notes/warnings
+ on top of being an entire MONTH late, this chapter is also woefully short. there are mechanical reasons for this, because there's a later scene that I didn't want to split up.
+ warnings for swearing, grief, illness, malice.
Divide
L is seriously ill. Seriously ill and seriously vulnerable. And seriously stupid. Maybe Rae is giving him too much credit by even ignoring him. He's certainly not a threat to anyone right now.
Thank goodness for that.
Monster.
Demon.
Murderer.
It would be nice, though, to see him suffer. Mollifying. Appealing.
Yes. Rae might go and do that.
After all, bad people should always be punished.
L's illness wears on. He spends three days in a feverish stupor, burning hot and freezing cold, his heart pounding arrhythmically, like it might shudder to a halt at any moment.
A death note can kill in many different ways. A death note can kill by illness.
Maybe Light is already murdering him.
If that is the case, then there is nothing L can do about it. If Light discovers his real name and finds another notebook, then L is automatically defeated. If a Shinigami falls in love with Light, then L is automatically defeated.
Misa fell in love with Light. So did Takada. Maybe Mikami, as well. He wins people. He makes people like him. That's what he does.
Perhaps L never stood a chance at all.
Watari stuffs him with vitamins and pain pills, and cleans the room, and at one point even puts him on a drip. L doesn't respond or help. He cannot think. His mind is a fog of incompetent and fear and Light and death and Rae.
He sleeps fitfully. He wakes fitfully. He thinks fitfully, fruitlessly, in circles.
L can acknowledge, now, that he loves Rae with all his heart. That he'll never be in love with anyone else. That he is spent, maybe forever. Maybe the way that Mail is spent; inescapable.
It was always a doomed relationship. Doomed from the very beginning. Rae never should have comforted him after Naomi's death. L never should have put his hands inside Rae's chest. L never should have told Rae about his mother. They should have stayed enemies, and circumstantial rivals. It is almost irrelevant now, whether L uses the notebook, and that was so important in the beginning.
L wants.
He wants one day, with Rae. He wants to be happy and uncomplicated and safe for just one day. Even if Rae never touches him. Even if it's just a day of conversation; of if they can never be together again afterwards. Even if he dies afterwards. Even if he goes to hell. He just. He just wants one.
He can't have one day.
L cannot go back, no matter what he might want. He cannot physically undo what he has done.
I love you.
This illness is going to kill him.
I love you.
Rae won't ever know.
I love you.
L is so sick of doing the right thing. He wants Rae's help. He wants to stop. He wants to write in the death note, at the very least, and end the whole agonizingly slow process of wanting and not having.
Naomi would be so disappointed in him.
And Rem warned him not to fall, so long ago. Before all of this. And back then, he never would have thought any of this possible, but things change. People change. He's never really recovered from the day Light defeated him.
"Are you dying yet?" someone asks, and L lifts his head suddenly, the whole room rushing around him, nauseating and blurry.
His Shinigami is slouched in the doorway, wings glinting dangerously in the artificial light.
"I want to watch," it explains, with a disgusted little smile. "I want to see how much you suffer. Can you feel the bile rising in your throat? Is the pain unbearable? Aw, look. You can't even keep your head up."
L pushes a hand over his eye and fights the mounting urge to vomit.
"Do you know how long you've got left to live, monster? Because I know."
Rae must feel safe, knowing that he's ill. Rae has actually come here to torment him. To make him feel awful.
He can't die yet. He's supposed to live for the full five years.
"Haven't written in the notebook yet," he mumbles.
Please don't go don't go don't go.
Rae snorts.
"Evil and stupid," it says, damningly. "You could be replaced by just about any criminal out there. A randomly selected mugger from the street. The serial killer we – sorry, I – just arrested."
Rae looks so pleased with itself, with the prospect of a world without L in it, and L doesn't want to deal with any of this.
Please, he thinks, vaguely, desperately, nonsensically. Please please please.
Why weren't you smart enough to see that I was lying?
Why do you have to be so damaged by me?
WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE ME, DAMN YOU!
L smiles, lazy and slow. His cheeks ache.
"Does this mean you've decided I'm no longer a threat?" he purrs. "Interesting."
It is the right thing to say. Exactly the right thing to say. L always does the right thing.
Rae snarls at him and walks away.
