warnings: graphic, introspective sex, vague descriptions of torture and gore, and extreme liberties taken with the shinigami realm and its rules and nature. and hah don't ask me what's going on with the timeline.
notes: so it's been a month since my last update, but! i have a somewhat explanation which is that this chapter is nearly 15k and the one after it is nearing 17k and so i sacrificed timeliness for quantity, you know? the quality is suspect, as always, but i'll leave that up to you guys to decide. okay, couple of things:
1) the poem that L is quoting in the first scene is tulips by sylvia plath. it has nothing to do with sex but hey, artistic license and interpretation, eh? 2) the shinigami king and midora (while both canonical shinigami) are probably not very in character here. i know they appear in the special oneshot chapter, but i don't, uh, actually remember the special oneshot chapter. (i'm not even positive i ever read it?) so alas, theses are just characterizations i made up for them myself because i'm awful. i hope that doesn't bother anyone too much. 3) i pinkie promise the syd and sadie stuff is important to the plot. i hope it's not dull or annoying, as we're pulling up to some plot shifts that will become apparent next chapter and this stuff is necessary groundwork.
alright, that's all, i think? anyway i hope you all had a good thanksgiving if you live in the states, and if not, then just a good november in general! i know i was really awful about answering reviews last chapter and i'm really really sorry about that, so thank you to anyone who reviewed last time, and thank you all just for reading, period.
chapter twenty - the magician.
"The worst fault you have is to be in love."
"'Tis a fault I will not change for your best virtue."
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure, L thinks. Roger had always hated Plath, and L had taken that as a reason to sing her praises effusively - or as effusive as he could manage to be while still retaining the solid veneer of having nothing particular inside of him. The tutors and nurses all believed it, though he wonders now whether it was only because that's what they'd been paid for.
A had believed it because he'd wanted to.
B had not, because he hadn't wanted to.
It's a curious thing, that the greater the intellect, the less disposed towards fact and reason one is. You become so high in your own estimation, growing while the world stays the same size, that everything soon looks small and moveable. Reality becomes distortable, and you class your role as you see fit: A is for martyr, B is for villain, L is for…
Light.
He stirs awakes beside him on the dirty floor and the thought hits again, just a line, read at 14 and understood then, and understood differently now: I have never been so pure. He's slightly hard against Light Yagami's slacks, head blurry with the night, with poetry, with all the trappings of love.
That word keeps coming up, again and again. Maybe that's what L stands for? If he decides it does. It's all about decision. That's what he's not making, by making so many. I will make Misa Amane fall in love with me, I will send Aiber a message - he hopes Rem has finished the job by now - I will fuck Kira on the cool floor of an abandoned building as he wakes. Tiny things, but never the answer to the real question that's being asked:
What are you going to do about your - and this is only to give a nameless situation a name - love?
Kill it, bleed it, destroy it? Lock it away? Call the authorities and have someone else clean up the mess that's been made? Or the other, the whispering possibility that he considers only to marvel at the absurdity of, but then spends long hours marveling, as if he can't bear to let it go away again. A house in the countryside, an apartment in town, locales around the world to slip in an out of, hand in hand - metaphorically, of course, as they'd look abominably stupid going around sweating their palms against one another like schoolchildren - taking on cases, drinking cold coffee and sweating in the dawn and fucking on Sundays while the church bells of every little European town toll.
Light stirs awake beside him and L doesn't know what to choose. Or he knows, in that gut-clench, don't make me look at it, don't make me look it in the face way that one knows unflattering truths. But as Light wakes up, he holds out anyway, for a change in the atmosphere, a shift of the Earth's axis to calm him back to denial.
The world doesn't move, and so L moves it himself and, as Light's eyes blink blearily open, he leans in and kisses them closed again.
Light kisses him back, startlingly, with a force that grips him by the jaw, leaving fingerprints of hallway dust across his face and making it hard to breathe. If L had allergies he'd be dying on this floor. He might be dying anyway, Light curling his tongue against teeth, against everything, violent and pressing and demeaning in what it demands. Surrender, Light says, without speaking, but L doesn't know if he's asking for it or offering it.
L gets harder in his jeans - and he's been wearing the same clothes since the motel, hasn't washed or brushed his teeth or slept on anything but hard ground, only managed to get toilet breaks by goading Rem into walking him the six yards to the restroom a few times a day - but L is hard in his jeans and no matter how sullied things get, he only wants it more.
Light pulls back gasping, understated laughter rippling through his blinking eyes, and he says, with barely a pause for air between the words, "It's not morning yet."
L shivers with the semantics, with the denial for denial's sake. Maybe he wants L to beg for it, or maybe he just wants him to ask, and maybe that should be enough to make L refuse to do either of those things, but he is not so stubborn in the glow-warm press of bodies - closer, closer, just a shift of the hips, closer - but Light had crawled back to him in the middle of the night, after fucking someone who is not him, and he thinks maybe they should both be permitted to make allowances.
Circumstantial imperative or not, he doesn't like the idea of someone else touching what he's claimed for his own. Is that so very cliche? Is he the jealous boyfriend now? Isn't that Light's role? L is not supposed to care. L hadn't cared about Mikami or whatever he'd been called - Mikami, Teru Mikami, he remembers it perfectly, of course - but then he'd just been… a man. Someone on the street, someone met in coffee shops. Someone locked out of their little world, the one Light has chained him up in. Or had L? He's the one who brought the chains in the first place.
Misa is different, though. Misa makes him seethe, makes him lonely and fierce, makes him feel things that L has not yet figured out how to. Or if he knows how, he's not equipped with the right abilities.
Surrender, isn't it?
It's not morning yet, Light says, and L snorts, makes like he's going to roll over, and says, "Then I suppose we should just go back to sleep."
His skin is buzzing, he feels all lost under his clothes, and he knows the sensations are mirrored in Light, because if they weren't he wouldn't take that chance. L only says no when he knows they will say yes for him, and Light does, tugging him back and up against him, nearly climbing on top in a rough rut of clothing and breath and the fluttering need.
That's just a pale word for a dirty thing, though. Sex is what it really is. Hormones. Arousal. Lust. Those are all too clean, too. It's just the desire to come, to stop the aching, hurting want that rides through them with laughing chemicals. To fuck. Dust off all the lovely words, the poetry, the nice parts that dilute it, and that's all it is.
They're going to fuck on the floor. Like animals, or people in porn, or young men without the presence of mind to purchase mattresses for their captives.
I am a nun now, L thinks, his fingers clawing up Light's back, feeling the press of his cock against the worn material of his thighs, and it's not anything like what dear Sylvia meant, but she is dead anyway, and the cruel irony would likely not send her spinning in her grave. There's a measure of truth to it, though. He can count on one hand what he has left, and he clutches that against himself as it writhes on his lap, pressing slick, sharp kisses to his neck.
He pulls Light back by the hair, arching his neck into a tendinous dome, forcing them to confront one another. "How was your night with Misa?" he asks, masochism disguising itself as sadism.
Light pins him by the shoulders, thrusting forward, body grinding down with uncomfortable force, so close they may as well be merging skeletal systems, and the fact that it hurts justifies it. Violence is the cure for devotion, and Light is feeding himself its medicine in great gulps.
He leans down, so close to L that, quite comically, their noses brush, and says, "She got me off."
"That doesn't answer my question," L replies, thrusting up against him, tit-for-tat, blow-for-blow, like a barter system where they spend all their currency on one another. Left poor and destitute in the streets.
L has his mind, has his body, has a few sets of clothes - some of them Light's - and a toothbrush and a pair of extended handcuffs and time. Time alone with the ceiling, with the murky stars that bleed into sky-scrapers, forming a chilly light-source that seeps in the boarded up windows and makes Light's hair glint like neat new pennies. Currency. Light sucks a bruise on his neck and this feels like the only thing he has now.
Surrender, the fingertips ask of him, the air and the pressure and the raging, fizzing, vile need - pretty, even words for ugly, uneven things - and he is afraid of his answer.
He cants his hips up against Light's, and is met and forced down again, rubbing his flesh so raw that it hurts, but he doesn't care, or if he does it's in the way that demands more. That's been the strategy of his insides with Light Yagami from the beginning, hasn't it? More of this, whatever it is.
He pulls up Light's shirt, jerking it over his head, catching his busy arms just a moment before Light is unbuttoning his jeans, slipping them down as far as they'll go, stuck between the rough floor and the press of L's body against it. He's so so hard he thinks he could die and it's an embarrassing, mid-sex thought that he'll later roll his eyes at and ignore, but now it tears through him, racking his body with punishing desperation.
