warnings: minor blood, choppy scene structure, questionable flow? not much happens in this chapter but also a lot gets started?
notes: hello i am late late late with this, which is a product, no doubt, of going to visit my gf in california, meaning i have a lot less free time to write/edit/etc than i usually do, and getting sick from a slight (unintentional) overdose on pain medication. i'm healthy now, tho still with the bae, and by all mean i should have been done with this chapter about two weeks ago, but here i am, late and apologetic. i'm sorry, please forgive me, and i hope this chapter is of passable quality?
this is probably the most LxB-heavy things have been so far, and for those readers who don't jive with that pairing, i'm really sorry - but it's not going to go away anytime soon, bc it's very dear to me, and a dynamic that was always going to be important to this fic. i don't want to lose people over this, because you all are amazing and unbearably kind, but it's very important to me that i write the content that i enjoy writing and think will make a good story over what will most please the crowd. sincere apologies, and if you can't look past the pairing discrepancies then i understand, and thank you so much for sticking with me this long.
thank you so much to all of you in general. i could never have gotten so far or have maintained the urge to keep going without you guys. much love and i hope this chapter is semi-readable? i love you all.
chapter twenty four - where the heart has been.
"You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since – on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to displace with your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be."
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
L's hands like a vice-grip on him, squeezing the October air out of his lungs. L's hands a prayer to a god he'd forgotten. L's hands. Light's head against the wall, his cheeks hot, his eyes glassy, the rest of the room covered in the pearly sheen of dawn in autumn.
"That feels," he breathes, and then doesn't finish the sentence.
L strokes his fingers up and down, pressure receding, and Light makes a noise that he will later disclaim any association to. He opens his eyes and he sees L smiling at him, small and silent, and peculiarly comforting, despite the pangs in his stomach that tell him it shouldn't be. You shouldn't love your captor. You shouldn't love a man who accuses you of murder, locks you up without probable cause, and touches you in places that no one's ever touched.
You shouldn't love a man. You shouldn't love.
"Feels?" L asks slyly, blunt nails brushing Light's cock, making his hips jerk and his spine tingle. "Bad? Painful? I mean it, that sentence could end anywhere, Light-kun. I wouldn't want to continue something you didn't enjoy."
Light grits his teeth, tries to smile through it. "Then you should probably stop talking."
L hums slightly, reintroducing the chokehold to Light's cock and jerking swiftly, and it shouldn't feel half as good as it does, but it does. He ought to be the one sitting up, smiling, unaffected and barely interested, instead of spread out, too weak with arousal to hold himself up. He knows he must make a pretty sight, fodder for the Kira profile. He knows L is going to think of this later, hold it close to his chest, the way he does with victories. Maybe when Light presses him to some wall or another and asks for what L so willingly gives.
Maybe years from now, when Light has been proven innocent and the real Kira has been caught and L is far away on some important case or another.
That's how it has to end up, isn't it? Light thrusts his hips, grunts and winces, feels a pressure welling up in him, heavy and all-encompassing, body strung out and desperate for just - that - one -
Touch.
He comes. His thighs quiver and he resents the man whose hands stroke him through it just as much as he wants to keep him around always, there and never gone. They could rule the world if they had time, and space, and each other. They could do anything.
But L has to go. There's no other way this could end up.
one month later.
There's a ringing in his ears, like after an explosion. Everyone keeps talking at him but he can barely hear it.
"Sir, this is a crime scene. I'll need you show me some form of identification. Sir?"
"Oh man, Light, you should have seen him, he was like another L, except, like, crazy. And then the kid with the gun and the lady with the car, she just went straight through the wall, I didn't even know she was there! And the police came and I don't know what's up with that, it's like everybody got the memo about your hide-out on the same night. It was weird. You should have been here, but I guess that would have been bad because then they would have arrested you, but - "
"Where is he, Yagami? Goddammit, would you stop playing the tragedy and just look at me? You're going to have to start explaining at some point, because I don't think you're gonna be able to make this mess disappear with a sob story and a pretty lawyer this time."
"Sir? Sir, can you hear me?"
"It's weird, I think I remember that lady, Light. Yeah, yeah, you know her. She was that blonde, you know? The one who always stank and hung around with L and, well… this guy."
Everything snaps into focus. Aiber's at one side and there's a rookie policemen peering through his helmet on the other. Ryuk hangs above them like a gaudy parade floating, grinning down.
"What?" he says, to no one in particular, but after the word is out, he realizes he's talking to Ryuk, who's pointing down at Aiber with one long, clawed finger and a grin that splits across the sunrise that's edging up behind them.
Everyone starts speaking again at once, but he only follows the thread of what Ryuk's saying: "I said, you remember that blonde lady, right?" And there's something about his eyes that seem too self-aware, leading even, but there are too many issues already so he doesn't question it, just locks his mind on the words and makes himself process them. Blonde lady, with L and Aiber. Shit.
"Wedy," he says, eyes snapping to Aiber. When did he even get here? "Where is she?"
"What? I don't know," Aiber snaps, "and if I did I wouldn't be sharing that, or any, information with you. You're the one who needs to start talking, and fast, before I have them sweep this place for your prints." He rubs at his stubble. "Actually, you know what, I think I'll have them do that anyway. Boys!"
The officer is wide-eyed in his helmet and obviously dubious about taking any old orders flung around by an overloud fop with some fancy papers. "I - " he starts, looking between Aiber and Light uncomfortably.
Light rolls his eyes, reeling in his spiraling panic and coming back to himself, in his suit. The professional, the golden boy, the one with the answers. "Morello-san," he says, quiet and stern, commanding attention, "I know you're disappointed that we didn't find what we were looking for, but that's no reason to go flinging around accusations."
He watches Aiber's jaw lock up. He doesn't want to be afraid of Light, but he is, and if everything in the entire world hadn't just gone to shit, Light would be thoroughly enjoying this moment.
"Sir," the policeman starts again, and it's not clear who he's addressing but it doesn't matter anyway. The morning pours over the horizon in prickly, uneven beams of light and it's beautiful, maybe, but it doesn't matter.
"I'm with him," Light says, nodding to Aiber, and then turns in a random direction and strides away with every appearance of knowing exactly what he's doing and where he's going to do it, and betting on the fact that Aiber will follow.
The big lug doesn't disappoint, and Light hears the gritted agreement of, "He's with me," before the heavy patter of steps catching up with him. Ryuk floats above them, grinning, wings shining with a pale glow in the sunlight.
"You think you're really cute, huh?" Aiber asks, following Light across the alley, and the words are looser and funnier than they should be, tone not quite reflecting the loathing that Light knows to be there. "Fucking adorable. I'm not much for violence but I'd kill you myself here and now if I thought it would do any good."
Light turns a sharp smile on him. "The feeling is so mutual," he says. "Now tell me about Wedy."
"I tell you?" Aiber barks incredulously. "Why don't you tell me? You obviously know a lot more than anybody else here."
Light's eyes laugh even as his insides twist around on each other. "Yes, but that's true no matter where I go."
"Oh, cut the crap, Yagami. I know you're Kira, you know you're Kira, and there's no point playing it off because I don't have proof and the suits all dance to your music anyway. Nobody believes my accusations now and they're not gonna suddenly start just because I pinky promise that you said something incriminating."
Ryuk laughs. "He's got a point, Light."
Light rubs at his jaw, wants to snap at Ryuk to shut-up but doesn't like how it'll make him look. He's saving the crazy card for when he doesn't have any options left, but hopefully it won't come to that. He looks sideways at Aiber. "What about Watari?" he asks. Not giving anything away, but not being particularly subtle, either. He hasn't got time for subtlety anymore.
"Already knows you're Kira," Aiber says flatly.