L throws his head back against the pillows, hands fisted and throat burning.
A new terrorist has been making headlines in the United States. So far, they've successfully attacked three semi-urban buildings in three separate precincts; Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. L is still unwell, and Rae is busy investigating a prolific mass murderer, so Raye attempts to tackle the case on his own.
One thing is certain; the crime rate is starting to rise. Faux-Kira is long gone, and the big-shot criminals are starting to feel safe again.
Faux-Kira. Takada. The criminal who murdered Naomi. Every agonizing second of that investigation - sitting in the godforsaken car, listening to Takada hit on his precious wife, running and screaming and finding her dead and too late - is burned into Raye's mind like a fire-brand.
And yet, sometimes he feels as if he can barely remember the details at all. As if everything is fuzzy. He can recall Naomi's lifeless face, but not the colour of her jacket or the address of the building or which room, exactly, he'd been standing in.
Maybe grief does that to people, sometimes.
People who aren't Mail, anyway. Stupid fucking Mail. Who is outside on the balcony, staring into the distance. Raye can see him if he cranes his neck.
A synagogue, a shopping center, and a state-funded orphanage. The only real link between the three bombing sites is geographic location. Which means…it's more likely that the message isn't religious, or moral. It's more likely to be terrorism for terrorism's sake.
Right?
Raye isn't good at psychological profiling. At heart, he's still just a simple FBI agent. He can pull his weight in a team, but he struggles with working alone. Theoretically he could ask Mail for help, but this will eventually be Rae's case, and Rae needs to be protected from L and everyone who supports him.
So, Raye spends a good three hours staring at pages of data. Dates and times and local traffic and victims both injured and dead. He also has a list of orphanage staff who were on site that day, and lots of grainy, poor quality security footage from the shopping center. Raye decides to look for matches, and scans the surveillance videos for people matching the descriptions in the staff records. The process is frustrating and stupid. It would be a million times better with Naomi beside him, her keen eyes flitting across the screen, one hand twirled in her hair, teeth pressing into her lower lip.
It would be ten times better if Mail would stop blowing smoke outside and come back into the room. Raye hates him for not being a real, normal person. He hates him for having years and resources, and still not having found an effective cure for this godforsaken loneliness.
What good are you, really? What good are you?
The footage is useless. People can disguise themselves. Especially when the only evidence is a bunch of low-quality pixels. And Raye can't do this. He's sick of this. The orphanage janitor has only one fucking arm. His file says that he has a wife and two kids. He has one fucking arm, and Raye wants to find him and kick him in the face out of pure, bitter jealousy.
Everybody gets a fucking family, except him.
Except him and L. But L is abusive and unkind and deserves to live alone, die alone. He didn't deserve Naomi's friendship. He certainly didn't deserve Rae's trust. He doesn't even deserve Mail's fucking psychosis.
The longer Raye works here, the more doubtful he becomes. The Shinigami tries not to let personalities get involved in the cases, but sometimes it makes a comment that sounds so broken and sad, and Raye finds himself reconsidering his decision to stay all over again.
Raye could leave, but he'd have to take Mail with him. For purely mechanical reasons. He's pretty sure he'd collapse five feet away from the building, otherwise.
Raye needs to stay. He needs to stay and be Rae's voice. He's useful, even if it's only as a glorified ventriloquist's dummy, and he has to work cases. He has to.
He can't. It's just a screenful of fucking people, walking around, and how is he ever going to pick a terrorist suspect out of…
Oh.
One of the men in the shopping center only has one arm.
Well, that's a start.
L keeps calling and calling and calling and calling. And he's hurting so much, and Jas feels sorry for him.
It's not my fault.
You were the only one.
I had to.
He knows she exists. He is so very clever, even when he's broken and alone. And so she can be strong. She can be strong.
And…she knows what he's frightened of. He knows she's omnipotent. He's wasting energy, and precious, precious time investigating her.
Just stop, will you? Just stop! Just stop.
Stupid boy.
You're only human.
With nothing better to do, L decides to use his mediocre hacking skills to try and further investigate the Tracking Library.
It's probably a futile venture. Everything seems to be a futile venture, these days. But the world is a nauseating fog, and any distraction – even an inane one – is welcome.
