warnings: so much canon-bending and made up shinigami mythology, still heavy on the LxB, mentions of past abuse, minor character death. mostly this chapter isn't very eventful in any meaningful way? oops.
notes: so, only three weeks for an update, that's not so abominable this time, is it? well, anyway, hi, i'm taking a break from tumblr this week and thus getting plenty done, so here you are! very special special thanks to my bb darling friend ren for introducing me to the poem that is the source of this chapter's leading quote. this time what's going on is mostly a weird exploration of L/B/mello/wedy in varying dynamics because i like tangents but also there's build-up and a vague hint of plot. mostly just awkward domesticity, tho!
anyway, cheers, i struggled a lot with some of these scenes so i hope it's at least somewhat readable, and even if it's not thank you all for your continued support and kindness!
chapter twenty-six - the big bang.
"I am the one below,
and they come up to me.
I am the judgment and the acquittal.
I, I am sinless,
and the root of sin derives from me."
- Unknown, The Thunder, Perfect Mind
"I'm going to tell you a story, Midora."
"Oh, why me, your majesty?"
"Why?" The King asks himself, blinking his great eye up at the quivering, cold heavens that peek in through the worn edges of his golden chambers, seeing in a moment the destruction and the rebirth of a number of worlds, and wondering vaguely why it is so drafty in here. "Because you're the only one who still listens to me."
It starts with darkness. God, or somebody, says, "Let there be light!" at some point, but before that there is darkness, and an infinite, nebulous emptiness that floats in it and that it floats in. The universe is not a universe, not even an idea, only an absence. The dark is the hollow where the light should be, but the light doesn't even know it exists yet. Nothing knows, nothing exists, and the absence is swallowed over and over by itself.
The first idea that the universe ever has is death.
The second is light.
So, "Let there be light!" says God, or somebody, or nobody, but it echoes through the expanse of existence which does not yet exist and brings it into being. The light goes on, the light goes off, flickering in and out, learning the ways of creation and destruction, teaching itself life and death.
And the world grew out of this cycle, this whirring back and forth, planets swirling, stars catching fire, heavens coasting over hells and realities stacking on top of one another, and inside of each other, small doors to big worlds burrowing into silent places, expanding and contracting against one another without ever changing in size.
The world learned about breath, about water, about stone and bone and meteor showers, about liquids and gases and solids, about dark, undetectable fleshy parts that hide even from God's - or somebody's, or nobody's - pronouncements. It learned to crawl, and walk, and run, and build with its hands. It learned fire, and trees, and salty sea air, and airless vacuums in the depths of space. It learned flight and learned purgatory, morality and chaos, laughter and time, age and beauty and fear and kindness and sleep.
It learned all of these things, and more, but it never forgot death.
"Where did you learn this story, your Majesty, if I may ask?"
"Oh, I think I dreamed it."
"Is it true?"
"I know it to be true, but maybe I dreamed that knowledge also."
"Have you ever asked the Upstairsmen about it?"
"No, no, I've never thought to. There's an idea, though, Midora. But they don't seem to come around anymore, do they?"
"No, they don't."
"Would you like to hear the rest of the story?"
"I don't suppose I have a choice, do I, Majesty?"
"I don't suppose you do."
Before men killed with rocks and knives and their bare hands, they killed with death. It was not an airy concept, but a solid object, a whirring darkness that could be contorted and directed at will. It had existed always within the void of before, and remained still in the now of after. Neanderthals and animals and the quivering dark shapes that wade in the shadows all warred against one another with this weapon, each breaking off a piece of it for themselves and honing it to its sharpest, most formidable point. They fought, they died, they fucked and propagated and grew and fought more. Death was bred into them with life.
But soon the light began to overhaul this violence, revealing patterns and giving shape to the world, allowing things awareness. When humans began to know themselves, they forgot about death in its purest form, and began building tools to prod at it from afar, leading it like a dog on a leash, rather than a pulsing, growling part of them. And in this separation the dark shapes were drowned out, herded by the shapes of light into tiny corners of existence, though given free reign throughout their own territory.
Humanity learned to ponder itself and the shadows learned to slip in, gentle and caressing, offering the ease of pure death. No violence, no blood, just an end. The humans who were lucky, or unlucky, enough to happen upon these leavings of a time past were entranced by them, became mired as they had once been in the luxury of death's empty dark, and found it inescapable. Their fragile minds had only just learned love, and were cowed by it, and the introduction of such gentle dissipation was too foreign, a contrast to their clamoring, self-obsessed emotions.
They used death all wrong.
They used it to kill rather than to end, but the universe did not reject this action, because the choice to do this shaped it into being, made it a viable option. Made it part of the world again, if in thin, uneven stripes.
First it came as an animal, then a tree branch, a strange stone, a bronze tool, iron, steel, glass, gold, music and poetry, the written word. As humanity shifted and changed, death changed with it, shifting form to best fit in with the current reality. Thousands of years passed before it reached its latest form, a neat, indistinguishable thing. A black slip, with pages and pages and never-ending pages, opened and tuned to the written mind of today's society.
A speck of black wading into the bright day.
And God, or somebody, or nobody, said again, "Let there be light," and there was light.
"Oh, I think I know this story, Majesty," Midora says, lounging heavily at the edges of the King's overhanging shadow.
The King frowns, brow clenched in aged dissatisfaction, like an old man puzzling over his surroundings, wondering how in the world he'd gotten where he was. "You couldn't possibly," he pronounces, to the wide and empty room. Midora is the only one of his subjects who is here. Midora is the only one who ever comes anymore. "It's a very old and royal story, and it's mine, and you don't know it. You're mistaken."
"Of course, your Majesty," Midora says slimly, but she thinks she has dreamed this same dream. She thinks maybe she is dreaming now.
This realm has been heavy with the haze of sleeplessness for a long time now, so long that time has turned over and lost itself, and they are floating, hollow, in both the then and the now. Maybe the story sounds familiar because she has lived it, is living it.
She rolls onto her back, staring up at the broken dome of the ceiling, the darkness slipping in to mingle with the gold light. "Do you tire of me, Majesty?" she asks after long, stretching moments of silence.
"I tire of everything, Midora," the King says heavily, breathing a long sigh out with the words.
She had been looking for a dismissal, not a tragedy, but she rolls her eyes and sits up, balancing her heavy chin on one thin hand. "Age and power will do that, I hear."
The King shakes, his whole body moving with his head, and he may be indicating the negative, but he looks more like he's having a bodily spasm. She's used to this, though. It used to be sad, and before that it had been funny, and now it is just routine.
"No, no," the King says, "I don't mind the quiet, nor the emptiness. It's the whistling, the whirring that I can't stand. I wish it would stop. I can't sleep with this terrible clamor going on." He shuts his eyes, the corners crinkling with pressure, and if Midora hadn't unlearned pity, she might be feeling it for him now.
"Clamor?" she says, head tilting to the side, and the whole room rocking with it. It's like a dreamscape, this place, too bright and indistinct, and maybe that's why the others had ceased attending. Maybe that's why she always comes back. "I don't hear anything, Majesty."
His eyes open, face contorting with surprise, but it glosses over with weariness soon enough. "No, you wouldn't," he says airily, "even such a violent noise is too far away for your ears. I wonder if they can hear it on earth, though. Do you think they can? I don't imagine they can escape it at such close range."
Midora straightens as well as she can, curved little body trying to right itself, and she says, "What's making the noise, Majesty? Do you know?"
"Of course," the King says, puffing himself up, evidently insulted by the implication that he might not. "What sort of king do you imagine me to be? It's an Abomination, of course."
Midora tilts her head to the side. She doesn't know what that means. She says, "I don't know what that means."
"No," the King says, "you wouldn't." And then he closes his eyes and begins humming. She thinks, perhaps, just to drown out the noise.
L spends several minutes resisting the urge to, and another couple denying the reality that he is dry heaving over the dashboard. His throat feels all washed out, his body sticky and gelatinous from the highs and lows, sweating and shaking with chills. Despite his general unflappability, he has been sick before and he knows what it feels like, but that doesn't make it an easy reality to confront.
