warnings: uh vague sexual content, minorly explicit violence and blood, action written by someone who doesn't know how to write action? possibly disappointing anticlimactic-ness.
notes: well hello! it didn't take half as long to update this time i don't think, but things went a little slower than i expected them to and i'm sorry for that. these were some of my favorite scenes to write in the whole fic and something i've been looking forward to for months now. that said, i'm far too close to it to have a clue if it's any good so if it's not my apologies are sincere. all i really want to do is write a good story that i enjoy writing and that you guys enjoy reading, and i just really hope this doesn't disappoint.
oh oh, and who's excited for the special dn anniversary update? show of hands?
thank you all so much for reading.
chapter twenty-three - the devil you did.
"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The boy is sober and thin when they bring him in, underfed and ravenous, hair hanging in mangy knots across his face, and a blue-tinted pallor to his skin that suggests he ought to have succumbed to hypothermia many months earlier.
Probably the least notable thing about him is that he doesn't speak. A hadn't spoken more than a word for days when they'd first brought him here, and L had spent an entire week completely undetectable, exploring the cavernous passages and attics and cellars, popping up only as a set of unwashed, barely developed hands at the tail-ends of meal times to grab something off the dessert tray and then scramble away again.
Roger had called it cause for worry, but Quillish had seen it for what it truly was: investigation.
After two years with L, though his peculiarities are numerous, he thinks that he has finally come to understand the integral distinction between him and other children of his age - and most other people in general - and it is not only his photographic memory and incredible capacity to retain and even understand complex information, but his, if this is the word for it, childishness.
His power lies not in growing up faster, but rather more slowly.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
Quillish doesn't think much of Picasso's work as a general rule - he's more Monet, even a Turner, sort of fellow - but he finds immeasurable truth in those particular words, and would venture to add that every child is also, in fact, a detective.
L Lawliet, though, through whatever happenstance that had led to his very queer living situation in the back room of St. Michael's church, with food and shelter provided, but no particular guardian assigned, had managed to retain the integrally violent curiosity of a babe at its mother's breast, seeing the world for the first time and wondering at every sight - and through the bravery lent by his intelligence, venturing to discover it. Whereas most children are, by his age, educated out of the instinctual and into the societal necessities of sit up straight, comb your hair, don't put that in your mouth, don't say that because it will offend.
The priests of St. Michael's, while evidently making a valiant attempt to educate their young pupil in the ways of the lord - whatever ways those are, nowadays - had been too old and too thrown-off by L's strange intellect to insist upon any stricture in the matter, and more or less had simply left him to raise himself up.
And he had.
Beyond Birthday, however, looks as if he hadn't been raised at all, but rather left for the first six years of his life to grow like some creeping vine in the wilds of the Japanese countryside, which is where Quillish had found him a week and a half ago. He is nowhere near as perfectly tempered for deductive work as L is, but there is a writhing natural genius in him, tangled up with the quickness of necessity.
He is the animalism to balance out A's neat human practicality, and - ideally - dropping L in the middle of them will hone him more sharply into the weapon that the world needs, to do that job that no one else can do. They'll also make convenient back-ups, should the original somehow fail.
And, as a quaint and charming bonus, all being boys of more or less a similar age, they may get on very well.
They do not get on very well.
Quillish doesn't know the sequence of events that leads to each circumstance, but on the second day after Beyond Birthday's arrival, A is found crying in the west study about 'ghosts in the walls,' and B and L are absolutely nowhere to be found until late evening, when - after a thorough search is conducted of the grounds - they're discovered in the storage room of the green house in curious states of dress.
B's clothes, bought new to replace the rags he'd been found in, rest in a rejected heap off to the side of the cramped little room. He's dressed now in L's white cotton shirt and blue jeans, which hang loosely off of him - as for all of L's smallness, B is still two years younger and on top of that severely undernourished - and L sits cross-legged across from him, bare from head to toe without any evident concern over it.
They face each other studiously, as if each equally as puzzled over what the other is. There is no indication either way as to whether Beyond has taken L's clothes by force or if they had been given freely, and no explanation as to why such an uneven bargain had gone on.
Quillish expects that physical exploration of one's fellows is natural at such an age, but he knows that suggesting such a thing would turn Roger a rather mortified shade of purple, so he refrains.
Instead, he simply asks, "L, are you alright?"
He blinks, and stands quickly, giving the assembled search party a rather blunt view of his entire body. He doesn't appear to notice or care, and does not even look at Beyond Birthday when he says firmly, like an orator giving a speech, "He's no good. Take him back to where you found him."
This declaration, however hurtful it may have been to a child like A, sends B into an uproarious fit of laughter. One that, if Quillish had to guess, benchmarks the moment when the majority of the staff of Wammy's decided quite firmly that Beyond was the scientifically minded equivalent to spawn of the devil.
Roger frowns at the display. He'd said not to bring B here, said A was getting on bad enough as it was and another one couldn't be expected to fare much better, and he evidently finds his prediction well proven by the current incident.
Quillish, however, takes it as any investigator worth his salt would: as a clue. A piece of a larger puzzle, a dot on a map only just unfolding. L, as is usual, may in fact be right that B is no good, but good is not what they need.
"Come," he says, taking off his coat and putting it gently over L's shoulders - not so much for decency as for worry over the chill - "I'll have some cocoa made. You too, B." He glances over his shoulder at the younger boy, watches his expression even out as his laughter dies down.
They walk like that, all in a congregation of good old fashioned British hand wringing and whispers, Quillish prodding L along in the front, B following step-for-step behind them, like a curious, grinning shadow that one cannot escape.
Like a ghost in the walls.
fourteen years later.
The ghost is in the halls.
He opens his eyes and it's too dark to see anything but his reflection and that doesn't even make sense, because there are no mirrors, or stoves, or chairs, or anything like that in this place. He is alone here. He is alone.
But the voice claws up from the bottom of him, the words ringing backwards like some sort of feedback, and he sees hell in a white t-shirt, grinning like hell does, and looking down at him from a casual hunch and he cannot breathe, he is not here, nothing is here - he is alone, he is alone, he is alone, he took out all of the parts that tried to crawl in, he filled in the cracks, he is a martyr and a pretender and his own laugh track, he is in love with a boy named Light and a world that doesn't exist and he is nothing. He has taken the something and blown it into the wind and that's okay because nothing is okay, and so it fades. He is not the center of the word anymore.
