warnings: sexual content, alcohol, insanity, confusing timeline logistics. writing of generally suspect quality?
notes: i'm sorry, i'm late again! this california thing, while doing wonders for my life in general, has cut my writing time down quite a bit so update times may be longer for the next couple of months, until the summer when i'm going home again. (i'm moving semi-permanently back to ca in august tho and getting a job so who knows what will become of this fic then. all i can promise is that it will most certainly be finished if i have to sell my soul several times over to make it happen.)
i'm sure the timeline in this chapter is very confusing, as the last scene of the previous chapter slots in somewhere, in classic time-skip fashion, into the middle of this chapter. hopefully it's not completely impossible to puzzle out. the LxB is strong in this chapter, so i'm sorry if that ship doesn't float your boat. please don't think that i've abandoned lxlight in any way, shape, or form, though. it's all leading somewhere and i promise that place is full of our two favorite dorky genius boyfriends.
thank you for reading as always, i sincerely hope at least some of you enjoy this chapter!
because last chapter was so long ago, i wrote a dorky little catch-up paragraph in soap opera style to jog your memories below, so!
previously on nights!:
A supposed Shinigami who is terrorizing the city of Tokyo, leaving a trail of dead children in it's wake, made itself known to Kiyomi Takada, a fragile dame, who in turn made herself known to our hero, Light Yagami, when he questioned her in his search for answers! Elsewhere, three travelers left a man named Sydney Grauss holding the severed limb of his departed beloved, and made their expedition to the east, where they shortly discovered the location of the subject of their search, the world famous detective L! Escaping to an abandoned house with this detective, tensions ran low and high as the quartet attempted to determine their next move, and ultimately came to a startling decision regarding the fate of our hero, who at the present moment finds himself distracted by the mystery of what has become of his sometime love interest, pop modeling sensation Misa Amane, and her Death Note!
chapter twenty five - unquiet ghosts.
"All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
Misa sways against him, batting her eyes at the sky. "I was somewhere I've never been before. She brought me there."
"She? Who?" Light demands, his grip firm on her shoulders, trying to shake her into facing him, but she lolls like a doll, limbs stiff and posable. "Misa, look at me."
She shakes her head, drawing her hands out of his and pressing them to her face, covering her eyes with the flats of her palms as if to block out more than just vision. "She was a god I didn't know. I still don't know. I wanted to be good for you, but I couldn't stop her. I couldn't hold onto it and now you don't need me anymore, and I don't, I don't… " Her breath is heavy, sodden, words coming fast and tripping over each other, one after the next.
"A god?" Light repeats, stepping back. He looks upward, the sky over Tokyo lit blue and cloudless. He can't spot anything that could be a Shinigami, not Rem's pale musculature nor the wide-brimmed shade of Ryuk's wingspan. He'd followed Light to the diner, but disappeared shortly afterward, fading off into the muddled rush from there to here. "How?" he asks.
"What?" Misa says, uncovering her eyes to peek out at him. They're glassy, but she's not crying, and she looks suddenly unaware of her own predicament, preoccupied now with his.
She takes a few steps forward.
"How?" he repeats, louder this time, nearly yelling into the murk of the alley. His frustration is ebbing in waves, low to high, and then down again. "The children, the bodily fluids. How could a Shinigami do that? How could it take your Note?" He ruffles an angry hand through his hair. "How could Takada see it?"
"Who?" Misa asks, voice small, but he doesn't hear her.
"Oh," he says, out loud but to himself. "Oh, oh. I have an idea." He turns back to Misa, posture going straight, shoulders set, suddenly calm and ready for decisive action. "We have to go."
He reaches out for her hand, feels the small scrap of paper pressing into his palm, her fingers quivering where they interlock with his. "Where?" she gasps, letting herself be pulled along, tiny legs dancing after his like an off-balance ballerina. "Light, please tell me what's going on?" she asks when they finally stop for longer than a breath, taking the escalator down to the train station behind a hundred slow-moving commuters, all in similar shades of blues, blacks, and greys, a relative ocean of mundanity.
"Light?" Misa repeats, voice growing shriller, the tears waging their threat again.
"We're going to see a friend," he says, then abruptly lets go of her hand, pulling the scrap of the Death Note into his own, and not planning to give it back until such time as it becomes necessary.
She stumbles slightly, displaced for a moment, but she picks herself up admirably, smile wide, misty-eyes crinkling. He prefers it this way. The less she knows, the less of her he has to manage.
There's something they say about old habits and dying hard. B has always wondered what the distinction is, what dying softly would be like. He's been knocked off a good few times, but he's never gone like that. He's not even sure there is such a thing.
So maybe what they're trying to say is just: old habits die.
And here they are, killing them.
"You haven't gotten any better at this," L grits when B shoves in, biting his shoulder with a jolting vengeance. Fucking L has always been like this, like storming a castle only to find it unlocked, welcoming, all the traps and attacks mounted inside, trembling and chaste and ready to destroy.
B has very much missed being destroyed.
He pulls at L's scalp, claws his back, hikes his hips, does everything at once because he hasn't for so long and the sex they're having now is less a procession of events and more a convergence of them, like the universe turned back on itself. Time is self-repeating, maybe, and death is a big joke and life is the punchline, or maybe it's the other way around - he's got all these celebratory declarations in him, each more pretty and ruining than the last, but they merge into the present in a heady sludge and if there's more to existence than rib bones and rolling eyes and L's stunted breaths, he doesn't want it anymore.
"I think," B murmurs softly in his ear, romantic like the end of time, "you've actually gotten worse."
It's then that L starts laughing, falls back against the mattress and just full out laughs in a way that B has never heard before, and doesn't understand or know what to do with, so he just stares, slightly in awe. And yes, this is what he'd traveled here for. This is why he never dies, no matter what. Here is the thing with feathers, and it's a lot better in bed than hope.
Although, at this rate, L is laughing so hard that B can't even properly penetrate him anymore. "Would you stay still?" he snaps, but he's grinning and he doesn't want to stop. Here is euphoria. Hello. He's found it and he's not letting it go.
"This is so stupid," L says to the ceiling and B's cock actually slips out of him and then they're just two sweaty men in half their clothes lying on a bed in an abandoned house and if this is euphoria then L's right, it sure is stupid.
"What is?" B croons, lying down next to him, cock lining up with his hipbone and thrusting, but casually, only a minor exercise compared to the exertions of being in and around one another.
L says," Me," and smiles in a way that B doesn't understand, but will. He's different, not preserved the way B has forced himself to stay, changed by the world as he's met it, shaped into a new, sharper, more deplorable thing, but still a thing that B loves. He's carved out his heart for this thing. He's mounted it on the wall. He's got poetry and his hands are all shaky and if this is not love then he will twist and mend reality until the word takes on a new definition.
"I could have told you that," B says against the shell of his ear, hips moving, pressure burning but not half as much as he wants it to.
Then suddenly the smile disappears and L is standing up, shoving him aside, naked in the bright room and looking around like he's lost something and needs it back.
"Uh, hey," B grunts, rolling over, body following as if connected by a string, "I was kind of in the middle of something there, I don't know if you noticed."
L doesn't look at him. "You're not real," he says, but casually.
B sits up and his cock is still hard and his organs feel shaky, grown all in new shapes, and he wonders if L would turn to look if he carved open his chest and showed him what was underneath. Probably not.
He grins like the devil because he doesn't know how to do anything else. "Maybe not, but in case you're not keeping count, darling, I'm all you've got. I'm the old wive's tale come to take you away, and the world we're in now isn't made of the steel of your buildings. Nobody's gonna save you because there's nothing to be saved from. There's nothing but what you insist upon."
L shoots a disparaging look over his shoulder, and his eyes are far away and if B could tear out his bones and rearrange them, he would. "I never asked for you at all," he says. "I asked them to take you back."
"I would have crawled across the world for you," B insists, sitting up. He feels his voice getting younger and he doesn't know why but he doesn't question it. "I did. Here I am. Are you going to let me fuck you, or what?"
L turns back to him fully, walks over and comes to sit on the bed beside him. He's gone robotic again and B doesn't like it. Maybe that's why he'd kissed him, let him in - trying to stop the noise long enough to get the mask back on, and then he's not a person anymore, just an idea. From the way he's looking now, it's a very very bad idea.
"What will you do if I say no?" he asks, and god, he just loves that question. Always has. Loves teasing and restraint, loves watching B corrode with want and tired adoration, loves beating him to death with his own heart.