When it rains, it pours, he supposes.
Or maybe it'd been pouring all along and he'd just been hiding out from it.
There is a large, disturbingly gentle hand on his back, stroking in soft circles and digging lightly into relieving pressure points, and a part of him wants to take the low easy dirty road, just run away laughing with the devil. Fly B and himself to some far off tropical island that has palm trees and hula girls that don't speak any language he knows, fruity alcoholic drinks, all the trappings of the decadent escape of the wealthy and the powerful.
He is both of those things but he's never put himself in the same category as the rest of them. He's like Light in that way. Maybe he's like Light in a lot of ways. Maybe he's like B in a lot ways, too. Maybe that's why he's trying to throw up now - though without much success.
"When's the last time you ate?" B asks, lowly, comfortingly, a dull and loving condescension that he luxuriates in. It makes L feel warm and not in the nice ways. Are there any nice ways?
"Get off me," he says, shrugging B's hand off and losing the only bodily warmth he's got with it.
B makes a clicking noise with his tongue and L can see his expression without looking at him. "Touchy, touchy," he remarks silkily. "Just because you sold your boyfriend up the river doesn't mean you've gotten rid of me, too. He was just soups and salads. I'm the main course."
"Please don't compare yourself to food, or I'll have the urge to be sick again."
B pulls the lever and slides back in his chair, stretching out lazily, like they're sunning on a beach in Ibiza and not sitting curbside in a stolen car trying to maintain consciousness. Well, maybe the last part is just L.
"I think I'm sort of a roast beef," B says, "or a lamb chop. Something heavy and chewy that you have to kill to eat. Something that bleeds a lot." He draws a finger down L's shoulder and it's slinky and rough and the opposite of comforting. If L could manage to vomit he'd do it on him just to make a point.
"Please," he laughs, hoarse and empty, looking up abruptly and getting a head-rush that he tries to blink away, "you're a fruit tart, all the way." Sticky sweet and pretty, but ultimately nauseating and far too rich. Thinking about it makes him sick. Everything makes him sick right now.
B leans over on the edge of his seat, fluttering his eyelashes like a schoolgirl. "Alright, vanilla wafer."
L humphs and lets his eyes fall closed. "Most people would say dead fish."
"Most people haven't fucked you."
"Are we talking general population or criminal population, because if it's the latter, I'd have to contest - "
"Oh please, L," B snaps, grabbing him roughly by the jaw in a way that one probably shouldn't handle an ill person. "You're playing it so tough nowadays, all dressed up in Grandpa's clothes, seen and done all the dirty things, but I remember you sporting the same sort of ugly pretty waste at age 12, and 15, on and on, and it hasn't gotten anymore creditable, just more well-rehearsed."
L's quivering a little bit under his touch and he's not sure if the two things are mutually exclusive or not but he hates himself slightly for it anyway. "You don't believe me?" he says, managing to sound indignant even through a scratchy whisper.
B leans in close, breathes all over him. "I'm sure you've touched a few people in their nasty places, but all the flashy promiscuity? Don't all the amateur psychologists say sexual deviance most often comes from sexual trauma?"
"Well, as the traumatizer," L spits, feeling loose and uppity and angry without any energy to fuel it, "I suppose you would know."
B doesn't react like L would like him to, doesn't clam up or bat off the accusations, doesn't victim-blame or steep himself in hypocrisy like a textbook rapist. That would make everything easier. If B was anything like that they wouldn't even be having this conversation. He smiles thin and self-deprecating, and whispers, "I'm your monster," softly and pleadingly in L's ear, and L is dizzy and lightheaded and starving and nauseous at once and he threads his fingers into B's hair and shoves their lips together and kisses harder than he needs or even has the physical ability to.
Glutton for punishment, as always, but as L thinks it he isn't even sure which of them he's referring to.
B grabs him back, pulls him closer, tugs him in like a whirlpool with grabby hands and stiff fingers and this is the true romance that he grew up on, this is the thing that made him sick - or one of the things, because in retrospect, Qullish's little experiment in socialization, while good for international politics, probably wasn't ideal for child development. Such is life. Everyone has fucked up childhoods. Even Light Yagami, in his way.
B sinks his teeth into L's lip, clawing him across the car and into his lap, and gives him a reason to forget about Light Yagami - huddled and indignant in an interrogation room or a holding cell as he must be by now - and to remember the rain-wet mornings of his boyhood and the tiny hands that tore him apart and stitched him back together.
B is hard against him and L is not, doesn't seem to have the bodily energy to get it up, but he's not doing it for the pleasure so much as the sustenance, the disgrace and the madness, the feeling of being drenched and swallowed, overtaken and loved - or a dodgy, dark estimation of it - by something.
"You're the knight," B breathes, pulling back minutely to whisper ragged against his jaw, "and I'm your dragon. You're the hero and I'm your villain, right? Right?"
"Stop talking," L says, hooking a hand around his jaw and pulling him back in a messy kiss, the scratch of something that might be stubble - his own or B's, he can't tell - lips wet and cool at the seams, sticking together and pulling apart, rhythmic and sickening. The whole world does a somersault, and when it tries to right itself, overbalances into the window glass.
The light bump on his skull is nothing to the head rush, to the liquidity of his limbs, and B holds him up at the ribcage, like a prom date.
"I might throw up on you," L says, blinking his eyes open hazily.
B shrugs his expression without moving his shoulders, grin fond and tortured at once. "You could do worse."
Isn't that the truth? L feels ridiculous as much as he does sick, a grown man straddling the lap of another grown man in the front seat of a stolen vehicle. This stuff is alright for the teen years, maybe even at 22, but by his age and with his bank balance, he should at least be fooling around in a nicer car. With a nicer man.
Where have all the good men gone? Ah yes, away in a police car to pay their dues. There's no such thing as a good man. There's no such thing as good. There's no such thing as anything. L can't tell if his sudden metaphysical issues have been brought on because of his complex emotional circumstances or because everything is spinning.
He leans in to kiss Beyond again, sighing into it for lack of anything more substantial to grab onto, but he's quite firmly and unexpectedly rebuffed.
"Hold on there, cowboy," B says, tugging him back by the scruff of his neck. "Contrary to what one might think, I actually prefer my sexual partners alive, and you look like you've passed death's door to have drinks in its living room." He strokes L's hair, hands mollifying and sharp, and cool like the air around them. "So, how about we pack it up, try to find a decent cheeseburger somewhere, and I can fuck you in the waiting room on our way to visit god in his holding cell."
L freezes up. He's sure he's been rejected by B before, but never physically and never for his own sake rather than as a part of one of the torturous games Beyond has always played with L and with himself in equal measure. L hasn't got much pride - or else he does, and it twists itself in strange, hypocritical shapes to make way for the indignities of his existence - but the way he's held back makes him dizzy with self-loathing.
B has always attacked him, so for him to volunteer protection must mean that L's weakness is violently apparent.
He slumps sideways against the driver's door, hand searching bumpily for the catch of the lock. "Let go of me."
B's chuckle is hard and bright and it hurts his eardrums. "I'm the only thing holding you up. I'm your protection against gravity, beauty queen, so unless you're dearly missing your old friend, the floor, you might wanna take the hand up I'm offering." His fingers stroke placatingly against L's hipbone as he speaks. What a tool.
"I don't," L says, and finds the handle, pulling it open with a few rough jerks and an uneasy shove.
He's out of B's lap quickly, losing the contact between their bodies and gaining his breath with the separation. The sidewalk is cold on his bare feet and the sensation levels him. The world still rocks from side to side but he follows it instead of resisting, and if he's walking away from the car in a zig-zagging path then at least it's away.
"Yes, yes, point made," B calls after him, still laughing but there's an edge of his voice like the fleeting beginnings of worry. "You're strong and independent and you don't need no man, okay, but you do need a cane or something, unless you just like slanting diagonally for the view."
"I'm fine," L insists, and wants to laugh too, and would if he weren't so indignantly nauseous.
