warnings: a bit of violence and gore. and hints of B/Mello, which may make some people (everybody) uncomfortable. and lateness. warning! this chapter is late.
notes: Hello, it's me again! I know, I know, I'll fuck off in just a second but some things first: apologies that this chapter took about three weeks (?) to get out, which is about twice as long as it would ideally take. I'm lazy and constantly struggling with this bad boy and nervous that you'll all hate me after this chapter, anyhow, but here it is. Some things are explained but not very well. and look, I'm typing my notes with proper capitalization this time around. Who knew I could do that?
So, the quote at the top of this chapter is not from a book this time, but a webcomic. Or quasi-webcomic. It's called a softer world and if you haven't already heard of it, you ought to go look it up. When I started writing this I had just finished up Moby Dick, which is a goldmine of brilliant quotes that really resonated with this story, but after I used up all the really good ones, I was mostly just scrambling to find applicable literary quotes out of some sense of propriety? Which is kind of silly when it comes to, you know, gay porn, so I'm just throwing my hands up and going with whatever quote is pulling my heartstrings, and this story along, at the moment, be it literature or a line of poetry or even a lyric. Yeah, I may do the lyrics thing. I figure if you've made it this far into this mess, you're not going to be thrown out by that, of all things. ANYWAY, onto business.
Thank you, as always, to the utterly shocking amount of people who reviewed last chapter. I have no idea what I did to deserve that much sweetness and praise (and only one or two death threats!) but I'm utterly grateful for all of it. It made me so happy! Oh, and this chapter is dedicated to diabolicaltheory1 for sending me the kindest PM and encouraging me to actually get this finished and posted. ecstatic love for you!
chapter thirteen - heart attack.
"'Make love, not war!' is an unrealistic demand. What we need is a hybrid."
- a softer world, 978
"You look better in black," L tells him, hands running along his abdomen, straightening the creases out of his shirt. Light can feel the joints in his fingers, can feel the stutter and jerk of his movements, strange and imprecise but almost pretty, once you get used to them.
"God doesn't wear black."
He straightens his tie and it's red, red like his high school tie had been. He looks at his arms, at the slacks that L's pawing at, adjusting the way they rest on his hips. Khaki. He's wearing his high school uniform. He looks back at L, who's grown dimmer somehow, like he's less there than he had been. Light hadn't known him before college, had only seen the letter on the screen, had only known the big, daunting presence of the great detective L. There hadn't been anything more than that.
Lind L. Taylor. He'd tried to kill him back then, too.
Too?
Light is wearing his school uniform and suddenly L is gone and Light is on the floor and the world shudders, the aftereffects of some sort of natural disaster shaking the foundations. It's been forty seconds. It must have been forty seconds.
He hears a soft thud from several rooms over. And then -
And then. What? What now?
Misa's stopped yelling but Light can hear her sniffling. She's afraid. Light takes her fear and makes it his own because he has nothing of his own at the moment. It's very painless. He's just killed L and it's all very painless. There's something wrong with that, or maybe something very right about it. Maybe if he had just done this from the start…
"Quiet." Rem's voice is very loud in the room.
The space heater has been turned off and Light's thankful for that. He's burning up now. He's skin is prickling, chafed by the air. His body feels wrong, like it's not his body, like he shouldn't have one. The floor against his chest is rough, a solid presence, but he can't tell if he's touching it or not. The world tingles at the end of his fingerprints and L is dead in the next room and nothing. Nothing else.
Maybe he should close the door and lock it.
"Quiet, Misa," Rem says, but Misa sniffs and Misa steps on heavy feet and Misa is not quiet. Misa always takes orders, but she never does what she's told. She is not a girl who has ever done what she's told. The ground shivers as she walks to him. Light is still on the ground. He feels too faded to be feverish. He's not here. He's not here.
L is dead in the next room. Very quietly.
"Light, what's going on?" Misa asks, kneeling down beside him. He feels the heat radiate from her hand as she holds it above his head, too afraid to touch. Go ahead, he thinks. You have permission, just this once. Go ahead. "Shouldn't we - " she starts, "should I go after him?"
She's talking about L. Why is she talking about L? How could she of all people think that she could talk about L?
She doesn't touch him. Light feels like a statue that's been knocked over. She doesn't touch him and suddenly he doesn't want her to, can think of nothing more unsettling than the thought of her hands on him. Her tiny fingers. Her black painted nails.
"God doesn't wear black."
Oh, that's a good one. That's just such a good joke. The punchline is somewhere around here. The punchline is dead in the next room.
He stands up on shaky legs and when Misa goes to help him he shrugs her off with a vehemence he can't quite control. He feels dizzy and he doesn't know when he'd last eaten and he wants to be wild and feverish again, even though his sickness is gone. He can feel it gone - just drained out him. L had pressed a towel to his face and Light still wants to kiss him. There's a piece of paper on the floor, but he doesn't look at it. Misa keeps asking questions - "Do you want me to send Rem after him? Do you want me to get you some water? Do you want - "
The needle could stand to be cleaner, but she'll survive it just fine. He stabs it into the side of her neck in one quick movement and her eyes go wide but not surprised. He's been nothing but a betrayal to her from the start. She'd be better served finding some nice man with an intellect roughly equivalent with Touta Matsuda's, riding off into the sunset in a carriage of dreams and all that rot. A June wedding. She could wear flowers in her hair. She falls to the ground with a thud - there was a thud from the other room, he can still feel it shaking the floor - and Rem could probably have caught her but she doesn't.
She watches Light with her one jagged eye and Light knows, should have known all along. Always the traitor.
"You gave him the keys," he says, unsteadily. He needs to sit down, he needs to be still. Misa's position can't be comfortable, but he doesn't care. He grapples himself into her vacated seat - the chair he'd had her buy cheap from a going-out-of-business sale. Two of the legs are loose and it groans unsettlingly with any weight that's placed on it.
He feels like he might decay on the spot, but also like his skin is clean for the first time in a long time. He can think straight. He can see the world as it is.
"Yes," Rem says.
Ugly. There is a deep brown discoloration at the corners of the baseboards, where the metal sticks out unattractively. There is dirt under his fingernails. Everything rusts and rots and dies eventually, everything in the world is breakable and there is no use trying to keep it whole. There is a mirror and there is a vase and it - it shatters.
No. No.
There is dirt under his fingernails and he latches onto it, suddenly convinced that the only proper way to get anything in order, to make the world right again, is to get it out. Clean. Everything has to be clean. L is always dirty, never showers as often as he should.
Is. Present tense.