B shrugs, looks at the ceiling, says, "Let you fuck me, I guess."
L looks a little taken aback. They've never done it like that before. There was always the pursuer and the pursued, the denier and the denied. Their relationship is founded on that allocation of power, and B maybe rocks it just to prove that they are anything, can be anything, live in the grass, in the sky, in the park benches, in the grocery stores and the graveyards and every neat house on every neat street. If the world dies they'll both outlast it, and that's a truth B knows because he made it up.
Sometimes he thinks he made up everything. L is the only thing that's ever proven itself real.
"Would you?" he says.
B crawls on top of him, body writhing over his cock like he's being paid to do it, and he could have. Might have made a lot of money as a hooker if he had the time, but he'd burned himself down instead and then locked himself away, waiting for the prince to come climb his tower. The prince is lazy, though, and afraid, and when B penetrates himself on L's cock without any added lubrication, his breath catches in his throat and he grits, "Oh wow, this was a terrible idea," and then grins the whole way down.
Light bangs on Kiyomi Takada's door with a closed fist, his other hand grasping Misa's, and it's probably not the best idea to introduce one girlfriend to another at a time like this, or ever, but he's really long past caring about appearances at this point. He's got so many things on his plate they're spilling over the sides. He remembers being seventeen and not caring about anything.
Where, oh where, have the good times gone?
Misa's pouting beside him, eyes tired, and he would let her rest if he could. He would drop her off and forget her if she hadn't made herself indispensable. She always does that, somehow.
The door opens and it is not Kiyomi Takada staring back at him.
"I," Light's already begun, but he stops himself when Mikami raises an eyebrow at him. He swallows. "Teru."
Mikami looks between them, Misa and Light with their hands clasped - only so he could keep the piece of the Note pressed to her skin, but in retrospect maybe he should have just let her hold onto the damned thing - and breathes a soft puff of disparaging air.
"Yagami," he says, flatly, but his brow is creased and it's obvious that he's equally as surprised to see Light as Light is to see him. "Amane. Can I help you?"
He doesn't remark at the fact that they're obviously together again, despite having broken up in an extremely public spectacle not a week earlier, and Light appreciates the courtesy because he's got no room on his tongue to spin explanations.
"Is Kiyomi here?" he asks, letting go of Misa's hand, but shooting her a sharp sideways glance that he hopes like hell she understands. It's asking a lot to request that she not completely botch everything, but she owes him as much for having gone and lost the Notebook.
"Takada-san is asleep," Mikami tells him, blocking the door like a bodyguard, and since when do the two of them hang around together, outside of police headquarters?
Mikami's fully dressed in a suit and tie, but his clothes look rumpled, hair falling in mussed lines. He'd probably slept here. They're probably fucking. Wouldn't that just be like the world, to throw all of Light's pawns together in some romantic polyhedron and call it chance, just a quaint happenstance. Not like the universe circles him in a whirlpool, mocking him the whole way down. Not like the stars have all aligned themselves to fuck him over. If there is a God up there - capital G - it evidently doesn't like him very much. Probably can't stand the competition.
Shoving down all the spiraling panic, he breathes in, makes his eyes shiny and deplorable, and says, "I need to speak to her. It's urgent. I really hate to intrude, especially after she's had such a testing time of it, but it's a matter of life and death."
At his side, Misa is nodding vehemently, golden hair bobbing comically in the hall light.
Mikami blinks at them skeptically. "Whose death?"
And he's smart, and Light had liked that about him, but he's not asking the right questions. L would. Light would like to strangle L with his own hands, or gently stroke his forehead, or do both at once - but - but L would do it right.
"I don't know if you remember," Light says, his impatience leaking out before he can plug the holes, "all the murdered children. What is it, eleven now? Although, I guess they haven't found the bodies of the last two, but no one has high hopes for their survival. I need to speak to Kiyomi."
"She's not amenable," Mikami shoots back, gaze thin, obviously not at all endeared to Light by the sarcasm.
"Well, Light," Misa sighs, shrugging her shoulders unbearably high, "you heard him. She's not 'amenable.' Let's just go and tell the police about the monster I saw." She's turning to go already and he's watching her with wide, frantic eyes, and making sure that Mikami watches him watch.
She's a terrible actress but she's not half bad at lying.
"Misa," he snaps at her back, as if chiding her for her brashness.
He's not sure if he'd imagined the gasp that had echoed through the other side of the wall, but he's very certain that his senses aren't deceiving him when Takada's thin wrist appears in the doorway, a manicured nail crooking them toward her.
"Let them in, Teru," a tired voice says, and then her figure sways into the hazy glare that shines through the curtains as she disappears further into the room.
Mikami must like taking her orders as much as he'd liked taking Light's, because after a drawn out moment and a thin breath, he moves aside, holding the door open for the two of them.
"Where the hell did you find a ranch?" L breathes loosely, head back on the area of the bed where there would be pillows if this were a proper room in a proper house in a proper world. As if he hadn't just properly fucked Beyond Birthday.
B gives him a withering look, hand slung down somewhere between them and digging through the dirty parts between his legs, investigatory and utterly unashamed. "Texas," he says, drawing out the S like a nursery rhyme.
L has principles somewhere that insist that he shouldn't grin, but he does, anyway. "And why, exactly, did you want to become a cowboy?"
"The modern term," B corrects ostentatiously, pressing one long, sticky finger to L's lips, "is ranch-hand." He seems to become distracted with L's lips, drawing the pads of his fingers along them, following the shape of his jaw and it's like old times, dusty and close, hiding in the backs of closets and under beds, exploring the deep dark quivering parts of one another. "There was an old western playing on the flight over," he murmurs. "It looked comforting, like an easier world to live in."
L tries for a moment to imagine B in the full get-up, boot straps and a wide-brimmed hat, wheatgrass sticking out of his mouth. It's no more or less comical than anything B has ever been.
L does not know what to do about him. L does not know what to do about anything, so he snakes his hands in B's hair and kisses him like you'd kiss a boy at a carnival, who'd bought you cotton candy or won you a stuffed bear in a rigged game. They kiss like they're on the precipice, like things are imploding.
"Was it?" L asks him, pulling away. It feels like they're on a day-time drama and this is the touching love scene. It's sort of a relief when B pinches him on the ass.
The touch is sharp, but enjoyable, like everything with B, and L knows that he owns him. That wherever he goes and whatever he does and whoever he's screwing for information for whichever case, Beyond is a thing in his back pocket, a thing he can't let alone. He tried to purge him out of his system, but he just keeps coming back, incurable. Fighting it is fun, sometimes, fighting makes him alive, but then other times sleep is the answer.
Perchance to dream. Perchance to wake in a world that doesn't scar. What a load of idiocy. What a sap he's become in his old age. Twenty five. It's a nice, solid, even number. A nice number to die on. Poetic, even.
"Hey," B snaps, and L realizes that he'd answered his question, but he hadn't heard it at all. There's a rushing in his ears and it might be laughter and it might just be hunger pangs. B shakes his face. "Don't think of that. You were never a defeatist, you were never defeated. You're sugar and slime and puppy dog tails. You're all mixed up and if I could peel you apart it'd be fun for a moment but then you'd just be in pieces. I saw you in the factory smoke. I saw you in all the cities. I know you don't want to exist because I don't want to either, but we do, so get over it."
He turns L's face to him, touching him like a loved one, and that's a strange thought but that's what he is, isn't he? Loved. So, then where does Light Yagami fit into all of this?
"Can you read minds?" L asks distantly, honestly curious for a moment.
"Yes," B replies immediately, sinking down against him, the jester again as if he had never been anything else, "and I know what you're thinking. How is he so handsome? you're asking yourself. Well!" He tosses his hands up like he's got more to say, but L knows he doesn't. They've both got masks. He'd found B at age nine in the hallway bathroom with a stolen scalpel, trying to reshape his face.
L had taken it away and kicked him in the shin.
B had bitten him on the shoulder and the wound had gotten infected. They were forbidden to go near one another for two weeks, and B had climbed in through his balcony window every night and showed him how his scars were healing. L hadn't ever told anyone about the scalpel. Hadn't cared enough. Had cared too much. Something like that.