It buzzes in him. It's such clawing weakness. Sometimes he wishes he could hack this part of his anatomy off - make a proper nun of himself, take up life as a castrato and let merry tunes follow him instead of bloodsport and mussed bedsheets - but that would strip him of a valuable weapon. Sex and intellect, polar opposites on the evolutionary spectrum, but somehow merged by now into the hulking mass of present day humanity, and the tools most essential to his success.
Well, maybe he could have caught Kira up - hook, line, and everything else - without all the fucking, but he's certain it would have taken a great deal longer, and a line count of several thousand extra in conversational banter.
He's scrabbled up from his limp 180 to a near 90 degree arch, pulling Light soundly between his thighs, forcing him there as if he wouldn't march willingly. His cock is crushed briefly between their bodies, but the sharpness is diluted by further disintegration as he feels a warm spike of flesh press between his legs, and -
"Oh," he gasps, a theatrical mismanagement of himself, and Light slows, the cognizance of the words too stiff for it to strike him as a rare expression of sexual pleasure. "Oh, well, this isn't going to work."
"What?" Light huffs breathlessly into the chilled sweat on his throat. "Crisis of conscious? It's a few months too late for that. Years, probably."
"Nineteen," L replies, pushing him backwards, "but I'm not much for counting at the moment." He doesn't let go, just paws, bleary and over-aware, at the small of Lights back with his palm. "Since you can't seem to remember to scare me up a a mattress, I don't suppose you've brought lube?"
"I have one on order," Light says hurriedly, frowning, face a fine red tint, pulsing just like the rest of him. "The mattress, not the lube. I…" His hands shiver on L's skin and he doesn't look anything near ready to roll over and call it a night. Quickly he backs up, pulling himself up on his knees, out of the prayer huddle over L and into a wiry stretch that shines in the radioactive glow of Tokyo. Pennies. He's so beautiful it flips around the scale to ugly, then makes another loop back again.
He bares himself like a prize for the taking. "Do me, then," he says, holding out his arms, an invitation that he shouldn't be giving. Don't let the bad man in, little boy. "I won't mind. Not tonight. Everyone's having a go."'
As if that makes the invitation more appealing.
L sniffs, looking away, even as he rocks his hips against Light's, bare cock rutting weakly against the expensive fabric of his slacks. "You will," he tells him. "It'll hurt, you'll probably bleed. I won't be gentle."
"Since when is that new?" Light kisses his mouth before he can answer, sucking all the air out of him, chapping his lips and clawing at his scalp with young hands. He pulls back abruptly as he'd come on. "You've never been gentle with me since the first day we met."
L does not flip them around. "I met you before you met me," he says. "I saw you on a screen. You were very pretty." He doesn't wonder if Light minds the past tense.
Leaning in, Light moves as if to crawl into his lap, slow like a sleepwalk, one hand going to his zipper, the other keeping a firm hold on the flimsy material of L's shirt. "And what did you think of me then?"
L remembers it quite vividly, the burning scent of his overworked mainframe, chugging through profiles in a dull slog, stuck in one of the slow dips that every case has where the romance of the crime is wearing off, bleeding into the tired reality of the day-to-day grind. He had rolled his eyes at Light Yagami's name - very maudlin of his parents, wasn't it? - but otherwise not blinked at the perfect records, perfect teeth, perfect nostril alignment.
He'd looked like a bore.
On his back now and watching as Light probes down between his own legs - wincing slightly, the pain a vague annoyance - he's struck with how inaccurate a hunch that had been. Light is many disastrous things, erring on the side of maniacal, and breaking into tiny pieces every other day, but he has never been uninteresting.
So, is that the only qualification for adoration? This is not adoration, of course, nowhere near so flimsy and red, painting his hands in grasping shades. But there are bits of it dribbled around, coating the mismatched surfaces like some pseudo-surrealist painting in someone's attempt at an art gallery in lower Manhattan. He'd caught a murderer in one. A shooter. Simple deaths, clever chase. For a painter he'd been firmly mechanical in the application of death, laving it on in smooth strips, like a day-job.
L bucks against Light's body, slowing his movement. This is his day-job.
"I changed my mind," he says, pulling Light close by the jut of his wrist. He hadn't answered the question, but Light is hard and vexed and doesn't seem to care. "You can do it."
Surrender. Hello, watchword. As if letting himself get fucked in the ass in a particularly painful way is some sort of grand romantic gesture. It's not. He knows it's not. He does not know how to gesture. He has unlearned his subtleties through Light's presence. He can only shout. It's not what he wants it to be but it's the best way he knows how to do it.
Light blinks and doesn't seem to understand surrender, and then it clicks what he means, like a record hitting the notes, and he swallows twitchily. "What about the blood." He forgets to ask it.
"What about it," L says, and pulls him close by the jaw, kissing him like there's a brass band in the background, playing up a violent crescendo.
Light flutters against him, caving as easily as if he'd been waiting to, held up by barely a string. They move in a strange, gaiting rub against one another, legs locking and wrapping, settling into an uneven pretension at the missionary position.
"Is this because you don't want to hurt me, or because you want me to hurt you?" Light asks, fingers pricking into him with the uncomfortable grit of skin against dry skin. This is going to hurt them both.
L doesn't know how to answer that right now, left leg shaking slightly, though he has no idea why - not like he hasn't done this before - so he says, "I'll tell you tomorrow." It's an IOU of a reply and Light barks flat, spacial laughter out quite abruptly against his shoulder, right as he slips another finger in.
The pain is in his lower back, spreading out dry and clawing, like sand against skin, the desert writhing underneath him, between his legs. Light breathes on his face.
He'd been 11 when B had first tried to play doctor. Dirt under his fingernails, grinning in L's hair. "Go away." L had tried to sound bored. He hadn't been bored. His heart had thumped, feeling small and loose in his chest, and his limbs hadn't moved much, lying back, fingers twitching. "Go away." B hadn't gone.
Light doesn't go; L doesn't ask him to.
It's trauma, but released and recognized, and the knowledge that it hurts, that it is allowed to hurt and that he doesn't have to explain it to Light, is oddly freeing. He is not trapped against the floor, he is not the kept boy with the bright mind of the mid-eighties who'd gone where they'd told him. He is no longer a quiet child, no long a troubled teenager, no longer a sullen man in a sky-scraper counting bodies and making lists. He is, if only momentarily, released from his daunting identity, allowed to breathe in and out in rapid succession on the floor as a devastatingly - unfairly - attractive boy struggles with the mechanics of fucking him more or less dry.
And he is allowed to enjoy it, no questions asked.
Ah. Maybe 'enjoy' isn't the right word; Light doesn't even look like he's enjoying it, wriggling his hips in order to hit an angle that will make it smoother. There's spit involved, at least, and it cools on L's skin, shivering his flesh, making his cock pulse and his head reel. He feels stretched open and pulled in conflicting directions with a harshness that only breeds more desire, but rightly shouldn't.
Hello, surrender. Nice to meet you. I am L Lawliet, I am 25. I do not have a home, I have never had a home. I have never.
It's not the cock, ass, fuck, domination, submission, pain, hate, love, violence, closeness that necessitates his giving in. That's all just the layers on top, drooling in a slow honey crawl across his body, making him drip pre-come, making Light stare down at him with wide, ringed eyes, like any hormonal mess of a kid being allowed to release its tremoring lust onto and into something. Surrender is something separate, something that happens because he asks it to, because he takes it with his frail hand and invites it in.
It's very easy, so easy that it's become extremely and undeniably difficult, because the simple has always been something he's denied himself.
So, what's the worst thing that happens if he says yes? If he hands himself over and says, Alright, Yagami, I love you. Alright, let me take you to London, to Singapore, to the far Canadian north. Are these just testosterone dreams that float through at 4 am, and dry up by morning? Or will he look at him tomorrow and think yes, yes, this is what I want?
They both wince through the bulk of the act, unrestrained discomfort lashed on one another, but there's a sort of communion to it. A mutual recognition. Why even fuck when it hurts, except that it's one more thing to have in common?
L comes onto Light's stomach with an arching cry in his throat, body quickening and loosening, mind surrendering, and it is far and away some of the worst sex they've had, but that doesn't feel like a bad thing, like anything but an necessity. His body falls in loose, disconnected parts to the cool floor. He has never been so pure.
There's a bit of blood, but mostly it's come and sweat and exhausted amusement.
"Is it morning now?" Light asks, settling against him in the muck of bodily fluids and emotional torrents. They are both sore and pleased and tired. "It'll have to be morning at some point."
L doesn't respond to the question. "It's a very curious thing," he says, looking elsewhere, "but, Light, I think it happens that I love you." Looking elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere.
If Light blinks, L doesn't see it, doesn't feel the flutter against his cheeks. "Ah." There's fingers in his hair. "Good to know." As if to say: I already do.
twelve years ago.