He is not anyone.
There is not anyone here.
He kicks the ghost in the shins anyway.
The movement comes out of him like a storm, unpracticed bones snapping with force, and the connection is solid and real and L is yanking himself up into a half-crouched fighter pose on instinct, colliding with a madness and a strength that he saves like a secret, shameful trinket for special occasions when he cannot keep it down. No no no no no no no.
"No no no no no no no," he is saying out loud, but the words are slurred and mussed and he sounds far too young, and terrified, a little child fighting specters in the dark. The punches connect, the kicks meet flesh, and cloth - familiar cotton, soft from wear - he knows he knows he knows, the way you know in a dream, the way the truth sneaks up and whispers itself in your ear long before the logical proof appears. He knows.
"No no no no."
"Yes yes yes yes."
His blows are weathered, the hands grapple but without violence, and there is a joyful acceptance, a reception of communion. Where is Light? Light belongs here for this. Light is on his side, if not in any material way then in the way that he would stand here and say no no no with him, that he would fight and claw and tear. He would kill the ghost.
"Slow down, prince, you've got time. I've got miles of time and it's yours. Slow down, L." The voice is older, and deeper, and sickly pale with a distance. It sounds like Christmastime, tinkling bells and fairy lights, and the rushing wind in the apple grove and the cold on his back that always got warmed away.
"No."
Even with the chain keeping him in a certain range, L's violence is unyielding and wilder than it has been in years, fists swinging and legs kicking - unmeasured, fueled by animal instinct and a loathing that has nowhere to go but here. And the ghost doesn't back down, but takes it all, shoving him back, crowding him, limbs wrapping him up and begging for the bruising weight of the crushing, writhing pain that lives here in this moment, rising like a wave from somewhere too dark and deep to see the bottom of.
"L."
"No."
"L."
"No, no, not ever, this does not happen ever, this does not happen."
The ghost laughs. "Of course it does, you shithead." Terms of endearment. "Just slow down and look at me."
L cannot breathe, like swallowing water wrong, it chokes him, this moment, the feeling of being crushed against the wall as his blows slow down, body weakening, head light from the sudden burst of activity - but he can't, he can't, this can't happen.
But it does. He is here and grasping him like a vice, breathing all his air and pushing so close that they might as well melt into some foul, amorphous monster and be done with it. Where is Light? is a thought he should be thinking, but he cannot even remember how.
"Get out of me," he breathes, even if he means off, even if it comes out messy and hushed and exhausted, as Beyond Birthday pulls him into a strange and uncomfortable hug that makes all of his flesh sting like one big open wound.
"Can't," B says into his shoulder. "Can't possibly."
"Yes, this is Watari," Aiber grits into the phone, hands scrambling across the desk for the clearance codes that he reads off to the chief of police in as stately a tone as he can manage, disguising his voice even behind the modulator. "Now, may I speak to your supervisor? It's urgent. No, L does not have time to do this sort of thing himself. Do you really think you're that important?"
He is completely sober for the first time in a long time that he can remember, and as he's handed off to relate his information to someone of authority, his mind - pulsing and awake - repeats back the address that he's imprinted indefinitely into it over the last few hours. It forms aching shapes in his throat. Everything hurts a little bit, but it's drowned out a little more by the rushing adrenaline of discovery.
This might be it. It might not, but - it might.
"Yes, hello, this is he," he grits into the phone, agitation mounting with his excitement. "That's right, I need a dispatch team to a location in Ikebukuro, as soon as possible. There's been a lead on the possible location of a critical bit of evidence needed to apprehend Kira, and we don't have enough men at our disposal to make a proper showing there on our own. No, I won't hold. Do you think L cares about your wariness? He doesn't. He's far too important to. Just give them all helmets and tell them to play it safe. They're trained, aren't they? Or are you officers so incompetent as to not be able to scout out a location?"
After a few minutes more of his very convincing arguments - riddled with a few pride-shattering insults just to sway things - he's reciting the address with a smugness that he's fairly sure is nowhere near suited to the role he's trying to play.
It's only moments after he's hung up the phone, cracking his knuckles victoriously at a job well done, when the man himself marches in the door and says, without any apparent condemnation, "I don't suppose I want to know why you were just impersonating me on line three?"
Aiber shrugs slightly, too satisfied to panic, but not altogether keen on this development. "If you don't give me anything to work with, you've gotta know I'll go out and find work myself. I'm the everyman, and I'm doing your job for you, so you're welcome." He gives a finger-gun and click of his tongue, but it all feels a bit ridiculous without a drink in his hand.
"Whatever job you're doing, it's not mine," Watari says, cocking his head cooly. "But I won't stop you. I don't ever stop L and he ruins things on a daily basis. I only hope you're prepared to deal with the consequences of your actions."
Aiber breathes out, calming now with the knowledge that Watari has no intention of canceling the dispatch order, and a golden, glowing image of the future flickers through his mind of dragging L from a proverbial burning building, taking him by his proverbial hand and riding off with him into the proverbial sunset where Kira is nothing but a dreary bar story.
These things are not real. They will not happen. Nothing will work out half as well as he wants it to, because nothing ever does.
But L will be back, and that's enough. Aiber's not completely lost to his romanticism. It's enough.
"How?" L asks, and B's shoulders twitch and he's distracted for just long enough that L has time to twist the chain around his neck, jerking them back around on one another and crushing B against the wall. There's a rattle and the dim of night and he feels like he wants a cup of coffee and a bed to lie in and not sleep, just stare at the ceiling and hate the things he wants to hate and love the things he wants to love.
He chokes B, listens to the gasping, guttural noises and he doesn't second-guess it for a second. It's like killing a bug, some foreign entity that's crawled into your home and doesn't belong. It's not murder if he started it. And even if it is, L is okay with having this blood on his hands. He doesn't know how or when or why or what but that isn't half as important as undoing it.
Get out, get out, get out.
B head-butts him, knocking his grip away and using the leverage of the chain to swing L around with one hand, slamming him into the wall like a sack of bricks that crumbles heavily to the floor.
"I didn't wanna have to do it like this," B breathes laughingly, reaching down to grab at L, who spins quickly, kicking upwards and jamming his heel into the center of B's chest, knocking him back several steps and making the chain wring taut around his throat.