"Why?" he says, stopping for a moment. "Why would you do that?" He looks up at Rem and she looks down at him and it's a look that's wrong on her. Pity. She pities him. He hates that and his stomach twists and she's nothing, really - Misa will never love her, could never; Misa loves him. L loves him. Everyone loves him. He's God. "Why?" he asks again, because she's not responding and he can't tell how long it's been, moment to moment nothing more than a frazzled buzz of nerves and the tick of his watch. What times is it? Misa's still on the floor.
"It was a test," Rem says.
What? What does that mean? He hears the words but they don't fit together properly. They give you tests in school, people test things to make sure they're working properly - aptitude, functionality, the state of being testy - but L left and L ran and how does any of this make any sense? This feels like a fantasy, like something he'd think about while palming himself through his slacks, imagining L to be -
L is in the other room.
"He wanted to see what you would do." Rem is moving closer to him and Light can't decide whether to be disgusted or grateful. She is a god, in her way. "How you would react." Rem looks at him and then to the paper on the floor, L Lawliet looped across it in uneven penmanship. "I guess he saw."
Light stands. He stands and he's standing there when Ryuk fades in through the wall behind him, grin leaking something perverse onto the scene - as if it wasn't already there. Misa's on the ground and Rem is a beastly, hulking presence and Light is standing. Light is standing.
Ryuk laughs and he keeps laughing. He can feel the tiny pulse of his watch as the seconds tick by. More than forty. Far, far more than forty.
Mikami, he thinks. Mikami in a white t-shirt and jeans. It could be so easy. Just a little twist, a little chafing bend of reality and there really wouldn't be a difference. There really wasn't anything so irreplaceable in L that can't be cultivated in someone else. Humans are formed by experience, by circumstance. If the soul is there, it is simply an un-carved block cast into the world to be made human only by suffering. The tides roll in and the water wears at it and eventually, maybe, there's a person there at the end of it all.
Light is hands and strong fingers and a neck and eyes that practice smiling into the mirror and smooth silky hair and a voice, a voice that people listen to when it speaks. He is a name. Moon Night God. Light. Yagami. They're just parts of a whole. He is calves and he is khaki and he is that tiny, screaming, rabid thing that thrashes in his chest, that says this is all wrong. There is paradise somewhere beyond these walls, but you have burned it and you are burning. The torch is lit. Little boys have their livers carved out. Violence takes you and it paints the walls. Time moves too slow or else too fast and everybody goes to work and everybody collects their paycheck and everybody pretends to fall in love because the enormity of their singularity is terrifying. Light is eyebrows and lips and feet that blister in his running shoes on the tennis court.
Light is mostly names, and mostly other people's names. Light is Kaito Hidaka and Korou Otohara and Naomi Misora and more and more and more and the world over. The world shivers in his hands. Light is the Death Note. Light is death and Light is God and Light is the killer that they all call him.
And Light is L, in some ways. Light is sometimes more L than Light is himself. Sometimes there is no such thing as Light Yagami, only Kira and L. Only larger than life beautiful things.
Ryuk is still laughing. Light is still standing. L is still in the other room and Light steps one foot in front of the other, because he'll have to do something with the body.
His bare feet stick to the cheap linoleum as he moves into the hallway. The walk feels shorter than usual, maybe because most of the time he's going the other way, antsy to get to L, L tied up and packaged tight for him. Like a pet, a prized hound. L did warn him. This was always a terrible idea and things were always going to end with somebody's blood soaking somebody else's hands. He should breathe, he should get over it.
He moves to the hall, and to the small room connecting it.
It's really not that big a deal, if he puts it into proper perspective. People die all the time, every day. Death is just as human as anything people do, if not more so, and the wheel needs to keep turning and the stars need to -
L is in the next room. L is curled up on the bare grey carpeting, thumb to his mouth, head tipped limply to the side. "Took you long enough," he says, shifting into a more watchful position. "I thought you'd died in there or something. Misa has stopped shrieking anyway, so I suppose I should just count my blessings."
Light doesn't -
Light doesn't.
L is in this room. L is looking at him like he's gone crazy.
Light can't - there is too much in him, swirling around, making tornadoes, making him sick, and all that really registers at this point, above all the scattered, contradicting questions and thoughts and demands and pleas and prayers and wild hope, is -
Oh thank fuck.
"Ow," Beyond Birthday says.
Because Mello once heard a story. Mello sat awkwardly on a sofa with L curled up across from him, picking at pastries and mumbling somewhat uninterestedly about an FBI agent named Naomi Misora and a girl with her eyes removed and lots of little Japanese dolls. Lots of symbolism. Lots of psychosis. Mello had taken notes. L had rolled his eyes.
"You should be able to retain information of this level of detail without any aide. Real life doesn't always allow you a pen and paper," he'd said, and then dropped a fruit tart straight into his mouth.
Mello remembers the scratchy feel of the pillows at his side, the rock that had been stuck in his shoe that he'd been too nervous to shake out. "Fuck off," he should have said. Should have had some goddamn backbone. Matt had said so - or, Mello had said so, and Matt hadn't contested it. Probably hadn't even been conscious at the time - three in the morning and the two of them spread out on the bedroom floor with chocolate and cigarettes and all the necessities. "Fuck off," he should have said.
He'd just apologized and set his notepad aside. L had snorted, as if he'd expected as much and looked down on him for it - which hadn't been fair, hadn't been fair at all. He'd said so after. "L is never fair," Roger had told him, with an unassuming glance and a tap of his pen.
But Mello had heard a story. He hadn't taken many notes and he doesn't remember most of the names or the dates exactly - that's why he's not number one, maybe; Near has a photographic memory and how is that fair, how is any of this fair? - but he remembers one name.
Beyond Birthday.
He'd heard it before. Wammy's loves a good ghost story and Beyond Birthday is the best ghost, even better than A. Grady, the groundskeeper's son, had half the intelligence of a Wammy's House two-year-old, but he'd still told a damned good scary story. True stories, he'd said. Beyond Birthday was the kind of boy who tore wings off of butterflies, the kind of boy who could stay very still and quiet for hours and hours in order to get the butterflies to land in his hand. A boy who no one blinked twice at when he came home with blood in his mouth and dirt on his hands, always climbing trees and killing things and laughing quietly. Always following L around like a rabid animal who'd chosen himself an owner.
Beyond Birthday is a legend. Beyond Birthday is a murderer. Beyond Birthday is in prison.
"Ow," Beyond Birthday says. Mello had hit him hard, but not hard enough, and it's barely a glancing wound. Beyond Birthday shrugs it off. Beyond Birthday knees Mello in the stomach and then shoves him over, and Mello watches the ground twirl in unquiet patterns around his head.
