as the wind blows. It isn't raining yet, but the sky is dark and the air feels heavy and moist.
L never really studied in university, the same way he never really went to school. He had always been considered too much of a genius to mix with people is own age. His eyes pick out a couple making out behind a tree, a group of young men stressing about an exam next to the library, a girl doing her makeup using a parked car as a mirror. L wonders idly what it would be like to have a normal life. To be nobody.
Well, he'd be free of Rae, for a start.
The laboratory in question is in the South building, basement level. Viral research lab 3A. He has photographs of the men he's looking for. Two are European, one is south African, and another has a history that's difficult to trace, but he's definitely Caucasian. L thinks he might be from Australia, originally.
Of course, they're not more important than the rest of the staff. They're just the markers. The whole lab must be involved, somehow.
Only those with less than twenty-five percent Asian ancestry are affected, according to M's calculations.
They're calling the killing influenza strain 'flu-x'. L thinks it sounds like something Near would have come up with. And then Mello would have shoute-
Never mind about that.
There will be lots of security. There's no way L will be able to sneak in, not without help. But he's got no intention of sneaking in unnoticed. The laboratory deals with a pathology company called Idia. They send viral samples twice a day by courier. Thankfully, the heads of Idia had not been coy about sharing the information they knew, once they had realised they were dealing with L.
"We've been keeping a close eye on all samples that could potentially be used as bioterrorism agents," Professor Mae Aizawa had told him, "but of course, nothing is even close to the genotype of this awful flu-x. This particular laboratory is, to our knowledge, working towards making vaccinations for some of the ordinary strains of influenza. Usually injectable, although they were experimenting with mucosal delivery a few months ago."
Aizawa. L wonders if she's related.
Of course, no laboratory would be stupid enough to send off samples of the specimen they're using to commit genocide, but it does give him a way in. L takes out his ID card. Ryan Seeto. Temporary Idia courier, usually works in data collection. One quarter Japanese, just enough.
It's still not a good plan. Once he's in, he needs to find out how those four men have managed to survive. And then, later, who's behind the flu-x virus in the first place. Someone has hired this laboratory, L knows that for sure. This isn't the work of a few professors, this is the work of someone big.
Someone with a god complex.
Again.
He's thankful for Rae's silence, his mind is whirring overtime as it is, still skimming over all the information he read before he left.
Everyone who had set foot in this university who wasn't at least one quarter Asian died in the first forty-eight hours the flu-x virus hit. Save four men. From the same lab. It's not a question of whether they survived by chance.
L is one hundred percent certain they have either a vaccine or a cure. He just hopes its the latter.
Given the nature of the lab's previous works, that's only thirty-eight percent likely.
Lab 2B, lab 3, lab 3A. L stops and holds his hand up to the doorknob.
None of them ever showed any flu-like symptoms. Meaning they knew when it was coming.
It also meant that four men let an entire district suffer, while they knew how to prevent it. And why would whoever-is-in-charge save them? If the goal was to wipe out every foreigner in Japan, why protect the scientists? Certainly, you'd promise to protect them, but why go through with it after the virus had been released?
Because anyone who had a cure could hold the world to ransom, of course. These men probably didn't know it, but they would be exposed by their own employers, held up as an example to the world.
If the terrorists have their way.
L doesn't understand racism. He's seen so much of both worlds - this one and the last one - and he's come to the conclusion that every single person is fascinatingly, intricately, impossibly unique. Why would someone attempt to generalise the entire population on a trait as broad as skin colour? At least generalising based on whether or not someone was a convicted axe murder had some relevance to your own life.
And even that was a dangerous thing to do.
"You do realise you'll die, now," Rae says calmly. "You've been exposed to the virus. You'll die too."
L knocks. The door swings open. A man with curly brown hair and blue eyes opens the door. He's not much older than L. His nametag reads: E Smith.
Edward Smith. One of the four. Child prodigy, completed a masters degree in virology at age fourteen. Part of the team that came up with the existing single-dose rabies vaccine in the United States.
