notes/warnings
+ swearing. lots of swearing.
Rage
It's quiet without Rae around. Ridiculously quiet. There's nothing to listen to except the hum of the car and the swish-and-crunch of his own chewing. Not that his white chocolate mousse requires an awful lot of mastication, but the sound echoes around inside his skull regardless.
L swallows delicately and cocks his head.
The glass is both bulletproof and soundproof. He cannot hear the crack of the leaves, or the grit of dirt caught under the tyres. He cannot hear the call of the birds in the trees. Just the car. And the bells.
A wedding, maybe. Or a christening. Or...
Way out here, in the middle of nowhere. This is a national park. There aren't any churches within one hundred miles of this place.
Why can he hear bells?
He presses the button that lowers the partition dividing the front and the back of the car. It's too quiet. He's imaging things.
"So, how did it go?" Watari asks dutifully.
"As expected," L says, touching his lips. "He has agreed to help us. The next step is obtaining reliable evidence."
Only then will it be safe for Matsuda to leave the base. And it could take another fortnight or so before Eve is disbanded, destroyed, or arrested. L hopes Matsuda can stay put for such a long period of time. Now is not the time to be stealing planes.
Matsuda's judgement of what constitutes a good idea is - and always has been - terribly hit-and-miss. And the odds of him succeeding only ever seem to improve when someone else is in a dire situation. Under such circumstances, Matsuda almost never fails.
He's reliable in that way.
And so, L trusts him with big secrets, and not with small ones. It's a strange relationship, but one L has come to take a large amount of comfort in. Matsuda will shoot him if he ever snaps.
He'll be okay.
His phone rings. He picks it up with two fingers and examines the screen. M. They must have found something.
"Yes?" he asks softly.
Fifty seconds later, the phone falls from his hand and drops uselessly onto the vinyl. L buries his head in his hands, and the scream of the bells slowly rips the world apart.
Raye Penber stares at his wife. She's driving, because he can't stop his hands from shaking. She's always been better in a crisis.
"M can't be sure it's definitely him," he says weakly. "It could be... they could have shot someone else by mistake. Until we get down there and identif...ide...ident..."
"M has already seen a recording of the shooting from CCTV," Naomi tells him. Her voice is soft and gentle, beautifully sad. "He's unlikely to have been wrong."
According to the preliminary police report, the assailant has already been arrested. Bufu is happy to stand as a witness, meaning that either his connection with Yotsuba is tenuous, or they really aren't the group that's behind all this.
So following Bufu had been useless. Pointless.
Definitely not worth dying over.
"Do you think Wedy's dead?" he asks. It's an important question. Pivotal. Two people were shot. The paramedics pronounced one dead, and took the other to hospital with critical injuries.
M couldn't tell them who was who. That's why they're here. To find out.
His wife shoots him a pitying look and pulls over. Raye stares blindly at the little cafe with its bustling patrons.
It seems so...normal. No one even cares.
"This place," he says, darkly. "Why was it so important to come to this place today?"
He bangs his fist on the hood of the car. Naomi takes his hand.
"Don't draw attention to yourself now," she warns. "If you need to have an outburst, you should wait here. We need to be just ordinary people. Not detectives, not police, not colleagues. I'm Matsuda's sister. That's all."
Matsuda's sister is a real person, but by they'll be long gone before she shows up to confuse the issue. It's safer if they can keep there real identities a secret. The fewer people who know who they are, the better.
Raye scrubs at his face with one hand.
"It's all right," he croaks. "I can handle it."
Naomi clings to his arm as they approach the alleyway, mostly for show. She's handling it better than he is, he knows. The alley is disgusting, paint peeling off the buildings, and mud all over the street. It's been raining, and the clouds overhead are thick and dark grey. There are people in police uniforms taking samples and snapping pictures. As they draw closer to the fenced-off area, Raye can see a thick coating of blood covering part of the bitumen.