"You've never been fine in your whole life," B says, and L hears a door slam and knows he's being followed.
It makes him speed up, but that makes everything go jagged, reality cracking into wispy pieces around him, head fizzing like an old car radio, the voices from people he's met, conversations he's had, dreams he's dreamed all spinning his head in a whirlpool of noise and sensation, white and black spots drifting in and out of his vision, a bright sharp emptiness filling him up, getting louder and louder and harder to hold onto.
He doesn't remember falling down, didn't feel himself collide with the ground, doesn't even remember at first where he is or what he's doing - could be waking up in the morning, could be on the floor by the air conditioner, or in the hidden bedroom he was locked up in, or one of the many hotel sofas of his past - and as B's face swims into his vision he thinks at first he's looking at his own reflection. Then he remembers, hard and fast, like an abrupt drop into the deep end, suddenly submerged in memory and emotion.
"I'm fine," he says, or tries to, throat parched, body drenched in cold sweat, stomach rolling, feeling half-dead and incapable of movement. He wants to close his eyes and just sleep here, wherever they are, whoever's around. He wants B to sleep with him. Just lay with him on the hard ground, like they'd done on the hill, like they'd done in so many darkened rooms.
"I know you are," B says with a small, infected smile, and L registers distantly shortly before he drops out of consciousness that it's a bald-faced lie.
The lamp in the room is too bright. Nobody asks him any questions, but they bring him some water and miso for a thin breakfast and watch him closely, all with their helmets on. Light doesn't think he's seen a face in hours. He falls asleep twice, and wakes up handcuffed to a chair both times, cheek pressed to the cool metal of the table, neck bent at an awkward angle, more exhausted every time.
He dreams he's awake, that they sentence him to death, but the execution chamber is his old high school and the electric chair is his old desk, and all the other students are standing around watching and pointing fingers. He dreams he is a small child lost at a street festival, his parents disappearing into the hectic, laughing crowd, the jovial music blurring to a rush in his ears, while two twin L's with matching grins do strange performance art on stage. He dreams of Misa, naked and pale and leading him through a house that he's never seen before, but recognizes as a place where they have grown old together, and one they will die in.
Everything smells like burnt coffee and the rot of the alley where she'd lost her memories. He dreams that Shinigami are not real, that he'd dreamed them, and the monotonous emptiness of his life previous to the Death Note is the true reality. He dreams that L is made up, that he is begging at someone's feet - Aiber's, maybe - to make him real, please make him real, while the investigation team looks on from the audience and ranks his performance out of 10. Ide gives him a 3.
His mouth tastes like a carpet when someone comes into the interrogation room and he wakes abruptly, sitting up and arranging himself as if he'd been waiting, bored and uninterested, all along.
He gets a vague sense that he should suspect that this is a dream, but he doesn't, even as his father stands in front of him, red-faced and breathing heavily, as if he'd run all the way to this room, this moment, without stopping. He looks at Light and Light looks at him and there's a strange instance of recognition, and possibly remembrance. He thinks maybe he'd forgotten his family in the last twenty four hours, forgotten himself. He'd just been a torrent of emotion, movement and reaction, scrambling exhaustion and fear.
"They told me to wear a helmet," his father says, his breaths slowing down.
Light blinks at him. "You didn't."
His father frowns at him. "Of course not," he says. He moves forward, stops with his hands on the back of the chair opposite Light, then pulls it out with a sudden jolt and sits. "What happened, Light?"
Brushing his hair out of his eyes, Light doesn't have to put in much effort to make himself look pitiable. "I was going to ask you that."
"They won't tell me," Soichiro says. "Orders from higher up, but nobody knows quite who. They say it's about the Kira investigation, but they're not charging you with anything. They're not even making accusations, they're just holding you here until they're told otherwise. It's - it's mindless, unjust, - "
"It's the system, Dad," Light says, even though he agrees. The fallibility of the law is the reason he'd started all of this in the first place.
His father is shaking his head. "But these men, my colleagues, they know you, Light. You grew up with them. I expected this kind of thing from L, but - " He stops, mouth quivering, then falling shut. Maybe he understands more than Light gives him credit for.
Light taps his fingers in an uneven tempo across the metal tabletop. He hates this room and his head is muggy and he spikes at once from cool sobriety to hysterical amusement. He wants to go home, he wants a bed to sleep in and someone to cook him breakfast. He wants the dead and the guilty to stop their screaming in his head. He looks up from under his eyelashes and if he's supposed to be selling innocence he might be falling down on the job.
He says, "You don't honestly think this could have been anyone else, do you?"
"Light," Soichiro starts.
"I saw him." That cuts him off right good. Light closes his eyes and the blacks and whites of L's figure are branded against the greys of the city in his mind's eyes, planted like a flag on a hilltop, a marker on a grave. "Across the street."
"Light, don't - "
"Why would I lie about this, Dad?" He thinks the real question that needs to be asked is why is he telling the truth? Maybe because it feels like the only thing left to do. The gauntlet has been thrown down and he's not going to shy away from the fight that calls him, even if he's struggling slightly to keep himself upright.
His father rubs at his unshaven chin, looking uncomfortable and unduly aged. "I didn't say you were lying. The stress, the panic, it can cause hallucinations, things like that." He closes his eyes and breathes in. "They said you were hysterical, screaming and struggling." He's looking at Light like wants to be told that it's not true, that someone had their information wrong, had gotten him confused with some other boy who's up for mass murder.
Light is disgusted but he's not sure who with. "You get pulled into a car by a dozen men in uniform without warning or explanation and you tell me how well you bear it."
Soichiro looks down. "That's fair." He studies his hands, and Light does, too, tracing the veins, lines worn thick with repeated action. There's a vague part of him that feels sorry for his father, for his misguided fears and his high, high hopes. He is a good man in a bad world, and he runs with the tide because that's all people like him can do. He deserves better. Light is changing the world for people like him, but he would never understand that.
At this point, he's not even sure he understands, either. There's too much in his head for principles and moral dilemmas. There is only his quest, the blood in him squirming around, the ragged images in his head of L naked, L grinning, L afraid and pretending not to be. L across the street, watching him in his despair. It's too much L, really, it makes him sick.
"Light," his father says, sighing and leaning back in his chair, posture loose and exhausted, abandoning his high-strung energy for the moment, "why does this keep happening?"
His eyes are watery and dark behind his glasses. Light remembers him when he'd been younger, more alive, a buoyant officer with a spring in is step and ill-fitting suits that Light had dug his fingers into the fabric of. Daddy's home, Daddy's home! The joy and the comfort, always slightly distant, and now a world away. He remembers when he'd wanted to make his father proud. He remembers achieving as much before his 10th birthday, then moving onto subsequent prospects without a glance back.
"I don't know," he says, and it's such a thin lie and he's almost disappointed when his father doesn't object to it, just sighs long and emptying and emptied, and closes his eyes with a thin, forgiving smile.
"Light's not Kira," Matsuda says, fingers tapping against the plastic top of his styrofoam coffee cup, looking around at all of them imploringly.
The brew is shit, tastes burnt, and Shuichi winces as he swallows it. He'd forgotten how much he hates waiting room coffee. He'd forgotten how much he hates waiting. The chief has been inside for longer than he'd anticipated, and he's starting to get itchy.
"Of course," Ide's saying, eyeing his watch.
Mogi grunts from his chair and Shuichi feels prompting eyes on him, and forces out a grim, "Right," and a tight, thoroughly unconvincing smile.
The leather soles of Aiber's shoes click loudly as he sways back and forth across the tiled floors. He's intoxicated again, but Shuichi can't even tell when he'd had the time to get himself that way. "I bet you," he starts, stumbling slightly over the gold tassels on his shoes, "wait - how much is 20,000 yen?"
"More than you probably have on you," Ide says with a keen mix of amusement and distaste, and a healthy dollop of nervous energy.
"I bet you," Aiber revises, a hazy grin on his face, "whatever I have on me that he is Kira, and that you'll have undeniable proof of that within the week."