Sadie Markovitch is studying microbiology. Sydney Grauss is failing at graphic design. Despite these rather disparate circumstances, they fall in love in the cold spring of 1992, in the park at Russell Square, drinking bad coffee out of little styrofoam cups and laughing at all the couples that are richer and prettier and more sober than they. Sadie wears her hair in braids and Syd draws designs in ink on her skin and they sleep on the floors of other people's apartments, fucking and smiling and forgetting to give a damn.
Syd drops out of school in the winter of '93, and Sadie follows his example a year later, throwing up her hands and dodging her mother's phone calls. In '96 they buy a studio apartment and the empty shop below it for dirt cheap, and fix it up over the course of the next few months, until it's fit to pass government inspection. Syd works construction and Sadie waits tables to make ends meet, and in the summer of 1997, Syd's Tattoo and Piercing Studio opens its doors to the public.
In the year 2000, start of the century and romanticized as the dawn of a new age, Sadie Markovitch meets a boy in a bar.
He has ratty hair and heavy eyes and he buys drinks for several people, though he never touches one himself. But he laughs like a drunk and he smiles like a friend and when Sadie, laughing and tripping over her own feet, tells him that he has, "great cheekbones," he asks if she knows anywhere he could stay the night.
And this is how Syd and Sadie - in their little flat, with their mattress on the floor and their trunk-sale television and their beanbag chairs - gain a lodger.
B is too skinny for his own good, and he only eats when you remind him to, but he learns to draw as well as Syd within two weeks, and has a mind for calculations that makes it easy for him to help Sadie manage the business, and all of the customers - tattooed and grinning and varied - agree that he is a prodigy. He says he is 19, he says he has no family and nowhere to go, he says that his name is just a letter, and that he likes Sadie's dress.
"Very slimming," he murmurs, eyebrows popping, repairing one of the tattoo guns with steady hands.
"She doesn't need slimming. She's slim as can be already."
Syd puts his hands on her waist and Sadie laughs and tells him to can it, and three nights a week B minds the shop while they go out dancing. B tells bad jokes and makes shadow puppets in the streetlights and doesn't seem to gain or lose weight, or sleep, or do anything boys his age are meant to do.
And then one day, laughter. Sickening and far too loud, filling up the empty morning space. Syd wakes and the sheets beside him are cool and he hears it. He goes down the stairs. It is January and they've kept the heat off to save money. Sadie is on the studio floor, overlarge night shirt flipped up to show her skinny thighs, a dark pool of blood cushioning her head.
B is laughing, arms crossed over his chest, one hand cupping his chin. "I didn't kill her, Sydney," he says, wolf grin spreading like a gash on his face. And then, "She's very beautiful, isn't she? I always thought so, from the first."
"What did you," Syd says, "why did you - I - I -"
"I followed her home like a stray, and she was as good a mother as anyone could ask for. You would have had pretty kids, even with your genes in the mix, I think. But it happened just like I thought it would. I didn't kill her. I just watched."
"Why didn't you - what happened?"
"She fell. Slipped, I think."
"No, no, no, no, no, no."
Syd gets on the floor. He takes her face in his hands. He gets blood warm on his fingers, on his sweatpants, cradling her in his lap.
No no no no no no.
Everything gets dark. When Syd looks up again, B is gone. He leaves no belongings, no mark or indication that he had ever been there, and none of the customers really ask about him. Everyone's too preoccupied by their horror at Sadie Markovitch's tragic accident. That's what the coroner calls it. Accident. No no no no no no. Edmund tells Syd to let it go. No no no no no no.
Without Sadie - or B - there to manage the business aspect of Syd's Tattoo and Piercing Studio, it loses patronage, and he has to take on extra jobs to keep it afloat. Small ones at first, then bigger. Passports become his niche, though, and they're what he's best at. There's an artistry to forgery, and he lets himself seep into it, and it into him. He sells the flat upstairs to a nice working class family with twin baby girls. He drinks by himself, without Sadie there to take her half of the bottle, and vomits on the front stoop by himself, too. He gets a smaller apartment, a few blocks away. One where he'd never fucked anyone against the counter, or lain in bed all day watching the Saturday cartoons. He lives alone. He does his job. Jobs.
Five months and some days later, B shows up on his doorstep again, looking exactly as he had the first time, only absent of the drunken girl giggling on his arm, saying, "Syd, Syd, look what I've found!"
"I need a passport, old sport," he says.
"I need my girlfriend back, you little bastard," Syd says, jaw grit and drunk with more than the rum.
B stares at him for a long time, head cocked, then says, "Deal."
The graveyard is not hard to break into.
"What are we doing?"
"Magic!"
Syd swigs heavily from the flask that has a permanent home in his pocket. "You and your magic tricks."
The digging is heavy work, but B doesn't look to be breaking a sweat, and Syd has no idea where this will take him, or what it will achieve, but there is a curious gravity to B that makes one want to trust the fantastical to be in him - if it's in anybody.
And there she is, already far rotted, crawling with maggots, eyes hollowed out and flesh seeping off the bones. Syd retches in the grass. B stares down, a queer kindness in his eyes. "Still so pretty, I think."
"You're sick - this isn't - this isn't - " This isn't going to work. He's known it the whole time, of course, a laughing little surety in the back of his fluid mind, but seeing her there, dead as dead can possibly be, he doesn't want to look anymore. He doesn't want to be here. He wants to be back in the bed in which she had never slept, in the apartment at which she had never lived or smiled or danced. "I don't want to," he tells B, eyes cast up from where he's slumped on the grass.
B is a tall, billowing shadow. He'd stopped wearing the jeans and t-shirt a few weeks into his stay with them, and had started trading styles from day to day - tuxedos to leather jackets to sweater-vests, with no seeming preference over one or the other - just trying on identities, and slipping them off just as easily. Now he's in a thick black raincoat, like some primetime villain on a budget, grinning in the moonless night.
"You're here now, Sydney. Might as well."
He flips a thin pocket knife out of his sleeve, drawing it along his left palm with slick determination and not even a flinch, then holds it over the open coffin, squeezing out at few drops of blood. It looks near-black in the dark.
"What are you doing?" Syd asks, but doesn't get an answer.
B rubs at the wound when he's done, like it's a small pinch and nothing else. He looks down at the body, face one of vague expectancy. When nothing happens after several minutes, he shrugs. "Oh well. Was worth a shot. I thought maybe it would do something for her - body and blood, sacraments and whatnot - but it looks like the magic only works for me." Idly, he falls into a crouch in the grass next to Syd. "You're still making me a passport, though, old friend, unless you're keen to end up like the Missus." His eyes flick up, scanning Syd's forehead for a moment. "That, however, doesn't look to be on the cards tonight."
Syd swallows down another sip from his flask, mouth still tasting of sick. "What am I supposed to do without her?"
"Who says you're without her? She's right there, isn't she? Go on, take a souvenir or something. It'll do you good."
"A - what? I'm not going to - I'm not - " Desecration, that's what that's called.
"Oh, come on," B urges, leaning over to reach down into the grave, rooting around for a bit. Syd should be worried about this, Syd should stop him; he doesn't. Then there's a snap and a thick sound of tearing, crinkling dust and achey bones, and B sits back up with a dismembered leg in his hand, brushing off loose flesh and maggots like it's nothing to him.
Syd retches again.
"Here. It's for you! What, you don't want her? I'll keep it, I guess. I always did like lovely little Sadie, from the first moment I learned her name."
His lips quirk. Syd's throat spasms further.
Showered and far drunker in the grey morning, Syd asks, "What name do you want on your passport, then? Do you even have a name?"
B is at the sink still, scrubbing obsessively at Sadie's bone, making it shiny and clean - and Syd can't think too hard on that, can't confront himself with the reality of the situation, or else he won't be able to move or breathe or get on with living.
"My name is Beyond Birthday," he says, over the rush of the faucet.
"That's not a name."
"It's my name because I say it's my name. Everything is something only because it's said to be. It's my name. But it's not what I want on my passport. No, let's say, Rue Ryuzaki, shall we? That will do just fine."
four years later.
Syd cowers on the floor when B walks in. He'd known. He'd known it was too easy. Monster movie villains don't die so quickly. There's a long chase scene and plenty of casualties, and at the end only the heroine survives, traumatized forever after. But the heroine is already gone.
She's been gone for years.
There's a picture of Sadie pasted on the wall with the rest, posing with him and a burly man who is tattooed head-to-toe in strange blue squiggles. She laughs at the camera. She'd laughed at everything. She'd laughed at the biology teacher that had suggested she suck his dick if she wanted high marks. She'd called Syd straight out of class and they'd had a few drinks and shared the amusement like a meal between them. That had been early on. Everything thereafter had only gotten funnier.
And then B. And then everything got less funny.