Someone was murdered here, he thinks, and he feels sick. Naomi says something to one of the policemen, and flashes her driver's licence. It's a fake one, of course. It presently reads Akane Matsuda.
There's a body bag lying a few feet away, and it's clearly not empty. And it's just sitting there. On the ground. Like it's nothing. Like it's a sack of garbage, or potatoes.
He never had time for Matsuda. He barely said a single kind word. He had always been impatient, always angry, often derogatory.
Please let it be Wedy in that bag, he thinks viciously. Please.
No one in their little group was supposed to die. That was never part of the plan. They are all brilliant, each and every one of them. There is no Kira here. They should win every case easily.
This should never have happened.
The officer finishes talking to Naomi, and she releases her grip on Raye's arm so she can follow him to the body.
He's a fucking FBI agent. This shouldn't affect him so much. But Matsuda was...is such a child. So young. So stupid, but so much potential.
What happens when someone dies here? Is that it? Surely it can't just be world after world after world. Do the dead just rot in the ground? Do they automatically go to hell?
Please let it be Wedy.
The officer unzips the bag. It's just black plastic, a glorified bin liner. He's still talking, or at least his mouth is moving. Naomi leans over, and then jumps back, her hand cupped over her mouth like she might be sick. The policeman pats her shoulder awkwardly, as if that's any fucking use at all.
And then he knows.
He knows by the way she doesn't look at him.
He knows it isn't Wedy.
L arrives back at base; Naomi sees the car pull into the garage. He will already know the news. M would have called him first, as soon as he found out what had happened.
She knows L cared for Matsuda. More than he cares for any of the rest of them, even.
Maybe...if L had been a woman..
No, that's an unreasonable line of thought. And totally unhelpful. Right now, she needs to step up to the plate. She knows she's the one amongst them who copes best with grief.
Right now, she needs to be L. At least for a little while.
Watari stands in the rain, holding the passenger door open, for a good five minutes. L does not emerge from the car. Naomi frowns.
This is bad.
Eventually, Watari picks him up and carries him - carries him - to the door, bridal style. L flops around like a ragdoll, apparently immobilised by the enormity of what has happened. It's what he does when things go wrong. It's what he did before Kira killed him, too. He gave up. He surrendered and let himself fall.
Naomi draws the blinds. It's not something the others need to see.
Raye is sitting at his desk, head inclined, clutching at his hair with both hands. His shoulders are shaking. M is sitting cross-legged on the floor, calmly smoking. Naomi doesn't know whether he's completely unaffected by recent events, or whether he's just so filled with grief already that Matsuda's passing makes no difference to his behaviour.
Watari eventually comes into the room, alone, and Naomi knows better than to ask. She doesn't need to ask, anyway. She knows. She's his unofficial deputy. She knows.
She sits with her husband for a little while, but he's not in the mood for comfort, and she's glad of that. She feels spread too thin as it is, like she's expected to hold it together when everyone else crumbles.
She calls the hospital. Wedy is critical, not stable. They can't say for sure she'll ever regain consciousness, even if they can get her through the danger period.
The man who shot her - and killed Matsuda - is called Adam Creagh. The police have him in custody. She's already made preliminary arrangements to have him transferred to them for questioning. In a few days. After the funeral.
After the funeral.
How does one say goodbye to someone like Matsuda, she wonders. In the past - whenever their little group was required to briefly split up - he always used to wave, or tap his fingers against his head in a childish salute and grin and say see you later. Or, more often than not, isn't this exciting, I can't wait! Because Matsuda always thought even the tiniest, easiest, most basic missions were enthralling. He just loved the job.
Loved. Past tense. Everything is past tense now.
Where are you now, Touta? she wonders.
The rain pelts out of the sky, great torrents of water slapping the ground. It's been long enough. Naomi excuses herself, touches the back of Raye's neck as she passes, and heads outside, into the hall. The elevator is both finger-print locked and password protected. No one can use it except them. She takes it all the way to the top floor. It's just a storage area, one giant room filled with boxes and maintenance equipment. No one lives up here. She heads to one corner, unlocks the hatch that opens to the outside world, and clambers up the fire escape.