"That didn't really hurt," Beyond Birthday continues, tapping his cheek as he leans over Mello, sharp-tooth leer splitting his face, "but it's the principle of the thing, isn't it? You can't just go around hitting people, especially people who've just preserved your chastity for you. Or did you want him in you? It's okay. They tell you wrong things, but it's okay to want to be raped. It's okay to want to die. It's okay to want your fingers ripped off one by one."
Mello can't breath. It's like before. It's like Watson all over again, except Watson's slumped against the leg of a side-table, a stack of books collapsed across him. Some are split open and the pages shift and bristle in the breeze from the open window. The window is open. Beyond Birthday came in the window and Beyond Birthday killed Watson and how did that happen? How does this make any sense? Beyond Birthday is a story he'd heard once, twice, a few times, but Mello has lived a whole life without Beyond Birthday coming in windows, so why has he started doing it now? Why is he balanced on top of Mello, hips straddling the middle of his chest, wide, wild eyes staring back down at him.
And sharp, sharp teeth.
"Get off me," he says, because those teeth have been glinting in the edge of his vision and those teeth have been some sort of spectral ghost following him around, and no, that can't be it. "Get off me!" he yells, and how long has it been? How long has Beyond Birthday been tailing him? Weeks or more. He's supposed to be a detective. He's supposed to be someone who doesn't get pinned to the floor, knocked around like some kind of child.
"Do you know who I am?" Beyond Birthday asks him.
"Yes." He doesn't look much like L, Mello thinks, staring up at him. His jaw is sharp and his eyes are smiling and his tongue keeps making fleshy, slick sounds in his mouth. "Yes," Mello repeats, because he's not sure that he said it in the first place.
Beyond Birthday shifts his weight slightly, fingers coming up to claw lightly at Mello's temple, like he wants to dig through the skin. It's only after a moment that Mello realizes that Beyond Birthday is stroking his face. He bucks his hips trying to shake him off, trying to yank his wrists out of Beyond's grasp, but it's not working, he's stuck, he's stuck, and he's going to kill this bastard. He's going to fucking kill him.
"Do you know what I am?" Beyond Birthday asks.
"A murderer," Mello barks, then tries to spit in his face, but Beyond's too high up and he just grins as the spittle lands on Mello's cheek. He thrashes again, desperate, unclean - he feels unclean.
Beyond bites his bottom lip, twisting it up between his teeth. "Well, that - yes. I guess I'm a lot of things. Crazy, you know, being one of them. Mad." He sits up, drawing white lines on Mello's face with his fingernails, then leaning down to kiss him on the nose. Mello almost manages to land some teeth marks on his chin. "They gave me tests and I answered all of the questions right and they gave me an A for arse-backwards mad. You know who else took the tests? You know who always gets straight A's?"
Mello's trying not to listen, looking around wildly for a way out, and he can't - there's no one else. Watson is dead and there's no one else. He'll have to make it alone, he'll have to do this by himself, he'll have to, he'll have -
"Mihael," Beyond snaps, voice silky and ragged at once, "eyes up here. I'll give you a hint, it starts with an L."
He doesn't notice at first, but it seeps in as the words register, and then it sort of clicks and Mello's really going to vomit now. He hasn't had anything but that cocoa all day - what day is it? - but he's going to vomit. This is not happening, except for the part where this is obviously happening, and how is this happening?
There is water on his face and it takes a moment for him to realize that he's crying and he wants to take it back, undo, undo, because he's strong, he's a fucking detective and this is not how it's supposed to happen at all. It's pathetic, but he wants his warm bed back, wants Wammy's and Roger's overtaxed drone and Matt's hair tickling his hands and sharp cigarette smoke and off-white walls with dirt in the cracks, oak paneling, a church down the road from the main building where Mello used to break in and pray when he was very, very young, when he didn't care that the other kids laughed at his rosary. He still prays these days, but mostly just to spite them. The church down the road is too far a walk and no one listens just as well from his bedroom as no one had listened there.
God, God, are you there? Hello, please pick-up. It's me, Mihael - just like Beyond said; Beyond knows his name; and how how how? - and I could use some fucking help right about fucking now and fuck, fuck fuck fuck. That's not how you pray. He always does it wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong enough to be second best, to be the one on the linoleum floor with a psychopath in his lap and the corner of a hardcover copy of The Brothers Karamozav digging into his shoulder.
There are tears on his face and Beyond Birthday leans down and licks at them and the whole cycle starts over again, Mello screaming and kicking and his throat hurts and his body hurts and how long will he be down on this floor? Until Watson's body starts to decompose? Until the neighbors come to check - as if the neighbors would come to check. This is a lonely city. It's all lonely cities. There is ghost story on his lap licking his face and he ran away from home, or close enough to home, because he'd wanted to catch the glory by the hair. He'd wanted to be somebody's hero and he'd wanted just one good pat on the back and a, "Well done, kid."
But that's all fucked now, isn't it? Or maybe it's been fucked from the beginning. He's always known - L - L
"L's dead," he says to Beyond Birthday, the words lodging thick in his throat and the sobs wrack his body and it's almost a relief to say the words, to get them out. To speak, to speak to somebody.
"No." There's a hand in Mello's hair and suddenly he'd being yanked up and thrown down again and the playful madness in Beyond's eyes has been replaced with something seething and violent that tosses Mello around like a rag-doll. "Is that what they told you?" he spits, not waiting for an answer. "No. I would know, okay. I would know. You know with identical twins, there's all this research into telekinetic connection. Like they're one person. Like they can feel the other one there, like a second layer of skin. It's like that." He glares at Mello, like he's daring him not to believe it. "I'd know, okay?"
"Fuck you," Mello says, too drained of energy to yell properly, but he's angry and he's annoyed on top of it all, because Beyond Birthday is speaking to him and Beyond Birthday is out of his mind and what did he do to earn this, really? There's a madman in his lap and how did he get there, how did any of this get the way it is now? "You psycho fucking fuck," he says, calmly, like he's addressing Beyond by any old nickname. "Don't you understand? You're nothing to L. Nothing. He doesn't care about you. He probably doesn't even remember you exist."
Mello thinks Beyond's going to hit him, but he just slaps a limp hand through the air, suddenly outrageously camp, and lets out a wheezy giggle.
"Oh, deflection!" he squeals. "Father-figure issues! You are exciting, even without the jailbait rape-attempt saga. It's the trousers, I think." He slides one hand down Mello's waist, trailing his fingers across the leather on his hips, and Mello nearly sprains his wrist trying to get him off again. "They're very tempting. But L - L, L, L. L's a whole other thing, you know."