"Did you really want me to kill you?" he asks, changing the subject again. He doesn't specify a time or a place but he doesn't think the request had ever come up before in all of their history. Run away with me or take over the world with me or care about me just please care - but never kill. Or maybe he's just forgotten it. L has forced a lot of the old out of him to make room for the new.
"Did you really want to kill me?" B shoots back, eyebrows raised, head crooked like a show-pony.
Always a question for a question and never an ending, never an understanding.
L falls backwards, looking up at the ceiling. "Somebody's going to have to die," he says. "This'll never work out, otherwise. It would be easiest if it were you."
"And I don't suppose you'd miss me?" B asks, fingers circling on L's thighs, because he knows the answer and he's smug about it.
Maybe the thing he so adores about L and always has is how indispensable he can make himself to him. Maybe he's only in love with the thing that needs him, rather than the other way around. L would like to go without, and has. L would like to go back to his stunted, plate-glass existence, all his clean rooms and quiet mornings, barely anything slipping between the cracks. The mask tightly fitted.
Where, oh where, have the good times gone?
L doesn't answer B, just presses his hips up into his hands and says, "I am paralyzed with inaction. I am so much less capable than I am supposed to be." He's smiling but it hurts and he's not sure he's ever been this weak. B's hand is circling his cock, tugging it to life even though it's only been an hour and L likes it because it swallows him up, makes thinking hazy and easier to bear. "I don't know what to do."
B grins against his pelvic bone, cupping his balls in one hand, dirty and calm and far kinder than L would like him to be, and says, "Well, if you want my advice - "
L's hips buck. "I don't."
" - in situations like these, I always find it's best to ask oneself: what would L Lawliet do? And then do the opposite." He kisses L's hip bone, jerking him with the other hand. "Loudly, and in public." He kisses the other hipbone.
A few minutes later, L comes in his mouth, body quivering, back arched - and he gets an idea.
It's too early for anyone but the chief to be in, and Aiber doesn't want to make pleasantries, so he just stops a yard from his desk and asks, "You heard from your son recently?"
Soichiro Yagami is a firm man, solidly built if not overlarge, but with lines of wear all down his face, dripping into the corners of his eyes, around his cheeks. He's not well shaven today. If he'd slept last night it hadn't been much. He blinks at Aiber like he's shocked at being addressed.
"No, I," he says softly, then clears his throat, hardening up, "I don't know if I should be telling you anything, honestly. For whatever reason, you seem to have a grudge against Light." He's still sat in his chair, back straight, facing Aiber across the gloomy fluorescents of the office.
"Come on, sir," Aiber says, because all trappings aside, he's owed some measure of respect, "I think we both know the reason." He lifts an eyebrow and the implication hangs heavy. Some respect, but not too much.
Soichiro turns back to face his desk, sipping from his coffee mug slowly, measured in the way that aging men tend to do everything. "L is dead," he states, voice low and dull, but in the empty room it gets everywhere. "It's not a pleasant truth, but it's become an obvious one. Whatever relationship he had with my son, with you - whatever he meant to this team - it's a fact we have to face if we ever want to move on." They're bold words for such a blind man. "I don't blame you, or L, or anyone but Kira. This is Kira's mess and we can't let him get away with it. That's what I have now, that's what I hold onto. I want to see him pay."
The gothic W blinks on the screen across the room, an invitation for Aiber to come up. Before he goes, he says quietly, nearly apologetically, "You will."
Kiyomi Takada stands there in a dressing gown, hair a mess, and Misa hates her more than a little because she's beautiful. She could have killed her in a another world, one where Light liked beautiful girls. As it is she sits on the sofa in her sweats, a piece of the Notebook clenched in her hand, dreading the occasion when she will have to speak.
"We're out of milk," Takada says, falling like petals into a straight-backed chair and casting her eyes on them like they're something dirty that's washed up on her shore and she's waiting for them to be taken out with the tide again. "If you want coffee, you'll have to take it black."
At Misa's side, mannered but frantic, Light nods. "Please."
He sits back while Mikami - the man in a suit, wrinkled now, the man with the glasses who Light had slept with, or had as far as presentation goes - serves him grimly. They don't seem to get on anymore. Who would have thought.
Misa holds up a hand. "I'm on a cleanse," she says, because that's what all the other models say when they're offered food. She's not really sure what it means but it sounds better than saying I may be sick on your carpet as it is.
Takada smiles. "Of course you are." Misa can tell when someone's being condescending. She's had enough experience with it.
She wants to go home.
"So," Mikami says, pulling back to stand beside Takada's chair like some sort of bodyguard, "talk. Tell us what you were so eager to share, Yagami." He might be sneering if his expression had more energy to it.
Misa doesn't really understand why everyone in the room hates everyone else, but she's swept up enough in it to want to disappear. Hate takes precious effort. She wants to sleep.
"It's not my story to tell," Light responds, glancing sideways at Misa as if prompting her, but she doesn't know what to say or how to say it. She'd cried on Light in the alley, gotten her tears all over his shirt and there's still a vague wet stain there if you look closely.
She looks closely. She squeezes her palm around the scrap of paper.
"Misa," Light says, firmly, like it's an order.
She thinks about fainting. She wishes she would, or wishes she was a better actress so she could pretend to. "I don't know how to explain it," she says softly, when she can't think of anything else to do. She had barely communicated it to Light, just: monster, killer, bright lights and death and the end of time, little bones and a drop of blood and sugar and spice and everything nice -
"Misa, please."
- that's what little girls are made of.
She wishes she'd start crying, tears pouring silently down here cheeks. She's made herself plenty of times before, for roles and just to get out of gym class when she'd been younger, but it's not coming now. There's a well in her and it's swallowing up everything she feels and is and wants and she's not sure what to do, or what to say, and everyone is looking at her and she can't, she can't -
"Teru," Takada says, her voice like a drop down the well, hollowed and echoing, a porcelain jar, "I think we do need milk, actually. Hop around to the corner market and get some, will you?"
"I've told you," Mikami breathes back, low and gruff, "I'm not here to be your butler. If you want - "
"And take Yagami with you, please," Takada continues, completely cutting him off. "I think we need a little girl time, Amane-san and I."
The reactions are uproarious, if muted. Light's back immediately goes twice as stiff, and Mikami looks at Takada as if she's just asked him to go stand in traffic. Misa want to feel something just as sharp and tragic, but she doesn't have the energy for emotion, and she just sits there, waiting. She almost wants them gone - even Light. The less noise the better. She just wants to sleep.
"Takada-san, I really don't think that's the best idea," he's saying, hurriedly, and Misa knows he'd only brought her here to pump them for information and then leave, and he's heavily put-off by the wasted time.
"I agree with Yagami," Mikami says, "it would be more practical - "
"I really just want some milk," Takada interrupts, seeming to care for manners just as little as she does for her current state of dress, "please." It's not a very convincing argument but she's looking in Mikami's eyes and the shaded light is falling over her like a veil, and he must understand something that neither Light nor Misa does, because after a moment he nods and turns to get his coat.
"Yagami," he beckons, without looking back.
The level of insult on Light's face would be comical if it weren't so frail, and Misa bleeds beside him and always will, but she likes seeing him hurt. She likes knowing he's not the statue he pretends to be, that he falters just like her, that they're the same in some fundamental way that means he needs her, couldn't do without. He must need her, or they wouldn't be here right now. She'd still be in that diner, afraid to move.
"I'm hesitant to leave Misa," he's saying, slipping into the role of the dashing hero as easily as blinking, and she despises him for it because if it's so simple why can't he ever do it for her? Even if it's just pretend. Why does she have to know the bare bones? She wants his pretty lies because at least that's something pretty.
Before she realizes, she's saying "Go. I'll be fine." Blinking at the coffee table in front of her. His mug is untouched, steaming. He really can't argue now.
She knows he's frowning at her as he stands, mumbling stunted goodbyes that she doesn't hear, and for a moment she wants to call him back, beg him to stay, cling to his arm and not let go - but then the door shuts with a hard click and he's gone.
"Alone at last," Takada says.
Misa looks up at her and she's expecting that fierce smile, the one the competition gives you, the one from friends who aren't really your friends. From girls who write mean things about you on the bathroom wall. Takada is not smiling.
Rather, she's digging in the drawer of the side table and pulling out a thin pale bottle with bright silver lettering in another language on the cover, and shaking it so the liquid inside sloshes around. "Teru hates drinkers," she says softly and disparagingly.