The screen is too bright, and L has to keep stopping to rest his aching head against the desk. He eats a grape and manages to keep it down. His computer skills are far inferior to both Watari's and Mail's, but neither of them can pursue the hell-god and keep their memories intact.
Sometimes, L feels like he's fighting too many people. Stretched too thin, wound too tight. Outdated and laughable. Subconsciously, he reaches for his phone and dials one more time. Calling has become a hobby for him. It's something he can do when he's half-dead from dehydration, bedridden and weighed down with sweat-soaked clothes and self loathing.
He saved Rae, though. He saved Rae. He saved Rae. He's doing better than both Raye and Mail put together, because he was able to save the one he loved.
Just once.
Never again.
It has to be enough.
"Hello, this is the Tracking Library. Our staff are unavailable right now. It doesn't matter how many times you call, they will never be available."
The world lurches to a halt. Cold fear pulses through L's chest, his fingers white-knuckled where he's clutching the phone. The message continues, and he's heard it so many times before that the very concept of it having changed is the most terrifying and disconcerting thing in the universe.
"This is the last piece of advice you'll get from me. Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone. Do you understand, L?"
Soundlessly, L slips from the chair and collapses on the floor into a trembling, disoriented heap.
Maybe that wasn't the right thing to do?
No. Enough of that. She is the queen. She is the god of hell. The bearer of the white notebook. Everything she does is exactly right, and she must always believe that.
L needs to recover. He needs to focus on the world around him, the world of mortals, the world of humans. The world that sustains and fascinates and disgusts Shinigami. The world that made her who she is.
She promised herself, right at the very beginning, that she would only ever impact on those who were in hell. So L must be strong, for the sake of everyone else.
He is strong, even now. She's practically threatened to bring Light down over his head, and still he pushes himself up, and gets to his feet.
"Everything will be fine," she murmurs, softly, fondly. "You have done so well, L. You don't even understand how well you've done, but that's okay. There's not long to go, now. It will all be over soon."
He can't hear her, of course. But she says it, anyway.
L grips the table with trembling hands, the world around him a little clearer.
So.
The hell-god directly acknowledged him. And in doing so, practically admitted that it has no actual way of controlling him.
You leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone.
It's a little late for that. Naomi was killed by someone in hell. Grace probably was, too. So the god of hell is either malevolent or careless. Either way, L has no reason to trust the words of such a flawed deity.
He's dealt with flawed deities before.
And…he will not be bullied.
L drags himself back into his chair, eats another grape, and defiantly hits 'redial' on his phone.
"Hello, this is the Tracking Library. Our staff are unavailable right now. Please note that records cannot be given out over the phone. If you have another request, leave a message after the tone."
The regular message is back. As if the other never existed at all. The hell-god is ignoring him.
Good, L thinks, and turns back to his computer.
Raye Penber is so ridiculously fucking pleased with himself for actually discovering something. It's pathetic. And kind of disgusting.
"Excellent job," Rae tells him, brightly, because that's exactly what Raye wants to hear.
"Thanks," the man replies, ducking his head a little in embarrassment. "I, ah, haven't found anything else useful, yet."
Of course you haven't. You're not actually any good at this, you know.
"That's fine. We've got a lead to work with, now. You've saved me some time."
With Raye's help, Rae is bringing the world of crime to its knees. It is kind of sickening that it has to pose as L in order to be successful, but still.
The ends justify the means.
Always always always, the ends justify the means. Some people are just too stupid to understand that.
"What's the next step?" Raye asks. "There's no other data available on the janitor at all. We need to find out if his name and address checks out, right? But none of the surviving staff members want to discuss anything, and most of the paperwork has been destroyed."
The name on the employee file is 'Edgar Bridges'. Middle-aged man with a nuclear family, a restricted workload, and an apparently pristine criminal record.
"He never drew a disability pension?" Rae muses.
"Well, not under that name, anyway," Raye says, dejectedly. "We've still got almost nothing to go on."
"That's not true," Rae tells him. "We know this man survived the bombing in the orphanage, because he showed up in Florida two days later, and…"
L shuffles into the room, as quiet and insidious as a brain tumour. Rae is overcome with the intense, primal desire to get away run away now now now!
Don't be stupid. It's only L.
Everything is okay.
It is, of course. It's just always such a horrible shock to see him, now.
'Do Shinigami feel pleasure, Rae?'
Shut up!