Light breathes in once, tucking in all the loose strands - L's hands a prayer to a god he now remembers, L superiority as he'd clicked the handcuff chain back on. Had it just been a game? Had he known he was saved and played the loyal pet just to make Light relax, get sloppy. No, no, he can't think of it, if he thinks of it he won't stop and he needs his mind for other things now. Like finding him.
He shoves it all down, and says, "I would protest, but I know you won't believe me and I really can't be bothered to have a pissing contest with you right now, but okay, for the sake of argument, let's say I am Kira? Then what am I doing here?" He constructs it in his head as he speaks, laying out the trail even as he follows it to its end. "If L was in this building and you found him and sent the police after him and told me abut it - like an idiot, I might add - then where is he? Did I do something with him? Get rid of the evidence? If I did, then why the hell would I come here in person, implicating myself? Because I'm stupid? Because you know that's not the right answer."
Aiber shakes his head, rubs at his wide, flushed cheeks. "No, no, you're not. Full of shit, maybe, but you're smart. So smart that you might have… thought of this in advanced and come here in a panic specifically to cover your tracks." He says it but Light can tell he doesn't believe it, and that's good, that's enough to use to sway him.
"Were that the case," he says, "then why would I be having this conversation with you?"
Aiber looks at him for a long moment, then grits his teeth, eyes rolling. "Fuck. Fuck, you know? I fucking hate this. I don't care about your pride, or his. Or mine. I couldn't give a shit about your grand plan. I just want him back." He pinches his brow, looks starchy and pained, and if Light's whole mind wasn't twitching with every moment of inaction, he might be able to conjure up some feeling about this - pity, hate, amusement; something vague to swim in the back of his head - but it's not there now.
"Then tell me," Light says again, "about Wedy."
"What about her?" Aiber snaps, evidently caved enough to be willing to give up the information Light needs.
"When did you last see her?"
Aiber breathes out. "In person? A day or so after L went missing, just before she skipped town."
"And not in person?"
"She called me. Couple of days of ago."
"How many days, exactly?" Light pushes. Just like interrogating a suspect. Aiber is as fine an example of the dodgy, under-intelligent criminal as one can find.
"I don't know," he says. "Three, four, maybe? What's today?"
Light ignores him, skipping over that. "Where was she calling from? What was the call about? You've gotta give me something to work with, Thierry."
"Stop saying my name, Light," Aiber snaps back.
"Afraid?" Light asks him, forgoing the investigation for a moment to give into the oft-ignored childish urge to bait. Usually he exercises it on L, who plays so well at that sort of thing, but at the moment as much isn't really an option.
Aiber snorts. "Of imminent death? Sure. But also, you're pronouncing it wrong."
Light rolls his eyes, dropping it. "The phone call," he prods.
"Was from London," Aiber says, acquiescing, a meaty hand ruffling his already thoroughly ruffled hair. "She was asking about, I don't know, some case Watari had her on. Not related to Kira," he adds quickly, "supposedly."
Light's insides are clenching a little, fizzy and agitated, and he has to put effort into calming himself enough to process the information. "Supposedly?"
Aiber breathes out. Ryuk's eyes slide back and forth between them, like he's judging a match.
"She was tracking an escaped convict. One of L's old cases. She wanted to know if I knew anything about him or if L had ever mentioned him before. I told her no, and that was more or less it, until…"
"Until what?" Light presses, but Aiber's turning away from him, digging his phone out of his pocket hurriedly and punching in a number. "Hey!" Light calls after him.
"I have to call Watari," Aiber says, waving him off and stumbling a few feet away to press the receiver to his ear.
Light's not even close to letting him slip away that easy, not without any answers, or even a vague idea of which direction to go. Wedy, he knows, and some unnamed former catch of L's who'd broken out - in London? Fascinating as studying L's old cases might have been on any other day of the week, under any other sunrise, Light's got far too many catastrophes circling him at the moment to have a thought to spare to anything that isn't integral to helping him solve at least one of them.
"Hey, wait!" he calls again, following Aiber, but he only makes it a few steps before his own phone goes off and he's digging into his jacket pocket - hoping, hoping, hoping - but no, don't hope, that sort of thing is dangerous and -
It's Misa. Light's teeth grit and his eyes roll and he would really like to be able to press ignore, because she is really the last thing he wants or needs on his plate at the moment, but there's always the slim possibility that she's got relevant information - either delivered by Rem, or garnered on her own, because twist of all twists is that she's not actually half as stupid as she acts, and especially with those eyes of hers, she's been known to come in handy every once in a while.
He slows his steps, answering the call and vowing to make her pay virulently if it's nothing but a giggly good morning. "What?" he snaps into the phone, too stressed and scattered to bother with pleasantries.
"Jeez, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, huh?" she titters back, tone peppy and bubblegum pink as always, but there's something off-kilter about it that he doesn't bother to think all the through, mostly for lack of room in his head to puzzle over more quandaries.
"Actually," he tells her, not bothering to disguise his annoyance, "I didn't sleep at all."
There's a breath on the other end of the line, and he can hear laughing and clanging muted in the background. He watches Aiber, who's halfway down the alley by now and out of eavesdropping distance, which is a pro as far as Light's phone call goes but a con when it comes to Aiber's.
"Well, that's a cute coincidence, I guess. Cause, uh, neither did I," Misa says, cheerful but strained, like she's bracing for a blow. "That's actually what I'm calling about! My shoot went really late last night and I stopped in at this 24-hour diner on my way home and I've sorta been here since. I was wondering if maybe you could come pick me up?"
Everything halts for a moment and he has to repeat her words back in his head in order to confirm that he hadn't misheard the ridiculous bullshit that she'd just uttered. "Excuse me?" he says, hoping that his tone is enough to scare her into hanging up. "You want me to what?"
"Look," Misa says hurriedly, "I know you're really busy with this new case and all, but I'm just - I got really spooked, okay? I feel like someone's watching me. And I think as, you know, someone who's had stalkers before, I'm kinda justified in being freaked out?"
Light grits his teeth. "Yeah," he forces out, "I guess I have some idea of what that might be like."
Strangely enough, she doesn't seem to cower much beneath his disgust, or the obvious accusations he's flinging at her feet. Whatever, she was never very quick, but he does not have time for this.
"Come on, Light," she begs, because she is a begging thing, pathetic - tiny hands, tiny voice, tiny thighs and a heart full of love and loathing; and he loathes to think about it. "You can't spare half an hour to come walk me home?"
"No, actually," he tells her, keeping his eyes locked on Aiber, getting ready to hang up in the next ten seconds, whether she let's it go or not. "My hands are kind of full at the moment." He'd fill her in on the details of L's escape if he thought he could manage to do it unnoticed in a location swarming with police, but he's not going to take the chance for something so inconsequential. "Where's Rem, anyway? Shouldn't she be the one playing bodyguard for you?"
"Who?" Misa ask, voice sharp and squeaky, and for a moment Light thinks maybe she'd just misheard, maybe the bustle of her piece of shit diner is drowning out the words, maybe the reception's bad, but - no. No. "Fine, if you don't want to do it, I can get somebody else. I just thought I'd ask because you're my boyfriend and that's what boyfriends do."
She's talking like - she's talking like she has no idea about anything. She's talking like an idiot. And not just the powdered, plush, pink-lipped stick of dumbed-down dynamite she likes to play for the crowd, but like she really is only half there. Like she'd completely missed the last month, or something. Forgotten it.
"Misa," he says, a wave of panic rising in him, "where's your Notebook?"
"What? Light, are you feeling okay? Maybe you really should just go get some sleep. You sound pretty wrecked."
"Misa, where is the Notebook?" his voice is so deep and hard and destroyed, wallowing - why is this happening, why is everything coming apart? - that Aiber glances his way, but Light doesn't care right now, can't possibly make himself care, there's too much going on, too much to think about, to handle and, fuck, why?