"Light, too," Misa says, without really meaning to, as Takada takes a sip and passes her the bottle. She takes it in shaking hands. Takada's nails are much more well-kept than hers.
"So," Takada says, leaning back in her chair, looser but still delicate, and maybe it's impossible for her to be anything but, "do you want to talk about death, or shall I?"
Misa breathes deep and takes a sip.
They're lying on their backs across the mattress, naked and cool with sweat on sheets that smell like acrid dust, listening to the muted whirring of the body shop across the street.
L asks again, "But did you really want me to kill you?" and his eyes feel sticky with the cloy of sleeplessness.
"Did you really want to kill me?" B's response is unchanged. "Whatever your answer is, my answer is the same. I go where you go, like a constellation." B is still poetry. B is still the madman on stage reading off tortured lines that mean nothing - or mean something, but badly - and waiting for snaps.
"That's not fair," L says, instead of, 'That doesn't make sense,' like he should have. That's not even how constellations work. B knows that. He sacrifices reason for rhyme and L has never understood why. He should be too smart for that. Maybe that is why. Maybe logic is what makes you stupid.
B turns on his side, facing L again after a long love affair with the ceiling, and plants his chin the palm of his hand. He looks like a pin-up girl. "Truth rarely ever is."
"You're utterly full of shit," L tells him, but turns on his side to mirror his pose. It feels a bit like a guilty pleasure, like indulging in bad pornography, but slipping into this role - as an equal and opposing force, matched and not incongruous the way things had been with Light - is comfortable in the way that few things are. In the way that coffee and a newspaper on a sharply sunny morning is, looking out a penthouse window at a grim crooked beautiful city.
He realizes he'd used the past tense to refer to Light. That doesn't bode well. He knows what he's doing because he does it every time. The disconnection and disassociation. He'd done it with B, but now he's back and he's falling into old traps and luxuriating in the capture. When he sees Light again, will he become the present? Should he see Light again, or is it better to divorce himself from his feelings and get on with it? And in what sense, exactly, is he using the word better? Better than what? And for whom?
B doesn't say anything for several minutes, so finally L states, "You've killed a lot of people who didn't deserve it," as if he's trying to remind himself. So has Light. He's killed a lot of people who did deserve it but by sheer numbers he's had to have knocked off more innocents than B.
"So have tornadoes," B replies, foggily.
And what is an innocent? A child? Someone who's never done anything bad? Does such a person really exist and if so what is their value compared to the average person? Is the absence of bad inherently better than taking the bad with the good, when the world is a self-repeating cycle, propagated by maintaining the balance that violence and kindness and all of that grey morality in between creates? But that's too clinical, isn't it? It's divorcing action from feeling, and thus taking away the substance that makes morals what they are.
You do not kill because then the person you have killed is gone, and they cannot participate in life, and the people who loved them are suffering, and we have as a species decided that the suffering of our brethren is counterproductive. Evil is just a concept layered on top, a window-dressing to give it the chrome and leather tint.
"You have consciousness," L argues, mostly because he cannot abide letting B have the last word, thinking that he's stumped him. He hasn't, L's just stumping himself. He doesn't like to get to philosophical when it comes to his work, but it's often a hazard of the job.
"Do I?" B counters. "You can't be sure of that. You can't be sure of anything, that reality is anything like what you think it is, or if there even is a reality. The only thing you can be sure of is your own consciousness, and even that is subject to rocky objections."
"Fine," L says, growing annoyed, "I'm operating under the assumption that you have consciousness."
"Then I'm operating under that assumption that a tornado does, too," B shoots back, grinning because he loves to play devil's advocate almost as much as he loves to play devil.
"In that case, it should be tried for mass homicide under several international statutes."
"Do you want to make that arrest, or shall I?"
L's annoyance is building up but it snaps back like a rubber band at the look B gives him and everything melts away comfortably and he rolls onto his back. He mumbles, "We're going to have to talk about real things at some point or another. Like Kira and Shinigami and the fact that you told me once when you were nine that you could tell when people were going to die. We're going to have to talk about black notebooks and why you don't have any burn scars and who exactly has been killing and raping children in Tokyo for the past several weeks. You're going to have to lay your cards out and tell me what I want to know. I'm going to have to threaten you with execution and you're going to have to dance around the subjects I want to hear and eventually submit. You're going to confess your love for me and I'm going to tell you to can it. I can see all this happening like a play I wrote myself." He looks sideways at B again. "I know you too well."
B looks at him like he believes every word, but without the awe that L is used to inspiring. B is in awe of him, maybe, but in different ways. "You know too much for your own good," he says, silkily, like piano keys and crooked fingers. "You're going to overload and implode the way you always do and the play will cut off in the second act and the curtains will fall closed on an empty audience and I'll be there to pick up the shards of your ego. You're too smart but you're also a self-defeating little child. I love you most when you're disastrous."
L sits up. The words hurt, like lifting small bits of skin one inch at a time, and the flesh beneath it boils. He'd be raging if Light had said something like that to him, but Light doesn't know him well enough to hurt him properly. His barbs are cruel but they melt against L's outer layer. B knows how to get under his skin because L had grown it in part to keep him out. Light is more comfortable to have around but comfort doesn't save anyone. It's just a balm for the wound.
L is the disease and B is the experimental treatment that never works but that he keeps trying anyway. He should have known he'd end up in the midst of this crises again, but it's strangely peaceful here. A slow gust of wind flows in from the window and it smells like cold grass. B's convictions are loose and hazy and changeable and L could drown in them. Everything is separated like a dream and he could stay still and drift away into this house, but he knows if he does he'll hate himself for it. He'd hated himself for staying with Light and it will be the same with Beyond. The only solution is silence. The only way to live is without.
He stands up on the creaking floorboards. They feel almost hollow. The place probably has termites. He picks up a pair of jeans and t-shirt, not bothering to differentiate between whose is whose. It doesn't seem to matter. He and B could switch bodies and he doesn't think he'd notice.
"If that's the case," he says, buttoning up his trousers with fidgety hands, "stay tuned for disaster."
He walks to the door expecting for B to follow him, keep him locked on a leash and unable to move out of his sight, but there's a hazy knowing glance searing his back that says that B's fairly certain that his claws are in and won't be easily dug out. Isn't that always the way of it?
"Bring back coffee if you go out," B calls after him, sounding cozier than the location at all warrants, stretched out nude and pale and shameless on the bed, "and watch out for tornadoes."
L's steps creak down the hallway and he tries to process the words without feeling them. It's mid-morning and he's going to do what he has to.
The heater hums lowly from the edge of the room and the second sip of alcohol sends Misa's throat burning. She feels too hot in her jacket but she's not comfortable enough to take it off, so she just flushes dodgily and sets the bottle on the coffee table. It makes a hollow sound against the wood.
"I haven't slept in days," Takada murmurs, standing up to peek out through the window. Maybe she can spot Light and Mikami exiting the building, or maybe she's just scanning the passersby, but either way her face is beautiful in profile. The kind of classic features that put Misa's bubblegum pop schtick to shame. She knows it but at the moment she doesn't care. The real bother is the lack of numbers, no little red letters spelling out Kiyomi Takada, not anymore.
She turns back to face Misa. "Not since it happened. I think she took it from me."
"She?" Misa asks in a thin voice, not because she's really confused but because the room drops into a silence that demands she ask it. If she knows nothing else, she knows her cues.
Takada picks up the bottle, falling back into her chair, but she doesn't drink any yet, just sloshes the liquid around and watches it move. "I don't know why I decided it was a female. Do you think monsters even have gender? I don't suppose it matters. It just felt like that to me."
It had to Misa, too, but she hadn't really thought much about it. She hasn't really thought about anything, because it'd all been hazy half-between moments and then struggling bursts of activity with Light. She can remember the white light and silky orange now without even wanting to cry.
"Did you tell that to - to Mikami-san?" she says after a few moments. If Mikami knows that then that means he can tell Light, and Misa won't have to ask anything at all. She can just sit here until they return.
She wishes they were back already. She wishes she could drink more. She doesn't even like alcohol but there's a bubbling in her head now that tells her she could start to. She feels too frail to take the bottle out of Takada's hands, and that's hardly good manners, anyway.