He remembers sobbing on the linoleum floor. He remembers the imprints of B's boot-tracks in the mud out front.
As Beyond Birthday stands over him, presence mighty and forbidding - though in a smiling way - he winces for the contact. For the blow that sends everything lights-out. This is the place where she'd died. He doesn't mind so much if he can do it here, too.
B doesn't move.
"Are you going to kill me, or what?" Syd asks, not looking up.
"The latter," B says flatly, "of course. You think I'd go for predictability, do you? That's your problem. She always was cleverer than you." He flicks a finger at the picture on the wall.
"Yeah," Syd agrees, "she was."
"Besides, I still need my passports, don't I? I've got the little lady in the front-room taken care of - blessed little Mihael is wrapping her up for safe-keeping now - and we're going to get our money's worth out of her pretty mouth, I'm sure. You did us a favor by bringing her around, actually. She knows things. Or she knows people who know things, anyway, and that's close enough. Even if I do feel a little betrayed by your cruel misconduct. Really, Syd, I thought we were friends."
"No, you didn't."
B smiles. His eyes hover over Syd's forehead again, and his teeth look sharp in the growing evening dim. "Just get it done. Then you're free. Pinkie promise."
There is nothing there.
Aiber blinks, staring at the empty street which had, he's very very sure, a moment before been crowded by a mass of unliving flesh and one steely yellow eye, and - and a voice. It had spoken. The echo is sharp in his ears. It had been right here.
There is nothing there.
"A? Is that you?" Watari asks dully over the line, professionalism almost wavering under the tepid exhaustion that Aiber knows is weighing on him. It all feels very far away for a moment, and then he snaps back into reality, just as Watari's firmly repeating himself. "A, come in, if you're there."
"I'm here," he says, swallowing as he marches up and down the sidewalk to look around both corners, then up into the sky, where the murky clouds would cover the thing if it was up there, but he can't help squinting anyway.
"Not altogether, I assume." Watari's voice is clipped over the line, but not unkind.
"I haven't been drinking," Aiber snaps, and then, as if to completely invalidate the previous statement, segues directly into, "I just saw the Shinigami."
L, were he the one on the other end of the line, would make some droll comment examining the irony of what he'd just said, even as his mind was already calculating through every conceivable possibility. Watari wastes time with no such amusements. He knows full well that Aiber is a capable agent, and has never let his more Bacchic pursuits interfere with his work before.
"Rem?" Watari asks, fingers already clacking over keys and echoing lowly through the receiver.
"Do you know another god of death? Yeah, that's the one. It just showed up, said my name, said it had a message for me, then - poof! Gone."
"Poof?" Watari repeats back. "It actually went poof, or - "
Aiber's eyes roll hard as his cab arrives, and he holds up a hand to signal the driver to wait. "No, it didn't. Hell, it didn't do anything. It was just gone. It's still gone. It didn't fly away or anything, it literally, like, popped out of existence. Can those things teleport or something?"
"I wouldn't presume to know. My research on the subject has turned up nothing but ghost stories and pop culture." More typing. "Where are you? Was this recent?"
"Just happened. I'm a couple blocks down from Yagami's place, near the train station. Tell me I'm not making a wild intuitive leap when I say that these two things aren't unrelated."
"I told you not to go there. You disobeyed an order." Watari's voice is not gruff or condemning. Rather, he sounds as if he's simply, uninvestedly, stating a fact.
"I considered it more of a suggestion," Aiber counters, humor present but not heavily relied upon. "Besides, it's a good thing I did come down, or else I never would have stumbled on this surprising new turn of events. He took the last train, also, which means he's out for the night. And with the Shinigami hanging around, I'm guessing that means - "
"L is still in the city," Watari finishes for him.
"If he's alive, that is," Aiber says, mostly because he longs for Watari to correct him. To inform him, most assuredly, that L cannot be dead.
He doesn't quite. "We're to act as if he is, until we have a body. Those were L's instructions, before he disappeared. The game is still on, and this is a rather telling implication of the arena. If L is still in Tokyo, it won't be hard to follow Yagami's trail directly to him. The only question is whether or not we ought to, or just let L play out his own strategy."
"We've been waiting for L's strategy for weeks. Nothing's happened. We should just - "
"You should get in your taxi and come to headquarters, is what you should do," Watari says it with a hint of amusement in his voice.
Aiber freezes for a moment, then looks from the exhausted cabbie, to the tiny lens shooting around the glare of the stoplight. "Traffic cameras?" he asks, finally sliding into the backseat of the cab and giving the driver directions uptown.
"I can even see the suit you're wearing," Watari confirms. "Nice colors on you."
Through the unwashed window, Aiber watches the block where he'd seen the beast pull away, fading into obscurity among the masses of indistinguishable city. There's nothing there.
"There's something else," he says, quite suddenly, having forgotten his original reason for calling in all of the otherworldly excitement, but it's back now, stirring worry low in his belly. "Wedy called me a few minutes before this happened. Or, at least, somebody using Wedy's phone."
The clacking stops. Everything on Watari's end of the line becomes suddenly stiller and colder.
"And this person said?"
"Nothing. Just a lot of laughing and heavy breathing, which has me a bit more worried than not, since last I checked, Wedy wasn't really the type for prank calls."
Watari's silence is heavier and more distinct than most of his conversation has been thus far. He says, after a moment, "Did you try and track the location? Did you hear any background noise, or any distinguishing indication of the area from which the call was made?"
"It's not like I really had the time, not to mention the fact that I was a little thrown off. Just laughing, and then the line went dead. If I had to guess, I'd say it was a man, but it sounded purposefully disguised, so who knows." The taxi pulls through empty city streets and into more crowded ones, out of the residential areas and into the city proper, where quite a few late night stragglers hang about the shops and restaurants. "So do you think maybe now you'll tell me about this Beyond Birthday? Or is it still 'nothing to do with the case at hand?' Because if anything has happened to Wedy, I swear to god - death gods, and christian gods, and anything else that could possibly be up there - that I will - "
"Aiber," Watari puts in firmly, cutting him off with little exertion, but a whole heaping ton of presence - even through the phone, "just get to headquarters."
The line goes dead and Aiber huffs, snapping the phone shut, and glances out the rear window, eyes scanning through the streets. There are people and lights, life, but as for what he's looking for? There's nothing there.
The transition is seamless and when Rem next observes the world around her, it is not a world she is expecting.
Light pours from every inch of the throne room, and then darkness, falling across the scene like it has substance to it, like she could touch it and it would be fleshy and moist. Then everything fades back into shades of native grey, and the room - if it is a room, hollowed out in the landscape as everywhere in their realm is - breaks even.
Rem blinks her eye at the Shinigami King, who hangs where he has been hanging for millennia and is expected to hang for many millennia more. He is awake. He was not, the last time she had been here, in this world.
Home, she thinks, though it is not a concept that comes to her naturally. She hasn't been back to the Shinigami realm since she'd gone to deliver Misa her notebook, and between now and then she has seen more than she had thought such a tiny little place full of tiny little people able to contain. She has seen murder, and Sunday mass, and sex on a park bench. She has seen movies. She likes romantic comedies. She understands neither the comedy nor the romance, but she likes Misa's face when she watches them. Soft and distracted and worlds away from herself.
Rem is worlds away from her now, but any confusion as to how she'd gotten here has dried up by now. The King can do things like that.
His thin, golden eyes blink at her. "Rem," he says, giving the word a new shape, repainting the fabric of their withered reality. The King can do lots of things.
"Majesty," she says, dully, out of propriety more than anything else. She does not like the King particularly, but she respects his authority, uneven as he is in enacting it. That is simply the way of things. "Did you sleep well?"
It's only polite to ask. He hasn't woken in years, as far as she knows.
The King gnashes his teeth consideringly, as if chewing on the stale air itself. "That depends on what awaits me in the conscious world." His eyes circle around in his head, little legs dangling impotently.
Perhaps he should look pathetic, hanging there like an ornament, but he doesn't. There is a strange regality to him, and a sense of the very, very old. No one knows quite how long he's been around. No one remembers the king before him, or if there ever was one. The largest earthly trees in the oldest earthly forests cannot compare a whit to his age and might, and yet he seems a decrepit thing in comparison to their planes and trains and automobiles, their televisions and their laughter and their ever-shifting governments and borders and laws. Change and disruption are, perhaps, what keep humanity from stagnating the way that their ancient glory has.
The stories say that the whole of the Shinigami realm was golden once, brilliant and gleaming, the way death was meant to be. Time has wasted it, rusted it to ash, made it grey and clouded with night. All that remains of their long-gone splendor is the throne room.
It's an inaccurate title. The room doesn't even have a throne in it. A term adapted from humanity, no doubt, same as their games and their jokes and anything of real worth left in their realm. Humans are disgusting, no doubt, but Shinigami are hardly any better.