"What notebook, Light? Gosh, you're freaking me out. Yoshi keeps the book with all my appointments in it, but that's the only thing I - "
"Stop talking," he snaps, and she listens immediately.
God, they're really fucked now. He doesn't know how or when or why she gave up the Death Note, or who she could have given it to - Rem? Why would Rem do this when she knows that Misa's eyes are most of the reason Light even keeps her around? Is she stupid? Does she want Misa to die? He just knows that this is a loose end he has to knot before he can do anything else. L will have to wait a bit, and the dying children even longer, because Light's just got too much going on and not half enough time or reach to handle it all.
He needs help. He needs L. If L were here he would help.
But L's not here. L left him. He can't - he can't think about this. He doesn't have time.
"Misa, tell me the address of the diner, and then stay put," he orders, and she listens like the good girl she so longs to be, reciting back the numbered street to him in a waveringly confused voice. "I'll be there as soon as I possibly can," he says, then hangs up.
Turning, he strides directly over to Aiber, whose phone call appears to have ended only a few seconds previously. Squaring off against one another in a half-there, almost panicked fashion, they both say, "I have to go," at roughly the same moment, and then stare with stumbling offense at one another.
Light gives a quick, jerky nod. "This conversation isn't over," he says.
"You're damned right it's not," Aiber agrees with a sharpness to his tone that suggests anything but agreement.
They both turn, heading in opposite directions, but Light hasn't gone a few steps - or let his mind cycle through more than two or three possible courses of action - before he stops and calls over his shoulder, "Wait, the escaped the convict, the one Wedy asked you about? What was his name?"
Aiber rolls his eyes, doesn't look like he wants to answer, but seems to want to waste time dodging around it even less. "Something weird," he grunts. "Beyond Birthday. Yeah, like the English words. That mean anything to you?"
Aiber asks the question but he doesn't wait around for the answer, just takes off, climbing into a dirty cab that's appeared on the corner. Light stands there, willing himself to move. The sun is almost fully up now. The name doesn't mean anything to him, but it does mean something that as soon as it had been uttered, Ryuk had started laughing hysterically.
nine years earlier.
B wrestles him to the ground through the balmy Saturday wind, laughing all the way down. His fingernails are too sharp, need to be trimmed, but he smells like fresh earth and his skin is warm and it's easier than it should be to go down with him.
"Anyone could see," L says, because they're on a hill, framed on all sides by rolling, picturesque countryside of the sort that makes it onto postcards in the Winchester tourist shops, the orphanage a hulking grey blotch on the landscape behind them.
"Anyone is nothing to me," B replies, rolling onto his back and off of L to lie by his side, like some kind of cheesy teen romance that inevitably involves a romantic picnic in a field, and long hours spent staring adoringly into one another's eyes.
He doesn't look at B. "That doesn't make sense."
"Makes sense to me," Beyond says, picking blades of grass and flinging them at L, childish even for all his punishing intellect.
"Lots of things make sense to you which have absolutely no basis in reality," L says, sitting up, watching the forest quiver in the breeze, new buds shaking on their branches. If he had any sense at all he'd get B lost in that woods, and leave him there - Hansel and Gretel with the breadcrumbs all eaten up - and come home alone, to a safe and quiet bedroom where he could rest and think and save the world in peace, without constantly batting the devil off his heels. "Want to tell me again about red numbers? About the constellations written in the back of your head? About gods and monsters and all the poetry that makes me so ill?"
He does look at B then, tracing patterns in the dirt, drawing his skinny calve up along L's - such a sloppy seduction, and somehow it always works - and he thinks, no, calling him the devil is flattery. Spawn of Satan, Little Beast, Monster. So much power given to a little boy, so much destruction rent just through grappling for something. L does not like him and does not love him, but he thinks he understands him in that moment, spread out under the cool spring sun.
He is just looking for something to believe in.
Then, like always, like L should have inevitably expected, B proves him wrong - and silly and incompetent and utterly naive. It's one peaceful moment, just two boys on a hill, and then suddenly B is jerking himself up, grabbing L by the hair and gritting, "Don't patronize me, you little fucking saint."
He kisses L, and he hasn't done that in weeks, and it's sharp and wet and wrong and so L knees him in the stomach, throws him off, and watches B laugh himself to the ground.
L wipes at the back of his mouth, sits there, doesn't get up. He should run to the forest. He should run to the church. He stays, says, "Then don't throw yourself at my feet." It's cruel and he knows it, feels it as he says it and there's so much power in how easily he can convince himself not to care - not about this, or the hillside, or anything; just justice, justice, justice or else a vague and formless shape that looks something like it.
He tries to move after a moment, but B grapples for him, one mangy hand wrapping around his arm, keeping him locked down on the ground with him, and he asks, "Do you think I could get up? Do you think I could possibly ever get up?"
"Yes," L snaps, trying fruitlessly to shake him off. His touch is warm and cool, uneven like the tides of his adoration - going from violent to gentle, abuse in the form of absolution and vice versa. This is not a thing he'd asked for but it's a thing he has. "You're going to have to, one day."
Beyond's touch fades off, hand dropping, and he falls onto his back like the little drama queen that he is, and L - L is too tired to run. He falls back next to him, reverting to their original positions, but then suddenly B is curling sideways against him, lips to his shoulder, like a prayer, fingers soft and grasping and L's not sure, but he thinks he hears him mumble - between the breath and the wind and the wild fascinations of cruelty - "Not if I keep you down here with me."
They jerk one another off on the hilltop, where anyone can see, and while B is pressed against him, tripping through uneven breaths, L thinks then that he doesn't know if he likes him, doesn't know if he loves him, but is very, very sure that he does not understand him at all.
seven years later.
When the Los Angeles BB murder cases happen, when L is sitting in his hotel room, puzzling over the clues and the bodies and the neatness of it all, he decides that Beyond Birthday must have finally gotten up.
Weeks later, when B lights himself on fire in a stranger's apartment, and fails spectacularly, he decides that no, he is wrong about him again.
two years later.
They ditch the Honda six blocks from the scene of their escape - L counts - and then stand around stoically admiring their shoes on a shaded sidewalk while B steals them another car through a neanderthal means which makes Wedy rolls her eyes and mumble, "Amateur."
It's a half hour later, behind a new wheel and next to a broken window, that she taps on the dashboard, and L's eyebrows go up but he doesn't say anything, because he knows that B will.
"Hey, Merrie," he mumbles from the back, feet propped up on the armrest between the two front seats, leaning lackadaisically back beside Mello, "you know how L and I grew up together? Well, we learned morse code together, too."
He grins as Wedy stops tapping. Beside B, Mello squints, appears to be focusing quite hard, and then lets his jaw drop open as he looks from Wedy's hand over to L and back again, and says, "You were asking him to escape? Without me?"
Pulling the car into the intersection and taking the left turn off the main street, Wedy puffs her bangs out of her eyes and glances sideways at L. "Jesus, what the kind of school are you running? World War II prep, or something?" Her tone is casual but he can see her nails digging into the leather of the wheel and she is afraid.
"Or something," he says. Then, after some internal debate: "Don't worry. He'll let you go. Both of you." He doesn't look back at B but it doesn't take an enormous amount of effort for everyone in the car to know exactly who he's talking about.
The wind is cold and it whistles past them through the shattered glass and L is in a car with a woman he has fucked and a boy he has ignored and a man he has done both of those things with and to and he does not feel guilty or ashamed or afraid. He doesn't feel anything. It's all down somewhere swimming at the bottom, but he can't let it rise or he will be sick and he will yell and he will run. It aches, it aches, it still aches just to be here. There's still a cuff around his wrist and half a chain dragging on the floor and the sound of early morning traffic pulls at his skin like tiny hooks, making him itchy.