The rain is nearly unbearable, like ice-cold needles tumbling from the sky. She's getting too old to be shimmying up a pole like a schoolgirl. She almost slips twice before she finally gets her hands on the rapidly-cooling roof tiles and hoists herself up.
She finds what she expects to find not more than three feet away, standing hunched and drenched in the downpour.
"L," she says softly.
He makes no move to respond. He gives no indication that he even knows she's there, he simply stares into the distance. There's a church in his line of sight, Naomi notes. It's the one M attends every Sunday.
What is it with geniuses and ridiculous emotional attachments to churches, she thinks irritably, tugging her jacket closer to her body out of habit. It's already soaked through.
"You should come inside now," she says, with as much authority as she can muster.
L remains silent, but his gaze shifts from the scenery to his feet, and he slowly presses both hands to the sides of his head.
Naomi takes a few wobbly steps towards him. The roof is uneven, old-style and pointed in the middle. There are no safety rails; it isn't meant to be walked upon. She kicks off her high heels carefully. The last thing anyone needs right now is another fatality.
"It's been long enough," she continues. "You should come in for a little while and get dried. You can come back out later, if you need to. I doubt it's going to stop raining any time soon."
Still no reply.
Gritting her teeth, and throwing out her arms for balance, she awkwardly edges towards him until they're standing side-by-side.
"L," she says gently, pushing her irritation aside. "L. Can you hear me?"
He glances at her, briefly. His eyes are dead. Flat, glassy, doll-like, and dead. She's never seen him this bad before.
He drops his head again, staring straight down. His arms fall limply back to his sides.
"Why did you come?" he asks hoarsely.
She thinks that much should be obvious by now, unless he really hasn't been listening. She had assumed he'd just been ignoring her.
"It's wet," she says simply. "You need to come inside."
L does not answer immediately. The rain is starting to pour off Naomi's head in rivets and streak down her face. She's shaking, almost vibrating, in response to the chill.
Come on, answer me, damn you.
"But why did you come," he asks a second time, "to see me?"
Naomi pushes at her fringe, now well and truly annoyed.
"Because you're standing out here in the rain," she says briskly. "And I've come to take you back inside. Standing out here is both dangerous and unecessary. You could fall. You could be shot at. Come on."
She holds out her hand, offering it to him. L rarely accepts touches from anyone, but he's maybe a little bit more human than he used to be when he was alive.
And everyone needs comfort sometimes.
His eyes move from the rooftop to her palm, scanning intently as if it's a clue in a new case. She fights down a momentary urge to shout at him.
He can be so... inconsiderate sometimes.
"Not now," he murmurs, finally. "I didn't mean now. I meant, all those years ago, why did you come to me?"
She knows exactly what he's asking. In the beginning, when everything was new, and everything was possible, why did she want to work with him?
He's doubting himself, she realises, with sudden clarity. He's doubting his own goddamned judgement. He's their only hope, and he's doubting.
What kind of an idiot...?
Everyone wants to work with you. You're L!
Naomi forces herself to breathe deeply. He gets like this. She knows he gets like this. He's barely more than a child, emotionally. It's just a part of him.
But it's usually losing, not death, that affects him so badly. He's not nursing wounded pride today. He's not frightened for his own life. He's grieving, and that's not something that L has ever done before.
More human than I thought, maybe.
She has a brief, panicked premonition of L becoming like M, an empty shell, broken in every possible way, absolutely beyond all recovery and repair. But, she tells herself firmly, L is stronger than M. And besides, he was never in love with Matsuda.
As far as I know, anyway.
"How did this happen?" L asks, his voice suddenly sharp and clear, demanding. "How did this happen?"
"It was an accident," she says, honestly. She's been telling Raye the exact same thing for most of the day. They all know what happened and how it happened. She wishes they'd stop asking her to reaffirm.