"What were you doing on Earth?" the King asks her.
Rem hangs warily in the wide space of the room. "I have business down there," she says, not keen on sharing that she'd gone down purposefully to give a Note to a human. She doesn't want to be lumped in with the likes of Ryuk.
If the King can make expressions, he is frowning, evidently unsatisfied by her answer. "But why were you speaking to a human who is not in possession of a Note?"
Rem frowns back. "Are there rules against that? I've never seen it written anywhere."
On the floor below the King, a comparatively small, spotted creature scuttles lazily out of the glaring shadows, claws scrabbling on the stone floor and making cold noises spread through the chamber. Midora, Rem thinks, is her name, and she is the King's foremost advisor, or was, in the ages before the majority of the court either died off or fell into similar slumbers. She remains, however, among the common folk, gambling and chuckling and writing the odd name, when the fancy strikes. Her strange, lizard-like body looks even more withered with age than when she'd seen her last.
She waggles her loose eyes and clicks her tongue at Rem, as if in greeting, then disappears back into the dim that falls in contrasting slopes against the glow of radiant light that fills all else. This room is a halfway place. This room is a storm, swallowed. The scent of Misa's perfume, which usually lingers in Rem's head - flittering among the rest of her senses, reminding her of just what she has become - has gone away. It is replaced by a chilly emptiness, and it seeps into her every limb and tendon.
She does not like this room.
The King scoffs, taking no notice of Midora, throat choking out a few hacks of disapproval. "The writing of rules," he says, with evident disdain, "is a new addition to the culture of our breed. Along with the writing of names. I miss the days when nothing had a name. When death was built in blood and bone and the blues in the night sky, not neatly filed in alphabets of human invention."
Rem does not like this room. She does not like this creature, small and stingy, wriggling there in his forgotten grandeur. He looks like an old clock, or bit of outdated machinery, set aside because it has outlasted is usefulness, and kept only out of vague sentiment. The glory of the gods - mighty and varied as they may be - is but theoretical.
A year ago, she could not have thought it possible that she would ever desire so fiercely to return to Earth, but Ryuk - though he should not be encouraged - is right about this place. It is rotting, all the way down to its golden, gleaming core.
She frowns and says, "It's been thousands of years since the first human writing system was created." She'd hope he'd have gotten used to it by now.
Midora returns on wriggling legs, movements quick and indiscernible, and croaks, with evident merriment, "Yes, and he's been asleep for most of them." The King glares down at her and she grins sheepishly back up, jagged teeth pointing this way and that. "He pops an eye open every once and a while to make sure we haven't all rotted out of existence, then goes back to his slumber." She leans her bulbous head on one hand, dwarfing her palm. "He enjoys a good rant, too, and you just happen to be on the receiving end this time."
"Quiet, Midora," the King pronounces, though he seems unfazed by her insolence. Leniency is one mark in his favor, at least.
"Don't know what for," Midora continues, unabated, as if he hadn't spoken, "not when Ryuk's out playing toy soldiers with all of his favorite little humans."
That's very much true. Rem may not be acting according to the strictest Shinigami codes - social, more than formal, because though they have their stringent laws, far more is governed by widespread public opinion - but she's hardly half as bad as Ryuk, who has more or less become Light Yagami's faithful dog. If anyone ought to have been whisked back home for an earful, it's him.
"Ryuk?" the King asks, little head twitching to the side.
"He's young," Midora titters from the floor, rolling around to sprawl on her back, beady eyes watching the King from directly below. "You probably don't know him."
The King's chains rattle slightly, though the air in the room is utterly still, and the atmosphere spikes colder with his eyes. "I know him. I don't like him."
Midora laughs like a giddy funeral march. "No one does, Majesty."
The King's eyes cut back to Rem, and suddenly his power is tangible, crackling and yellow and piercing in the wide space between them. His might may, in fact, be forgotten, cloaked under a thick layer of dust, but it is there still, and it is waiting. The more he sleeps, the longer it waits, clogging up like an old pipe.
He could tear universes apart, if he wanted, she is sure. He could erase her existence, undo her very being. He could swallow her bones and grow a garden of her pearly flesh in his gut, all without changing expression, with Midora still giggling on the floor.
"I like you, Rem," he says, after a long silence. "You're smart. You taste like humanity, but you're smart. I don't like you sniffing around humans without notes, though. I don't like that at all. It's unseemly. Like playing with your food. I called you back up because I could sense your proximity to the unmagnificent."
Rem can tell as much by now, her only question is why now? She has been talking to L for weeks, and for all his peculiarities, he is most assuredly unconnected to the Shinigami realm in everything but his association with Light Yagami. Why had the King woken at her approach of Thierry Morello, who is equally unremarkable? Why now, of all times?
"Ryuk, though," the King is saying, "where is he? I can't feel him. He's indistinct."
Rem frowns. "You don't sense his presence on Earth?" she asks. That is strange. The King has the power to see much farther into the human world than the average Shinigami can, right down to the mechanics of things. Locating one of his subjects is all but elementary.
The King shakes his head, as if insulted by the suggestion. "There are too many to choose from. Which is he? Which of the three?"
It takes Rem a moment to understand, and even when she does, she doesn't. "You sense three Shinigami on Earth? Right now?" The King nods, and Rem's eye flashes down to Midora, widened and questioning, and she can tell that her shock is shared.
"No one's missing," Midora says, rolling back onto her front to sit up and properly asses the situation. "At least, not that I know of."
"Three," the Shinigami King repeats. "Which is he?" His eyes close and Rem watches him watch the world, watches him seep from one plane of reality to the next, with barely a hitch in expression for the go between.
Rem does not know what this means. She and Ryuk are the only Shinigami currently with business in the human world, as far as she is aware, and the only ones who have been down in a long time. Another joining them would be extremely unlikely. Two is just unbelievable.
She swallows. "He's the one in the Japan," she tells the King, curious to know if he will tell her where the rest are located.
As if newly annoyed by this information, his eyes snap open, cold and shining and sharp on her. "Which one in Japan?" he asks. And Rem has no idea what to say.
nineteen years ago.
Sundays are always the worst. The congregation will sing and L will hide in the upper levels, with the weight-bearing beams and the filtered light and the cobwebs. He knows all the hymns and the prayers and all the people who come every week, withered old countryside faces, sun-spotted and each one of them gripping hard candies in their pockets, eager to shovel them off on him.
"I don't believe in God," he tells Father Gregory, who follows him up one chilly december Sunday. "It's statistically unlikely that he could exist."
"I imagine it is," Father Gregory says, "and yet that that changes nothing for me. Curious, isn't it?" His eyes twinkle and he is kind and L does not dislike him. He is the youngest priest in the parish and bakes well and never corrects L on his Latin pronunciation. "Now come on, there are some men from town who would like to meet you."
L can tell immediately that Quillish Wammy is not a spiritual man. His back is straight and his mustache is clipped and he wears an air of superiority that, though muted, expresses obviously his condescension to Father Gregory and men of his ilk.
L dislikes him immediately.
Wammy shakes his hand like an equal, though, even as Mr. Ruvie - his rather more subdued companion - seems to be made uneasy by such a pleasantry being exchanged with a six year old child. After they introduce themselves, Wammy suggests, quite unsubtly, that Father Gregory go and get tea, and then it's just the the three of them. L is left alone with two grown men - surely in their mid-fifties at least - with no particular idea of what they want or what he is going to do if Father Gregory doesn't bring back muffins upon his return. Something drastic, probably.
"I've been told you're very smart for your age," Wammy says to him, crouching down so that they are roughly at level height. Ruvie remains standing.
L eyes them flatly, then smiles, quite satisfied with himself. "No one's told me anything like that about you."
Ruvie's eyebrows rise, but Wammy only grins at him. He is not as offended as L would like him to be, and he still does not like either of them. L doesn't take to strangers well, but especially not men in suits and fine wrist watches.
"There is no such thing as smart for his age at my age," Wammy tells him. "You are expected to be smart when you're as old as I am, and if you're not, that's the only thing that's of note." He traces a small pattern in the dust that covers the oak floors of the back room, and it's one that L doesn't recognize. He wants to know what it is, though. He want's to know.
"It's my belief, however," Wammy continues, "that not everyone was meant to be smart. The world is not made up solely of libraries and laboratories. There are orchards and churches and opera houses as well, and many other things besides. It is, though, my belief that you, L - given what I've been told by your guardians - would not make a very good priest."
"Nor an opera singer," Ruvie puts in. L narrows his eyes.