Mello is older and more worn around the edges than the last time L had seem him - sometime at Wammy's a year or two ago, just in passing, nothing very notable and nothing he'd bothered to note - and if he still retains the sparking naivete that has always kept him running, he keeps it locked down flat and undetectable when he turns to B and says, directing the question to no one in particular, "Will he?"
B scoops himself out of his sprawl and leans over to Mello to cup his chin, taking a good look at both sides of his face as if examining a purchase, and says cheerily, "Well, I was going to ransom you and make my fortune, but jeez, you don't actually have any parents who'll pay, do you?" He lets him go with a stiff jerk, arm bending at the wrist like a broken marionette. "Gosh, foiled again."
"B," L says, watching him in the rearview.
"L," B says.
"B."
"L."
It's an old game in new territory and he doesn't like having spectators. L hunches over his tucked leg, chin resting against his knee, and wants to be in the apple grove, where at least the smell of cool dirt is a familiar backdrop. Tokyo smells like smog, like Light's cologne, and it doesn't matter much that B had come from around here, because this is not where L had known him. L knew rainy English mornings and sweet tea and roaring fireplaces beside which they had torn each other to shreds.
This car is an ugly slate green and the world doesn't line up right being in it with so many people from so many places. He's got neat boxes in his head to secret away the worst of the clutter but the stacks are all coalescing into newer, bigger, stranger stacks and no one's giving him enough time to sort through them.
He'd left Light. Light had never come, Light had not saved him, because Light is not and has never been a savior. So that makes two of them. And the devil makes three. Tack on Wedy and Mello and it's far and away a crowd.
So he says, "Let them go and I won't put up a fight. I'll go with you and I'll play whatever games you want to play. Just let them go." Always the sacrifice. Is it just his luck or does he truly lay himself on the alter?
Mello sits stiffly and Wedy raises a brow at him, and everyone flinches collectively when B throws his head back and laughs uproariously. He does so love doing that. L digs his fingers into the skin of his calves and wants to open the door and throw himself out onto the sidewalk and run like hell. But he doesn't. It doesn't matter why.
The alter is there, and somebody has to do it.
B sits up, leaning closer to the front, and says, "Uh, who here is being held against their will?"
Automatically, Wedy's hand goes up, the other keeping a tight grip on the steering wheel and bringing them down a side-street, through a section of Tokyo that L is not wildly familiar with. Mello doesn't move and doesn't say a word.
"Nonsense, Merrie," B responds, waving Wedy off with a loose hand. "I offered to kill you back in London." The smile pulls tight on his face, too gentle to be a snarl, but shaped like one. "And we all know that death is the truest freedom."
From the front, all Wedy says is, "Then you must be one hell of a prisoner," with a strained little smirk of her own.
B collapses back over-dramatically. "Don't I know it." Dipping his forehead against the window glass, he instructs, "Turn here," and Wedy listens without question - which is her way, maybe, but only when the pay is good and the job is reasonable, which neither is at present - and L's not sure he likes feeling like the odd man out.
He draws his fingers along his temples, exhausted in a wired sort of way, hopped up on the movement and the offset beams of morning light that glare in through the windows, but still drooping with the chemicals released by orgasm, and the airy groundlessness of his current universe unraveling at all its seams.
"They go, and I stay," he says. "That's the deal." He's not sure if he's committing to it, if it's a lie or a promise or if he even has any intentions at all in this point. He may as well be an animal, utterly reactionary.
He looks over his shoulder at B, because he guesses that he probably has more of an idea of what L means than L does himself.
There's a drawn out smile and Mello is tapping the pads of his fingers against the leather of the seats and the car is clicking its turn signal and the world moves in stripes of slow motion and fast forwarded action. L thinks he'd missed whole spans of minutes on the way here, but now feels caught between every second like they've got hollows.
Beyond makes a wet clicking sound with his tongue, glances sideways at Mello, then shrugs. "Okay," he says flatly, no particular resistance, and L doesn't know what he's doing but he doesn't like it. "They're free to go. Soon as we get to the house I'll let them walk. They can even go squeal to Quillish if they want, doesn't matter much to me."
L wants to let out a breath but it doesn't come, because things are never this easy with B. So where's the other shoe and when is it dropping?
"What?" Mello snaps abruptly from directly behind L's chair. Ah, there it is. He turns to B, and L can see his pale brow set heavy, his mouth the stubborn line that it'd grown itself into for years. "That's it? After all that it's just 'see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya?' Really?"
Withering theatrically under the weight of Mello's evident betrayal, B simply ducks his head innocently - a complete mockery of the situation, not even trying for subtlety - and says, "Sorry Mihael, but who am I to refuse a direct order from our illustrious benefactor?" He breathes the words out with a dreamy sort of schoolgirl eloquence, batting his eyes up at L, who's frowning in the front seat.
Looking between them, Mello - who doesn't seem to buy into B's whole schtick, thank god, but also doesn't seem wholly immune to his charms, such as they are - clears his throat and faces L with a sort of soldier-boy dedication and respect, the kind that all the children at Wammy's direct towards him and which he has very little time for or idea what to do with.
He says, "L, with all - due respect," - stumbling over the first few words, voice gone deeper and more self-aware - "I dropped out of Wammy's, hitch-hiked to London, became a drug trafficker, was almost killed a couple different times, and - and teamed up with him in order to find you." The look he shoots B is not quite as fearful or derogatory as L would like it to be, and he takes note of that. "I'm sorry, but I'm not letting you out of my sight until you're back where you should be, and… " He stops, stumbles more, still a child and too ashamed of pride.
"And," L finishes for him, "you're given proper credit?"
Mello looks down at his lap and L watches him slump, cowed, and feels his footing coming back slightly, the ground reappearing under his feet.
That is until Wedy pulls them into a beaten garage next to an old stone house that glints ugly in the morning light and, rolling her eyes, says, "Well, don't get down on the boy for it. We're all glory hounds here, aren't we?"
She shuts the car off once it's parked, no keys to pull out of the ignition and no hope of starting it up again now that the wires have all been jump-started to hell, but it got them where they'd needed to go, L assumes. It's cold and it's dim in here, dusty like the crevices of his youth, and there's a strange smell of decay and a feeling of emptiness that fills up the air around them. L doesn't know where they are, but he knows it's the right place to be with Beyond Birthday.
It's not a place for Mello or for Wedy, though, and so he opens his door and says what he thinks will make them leave.
"I'm not getting down on anyone. It's his choice to be ashamed, just like it's his fault if he doesn't know well enough not to be." He steps out barefoot onto the cold concrete floor, the other doors all opening in a serenade of cool, clanking metal. Follow the leader, just as always.
Mello steps out into the garage beside him, brow crinkled, hair in his eyes and stiff with sweat, and he opens his mouth once, twice, then stops. Expression going flat, he says, "You know, everybody warned me about you."
Beyond's laughter echoes up to the cavernous ceiling, and the sharp smell of smoke hits the air at the same moment as Wedy lights up a new cigarette to stop her hands twitching. He knows her, he likes her, but he doesn't want her around. The boy before him he doesn't even know, and doesn't have time to. Everything is too much, too fast, swallowing him up.
"Please go, Mello," he says, one last attempt before his practicality falls apart, the last strands cut, and he stops thinking in the straight grey lines of logic and starts feeling in blurry bright colors. B's laughter fills him up like a warm draught of something.
He knows him, he does not like him, and if he's not careful he will disappear into the 18 year old boy who could not breathe without him there.
Where is Light? something in his whispers, but the answer is easy, the answer is not here.
Mello looks him in the eyes, gaze sharp and now almost rebellious, and says very clearly and pointedly, "No."
And L doesn't have enough energy left to argue with him.