"No one was here," he enunciates. "I knew Mail would never look out for Matsuda, and yet I left and sent both you and Raye away from base. Had he been forced to stay here, he would still be alive."
Alive.
"It was an accident," Naomi emphasises. "In the end, Matsuda made his own decisions. He chose to leave. He chose to take that risk. You cannot blame yourself."
"Myself?" L asks, and he sounds like he's choking. "Myself? I trusted him. If not for that, he would still be here, breathing, and talking, and giving criminals stupid names like 'Arcy' and 'Eve'."
He crouches down so suddenly that he appears to be falling, and Naomi lunges forward to catch him and hangs there, her hands hovering in mid-air.
"So, what?" she probes. "It would have been best to just treat Matsuda like a baby for the rest of his natural second life?"
L turns to her once more.
"Evidently," he breathes. "Because as it happens, the rest of his natural life has ended. Because I trusted him. Because he could not be trusted. Because I should have known."
Naomi touches him then, finally, her fingertips connecting with his shoulder. He's surprisingly warm, she can feel heat radiating up from under his sodden shirt. The shirt itself is nearly transparent, and she can see his painfully thin chest rising and falling rapidly.
He's so small. He looks so fragile.
I'm sorry, she thinks, and she's not sure why. I'm so sorry.
"I was selfish," L explains. "I wanted to be safe. That's why I trusted him. Because he made me feel..."
He trails off, and she thinks maybe his lower lip quivers a little. She doesn't want to know how Matsuda made him feel. Of course, being L, that sentence feasibly could have ended with 'infuriated', 'superior', 'uneasy', or 'hungry'. But she's terrified that that last word was intended to be 'happy'. And really, she doesn't want to know.
"At least I'm alone right now," L whispers, which makes no sense at all. "I'm glad to be alone."
"You're not alone," she says bluntly. "I'm here, L."
"Oh," he says, as if seeing her for the first time. "Yes. You're very wet."
"We should go inside," she insists, tugging on his shirt.
L doesn't budge.
"At least Matsuda will be dry, in...in that box," L says miserably. "He once asked me what happens when we die here. I said I didn't know. Maybe this is all anyone gets. One second chance. And I threw his away."
He's talking too much. L never talks about things like this. She needs to get him back to the others, back to reality, away from this isolated little world of despair he's created for himself up here.
"I was so selfish, Naomi," he says, and she hates hearing him call her by name. Hates that he's so far gone he doesn't even value the system he created to keep them all secret and safe.
"Everything I did was for me," he adds. "Even protecting him. It was all for me. I'm no better than...I'm no better than Light."
Naomi does the only thing she can think of. She lets go of L's shirt and slaps him right across the face.
He's nothing like Light, and he knows that.
He must know that.
The funeral service is a small, state-run affair. Only Matsuda's real family - one sister and his stepfather - are allowed to attend, alongside a few old colleagues.
L refuses to let any of his team members leave the building, but he sends Watari to place a visual tap on the church, so that the others can observe from the safety of their own base.
That had been Naomi's idea. She said the act of watching the funeral might help to give them closure. L isn't sure what exactly 'closure' is meant to entail, but it sounds suspiciously like 'forgetting about Matsuda and moving on with their lives'.
He does not want to forget the man who shot Kira. He does not want to forget the man he trusted to stop Rae.
He does not want to.
But he allows it, all the same. On the screen, a priest is laying his hands ceremoniously on the coffin. L wonders what good that is going to do. Matsuda is certainly not going to wake up and try and push the lid off, no matter how much L might want him to. The action just seems pointless.
But then, everything seems pointless.
Naomi and Raye are leaning on each other, positioned right in front of the screen. Mail is sitting on the desk in the far right corner. L is standing dead in the centre of the room, next to his crockery-laden coffee table, feet apart and head hung.