L takes his distracted moment to pull himself back up, but by the time he's going in for a the blow, B's extricated himself from his noose and has plenty of time to duck his punch with a tinkling giggle.
"Oh, who am I kidding," he barks, in his same old, combat-boot, up all night, Sex Pistols voice - still the pretentious 15-year-old who'd shadowed L like he was being paid for it, only bigger and taller and with evidently far more muscle mass, "I love to do this."
He grabs L's swinging fist by the wrist and drags him forward, jerking him around, and L has to lighten his steps and follow avidly in order to keep from toppling over. That's all for naught, though, when B stops suddenly, letting him fall forward with the inertia, and slams his knee straight up into L's stomach, jarring him into a shaken collapse.
"I wonder who'll bleed first," B breathes, like the monster in the dark that he is, leaning over L's body. The view is familiar. The monster comes out from under the bed. The monster says hello with his hands, and goodbye with the rising sun.
L, knowing that the strength of his fist alone will not be nearly enough, tilts his wrist as he throws a punch, the quicksilver sharpness of the metal making a thin gash on B's cheek where the edge of the cuff skims his flesh. B laughs again.
"It always is me, isn't it?"
L doesn't respond, doesn't know what to say, hasn't played this game in years and cannot possibly start now.
He pulls himself up into a guarded crouch, body thrumming with adrenaline and the preformation of bruises, but it doesn't feel the way it does with Light - there is no warming, even glow of communion. There is no mutuality to the pain, or the pleasure. Whatever it is B feels, it's too foreign and unwelcome and vile to be allowed. He cannot allow it, or else -
"I would always bleed and you were always bloodless," B says, wiping at his cheek. He grins. "Are we home yet, Lawliet? Are we home?"
"Not even close," L grits, voice clawing itself out of him even as he longs not to engage. None of this makes any sense, but old patterns are so easy to fall back into, and before B can respond, L jams his knee up, hitting him directly in the scrotum.
B's eyebrows go up and he chokes a little, legs giving out as he falls to his knees. "Getting warmer," he says with a pained chuckle.
L takes the moment to look up and down the hall for any sign of salvation - Rem, Misa, anyone will do at this point - but there's no one and nothing there, and he'd given the makeshift lock-pick to Light because he's an undeniable fucking idiot, and now he's trapped himself in a cage with Mr. Nightmare himself, the reigning champion of childhood trauma and the one person L has ever had more destructive feelings towards than he has himself.
In his defense, this is the plot-twist of all plot-twists and the last thing he saw coming anywhere near him, now or ever. Beyond Birthday, even still living, is a figment of L's past, a scary story that keeps him up at night. If he is living and breathing and laughing uproariously still, it's in a world completely separate and unconnected from L's current reality.
And yet -
"You look good," B's saying, "kind of worse for wear, but then it makes sense given who's been doing the wearing." B's eyebrows pop up and L stands there, rejecting the words, not allowing them anywhere close, because B cannot talk about Light because Light is on a completely separate plane from him and they are things that cannot mix. L cannot let all the pieces in him touch because they will rip and they will tear and they will be unceasing, and when they're done there will be nothing left.
B is erosion and L is eroded and Light is the balm for the wound.
No.
Light is erosion and L is eroded and B is -
No, no, that's not right either.
L is erosion.
Yes, that's it. There's the winner. L is erosion and he is eroded and everyone else is just cannon fodder. If there's a whirlwind it's his own, and if he dies it's because he built himself the noose. No one else is allowed to touch the cross he hangs himself on.
"Of course I know about Yagami," B continues, as if L needs him to explain. He cuts him off hurriedly because he really doesn't.
"Are you real?" L asks, with a punishing determination forcing itself out of him and into his voice.
B cocks his head. "Well, I guess, but if you wanna get metaphysical - "
L kicks him in the face.
His jaw makes a very satisfying cracking noise and L hopes maybe it's been dislocated, but B spits and shakes himself and answers the question properly in the next moment. "Yeah," he breathes, "I'm real as I've ever been."
"Are you here?" L continues, barely listening to his previous answer.
B grins up at him like he understands what he's asking, even though L doesn't even really. "I couldn't be anywhere else."
"How did you get here?" L asks, moving from one question to the next like an interrogator. He doesn't know how he's managing it. If B had wanted to he could have gotten up and skinned L alive by now. Stripped him and carved him open. Taken the heart he'd always wanted home as a prize.
B shrugs, still doesn't stand. He's on his knees and L remembers times like these - not even counting blowjobs - and it makes fissures in him if he thinks on them too long.
"Took a plane," he says. "Then drove a car. Really wasn't that hard, if I'm being honest. Not half the chase I expected, and none of the primetime mystery hijinks that I so love, but the ends justify everything else, and you are the end." He swallows, closing his eyes, and then starts speaking like it's suddenly turned into a recitation: "I think you're the end of the world and I've always thought so. Every time I look at you I see a light show, and I think when I was born the devil put a letter to you in me."
"Your poetry hasn't gotten any better."
B grins, opening his eyes again, like he's coming back down from a demented high or something. "Well, prison's not really the place to practice. I did learn how to make a nifty shiv, though! I can show you whenever you decide you want to stop playing 'victim of a home invasion' and act like a real boy, stripped of your Pinocchio wood, for five seconds." B shakes out his hair like a wet dog. "Seriously L, are you having fun playing princess in the tower, while all your little soldiers outside sweat and wring their hands over you? I suppose this is what gets you off nowadays, huh?"
Among other things, L thinks, but doesn't say. Instead, he breathes in and out, lets his mind level, even as his pulse still thrums rapidly. "B, get back in your car and drive away." He doesn't care where he goes, what he does - christ, who he kills. He just wants him away.
B rolls his eyes, then sets them determinedly on L. "Not without what I came for, sugar."
L's limbs twitch. He wants to pace back and forth but he refuses to turn his back to Beyond, refuses to look away for fear of where he might show up next. Whatever crevice he intends to crawl in through, L is sure he doesn't want him there.
"Do you know why I didn't kill you after the case in LA?" he asks, quietly, voice gone detached and smooth suddenly, in a way that he hopes pisses B off endlessly.
He looks more amused than anything else. "Because that would eliminate the possibility of conjugal visits?" he suggests, with a juvenile tilt of his hips.
