warnings: blood, violence, guns, poorly constructed scenes and aiber hugging people. you know, the usual.
notes: well, well this chapter took longer than it should have because i got sidetracked by original fiction for the first time in maybe a year, so i'm trying to balance both nights and a short story that is quickly turning into a longer story. woe is me, excuse, excuse, etc. sorry this chapter took a month! you get your first smidgeon of lxlight interaction in a while in here, but it will probably disappoint (which i think is the goal because i apparently like to drag shit out?) never fear, tho, there'll be a little (lot of) somethin somethin next chapter.
anyway, thank you so much for all the reviews and comments and bookmarks and faves and everything! i love you guys and you keep me going. thanks for reading, as always, and i hope you enjoy!
(oh and by the way, i've finally changed my username to finally match the one i use on pretty much all other sites. it's still me, though!)
chapter twenty seven - curtain fall.
"A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer. There are people who kill out of hate or fear or greed. There are cunning killers who plan and expect to get away with it. There are angry killers who do not think at all. And there are killers who are in love with death, to whom murder is a remote kind of suicide."
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Security has gotten lax in his absence. No one asks for him to establish his identity, nor says much more than, "L? L, is that you?" through the intercom, frazzled and buoyant. He responds in the affirmative, and after a few minutes of static and a collective staring contest with the overhead cameras, the door unlocks itself remotely. Watari's doing, most likely.
He walks into the sterile grey antechamber, his makeshift posse following him with varying degrees of hesitance - Wedy with ease, Mello without, B tight-roping jovially between the two. It's like stepping into a time capsule, the him from the previous month haunting every inch of this place with ghostly reserve. The him that is here now can hardly believe he'd built this building. If he could do it over he'd scrap this design and go bigger, brighter, more ostentatious and offensive. Put up a whole cathedral, with gargoyles and baroque ceilings, religious imagery everywhere. The church that Kira surely craves. Give no one any room for doubt as to what this investigation was and is: a performance, a play.
Almost time for the curtain to drop.
The door shuts behind them, sliding closed at the press of some remote switch or lever, a minutia of design interface that L can't even remember now, and in almost the next moment Matsuda is tumbling out of the stainless steel elevator doors at the end of the hall, tripping like a newborn foal who's only just found his feet. Aizawa and Mogi, characteristically frowning and expressionless respectively, follow him out.
"Ryuzaki!" he shouts more or less into L's face, sliding to a jerky stop halfway down the hall. "I can't believe it, I was really starting to think you weren't coming back! People started saying you were dead, but I never - " he pauses, stiffening with a glance back to his colleagues behind him. "I mean," he begins to edit himself, but stops again when he catches sight of L's company. "Wedy-san! What are you doing here? Did you find Ryuzaki, because - "
"Matsuda-san, please," L says calmly, feeling himself slump back into character as easily as if he'd never been anything else, not an actor waiting in the wings nor fresh out of a job, "it's far too early in the morning for this."
"It is early," Aizawa agrees, barreling down the hall, expression slung somewhere between disbelief, anger, and exhaustion, "and I don't mean to skip past pleasantries, but where the hell have you been? What happened?" He's had a haircut and it's changed the shape of his face, made him look older and more like a cop.
Mogi is silent as always, but he wades in the background, a hulking shape, echoing the general sentiment of taut disavowal.
"Please, gentlemen," L says, dodging around them to continue down the hall, "my companions have had a long journey and I'm sure this conversation would go much more smoothly over breakfast and with everyone present. Watari is still here, I assume?" He's not assuming at all, knows as much from Light's reports, but his lines come out this way so he lets them.
"He's here," Mogi supplies, prodded by Aizawa's offended silence.
L nods, pressing the button for the elevator, and says nothing further. B, who has remained notably silent up until now, takes the cue immediately, like a stage direction, slinking through the crowd and pulling Mello with him. "'Scuse us, officers," he simpers.
"Yeah, he's still here," Aizawa mutters, picking up where Mogi had left off without acknowledging the in-between with anything more than a stuttered blink, like B's presence is something caught in his eye that he quickly removes. "We're all here, in fact, and we've been here, right where you left us, doing your job, while you've been off - what? Gallivanting with a bunch of motorcycle gang rejects?" His wild gesture towards L's accompanying party leaves little doubt as to which rejects he has in mind. "No offense meant, Wedy."
"None taken," she breathes lazily, following B's trail at her own pace.
The elevator comes, its doors opening with a shrill beep. L steps into it. No one else moves.
He says, "Sometimes a good gallivant is what one really needs. It did help me catch Kira, after all. Or did you not receive my packages yet?" He turns, punching in the activation code and the number for the main floor.