Takada laughs a glittering camera laugh, but drops off in the middle of it, like she's grown suddenly bored. "Oh, no, he doesn't believe me at all. He thinks I'm suffering from sort of trauma-induced hallucination. That's the problem with today's businessman, so much know-how and no imagination." She sips some of the vodka. At this rate they'll both be wasted before there's milk in the fridge. "He's been kind to me, though," she continues, stilling, looking at something past Misa and up towards the ceiling. "Kinder than I would have expected. He's stayed with me since it happened. But he doesn't understand." She smiles at Misa then, a conspiratorial smile, like the ones that children give to their friends across crowded classrooms. "Men never do when it comes to women like us. That's why I sent them away."
Misa's not sure what gender has to do with it, but she doesn't say that. "You think I'm like you?" She can't tell if she sounds flattered or offended, and isn't sure quite how she feels, anyway.
"You must be," Takada says. "Otherwise, why would she have chosen us, of all people?"
Maybe that's a passable conclusion to come to given the information that she has, but Misa knows it's not really about that. She was chosen because she had the Note, and Takada - she was probably just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right one, depending on who you're asking.
"I think it was probably just coincidence. It - she killed all those children, too. Do you think they were like us?"
Takada looks at her but doesn't say anything, brow crumpled and lips set in a thin line. After a minute of that, Misa says, "Can I have another drink?" and takes the bottle when it's offered to her.
A few more minutes pass before Takada stands up, peering out through the blinds again as if she expects something to be out there. Probably she does. Misa wonders what she'd think if she told her about Shinigami, about the eyes and about the rules and about the realm above them, made of bone and moonlight and old time, the way Rem had described it. Misa's not even sure she knows what that means, but she can imagine it. She used to be able to feel it like part of her, but it's gone now, along with her eyes.
She thinks she would tell the truth if not for Light, but that's a great big if and an impossibility. A fear. He's going to come back in a few minutes and Misa can't decide if she's waiting for him or dreading him.
Takada's eyes are clear and removed and even when she looks at Misa she never quite focuses. "I thought about marrying him at one point, you know. That boyfriend of yours - if he is that. He was a very good candidate for it, but he never gave me the time of day. I think I was offended by it then, but I suppose he doesn't give it to anyone. I thought at first it was simply a matter of alternative tastes - if you understand me - but it seems he didn't regard Teru any more highly."
She examines her nails vaguely, but Misa doesn't know why. They're clean and clear and perfect.
"He only comes around for horror stories," Takada continues. "I'm starting to think the only thing that boy cares about is death."
Not the only thing, Misa thinks but doesn't say, and everything seems suddenly humorous. "You don't know him," she snaps petulantly, taking a deep drink from the bottle, and she knows she's only being defensive.
"No," Takada agrees, "no, I rather don't." She looks away, then appears to be hit with a new idea and stands quickly. "You can read English, right? You must be able to, you've done shoots in America."
Misa blinks up at her with wide eyes, thrown off by the question, so out of line as it is with the rest of the conversation. She's passable at the English alphabet, but speaking seems like a lot of work right now, so she just gives a stunted nod.
Takada's already reaching into a drawer - the same one where she'd stowed her alcohol - and pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. She sits down next to Misa on the sofa without seeming to notice her proximity, the coolness of her skin lined up beside her, and leaning down to draw slow, even English letters in neat penmanship.
"I saw this when I saw her," Takada says. "Does it mean anything to you?"
Misa doesn't really understand the words, but she has seen them before, along with the orange tint of a world-ending sunset, and long pale hands that had stolen her memory away.
Aiber strides into the room without preamble, not bothering to lean and lounge in his usual way, but rather making a point to be as unsettling as possible. Watari is straight-backed in front of wild stream of information that glides across the screen like a movie on fast-forward. His hair is tinted slivery in the blue light of the screen.
"So, this operative," Aiber says, coming up to stand behind him, "wouldn't happen to be blonde, about yay-high, name of Wedy?" His rage his barely contained, but it wars with a tiredness that keeps it all bottled down.
Watari glances back over his shoulder, eyes lighting keenly over his glasses, before turning back to his work. "Might be. You'll rather have to wait and see."
Aiber gains a grim satisfaction from finally acting on an urge that's been pawing at him for days, and yanks Watari's chair back to twirl him around and lean down to force them eye-to-eye. A sniper is not much use without his gun, and the forty or so years Watari has got on him can in this situation only serve as a downside.
"Sorry, but that's not good enough this time, pops. All due respect, but you owe me some answers." No more Mister Passably Decent Guy.
For a man living in such old bones, Watari doesn't flinch, barely seems moved by the threat in Aiber's body language. "And what exactly have you done to earn these answers?" he asks, head cocked in a way strangely reminiscent of L. The resemblance is so sharp in that moment that Aiber takes few steps back without even meaning to.
He stands there, breath heavier than it rightly should be, and in the next moment he droops, coming down from the high of tragedy and into a world where villainy is an undefined mass instead of a sharply profiled boy in a pressed shirt by the name of Yagami. No more heroics, he supposes, but it all aches for no reason and he finds himself in the good old defeatist heap he was born in.
"I'm drowning here," he tells Watari resignedly. "Can't you give a guy a hand-up? Or did L really learn it all from you?"
Watari's face is set stern, but not unkind, and after a moment of scanning Aiber up and down it seems he takes something like pity. Turning back to his screen, he says, "Wedy is here, but she's not the only one. And she's not the horse I'm betting on to end this race."
Aiber pulls out a sliding chair at the adjacent terminal and falls into it. Still sober, but it hurts less now. "Don't you think it's a rather unfair gamble when I don't even know all the players?"
"You don't need to know," Watari says, and it's chilly and distanced as he fades back into his primary mode - gathering information with a pinched brow and a mouth set flat. "Just stand back and take your cues when they're given."
Aiber rolls his eyes. "You know, there's a reason I became a conman and not an actor. I was never very good at following directions."
If Watari hears him he doesn't respond, and Aiber takes that as good a sign as any that this scene is done. He stands and shuffles out, steps gaining strength with every passing moment. If he's not going to find answers here, he'll just have to look somewhere else.
The dessert freezer groans at his side and L plays with the curly-cue wire of the telephone, tracing the fault lines on the plastic covering. There's a hacking breath on the other side of the line, as if the captain is undergoing a brief medical emergency.
"That's Chief Yagami's son," he says, after a stiff silence during which he evidently reels himself in.
"I'm aware," L replies. There's a line forming at the front counter, a man in spotted brown coat with a toddler on his shoulders haggling with the shop's illustrious proprietor. "We'll also need you to bring in his sometime girlfriend, Misa Amane. I don't know if you're familiar with the September issue of TeenPop Magazine but she made the cover. She's a higher risk factor, so make sure that your men take extra care with her arrest. They'll need to keep the protective helmets on at all costs."
"Of course," the captain says gruffly, probably insulted, but wise enough with his career moves to know who and who not to talk back to, and that's what L is banking on to get this order to go through; his good - or, at the least, widely revered - name.
There's possibly an easier way to do this, one with the voice modulator and Watari's skills in diplomacy, but he can't quite bring himself to wander in from out of the storm without anything to show for it, just a stray taking shelter. If he's going home he wants an envoy to announce him, a cheering crowd, rose petals at his feet. That, or to slip in unnoticed and be treated as if he'd never been gone. If he thought he could get away with writing off his sojourn as his own idea, he would, but not even he can make all of the loose ends in that story tie up neatly, so the best thing he can manage at short notice is the rather pitiable truth.
He hangs up the receiver after scant goodbyes and slumps toward the back of the line, hands in his pockets and trying to organize his thoughts into neat, quantifiable rows. It's only when he gets to the front counter and orders four coffees that he realizes that he doesn't have any money on him, or cards, or some sort of well-dressed intermediary to get him what he wants.
Stepping back from the counter, he holds up his hands, cancels his order without apology and walks barefoot and grinning into the street. Helplessness shouldn't make him quite so happy, but it's this feeling of being lost that he treasures, rather than the stiff confines of found which he usually lives in. Light, B, even the whole of his work with the Wammy's establishment - he's always so very accounted for. It's only in the midst of a case, captured by a Siberian mob doctor or roaming the streets of Cairo in drag or hiding out after an explosion in the coastal towns of Haiti that he finds his escape.
In this small, almost suburban corner of Tokyo that has been left to ruin by the rest of the buzzing city that surrounds it, he is not found. He has an erring desire to walk and keep walking, away from the Kira case and the past that so likes to hollow him. It's not an unfamiliar urge.