L doesn't blink. There is an 18-year-old version of him who is far too used to this and that seems to be the him that's auto-piloting now.
He says, "Because you were not within immediate reach. Because it would have required the expenditure of resources and time and effort that you just didn't warrant. Because I already knew the end of that story and it would have been dull." He's not looking at B but he can see the white walls, white jacket, white nurses, and he remembers a panic and a fear that he puts on mute now. That he'd put on mute then. He thinks he's been on mute for years.
"Oh shut up, L," B snaps, and it's not the response he's expecting, but maybe it should be. Maybe he's been spending too much time with Light, who can easily be deflected by any blow to his pride. B had never been so simple. B had never had much pride. "I know this dance. I watched you choreograph it and I learned all the steps and I tore off your ankle bones so you couldn't cha-cha anymore. Sing me a new one, darling, cause this tune's gone stale."
L tilts his head at him. "To the point, then? Alright. Right now you're not dull. Right now you have my attention. Consequently, I have no qualms about putting an end to you."
B's eyebrows rise and tad, but he seems not so very discouraged by the threat. "Oh yeah, baby," he growls with a tilt of porno mockery to his voice, "eradicate me."
L round-house kicks him across the face. Blood flies from his lips, staining warm on L's skin, but B only laughs and touches his lips, like he's just tasted something nice. Like he's hungry.
"Annihilate me," he breathes, and L hits him again because he doesn't know what else to do. He hates this game but he doesn't know how not to play it. Is an alcoholic still an alcoholic if he's stranded on a desert island with nothing to drink in reach? Or is he cured? If you just stay away from it - if you just -
"Obliterate me," B spits, making a ragged move to stand up, even as L slams his fist into him, knocking him down again. His shoulder collides with the wall, his head makes a dull thud, and he breathes in and out too loudly. L hits him again before he even has time to speak.
"Annihila - "
"You said that," L grits, knocking him back. B pushes forward, body bearing upwards, and the velocity with which it hits knocks them both a couple steps away from the wall, and since B is taller and slightly broader, it tilts the dynamics of the fight sharply out of L's favor.
Only for a moment, though, as he uses the leverage of the cuffs keeping him hooked within a certain radius to keep his balance and quickly sidestep B, bringing the chain around his legs in a sort of lasso. B jumps it at the last moment, though, and tackles L so that they both go flying towards the hard ground. There's a thud and a skittering pain through his spine, but L doesn't let the head rush or the nausea keep him from jabbing B in the ribs.
Instead of bucking away, however, the way one is meant to do when injured in one of the most sensitive spots on the body, B leans into it, making a hollow animal noise that thrums through the hall, down L's fingertips, to the back of his mind where the sense-memory glows like a live thing. He remembers this disease, remembers it infecting him, remembers cutting off limbs, whole parts of himself just to get it out.
It makes love look like a pale thing. It makes Light's touch feel washed out and far away.
But no, no no no, that's not - it's not just a fiction. It's not just a story he told himself so that he could rest, it's a true, breathing thing, and if Light were here - if Light were here -
"Kill me," B breathes into his face, and he's laughing and he's begging and his hips are pressing into L's, grinding rhythmically, denim on denim and heady, making sparks flare where sparks shouldn't be and the whole world go a different shade of lightning. "Kill me," he demands, clawing at L's scalp, pulling him closer by the hair.
L's legs are parting and his throat is filthy with hot breath and he's hard and he aches from Light in him and there are too many dead children to count, too much going on, all spinning and violating, sensory overload and it feels like B was right and he is the end of the world, and he's ending it now - mounting and mounting, pressure so hot and close he could die, and all the bad, bruised memories laid out like a cheat-sheet to his pain, and it feels funny.
This is the monster under his bed, the skeleton in his closet, the ghost that haunts his ghost, but he's such a good fuck and such good fun and he always was, and L hates himself for it. For being here, under him. For meeting his hips thrust for thrust and luxuriating in the pleasure, wanting to choke on it. It's too much, too hard, the end coming like dynamite and it's all going to -
Oh.
He jerks slowly, body going shivery and very warm, the insides of his thighs growing sticky with come and that's really a bit pathetic, isn't it? A vague shame floats at the back of his mind, but the pleasure of indecency only makes his orgasm burn longer, body quaking under B's.
There is nothing pure here, nothing holy. Light had fucked him until he bled on this very same floor the night before, but L had breathed through the whole thing, had know himself and categorized every touch into something called love, something he could write on the walls and not loathe.
He loathes this. B on top of him, and losing himself. Soiled, dropped down, the apple grove. His hand in L's and L's in his and the world spread out like a blanket of agony that could only be overridden through a secret kind of sacrifice. The old church and the vines and the fireplace with the coal dust in it, painting their hands black. Queen humming lowly from a record player while he'd shower, clean the scent off of him - beginning every day again and again a new man after dying every night. It hurt too much not to celebrate.
L's thoughts are loose and interconnected and he cannot bear to open his eyes and see the look that B is giving him - hips now stilled, but quite obviously still hard and pulsing against L's clothed thigh. He thinks of Light's voice, his false laugh and his neat fingernails and the fluffy pale kindness of his strife.
Light is a separate animal from L, and that is why he can love him.
He pulls B up by the hair, throwing him off more easily than he should be able to, but B falls where he's set, like a rag doll, limbs extricating themselves from L's to leave him sticky and cold and writhing in self-disgust.
"I'm not dead yet," B singsongs from his slump against the wall, giving L sharp bedroom eyes that demand body and blood and all sorts of sacramental shenanigans of the like. "Keep your promise."
L reels back his fist, packing power into it. He intends to.
Mello raps his knuckles on the windowpane, antsy like an amateur, and says, "He's taking too long."
Wedy rolls her eyes, flicking her lighter on to watch the flame burn, for lack of anything more diverting to do. "It's barely been ten minutes. It takes twice as long as that to get L to even say hi to you sometimes."
The tapping stops, and Mello looks back at her, neck craning over the passenger's seat. "You think he's really in there?" The windows are foggy with the cold and in the evening light he nearly looks like the role he's trying to play.
Wedy shrugs. "Must be. B would be back already by now if he hadn't found what he was looking for. My guess is they're taking some personal time to 'catch up,' or whatever the kids are calling it these days." She arches an eyebrow at him, and not just because he's the only juvenile in the vicinity.