"Packages?" Matsuda asks, well-meant but unnecessary, the realization twitching into his eyes momentarily, just as it does those of the other officers. "You don't mean… "
"Kiras number one and two, respectively," L says. "They should have arrived early this morning, with an armed delivery retinue. My instructions to the NPA were very specific." He quirks one corner of his lips as the elevator doors begin to slide shut.
Perfect timing. He does love a good exit line.
His finale is fractured somewhat, though, when Aizawa shoves his way in throw the glinting doors right before they close, cornering L to the opposite wall. They begin to lift, a familiar light-footed rush under and around them, and L's shoulder blades slam into the elevator's mirrored inner surface. His head jolts sideways with the force and he blinks, dizzy and strangely satisfied, at his sidelong reflection. He hadn't slept the night before, kept up by his electric nerves and the rhythmic twittering from the bird's nests, and the blow to his head sends him temporarily towards the hazy edge of unconsciousness that he'd played musical chairs with the day before.
Righting his head, he looks straight-on at Aizawa, still wearing half a grin. "Ow," he says.
"You've got to be fucking kidding. But you're not, are you?" Aizawa drops his grip, hands falling to his sides, seemingly drained of the rage that had powered the assault.
"About Light being Kira?" L asks, rubbing errantly at the tender point of collision on the back of his skull, fingers kneading through chunks of his offensively scented hair. "I'm afraid not."
Aizawa shakes his head, turning to watch the tiny screen above the door flit through its procession of numbers - 8, 9, 10, 11; they've still got dozens of floors to go - and says, "You're not afraid. You're happy." He closes his eyes, clearly suffering his own internal catastrophe. "You're full of shit."
L rights himself so that they're standing side by side, somewhat prepared for another attack on his person, but willing to bear what may in fact be a well-earned consequence of his handling of the situation. "Only that last statement holds truth, actually, and even that is subject to interpretation."
22, 23, 24, 25, 26.
L misses the ground. He wishes B were here and wishes harder that he didn't. He's meant to have grown out of and away from that crutch, absence making the heart grow more absent, and all. Thirty floors up and he can still feel those fingers, cold and clammy, twined with his. He can feel Light's warm night-breath on his neck, too.
He can smell Shuichi Aizawa's cologne. It's minty.
"I don't even trust Light that much anymore," Aizawa says, as they approach their destination floor, not looking at L, "but something about your accusations makes me want really badly for him to be innocent. I think maybe you're doing your job wrong."
L wants to snort and so does. "I've never done it any other way."
The elevator stops with a small, barely perceptible jerk, blaring its location harshly with an automated female voice. L really wishes he had programmed these things silent in his initial designs. Aizawa sighs, glances over at him, and he doesn't look pleased, doesn't look forgiving, but he already seems to have accepted the situation for what it is. At present, thats enough.
"Welcome back," he says to L, as the doors slide open.
During one of the long nights when they'd been staying with Syd, Mello had woken up an hour or so before dawn, throat rough and eyelids crusted thickly, to B standing over him, studying his face. The fear had been momentary, but overpowering, hitting like a shock treatment, the blood inside of him glowing hot for a moment before his rational mind had made sense of things, reviewing the facts - he hasn't hurt you yet, and could have, so he probably isn't going to hurt you now - and the heat of his panic had faded to a cool blue unease.
B had laughed loudly at his expression. "I got you good, baby."
"Fuck off," Mello had mumbled, wetting his parched throat with a thick swallow and rolling over. He hadn't mentioned it in the morning, had barely remembered the encounter, and only recalls it now because of some haywire connection of sense-memory, attaching that single, unremarkable moment to the present with some stringy tether of his subconscious that demands he do so.
It's in B's stance, maybe, the sharp shift in demeanor that begins the second the elevator doors slide shut, cutting L out of the equation. There's that hot blood jump inside of Mello at the grin he's given, wide and maniacal, straight inside, seeping in warm and thick. He feels himself flushing. He looks away. He's not even really afraid of him anymore.
"Touta Matsuda, Kanzo Mogi," he hears B say, and wonders what that's supposed to mean until he turns to watch him bow lowly and obsequiously to the two officers in muted grey suits, who return the gesture with evident discomfort.
"Ryuzaki told you our names?" the supposed Touta Matsuda asks concertedly, straightening up. "I guess that means you're trustworthy, huh?" He gives a conspiratorial grin, obviously well-meant, as if he's trying ardently and with little regard for commonly held propriety to bond here and now in the very ugly hallway of a very ugly building that Mello doesn't quite understand the existence of.