Why have you let this happen? L thinks.
He bows.
"Sorry I'm late," he says politely. "I'm, uh, here to pick up the samples."
"Wait here," Edward tells him. "I'll go get them."
L peers past him, into the room. There are eight scientists, three women and five men. Most seem to be very busy, but two of the women are looking back at him. L waves.
"Would you like some help carrying them?" he asks, desperately scanning the laboratory. The scientists are working in the main room, inside little air-locked glass cabinets, using robotic arms. But there are a lot of areas out of sight. Three sets of doors leading into what L knows are higher-security rooms, the kind only used for very dangerous infectious material. The doors are each equipped with fingerprint scanners and retinal scanners.
Now why would a vaccination facility need those?
His question is, apparently, too out of the ordinary. Another man looks around.
"Go and get the samples, Smith," he says firmly, striding towards the door. He's older, and almost as wide as he is tall. He stares down at L. He isn't wearing a nametag.
"Who are you? Haven't seen you before. Where's Takashi?"
He his tone is both unsettled and vaguely threatening. L sighs loudly, inappropriately, and slouches even more than usual.
"Yeah, I'm a temp. First day. Takashi's sick, man. Says he'll kick my ass if I screw up."
He picks his nose, just for good measure.
The man rolls his eyes.
"Heaven forbid they employ anyone competent," he says darkly.
He has to be Phillip Woodford, unknown Caucasian descent. His financial records show he travelled to Japan with his sister last year. Her name is Marnie Woodford. She works for the Japanese police force. She was admitted to hospital with the flu on the second day of the flu-x outbreak. Philip went to visit her eight hours later. Her recovery was so miraculous that the doctors let her go home by the next morning. Her medical records say 'ordinary flu'.
There's an sixty-nine percent chance that it wasn't the ordinary flu at all. If that's the case, then what they have is not only a preventative, but also a cure. And easily transferable, in some way. There's no way the people in charge would have wanted it to be easily to pass on. The scientists must have altered it in secret. Interesting.
He needs to find that cure. In the next thirty seconds, or anything he does is going to be suspicious.
Smith comes back with several canisters in a bag and hands them to him.
"Thanks, man," L says, drawling a little. "Say, ain't you that Edward Smith that did all the fancy things with them vaccy-nations? I dunno much 'bout science, but my girlfriend's real smart like, and she says you're awesome."
Smith flushes a little. Woodford growls and stomps back into the lab. He hits a button on the wall, and tinted glass doors slide into place, cutting L's vision off from everything except Smith and about four square feet of the laboratory atrium.
"I like to be able to help people," Smith says, and his voice trembles a little. "Vaccines are fascinating. Look, I can't be out here talking to you."
L's head is still spinning. Woodford never gave his sister anything, as far as records show. No injections. A hospital would never allow those. So how?
L stares at Smith, slowly, turning things over inside his head.
Twenty...something percent.
"Oh, yeah," he agrees, laughing stupidly. "I mean, I don' even know what the words mean. She's all excited about parentally orentally buckle suppository...something, I dunno."
Smith brightens.
"You mean buccal repository vaccines? They're amazing, aren't they. They, well, they work where ordinary injections can't. I'm rambling. You probably don't understand anything I'm saying, do you?" Smith hesitates and snickers nervously. "Anyway, thanks. Say hi to your girlfriend from me."
L has a gun under his shirt. He had planned to hold someone to ransom, if needed.
Usually injectable, although they were experimenting with mucosal delivery a few months ago.
Yes.
Smith goes to walk away. L doesn't need to hold him at gunpoint. He only needs one thing.
"Wait," L says, grabs Smith by the sleeve of his lab coat, and kisses him.
And then, he runs.
"For a laboratory that's got nothing to hide, they've sure got a lot of security guards with guns. And just because a guy kissed another guy."