"Don't say it like that," Mello grunts.
Wedy could laugh tinkly and bright like a chandelier, but she doesn't. She isn't going to bother to play for him. "Don't give me orders, hotshot."
"Hey, I'm the one with the gun here, you know," he shoots back, not quite a threat but more a plea for recognition. That's why boys his age always get guns, isn't it? To be known. There's a flatness and a solemnity in him that's fairly singular, but he's not so special as all that. Just a child in over his head and not looking to surface. She remembers what that kind of naiveté tastes like. Ruinous, but worth it, maybe.
Still, she is not kind enough to resist saying, "And I'm the one who could have taken that gun away from you, shoved it down your throat, and blown that pretty hair off your pretty head anytime I wanted, and haven't. So let's both show a little more consideration, shall we?"
His fear is sharp in the moment, but it melts like ice after she follows the threat up with a smile, and he shakes his head, breathing out, "You're too much like him."
It seems he really is worried about his pet maniac, isn't he? That would be very charming if she could be charmed.
"From exposure, I'm sure," she says.
"It's only been a few days."
"Oh," Wedy says, a lying tenor mutating her tone, "I thought you were talking about L."
She hadn't but she says it anyway just to watch Mello's expression twist. He's going to have to be stripped of his misguided hero-worship at some point, and Wedy wagers she'd be far kinder about it than the man himself.
For his part, Mello mostly ignores the comment, resuming his rhythmic twitching. After several moments of that, he sits up, face set in a resolve Wedy can see in the side-view mirror. "I'm going in," he says, pocketing the gun.
"There's really no need," Wedy says, but doesn't rouse herself unduly to prevent him. It's what she would have done at that age, so desperate to prove her worth.
"What if the Shinigami's got him?" he snaps, reeling around on her as he opens his door.
"I don't think that's how Shinigami work," she responds dully, but honestly, she wasn't around the one at headquarters long enough to really pick up anything besides, big, ugly, and terrible conversationalists. "And even so? What's it going to do? Rip out his spine. He'll just grow a new one, probably."
"We're a team," Mello insists, stepping out of the car.
The cool rush of Japanese autumn splits the air with a familiar, peaking tranquility. She remembers laughing at age 19, barefoot on the sidewalk and smoking a stolen cigarette. The handcuff around her wrist is chafing the skin there, keeping her locked to the front seat, a prisoner under a night sky that she owns. She'd stolen it, so it's hers. But they'd stolen her, so now she's their's.
"You're a team," she corrects. "I'm your hostage."
Mello doesn't look back at her, doesn't appear to be listening at all, just mumbles, "Stay here," before slamming the door and jogging across the alleyway to turn the corner to the building's entrance.
"Say hi to L for me," Wedy calls after him, though she's not sure he hears or if it matters. She feels a little written off, but this is a game she didn't sign up to play, and she'd rather sit this round out, if it's all the same.
Yagami is, as politely as one can manage, haranguing information out of Ide and batting aside Aizawa's numerous and varied questions, when Aiber walks into the room. He doesn't look up and Aiber considers taking a few steps back and re-doing the whole thing, if only to make a proper show of it, but then a sidelined glare nabs him where he stands and he knows he's made the entrance he needed to,
"Well," Light says, as he crosses the room to where the printer is spewing out files that he begins shoving into a uncharacteristic mess of manilla folders, "have you got anything or did you just come as a spectator?" He appears strung together by the sheer force of his aggravation, and Aiber's not sure what to make of it, except perhaps some good clean fun.
"Who me?" he asks, finger poised toward his chest, eyes grinning innocence.
Light doesn't even bother to scoff. "Children are being murdered," he says, dead-set with disgust, but hardly wasting more than a singular moment on it before continuing his work, "brutally. I don't have time for this."
Aiber let's him brush past only because he knows he can make him stop whenever he wants to. And he wants to. "2-16-1 West," he says lowly, so that none of the other investigators hear. "Do you have time for that?"
Yagami doesn't quite freeze, so much as he slows, body relaxing in a way that could almost pass for natural, if not for the stilted distance suddenly splitting his eyes. His unease in apparent in how fiercely he's maintaining the veneer that covers it.
"What is that supposed to mean?" he asks, voice far more emotionless than it had been a moment ago.
Aiber shakes his head, calling for an abandonment of the act. "Don't play that role for me, Yagami, I'm not part of the crowd." He leans back, cracking his knuckles loudly, the noise splitting through the room. He's got too much coiled, anxious energy to know what to do with it.
Light's gaze doesn't shift and Aiber, tiring quickly of the stall-out, rolls his eyes.
"It's the address that I just sent a police dispatch team to, on suspicion of containing evidence pivotal to the Kira case." He grins wide, feeling like a toothpaste commercial.
"You don't have that authority," Light shoots back immediately, expression unchanged, voice even in tone.
"I don't, but Watari does." He glances back at the stagnant W on the screen, then again towards Light, and even though he staves off the flush of panic - evidently well adept in concealing even instinctual bodily reactions - there is no doubt that this information has shaken him. Eyes level, suit trim, jaw set; Aiber imagine he can feel him spooling apart from the inside out. "Draw's up, darlin'," he says, throwing out a mocking wink just to sweeten the blow. "Time to show your cards. I'm confident we'll track down the missing king to your queen - " leering and far too proud to be a prelude to success, but he can't resist, " - any minute now."
In a moment, the stolid unease is gone and Light's mouth is twisting vicious, feeling rushing into his eyes as if he can no longer keep it contained. "Your attempts at intimidation are laughable," he snipes, voice low enough to dodge the microphones.
"Yeah," Aiber says, "yeah. I am a bit laughable at times, aren't I?" He strokes a loose hand across his chin, expression contorting facetiously. "But, on the other hand, I'm not going to be charged and executed anytime soon, so as it goes, I'm pretty comfortable with my place in this situation right now. How about you?"
Light's mouth opens and his limbs twitch a little and Aiber can taste the sticky copper of blood on instinct, trained well enough to know when to expect it - but the blow never comes. Light never hits him. It's disappointing, almost, because that's what he'd been banking on. Throwing down, getting it all out on the floor right before the big finish - victory known twice, and in different ways. L coming back to find them bruised like warriors.