Beyond winks ostentatiously. "No to both, actually." He twirls to press the button, calling the elevator back down. You'd think in a skyscraper like this there would be more than the one. "This is Mihael," he continues, with a nod to Mello, "and I suppose you're already familiar with Miss Merrie?"
"Who?" Matsuda is speaking now with slightly more hesitance.
He seems to be the only one of the two willing to engage in conversation. The man who had gone into the elevator with L had sure looked ready to engage, though, and had Mello not been present for the odd martial arts demonstration at Wammy's House during his formative years, he might be worried about L's safety. As it is, he's mostly worried for himself.
"We go way back," Wedy supplies, pushing herself up from the wall she's posed against - though whether it's for the aesthetic or to the benefit her healing wounds, Mello's not sure. She gives Matsuda and Mogi a sideways glance, shrugging as if to disclaim association with B. "Please don't listen to a word he says, boys, it'll only confuse matters."
"Matters are already confused," B says, continuing off from her words in a parallel, if opposite, split. "Matters are confusing themselves and I'm really just trying to sort things out by making proper introductions." He smiles slyly, lurching forward in a pretense of slow motion to wrap an arm around Matsuda's shoulder, who quavers, leaf-like and folding, under the touch. "So, tell me about the boy."
"Uh, what boy?" Matsuda mumbles, looking from Mogi to Wedy for help, and then to Mello as a sort of last ditch resort, tossed out at the end just in case.
Mello rolls his eyes, decides on mercy over reserve. "Don't do that, B."
He is widely ignored, Beyond shooting him a sideways smile, and then continuing on quite casually with his physical interrogation. "The boy with the big brown eyes who's got the whole world all astir. The one your treasured leader has come back to haunt and taunt, and all that rot. I wanna know about the killer with the capital K. I wanna know," he breathes, practically licking Matsuda's ear, "about Kira."
"I… "
The poor man, sheepish and stiff, tries to shrug B off, but to little effect. Mogi looks uncomfortable, but he doesn't move to intervene, and even Wedy seems barely interested in the game of harassment in front of her. Mello understands her rationale, to a degree - this is how B is, and the sooner these men get used to it, the sooner the lot of them can all get down to business and start working together rather than in uneven, ill-suited tandem. It's baptismal, almost. Dump them in the deep end to see if they can swim.
That's what had happened to Mello, and he'd learned to paddle his way to a relative shore, but that doesn't mean he's going to be unduly cruel. When you have a hand free, there's no reason you shouldn't offer it to someone who needs it.
"Stop it, Beyond," he says, imitating a voice he's heard L use on him before, hard and no-nonsense, though he thinks a grudging fondness slips through.
"Stop me," B mumbles, without looking at him, and it's a dare, a thrown gauntlet. Na na na na boo boo, you can't catch me. He's such a little punk and if Mello were taller and stronger and also incapable of being killed or done any lasting violence, he'd like to wipe that shit-eating grin off his face. Would like to make him act like a real human for once.
But he's not, is he? And that's the other thing. They can't catch him, can't stop him, can't do a thing, really. L has left them all here, unsupervised, and B could kill them all if he wanted to. Or worse. Wedy's wounds are still healing and maybe that's why she doesn't move to intervene. Maybe officer Mogi can feel the stain of violence in the air, the twitching shadows that writhe at the corners of B's presence, making him more than a man, but yet nothing else conceivable.
"You know I can't," Mello says flatly, not sure what else to do. Not sure even if they're in danger. The air in the room feels hollow, B getting high on his own power over everyone present. Wedy still doesn't have her gun back. They'd all come here unarmed, helpless.
"Um," Matsuda says, looking around, trying and failing to catch B's eyes, which are locked tight on a space just above his forehead, "the elevator's here."
A moment later there's a sharp ding!, diverting everyone's attention, and the mood suddenly changes, darkness dropped in favor of a shrug as B loosens his grip to let Matsuda slide out as easily as he'd been hooked in. He smiles sheepishly, like he'd been caught in a prank.
"Whoops, looks like we have to cut the fun short, then." He slides back as the rest of them move forward into the lift, removed seamlessly from the equation. "I'll see you kids up top, I'm gonna take the stairs."
"L's not going to like that," Wedy says lazily, posing herself against the smooth wall like she's one of the building's sleek fixtures. Matsuda and Mogi have rather ducked into the far edges of the elevator, as much out of B's line of sight as they can get, and Mello wonders at how the danger in him is so obvious, even to those who haven't been exposed to even a sliver of it.
B shoots them a rabid grin as the elevator doors slide shut. "L doesn't like anything."