"Nor an opera singer," Wammy agrees, standing up straighter and dusting off his jacket. "I run a school for gifted children who, like yourself, find themselves without the social or monetary benefits of a child with the advantage of, well… "
"Parents?" L asks, thinking the insinuation of such is interesting, so far as it is a subject that everyone else who speaks to him or of him tends to avoid. But he is an orphan, and he appreciates that Wammy doesn't skirt the subject.
"Precisely," he says, tipping his hat at L. "We have libraries and laboratories waiting for you, if you would like to use them. You are very free to remain here, if you like, with the men who have raised you these past few years, but - "
"I want to go with you," L says, before he can finish the thought. He does not dislike Father Gregory, but he does not want to be a priest. He does not want to live on this country road for the rest of his life. He was made for better things. Bigger things. "I'm smart. I'm very smart. Everyone says so."
Wammy smiles at him, as if everything is going exactly as he'd wanted it to go. L doesn't like that, but he is not going to take it back. "Good," Wammy says, "very good." Then he smiles and his eyes twinkle and it is not kindness nor cruelty, but some sort of distanced state in between, at which he rests when he says, "Then prove it."
Then he turns around and leaves, Ruvie following him, before Father Gregory can return with the tea.
nineteen years later.
"Fuck this," Mello says, "I can't do it." He's not a boy scout, and tying people up was never excessively important to the Wammy's curriculum.
Merrie Kenwood - or Wedy, as all of the identification in her wallet, now confiscated by Beyond, refers to her - remains collapsed as she'd fallen on the off-white linoleum floor, stained in B's blood, blonde hair fanned out like scant cushioning. She's pretty, with very smooth skin and a small nose and fire engine lips, but she currently looks rather more like a murder victim than not, and that has ruined most of the appeal.
The first thing he'd done when B had tasked him with tying her up was - kneeling next to her on the floor, trying to avoid the pools of dark blood - to smooth down her skirt. Anything else had seemed disrespectful.
Standing in the doorway behind him, B laughs. "Is it a moral objection or are you simply incapable?"
Back stiffening, Mello's fingers curl into fists. He'd spoken as if B had been there - as if he's always there, floating like the devil on his shoulder - but he hadn't actually expected a response, and Beyond's crackle of a voice cuts through the room uncomfortably, making his skin fizzle on his bones.
His mouth still tastes like sick. He wants a toothbrush.
"I'm capable," he snaps, voice wavering. "I just don't know how." He swallows and glances at B over his shoulder. "Methods of imprisonment don't come naturally to all of us."
He blinks for barely a second, eyes heavy and frazzled with exhaustion, and then B is close up behind him, kneeling down and reaching over his shoulders to grasp his hands in his jagged, cold fingers. Mello jerks instinctively, uncomfortable with touch in the first place, and uncomfortable with Beyond in the second, third, fourth and fifth.
"Don't - " he starts.
B chuckles, guiding Mello's hands through the knot in slow steps. "Hush little Mihael, don't say a word, Daddy's gonna catch you a mockingbird," he sing-songs. "See you loop-de-loop a few times, and then you pull it tight. Not before, or it won't hold."
Mello lets him finish up the tutorial - taking furious mental notes, so that this won't require a repeat performance - before shrugging him off in a hard buck of his shoulders. "Don't touch me," he says quietly. His voice feels muted by B's presence.
Beyond eases up, laughing again. "Afraid of little old me? I thought I was a savior."
Mello stands up, brushing off his hands and putting as much distance between them as possible without it looking like he's running away. "You did just get through vehemently threatening to rape a woman in front of me," he says, arms crossing. "Am I supposed to want to pal around?"
B leans in the halfway shadows of the settling evening that are gradually filling up the studio, but Mello can see his expression twist slightly, and there's a difference between his genuine amusement and the theatrical chuckling, but the two tend to overlap and crossbreed often enough that there's really no distinguishing.
"Oh come on," he says, drawing the words out as he slumps back against one of the art tables, "that was just posturing. You know how boys are." He pops his eyebrows, then gestures at Wedy with the toe of his sneaker. "It's what makes her skin crawl and her steps stumble and her insides turn out. It's her deep, dark fear: having her power taken away. Just like yours is failure and dear old Syd's is the possibility of the cessation of existence after death." He rattles it off as if he's reading lines from a book. "It's really far too easy to tell these things and then make the lot of you dance, like pretty little puppets."
"And he's the puppet master," Syd says, emerging from the back room with a length of card stock under his arm, "with his hand up all our arses."
"Ever the wordsmith, Syd, old boy," B says, grinning and jumping up out of his seat. He holds out a hand. "Keys, please."
Syd looks at him blankly, a grim humor plastered over the quivering fear underneath. "Keys to what?"
"Don't tell me you haven't got the Navara anymore," B laughs, strolling over the coat hanger to fish around in the leather pockets of Syd's discarded jacket. "It's not as if we can carry Miss Merrie bodily through the streets of London in the evening rush, can we? Aha!" With a tinny jangle, he pulls out what Mello assumes are car keys.
"I - you're not driving my car," Syd snaps. "No way, not after last time."
B giggles tauntingly, tossing the keys from one hand to the other. "Oh, and how do you intend to stop me? A bit of drunken brawling? Maybe throwing up on my shoes?"
Mello watches Syd grit his teeth. He understands the frustration, the indignity, of being at the relative mercy of a man who is both criminally insane and a bit of a raging prick, and it's this strange camaraderie of victimhood that makes him speak up.
"The fact that your presence consistently inspires vomiting," Mello says, dragging a finger idly through the dust on the window ledge, "is maybe a sign of something."
"A sign that things are going just as planned," B titters, pulling Watson's coat back on and hooking his duffle bag over his shoulder. "You have everything, yes?" he asks Mello, who nods because he hasn't really got anything to have, other than his change of clothes, now freshly laundered, and the ones on his back. "And you?"
Syd looks around quite comedically, checking over his shoulder. "Me? I'm not going with you."
B's laugh is grating and more perfunctory than anything else. "You're cute. Isn't he cute, Mihael?" he asks, though mercifully doesn't give Mello time to respond. "Of course you are. The last time I let you out of my sight it ended with me getting my kneecaps shot up, and I don't fancy a repeat performance." He nods to Wedy on the floor. "There'll be more where she came from, and I doubt any of them will be half so pretty."
"Wha - " Syd starts, but his adamant expression melts resolutely off his face when he looks down at B's knees, which, while a bit sliced up, appear ultimately undamaged. He sighs, scratching his bald head with one antsy hand. "I have my equipment here. I have the printer and the materials and - "
"Bring the printer. Bring all of it," B tells him, impatiently, digging around in his pocket to pull out Wedy's phone, seemingly already distracted out of the conversation. He doesn't look back up at Syd as he says, "At the place I have in mind, there'll be plenty of room."
Mello watches Syd dig his fingers into his palms with restrained frustration - at the indignity, the helplessness, the inhumanity - but Mello's learned by now that pride isn't something you hold onto if you want to survive. You grin and you bear it and you let them say what they want, and treat you how they want, because in the end you will be the one who gets out alive, who gets what they want. Then you can have your pride. Once you earn it.
As Syd nods resignedly - "Okay, okay, just give me a few minutes to pack it up," - and returns to the back room, B is preoccupied with the phone, scrolling through with a vague curiosity.
"Wammy's, Wammy's, Wammy's; oh look, an alternate Wammy's number, how quaint!" He rolls his eyes, and looks ready to toss the thing aside again, bored of it already, when he stops. "Oooh, hello, I don't know this one. Do you know this one?" He holds the screen out to Mello, who's more than half-way across the room and doesn't even have time to squint before B is turning it around again to press redial. "I guess we'll find out," he says, pressing the receiver to his ear and whistling a quaint, old tune as he waits for someone to pick up.
When you wake up you shall have all the pretty little horses. Dapples and greys, pintos and bays, all the pretty little horses.
Mello remembers the song from his childhood, from the nurse rocking him softly against her chest when he'd first come to Wammy's and caught the flu. He'd been bed-ridden and miserable for a week, and miserable for a good while after to be away from his parents. They'd been dead, of course, but he hadn't properly cared at the time. He'd wanted to go home.
It's a bit disorienting, even now, every time he remembers that he and B had grown up in the same place, not too many years apart.
Abruptly, the song stops and B grins wide, breath coming out more heavily all of a sudden, as if the curtain has been flipped up and he's got a show to put on. Someone is speaking on the other end of the line, but Mello can't make out the words and he doesn't know if he wants to. Part of him - many parts of him, including his gag reflex - just want to withdraw from this whole situation. He wants to be somewhere else. He wants to sleep. Just for a little while.
Then there's maniacal laughter, familiar to the point of routine by now, and he winces as he watches B cackle into the phone for a good half a minute, before snapping it shut.
Mello frowns. "Who was it?"
