#38 Invisible
Often Misa felt she didn't really exist in L's world.
His building was so full of computers and sterility and rigid, straight lines that she felt like she was intruding, with her bright golden hair and sapphire eyes that spoke of the outside world L rarely set foot in.
Sometimes, she even feared the building.
In her dreams she was walking down one of the endless hallways, and gradually she would realise that it wasn't ending… and the walls seemed to be closing in around her, and like something from a Stephen King novel, the building was alive and organic around her, and it was jealous. Jealous because she could be with L in a way his indoor, sterile world could not. She could give him warmth and affection and make him more human than the machine he had become.
Under the fluorescent lights, she felt an unwelcome guest.
It wasn't just the building and her over-active imagination though; it was how L's behaviour would change when he was on a case too long. He would sit for hours, hunched in front of screens that must have been slowly murdering his eyes for all these years.
He would barely move, only occasionally twitching a stiff arm towards his ever-present coffee cup and cakes. His expression became the pallid blankness of a dead man who has not yet been buried.
And his voice… she hated how his voice changed when he had no occasion to speak to any human being for hours on end. The warm, melting-honey voice which she adored suddenly turned into short, choppy sentences in a mechanical tone that reminded her far too much of a robot, and not the man she had agreed to spend her life (however short it might now have been) with.
All this was made somehow worse by the fact that L himself didn't even notice the changes.
It scared her. It truly and honestly filled her with a cold terror that the man she loved could so easily change. Oh, she knew he became so mechanical to solve the crimes faster and therefore help people, but at the same time she wanted to scream at the rest of the world to leave him alone, he was hers now, and though the world had needed him first, surely it was her turn now?
The nights she had walked past his chair to their bedroom, calling to him to come to bed, it was really too late for him to be up, and had got no response, not because he was ignoring her, but because his brain had shut down all communications to the world outside his own head, and he truly hadn't heard a word she said.
She whispered some of these concerns to Watari, and he could only tell her to wait out these times of invisibility, because when L came back from whatever places his mind wandered, he would need her to love him and reassure him that the world was not full of only the wicked.
One night it was all too much, as she walked in from some modelling shoot or another and discovered him crouched in front of six televisions, reviewing security footage of some terrorist cell or another. Over and over again, from various angles, they shot a crying woman in the head.
Misa choked, tears leaping to her eyes at the sight of death. Since the kira case she'd developed an aversion to anything to do with the dreaded subject.
L didn't even twitch at the sound of her whimper, nor her feet scampering past to their bedroom, desperate to be away.
But as Misa laid there on the bed, muffling her tears with the pillow, she felt a second weight, Very light, climb onto the bed behind her, and two painfully skinny arms curled around her upper body in an awkward hug, he was still so unsure about contact.
She had sighed and lifted her arms to his own, stroking his white shirt along his arms.
And he whispered, "Why is the world so wicked?"
Her heart skipped a few beats, so happy that suddenly, once again, he was hers and he needed her. Dutifully, she turned over in his arms to face his black eyes, seeing the doubt and sadness within them that made him human again.
She began to whisper her standard reassurances, feeling as though at that moment, she was the most real and solid thing in his entire world.