He shifts a little and Mello can feel the warmth of his thighs through his jeans, and what the fuck is that?
His voice is quiet and startlingly lucid for a moment as he blinks at something behind Mello's head and says, "There's the world and there's lights and stone and gravel and water and things, and that's all very well, but then there's L." His eyes snap back to Mello and then he's grinning again. "You ever been in love with a thing, Mihael?"
There it is again. No one's used that word around him since he was seven and Mr. Wammy came to visit him at the latest in a long run of foster homes. He used to whisper it to himself sometimes, when he was a kid, so that he wouldn't forget. But then he got older and forgetting didn't really seem like a big deal anymore.
"How do you know my name?" he asks, voice softer than he wants it to be.
B's teeth dig into his lip, the edges of his mouth quirking. "It's right there." He taps his finger at Mello's forehead, stopping right above so that it doesn't make contact, then shakes his head. "I'll tell you all about it later, just answer the question."
"Fuck you."
Beyond takes his wrists in one hand, flattening them to the floor.
"I'll take that as a I don't know, I've got all these teenage hormones, and the nice man with the sweet breath wanted to hurt me and I wanted him to hurt me. That's what it is, isn't it? There are always nice men with sweet breath and grabby hands."
He's pulling something metal out of his pocket and by the time that Mello realizes that they're handcuffs, they're already around his wrists.
"When I was a child," B says, "I wanted to work at a whorehouse. I thought it seemed romantic, you know? The body as a commodity, to be bought and sold. It's transcendence without the transcending. I thought it was very beautiful. Then L told me that no one would ever want to have sex with me." He laughs and latches Mello to what is probably the radiator. "He was 12 at the time. He ate his words later, just like he ate the skin off my bones."
Mello yanks at the cuffs, struggling with renewed vigor. "You're so full of shit," he grits. "I don't even know what you're talking about and I don't care!" Beyond moves out of his line of sight and Mello jerks around to try to see what he's doing, shuffling over to the other side of the room. "I don't care! Are you listening?"
"Pipe down, will you, goldilocks?" B calls over. Then there's a thump and Mello watches Watson's body collapse in a heap not a few feet away. B grins over the top of it. "Hey, you wanna see something neat?"
He wakes up in a church. It's the first of many mornings. It doesn't look like a church because it's the back room, where they keep the spare crucifixes and the extra hosts. He doesn't know any of this now, but he'll know it later. The year is 1985. He'll know that later, too.
It's snowing today. He knows that now. It had snowed all night and into the morning and he'd fallen asleep to the gentle rocking of his body against someone's chest, listening to the wind whistle through the stone. That person is not here now. Neither is her chest. There are men with black robes and lined faces and very little hair, all squinting down at him in mild, disdainful puzzlement. They argue. Nobody wants to keep him but nobody particularly wants to throw him away. There's a man with a pipe and harsh laugh and he doesn't look, doesn't contribute more than vague, joking suggestions, but he's the one who takes him in the end. Finds him new shoes and a warm coat, clothes for the little boy with dirty hands. Charity. One of the seven heavenly virtues.
He knows he should say, "Thank you," but all he can manage is, "Where is my mother?" over and over again until his voice goes hoarse and quiet. They find him bedding and they find him food - snacks, sweets from town, little boy food. His mother is not coming back and he decides, after a day of waiting, that she must have died. She died, so of course she can't come. He cries into the laughing man's robes and gets knocked off to the side. Can't be bothered, he says. Has a mass to do, he says.
The laughing man stops laughing. The laughing man stops smoking his pipe. After a while, the laughing man gets put in a plot behind the chapel, and the little boy sleeps and wakes in the church every morning for three years.
That's when the rest of them start dying.
Mogi's easy. He doesn't talk much, so Aiber does all the talking, lays it down and lets it settle. He's been through it enough times before - Matsuda, Aizawa, Ide - it's just the chief after this, and maybe a bit more fucking around with the girl, and things will start to unravel.
"You - " Mogi says, quiet, not angry and not confused and not anything really, just quiet. "You're saying - L and Light?" It's a comparatively calm reaction. Aizawa had thrown a shit-storm about speaking ill of the dead. Ide had blushed and told him to fuck off. Matsuda, well - Matsuda had been a bit more fun at least.
"Yes," Aiber says, nodding. "L and Light, Light and L. Anyway you wanna slice it, it happened."
They're in a downscale bar that he imagines Wedy would turn her little designer nose up at, but Aiber feels at home here. He remembers slipping out of his house to sneak into places like this when he was a teenager. Couldn't go to any of the nice bars in town, because more nights than not, his folks would already be there, doing shots off of each other's stomachs and pawing at people half their respective ages. He'd been 19 and two years out of the house before he'd actually legally entered a club, and a few months older when it had been one that didn't have vomit on the sidewalk out in front.
Tokyo's night life isn't bad, but he can't stomach it anymore, and doesn't have time to, anyway. There's too much to do, too much to find out, and the days move faster now, or else rush past him in a haze of alcohol and Lucky Strikes and boys with hips almost like L's. He'd barely made it out of bed this morning, but Watari had called and then called four more times until he'd picked up, head throbbing and some little prick yelling for his money in rapid Japanese.
"Mogi today," Watari had said, and so here he is today, with Mogi.
The whole plan is to bring Light Yagami down from the inside. If they drop enough hints, sow enough discord, and maybe drive Misa Amane a little crazy in the meantime, eventually something's got to give. Yagami evidently doesn't suspect anything, because Aiber hasn't noticed his heart stopping yet, but it's only a matter of time. Still, if they can find L - and they will find L - quickly enough, it won't matter. They'll get him back and Yagami will go to the execution chair and things will go back to how they'd been. Criminals will keep on going the way they had, and the world might swallow itself whole, but there will be more days on more mattresses on more floors, and he will hold L's wrist and L will fall asleep - for real this time - and it will be -
It will be alright. Or something like that.
"I don't know if I should believe you," Mogi says, and he might as well be reading stock phrases from the catalogue of, 'things to say when receiving surprising news.'
Aiber splits up his smirk with his drink. God, this is so easy, he might as well not have gotten up in the first place. A text message and well placed emoticon could have done just as well, and he wouldn't have to foot the bill for their drinks. He'd offered to pay, of course. A scheme is a scheme, but that's no excuse for bad manners.