The heater whirs at the side of the room, low and even, a rhythm one could fall asleep to. It's too early for this, but then there would never be a good time to play through this tired scene again. Don't they already know how this ends? Or maybe they don't know anything at all, and never will, and this is just another exercise in incapability.
"I'll take you up on that bet," Matsuda says effusively, sitting up straight, spilling a bit of coffee on his starched white sleeve.
"Gambling's illegal, Touta," Shuichi tells him idly, and lets his eyes fall closed. The day is already long and it's barely noon.
The Tokyo sewers remind Rem in many ways of the Shinigami Realm. In particular, there is an ancient and deserted castle in the depths of the Blue Mountains which had belonged to one of the lords of the Old Times and now belongs to no one, only sits silently, frozen in the cold spaces of the present and buried under the dirt and grime so native to their current reality. The place smells of rot, the walls caved in, halls dilapidated, vaulted ceilings fallen away to reveal the deep dark sky peeking in. She had played there - as much as any Shinigami can play - when she had been a few hundred years younger.
The rot in the Tokyo sewers is not human, not flora or fauna, not anything of this earth, and that of all reasons is why she knows she is on the right track. She worries endlessly about Misa, small and swamped in loneliness, or else with Light and undergoing his abuse, but she's doing this for her. Whoever is doing this is after pretty little girls and boys, and while Misa is well past the age limit, she is the same kind of victim. Men with knives and men with Notebooks and men with cameras, they're all bit players when it comes to miraculous evil, and Rem can protect Misa from them without much trouble; but this is something else.
Something citric and foaming with disease, laughing and sobbing and bleeding its unreal madness everywhere. The air down here smells like fractured reality and Rem knows that their Shinigami criminal - if it is even that - is what has made it this way.
There are shadows twisting behind her, the darkness learning new ways to move around her bright body, and suddenly she smells it sharp, and it doesn't smell at all like her home anymore. Following the sloping lines of the tunnel system, she isn't overly surprised to find the bodies. A boy and a girl of a similar age, lying next to each other, naked and soundless as sleep. Rem knows they are not sleeping. Misa tosses and turns, laughing and whimpering with her terrible, wonderful dreams. The children are silent.
"Where are you?" she says to the dark behind them, and receives no response but an echoing quiet.
Wherever the thing who did this is now, it's not here. She sighs at the bodies, tamping down on any feeling they might bring about. Death is bred into her, part of her very being, but the human world has distorted the purity of it, making it an ugly thing. Her long exposure to their evils and their goods and their hate and their fear and their aching love has twisted her. She feels almost scared, almost sorry, almost. But Misa is the claimant of most all of her human feeling, and she funnels it all in that direction.
Her worry spikes and she turns to leave. There's nothing else for her here. She'll tell Light Yagami what she's found and leave it to him to figure out the finer points of getting his team of small men to the bodies. She's done her job.
She's about to go when she feels the pull, the presence overtaking her, and she knows in that moment that there is another Shinigami in these sewers, and it is coming straight towards her, full speed ahead. She turns rapidly, ready to funnel all of the spiraling energy swirling inside of her into a fierce defense, when she hears a very familiar, very annoying laugh.
"Man," Ryuk says, swinging backwards, head arched back to stare at her upside-down, like a trapeze artist, "have I been looking everywhere for you!"
They're posed like a bride and groom on their honeymoon, except the bride is unconscious and the groom has a brown take-away bag under his arm.
"Mission success?" Wedy asks, brow raised, eyes tired, and B walks in and sets L down on the nest of ratty blankets that Mello had only recently vacated, after a short and traumatic nap.
L is pale as always, but his skin is shiny and grayish, hair wet with sweat. He doesn't ever look like he's in good health, but at this point he should probably be in bed, rather than wrapped in a few measly sheets on the ground. Mello can attest to the healing properties of such a resting place, which are precisely: none.
"Depends what mission you mean," B says, tucking him in like a fussy nanny, hands so gentle and exacting that it's hard to watch. "God, Jr.'s been corralled for the time being, his good-time girl, too, and the captain of this armada is sure to make a stirring appearance just as soon as he gets all - or any - of his faculties back." He strokes L's hair and Mello really wishes he wouldn't. Not in front of them like that.
Even if it's not supposed to be a secret, it should at least be private.
"Is he gonna be okay?" Mello asks, testing the waters of worry to see how comfortable he finds them. He's not sure if it's more advisable to hold onto his earlier anger, a shield to protect him from whatever is happening here and whatever is going to happen, but he can't quite help it. Sick and helpless, L seems like a far more pitiable character than an unforgivable one.
B grins, letting up his touch to sway his way over to them, handing out burgers and fries and lukewarm coffees from some off-brand Americana fast food joint. "I've never known him to be that, but either way, he'll be up and running in no time, even against the doctor's orders."
Mello takes a few ravenous bites of his burger. For all he knows it could be disgusting, but sustenance is sustenance and for the purposes of survival it tastes like heaven. Around an ill-mannered mouthful, he mumbles, "I'm guessing you're the doctor?" with not half the disparagement that he's intending. He swallows thickly. "That doesn't seem safe."
"Don't worry, sport," B says, ruffling Mello's hair like a favored pet, "we've played plenty of times before."
Wedy snorts indelicately and there's enough connotation there for Mello to not want to fully examine the remark, so he just shrugs out of B's reach and makes himself a picnic on the ground, cross-legged and shoveling fries into his mouth.
"Anyone have a pen and paper?" B says, switching quickly onto the next topic, pale mouth worrying his fingertips, at the same time as Wedy pushes herself off the wall and asks, "So, he really did it?" with an unreadable glance towards L.
No," Wedy says, as B chirps, "Yes, Ma'am," both responding to the other's questions at once, and from the floor Mello rolls his eyes and digs into his pocket.
"Syd gave me a permanent marker," he says, holding it out, and B glides over and snatches it up faster than he can process, looks around for a bit of paper, and coming up empty, pulls back the sleeve of his shirt - a shirt he was definitely not wearing last night - and starts a bullet-point list on the skin of his arm.
"Toilet paper, toothpaste, what else?" he asks, casually, as if they're a suburban family that does this every week.
"A shower," Mello says dispassionately, chugging down his coffee black even though the taste makes him wince.
Wedy slants over on her small, bare feet - heels abandoned at the edge of the room, along with his jacket and belt - to stand over them. "What did L's team think of this? They're really letting him point the finger at Yagami again? Tenth time's the charm, or something?"
"I wouldn't know," B says with an overly pronounced wink, scribbling something else on his arm, then turning back to face Mello. "I can rig the waterline before I go out, get the baths working. Maybe some electricity, too, if you're all good girls and boys."
"Thanks ever so," Wedy says with an eye roll, but she doesn't seem half so afraid as she probably should be of a man who has tortured and beaten her. After a moment of thought, she adds, "Shampoo and conditioner. And soap if there's none here. Deodorant and a razor, too, and - "
"I'm running out of arm here, princess."
"Maybe you should have thought of that before you made me leave most of my luggage in London."
"Uh," Mello puts in, feeling left out of their back and forth, as usual, "shouldn't we get something for L?"
"Like a sugar cube?" B asks dreamily, palm cupping his chin as he glances over at L's sickly form.
"Like medicine." Mello sips his coffee again, the bite of caffeine making him bolder. "Or, like, a real doctor?"
Beyond caps the pen, falling back dramatically on his elbows, body spreading in the large room, his long limbs and eerie shadows taking over the space like something daunting. A horror movie monster. He laughs and he sounds happy and only very vaguely malevolent. "If we're going into kidnapping, I'm going to need more than just an arm."
"Can't we come with you?" Mello asks. "We're free to go where we want now, right?"
B scratches under his chin. "That is what I said, isn't it?" He shrugs. "Sure thing, we can make an outing of it, but somebody needs to stay home and watch Daddy."