He doesn't want tea. He doesn't want sugar. He hasn't eaten a thing for the past three days. No appetite. His brain is running on nothing.
I failed you, he thinks, miserably. I failed you again, Matsuda.
Nothing can ever happen to you.
But it did. And it's my fault.
L loathes feeling helpless. In the past, he has always prevented himself from becoming excessively close with any other human being. Life is fragile. Seeking to protect any one life will ultimately fail.
Not this soon. It didn't have to fail so soon.
Rae looms behind him. It returned to his side sometime last night, during the seventy-two minutes of sleep he'd involuntarily indulged in. The Shinigami has been insufferable, repeatedly pointing out all the ways Matsuda could have lived if only he hadn't been so stupid. Oh, and crowing about how Matsuda's murder was mostly L's fault for not using the note to execute Bufu and all of the known members of Yotsuba.
And now, right now, right here, the god of death is laughing. That high, cold, awful giggle that makes L want to tear out his own hair at the best of times.
It's been laughing since the funeral started. Laughing. Laughing.
L tries to ignore it.
On the screen, he sees Matsuda's sister wipe away a few tears. She's a tall girl with floppy black hair and dark eyes. He can see the family resemblance. She's moderately pretty, and she has an engagement ring on her finger, but no wedding band. Her dignified sniffles rapidly turn into harsh sobs, and she clutches at her white handkerchief tightly.
L recalls Matsuda mentioning her once. Akane. Clever, beautiful, talented Akane. Pride of both of his parents. Never called. Never remembered his birthday even once.
Neither did L, but L was here and with him. They worked together. This woman barely knew Matsuda. L knows her tears are mostly for show. He doesn't understand why she showed up at all. Maybe she thinks she stands to inherit something from her brother?
Note to self, remind Watari to make sure the trust fund is secured so that errant relatives cannot access it.
Fake tears at his funeral. Touta Matsuda deserves much better. So much better.
Raye Penber is crying. L supposes that's worth something.
And Rae keeps on giggling.
L can't block out the sound, no matter what he does. He clamps his hands over his ears, stuffing his fingers into the canals as deeply as he can. Naomi glances at him strangely, but doesn't speak. She's mostly focused on the screen.
L has never cared much for funerals. There's alive, and there's dead. Matsuda was dead the second that bullet penetrated through his pericardium. Having a ceremony about it three days later is irrelevant. Meaning nothing. Signifying nothing. Here lies Touta Matsuda. Slighter more stupid and ten times more human than an average man.
"We have all seen the hand of god once," the clergyman warbles on-screen. "May our Lord guide you safely through this death, too."
What god? L thinks, accusingly. Where is his hand?
I am the world's greatest detective, and I've never found even a trace of this god.
But if you've seen him, priest, then maybe you can ask him what good reason he could possibly have for letting Matsuda die. And then punch him for me. For Mello.
L shakes his head. His inner monologue is starting to sound disturbingly like Mail. He's never felt like this about anything before. He's never been bereaved. Not ever.
Not since he was six years old, almost seven, and she...and the Shyster...
It was raining that day, too.
No. None of that. He's blocked that out. Buried in the past. Evaporated. Gone
Like Matsuda.
The room is moving under him, swinging from side to side. Vibrating, he's certain, with the force of Rae's laughter. The sound is tearing through L's mind, horrible, evil, the worst thing he's ever heard.
Are you laughing at Matsuda? he thinks, angrily. Do you think it's funny, because you never liked him and now he's dead.
And you knew he was going to die, you bastard. You knew! You would have seen it right there, hovering over his head. That's why you left, isn't it? You wanted to watch him die. Did you laugh at him then, Shinigami? Did you laugh in his face when he was bleeding, and the life was draining out of him?
L clenches his fists, still pressed against his ears. All he wants is silence. Raye has buried his face in Naomi's shoulder. Mail is reaching for another cigarette. The priest is sprinkling dirt on the coffin, for some stupidly arbitrary reason.