She's at a booth in her set clothes - sweatpants and a t-shirt and her hair tied back, sunglasses slanting down her nose and a shaky air of fragility which, combined with the disguise, holds off the adoring strangers. Light walks in and he has no idea what he looks like, hadn't bothered to check and doesn't think it matters half as much as the other six million things that are falling apart at the moment.
He sits down across from her in the booth.
"Coffee?" he says to the waitress, giving her a wan smile and trying not to panic. He doesn't want to have this conversation in public, but even a cab wouldn't afford proper privacy and he cannot manage to let this wait until they're home.
"Light," Misa says softly, smiling gratefully, like she hadn't truly believed he'd come at all. There's none of the usual squealing or lash-fluttering, nothing about her that demands attention, but rather an uncharacteristic stuntedness that makes his name float back down her throat as she says it.
"What happened?" are his first words, but he shakes his head a second later, brushing aside. "No, you don't know what happened, do you? Fine, then where did it happen?" He jabs his fingers quickly against the sticky tabletop. His coffee is taking too long.
Misa's glasses shift as she scrunches her brow at him. "What do you mean? The shoot? It was just - "
"Not the shoot," he grits, his whole body tensing and loosening in uneven muscle spasms. The waitress sets a mug down next to him and Light had thought he'd be able to put this off until he'd gotten the basic information out of her, but evidently Misa's even more useless without her memories than she usually is, so he pulls out his wallet and flicks back through the cards and IDs there and pulls out a tiny square of folded notebook paper, which he immediately reaches across the table to press to the palm of Misa's hand.
At first she twitches, a confused little smile lighting her up, evidently taking it as a romantic gesture rather than one of necessity. A moment later, when the scrap from the Note makes contact, she freezes, her shoulders setting hard and her mouth falling open. Light remembers this, being confronted with a storm of information that feels familiar, but doesn't fit in anywhere in your view of the world - a harsh kind of deja vu that overpowers the things that call themselves 'real' and sets in as a loose truth.
And then suddenly knowing.
She jerks her hand out of his, elbow slamming against the booth and the air blowing out of her in a sharp little gasp - not delicate or breathy the way she feigns them - just any grunt of pain from any human being. She's still holding the bit of paper.
"Misa," Light says, leaning across to gently lift the glasses from her face, looking at her eyes. Windows to the soul, except sometimes he wonders if she even has one of those, or if she's just a conglomeration of pretty things she finds and calls a part of her. There's nothing pretty there now - just a sharp, self-denying fear. "What happened?"
Her hands shake, brow furrowing. "I don't - I didn't…." Her eyes snap to his very suddenly and she says quickly, like she needs him to understand, "I didn't give it up."
"The Notebook?" Light asks, voice lowered, as if Aiber's listening in even now, ear to the door and waiting for him to trip up.
Misa doesn't say yes, doesn't nod her head, but it's not an answer he needs to hear to know. "I didn't," she repeats, stumbling over the words, clenched hands shaking. "She took it."
"What, who? Rem?" Light asks, trying to tamp down on his incredulity.
That's something he hadn't been expecting, but maybe he should have been? L goes missing just as Misa loses ownership of the Notebook - and thus her memory and most, if not all, of her worth - just as this Shinigami nonsense rears its ugly head. Rem and L have been in cahoots for weeks, maybe they took the distraction of the case as an opportunity to put a plan into action. Or, more likely, they manufactured the catastrophe; maybe not the children dying, but who had given him the information confirming a Shinigami's involvement in this whole mess? Rem, of course.
But, no, so had Ryuk and he doesn't lie because it's of no value to him to manufacture events when there's already so much going on to keep him occupied. And Takada, how could what she'd seen be explained? Does L really have far more reach than he had given him credit for, or -
Abruptly, Misa cuts off his spiraling thought processes with one word: "No."
No. No, not Rem.
"Then who?"
Misa looks down at her hands. "I can't," she says, shaking her head, eyes shiny and if this is a performance for sympathy, her acting skills have really improved. "She took it, she took my death," - if she says note after that, it's drowned out by a choked breath of panic and Light doesn't hear it. "I don't know what to do, Light, what do I do? I want to be useful, I want to be useful, I want to help, and she took it, and I can't - I can't - "
She's crying and he doesn't know what to.
"Misa," he snaps, "Misa, pull it together, we don't have time for this."
Evidently, reason isn't going to do anything to sway her, and as the volume of her teary breathing rises, people begin glancing their way. Maybe it looks like any couple's spat, but he can't risk the attention being drawn, so as a throaty sob mounts in her, he reaches forward and snatches the scrap of paper out of her hand, breaking whatever hold the trauma of her memories has exerted.
Blinking at him, she looks up, brow creased and lip still trembling. She is still afraid, she just doesn't know what of.
"Light," she says, softly, pleading with him the way a child might do a parent, "take me home?"
It would be a relief to be able to drop her off, put her away and not have to open the drawer again, but she's insinuated herself so far into him and his paradise that as it crashes down, she inevitably remains an integral figure. "I'm sorry," he says, and it's true, even if it's not as kind as it should be, "I - we need to find out what happened. We need to find Rem, and we need to find out who or what did this to you."
She looks at him, uncomprehending. "I don't understand."
Light stands, and slipping the piece of the Death Note into his opposite hand, sets some cash on the table and then holds out his palm to her. "You don't need to."
Cautiously, but with a wavering devotion that not even her memory loss can strip from her fallible bones, she slips her manicured fingered between his, twining around him like some creeping vine. She's not L, not something to love, but - whether she fully understands it or not - at the moment she's just about the only ally he has.
They climb in the through a window around the back and L feels his muscles quivering with the effort, out of shape from all the wasted hours locked quivering to something or another. And he'd done that why? Because of some romance he'd written in his head to justify his paralyzation. Maybe love doesn't slow things down, maybe tiredness does. Maybe he's so versed in the world, so exhausted by everything he's seen and been and done - and found very little satisfaction in - that Light Yagami hadn't been a stranded beginning so much as a means to an end.
Maybe he really had been waiting to die.
But it doesn't matter now, because the get out of jail free card that had ripped him from his comfortable disintegration is tugging him with un-careful hands through the window after him. "You're taking too long," B snickers, fingers locked around his wrist, and L had gotten off underneath of him not so long ago, but the contact is still a shock to his system, and he bats B off with ease, pulling himself the rest of the way.
Already standing in the large room, cavernous and empty of furniture, Mello frowns flatly at them, arms crossed over his chest, and L doesn't have the particular energy to sort through that whole separate mess at the moment, so he pretends he doesn't notice. Behind him, Wedy is pulling herself up with solid hands, but he can see the strain in her jaw and he wonders what hurts. He doesn't need to wonder why.
"Not you too," he says, glancing over his shoulder, but it's not a question because he already knows. And he'd never taken her for the loyal type, but here she is, neglecting the free pass she could take out of here to follow him about like a very well dressed bodyguard, the way she's always done.
She lands, dusting off her hands, and shrugs. "I follow the money."
L doesn't blink at her. "Watari has lots of money."
"Yes," she says, glancing slyly over his shoulder at B, "but if I let you two kill each other, I really don't think I'm going to get paid."
Wedy's by the window and Mello's leaning against the opposite wall and B is lounging stringily around the banister of a dusty set of stairs and L feels cornered on all sides by a cast of characters he doesn't recognize. Mello is taller and quieter and far and away distanced from his catastrophic youth. Wedy is less harsh, more a person than a character now, and her lips are chapped and colorless.
B is - B is something he doesn't recognize but knows all the same. Grown up out of his old disguises and into new ones, and if he's a mirror it's a foggy one, and if he's a monster it's a monster with friends.
"You'd be surprised," L says, voice less even than he usually keeps it in company, but then Light had worn away the topmost layer of skin and he hasn't yet had time to grow it back. "As I'm sure you've realized by now," he continues, gesturing to B, and then briefly at Mello, "I am very much replaceable."