He's standing on the moss bitten sidewalk outside of the corner store with pebbles digging into his feet when a squat, beige car pulls up to the curb and rolls down its window to reveal his own face staring back at him. It's not actually his face, of course, but L thinks he's spent more time looking at B than he ever has himself, and his features give a better picture of what he is anyhow. Like the copy is the original and the original is the copy.
"How much for a one-off in the backseat, huh, sugar?" B asks, brow contorted with a self-gratifying humor and L would laugh except he doesn't do things like that, so he just stands there. After a moment the passenger's door comes open and B says, as if the previous joke had never been made and this is their first moment of acquaintance since lying together on that bare mattress in that bare room setting the universe right side up, "After I sent you out for joe it sort of struck me that - "
"I'd have to pinch it if I wanted any?" L supplies, without a gesture to his empty pockets, curling up into the passenger's seat. There's no wear and tear in this car, and the keys are firmly in the ignition, so at least this ride wasn't hot-wired and doesn't have to be ditched the moment they shut it off.
B pulls out onto the main road, heading in the opposite direction of where they'd come from - and L hopes he's left Wedy and Mello in decent repair - and says, "That, and there was a pretty high likelihood that you weren't going to come back."
"I said I would," L tells him, even though he probably wouldn't have.
"You say a lot of things, doll. You're rather known for it." They switch lanes and B flips off someone in the rearview. "I know you were going to come back when you left, but once you were gone, reality changed. Out of sight, out of mind, out of my reach, and rinse, repeat the last several years." His eyes glint. His fingernails are uneven, grip firm on the steering wheel. "I don't want to do that again. I don't think I can take the big house a second time. I'm very delicate." He flutters his eyelashes at L like a showgirl.
L's pretty sure B can take anything, but saying so feels at once too much like a compliment as well as a strange sexual innuendo.
He leans his chin on his hand and watches the rush of the grey, blue, white, browns of the city out his window. He says, ignoring B's effusive personal amusements, "Would you like to go with me to witness an arrest?"
B grins wide at him. "Do the stars weep when the moon dies?"
L's mouth goes flat, the bristling expanse of his brow rising. "I don't really know. Is that a yes?"
Beyond leans across the seats, making the car swerve dangerously, and presses a dry kiss to the edge of L's cheek. "Just give me directions."
It's a quarter past 9 when the call comes in about the location of one Light Yagami. Wasn't at home, the exhausted officer tells him through the buzz of midmorning traffic, and Quillish expresses his sympathies in as distanced a tone as he can manage. That's a part of the job: the distance.
"Never become emotionally involved," he'd told L, during some lesson or another, when he'd been ten, perhaps eleven. They'd been in one of the various forests that edges Winchester, reviewing the basic tenants of cartography, and L had been needling him for investigatory pointers as they'd waited out the worst of a summer storm beneath the eaves of a ramshackle and quite long deserted shed.
L had peered defiantly over the collar of his yellow slicker and asked, "Why not?"
Quillish had never hemmed and hawed over the children the way Roger was wont to do. He'd thought about it briefly, rather than simply pulling a stock answer from his breast pocket. "Because it makes it harder to do the job."
"What if it makes it easier?" L had responded, quickly, as if he'd been saving that the whole time, a secret and highly valued trump card. "What if it makes me better?"
"Then by all means," Quillish had told him, as the rush of rain had slowed.
He's still not sure which of them had been right, or if there is a right way of it. He tells the officer that Light is not in, because it's the truth, and because he'd like to know what Aiber had done to arrange this arrest before he makes the decision to support it one way or another.
"And you don't have any idea where else he might be?" the man asks in a burly, plush tone, more routine than curious.
"Could you hold for a moment?" Quillish says. "I'll need to check."
The man grunts his assent and then Quillish switches lines, calling Aiber's cellphone even though he's in the building. He can hear the ringtone - one of a selection of overly cheery French pop songs - from down the hall. The first ring is routine, the second laziness, and the third simply sheer defiance. He picks up on the fourth.
"Yessir?"
"What exactly have you set in motion?" he asks, not bothering with the pleasantries.
"Curious all of a sudden, huh?" He can hear the smugness both over the line and through the low thrum of Aiber's voice that echoes down the hall, growing ever closer. "Well then, how about I show you mine if you show me yours?"
"I'm too old for that game," Quillish responds, not skipping a beat. "I just got a call from a police officer looking to arrest Light Yagami. Something you want to tell me?"
There's a puzzled silence and then the line goes dead and the door flies open and Aiber is standing, face wide and brows up, in the doorway. "That wasn't me," he says, but there's a buzzing, nervous energy to him that hadn't been present during the phone call. Quillish lifts a skeptical brow. "Cross my heart."
"Well, if it wasn't you, and it wasn't me, then that only leaves a few suspects." He doesn't switch back to the call with the police officer, but rather brings up the stylized W, getting ready to put it to use.
"L," Aiber says, the hope that lights in his face jagged and frail and utterly prepared to break and be broken.
"Ideally," Quillish agrees, but his suspicions lie closer to Beyond, because of the two, he's the one who is most definitely in town. For all they know L could be off sunning on some tropical island on Kira's dime. Probably isn't, but the visual brings Quillish a grim amusement and he lets it settle in his mind. "Any idea of Yagami's current location?"
Aiber rolls his eyes. "His father got a call from him earlier, but after the conversation we had this morning, he didn't look likely to tell me, so I let it lie. I'm sure there's not a man currently in this building who would refuse you, though." He smiles tight and expectant.
Quillish sends out the signal, the letter that precedes the voice, then flips on the mic and lets his words crackle over the loud speakers. "Yagami-san," he says, "might I ask about your son's whereabouts? He's usually in by this time of the morning." He's not overly subtle, never asks where Light is when he's late and this instance sticks out, stark and strange, a different kind of morning on a different kind of day.
He is banking on propriety more than anything else to get him his answer and, given the man he's dealing with, it comes through in a pinch.
"I, uh, yes," Soichiro says after a notable silence, during which all of the eyes in the room turn in his direction. "He called in half an hour ago and told me that he'd be absent for the first half of the day, as he's gone to see Kiyomi Takada for follow-up questioning." He scratches nervously at the grey hairs lining his jaw and Quillish feels a well meant sort of condescension, the way he always does for men who grow old.
"The witness from the other day? He's gone back to the station, or to her home?"
"I'm not sure." No matter, it's an easy check. "What is this about, if I may ask, Watari-san?"
Since he's facing the screen and not the camera, Quillish is only treated to a side-view of his imploring facial expression. "Just a routine check-in," he says, and severs the line. Next to him, Aiber is shuffling from foot to foot with a nervous excitement that seems to fill the air with a strange, silent static.
Quillish doesn't turn to look at him, just switches the line to the policeman back on and says, "Sir, are you there? I believe I have a location for you."
It doesn't much matter who had made the call. Further investigation into the situation can only sabotage things, and if it is L, then there's no way his interference will go over well. If it's B, then it will only go worse. The only thing left to do is watch it play out and check to see who's left standing in the resulting wreckage.
There is a group of cop cars outside of Light's apartment - a thin, ugly building that L has never seen before, surrounded by neat shrubberies that have shriveled in the autumn chill - and they watch the group of helmeted officers, possibly the same as from the night before, shake their shiny heads at one another and climb back into their vehicles.
"Follow them," L tells B from his slouch in the passenger's seat.
"Miles and miles ahead of you," B says without looking at him, one hand drawing lazy circles on his thigh that shoot shameful little sparks through L's bones. This is all so familiar it's jarring, this reversion to a former self, but the whole world is loose and unmanageable at the moment and being in unhealthy teenage lust with his own personal ghost is the only thing he can do to ground himself. It's the only thing that's easy.
B has always been easy, and at once unendingly difficult.
"In your sweaty, adolescent dreams," L tells him, not smiling sideways with a cocked eyebrow and an air of heady conspiracy, but wanting to.
B makes the expression for him, if with slightly more malice. "You always are."
They head into another neighborhood that L doesn't recognize, wholly more high-end, and L wonders if this is where Misa has moved to. Wonders what Light is doing with her. Looking for him, he hopes - doesn't want to, doesn't want to suffer the indignity of caring - but doesn't think he could breathe at all if he thought that Light could breathe without him. Love or no love, there is a hollowing need, one he's staked his reputation on, one he's hoping will save all of them, or else kill all of them.
L hasn't yet decided which option he prefers.