Aiber is a lover, not a fighter, but he wants Yagami's blood on his hands if he wants anyone's.
But Light doesn't hit him. Doesn't do anything half so kind. Just tilts his head ever so, school boy charm radiating, and says, "You so sure about that execution thing, Thierry?"
And Aiber can't keep his mouth from falling open, can't help his eyes going wide or the way his stomach drops. He's dying, he's dying, he' s - not dying. Light doesn't have a pen. Nothing is written down, but he knows. He knows, and it's only a matter of time.
L better get here soon.
Light evidently isn't going to wait for him, though, because abruptly and without a second victorious glance at Aiber, he turns on his heel, heading for the door. When he speaks it's loud enough that everyone in the room hears it clearly.
"I have to go," he announces, projecting earnest concern and wavering excitement into his voice with despicable ease. "If there's been a development in the Kira case, if there might be some chance that L has been found, I have to be there. I'm sorry." He gives one last emotive glance, then disappears into the elevator.
"Uh," Matsuda says dully, after several moments of confused silence, "what was he talking about?"
Aiber doesn't even glance at him before barreling out into the hallway. The staircase is on the right and it shouldn't take him that much longer to make it down than Yagami if he runs. Shoving open the door with one hand, he dials a cab company with the other, barely managing to catch his breath enough to order a vehicle to the curb.
If Kira's going to be there for the end, then he better bet his pasty Japanese ass that Aiber will be, too.
He doesn't understand the mattress and he doesn't try to, just steps past it on the way in. The door is unlocked and the hall is dark and if there are monsters here, Mello can't see them. He's hasn't yet decided whether or not that's a good thing.
He wants to say B's name, and then he wants to say L's name, and the indecision as to which to choose leaves him silent. He takes slow steps inside, keeping his hand wrapped around the gun, and doesn't fully close the door behind him. He likes the thick strip of light that pours in from the street, and the easy escape-route, should he need it.
Not that there's much to be afraid of. B is here and B can take anything, can fight anything, and, it seems, can save anyone he chooses to. Ellie Cale, Merrie Kendwood - Mihael Keehl. He wracks up far more dead bodies than live ones, surely, but that the latter category even exists says something as to the complexity of the situation.
As he nears the end of the hall, Mello hears a tinny, weak sound from the far left, like the shrill scrape of metal, only muted. He clamps down on his gut reaction to cut and run, pulling the gun from his pocket as he takes the turn. The sound grows louder, his steps speed up - and what is he doing here? Why hadn't he brought Wedy? Why hadn't he gone with B in the first place? This would all just be so much easier were he not - another clang, louder and more insistent, speeding him up - alone.
He comes to another corner and he barely manages to unlatch the safety on the gun - repeating B's scatterbrained firearm tutorial over and over in his head - before he's turning abruptly, feeling ridiculous even as he does, like some shitty cop on TV, storming a crime scene.
From the noise he expects to be confronted directly with something at his first step. The reality is farther away, and harder to make out, roughly halfway down the hall and cast in dark blue shadows. He should have brought the flashlight. Why didn't he bring the flashlight? A lot of good a gun does him if he can't tell who - or what - he's shooting.
The smacking of flesh and the pained grunting propels him forward to find out.
For a moment all of the vague innuendos and sideways glances between Wedy and B support a mounting suspicion in him that he knows what he's about to walk in on, and why Wedy hadn't wanted him to, but he doesn't let the thought fully form, doesn't let the word shape in dirty whispers - the word pinning him to the floor as Watson had leered over him, and again clawing his throat through the stench of blood and flesh. He doesn't think it, doesn't dare, and in a moment he forgets that the idea had ever been there at all.
A shard of the glassy outdoor light spikes in from the boarded window above them and Mello doesn't have time to consider the logistics before he's sprinting forward, gun trained on B, and shouting, "Get off of him!"
L is pinned to the floor on his back, hair fanned out in feathery pools, looking like a sacrifice, like a victim, lip split and teeth pink with the blood, and B is poised over him, fist reeled back for another hit and Mello should have known, he should have known that the bastard couldn't be trusted, can't save anybody and shouldn't be given the chance to try.
His finger is brushing the trigger when B's stance falters, his shoulders sag, shadowed face twisting just out of sight. He says, "Mello?" in the wrong voice, with a note of disbelief, and that's the exact moment that Mello notices the writing on his white shirt. Writing that hadn't been there when B had gotten out of the car.
To-Oh University.
The words barely register, and even when he slots them in as something he'd read before - in Light Yagami's file, the college he attends - they don't permeate as having anything to do with the situation.
He barely even realizes he's speaking when he asks, with mirroring shock, "L?"
They stare at each other for a difficult moment, Mello's eyes adjusting well enough to the dark that he can make out the face squinting at him from its crouch - the thin jaw, the swoop of the nose, the browless stare. It's not the right one.
From the floor between them, spread out and battered, B croons, "Beyond Birthday," in a mockery of their confusion, arching onto his shoulders to grin at Mello upside down.
They've done studies on this sort of thing. The brain sees what it wants to see. If you show a subject a blurry picture, gradually bringing it more and more into focus, their brain will decide early on what it is being shown and latch onto the image as truth, even if further clues prove the estimation wrong. He'd expected B as the villain and he'd cast him in that role, and L - with L he hadn't known what to expect. Not this, certainly. There is blood on his knuckles and he's frowning artlessly, squinting up at Mello like a man abruptly woken from sleep and confronted with information he cannot yet process.
"You have a gun," L says, after the silence has stretched too taut.
Mello looks forward at his outstretched hand, the metal and the trigger finger, and drops his arm immediately. He hadn't realized he'd still been pointing it. "I didn't - " he starts, " I thought - "
Quicker than fits the pace of the conversation thus far, L forgoes questions and accusations and simply says, "You're with him," flatly, not glancing at B, who's grinning sumptuously up from the ground, body tilting against L's in a way that makes him tighten his grip on the loose collar of B's t-shirt, keeping him locked beneath him.
"I'm not - " Mello starts, but stops abruptly. It's not as if it isn't true. But it's more complicated than that. Justice has Armageddon's blood all over his hands and this is all a lot more complicated than that. He says, "I was looking for you."