B shrugs. "Some poor sap calling dear Miss Kenwood by her fake name. Sounded European." Slipping the phone back in his pocket, he claps his hands together vigorously, as if calling a class to order. "Now, let's get this show on the road, shall we? Sometime in the next millennium, eh, Sydney?" he calls into the back, getting only a tired grunt in response, but it appears to be enough for him.
Mello pushes off the wall, hands shoving into his pockets. "So, how are we going to - " he starts, but cuts off shortly after, his question answered by the way that Beyond leans down and, in one tug of little effort, lifts Merrie Kenwood up in his arms and carries her, bridal style, to the door, setting her body down on a chair and skipping outside.
"I'll bring the car around," he calls back over his shoulder. "I won't be a minute! Look sharp, Mihael, we're just getting started."
That, Mello thinks, is what he is afraid of.
When Light wakes, L is asleep, which is a notable occurrence in that he can count on one hand the number of times it's happened since the imprisonment.
Imprisonment. It's such a nasty word and, besides, not a factually accurate descriptor for the situation. The connotations of such a word may apply - chains, abandoned building, limited bodily freedom, violent sex - but at the actual root of it all, it doesn't quite fit. There is not a word in Japanese, or in any language he knows, to properly describe what they have gotten themselves into, and how they have gotten themselves into it.
Love is just as ultimately inapplicable. All the connotations are there - the evidence of love, all the paperback romance novel trappings - but none of the same substance. Love feels too cheap. Too common. Anyone can be in love. Light is not just anyone, and L is not anyone at all.
When he'd said it in the night, parts of him had skipped beats, had broken open and leaked on the ground, and he'd had to shove it all back in and spackle himself shut. Good to know. But is it good? Does he want to hear it? The lie, chasing the truth, catching the lie and wrapping it up - he doesn't have the energy to keep it all straight. Does saying it cancel it out? Is it better off cancelled, anyway?
Sometimes I want to pretend the only thing that's ever happened to me is you.
It's not pretty, the insides, and he can't lay them flat and examine them. Not now. Not with everything spinning, all up in the air.
They're not pretty now. Light's skin is slick, sticking to the floor with blood and semen and whatever else, the endless carnage of romance. L looks like a fallen idol, torn and bruised and split open. Emptied. Light is hollowing him out to make room for himself, but does he even want a thing that's hollow? Does he even want a thing that loves him?
In the night he'd been tired - of himself, of his world, of the puzzle pieces all fluctuating out of sync - but this morning he wakes energized, fire renewed, the urge to destroy and rebuild lit brightly in him.
He wants to fuck L again. He wants to fuck him while he's asleep. He wants him to wake conquered, swallowed, helpless to do anything but what Light asks of him. Eager to give everything. He'd been eager last night, but comparatively, so had Light. Both of them itching to surrender to the other, but - like the winning race horse that he is - L had come out on top. Or, as it goes, on bottom. He'd given himself over like it had been a victory.
Light can't decide who has the power now and who doesn't, and if - in their relationship - there is any power left to be had.
He sits up, careful not to wake L. He doesn't have the faculties to participate in a particularly meaningful conversation at this point, and loathes to have any other kind. He disentangles himself carefully, stinging with the peel of flesh away from flesh, and L sleeps heavily enough that Light's slight stumble as he stands up doesn't instigate anything but a huff of unconscious breath and a roll against the wall.
Blearily, he checks his phone, listening to a voicemail from his mother, who's suggesting he come home for the weekend, as his apartment is, "probably quite lonely," right now, and rolling his eyes at a text from Sayu that suggests that they, 'hang out and talk about boys.'
He doesn't respond to any of it - it's too early in the morning for him to play house - moving instead to the public office restroom, with its cold tap water and its humming hand-dryers, and cleans himself up. He considers doing the same for L, but decides to have coffee and a brisk morning walk before he starts in on that particular game.
At the front of the building he unhooks the key from where it hangs on the wall, easily accessible to anyone in the building who isn't handcuffed to an air conditioning unit, and locks the door behind him. Although the buses are running and he could take one to the nearby shops, he prefers to go it on foot, and it doesn't take very long with his sturdy pace.
It's standing in line for coffee at the mini-mart, behind an elderly woman who's squinting at the cigarette shelf and in front of an antsy gang-banger who keeps heckling his phone, that Light sees the headline, in large black Kanji against the dull grey newspaper, in the dull grey shop.
Three More Children Attacked in the Night, Police Say.
Apologizing as he ducks around the woman who's finally settled on Camel, he pulls the paper from the rack, eyes scanning the article, which supplies little information - rushed this morning as it undoubtedly was - aside from that which points, with little margin for error, to the same culprit who's been raping and killing children this past month. Two girls and one boy this time. Three children in one night. That - that's a lot. That's too many. Not only is it unrealistic, given the distance between each house from which they were taken, it's excessive. This guy is tempting fate. This guy is taunting God.
This guy is asking for Kira. Light would be remiss to deny him.
He needs to solve this case, he needs to get L on it and he needs to divert the investigation team from Kira long enough to sort this out, without drawing any connection between the culprit's impending death and the time at which they find him. It will need to be public knowledge before he can act, which will be difficult. He can barely contain himself from scribbling on his pages now, and he doesn't even know the name. But the urge is there, the need. Judgement. Justice. He is going to -
His phone rings and, quickly purchasing his coffee and the paper, he steps out of the shop to take it, composing himself in a half-second.
"Hello? Dad?"
"Light," his father says, tense and twitching on the phone, the way he always is these days, "you're up. Good, I - we need you down at headquarters. There's been a development. The Shinigami has been seen again."
Light's jaw locks up and he has to physically force it to open again, feigning the perfect blend of shock, confusion, and excitement. "You're kidding! I'll be right there," he says, before snapping his phone shut.
He doesn't care if he has to use love or his Note or his bare hands, he is going to fucking kill Rem.
He vaguely considers going back to give L the update, and maybe a good morning kiss and a mess of spoken mysteries to keep him busy through-out the day, but ultimately decides it would take too much time and more emotion than he currently has the capacity for, and instead hops a train straight back to the city center.
It looks, if Mello had give it a proper descriptor, like a nest.
It's one of several squatter apartments all down the block, but this one is padlocked and B spends a good few minutes digging in the dusty dirt of a dead potted plant for the key. Inside, the electricity works even though it shouldn't - "I just reconnected the line," B says, "no big deal; anyone with an electrician's license could do it," - and the floors are spread with neatly filed piles of everything from books to musical instruments to glassware to old photographs and other people's mail. There is a gramophone and a toolbox and an open book of souffle recipes and… what looks like a human bone. Everything, though neatly lined up, is covered in a thick layer of dust, like a disused room of an old manor house that hasn't seen light in years.
The place has a strangely haunting quality to it, as if they've stepped out of busy London and into somewhere foreign and quiet, although the illusion is shortly broke by a honk from outside the barred windows.
Beyond sets Merrie carelessly down on one of several mattresses that line the floor, peeking out the window quickly before drawing the blinds and mumbling about, "keeping out the riffraff," with a wink to Mello. There is no other furniture in the room, but there are enough objects to make it an adventure to avoid knocking into things as Mello steps around the piles and stacks, vision almost completely blocked by the giant box of supplies that Syd is having him carry inside.
The man himself is taking up rear and having quite a difficult time of it, lugging the printer into the room in his short, twitching arms. Immediately, he knocks over two stacks of books, including several travel guides for London, 1999, which means - aside from the fact that B is a terrible packrat - he's had this place for five years, at the very least.
"Do you live here?" he asks, looking around, because - despite homey being the last thing he'd call it - if B had to live anywhere, this place fits the bill pretty nicely.
B shrugs slightly, twirling like an underpaid showman. "Technically, I live in a California state prison - although currently I'm on holiday. But, back in the day - after Wammy's, but before the whole convicted felon thing - when I did a bit more traveling, this is where I would always stay when I was in London. Aside, of course," he says, shooting a conspiratorial grin at Syd, "from a couple months around the turn of the century."
Syd, if he notices, doesn't give any indication of it. "Makes my place look like The Ritz," is all he says, grunting to set down the printer with a look of comically exaggerated relief.
Ducking around him and leaning past Mello, B roots through a pile of seemingly miscellaneous junk, emerging a few moments later with a finely-edged knife. It is spotlessly clean.
Something in Mello's stomach drops immediately and he's uprooted out of the lying calm he's tricked himself into on the way here. Back in the truck, with B and Syd taking cheap shots at each other and the radio flipping from static-filled classic rock station to static-filled classic rock station, it had felt almost like this could have been any late-night trip to any place that people go in the late night, and even with an unconscious woman sprawled across his lap, Mello had managed to get himself breathing again. Not so anymore. His heart rattles around behind his rib cage and he wants to go back to Syd's, back to the lumpy sofa and sharp smell of ink, and just close his eyes.