"Please stop calling him that," Wedy says languidly, sipping her coffee like it's out of a china cup and they're having this conversation around a mile-long dining room table. "I'll stay if the kid can't stand to be cooped up in here any longer, as long as he pinkie promises he won't forget a thing on my list." She glances sideways at Mello, a small smile quirking her lips with a fondness that he doesn't understand, but feels reflected in himself.
He is not afraid of her anymore. She is comfortable. She is known. It's good, he thinks, to finally know something.
So, he chimes in quickly with, "I'll stay behind. It's not like I want much and, well, I figure I owe you one." He looks up through his eyelashes at her, the way he's watched her do - to the men in their airport security uniforms, to Syd while he'd shivered next to her, even to B once or twice. The windows in the room are all covered but one, and only thin cracks of light make it in, but one falls straight across Wedy's face, and he can see the conspiratorial jump of her eyes clearly
"For the torture," she asks, straight-up, not pulling any punches, "or for not listening to me when I gave you some damn good advice?"
Mello had been thinking off the latter, of the way he'd shrugged her off back in the car, and it had ended with her ruining one very expensive looking shoe to come in and save their asses. The torture had slipped his mind for the moment. He feels guilty for even a second of negligence. He's resigned himself to his immoral means, but he cannot forget, not ever, or it devalues any suffering that he's caused or allowed to happen, and he doesn't want to be like that.
He looks at B, who's spread himself out enough to cross through several patches of light, and then to L, who is curled up in the cool shadows at the edges of the room. He wonders if they're like that, if they remember, or if they operate oppositely, and one does and the other doesn't. He wonders which one is which.
He takes a long gulp of his coffee. "Mostly," he says, "I just want to stay here."
Wedy shrugs, accepting that as easily as she seems to the rest of the world, already resigned to any chaos and calamity that might occur. B laughs, pushing himself up and turning his glinting grin on Mello like a spotlight.
"A sudden desire to play guard dog?" he asks Mello slyly. "I know how that goes, baby boy."
He winks, and Mello really doesn't think that he understands, but he doesn't want more condescending pet names thrown at him, so he doesn't say that, just watches Wedy and Beyond shift in and out of the stripes of sunlight as they get ready to go, and finishes his cheeseburger.
Kiyomi gets dressed for the first time in days. She showers, blow-dries her hair, and paints her face in glossy make-up. She cleans up around the apartment, washes old dishes, sweeps. She finds a small scrap of paper where Misa Amane had been standing when they'd come in to take her away, laying on the floor like a marker, sticking out dull white on the wine red carpeting. A part of her wants to keep it as a sort of memento, an item important to whatever the hell it is that's going on, but Teru catches her staring at it in her open palm, and she hurriedly throws it away, brushing off any meaning it might hold for the sake of appearance.
She'd tried to get him to go home. He'd even left for an hour or so, but he'd ended up on her doorstep again with an armful of legal documents that needed examination and correction, a frail kindness in his eyes.
"I worried you might not be alright," he'd said.
"I'm alright," she'd replied, but she'd let him in anyway. She's known herself to be cruel, but not unduly, and he'd looked so small and pathetic on her doorstep with his life's work, eyes bloodshot, begging for entrance.
She's considered that he might be in love with her, and that she maybe ought to be in love with him, but she's seen boys and men alike in the thrall of romance, staring at her adoringly, and he does not look like them. She appreciates that about him. He is strained and fragile and maybe couldn't be in love if he tried, which is good as far as it's the last thing that she needs.
"Coffee?" she offers, when he's all set up at her kitchen table with his files spread out and his hair in a careless ponytail. "We have milk now."
It's supposed to be a joke but she thinks maybe it hits more like a barb. They haven't talked about Light or Misa since it happened, haven't combined their mutual knowledge of the mysteries surrounding the Yagami name, or the monster with red eyes, or the overhanging presence of the detective known as L. But they will. They need to, or she's going to lose her breath again, and curl up back in her dressing gown with a bottle of vodka and days to lose.
But she'll let him get some work done beforehand. She's knows how to be kind, sometimes.
Jusco is large and fluorescent and the first thing Beyond does when he gets a cart is ride it around like a bumper car, laughing as a five-year-old would and steering around the sharp turns with the carelessness of someone even younger. Wedy supposes that you unlearn cautiousness once you realize that you can't die. Or maybe he can, maybe there's some secret code to be punched in, or point to be pressed, and he'll fold as easily as any of them.
Maybe before she would have enjoyed figuring it out, destroying him and watching him flutter and fall the way he'd made her do more than once. Now, while the satisfaction would still be applicable, the loss of his wild, heartless, lovelorn presence would send the situation as it stands all aflutter. He's a shithead, but he's the operator of this machine they're all strapped into and if he goes down all the gears stand to stall, the house of cards collapsing - pick your favorite metaphor, they all spell bad news.
"About L," Wedy begins, when they're in the feminine hygiene aisle, ambling past row upon never-ending row of tampons. She doesn't turn it into a question, just lets it hang.
"What about him?" B says over his shoulder, tongue clicking impatiently as they roll along slowly to the offbeat rhythm of one squeaking cart wheel. "I'd reckon you'd know most anything better than I would, given the timeline of your acquaintance versus mine. I should be asking you things."
Wedy shrugs, steering them toward the deodorant. "Shoot."
He grins and points an embarrassing finger-gun at her. "Don't tempt me, Barbie."
She cocks her eyebrow but the action feels almost impotent in opposition to his tyrannical offhandedness. "I'm sure I always tempt you, Ken."
"Tell me about the first time you met him?" he asks, almost coyly, like it would be a real favor for her to oblige. He's watching her pick out deodorant with big lonely nighttime eyes, the same way he's been doing for the whole shopping trip - not participating, just giving directions and then observing studiously as she carries them out. This just feels like another in a long line of requests.
She says, "What about it? It wasn't very eventful. He called me up when I was in police custody, offered me a bargain, and had me out of there in under twelve hours. He had the voice modulator on and sounded like a tool and I figured he probably couldn't do a thing for me, but that it was worth a shot. Turns out I was right." She shrugs, sloughing the whole of it off as a dim remnant of a far away time, a far away girl who thought she was smarter than she ended up being.
B shakes his head as they turn into the next aisle. "No, no, that's cardboard. I mean when you really met him. I don't care about your acquaintance with the detective L," he says, pronouncing the title with a hoity-toity lilt and a roll of his eyes, "I wanna know when you met the scraggly little man who houses the brain that launched a thousand ships. What did you think of him? What did you feel? I want all the lurid details." He sounds like he wants to live vicariously through her experience.
That's tougher to think of. The scandal in Prague had not been the most enjoyable period of her life, and had in fact made her recent sojourn with Beyond and company look like a carefree jaunt with a couple of dear pals. She had known the word hunger and she could've used it in a sentence, but in Prague she'd truly learned it and it had learned her, wrapping up around her like a quiet, aching friend and seeing her off into dark places. She'd fucked the case up. She'd really fucked it up and she'd suffered for her mistakes. She'd assumed her far-removed benefactor had given her up for dead, and then he'd wandered in, as if by accident, in a Czech military uniform, and pulled her into a car. The building had burned behind them as they'd driven away and, after the fact, in his hotel room in London, he'd told her the fire had been started by a gas leak and she'd chosen to believe him not because he was overly convincing, but because it had been easier to stomach than the truth.
"I didn't know that he was L at the time," she tells him, turning towards the shelves like she's looking for something important, even though there's nothing in this aisle but baby formula and condoms. "I just thought he was another field operative, like me, sent in to clean up the mess I'd made of the case L had me on."
"And did he?" Beyond asks, flicking at a packet that says, 'Ribbed for her pleasure!' in excitable yellow kanji. "Clean it up?"
"Burned it down, more like."
She walks in smooth steps down the bright white linoleum rows, stepping on the cracks, breaking her mother's back. Beyond follows easily, seeming to travel without moving his legs, a specter caught in a rare moment of well-lit solidity.