Mello barely reacts to that, arms just crossing tighter across his chest, but, quite typically, B breathes out a long sigh, flutters his eyelashes and drops a hand over his heart. "I'm flattered."
"I know you are," L says, barely glancing at him. He can't look, can't look, can't feel a thing and doesn't want to. It's like going from very cold water to very hot all of a sudden, there's too much new sensory information, and his mind runs over it, tries to justify, find nooks and crannies to tuck it all away, but there isn't enough.
His past is on him like a starving dog and the future's none too gentle either. Only the present, withering past him from second to second, is solid enough to grasp onto, but from every moment to the next he has to change hand-holds and it keeps him wobbling.
Without any particular volume to her voice, but still perfectly audibly in the stretching silence of the room, Wedy says, "You seem different," spitting smoke between the words.
It takes L a longer moment than he is comfortable with to realize that she's talking about him, and another to organize it all in his head. The idea that there was a him that was with her, and one that she feels justified in drawing comparisons to and about. As if she knows him. It's ridiculous, about as permissible as comparing a mask with the face underneath.
Barely turning to face her, he evens out his voice, tries to lock the mask back down, and says, "Yes, well I apologize for not withstanding my captivity more admirably."
Beyond is giggling in the background. It's an obnoxious score to an already dull scene, and L wants out.
Brows rising, Wedy seems unable to resists a retort, probably because she's no longer on his payroll and can't see any reason to demure. "We all figured you knew what you were doing," she snaps, distantly, tapping the end of her cigarette. And the implication is there, and strong: she and Aiber and Watari, all waiting there, expecting him to burst out any second at the forefront of some master plan, a thousand victories at his feet.
And the crowd goes wild.
How disappointed she must be with this tired man in a To-Oh University t-shirt who wants nothing more than a decent shower, a cup of coffee, and several weeks alone to remember what he is. At present, he doesn't have any of that, and he doesn't foresee it making an appearance anytime soon.
"And that's an enduring mistake that everyone makes," he says abruptly, hardly realizing that the words had formed until they're out of his mouth, making waves in the open air. "I never know what I'm doing. I have no idea whatsoever." There's too much in his voice. The mask is coming loose, he can't keep it latched up. All his strings have been cut and he cannot afford more.
The air in the room is bankrupting him. Beyond must be enjoying this. The deterioration.
Wedy is still, maybe shocked, examining him with an interest not wholly professional - because she is not wholly herself, not anymore, not the self she made, and neither is he. Mello is silent and concentrative and L does not look at him because he does not have room inside himself to fit more apologies. Sorry I'm not the hero you dreamed of. Sorry you saved me, sorry I never would have saved you.
Sorry you prefer the stunted copy. Sorry that I understand why.
"B?" he breathes, turning back to the lounging ghost on the staircase, but not making eye contact.
"Hmm?" B whistles, the sound slicing between his teeth, sharp and topping the list of forgotten things. L does not want to remember but it's like a dream from years ago, set off by something, sneaking up and taking over the mind.
L trudges over to the staircase, and he forgets to slump, and then he forgets on purpose. Back set, like a soldier headed for battle. "Are we going to get this big final battle scene over, or what?" he asks.
Swooning like a debutante, B angles himself after L, moving somehow without seeming to exert any effort. "I was thinking more of a heartfelt reunion, actually," he simpers, following L up the first couple of steps.
"I'm sure we can compromise," L replies, and they disappear like that, without a glance back - although he thinks he sees B giving a cutesy little wave to Mello and Wedy over his shoulder. A tough crowd this morning, though, it seems, and they exit stage left without a hint of applause.
Rem's nowhere to be found - shocker there - and he's got Ryuk out scouting for her, but in the meantime the only option he really has is to return to the scene of the, for lack of a better word, crime. He's spent enough time digging through files and reports, clawing through impotent human means in order to try and understand something divine, but it's become undeniably obvious by now that that just isn't going to work.
Still, in his head, the process of exploring the cosmos, getting down to the dirt, the bone and the marrow all choked out, understanding death - well, he'd not expected it to smell so bad.
"What were you even doing in a place like this?" he asks Misa, covering his mouth and nose with one sleeve as he tugs her along with the other hand. This is her dream, he supposes, a quaint stroll through the city with him on her arm. And half the time, considering her varyingly absent memory, she might in fact think that that's all it is.
"I told you," she says, breathless and obviously confused, "I had a shoot. The theme was grunge and there are some really perfect warehouses around here that a lot of photographers rent out. I think the pictures came out really well, too! I can show you when I get a few back." She's batting her eyelashes, latching onto lines she knows, even though the frailty is obvious just beneath the skin.
She knows he doesn't want to see her goddamn photographs. He knows she knows. And yet they never abandon this game, do they?
"Alright," he says, cutting past the flaky skin to the parts that matter, "alright. Then what happened here? What scared you so much?"
Stopping, Misa frowns, her hand still in his. She reminds him of Sayu sometimes, stumbling and young, without a care. Maybe smart, but selling off all the truth she can see for visions of sugarplums. Sayu is allowed to have her naivete and her pretty lies. Light is saving the world for people like her, so that she can keep the rose-colored glasses on, but Misa had signed up for this. She killed, she fought, she got what she wanted.
"I don't know," she says, softly. "I don't remember."
Light sighs and slips the folded scrap of paper out of his pocket, and Misa flinches, like even without remembering she understands.
She says, "I don't want to remember."
If the world was fair and kind then maybe she wouldn't have to, but her parents are dead and he's all she's got left. If she wants to keep him, she has to keep the blood, too. He presses the Notebook paper against the skin of her wrist.
He says, "Misa, tell me what happened."
Wedy's smoke paints patterns in the light that spills through the shuttered windows. Mello sits cross-legged against the adjacent wall. He's tired and he's hungry and he's bored and the tiny part of him that wants to pull one of the books off a shelf and occupy himself wars with the other, larger part that insists that things hadn't turned out so well the last time he'd fallen asleep reading. He doesn't trust himself to stay conscious, and isn't sure he trusts Wedy not to leave him to the wolves.
"What do you think they're doing up there?" he asks, without really thinking about it. That's the thing you say in situations like this, isn't it?
She looks sideways at him, eyebrows rising, and he gets an impression like he's disappointed her but he's too exhausted - and busy nursing his own disillusionment - to particularly care.
Taking another drag, she says, "Oh, playing checkers, I'd assume," with a distant leer, then letting it fade out into the pristine old Hollywood sadness that she's got following her around, sharp with the smell of nicotine.
"Yeah," Mello says, and doesn't even bother to block the mental paths from leading to their inevitable ends - what do any two people do alone in a bedroom? - "I guess so."
L's still got half of a chain around his left wrist and it hangs at his side as they walk into what he assumes is the master bedroom. There is no furniture but a large mattress on the floor, bathed in cold winter sunlight and sitting like a bright white stage in the middle of the room. At least his great escape didn't take him too far outside of his usual routine; bare rooms and beds and boys who don't take their eyes off of him. It's all so similar it might bleed together.
B flops down on the mattress like he'd done when they'd been teenagers, hair fanning out behind him in a mess, flashing the over-the-top bedroom eyes, and L supposes this the part where the Metallica album should start playing. It doesn't.
"So, what'd you do after?" L asks, taking the suggestion that they're meant to be catching up at face value, words utterly devoid of anything but the haunting lack that he's filling himself up with currently. "London, then, like you said? Did you make it on the West End?"
They used to talk about the future like a dream. Then B left and L woke up from that dream and it may as well not have happened at all.
B sits up on his elbows, squinting at him curiously - exaggeratedly - as if those aren't questions he'd been expecting. "Why do you wanna talk about the past," he says, "when the present is just so ripe?" He gaze skates along L's clavicle, the bruises peeking just over the edge of his shirt, and L's not sure what it says about him that he doesn't know if it had been Light or B who had made them.