The cops put on their lights, speeding up quickly and parting traffic to parallel park in front of one of the many ritzy apartment complexes. B parks across the street at L's insistence not to draw attention, and they watch.
The first man L sees is one he doesn't recognize, tall and broad, but self-imploding, with more hair than he needs and a nicer suit than L would like him to have. He's attractive. Light is, too, utterly more so, even pale and withered and stumbling with a shopping bag clutched to his chest. They look like they're going for a friendly stroll.
L is half-tempted to tell B to drive up on the sidewalk and hit the stranger with the car. B would. Then he'd turn it around - like he does, like a genie twisting a wish - and hit Light, too. Always the misbehavior.
B would do anything for him, even still. So much that it's too much. Light won't do enough, and it's going to get him killed. L doesn't know what to do, so he sits, and he watches, and he waits, feeling the warm, fizzing press of Beyond's groping fingers through the material of his jeans.
Light had insisted on paying for the milk and Mikami had insisted that he not and he had acquiesced partly out of politeness and partly out of an antsy desire to return to the apartment as soon as possible - before Misa, left alone with the scrap of her memories and someone who had wanted to, for whatever reason, get her by herself, can spill the entire plot in less than twenty minutes.
He does insist on carrying the bag, however, and as Mikami makes sure to keep several feet away from him at all times, he gets away with that much.
"You used me," Mikami comments flatly when they're about a block away from the house. They haven't exchanged more than vague small talk the whole way there and back, so the fact that he's bringing this up now either means he's forcing himself to do it before he runs out of time, or else he's banking on their arrival home to cut the conversation short.
Light breathes in, refrains from rolling his eyes, and forces a polite expression. His words are less polite: "You didn't seem to mind."
Mikami frowns deeply, but it doesn't seem necessarily directed at him. "That's not what I meant. Sex" - he says the word like he has trouble with it - "sex isn't something that matters much to me, either way. You wanted to, for whatever reason, and - equally as mystifying - at the time I wanted to as well. It was mutually beneficial." He looks at Light then, and if he's fibbing he's doing a damn good job of it. "The flowers are what tripped me up," he says.
"Roses were too cliche, huh?" Light keeps his voice distant, shifting the weight of the grocery bag across his arm. He doesn't care to have this conversation in the first place, but this is more or less the worst possible time for it.
"You used me," Mikami says again, but with a different cadence to his voice this time - or maybe it had been there all along, and Light is only now bothering to hear it. "You set me up. The police came to that address you sent me to. You sent me there for a reason. I was a scapegoat for something, wasn't I?"
They come up around a slanted corner and the sun crests over the tops of the buildings, momentarily halting the flow of monotonous accusation before they drift back into the long grey shadows again. Light doesn't know what to say in response or if this is even a concern at this point, considering how wholly everything else is coming apart around him. The suspicions of a prosecutor with some nice biceps is really the least damaging thing going on today.
"Amane broke up with you very publicly and obviously," Mikami continues, "with me as a catalyst, but now you show up here with her like nothing's happened. Everything was finely tuned. Everybody saw what they were supposed to see. What I wonder is, why?"
"Maybe it's confidential," Light responds vaguely, keeping his voice distant and important, testing the waters.
Mikami frowns. "If what you were doing was approved by some sort of governing system, you would be here on their behalf, waving your badge around like before. Instead, you brought your girlfriend over to talk about monsters." His eyes are level, the sunlight glinting off his glasses and reflecting a glare back.
"Was that a mistake?" Light asks, after a slow moment. "Was I wrong in thinking that Kiyomi has been wanting badly for someone to talk about monsters with?"
Mikami arches his eyebrows but it still doesn't give him much depth of expression. "You really believe all of this then?" he asks skeptically. "Child killing beasts with orange hair?"
Light freezes, his steps slowing gradually as his body catches up with his mind. "Orange hair?"
There's a police car pulling up to the curb and Light only notices it out of the corner of his eye, wading on the edge of his consciousness but left out of the main view in favor of the present issues that dwarf him. Orange? Had Misa said something like that? Can what Misa says - or Mikami, or Takada - be counted upon? Not at all. But it can be factored in and he is factoring it.
He wonders, indistinctly, if Shinigami can even have hair at the same time as Mikami shrugs and says, "It was just some nonsense that Kiyomi said the other night when she was frightened and babbling," and just as these two thoughts are being processed, coalescing in his head to crawl outward into tiny, tethering theories and urges and doubts, another police car pulls up.
Then another.
Light can feel the carton of milk through the bag, cool and solid and something to grip as his whole body seizes up. His instincts are insisting with a fizzing urgency that he run, run, run get out of here away hide, but the part of his mind that is floating outside of the present moment thinks all of these thoughts, like they might not even be here for you and running just makes you look guilty, and he manages to reason himself out of the self-preservation that the unthinking parts of him are demanding.
The struggle lasts just long enough for the men in helmets to emerge, like a swarm, taking up the deserted sidewalk. Mikami slows, body halting the way one does when faced with a traffic accident or the effects of a natural disaster - waiting for a cue as to how to receive it. The initial confusion, the attempts of the brain to justify the event as something that can fit into everyday life - a joke, a mistake - and then the realization, the blank horror.
"Light Yagami," one of the officers says, and it might have been comforting, if a betrayal, to hear a familiar voice from behind the mask, but the man speaking to him is an utter stranger. A stranger with a pair of handcuffs. "You're being taken in for questioning in connection with a matter of international security. Please come quietly."
A car floats past on the road, the traffic signals change and a handful of pedestrians, unconnected and ignoring each other, cross the street like loose wires. Fuzzy pop music plays out of somebody's window radio and the wind rushes with a morning quiet.
They are in the center of it all, the universe is orbiting around the fixed point that is this moment, and Light's wiry mess of a brain begs him to do something grand, to make a show and sparkling scene out of what might be, is begging to be, the end.
"Yagami?" Mikami asks, brow thick and dark, finally in the present instead of drifting outwardly, disconnected. He's here to watch things burn. Things are going to burn.
Light is going to burn them.
The metal of the first cuff touches his wrist, cold and flooding him with sense-memory, and he wonders who had ordered this arrest without really wondering, because he knows, he can feel it, he can feel it in him and on him and around him, but then he always can. So maybe it's a dream. Maybe this isn't happening. The world is what you make it and he could erase this part. He could knee the first cop in the stomach, shove through the second one, yell, confess, break down and sob. It's all so illusory but so real, it all might have happened already or be happening now.
He thinks, vaguely in the back of his mind where the lazy mornings float like petals in a stream, that he might be having a panic attack.
And then he sees him.
The man across the street, the man in a white shirt and blue jeans, standing on the sidewalk with his back straight and his mouth set, a ghost come to watch them burn him at the stake, and it's such a relief to see him again after Light had thought he'd been lost, and it's such a blow to his gut, too.
He looks at Light and Light looks at him and even though he'd known, felt it with the quavering certainty that he feels things like truth and justice and maybe even love, having him here, in the present and watching springs reality on him like a trap, crashing down and making everything too sharp and real. The cuffs are not a metaphor for destruction, they are just cuffs.
This is an arrest.
He is being arrested. He realizes dazedly that he isn't breathing and hasn't been, the blood in his veins pumping thickly, and there are spots forming over his vision. Both the cuffs are on his wrists, Mikami is being escorted away from him, and the circle of helmeted policemen around him seems to grow, filling up the pale morning with black glass and badges, glinting at him like cruel machinery. It's all crashing down on him and things are burning but he didn't light the fire.
"I don't understand," he says, and he hadn't meant to or tried to, but there it is floating like a shameful secret and he does understand, he knows the truth like a fine friend and he loathes it, and all of their gloved hands are on him, sickly and too warm, pulling and thrashing. "I don't," he says.
L watches him from across the street and he can't stop himself from turning to watch back, meeting his eyes, and he doesn't know what to do, didn't plan for this, didn't have time - everything's spinning - where is Misa? Why isn't she with him? She would prevent this. Why did they separate her from him? Why did they take L? The world with all its grabby hands. He's drowning, he can't breathe, all of the hairs on his body are sharp with sensation and he's sweating more than is attractive, will smell in the interrogation room. Doesn't want to breathe his own air.
He's not sure when he decides to buck, trying to to shake the hands off, get them away from him. Body moving like an animal, trapped and panicked. He doesn't know what to struggle against so he just struggles.