Wedy's voice is flat when she speaks. "He came to visit me in the hospital a few times, afterwards. Didn't bring flowers or cards or anything, or even tell me to get well soon. I'd just wake up sometimes and he'd be there, and he'd start talking to me about some article he'd read in a science journal, or some gruesome bit of international news. If he'd been slightly nicer I would have assumed he'd had a crush on me or something, but he wasn't and I didn't. Eventually I got used to it, to him, and even though I thought he was off-putting and somewhat annoying, I started to enjoy the company. Then he disappeared one day after a couple of weeks of this, with no warning or tact, and I was angry at him, and then I mostly forgot about him, and then when I was well enough to start doing jobs for L again, I finally realized from my employer's sharp shift in demeanor towards me that he'd been the man who'd pulled me out of a mob prison in the Czech Republic."
They've moved into the frozen foods section by now and Wedy's not even sure if they want anything from here, but the flow of her narration had been dependent on her track straight ahead, without any interruptions.
"And is that when you slept with him?" B asks with minimal interest, as if they're talking about someone he doesn't know and doesn't care to.
"No," Wedy says stolidly, "that was later on." She doesn't elaborate. Before he can shake her down for details the way she knows he's probably aching to do, she aims to get there first. "What about you? What was your first meeting with L like?"
B stops abruptly, turning on his heel and tilting his head at her. The bustle of the enormous store seems to freeze with him, quieting to a distant murmur, and she can't tell if it's the embellishment of perception doing it or if he really does have ridiculous magic powers. He says, without the usually airy, nasal flair to his voice, "If you walk in halfway through surgery, it looks like murder."
Wedy frowns. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It's an expression," B says.
"I know it's an expression. So what?"
"So," Beyond tells her, turning back around to continue on with their experiment in domesticity, "I walked in halfway through surgery the day that I met him. And the surgery is still going on." His voice gets dimmer as he gets further away, the rest of the world bleeding back into focus around him. "And it still looks like murder."
He is dreaming and then he is not, but the disconnect into the waking world isn't obvious, and the ambiguous shape of hulking danger that hangs over him fades slowly and seamlessly into the haloed brown wood that boards up the windows across the room from him. It takes longer for him to remember the room, and think up a plausible explanation as to how he had gotten there.
B's face, and a tidal wave of sensory information, the humming of his skin and the cold sweat on his upper lip, the ground beneath him; his memories are foggy and loud and hard to set in order. He sits up and whole world moves with him but, unlike before, the spinning slows and the room sets itself right within a few moments, and then he is just cold and violently thirsty.
"Hey," Mello says, because Mello is standing in the room, slightly off-center, hands at his sides and frowning distantly. His tone is tentative.
"Hey," L says back, for lack of anything else to do.
Mello scratches his arm, pale hairs glinting in the uneven light. "How do you feel?"
"Where's B?" L speaks before even registering what Mello had said, and when he does fully process the exchange it strikes him how ill-fitting his question had been, how starkly it must stick out. Blinking a few times, he bats it away, overriding it with a quick, "Fine." Then he pauses and rethinks. "No, sick, actually, but better than I did."
"You fainted," Mello tells him starkly, weight shifting from one foot to the other.
"I assumed as much." L leans his back against the dusty wall behind him, taking slow breaths. "What time is it?"
Mello shrugs, turning to look out the only uncovered window. "Noon, maybe? I don't have a clock. They'll probably be back soon, though. They've been gone for a while."
"Gone where?" L tries to ask, but breathes in some stray mothball or another as he does and ends up hacking the words out indecipherably, doubling over slightly at the sharp pain in his lungs.
Mello's figure twitches in his peripheral vision, obviously at a loss as to what to do, until he says, "I'll get you some water," and moves towards the window. He stops halfway there. "Well, no," he says, "actually I won't. You have to drink straight from the faucet because there aren't any cups that don't have a fungus growing in them." He crosses his arms, as if using the leverage to hold himself up. "At least, I think it's a fungus. I don't really know."
He blinks at L expectantly, who - after a drawn out internal debate over whether the burning in his throat or the shaking of his legs is less preferable - comes down on the side of the former and stands to follow him. "I guess Wammy's only really teaches biology insofar as it relates to corpses, huh?" he murmurs, going for levity, but his voice sounds so hushed and unamused even to his own ears that it hardly does anything to lighten the leaden mood.
Mello waits for him while he makes his slow trek, and when spatial relations become too much for his body to handle, he's there at L's side holding him up like a bony, golden crutch. The bathroom is down a long, cavernous hall and since functioning electricity seems too much to ask of Dracula's manor - which this may as well be - they move slowly through the grey dark. The bathroom itself is cold, made of marble and glass, and although it lacks most furnishings, there is a large, claw-foot tub pushed against the far wall, underneath a tiny window with a square of corroded wood across it, which lets in at least enough light for them to find the sink.
The water is cool if not entirely crisp, and he can feel his heart rate slowing to a reasonable speed as he swallows unceremoniously, lapping like a dog and caring very little about appearances at this point, either way. Mello is still holding him up, but seems to suddenly become aware of L propping himself against the sink, and retreats a few steps back to simply watch.
The moment drags on, the hiss of running water filling up the room, diluting the tense air with a freeing distraction, and L stays with his head in the sink for longer than he really needs to simply to avoid whatever else the scene will turn into next. When he stands up straight, shutting off the faucet, his hair is dripping and he feels somewhat comical standing there, as if in out of the rain, in the middle of a dark room with a teenage boy.
He wants to ask about Beyond and Wedy, where they went and what they're doing, and to whom, but nothing comes out. He feels drained, a wet matchstick on the edge of a forest fire, so close to the action and yet incapable of touching it. Light is locked in a cell somewhere, Misa in another, and he's here with wet spots on his t-shirt and the lonely impotence of a man who's grown used to relying on others to provide.
All the little soldiers set to run at his command, and he can't find his voice.
"Do you like cold french fries?" Mello asks, after several stretching moments of silence.
"No." L frowns. He hadn't even thought about food, but quite suddenly he's rabidly hungry. He frowns more deeply and looks up. "Do you have any?"
Mello raises his eyebrows, but turns quickly on his heel. "I'll get them."
He disappears into the darkened hallway and L closes his eyes and follows, moving in accordance with his four auxiliary senses. Watari had blindfolded him and sent him out to tight-rope on a tree branch when he'd been 8. He's been extensively trained in dealing with all forms of sensory deprivation. He is a master at this.
He bumps into the wall twice and ultimately ends up in the wrong room, a grand dark study with a mass of covered furniture, armchairs and desks that stand like patient ghosts in the deep shadows. He opens his eyes slowly, matching the reality of his setting to how he'd conceptualized it in his head. There's a melodic twitter coming from the vaulted ceilings and L would not be surprised if there are whole generations of avian life rooted up there. The thought it actually comforting. Maybe this place isn't as dead as it looks.
When Mello finds him he's sitting curled up on a covered sofa, bathed in the light from the window that he'd cleared through violent use of his foot and shoulder. Mello blinks at the rubble, glances upward at the gentle tweeting, then sighs and sits down next to him.
"There's ketchup, too, if you want," he says, handing a nondescript bag of leftovers to L.
"Charming," L says, wrinkling his nose, but he eats what he's given. After the suspect diet Light had had him on, this isn't much of a downgrade.
Several minutes pass where most of what he can hear is his own chewing, intermingled occasionally with Mello's bare foot tapping on the floor, but once L's fed enough to regain a minimal amount if his faculties, the strained quiet doesn't feel like enough. "I think," he says, after some deliberation, "that propriety dictates that I owe you an apology."
Mello shoots him a slow sideways glance. "I don't care about propriety."
"Oh, good," L says flatly, voice returning to its standard state of blasé, "me neither. What I mean is, you came an awfully long way for something comparatively disappointing, and if I try to dredge up some empathy, I can see how difficult a situation you must have found yourself in."
The crease in Mello's brow grows deeper with each word. "And what situation are you talking about, exactly?"