Rolling his eyes as L looks down at himself, B evidently grows bored of his own subject, because he quickly tips the conversation elsewhere, planting his hands on his knees and leaning forward to say, "You could have asked me about that stuff anytime after the LA trial. You could have visited."
The words are playing hurt but his voice is dancing with the satisfaction of rejection. B always was just as much of as masochist as a sadist.
"I could have," L agrees. "I didn't. I'm here now." He hasn't moved form his straight-backed stance in front of the closed door. He tilts his head to the side, a deprecating grin clawing itself up without him truly meaning it to. "And all it took was you kidnapping me."
"Uh," B says, pulling himself up, expression wide and comical, "un-kidnapping, you mean. You were already kidnapped, I just 'napped you back." He strolls over to L, lining up their bodies exactly, mirroring L's uncharacteristic posture, becoming the reflection he so craves to be. "I think this is what you call a 'double negative.'"
He smiles and L's brain latches onto the symmetry and he has to pointedly resist copying the expression. It can be so easy to exist as half of a whole, but it's wrong wrong wrong, and if you let it in it chases away all the things that make you you, and then -
And then things like this happen. And then Beyond Birthday is standing in front of him in the abandoned bedroom of an abandoned house and L can see the light reflecting off his eyes and the laughter lines formed around his mouth and - curiously, no burn scars. Hadn't there been scars? He hadn't studied the photos too closely - still almost raw, back then, and everything was still almost forgivable - but given the amount of damage B had sustained through his attempt at self-immolation, there should be extensive tissue scaring.
If it's there, he can't see it. He looks at B and what he sees is -
He can't look.
Eyes flitting away, his back drops into a clumsy arch and he slumps past B and over to the window, staring at the brown dirt out front that had maybe once been a yard. He says, without looking back, "What are you doing here, B? What's the plan? Swoop in, play the hero? Rescue me from my terrible fate and then what? We ride off into the sunset together?" And of course he knows the answer, he always knows the answer.
You are the sun I orbit around.
"Maybe," B says, voice going starker, less frilly. L doesn't know if that's bad or good or if its possible for B to be either of those things. "And maybe there was a guy on my cellblock who used to give me extra pudding at lunchtime who got axed by Kira a little while ago."
He surely says it the way he does - in his truthful voice - so that L will know that it's a lie.
"Uh-huh," L breathes, turning back to lean against the window ledge and face him, "and this friend of yours, what was he in for?"
B meets his eyes squarely, smile squirming back on. "Maybe I didn't ask."
"Maybe," L concedes, "but I doubt it."
The thing is, for all his strangling disassociation, he knows Beyond Birthday. Knows that people form strange attachments to him, drawn in by the cloying, quiet dark, and his surety, and his baldfaced acceptance of the evils of mankind. Everybody's got ugly secrets and B is the priest, hulking in the shadows of the confessional, either absolving your sins or taking them for his own. That's why Grady had liked him just as much as he'd been afraid of him, and why A had danced with him on late nights to bad punk songs he didn't know the words to, then avoided eye contact in the morning.
Beyond Birthday is everybody's shameful secret, a thing you like not because it's good or kind but because it is there, offering itself to you. Only the very desperate ever take the offer, and funny how those that do always either end up dead or wishing they were. Some kind of miracle, isn't he?
If B had made a friend in the prison - not unbelievable, given his track record - and that friend had died of a heart attack - also permissible, given Light's - then L is still a shiny, neat one hundred percent sure that that's not why he's here.
He'd shrugged when they'd found A hanging from the rafters, said he "looked funny all pale like that," and L knows exactly what he's doing here now.
"Oh, of course, I almost forgot," B says, head bowed slightly, a condescending little laugh peeling out. "I'm not allowed to be in love with you, but I'm not allowed to be anything else, either."
L's pavlovian reaction to the words - a self-denying fear mingled with a quaint resignation - is torn in half by his eye-roll, and he dismisses it all far more easily than has been doing with Light. Experience, he supposes, is worth something.
"Don't use that word," he says, a flat instruction.
B laughs, stringy and deploring, moving in swaying paces across the floor like trying to puzzle something out. "I'm sorry, do you have it copyrighted? Did you and the boy wonder take out a monopoly on tortured romance?" There's bite in the words, but it's masked by the laughing, dancing show that B always puts on. L wishes he'd cut it out.
On instinct he wants to shoot back some quip about patent documents, go along with the welcoming, empty buzz of trading feather-weight blows, like they did when they were kids, insults changing with every new word added to their vocabularies, and mounting into long sparring games of hours spent talking each other in circles simply for the fun, or else distraction, of it. But his old habits have died hard and he's in no mood to resurrect something so long buried.
B shouldn't be here. There is no place for him here.
So L says, very seriously, so grim that he thinks he'd probably laugh at himself if he could see it from the outside, "You don't know anything about him. Or me, for that matter. Not anymore." It's up for debate if he ever did at all, or if they just traded shells with each other, admiring the handiwork of their respective masks.
L wants to say the latter. It feels much safer and cleaner, easier to close his eyes against.
He blinks for half a second and then B is across the room, right in front of him, nose sharp and eyes grinning, breathing L's air like it's his own. Close. Closer than he'd gotten since the floor, and the blood, and writhing touch of - no, no - L is not going to the think about this. His continued survival is dependent on him not thinking about this.
The cut on B's cheek is clean, like a scar, not scabbing over the way it ought to be, and L is grateful for the distraction that studying it brings him.
"Be honest," B breathes in his face, and L feels his muscles springing down, preparing for violence, "what is it that did it? Is it because he's prettier than me, or because he's not as smart?" His eyebrows jump.
L's breath lets out. This is a subject that's safe, on he can touch. He matches B's sharp smile, says, "You'd be surprised."
"What?" B laughs, swinging around to lean against the window beside L, wholly more casual than the air in the room is insisting they be. "He can keep up with you so he's a prodigy?" He shoots L a sideways glance, and he can feel the edges of his fingers brushing the dangling edge of the chain.
"That," L says, pulling the cuff out of B's reach, like dangling a toy in front of a cat, "and he looks like hell some mornings. And yet."
The words he doesn't speak are heavy and pounding. Love like a theme song, a shield to hold up between him and his creeping past. I am in love with a man who is not you.
Characteristically, however, Beyond doesn't seem at all dissuaded by the idea of competition. Rather, he turns, leaning far too closely to L, arm linking casually through his, hanging on him like some groupie. L supposes that's what he is and has always been - his number one fan.
The feel of B's nails digging into his skin should not be as shocking as it is. He says, "All this time, L, and you still only kiss the mirror when it doesn't look back at you."
L blinks at him. "I don't know what that means and I'm not going to try to figure it out." He doesn't attempt to detach B from his person. He knows a lost cause when he meets it, shakes its hand, and get its sweat all over him.
"It says a lot," B tells him, utterly ignoring his response, leaning his forehead against L's temple, some platonic touch that reels with something far less platonic, "that the murderer of the century is your cleanest option." His breath is warm and he smells like ginger ale and hair product. "But I guess he keeps it tidy, huh? The blood on his hands doesn't get smeared all over you. Not like mine."
L stays perfectly stock still, waiting for the touch to fade, the ghost dissolving back into his laughing mysteries, but he doesn't go. He's not sure what B uses to cut his hand, but he holds it up, showing L the thin slit down the center of his palm, leaking bright blood that glints sharply in the morning light. L has enough time to see it, study it, understand the action - even if he purposefully ignores the intention - before it's being smeared across his cheek.
Lovely.