"Get off me," he says, quiet and thin, it hurts his throat.
"Yagami," somebody's saying. So many people are saying his name, trying to hold him still, and even though he can barely make out L's expression across the street, the stain of something like pity reflects back at him and it makes him shake with a familiar fury, a fury called home, low and simmering always, and suddenly here and swelling, boiling, tearing him open.
"It's him!" he shouts, lunging forward, finger pointed crookedly to the lone white figure on the sidewalk. "He set me up! He set me up!" There are hands all over him. L's expression changes but Light's vision is blurring and he can't see it. "Don't you understand? He's a liar! He's corrupt! He set me up and you all are letting him!"
It doesn't occur to him until later that none of them know that it's L he's pointing at, that no one recognizes the sickly man in frumpy clothes as the one pulling the strings of this operation. Accusations mean nothing when flung at a nobody, an extra on the film reel that plays them through this action scene.
Mikami is watching him like a spectator, mingled sympathy and disgust and something like plain scientific interest warring on his expressionless face.
"You have to let me go!" he yells, without thinking, only feeling it, the tidal wave of hollow rage and the sharp sting of abandonment. He was always betrayed, but now he is alone.
L stays on the other side of the street. Light's voice hits high notes. He feels like he is going to faint. He doesn't remember the last time he slept, or ate, or even realized he was in a physical body and not simply an omniscient, overarching consciousness moving through the city, trying to fix every one of its tragedies at once.
Children are dying, are dead, and he doesn't care. Misa has lost her Note and he doesn't care. He is coming apart, making a public spectacle of himself and if he feels anything particular it's lost under the gauzy suffocation of the moment. "It was him," he yells again, as if it will mean anything this time. They're barely even looking where he's pointing. He's not even sure he's speaking out loud.
He's being pulled into a car, the tinted interior drowning him like a cold dip in a lake, and he sees Mikami being questioned by some of the men off to the side, and Takada's building just down the street hazy with the early glow, passersby watching with curious trepidation, the streets pervaded with an oblique disquiet. Through the slanting cracks between the bodies pulling and pushing at him he can see L standing there on the other side of the street.
A car pulls up, beige and beaten up, loping to a stop at the curb, and L climbs in. Whoever opens the door for him has a rowdy head of black hair and a white t-shirt. Two L's, he thinks, and wants to laugh because it's the stuff of fantasies just as much as it is of nightmares. One is already too much to keep a hold on. He cannot possibly manage anymore. He can't manage anything right now. Even sitting up is hard.
He slumps onto the policeman beside him.
"We just want to ask you some questions," the man says in an unsteady voice. He's sounds distantly familiar, like maybe they'd met one day when Light used to go and visit his father at the office. The person that Light is now, ungainly and struggling, without a way to differentiate up from down and left from right - L from himself from the other L from the city streets that the cold, pale sun beats down on - is sharply different from any person he has ever been before.
"No, you don't," he says, low and conspiratorial, and maybe partly unconscious. "You want to kill me."
They pass the car with two L's in it when they pull away from the curb, the low rumble of the motor merging with the buzzing in Light's head to form something like a lullaby. He's dripping slowly into sleep, but he has just enough awareness to register, with a soft blink, that one of the L's is grinning at him with a mouth that he's never seen before.
The sidewalk fills up with the blue-black uniforms of the NPA and Misa is at the window before Takada even finishes writing. She knows what's happening before she sees him being shoved into the car, wants to run out and would if she could get herself to move, but it all feels too futile. The streets are filling up with onlookers and she feels like the furthest satellite in the heavens from two stories above.
Everything's crashing, but everything always has been.
Takada comes slowly, drifting over with haughty grace, to stand beside her. "Doesn't Light work for the police?" she says, with only vague curiosity as they cart him off.
Misa doesn't answer. This feels at once like deja vu and a prophecy. History repeating. History forever happening in every moment and in every possible future. There's a group of helmeted men surrounding Mikami's lean, stranded figure and as they move - in one great organized mass, an oncoming army - towards the building they're in, Misa realizes that they are coming for her and nothing else.
Not everything is lost, but nothing is found, and all she really wants is to curl up in a warm bed with Light's sleeping body - because he's only kind when he's unconscious - and write names in her book the way she is now accustomed to. She has designed herself around his grand plans, morphed to fit the role of his murderous goddess, and losing that is just as good as losing him. And now he really is lost.
There's a heavy knock on the door and if Rem were here this would be different, but both she and Ryuk have been absent all day and there's nothing for it. Takada goes to answer and Misa drops the scrap of paper clenched in her hand, losing with it both her memory and any meaning that the letters traced out of the coffee table - S-A-D-I-E M-A-R-K-O-V-I-T-C-H - might have held.
The cops come in and they cuff her and she wonders why. She doesn't glance at the English words, just yells a lot about Light and gets tears on her cheeks.
The first day after they had left him Syd had slept for 14 hours. The dust in his apartment had flared up with his entrance, circling like a slow storm in the mid-morning light of his entryway and he'd collapsed on his bed and slept until the middle of the night, basking in the relief of his loneliness. The absence of the overhanging threat.
The next morning he buys coffee and pastries on his own dime and goes down to the station as soon as Edmund's shift starts, with an apologetic smile and several packets of sugar. He can't remember how Edmund takes his coffee, so he prepares for everything.
The relief in his eyes when he sees Syd is relieving in itself, and after tentative pleasantries they make lunch plans and Syd goes out for a several hour long smoke to check on the shop, clean up the blood stains, take out the rubbish, and google how to make the smell of death go away.
At noon they meet at a pub for sandwiches. Edmund's job forbids drinking on his lunch hour and, against his better judgement, Syd is taking Beyond'd advice and sticking with the sobriety. They don't talk about much of value, only a passing mention of Wedy - "What happened with that American bird, then?" - and nothing but a staggered awkwardness to suggest the uneasy terms on which they'd left each other.
"No more ghosts, then?" is the parting question.
Syd smiles and something aches but he lets it. "No more ghosts," he says, and they leave it on that note.
It's only the next day that he gets things sorted out well enough to make the drive out to the cemetery. He picks his car up at Heathrow, unscathed but stinking of cigarettes and tuned to all the bad 80's radio stations. Sadie had been buried in her hometown, which is just outside of an hour's drive from London and stained a violent autumn orange at this time of year. Her gravestone is new and shines a cool slate grey next to the worn plots of her relatives. The spaces reserved for her parents are unoccupied. She'd died before them. They'd always said Syd was a bad influence, and obviously they'd been right.
The last time he had been to her grave B had been there, and Syd had been drunk and crying and horrified. The day is peaceful here, a billowing film-view of the countryside, and it feels like a whole world separate from the last few days of nightmarish mundanity and tiredness.
He can still feel B's arms around him, the touch seared into his skin. There's something more than wrong with that man, but Syd is by this point past caring. He is here and she is here, if still and cold and rotted through. He is with her and that's what matters.
The bone is in his satchel. He can't remember what part of the leg it is, the technical name - it's been too long since he's been in school and he'd been too spliffed up for it to matter at the time, anyway. It's broad daylight when he starts digging, but no one's around and no one comes to stop him, even as evening comes on. The job takes twice as long by himself, but the purity of the task overhauls his exhaustion.
This is the right thing to do. He's just giving back what's been stolen from her.
When he finally reaches the coffin he has a hell of a time getting it open, hands fumbling in the mounting dark and wondering vaguely about the smell. It had stunk worse the first time, but since she's more fully decomposed now, should't it be worse? He decides there must be some biological reason for this - maybe the smell fades, it doesn't much matter - as he finally manages to get a grip and pull back the lid of the coffin.
It's empty.
He stares for several moments, squinting, trying to see a corpse that is not there. Sadie is not in her grave.
And it occurs to him then that he'd lied, or just been wrong, or both, because there are plenty more ghosts left.
tbc.
end notes: hello, syd! hello, takada and mikami! hello, light's good old psychosis! hello, the beginning of the end! we're officially edging into third arc and it may be a bumpy ride, but hopefully you guys will like it somewhat? we're going to be seeing a lot of mystical and supernatural elements in the following chapters, because that's something i love about the dn universe and am excited to explore.
i'm hoping against hope that the next update won't take as long, and also that this chapter didn't disappoint too much? i love you guys, thank you so much for reading, and as always, all reviews and comments are wildly appreciated and treasured!