L shrugs. "You came here for glory, and what you found was a mess. I don't know what B has or hasn't told you, but my imprisonment with Kira was mostly, if not initially, voluntary. First it was part of a game, and then it just part of my own folly, but it was never something that I needed to be rescued from."
"So, what you're saying is that I came all the way here for nothing?" Despite the question that it's phrased as, Mello doesn't appear to see this as brand new information.
L nods. "More or less. It's my nothing, though, and I'm sorry you had to become involved in it." He feels like he's reading off lines from a grief counselor, a stiff cop comforting the bereaved from behind a copy of Compassion for Dummies.
Mello sits forward, scratches under his chin, then stands and begins pacing back and forth raggedly. He stops after several rounds of this and looks at L with a curious expression, face far more boyish than it has looked through the whole conversation. Even in his gaunt, tired eyes there is a spark of the familiar idealism that L had seen peeking around corners at him during his infrequent trips to Wammy's House.
"Maybe I don't regret it, though," he says, with more force than the situation really calls for, speaking loudly and with apparent passion. "Is that strange?"
L blinks and processes the thought, and can't decide if this makes him like the boy more, or if it's just the sliver of a genuine emotion that's making it easier to breathe in the room, but it doesn't much matter about specifics. Big picture, and all that.
"Not much stranger than anything in this world," he says, sinking back into the sofa. The twittering of the nests above them provides a less solemn backdrop than the scene really demands, but he thinks he likes it that way.
Mello sits back down. "You sound like him."
There is no great mystery as to the identity of the man in question. L thinks back and tries to keep an eye roll in check, but ultimately fails and lets his expression do what it will. "Maybe," he says, "he just sounds like me."
They sit there like that, in quite company and sharing cold french fries, for another ten or so minutes before Wedy and B get back and the world gets going again, the whirring mechanism that keeps them all spinning through the motions of life, death, love, and other such melodramas starting back up. The quiet is a kind of respite while it lasts, though, and makes L consider vaguely the idea that Wammy's kids might not be so doomed after all, or if they are, he's at least in good company.
Misa cannot see her. Rem speaks, but gets no reaction. She'd expected this, been prepared for it, but the wall of separation - thin and colorless, a membrane of colliding worlds and their intrinsic inability to properly mesh into coherent communication - leave her feeling sickly and alone. They had been apart before, and she had been forgotten, but always with the promise of remembrance, of reintroduction. Now she floats in a bright room, Ryuk at her back, whispering gentle kindnesses to a girl who cannot hear them.
She's handcuffed, wrists and ankles, to a chair, and as far as Rem knows, no one has been into see her, except likely to provide the untouched tray of food at her side. Her head is pillowed on the worn metal table and she blinks soundly, unaware of the two of them floating right in front of her.
"How did this happen?" Rem asks, once she's fully tested and confirmed Misa's lack of response to or awareness of her. "Why did she give up the Notebook?"
Ryuk shrugs, still smiling. "Dunno. I tried to ask Light, but he won't talk to me. He can obviously see me, though, because he glares and makes obscene hand gestures that I don't understand under the table. All I know is that between last night and now L escaped in a car with some wacky people, Misa lost her memories, Light went grocery shopping with his favorite lawyer, and then suddenly the police are everywhere - with their helmets on, too, so good luck seeing any names - and I'm following a bunch of cop cars through a traffic jam across Tokyo." He looks confused, but more energized by the disaster than perturbed. "Anyway, I figured you'd wanna know what was up."
His vague acknowledgement of the weight of the situation doesn't impress Rem much. "You should have come to get me the moment things started going wrong," she tells him.
"Maybe, but it was way too fun to quit watching."
Rem sighs, moving closer to Misa to examine the tear tracks on her face. She would like to be able to brush them without going right through her cheek. She would like to be able to touch the girl without seeing her own hand, without a mass of disgust and strangeness intermingled in their contact. She would like the girl to want to be touched by those hands. None of this is possible, hardly even qualifies as conceivable.
So, failing fantasy, Rem would simply like to keep her safe.
She turns back to Ryuk. "At least if L's out, that means that this is probably his doing. He'll protect Misa. He has to. We made a deal." She is sure she is attempting to convince herself just as much as she is Ryuk.
They fade out into the hallway, through the wafting fumes of burnt coffee and exhaustion, men in ill-fitting suits flitting around them like flies on a corpse. "Do you really trust that guy?" Ryuk asks, half of his leg disappearing into a copy machine.
"Not at all," Rem says, ducking down a corner when she spots L's investigators camped out in a line of folding chairs in the adjoining hallway. It wouldn't make much of a difference if they saw her at this point, seeing as everything seems to be falling apart for Kira anyway, but she doesn't have time to be harassed for answers at the moment. "But Misa is still better off with him than she is with Light," she tells Ryuk, who follows her alternate path without complaint.
"So then, do you wanna go find him? Talk to him?" Ryuk's grin shines brighter as they drift through the wall into the white midday sunlight.
"That can wait," Rem says, looking skyward, even though the true direction of what she wants to find is not so much above Earth, as it is parallel to it. "Right now I want to talk to someone else." She speaks clearly and concisely, and waits to be heard.
She doesn't have to wait long.
They bathe sequentially with cold water in the half dark, more bathing products on hand than one would find in the stockroom of a five star hotel. After in-depth exploration of the haul, L decides the Creamy Cranberry scent of his shampoo is somewhat nauseating, but it's counterbalanced by his unending preoccupation with the loofa.
"Need me to scrub your back?" a voice titters, fifteen minutes into his soak, and he's far less surprised than he reasonably should be when B's fully clothed body sinks down into the tub with him.
L blinks at him, doesn't remark at his state of dress - he's always taken performances of this sort in stride, doing his best not to feed into B's attention-mongering - but just says, "You already had your turn."
"I wanna go again," B says, leaning forward to place his chin on L's bent knees where they're curled up in front of him. "I'm greedy."
L leans back, closing his eyes. If he's uncomfortable with the arrangement, himself naked and exhausted - though considerably more well-fed and caffeinated than he had been, thanks to B and Wedy's grocery expedition - it's only an afterthought, a consideration of propriety that's promptly abandoned with the rest of his identity, which is piled down on the floor somewhere, gathering dust. He pinches his nose and imagines it's Light here in the bath with him. The image doesn't make him feel better but it does make him panic slightly, the wild weight of what he needs to do hanging over him once again in full color.
"I have to dry myself off," he says. "I have to get up and get dressed and I have to make a call and I have to show up and make the world not end. How am I going to keep the world from ending when I can barely walk in a straight line?" He shakes his head. "This was all such a terrible idea. Existence, I mean. I bet the cosmos looks back on the Big Bang as an embarrassing mistake. I know I would if I was responsible for such an unmanageable mess."
"You like the mess," B says, leaning forward and brushing a wet strand of hair out of L's eyes.
"I like other people's messes," L corrects, leaning into the touch. "I like to watch them, and dissect them, and learn from them. All that knowledge is supposed to keep me from making my own."
B lifts his hand, trailing it down L's jaw, mapping the bones like he has it all laid out in a diagram in his head. "Since when has knowledge ever done anyone any favors?" he says. "The more you know, the more you'll tear yourself into tiny bits. I like to watch, too, but mostly just you. Everyone else is a pale imitation."
L smiles at him degradingly. "You are the palest," he says, and kisses B's cheek. If it hurts him, then it's doing his job, but B just smiles like he thinks he knows better, and maybe he does, and maybe the world ending is the best possible thing that could happen. He's not even quite sure what that means - Light's conviction, his death; L's own admittance of fallibility; the place where these two opposing certainties will inevitably collide, and dance, and destroy. He doesn't want to kill Light, but he doesn't want to let him live. The only solution is no solution, and that's all L has been achieving thus far, but he knows it has to change, and soon. Before the world catches up with itself.
He stands, naked and with a grim fondness, in front of B, the water dripping off him in cool streams, and says, with a characteristic cock of his head, "Get me something to wear?"
"Sir, yes sir," B hums, getting up and padding, soaked and dripping, across the marble floors, down the hall and into the room that's become their main center of operations, to the backdrop Mello's indignant yell of, "Stop, stop, you're getting it on the leather!" and Wedy's melodious laughter.