It's smells like it always does, fresh from crime scenes, or a scratch here and there. It's roiling inside all of them, always, so it shouldn't be such a shock to the touch but it makes the warring hypochondria in him - by now beaten down by a slovenly nihilism - rise up ever so slightly.
This can't be sanitary.
B rubs his blood along L's jaw, over his cheekbone, up to the temples, and L simply flinches, huffs, and says, "Beyond, I know you're trying to be symbolic or something but this is mostly just gross."
"Good," B says, patting the other cheek, openhanded and fierce in how he paints L in wet stripes, the artist at work, the madman he's always been and the child he still is. The sharp, tangy smell of flesh makes L's stomach roll, reminds him of tussling in the sprawling fields, laughing and tearing and hating all the way down. What a way to live and what a way to die.
Beyond Birthday should be dead. He'd tried to kill himself, and L has had ample opportunity throughout his life, shovels and bricks and spur of the moment weapons that he could have tilted a little more sharply, hit with a little harder, aimed deeper. They'd torn each other open and yet they're still standing and it seems wrong, a fluke in human history. If he'd killed B before, sometime during is imprisonment, then he wouldn't be here now. No one would have come to save him from his self-imposed imprisonment. He'd still be with Light.
For some reason that he doesn't understand, but which maybe has to do with the vile joy in B's eyes, that thought scares him.
Not that he particularly wants to be with Beyond, but he's free. Let out of the cage he'd locked himself in - with love and long nights and pretty words about justice, and destruction, and saving the world. Not even his words. His words were, "Sometimes I want to pretend the only thing that's ever happened to me is you."
Sometimes. But sometimes he doesn't even want that. Sometimes he wants to pretend the only thing that's ever happened to him is nothing. If there is freedom in the world, that's as close as he can get to it.
"So," B says, dropping his hand and wiping it on his own jeans - flippant as always with his wound, like he barely notices it's there - and tilting his forehead against L's, "you love him, then?" His voice is equal parts mocking and curious, as if he really does want to know and already knows at the same time. Knows and doesn't care.
"Yes," L says, stolidly, and he's not fibbing. Free or caged or devoured or alone, Light Yagami is a thing he has loved. He has spaces in him with that name carved out. He is self aware enough to know when he's caught and by whom, but - at least at this particular moment - he has no interest in romanticizing it any further.
Their noses brush. It tickles, starkly innocent for the blood and the bones and getting off pressed to a floor that slinks wholly throughout their whole relationship. And yes, this is familiar. If he has a home, it feels like this.
It's no great wonder that he'd left home as soon as he could possibly manage.
"But you could live without him, couldn't you?" B asks, silkily but in a louder voice than such a secret question with such a secret answer demands.
"We're not having this conversation," L says, pressing his forehead even more sharply into B's, as if he can shove him off that way or something. As if he's ever been able to.
He expects B to kiss him, like in the movies that play in his head like cheap porn that you get off to and then forget, but he doesn't. Pulling back, letting go, he spins on the heel of his tennis shoe - the same brand that L used to wear when he was 18 and weedy and tired of existing - and spreads his arms out as if for balance, like he's walking a tight-rope.
"That's the difference between you and me, L," he says, without giving L time to point out that that's hardly the only one. "I couldn't, wouldn't, and didn't." Live without you. He doesn't say the words explicitly but they're there and they eat at L's skin.
He looks like he'd survived just fine, though, and L means to say as much, but then B is turning sharply with a laugh, balance shot, voice changing like a radio station. "No, no, I'm just a stalker, right?" He grins, takes in L's expression and nods, but there's something piercing underneath. "A lovesick fool in love with everybody's love." He says the words like a melody. "I don't know you. I'm lying to you, to myself, just to get some ass."
He marches over to L, close again, breathes in his face, and L says, "Don't," but doesn't actually mean it.
B ignores him. "I'm every frat boy with every vial of Rohypnol and when I touch you it's rape and when I love you it's obsession and when I look at the deepest, darkest, ugliest parts of you and don't flinch, don't look away, it's just plain stupidity, isn't it? I'm just a stupid little creep with my hands all over the holy grail and - "
L grabs him by the face and kisses him because it seems like the only thing to do at this point. This is the music swelling, Hollywood moment, where the hero grabs the heroine and the fireworks go off in the background and nobody dies and nobody hurts or hates or destroys, nothing's clawing, nothing's making the hero feel sick and thrumming and empty.
Nobody's grabbing the hero's ass and pressing him against the window ledge.
This can only end in disaster, but he and disaster grew up together, climbing apple trees and exploring the horrors of existence one rabid touch at a time. And, well, at this point, L's got nothing better to do than relive his teenage years again.
two hours later.
It's mid-morning when he comes downstairs. He's not wearing the To-Oh University shirt anymore, and he only notices because Wedy raises an eyebrow at him, looking down at the blank white space of B's t-shirt. The fit is awkward on him but the fit is always awkward on him. His legs feel strange.
"You don't happen to have a cellphone, do you?" he asks Wedy, standing at the foot of the stairs, and lowly so as not to wake Mello, who's curled up in some moth-eaten blankets against the wall, head pillowed on a balled up leather jacket and breathing soundly.
Wedy shakes her head. "Confiscated."
L had known that, knows B's ways, but he couldn't think of anything else to say. He nods, then continues on to the back window, hand on the ledge and making to climb his way over and out. It probably looks like a tired escape, but B is spread out on the mattress upstairs, counting constellations in the ceiling plaster and waiting for the ball to drop, the big shebang. End of the world, and all that.
End of the current world and onto the next one. It's not salvation but it's better than rotting. L has been rotting.
"What are you going to do?" Wedy asks him, arms crossed, making no move to stop him. She's become a spectator in this war until such time as one of the sides calls on her.
L lifts one leg over the window ledge. "What I have to."
A bicycle bell sounds from the street, skating past on the easy wind, and it's warmer today than it has been. He's not wearing shoes and the roads here aren't clean but it doesn't much matter.
Wedy huffs, unimpressed but not unkind, and says, "How dramatic," in a tired voice. He doesn't think she's slept.
He smiles at her in a way he doesn't expect himself to, comfort from the comfortless, but his world has become suddenly very bright and clear and the answers are, for once, laid out in front of him instead of hidden away at the end of a long and winding path.
"I'll bring back coffee," he tells her, and lands his feet firmly on the ground.
A garbage truck and two old women in hats and scarves are all he passes on the way to the corner store, and even though he's barefoot and wrecked, the area is suitably poor and underpopulated for the cashier not to complain. L asks if he can use the phone with stunted speech, and maybe he lets him only because L looks like he's recently been the victim of some attack. He'd washed the blood off of his face but it's not enough to get rid of the stench of violence.
The number is easy, memorized. He memorizes all official government phone numbers and addresses every time he travels to a new city. "Hello, may I speak to the chief of police? I am an agent of L and I have urgent information regarding the Kira case. No, I would not like to be redirected to the Kira Taskforce headquarters. I believe that operation to be compromised. Yes, I have clearance codes."
He cycles through the numbers as easily as reciting the alphabet, and after he's been traded between lackeys, he's put through to the chief, who is equal parts nervous and smug, having landed a break this large and utterly simple.
"There are a couple of people I'd like you to take into custody," L tells him, smiling thinly when the cashier taps his watch, telling him to hurry it up, "starting with Light Yagami."
tbc.
end notes: you may be asking yourself at this point "is what i think is happening really happening?" the answer is probably yes. actually i don't know. what do you think? i'm barely sure what's happening most of the time if i'm honest, but i can tell you here and now we're going to get a dramatic locale and dynamic change pretty soon, and an introduction (and reintroduction) of some newly important characters. oh what fun! *toots party horn*
okay, but seriously, thank you all for reading and reviewing, sorry for being atrociously late. i love you guys! all comments are appreciated mega super a lot! see you guys next time (which will hopefully come a bit faster)!