There's a collective exhale as soon he's gone, or rather they are gone, up, up, and away. Wedy looks at her nails. Mello shifts uncomfortably.
"Who is that guy?" Matsuda asks after the quiet sets in, the whir of the plate-glass machinery that surrounds them the only other sound, muted and far away.
"That," Wedy says, not looking at him, not looking at anything, making herself stony-eyed and unreachable, "is one very good question."
No one speaks for the rest of the ride up.
He smells it like blood, but far off. What a vampire, what a monster; the cops and robbers would have a field day with him, if he'd let them.
He hadn't quite lied - he will meet them at the top and he is taking the stairs, just not quite in the exact order that had been implicit. First down, down, down. That's where the cells are. That's where they're keeping god locked up, if anywhere. Playing with his food is just the tip of the iceberg, but the rest of it resides below, frozen solid in the depths. Death is huddled down here and he wants dearly to meet it and shake its hand. Kiss its cheek, its mouth. Take it and eat it and have it inside of him.
He's either going to swallow the falling star or it's going to swallow him.
Cavernous, cadaverous, the hallways stretch into the next world and he follows them. L had told them how he'd built this building, constructed it for the sole purpose of catching the uncatchable. L hadn't said much about Kira, but he had intimated his attachment, his obsession, his integrity lost and found and lost again. He says the word love but he doesn't like how it tastes, and so B will bite it off his taste buds. Save him the pangs, keep them for himself.
He wants to kill Light Yagami. He's planned it in his head many times over, in many different configurations, with bloodshed and without, bruised and hollow, quiet or screaming loud - there are many ways to end a life. B feels entitled to enact them on others because he has experienced most of them himself. Dying again and again, reborn again and again. Like the messiah, only a little more well groomed.
He comes to a door that wants a code and makes eyes at it, as if he could seduce answers out of a machine. With any luck, Wammy or L had been the ones to program this place, rather than entrusting it to one of their bumbling hand-puppets, but even then that's no guarantee that he'll be able to crack it before L sends someone looking for him.
He hums to himself, remembering birthdays and anniversaries, words that had melded themselves inside of worlds, become a part of the past and therefore integral to the present. It's not going to be any one of them, is it? He chews his lip, setting his mind to generate and punching in a random string of numbers, trusting his fate to the universe.
ACCESS DENIED. It blinks across the small screen in blocky red letters.
"Very rude," B huffs at the universe.
And, in a show of true madness and hilarity - the sort of thing that follows him around like a drug-haze - in a glassy, empty, deathly voice, the universe answers back.
2-3-8-9-4-0-1, something whispers to him without speaking, and he feels shadows encroaching, wrapping him up, and they stroke him the way God strokes the Devil's brow in his fevered sleep, damning and absolving in one gentle blow. He shivers, letting it glow through him, and tapping in the numbers as they sing through his head in a distorted lullaby.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The door clicks open and as B slithers in, he feels some sort of familiar monster drawing a glinting finger down his spine, and he grins. "That tickles," he mumbles, and then something hits his senses, familiar and citric, seeping into his memory with a hazy drunken warmth, body crushing his in a frail, fizzing kindness. Home, or an attempt at it, and he knows this, doesn't he?
He turns hurriedly, trying to catch a glance, suddenly doubting that it's the mad universe helping him out so much as something much more solid, but as soon as he looks it's gone. The feeling zips out of existence, nothing left in his periphery except for the dark hall he's been let into. The edge of an epiphany dripping out of sight, and he reaches for it with the depths of his senses, but to little avail. Only the vaguest imprint of a truth almost known.
God and the Devil are gone. It's just him now. He sighs, rolls his eyes at the indignity of the mystical, and turns to go find Light Yagami - though whether to destroy or exalt, he hasn't yet decided.
Because yes, he wants to kill Light Yagami, but even more so he wonders, with his little black notebook and his little rusted heart, if Light Yagami will be able to kill him.
By the time they arrive, stiff and antsy, in the main room of headquarters, the yelling has already begun.
"This is utterly unbelievable in part, and yet we all should have expected it! Your complete disregard for the integrity of this team combined with your disinterest in following any ethical guidelines should have been warning enough that, no matter what proof we came up with, you would ignore it in favor of pursuing a desperate attempt to prove your gut instinct correct. My son is not Kira! He has never been Kira and never will be and the fact that you think you can just waltz back in here after a month without a word is not only ridiculous, but morally despicable!"
"Chief, I know what you're saying but can you just calm down for a second so we can - "
"So you can what? Lynch him in peace and quiet? Why don't you both shut the fuck up and let him explain his side of the story before you break out the pitchforks and torches, yeah?" Aiber glances at the elevator when the mechanically feminine voice announces their arrival. "Oh look, here's more to join the mob," he huffs, then stops short when he sees Wedy, arms crossed, trying to hold herself up and arguably failing. The air in this place is too hot and empty.