"I don't know if you should either," he tells him, setting down his drink. The glass is foggy and he leaves thick fingerprints all over it, wipes them away with the edge of his sleeve and his mouth tastes like frost and the ash Wedy left behind. "Hell, I don't know anything. But you're a sharp guy, Mogi-san. I'm sure you'll figure it out."
He reaches out a friendly hand and knocks him on the shoulder, patting his back like they're old war buddies or something. Aiber's not the type to have war buddies, though. He's not the type to enlist in the first place. He throws some crumpled bills on the table and stands up, feeling airy and relieved. There's a clattering, stilted sound across the room as a very drunk man in a very cheap suit knocks into one the waiters and then apologizes profusely, stumbling over his words like stones on the pavement.
"What are you using me for?" Mogi asks then, and Aiber smiles charmingly at him on instinct, only processing the question after the expression has formed on his face.
His hand is still on the table and he doesn't move, just leans there. "Excuse me?"
Mogi is looking at the table, scratching the cheap wood with two errant fingers. "You're using me for something, right?" he says, sounding as unmoved as ever. "It's a game. You guys are always playing games and you're always using us in them." He curls his fingers up to stop them clawing at the table and Aiber can see him reign in the urge. "You, L, Light, Kira."
Maybe Aiber should pay more attention to the fact that Mogi groups Light together in the same manipulative group as the rest of them, but as it is, it barely registers. Instead he frowns and sits back down, planting a finger on the table and saying, "Hey, I'm not one of them."
"Yeah," Mogi says, not seeming to intend any particular offense, "you are."
"No, I'm not."
Aiber picks up his half-empty drink and tosses it back, swallowing with a grimace and enjoying the the fizzle and burn at the back of his throat. He's not sure what to say to that, hadn't penned anything like this into the script and has never been very good at improvising. Never been that good at planning either.
He's just never been very good.
He flags down the bartender and orders another, and one more for Mogi, too, even though his glass is mostly full. They don't look at each other, but Mogi's back to clawing at the table - a nervous habit, reminds him of the way his sister used to scratch at her arms until they were scabbed and bleeding; reminds him of how they'd put her in a long-sleeved dress for the funeral, and peonies, peonies everywhere, peonies for the girl who'd had pollen allergies when she'd been alive. Their drinks come and someone is singing drunkenly out on the street, performing for the laughing crowd.
"So what if L and Light were seeing each other?" Mogi asks him after a few long, silent minutes. Aiber wonders what the hell he's been thinking about, wonders what a man like him even thinks about. "So what?" He doesn't even make it sound like a question. It doesn't sound like anything. Aiber might as well be at a table by himself.
"They weren't seeing each other," Aiber grits at him, trying not to be affected, shoving whatever the words raise out of him back in with another gulp and a hand across his mouth. "They were fucking. It's different. L didn't - " he tries, flounders, "- that was a game."
Aiber can't decide if he's gotten the job done or not. Watari would probably tell him to try a little harder, the old bastard.
Mogi puts his hands in his lap to stop the scratching, says, "Are you sure you don't think Light is Kira just because L did?" His voice is deep, pleasant, too pleasant for the words and Aiber hates violence, hates when people bleed ugly all over his clothes, but he wishes Wedy's gun was here, and he maybe wishes Wedy was here, too, because doesn't know how to point the damn things. "What evidence do you really have?" Mogi asks.
And there's a switch that's happened somewhere along the lines, because when his glass was full, he'd been the one behind the counter, asking the questions, taking the notes. But now Mogi looks calm and Mogi looks placating, and those are both things Aiber can't afford to be, or hasn't since L disappeared. October 31st. Fucking halloween, and isn't that a good joke? His own fucking birthday. Isn't that a better one? He puts his hand on the table and squares his jaw and tries to focus on Mogi's face instead of the bar lights twinkling behind him.
"L's gone," he says, trying to remember Mogi's question as best he can, "and the only people who knew his identity and knew where to find him were on the investigation team. Now unless you think Matsuda is Kira - "
"I think you're drunk," Mogi says, no condemnation in his voice. Aiber looks at his glass and it's empty, and this all seems like a really terrible idea now.
"So what if I'm drunk?" he says, pushing his hair out his eyes, where it falls in thick strands. He needs a shower, needs a glass of water, needs someone nice to take home. "So what, right?" He stands up, stumbling out of his chair with exaggerated incapability so that Mogi will stand from his own and take him by the arm. He does, plays just right even though he doesn't seem to know that he's playing.
They make it out into the street, into the thick, cold air, and Aiber thinks about kissing him but doesn't, and it's just another blurry night in a blurry month.
two hours earlier.
Light whimpers often and he reminds L of a child. Not of any of the children's he's known in particular - stony-faced little overachievers who are more akin to Light when he's up an about and tearing apart the world - but what he imagines the generic child must be like. Helpless and curled up and afraid of itself, of its circumstance, and unable to define the world around it through language or coherent thought; a being who lives through white noise and desperation. Light whimpers and L brushes his sweat-soaked hair up from his forehead and rather wants to be able to take care of him - for convenience's sake - without having to admit to the fact to any of the parties involved, himself included.
"What would you do if you escaped?"
Rem's voice is low, kept quiet so as not to wake Misa, who's been out in the chair for going on an hour. L's body locks up at the shock of it, but he pretends to be unfazed. The thing about a Shinigami is that there's no presence to it. Whether it's because they're not from this world or if they're simply like that regardless, he doesn't know, but it's highly unnerving, either way.
"Eat an ice cream sundae, probably," he tells her, without turning around, and after a moment she floats into view, phenomenally unobtrusive for someone of her size and appearance. Maybe it's the way the dejected look on her face has become even more dejected than usual, but he guesses at her intention fairly easily. "You're curious about what would happen to Misa, I assume?"
Rem says nothing and L puts a finger to his lips.
"Can Shinigami really become attached to humans, or have you just seen her in her underwear too many times?"
The shift is instant and the boil of her anger is suddenly palpable, her one eye narrowing to a slit, and it strikes him then that Shinigami are really real, not just in the vague, plastic way that most things are real - gaming consoles and fried ice cream and tax returns - but real in a human way; an uncomfortable, gutting way. She's embarrassed, he realizes, ashamed of her feelings, and he instantly likes her all the more for it. A thing wracked with shame and doubt and quietness is infinitely more sympathetic than even the nicest man with the surest smile and the cleanest conscious, with no thought of possible wrongdoing.
L tries to smile at her. She takes it as a threatening gesture.
"You're despicable," she says, lips curling around the words with a familiar disdain. "You're just like him."
It's not hard to know who he is. L could be insulted, but he laughs instead, glancing at the clammy forehead of the prettiest boy in town. It's terrible to want to kiss a sick man, no matter what definition of the word you use, and L is terrible.