L's eyes drop, then flash quickly back up, and it looks like he wants to say something but doesn't want Mello to hear. Grip loosening slightly on B, he sits back on his heels, body still straddling him flatly to the ground. "It looks like you've found me."
There is only one thing that keeps Light from writing Thierry Morello's name on a scrap from the Death Note, and it's not that it might alight suspicions and it's not that L would be quietly viscous over it - it's simply that he doesn't have time.
Ryuk is with L, Ryuk is watching over him, but what is Ryuk going to do about cops? Deprive them of their produce? Maybe if it were Rem she'd devise some way of getting L out of there - as L leads to Light as Kira, which leads to Misa as the Second Kira, which leads to Misa's death, which is the bargaining chip which his professional relationship with Rem is founded on - but he has her out scouring the city for everyone's favorite rapist Shinigami and he's got no proper way of calling her back.
Children are dying and it tears him up but that isn't a priority right now. If L is found, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Even if L doesn't implicate him - and he wouldn't at this point, would he? Not after I love you is a stain on his tongue, he couldn't live without Light if he tried - there's still too much to explain, too much that even the taskforce wouldn't let alone, and especially not with Aiber leading the charge. And, more than that, he doesn't want it to end. He has the perfect set-up. He has everything he wants within his reach and he's not going to put it down without a fucking fight.
Leaning forward to shove another handful of bills at the cab driver, he grits, "Faster," and the man nods as the road starts to rush by them more quickly.
Wedy's considering lighting up again simply out of boredom when she hears the revving of the engine coming around the corner and sees the police lights. Half of her prays to a god that she doesn't believe in that they just keep on driving, but the other half thinks that a cop chase could do something to liven up the proceedings.
When the turn signal blinks in her direction, though, she starts to panic ever so slightly. And even if she luxuriates in the scorch-hot feeling of messing with the law, she's not going to much enjoy being questioned by a couple of badge-toting amateurs.
She tugs at the handcuff around her wrist which keeps her bound to the front seat, gritting her teeth as she tries to jerk it off. No-go. Okay, okay, no big setback. Ducking down slightly, she scours the floor for something with which to pick the lock, but comes up empty. The cop cars are parking and there's at least two of them, maybe three, and she hears doors slamming and murmured voices and, okay, no, she doesn't like or trust Beyond Birthday, but she likes the police even less.
Breathing a curse as she rolls her eyes, she pulls off one of her shoes and then stretches forward to shove the sharp point of the heel into the plastic covering below the ignition. She uses all the strength she's got to tear it open with several rough jerks, and breaks two nails in the process. It's been a while since she's hot-wired a car, but she's done it enough times in her life not to have too much trouble now, aside from the limited reach that the cuff gives her.
Just like riding a bike. A stolen bike.
Once the engine's started, the real challenge is managing to reach the pedals, and then to turn the wheel with one arm still stuck to the back of the chair, but there's enough adrenaline rushing to boost the pain out of her immediate awareness. As she begins backing out of the alley, she hears the voices rise and glances in the rear-view to see several officers in full regalia - helmets and all - chasing after her. Grinning, she slams her bare foot down on the pedal.
She's not sure what part of the building Mello and B are in, but she figures following their breadcrumb trail is her best bet, and heads right through the front door - and the surrounding wall.
Beyond Birthday is beneath him and Mihael Keehl is standing a few feet away, gun clenched in his palm, and this could be a Dickens Christmas special, what with the visitations of all his assembled ghosts. Failures both past and in the making, and here they've shown up with neither warning nor explanation, just when he'd seemed to escape all of his ties to the world. He half expects Father Octavian to limp in with his walker.
What he does not expect is a silver Honda to come careening down the hallway with an echoing crash and a bit of the building's infrastructure clinging to the side of it, but that happens, very suddenly and also without much advanced warning, pulling up beside their strange congregation and stopping abruptly.
The door flies open with what looks like a struggle and then one Merrie Kenwood, codename: Wedy, is raising her eyebrows at them over her extended leg, and saying, "Hey ladies, need a ride?"
From underneath him - body close and warm and twitching with an errant excitement that makes L want to recoil as much as it doesn't - B grunts with amusement. "Hey Merrie, I know you're eager to catch up with old pals, but you couldn't have walked? I signed a waver at the rental place, you know." His voice trills and his complaint is utterly hollow. If anything, he's probably jealous that he didn't get to drive through a wall.
"Bill me," Wedy says, looking them over, and like the good solider she is, not blinking at B's position under him, nor the blood that stains half of his jaw. "Now get in. The cops are here and someone needs to undo these cuffs so I can drive properly."
"You called the police?" Mello asks, voice straining on a disbelieving high note. And he's what? Fourteen now? Maybe fifteen. Too young to be wearing the trousers he is, certainly, and to be packing a piece that he likely has no clue of how to use.
Wedy rolls her eyes and L's got no idea how she'd gotten here or what she's doing mixed up with B and Mello - at least a Wammy's only team had made a certain sort of sense - but her presence is a comfort. She levels the world, brings him back up to Tokyo, 2004 and away from the swallowing cruelty of his youth with Beyond.
"If I'd wanted them here," she says sharply, "do you really think I'd have plaster dust in my hair right now?"
"It's a good look on you," B shoots back merrily, trying to sit up.
L's weight is displaced and the shift makes him panic and shove, slamming B back to the floor with a quick, quavering hand. B grins under him, evidently enjoying the contact, and L feels his skin trying to unravel itself right off his bones.
There are voices echoing down the hallway. Kira's castle is being stormed, and this is the second wave.
Mello is the first one to move, shoving the gun in his pocket and moving to grab L by the shoulder and haul him up. L's pretty sure none of the Wammy orphans have ever touched him before - alpha and beta notwithstanding - and the contact is strange and almost illicit. "Come on."
He jerks out of Mello's reach on instinct, says, "I can't," before he can fully think it through.
And what is that? What is that, really? Love? Devotion? Do such things even exist through an objective lens, or is it all just circumstantial. Sure, he loves Light when the only available option is to love Light, but several doors have just opened up, and the cavalry in leather has come to take him away, and how could there possibly be a theoretical bit of romanticism that is more important than this? Escape. The whole world. Light Yagami is just one person and he's not half as important as he thinks he is.
"What?" B mumbles up at him as the hurried footsteps in the distance grow ever closer. "Think Kira would miss you too much?"