She doesn't meet his eyes.
L is slumped at the rough center of a cacophony, jaw pressed to his palm, head titled as if listening with calm approbation. He's got one foot hiked up on the leather chair beside him and he's sipping from a china teacup with delicate peach blossoms etched into it, two crooked fingers hooked uncaringly through the handle. She nods briefly to him, then walks with perfect posture on clicking heels out of the elevator and left towards where she remembers the closest restroom to be.
"Wedy?" Mello mumbles after her.
"Don't follow me," she says calmly.
The yelling doesn't abate with her departure, and only seems to get louder as she gets farther away. Maybe she's just getting quieter. Yagami, Aizawa, and Aiber continue a number of diatribes against one another, with a stiff interjection every so often from Watari, and soon a number of heartfelt outcries from Matsuda. L is notably silent, or if he speaks it's too lowly for her to hear.
The bathroom is cool, clean, done in tones of blue. She used to do her make-up in here for early meetings. She locks the stall door behind her and falls forward on her knees. She is not afraid, she is not in pain. She is not so weak. If her stitches ache and her stomach flips on itself, it is a bodily reaction unrelated to her mental state. Beyond Birthday has nothing of hers, and can do nothing to her. He hadn't even meant to. He'd just tortured her the once and it's all fine now. Nothing much to think of. Certainly nothing to make her sick.
She unzips her skirt when she can stand again, checking the bandages for fresh blood, but the wounds are closed and healing. She is fine. Her hands shake and she mumbles, "Fuck's sake," to herself, struggling to get the zipper back up.
There is knock on the door of her stall.
"I said not to follow me," she snaps, imagining Mello's stiff little fingers and tired eyes, bright and afraid, clinging to her like a child to its mother's skirts. She quite wishes B had stuck around, if only so he could be the one to play the role of Mommy.
"Excuse me, I didn't hear," says a voice far older and more distinct than Mello's tender murmurs, and Wedy rolls her eyes, wiping the edges of them at a practiced angle in order to set her make-up in some semblance of organization, and unlocks the door.
Watari looks unchanged. His suit is starched white and stiff, like the generations of British gentleman that he had separated himself from, peeling off out of a natural progression, entropy as necessity. His expression doesn't flicker much, but if he'd formed any theories following her in here, they appear to be validated by her appearance.
He tilts his head slightly, a mannerism only barely reminiscent of L - natural instead of posed, seeming to meld with his frame rather than jerk apart from it - and asks, "What did he do to you?"
"Who?" she says, fingers clasped over the edge of the door, without real purpose. She can see herself in the mirrors behind him, hung silvery and shining with disuse and high maintenance over the sectional sinks. This whole place looks like it was designed by a prison warden. She supposes it was.
Watari takes off his glasses, producing a handkerchief from his pocket like the Jeeves who's example he has far and away exceeded by now, and wipes at the lenses reservedly. "I'm sure you've figured it out. I wouldn't have sent you at all if I hadn't thought you would." He squints at the glasses, holds them up to the light and checks for smudges that aren't there. "Beyond was a very brilliant boy and remained a very brilliant man even through his incarceration. And," he says, smiling or grimacing with an uneasy nostalgia, "he was always very good as chasing L down."
He sounds so unconcerned and she almost had her womb cut out a week ago. She walks past him, closer to the mirror, her own face growing nearer, more distinct and harder to look at. Her polish is coming off and she can see the rust beneath.
"If you sent him after L," she says to her own face, watching her Monroe red lips shape the words, "why send me after him?"
She knows the answer. She mostly just wants to hear him say it.
"Time," he tells her, as if it's meant to be emphatic, impressive. She doesn't let it be. She can hear the yelling still, echoing from down the hall, under the door.
Watari slips his glasses back on and comes to stand beside her. "I didn't necessarily send him, only gave him the basic information he would need to send himself. That L was missing, presumed dead, but possibly disappeared of his own volition, and did he have any idea where he might have gone if he'd gone anywhere?" Watari shrugs. He is far too casual about it, but so is she, so she doesn't fault him. For other things, yes, but not this. "You were the map to his explorer. I'm sure he could have come to the right conclusions given a few weeks and a lot of research, but I didn't have a few weeks to wait. Mello wasn't calculated into the equation. Whatever we expected of him, it wasn't to end up as a sidekick to Beyond. When I heard him over the microphone embedded in your compact, I realized that he must have been the cause of the hold up in London, and the reason B - who has proven himself a man of action, if nothing else laudable - was in need of a prod."