There's blood on the floor there, though, just like there will be blood here soon. He doesn't want anymore blood. Can't they go a few hours without blood?
"What are you going to do with that?" he asks B, trying to swallow down his unease. It's really not hard to figure out, with the way he's whistling over to Merrie's body, but he asks anyway.
Beyond rolls his eyes. "I'm going to slice her up some Wonderbread. What do you think, princess?"
The indignation that rises up in Mello, mixing with the already present fear and exhaustion, is possibly conjured by the demeaning nickname, and possibly just at the condescending way that B's speaking to him, used to it as he should surely be by now.
"Wonderbread comes already sliced," Syd puts in.
"Hush up, Sydney," B shoots back, "and get started already, will you? I want to be out of this city as soon as possible, if it's all the same to you." He nods to the far corner of the room. "Outlet's over there. Be a doll and try not to electrocute yourself."
With his teeth grit, whatever reply he's clearly itching to let loose choked back behind them, Syd turns in the direction indicated, moving with the sort of dejection that Mello himself has oftentimes felt when faced with B and his ridiculous orders and his shining, smiling teeth. So, given his obvious acceptance of the task, it doesn't quite follow when Syd freezes, body going sharp and harshly lined as he stares at one of the piles in front of him.
"You - " he says, voice blank and emotionless, before suddenly snapping into anger. "Is that - that's Sadie!"
Mello looks around. He doesn't see anyone who wasn't in the room beforehand, but he's suddenly on guard anyway. Sadie? Isn't that -
B glances over, eyelids drooping with disinterest. "Oh, yes," he says, glancing at the line of white bone resting in the center of the room, "my keepsake. Forgot about that."
Syd's dead girlfriend.
There's a flash of shadowed movement. Before Mello blinks, Syd is reaching for the bone - which looks like it might be a tibia, yellowed-white and completely clean of any muscle or blood, just sitting there next to a couple of clarinets. After he opens his eyes again, B is across the room, yanking the thing out of Syd's reach before he can even make contact.
"Ah, ah, ah," he teases, waving it somewhat crudely, like Syd's a child being denied a favorite toy, "it's mine. You wouldn't accept my kind offer, so I claimed it."
The look of outrage and disgust that blooms on Syd's face isn't, to Mello's mind, an overreaction. He stole Syd's girlfriend's leg bone? No fucking wonder they don't get on. Mello wouldn't be so hot on that, either, all told.
"Listen, you sick fuck," Syd starts, face turning an airy red color, eyes watery and strange and sharp, absent of any the usual deprecating humor he tends to use to combat B's tittering malice.
"Look, how about this?" B interrupts, and if he senses the sudden ache in Syd's presence, he doesn't seem to think much of it. "You be a good boy while Mihael and I take the lady down to the basement level and get started on the questioning, and don't run away even a little, and I'll let you have your lost limb once you finish the passports." He waves the thing in question around like a baton in some kind of showgirl act, grin twitching, though not purposefully cruel. "Deal?"
Syd looks as if he loathes nothing more than the idea of caving to B's demands, but his self-preservation instinct is - quite obviously - much more dominant than his pride, and eventually his body relaxes back into its usual humored slump.
"Fine," he says, "whatever."
B pulls the bone agains this chest, stroking it like a long lost love. "Then you can take it home and do whatever you want to it."
"I'm taking it back to her grave, you bastard," Syd says, but it's more quiet than a true insult would warrant, and it seems Syd has returned to his usual root of defeatism, if less jubilantly so than before. "Back to where it belongs.
"How darling," B sing-songs. "I'm sure you two will live happily ever after. Maybe you can close your eyes and move very slowly and it will be be just like she's alive. Well, no, it'll be colder and rougher and probably covered in insect life, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and once your engines are revving, well… " He lifts his eyebrows, hips canting upward in a game of obscene charades that makes Syd's fists ball up again, and of course that's what B wants, what makes his monster of a mind light up.
He's playing. Puppets and hands up arses and all that, and even with work to be done, B just can't let anybody's strings go up-plucked.
Mello just rolls his eyes, more disturbed by his lack of disturbance than by the necrophiliac implications. "Can you, like, stop that?" he says to B, arms crossing close over his chest. "Fucking with him is just going to slow down his progress."
"Aren't you a little knight in shining leather?" B says dreamily, folding his hands into a pose of schoolgirl wonder, before popping quickly into the stance of a toy solider. "But yes, yes, we've got to get started, anyway. There's a long night ahead of us." He salutes Syd with the bone - who only slumps down next to his box of supplies, valiantly succeeding in keeping calm - and then continues his march towards the door, nodding Mello along after him.
Mello stays frigid and still where he is. "Do I have to come?" he asks, trying his damnedest not to feel like a misbehaving child under Beyond's uneven glance. "I don't know very much about torture, and I don't think I want to learn."
As if that could erase the guilt and wobbling sickness that rushes up in his stomach every other moment, only to crash back down into a strained sort of calm. As if not watching it will lessen its reality. As if. No, it's for his own sake. He is selfish. His stomach is not that strong, not the mention the wading infrastructure of his sanity these days, and the already creeping desensitivity to pain and death and the blizzard of a man before him, who's leaning down to pull Merrie Kenwood's limp, pale body back up into his equally limp, pale arms.
"Oh, come on, it's healthy to expand your horizons!" He grins over the jut of her shoulder, kicking the door wide and moving out in the wasteland of deep blue shadows lining the hallway. "Besides, I need someone to hold the gun and keep her in check," he calls back over his shoulder, "and my hands will be busy busy busy."
Sparing Syd a last glance, Mello follows B out into the hall without quite meaning to, and decides - as they move past the unserviceable elevator to the stairwell entrance - that he'll go not to participate, so much as to oversee. Not that he really thinks that he could stop B doing anything even if he tried, but at the very least he can kick up quite a shit-fit about it.
"Do you - can't we just talk to her?" he tries, holding the door open to B, who nods his thanks, curiously well-mannered for a moment there. "You know, no knives or guns involved?"
Beyond whistles through his teeth and shakes his head, as they move down through the cavernous dark. The power appears to be out still in this part of the building, shadows fluttering with indefinite intention, reshaping the world around them into the golden glint of Merrie's hair and the sound of B's spiky breaths.
"If only it were so simple," he hums, sounding as if he wishes for anything but. "Alas, she's a Wammy's-employed professional. If she was likely to give up information easily, she wouldn't have this job. I'm only going to do what, by the grace of god and his wild packs of angels, I have to do to find out what's happened to L. It's a circumstantial imperative," B says, lips smacking with evident satisfaction around the words, "that things will get a little messy." He swings his mass of wild hair around to grin back at Mello, face stretched into indistinct patterns, but Mello can see - and recognizes - the whites of his eyes glinting in the low light.
"But don't worry," B continues, adjusting his grip on Merrie slightly as they reach the bottom of the stairs, "for your sake, I'll try not to have too much fun."
Wedy wakes bleeding. Wedy wakes gasping. Wedy wakes and she doesn't have enough energy in her to properly hate, so she just rolls with the tides of pain, moving in and out of reach with particular pattern or bodily intent, just twitching fires and icy blades and the boy with the blue eyes wavering in front of her. He doesn't know how to use that gun in his hands. He doesn't know what he's doing here at all. If anything is her ticket out of the place, it's him.
Except it gets harder to stay quiet, to think in straight lines, to keep the pleas from rushing out of her mouth like bile. And her vows turn indecipherable in her head and her pride goes wet and ungraspable and after what must be several hours in this hell-hole - dark room, bright flame, laughing eyes - she chokes out two words that might be able to save her.
Two words that, in her frazzled mind, she thinks might be able to save everybody:
"Light Yagami."
tbc.
end notes: the flashforward at the end of chapter 17 fits in between the last two scenes of this chapter, just in case anyone doesn't remember it, as it's been a while. and hey, sex, huh! there haven't been many sex scenes in a while as there's a lot going on plot-wise and so much has to happen in such little time that meaningless romps can't really be afforded, but this one was important, i think, in setting up some narrative stuff so i went with it.
i hope this chapter didn't disappoint after such a long wait, and i promise that the next one is actually going to deliver some action for once. (in this fic? impossible!) anyway, thank you all for sticking with me - and for those who are losing interest in the story or who bemoan the lack of lxlight lately, i completely understand and it's okay with me. i mean, i'd like for as many people to enjoy this fic as possible, but i know some of the stuff i'm doing is not going to be everyone's cuppa. ultimately, i have to write for myself, or else it's a bit's meaningless, isn't it?
anyway, thank you all so much for reading and i'd really appreciate any reviews possible, and will try my best to get back to them this time. much love to you all!