He comes back with jeans and a plain white shirt, and L could play it like a demanding child, forcing B on needless trips back and forth simply for his own immature amusement - but that isn't why he rejects the outfit.
"No," he says, lowly, attempting to make his intentions understood, "I want to wear something else. Anything else."
"I see," Beyond says, matching his expression, and L thinks that they're on roughly the same page for once, without the usual fallacies and shenanigans, until B comes back with wet leather in one hand and Wedy's slitted skirt in the other. "How's this?"
He honestly almost takes the skirt, but not before Wedy wades in and snatches it back with a short look up and down L's naked body and a request for them to hurry up and get a move on with the next operation.
"At this rate," she says by way of parting, voice drifting down the hallway, "Yagami will die of boredom before he ever hangs."
The order for Light Yagami and Misa Amane's relocation to the Kira Investigation Taskforce Headquarters comes in the late afternoon, from an anonymous but extremely high-ranking source outside of the NPA. The general reaction through the ranks is relief. Battling off the demands and pleas from Soichiro Yagami is taking more men and energy than they have to spare, and while the Japanese government has renewed its association to the search for and eradication of Kira, it's common knowledge that they want to stay as far away as possible from any hands-on involvement.
The good news is that none of their officers have been killed off, either because Yagami and Amane are innocent and unconnected to Kira, or because they are guilty and unable to access their murder weapon at the moment.
One wouldn't think that a couple of nice kids with bright futures would be capable of such heinous crimes, but Inspector Katsurou Takizawa has known children under the age of ten who have strangled their siblings in their sleep, and groups of teenagers who had run rampant, exhibiting insatiable cruelty wherever they'd gone. He does not believe in the inherent innocence of young people, women, the rich, the intelligent, or the beautiful. Everyone is capable of debased, immoral acts, and no one can be implicitly trusted.
He does not know what he believes about the suspects in custody, only that if they are guilty, they should suffer the most severe consequences. If they're not, however, he doesn't want to be responsible for holding two relative children, without charging them, for no other reason than because he'd been ordered to. He is glad to wash his hands of this fiasco, or at least set it out of his line of sight and let L take care of it. No one's officially saying it, but it's widely suspected that that's where the orders are coming from, and since none of them are particularly objectionable, they find it in their best interest to follow them.
The transfer is scheduled for 7 AM the next morning. Light Yagami and Misa Amane will be taken by an armed retinue to the center of the Kira Taskforce operations, and stationed with a smaller team who will stand guard on site.
Katsurou loathes to take orders from some Western show-off with a bank account to fund his ego, but he'd loathe even more for he and his family to be killed off by Kira, so he sends down the command to the lower ranking officers and hopes against hope that the next morning goes smoothly, and that somebody brings in donuts.
fifteen hours later.
L is not wearing leather or a skirt, but he is not in his usual ill-fitting uniform, either. He fades into the crowd with deep greys and greens, and a thick wool jacket that B had nicked from a nearby homeless shelter. He's got billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts, but he's stealing clothes from the poverty-stricken. He's not sure if that falls above or below the bar he's already set for himself in ethical bankruptcy, or if his time with Light had already eradicated any previous estimation of himself, anyway.
He feels more like mob boss than detective, an entourage of sharply dressed foreigners at his back as they walk from their stolen vehicle up to the entrance of the Kira Investigation headquarters. He imagines Matsuda drooping half asleep next to the security camera feed, wonders how long it will take him to spot their approach, and what exactly the reaction will be. L wonders if he's recognizable. He doesn't feel like the same person. This doesn't feel like the same world.
Keep it from ending, keep it from ending.
"What about the car?" Mello says, hanging back slightly, as Wedy strides past him, her figure loose and swaying over the grey sidewalk. "What do we do with it?"
L shrugs. "I'll have Watari sort it out. Get it refurbished, make repairs, and return it to the owners. Same goes for the rest that we stole, and if they can't be fixed, we'll have them replaced. Higher end, better gas mileage, that sort of thing."
B smiles. His sunglasses draw heavy shadows under his eyes, making him look even more sallow and sharp than usual. L can't decide if it's attractive or disgusting. "Forgiveness is expensive these days," he says.
"It's always been expensive," L says, and walks faster. He's not sure that he can afford it.
They move throw the sparse crowd delicately, disconnected but choreographed to each other's movements. L leads them, the captain of this tiny army, the bird at the head of the flight path that takes the brunt of the wind. First, as always. World's number one detective. That's almost funny and he almost laughs but then he sees the door, sees the handle that he'd never touched but waited beside while someone had opened it for him. There's the passcode and identification center beyond that, the metal detectors further on; a whole labyrinth of expensive pretensions at safety, when really the danger is within, and has always been.
L didn't build this building to keep Kira out, he built it to keep Light in. If only he'd taken precautions against his own movability, things might have worked out better.
But then who's to say they wouldn't have ended up like this regardless, in some altered configuration, but still the same basic circumstances. Still the choice between loving something or killing it, or doing both. Or doing neither. He wonders if B would have never come if he had never gone missing, and he wonders if he's okay with that. He would have been. He always was. Reality has changed, and it has changed him with it.
He's very curious, and very afraid, to see how it has left the god of the new world.
It's only been a day, but they might as well have never met before, for how separate Light feels to him. If L was smart he'd keep it that way. If he'd been smart, he'd have had Wedy hit him with her sniper rifle from across the street and call it sorted. He's not that smart. So much for number one.
He stops in front of the great grey double doors, not quite sure what to do with his hands.
"Do we just ring the bell, then?" Wedy asks warily, hips cocked, arms planted on her waist. She looks good in her new clothes, but he misses her pale, chapped lips. They'd reminded him of their first meeting.
B grins beside her. "We could always just find you a car and have you open the place up for us." He moves closer, angling his body up beside L's, peering over his shoulder and cocking his head.
"I'm thinking," L says, glancing up at the lens of the slim camera that watches them, "that we can maybe just wait."
They don't have to wait long before a voice crackles over the intercom system, Shuichi Aizawa's bluntly excitable tone distorted by the noise of the feed. "Is that - are you - " He's stumbling over his recognition, speaking before fully comprehending, and L enjoys it because it makes his return all the more satisfying.
"Yes," he says, leaning forward to speak into the microphone, finger on the wide black button, "I'm here to see the detective known as L. I hear he owns this building, and I have important information for him regarding the Kira case."
Life is the first thing. Death is the second. The third is a halfway world, strung between the two by forces unknown and unknowable. An act of violence, the grass slick with rain, a child's quiet terror. Headlights, scrapes, the clean burn of flesh renewing, stitching itself back together, unbecoming. Salt water. A breathless year. A foreign land in a foreign world.
An act of violence, revisited. Again and again.
She misses her home. She misses her leg. She misses places that she's never been, feels them writhing on her insides, cloying and shadowed. She can feel the gateway, once scattered - across the world, the city, the street - forming, all of the pieces drawn together, creating a lock to fit her key.
She'd stolen the key from a fragile girl. She's not sorry but she might have been at one point, when she understood the concept. Might have been sorry about the children, too.
She moves through the underground, through the skies, through the thick city smog to a tall silver building that glints in the heady sunlight. It is a new building. She is a new monster.
She is going to find home.
tbc.
end notes: well well. you guys know what i love? the shinigami realm. the note's got all these rules and restrictions but the world itself is pretty bereft of any canon history or detail, so it's fair game to make it up as you go along, and that's one of the most fun things about writing this. that and B. i really love beyond birthday there's no other way about it and i'm sincerely sorry to anyone who doesn't enjoy him or lxb but he's very important and fundamental to me, so here he is, taking the spotlight and yapping a lot about nothing.
that said, after this chapter we're going to start to rev up the lxlight engine again, so fasten your seatbelts, kids! (or at least don't stick any limbs out the window).
thank you for reading and any possible reviews or comments you might leave. i love you all very much!