Wedy's eyes twitch to his reflection, deep greys and blacks and whites ordered in neat lines in the periphery of her vision. She says, "I was never supposed to catch him or kill him, was I? I was just meant to tell him about the case, about Yagami. That's right, isn't it?" She feels cramped, everything too close-quartered in this windowless place.
"I sense resentment," Watari observes, tone disinterested.
She turns so fast she makes herself a little sick. A little sicker. "You're damn right you do," she hisses. "Sticks and stones are a hazard of the job, but you sent me in just so he could torture information out of me. I'm not a messenger, and I'm not a tool. I'm an agent, I do a job, and you don't get to decide what that job is without telling me." She's breathing too heavily, could hit him if he were a little younger or a little crueler.
Watari bears her venom gracefully; nodding, accepting blame, but far from apologizing. "It was necessary that B know what we knew about the situation in order to perform at his highest capacity."
He speaks of him like a machine. He does the same thing for L, but when the man is question tends towards the stiff and the robotic, the comparison feels much more justifiable. For all his violent otherworldliness, Wedy has rarely met anyone as unabashedly, animalistically human as Beyond Birthday. He evokes in her, among other things: loathing, disgust, fear, exhaustion, jealousy, nausea and indisputable pain, but all of this fits well into her conception of humanity. He could not have been built. Watari could not have built him.
Wedy grits her teeth, tries to breathe through the rage that won't get her anywhere. "Well, he performed. He performed so well I've got homemade stitches and what feels like a couple of bruised ribs. I'll be sending you the medical bills, I hope you know, whenever I have occasion to get proper treatment.
"I'll be expecting them." He looks so unmoved, but he doesn't try to justify a thing, and she appreciates at least that much. One thing you learn in ugly business is how much uglier it gets if you try to make it pretty.
She laughs a little, pressing her fingers cooly to the side of her face, trying to calm the whirring dissatisfaction in her. This is it. This is the world and sometimes you can pistol-whip the shit out of it and sometimes you just have to bear it.
"And I'll be expecting my paycheck," she says, and lets the matter go with that, because it's too heavy to hold onto at this rate. There's a spike in the volume of the voices outside, which had for the moment quieted to voracious discussion. They're back to yelling now, although L's voice is notably absent from the arrangement. Wedy nods at the door. "In the meantime, what do you plan to do about that?"
Watari doesn't quite shrug - propriety wouldn't allow that - but he communicates an equivalent sentiment in the raise of an eyebrow. "L is back, and relatively undamaged, it seems. How things are to be handled is left up to his discretion."
Wedy huffs a laugh, tries to find her feet with a glance in the mirror. "I can't think of a worse place to leave them." Nor, she thinks, but leaves it out to avoid sounding too trite, a better one.
Everyone is speaking very loudly. The words travel around him, forwards and backwards, and he knows what they're going to be before he hears them. He could have written this scene himself, blocked every movement, scripted all the accusations and defenses. He might have given everybody their own bit of airtime to say their piece, instead of this collision, a cacophony of voices all at once, talking over each other. Talking at him and for him and with him in mind.
"Aren't you going to say something for yourself?" someone asks him finally, after the mayhem of the conversation has worn itself down into an ill-tempered murmur. It's Ide. He's standing over L, looking down at him expectantly. Everyone is looking at him, in fact.
He ought to act the role of the leader he's meant to be, make some flashy statement to impress them, win them back to his side. Get the job done. Instead, he cocks an eyebrow, holds out his cup, and says, "More tea?"
Aiber, even as his sole defender, is the one who scoffs the loudest at this. "Jesus Christ, L," he says, snatching the cup out of his hand and slamming it down on the table in front of him. "Could you at least pretend to take this seriously?" He looks almost pained.
He had been the first one to see them get out of the elevator. Barely awake, sitting up on the sofa with the crisscrossing patterns of the pillows creased into the skin of his forehead, squinting blearily towards the front of the room. He'd stared at L like Moses with his burning bush - uncomprehending, lost out in his own whiskey-scented desert. Half a second and a, "Hello, Aiber," and L had been knocked back into the adjacent wall, again, and wrapped up in a claustrophobic hug that had made his head swim and his skin crawl and his breath calm just a little bit.
Aiber is too much tenderness. He is an annoyance and he is a blessing. L is very glad that he's here, but knows he shouldn't be.
Watari had come next, emerging from the control room with little ceremony. A nod, a, "Welcome back," an update on the situation - Light's location in the basement cells, the Tokyo Child Killer debacle, the general presumption by this point of his death - all business as usual. That had, at least, been grounding.