"Not just like," he says, "but close enough." Then he looks over at Misa, eyes tracing up her rumpled pajamas. "She'd go to jail at the very least, but execution is more likely. I might be interested in making a sort of bargain with you at some point, trading her freedom for mine, but not now." He glances back to Light, fingers running soft along the bedspread. "I have to stay here for a while. Someone's got to keep him from going completely off the deep end."
Rem snorts, or does the rough death god equivalent. "It seems as if you've already failed in that."
He rather agrees with her assessment, but admitting as much will help nothing, so he asks instead, "Would you give me the keys?"
"I thought you didn't want to leave," she says, looking from him and to the door and back again.
"I don't. I want to test something, see what his reaction will be if he thinks I'm escaping." He hold out his hands, wiggles his fingers. Rem doesn't present him with a mode of escape that easily, though, just ignores his hand. That's alright, he hadn't expected her to.
"He may kill you," she says.
"He may, but I doubt it."
The room is quiet, but there's the distant shake and shuffle of the building, the bang of doors closing. They're in a basement of some sort, he knows, and suspects it's no more than two levels down from the way the sound travels. He's not sure exactly where the building is, but from the occasional echoes of traffic that hit at certain points during the day, he can tell they're still somewhere in the city. Tokyo, no doubt, given how quickly and often Light comes and goes. Likely somewhere at least somewhat disreputable - somewhere no one Light knows could possibly run into or spot him. No doubt somewhere well hidden. Light might be an emotional wreck who's incapable of navigating honest human interaction, but he's still brilliant, and he wouldn't have left any ends hanging loose.
If L wants to get out of here ever, he has to rely on himself, not a chance rescue. And if he wants to get anything at all done, he has to get Rem to agree to this.
"What will you give me in exchange?" she asks, eye locked on him, but skipping up to glance at Misa every other second and she is a terrible liar and he realizes then how to get her to do absolutely anything he wants. He doesn't smile, but arranges his face in a suitably ponderous expression, shifting slightly to lean towards her.
"I'll provide a different sort of freedom for Miss Amane," he says, head tilting to the side, if only out of habit. She's seen him talk straight often enough to know that most of his mannerisms are put on, but she still listens with stuttered concentration as he speaks. "She's in love with him," he says, nodding to Light, "and that's no good for anyone, her included. I'll fix that for her."
"You don't think you can - "
"I'll make her fall in love with me," L says, firmly, more firmly than he actually suspects he feels. It's hard to tell how he feels, sometimes. "Please don't look so surprised, I do this sort of thing a lot. Practically make my living from it. It might not be easy and it might not be quick, but then it never is, and if I can sever her attachment to him, it will be worth it, won't it?" He lifts his eyes and does smile then.
She looks at him for a long moment, the off-color tendrils of her hair shifting in an eerie half-real way - as if she's only partly here, the rest scattered in faded, inhuman places - then produces a small set of keys from somewhere within the folds of what might be her skin and might be her exoskeleton. L wants to grab at them on sight, but has monitored enough hostage exchanges in his time to know that overeagerness never gets anyone anywhere, and stays stock still.
Rem looks him up and down, then glances to Light's huddled body on the bed next to him. "Promise," she says. Or I'll kill you myself."
"Pinky-swear," L tells her, nodding perfunctorily and holding out his hand. "Keys?"
Rem glances down at his finger, then slowly slips the largest key off of the ring, returning it to, presumably, wherever she'd gotten the rest, and hands him those that are left. "You're not getting out the front door."
As this is not an unforeseen turn of events, he just shrugs and says, "I don't intend to."
two hours later.
Mogi's hair smells like generic drugstore shampoo and he shoves Aiber off whenever he pushes his face into it, maneuvering him into the taxi with some difficulty and speaking in low-voiced Japanese to the sullen driver. Aiber speaks very good Japanese when he's sober - L had made him perfect it; L had made him do a lot of things, like yell, like scrub violently at his skull while vomiting onto a street corner in Montreal, like pay attention to the word choice in the shitty love poetry he likes to send to his favorite boys and girls - but Aiber is not sober now and L is not here and, plebeian as it is, he likes the smell of Mogi's hair.
"Where do you live?" Mogi asks him, communicating between him and the cab driver.
Aiber laughs because he suddenly finds it all excessively funny - him drunk in a cab, just the usual, and the blind man with his seeing eye dog leading him across the street a few yards away and the whirring glint of the Tokyo buildings that go up and up. It's all very funny.
"Where do you live?" Mogi asks him.
Aiber says, "France," and keeps laughing.
Until L was six years old, he'd lived in a church. Until he was 17, he'd lived with Beyond Birthday. Until a few months ago, he'd lived in complete silence.
All of those things are in some ways like the others and all of them are in some ways not, but none of them at all resemble what it is like to live with Light Yagami, and even that doesn't quite touch the reality of what it is like to live with Kira.
He misses the boy, actually. There'd been a night back - before things had lost their rose-colored tint, before they'd even truly fucked - where he and Light had gone up onto the roof together. L's feet had been cold, felt after a while like they weren't even there anymore, and the chain had dragged on the ground between them and Light had said, "You're a bad man, aren't you?" and L had said, "Your fly's undone," and Light had laughed and kissed him on the wrist.
But then, there had been moments when the silence was more peaceful than caging, moments when he'd watch the daily mass from the balcony above, eating stolen sweets and smelling like incense. Moments when Beyond would sit on his windowsill just after sunrise and tap out Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto on the wall beside him. And there'd also been the moments when B had left dead animals in his bed. Everything is pretty sometimes, and Light Yagami is no better than anything, even if he still kisses L's wrist.
Aiber would do that too. Aiber's hands were too large, and clumsy, and the pleasure of sex with him was that he wasn't very good at it. L was always better. Aiber was sloppy, Aiber smiled while fucking, did a whole 'Hugh Hefner in an armchair; you should prance around for me' thing, and did it well. He'd fall asleep after, sometimes on top of L, and L would have to kick him awake and off the bed if he wanted to get any work done.
Wedy's better. Was better. She had technique, as she did in all things, and made quite a production out of it. She liked restraints and she liked for her lipstick not to smudge and she liked a cigarette after, and to be the one to tell him to get out. She'd cook breakfast - eggs, bacon, pancakes, straight-up American style; never was much of a patriot, but never liked any country she was in any better - and tell him if he wanted to eat, he'd eat what she made. He, of course, went hungry, mostly just on sheer principal.