Matsuda isn't doing anything. Matsuda will never do anything again. The empty space in the room. The second empty space in the room.
Mello and Matsuda.
Rae floats gently over the floor until it's right in front of L, obscuring his view of the screen and Matsuda in a box and the idiot, idiot clergyman. The god of death moves jerkily, puppetlike and spastic, laughing too hard to stay upright.
"Oh, come on," it says to him, still snickering. "This is funny. He practically walked into it. Stupid clown."
It's such a tiny, pathetic little insult, but it hits L like a fist. Rage pulses through his nerves, sudden and urgent, exploding inside him. He reaches for the table and seizes the teapot - an expensive, delicate thing with gold on the handle - and throws it right at Rae's cackling face.
It goes right through the Shinigami - of course it does - and shatters against the television with a sickening crash. Cracking the screen. Killing the picture.
"Shut up," L snaps, so loudly his throat hurts. "I told you to shut up."
It takes him a moment to realise he's yelling. The others are staring at him. He's breathing hard, almost gasping. His mind is not his own, poisoned and resentful, focused solely on Rae.
Who laughs harder.
L is trembling. He's furious with himself.
"L?" Naomi ventures cautiously. "What? We...look, we're all bothered by that priest and his stupid platitudes. But there was no need for you to do that. Couldn't you have just switched it off?"
"I was watching that," Raye adds, sounding as if L has brutally murdered someone, instead of breaking an appliance. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"Leave him alone," Mail says darkly. "Don't you dare tell him how to grieve."
Raye mutters something about emotionally unstable geniuses that he probably thinks no-one else can hear.
"Did you honestly think that was going to work?" Rae asks gleefully, practically in hysterics. "First Matsuda dying. Now you're falling to pieces. This is the most entertaining week of my life."
Without even truly thinking about it, L reaches a decision.
"Watari," he says softly. "Please reconnect the picture to another screen."
And then he turns on his bare heel, and leaves.
He ignores Naomi's questioning stare, Raye's scowl, Mail's indifference. He strides out of the claustrophobic room. Away from the clergyman and his false god. Away from Matsuda's box. Away from closure.
There's something he needs to do.
He'll probably fail, but he needs to try. Right now. Because if he succeeds, it will be worth giving up every single one of his principles.
He arrives in his own bedroom and locks the door. He reaches under his shirt. The action itself seems to summon the Shinigami, who appears through the wall and stares at him expectantly, still smiling.
"Are you finally getting rid of Yotsuba?" it asks.
"It's like you always implied," L says tersely. "What's the good of having something like this if I can't get rid of evil? And right now, there's a significant amount of evil in the world. It's time I did something about it."
He sets the notebook on his bed, open at the first page.
Rae's grin widens.
"Yesss," it says softly, right by his ear. "Use it. That's what it's for. My gift to you."
L takes a pen from his pocket and clicks it into position.
He knows the names and faces of all the old executives of Yotsuba. He knows the name and face of the man who shot Matsuda. He knows a heck of a lot of bad people, after all.
This is crazy. It's a death note. He swore he'd never use it on anyone or anything, no matter what.
L touches the first sheet of paper with his fingertips. It's thin and cream-coloured. It feels like an ordinary notebook, practically weightless.
He's never felt this all-consuming wrath before. Matsuda is dead. Someone ought to pay for that.
It's his death note, after all.
"Come on," Rae goads.
All right, L thinks, fiercely, blindly. He cannot stop this pounding that drives him. He cannot combat the anger that controls him.
Or maybe he doesn't want to.
L presses his pen to the paper, scrawling out the three damning letters without remorse.
'RAE'.
tbc
a/n:
+ given the structure of this little universe, I think it's safe to say that Matsuda is not necessarily gone for good.
+ this chapter was one of those horribly awkward sections that doesn't have enough plot to be a chapter on its own, but is too big to be put with anything else. stuff will happen soon, I promise!
+ thank you. your comments make me so happy. :)