Soichiro Yagami, emerging from the stairwell with tired eyes and sweat on his forehead - after seeing to his son's comfort and making his best, though unsuccessful, effort to dispense with the guards who had been sent on L's orders to guard him - had been the opposite of grounding.
Evidently Light had made some intimations as to who was to blame for his current incarceration, because his father had immediately laid credit where it was due. Bracing, but convenient, as it had saved L the trouble of explaining it himself, going through the logistics of his police call, what the orders had been and why. They'd already known.
They had asked him for justifications. He has them in spades; Light's guilt is not something that is up for debate or that he even feels wildly engrossed in proving any longer. If they need testimony they can ask Rem. If L keeps his word on Misa's protection, she will no doubt gladly throw Light to the wolves, to be devoured by the pack he has so long been the leader of. It's not a challenge, not a fight that he's having, and mostly the investigation team isn't much more than an inconvenience, a minor roadblock before he reaches the castle gates.
And storms them.
"Nothing has ever been more serious in the whole of human history, I'm sure," he says, blasé, reaching around Aiber to get retrieve his teacup and pour himself another drink, "but kidnapping and imprisonment tend to exhaust me, and I don't have the energy at present to engage in a competition of vocal performance." He dumps several lumps of sugar into his cup. Everyone has gone much quieter.
That doesn't last very long.
"Excuse me?" Aizawa says after a lulling moment, and Matsuda follows airily with, "Ryuzaki, what do you mean?"
The chief is shaking his head, sweat on his temples, loathing L with obvious fervor. The man is probably very tired. He cannot rightly be blamed for denying the guilt of his son, the possibility of viperous betrayal from within his family. The crimes of a loved one are much harder to forgive than those of unknown strangers, moving in their dark places and fulfilling the duties of murder and mayhem that make jobs for people like police and detectives.
Evil is a distant thing.
When it comes close, it becomes harder to hate. L had learned that with the best of his lessons.
Contrastingly, Aiber perks up notably at L's words, brows raising and lips curling with almost relieved satisfaction. "So, I was right. He did have you hostage."
The investigators hold their respective breaths together as a single unit, brows furrowed, throats heavy, so much dependent on L's answer.
He doesn't give it to them straight, just shrugs and says, "He did no worse to me than I did to him during his imprisonment." He glances around, hates that there are no windows in this place. Even B's decrepit haunt is more comfortable than this building, if only for the natural light and fresh air.
It's in this minute search for something that isn't grey and manufactured that he notices Mello cornered against the far wall, hands crossed, observing, and alone. Where are Wedy and B? Where is Watari, for that matter?L had been so busy handling the people in front of him he hadn't had the mind to manage those he'd briefly set aside, despite how much more trouble the latter category could get in.
"You're saying Light kidnapped you? You? The greatest detective in the world?" Aizawa sounds sharp, but not wholly disbelieving. He doesn't like Light so much anymore, L can tell. Things have not deteriorated around here as much as he'd like them to have, but they'd certainly made a decent start.
He's about to answer, distracted as he is with his lost comrades, but Wedy's voice sounds from the opposite side of the room before he can manage to. "It's easier than you'd think," she says calmly. L turns slowly to face her, trying not to smile. "We got him out of the building Light was holding him in without too much muss or fuss, save maybe some property damage."
"The car, that was you?" Aiber asks excitedly, moving across the room to greet Wedy, seeming to have taken notice of her for the first time. Watari is at her side, but he moves cordially out of impact distance when Aiber swings his arms in a wide embrace, wrapping Wedy up in a vigorous, grinning hug. "That's my girl!"
She winces through the contact, brow pinched ever so slightly, and L wonders if it's out of pain or distaste, but sincerely doubts the latter. Her disinterest in Aiber is always feigned if it is present at all, and the look she gives him when he finally pulls back is one of pure fondness.
"I'm not your girl," she says smilingly, voice soft.
Everyone else looks vaguely uncomfortable, except for the chief, who looks ready to put his fist through a wall. "I don't mean to discount your experience, Wedy, but just because Ryuza - L said that Light was the one holding him there doesn't mean it's true." He's looking around pleadingly at the rest of them, a man halfway broken and sporting cracks for the remaining distance.
"Yeah," Matsuda agrees, hurriedly latching onto the glimmer of denial and hope, "I'm mean are you sure it was Light? Maybe you guys are just mistaken? It's probably just a big misunderstanding, right?"
No one answers him. L doesn't even look at him, just meets Wedy's eyes quite fiercely, as soon as Aiber's no longer blocking their shared line of sight, and asks, "Where is B?"