Thierry Morello wanted to be an actor when he was younger. Saved up his money and went to university for it. Found he was better at playing roles in real time, better when he could touch and smile and speak in low-voiced, conspiratorial whispers with the audience he was performing for. Merrie Kenwood always wanted to be a thief. Her mother wanted her to be Miss America and took her to beauty pageants all over the country. Merrie started lifting the prize money in the middle of the contests by the time she was fourteen. Started fucking the judges, just for kicks, a little while after that. She still calls her mother every week in her nursing home.
Still did. Until -
Light is standing in the doorway. He looks winded and he looks like he's just been shot and he looks like he might up and murder L here and now and L thinks, good. Good, then they can sort this. They can finally put aside their oh so precious little feelings and brawl it out, scrabble and scrape and break bones until one of them bleeds and keeps bleeding and doesn't stop bleeding. Let them settle this like mammals. Let them settle this like monsters.
L is on the floor, curled up, but his fingers itch and as soon as Light makes a move to hit him, L is going to hit back. His body coils, his feet twitch, and it's going to hurt. He can feel it already, the echoes of something that hasn't happened yet. Light moves slowly, or quickly, and L thinks about his fine thighs and the way his fingers move neatly, in a straight line, as he writes. "You're a bad man, aren't you?" and it's applicable on all sides, to all parts of the situation.
Light stops, stands in front of him, and the sound of his knees on the floor as he drops down next to L is not loud, but it jars the room anyway. And the feeling of Light's hand on his shoulder rocks through him and it's very quiet and he wants to move, he wants to hit him, he wants -
And then Light's breath is in his hair and his hands are scraping around his back and he says, "L," and he says, "How?" and L says, "What?" and Light tugs him by his hair and hugs him, very tightly and unexplainably.
He hadn't expected this, but he ought to have trained himself to expect the least likely and most out-of-place reactions from Light in all situations, and would if he let experience dictate things. He is choking L or he is hugging him and he is always doing one of those things, volleying violently from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, as if the only way to justify his affection is to balance it with utter loathing and vice versa. He cannot decide whether to be the hero or the villain and he scraps his lines and rewrites them every other scene.
He's killed Aiber and Wedy, he wants to kill Watari. L is set to hate him and set to fight, because that is expected, that is how the story goes. When people do bad things to you, it is only good form to be hurt and unforgiving. Anything else is weak and improper and playing the show all wrong. Kill him. That's the way. That's the only way.
L hugs him back, though. He doesn't fully understand the situation and he doesn't fully need to. Light smells like sweat and he looks exhausted and he leans too heavily on L.
"How?" he repeats. "How did you do it?"
"I don't know," L says, because he doesn't even really understand what Light's asking. How he got out? "Rem, she gave me the key - "
"No, not that. You - you."
It sounds like a question about L's existence, like some sort of philosophical inquiry. Well, when a man loves a woman - or rather, thinks she looks good in her Sunday dress. Maybe L will tell Light about his childhood sometime, but he's fairly certain that's not what he's asking either. His body isn't as warm at it had been, his movements not as jerky, and his fever must be almost completely gone by now, or else he'd be dead, brain boiled in his skull. Still, he doesn't look healthy, not like his good old fake-smiling self again.
"Tell me how you did it?" Light repeats, but L still doesn't know what he's being asked, and suddenly Light's turning away, pushing out of his arms and speaking to a blank stretch of wall. "How did he do it? Did you do something? It doesn't make sense. It makes no sense."
"Light, do you need to lie down or something?" L asks, cautiously, because if Light isn't going to yell at him and fuck him against the wall for trying to escape, L would rather just set this all aside and get back to it in the morning. Perhaps he can convince Misa to go out for pastries if he tells her that Light needs them to get better and she pretends to be stupid enough to believe him.
All of his plans these days are dependent on the conspiratorial tendencies of a couple of mass murderers and a Shinigami. It would be funny if the humor hadn't worn off a week or so ago and his wrist wasn't itchy and the room wasn't curiously warm.
"Tell me," Light says to the wall again, and then it hits him. If Rem isn't sticking her head through the plaster, then someone else is, and since the list of people who have the ability to do that it conspicuously short, Light can only be speaking to one person - or, perhaps 'person' is the wrong term.
"Light," he says, pulling on his sleeves, pulling him back to face him. "Light, is there a Shinigami in the room?" Light's barely looking at him, and when he does, it's in a curious, wincing way, as if L is too bright or quick or strange for him to properly focus on. "I want to speak to it. Light, look at me."
He pulls his sleeve again and Light turns on him with a vehemence that's not unprecedented but certainly hadn't been present in the situation up until now, grabbing him by the face and tugging his chin up and jerky movements. "I am looking at you. Tell me how you did it."
"I don't know what you're asking me."
He really is completely out of his mind, isn't he, this boy of L's.
Light jerks his head around, goes from scowling imploringly at the blank wall to the doorway, where Rem floats, a tender sort of loathing in her face. "You," Light spits. "You did it, didn't you?" Rem just stares at him, until Light shakes his head. "No, you don't have that kind of power, nothing has that kind of power, I - "
"Light," L says, firm hand of his shoulder. "Light - "
"Shut-up, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to - "
And L doesn't know what's going on, really, had a plan and succeeded in his plan and prepared for the natural fallout, but it's all not quite right. The world has tilted on its axis while he wasn't looking, leaving him to try to struggle to stand straight - to hold Light still, still and quiet - and get his bearings. He doesn't understand.
Then Rem holds up a piece of paper that makes Light's eyes go wild and hectic, accusing - somehow looking unattractive for one moment of his existence - and she says, "It wasn't a piece of the Death Note. It was a shopping list."
And then L rather does understand.
Light's muscles tense up, face searching, like he's attempting to figure out the punchline, then going loose and disbelieving. His body sort of slumps and his mouth curls unappealingly and L says, "You tried to kill me," at the same time as Light starts giggling. Madly. It's mad. He goes sort of boneless on L, fingers twining into his hair, and starts laughing like a maniac, body shaking with the tremors of it. It's not pretty, it's not pretty at all. Light had tried to kill him - with a shopping list, which is funny to some degree; which must have seemed dangerous to his addled little mind - and nothing about this situation is pretty.
If the story was going right, if it was any good at all, that would break the spell. L would be free. Goodbye, so long, see you. L would stop feeling the way he does, the need to brush Light's hair out of his eyes and put him to bed and tell him, tomorrow will be better, tomorrow will be less afraid. But it has always been a terrible story and as Light clutches him weakly as he laughs, L clutches him back.