"That's exactly what they didn't want me to do," L tells Rae quietly. "It's a repository mucosal vaccine. It's-"
"Absorbed through mucus membranes, ie, the mouth. Being repository, it provides them with constant absorption over a specified period of time. Therefore transmissible by mouth to mouth contact. I know."
"You surprise me," L says grudgingly.
"I read a lot. I get bored."
"What, is it boring just tormenting people all day?"
He had to think on his feet. He can't outrun fifteen guards with guns, especially with no direct route back, but he can outlast them. He's barricaded himself into one of the bomb shelters in the next building. They know he's there, but they can't get in. And he has phone signal.
"The others won't be here for eight hours, so you might as well get comfortable," he says, wondering absently how comfortable one can be when they're made entirely out of bones.
"Eight hours, unless Matsuda has sabotaged you again."
"You won't rile me," L tells it with quiet certainty. "I trust my team."
"Isn't that how you died in the first place?" Rae asks gleefully.
L ignores him. He's not sure if Rae is randomly insulting him, or if it's actually intelligent enough to deliberately try to wound him, but the comment stings.
The truth is, L is point two percent less confident in his own abilities than he was before he died.
"You have ten seconds, or we'll blow the place up," someone yells from outside.
L can only faintly hear them. They've been making similar threats for the past half an hour. Thing is, they'll want him alive. They need to know who he works for. Whoever the ringleaders of this genocide operation are, they're scared.
What L is worried about is that they might destroy their own laboratory. He needs that evidence. It's not enough just to get the cure, he needs to stop the people responsible, or it will just happen again.
He sticks his thumb in his mouth. He's out of sweets, and the room is dark. The only light is from the curious yellow flames that seem to burn on the inside of Rae's ribcage, and he knows that the people outside won't be able to see that. The bomb shelter is gritty and disused. There's carpet on the floor, but it's covered by a thick layer of dust. The walls are grimy, paint peeling in long curly strips. Spider webs decorate the corners of the ceiling, and every so often he sees a cockroach zip from one shadow to another.
They're cutting it close. M was infected ten hours ago. L knows that logically, he has another thirty-eight hours before the time he's most likely to die. But L also knows that the cure probably doesn't work after about eighteen hours, otherwise there would be no reason for Woodford to rush to his sister's side.
The others need to smuggle him in, they can't risk waiting until L can travel back to base. After that, logically, they should probably start getting swabs of L's mouth and distributing them to the various hospitals. That will be unpleasant. He hates having things in his mouth that aren't drenched in sugar.
"This is quite a tiresome way of doing things," he muses.
"You're telling me."
Clearly, they should start with the hospital containing Anna Simpson, so that things don't become nasty. Neither Watari nor M have mentioned her death yet, so L can presume she is still alive at present.
All there is left to do, is wait.
It's been three hours. No one is giving him any new information, and L isn't used to have nothing to do with his mind. He has no other cases in the works to ponder, and he isn't masochistic enough to try and psychoanalyse Rae.
He's not bored. He wishes he were just bored. He's antsy, on edge, nerves strung just a little too tight.
There's a twenty-seven...no, twenty-six percent chance they won't be able to save Mail. M. And that's far too much.
When he was alive, he'd never have let himself be so affected by his own emotions. Maybe he has changed by more than point two percent. Point two five, even. L frowns. That is a problem, and one which cannot be allowed to continue. He decides he'll ask Watari to start putting him through mental training again.
Tomorrow. Once M is safe.
The people outside have gotten quiet, but L knows they're still there. Rae is tracing designs into the dirt. They're surprisingly intricate.
"So," L says conversationally. "I'm the only way you can possibly succeed the king?"
"Yes," Rae says, without looking at him. The red eyes bother L less than they probably should. "The king's own decision, not mine."
"Yet, you don't seem to be concerned when I seem to be in danger," L says. "I could presume that you have absolute faith in my ability to survive -"
Rae snorts.