L looks at him and he wonders what Light would say to see him like this, straddling the beaten body of his own personal copy-cat, struggling his way through a muted emotional crisis in the span of seconds. He wouldn't understand. He knows L but he only knows a tiny part of him, an updated version of him crafted for the moment. L's not even sure that he is anything but moments, and the adjustments that he makes to himself in order to inhabit them sequentially.
If he has an identity at all, it's subject to who he's crushing underneath his body, whose hand is reaching for his shoulder, who is frowning at him expectantly from out of a car. He loves Light Yagami, perhaps - and even that much is subject to interpretation - but he doesn't love him enough for it to make any difference.
He stands, detaching from his locked hold onto B. He can see the press of his erection through his replica jeans but he pretends he can't.
"If you haven't noticed," L says, voice gone as unmoved as he can get it, holding up his chained arm, "my mobility is rather limited."
It's barely a second after he's spoken that B's up after him, gripping the chain in one large pale hand, and tugging at it with the other, splitting the metal with a sharp jerk and tinny clang and barely any apparent effort exerted. L just watches flatly, even as Mello's eyebrows flare up and even Wedy gives an appreciative whistle.
"Show off," L mumbles, pulling away to climb directly into the passenger's seat without a glance back. The leather is cold with the night and the shouting policemen are closing in on them and L's head spins with the headlights and the movement and the violence of the moment after so much stillness.
"Always," B laughs out, closing his door for him like the ruptured gentleman he's always wanted to be, right back to his muddy jaunts in his Wellington boots at age eight, his hands a bridge over every puddle that had threatened with alacrity to turn into a trapdoor.
He swings himself into the backseat, pulling Mello in after him with a familiarity that appears to make everyone else uncomfortable - Mello included - and reaching down to fiddle Wedy's handcuffs open. L wants to ask, but doesn't. He can't speak. It's not even been a month but he thinks he'd forgotten what the world looks like.
"Go, baby, go!" B calls forward, scrunching himself up between the two front seats to lean on his elbows and pant up at them like a dog demanding attention.
Wedy shifts her position slightly, then slams down on the gas, tearing down the hall and through a plate glass door just as the cops begin rounding the corner.
When Aiber gets there, Yagami is standing in front of a gaping tear in the facade of 2-16-1 West. For a glinting, strange half-moment he thinks that he'd done it himself. That some Kira power of immense magnitude had manifested itself and destroyed half the building.
It's only when he sees the tire treads that he realizes that the force in question was probably a car.
The night is thick with smoky light and men in uniform making rounds and asking questions and Light stands at the center of it, a stationary point in the frazzled buzz of panic that streams through the ranks and even has a few low-rent criminals in the area poking their heads out - only to duck back down as soon as they spot the cops. He is lean and dejected and his hair glows a triumphant, movie-set gold in the flashbulb light.
Aiber passes him without a glance and he barely pays any mind to the shouts of, "Hey, this is a crime scene buddy!" simply flashing his L-approved badge back without waiting for them to read it. He walks the whole building, following the trail of rubble and skid marks, but gets distracted by the yellow tape and the group of officers halfway down one of the hallways. There are men in sterile coats taking crime scene photos and blood samples. Blood on the floor. Not enough to fill a body, not half enough, but it's there and it's not even dry.
There's a quiet man with an uneven mustache cutting through some metal that's latched onto the wall, slipping it into an evidence bag with trembling precision. No, not just metal - cuffs. Industrial strength, special order. They're familiar.
He wants to grab the bag out of the man's hands, shout at them all, demand answers. Instead, he says, "We'll need this all sent over as soon as possible. L's orders." He flashes his badge again. He's far too sober for this.
They tell him there's nothing else here. They tell him there had been a car. A struggle. An escape and a chase, but lost. We lost 'em. We lost him.
He goes back to the front of the building. Yagami is still standing in the same place and Aiber stands beside him and for once he doesn't want to hit him or kiss him or watch him fry. He says, "How'd you do it?" The barely restrained rage has all drained out into a frail dejection, and everything moves slower and faster than it should, whirring around him in thick tides.
Light looks at him and there's a panic and a fear that is so sloppy, so unconfined and off the usual finely printed course, that Aiber almost believes that he believes himself when he says, "I didn't."
Misa is walking home alone. Misa has barely gone anywhere alone in the last several months. Rem at her side, Light in her sights, L's watchful eyes trailing doggedly behind - she'd always been guarded. Not like hiding under a bed all night while your mom and dad bleed out in the next room. Not like humming to yourself to chase away the street demons in one lonely alley or another. Not like men with knives and torn up grins and an eye on her throat.
She'd been safe.
She is not safe now.
She is not a child but she is thrown about like one, limbs weak, heart throbbing - everyone's heart-throb - and the monsters who lives at every corner of her view are here, tearing and taking. Or well, one monster in particular.
Orange and white, like citrus foam, and laughing. But scared. She doesn't understand the sensory information that she processes, just feels reality shake around her in a whirlwind and she wishes Rem was holding her hand and Light was holding her heart and even L and his goons had a blindfold for her eyes so she wouldn't have to witness her own destruction.
That is what this is. She is being destroyed. It's the one thing that she has left, that she's truly everhad, and it's being taken away. Wrenched from her grip.
Hand it over. Hand it over and it'll stop hurting.
She's weak, she's too weak to fight for it. She could never be the hero of the story. She can't even save the one thing he'd trusted her with.
Give me death. Give it back.
She gives. It goes. She can feel it flooding out of her, gone in an instant. She lets go and the Death Note is gone, disappeared, and the monster with it. She falls on the ground, the concrete staining her tights, body cold and clouded, too afraid to think, to ask the question.
It comes to her anyway, overriding the fear: what is a Death Note?
tbc.
end notes: ahem, this chapter is a bit shorter than i maybe wanted it to be, but adding anymore in would send it lasting for another 10k, so here seemed like a good ending point. i hope you guys don't hate lxb because that's going to be a major theme from here on out (as if it wasn't already, heh). that said, this is still an lxlight fic and their relationship is still utterly integral. and yeah, things can only get more fucked up from here.
thank you so much for reading and, as always, reviews and comments and general acknowledgement of this fic's existence make my heart light up like nothing else. i couldn't do this without you guys. thank you!