Why does he always end up kissing psychopaths on the forehead? Why does he always he always end up with somebody else's blood on his hands, somebody who shouldn't be the one bleeding, somebody who should be the one cutting. Light is too much like B for his own good, at least as far as L is - was - concerned with either of them. He hopes they never meet. He hopes B's committed suicide by now, the way he always promised.
He shifts, pushing Light up a little, and repeats, "You tried to kill me." Light nods, laughter barely dying down. Rem watches them with disgust. The wall might as well be doing the same.
Light's still hanging on him, but as the laughter goes down, his grip gets harder, and in a moment or less he's pushing L into the wall, face pressed to his neck and half curled up in his lap. His breath comes rough and shaky and his fingers card through L's hair and no. If there was a time for relief-laden make-up sex, that time has passed. He shoves Light with one heavy push.
"You tried to kill me," he says again, not sure why it's so difficult to process, given that it can't quite be the first time. But it's just - it's just. "You couldn't even manage it properly."
"Not for lack of decisiveness," Light says, crawling back onto L like some dog that won't give up, no matter how many times it's kicked. He's so warm and so good, even now, but L shoves him away, pulling himself half to his feet, and then kicks him in the chest for good measure. Light goes down hard, scowling, but seems more bothered by the principal of being kicked than any pain. He grabs L's leg, pulling him down with him, and L goes, landing in a convoluted straddle across his waist.
"Just for lack of reading comprehension," L says, and hits him. He hits him again. He grabs him by the hair and he hits him again. Light's mouth starts to bleed and it gets on L's knuckles, but he's still smiling, grinning like a loon, and when he wraps his arms around him, L means to hit him again, but doesn't quite. "That's for Aiber and Wedy," he murmurs, running his thumb along Light's bottom lip, picking up some of the blood and showing it to him. It's unsanitary, of course. None of this has ever been close to clean.
He should be angry for all of it, for Light trying to kill him with a grocery list, but then he should expect it by now. This is what he's signed up for. This is what he's bought and paid for. This is what he owns.
L rolls off of Light and lies next to him on the dirty carpeting. The room is empty of furniture, of anything but them and Rem's dull eye in the doorway. "I'm going to get you back for all of it," he says. "You know that, right?"
Light looks at him and the smile is gone from his eyes. He's maybe going to say something, but he doesn't, and he's maybe going to kiss him, but he doesn't. They stay like that for a long time.
Back in the bedroom, Misa is asleep - drugged, L realizes, when he sees the needle; Light really enjoys using it, doesn't he? - and has been moved to the bed. By Rem most likely, and as much is confirmed when Light trudges in with L and locks the chain back around his wrist.
"I need to lie down," he says. "Move her."
Rem looks at him like she's about to do something very Death Godly and violent to him, and L rolls his eyes. "Don't be a shit, Light-kun." He pulls up the covers and climbs into the bed next to Misa, leaving a small space on the other side of of the bed - the bed that surely isn't meant to fit three people - and making himself comfortable not a few inches from Misa.
"Light," Light says, correcting him. He resents the honorific, L knows, which is mostly why he brings it out.
He watches as Light watches him, then, after a thin moment, unhooks the other end of the chain from the bed and attaches it to his own wrist, like they had the once. Like they had done before that, for a long, long time. He keeps watching as Light crawls into bed next to him, keeping to the edge like he's afraid to touch anything. There's blood drying on his face. It will ruin the sheets.
L kisses his wrist, the chained one, and says, "Don't be a shit, Light," while trying not to smile.
Light falls asleep quickly enough - must still be exhausted from his fever, hasn't even eaten anything - and L lies there through night and daybreak between the first Kira and the second, their respective breaths a contrasting rhythm in the dark.
There is a heart on his chest.
There is a heart in his chest, but there is also a heart on his chest. Mello is chained to something, counting up and down from ten to keep calm, breaking into hysterical struggles every once in a while for good measure, and Beyond Birthday is doing something out of his sight that involves a lot of squelching and muted giggling and some humming of what sounds like a Ramones song, and then Beyond is standing over him, grinning like the devil on a hot day and there is a heart on Mello's chest.
It's still warm. The blood is soaking into his shirt. Its Watson's, it must be. Watson had tried to rape him he doesn't know how long ago and now he's dead and Beyond Birthday has cut out his heart and it's on Mello - like a live thing, like a creature - and he can't, he can't -
"You've stolen his heart, you see," B says, in his tinkling, smiling voice. His teeth are very shiny in the street lights from outside. "You're a smooth little criminal. You're a very pretty boy."
B pokes at the heart with the tip of one dirty trainer. Mello thinks about crying again, but he can't breathe. This is terrifying and very calm at the same time, and he's not dead yet, so he doesn't really know what.
"What, " he tries, "what - why are you doing this?" And that's stupid, stupid, psychopaths don't need a reason to go around cutting people's hearts out.
Beyond kneels down next to him and Mello flinches on instinct, tries to shimmy away, but he can't move, he can't move. "You ever been to the Orient, you little heartbreaker?" he asks, and Mello doesn't know what the hell he's taking about, doesn't know what the hell at all. "Either way, you and I are going to go on a little journey to the east." He grins so wide, too wide. "Like the monkey story, only in the opposite direction and with less moralizing. I've always wanted to see Tokyo in the winter, haven't you?"
He brushes Mello's hair out of his eyes with one gaunt, spidery hand, and Mello thinks don't at the same time as he thinks oh. Oh.
tbc.
end notes: I don't really know what's going on with my writing in this chapter. I feel like I've hit overdrive in the rambling poeticism department and I'm pretty sure I tone it down for a while after this? I hope? God, it just feels very stilted and awkward this time and maybe I was going for that but reading it back gives me hives. Still, it's been too long since I updated, so I think it's important that I learn to suck up my dissatisfaction and just get on with the story.
The 'shopping list' thing was possibly a cheap cop-out but it was always going to be. I wanted to build up something with dramatic tension and all that, then have it fall a little flat and be a mundane little fuck up - ridiculous but human. I don't think I really succeeded though, so it just reads sloppily. God, I'm whiny today.
If anyone is confused as to why Aiber is still alive (which is very possible because it happened about a million years ago), there's a flash-forward in chapter two in which Wedy changes her and Aiber's names within L's system, so that Light will not be able to kill them. Hence, survival! Like I would really let go of those two babydolls. Wedy will be beck, too, just in case anyone doubted that.
The 'monkey story' that Beyond is referring to is Journey to the West, a classical Chinese novel about Monkey, a pseudo-trickster figure in Chinese mythology.
Thanks for reading and *throws away any and all pretense at decorum* please review if you can. but of course, I'll love you all either way.