I'll kill you I'll kill you I'LL KILL YOU.
Not now, not yet. Soon. Soon, soon, soon. It's okay. Everything will be okay.
In any case, L doesn't look at Rae. He goes straight to Mail. Running to his only friend in the whole world.
His only friend in the whole world is insane.
"Hey," Mail says, blandly. "You look slightly better."
"I feel slightly better," L replies, in that stupid fucking thoughtful tone with his stupid finger stuck in his mouth.
You might be better, but you'll never be right.
L must never ever win. Must never ever get the better of Rae. Pure evil. Must never. Rae has to survive. Rae has to save the world.
"You working on anything at the minute?" Mail asks, casually.
Mail is definitely more functional than he was before. He's not any sort of threat, but if he continues at his current rate of improvement, he might eventually become one. But still. He has obvious weaknesses. He can be easily manipulated.
"You okay?" Raye asks, quietly, leaning closer. "Want me to ask him to leave?"
Everything is fine. Because Raye Penber has been won. Raye Penber doesn't belong to L, any more. It's not a bad day. It's a good day.
"Not specifically," L intones. "You?"
Mail frowns.
"Wait, wasn't there something you wanted me to hack?" he says, sounding puzzled. "I'm sure you asked me yesterday, but I can't fuckin' remember what it was."
"It was nothing," L murmurs. "That task is no longer important."
This conversation is meaningless. Rae wonders if L is staging it for Rae's own benefit, trying to make himself appear amenable and non-threatening. If that is the case, then L is clutching at fucking straws.
"Watari was worried about you," Mail informs him.
"Yes," L agrees. "He told me I should eat more vegetables."
Mail raises an eyebrow. L is practically leaning over the top of him. And Raye is watching the two of them intently.
L cares for Mail. L has cared for Mail from the very beginning. And that's the most important thing.
"He did? What did you say?"
"I politely offered to fire him."
Mail snorts, and L gives him this bizarre little lopsided smile, and Rae is suddenly bombarded with a frantic, all-consuming sense of relief. Of somehow having been plucked, impossibly, right from the jaws of death, from the very edge of obliteration, and only just in the nick of time.
If.
If L hadn't.
No, it's impossible. L is who he is, evil and grotesque and wrong, and Rae would have worked it out, always would have worked it out, even if L had never made a mistake.
It's not like.
Rae feels like it is staring into a chasm, the road not taken, terrifying and endless. That if it had gone on liking L and liking L and liking L it would have been sucked up and overpowered by something huge. Something that might have unseated even Rae's tremendous sense of self.
What is this?
What is…what is wrong with me?
What was almost wrong with me?
It doesn't matter. It's a false possibility, because L isn't the person Rae cared for. The person Rae cared for never existed, and L is a monster. It's very simple. Rae knows, logically, that it would never have fallen.
And yet.
And yet.
"You're still staying in this place," L says loudly, shattering the silence. "Huh. Good."
"Leave the Shinigami alone," Raye growls, and he actually gets up and stands in front of Rae protectively. "You…you just leave everyone alone, do you hear?"
L steps away from Mail.
"I'm not holding anyone prisoner," he says, softly. "All of you may leave at any time you choose."
Rae wishes it could break L's jaw, and make him shut up forever. The sound of his voice grates, every move, every…
Don't you smile again.
Don't you smile at me, you murderer.
"Believe me," Raye snarls. "I know that."
"Good," L says, diplomatically. "Then we can all go back to work."
He ambles out of the room without another word. Rae watches him go. It's easy. Everything is easy, because L is terrible and hating him is effortless, automatic, required. Rae will always be safe because L will always be a bad person, and it is pointless and unhealthy to dwell on impossible possibilities.
Rae can't fall. Rae doesn't fall. Rae is strong. Rae is important.
Everything is okay.
"So," Rae instructs, as calmly as possible. "We want to check all the flights that travelled between Georgia and Florida over those two days. Airports tend to have tight security. Bridges must have left some evidence behind."
"Yeah," Raye says, and his hands are shaking at his sides. "Yeah. Right. Okay."
tbc
a/n
+ health and work issues still ongoing. next chapter is about sixty percent finished, though, so hopefully there won't be another month-long wait. even if there is, please rest assured that I'm still working on this fic and it has definitely not been abandoned.
+ thank you for reading, and for your patience.