"- but I think that would be foolish," L finishes. "So, what happens if I die? To your mission, I mean?"
"Oh, it gets passed on to the next most worthy person," Rae says lightly. "Nothing to worry about. I'd probably have an easier job of it."
"I see," L says grimly, touching his own lips. "So that's why you were unconcerned with me exposing myself to the virus. You stand to benefit from my death."
Just as he suspected. So the Shinigami cannot be used as his own personal insurance policy. Disappointing, but expected.
It shrugs its shoulderblades.
"Doesn't matter to me, really. You'll change your mind."
"I will never change my mind," L says sternly, hugging his knees. Rae doesn't respond straight away, and the only noise in the room is the ticking of his own watch. The seconds seem like hours. Watari sends him another message.
M unconcious.
L drops the phone.
Unconscious is not the same as dead.
Sleeping is not the same as dead.
M will be fine. Watari never makes spelling mistakes, but that doesn't mean anything. M will be fine.
"You know," Rae says, "you could get out of here right now."
"No."
He still has time. All his calculations say he still has time.
"You know the names of four of the scientists."
And he can control their actions. He knows. Rae knows he knows, damn it. Owners of a death note can control their victim's actions before they die.
"Cause of death: shoots everyone around him before turning the gun on himself," Rae says, apparently to himself. "So easy."
"No," L says, twitching. He needs sugar. There is no sugar.
"These men are scum," Rae tells him. "I saw your disgust when you talked to Smith. And you kissed him."
Shinigami don't judge people. Even the Shinigami King doesn't judge people. L knows that. Rae doesn't mean what it says. It's just trying to manipulate him. It's just saying words, trying to get a reaction. He should not bestow any meaning on Rae's words, because Rae doesn't even know what they mean.
It doesn't matter.
"I said no."
"What will happen to them when they are arrested as terrorists?" Rae asks, tone changing as if it's genuinely curious. It moves around him somewhere, fluidly, without physical form for a moment. When it re-appears, it has his death note in its hands. L deliberately doesn't look at it.
"Justice will happen."
"The death penalty."
"It's still different," L tells it sharply. "The answer is still no."
He wants to be rid of Rae. He wants the death note to burn, like the Shinigami's chest. It's not fair to put a human in this position, just to test a death god.
"People are not toys. They are not sheep. They are not nothing," he says, voice steady. "I don't expect you to understand. People deserve justice."
"Judgement."
"What?"
Judgement had landed the boy he'd named Mello in hell when he died. And L can't see the reason. Doesn't accept the reason. No court would have convicted him, but god did, apparently. L hadn't even realised he'd had a favourite amongst the three Wammy boys until he'd found out.
"What is the difference between justice and judgement?"
L clenches one fist, the one Rae can't see.
"I am not god."
"Neither is a man in a wig at the front of a courtroom."
"It is still more dignified, more human," L says, but he's not. He needs sugar. He's not one hundred percent on that. Mail weighs on his mind like an anchor. There's no guarantee.
Twenty-six percent. Or was it seven?
"Dignity?" Rae wonders. "I see. The boy dies so that they can have dignity. I understand."
"It's not like that," L yells, and he rips the death note out of Rae's hands.
He drops it, as soon as he realises what he's done. It falls open when it hits the floor, sending a cockroach scurrying off into the corner, blank white pages contrasting sharply against the navy carpet.
L stares at it.
Rae presses a pen into his hand.
"I won't," L says, softly.
Another minute ticks past, second by second. The pen dangles between his fingertips. He doesn't let go. He doesn't bend down for the death note. He doesn't move.
He could.
Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six.
It would be so easy.
Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.
"I won't," L says again. Rae's disappeared. It's just him and the death note.
Something trickles down the fingers of his free hand. Blood. He unclenches his fist. Nothing becomes clearer. There's no message to say Mail is dead.
Twenty-one, twenty two.
There could be, though. At any second.
One, two, three, four.
Any second.
Like, for example, this one.
Bang.
tbc