Syd has been on hold all day, and when he finally is put through to someone at Narita who will speak English to him, they still don't seem able to understand what he's asking for.
"No, no, his passport would have said Rue Ryuzaki, but it's not his real name. I don't care about that, though. No, don't call the police! Or, I don't know, do, I don't care. Do whatever you have to, I just need to talk to him. Or - excuse me, excuse me!"
Cheery elevator music clicks live as he's put on hold again, and in the next moment his mind is blanking with rage and he's chucking the phone across the room. It hits the wall with a dull thud, and makes a cracking noise when it drops to the floor. He really hopes it isn't broken.
He really, really needs to talk to B.
When he'd been informed of the transfer, Light had fleetingly enjoyed the fantasy that his father had managed to get him out of the incarceration using some of his sway in the police force or just inciting some of that good old fashioned compassion that humans are rumored to have a mighty store of. Even deeper beneath the surface, squirming around at the gummy center of his id, had been the momentarily indulged idea that this had all been part of elaborate scheme of L's for his protection, that he'd thought he'd been doing him good and that, in fact, Light would be greeted upon his release by a bitter cup of police station coffee and that grim smile, worn around the eyes, that L gives him on the early, suffering mornings that they share.
None of that actually happens.
He'd caught a few glances at Misa in the hallway, but everyone else he'd seen was helmeted, and they'd been led out the back exit and into two separate police cars, promptly blindfolded, and spent a bumpy forty or so minutes traveling across town to a very familiar building that incites pangs of a very familiar panic. They'd taken off the blindfold once indoors at his father's insistence, but the guards had refused to leave - claiming their orders had come from the very top and couldn't be disobeyed under an circumstances. Two of them are still outside of his door now, keeping watch.
Or, at least, they had been.
He hasn't opened his eyes in lord knows how long, could have been hours or just a few minutes, slipping as he is through states of consciousness, unconsciousness, and the halfway place - stung with a amalgamation of memory and dream - inbetween them. Snippets of conversations that he'd had, or plans to have, or has never intended to have and simply finds himself accosted by, play through his head on a low static frequency, floating in the dim nowhere-world of his cell.
The room phases slowly back into being, deep grey and decently wide, nothing but the cot he's laid back on and a toilet and sink to keep him company, and the hulking, heavily armored door… which appears, now that his vision is focusing, to be open.
Light sits up. A little too fast, the whole of his vision going spotty, but then it passes and he is just staring at the door, the thin crack of hallway light slipping in, and the shadows flickering around the edges of the room.
He stands, approaching the door, cautious and excitable at once - maybe this is it, just maybe he is saved and everything is good and how he meant it to be; he is loved and he is valued and L couldn't give him up, wouldn't ever, always needs him around, and alive -
And then the shadows move, crawling up and introducing themselves, and with a little twist of the world's axis, he's being tackled to the floor, back colliding with the cool linoleum, skull grazing it, mind trying to figure out what exactly the hell is happening. The body on top of him isn't immediately evident as human, twisted in too many awful shapes and grinning like a mad wild dead thing.
Ryuk, he thinks for a moment, and L, for another, but this is neither of those things, and that becomes heavily apparent when the man - because it is a man, with two arms and two legs and only one head - leans down and breathes silkily into his face, in a voice he doesn't recognize, "Oh my god."
He is her brother, or father, or maybe a far off cousin. He is something of hers, or she is something of his, or they or someone else's, collectively, intertwinedly.
The other is not, is a thing of his own, outside of the kingdom, but holding the key. Not directly, not in his hands - she's got it, she's holding on - but it's his still. Funny how that works. Too many rules and regulations, too much dirt in her throat, grime in her lungs, ruin moving sluggish and encompassing within her skin. Composed and decomposed. She wants to see his body rot, sun shot out and bleeding daylight.
Her brother is night, moonscapes and star deaths, the universe spreading like an explosion currently in progess, endless and expansive and swallowing up the void around it with bristling, violent life. She almost has a bit of a crush on him. Just like before.
Night pins Day to the floor, straddles his chest and snarls down into his pretty, pretty face. And she watches.
The guards sent from the police station on his orders collapsed in the hallway outside of Light's cell is all L needs to see on the security feed before he's on his feet, bypassing the elevator and its meandering luxury to clamber down the stairs, barefoot and breath storming in and out of his lungs. There's a collective murmur behind him, gasps about the cameras in Light's cell having gone blank with static, but he doesn't stick around to discuss theories.
They'll follow him, anyway. Everyone always does.
He's not sure what he'd been expecting, bring Beyond here. A shield, maybe. He'd wanted his very own personal bodyguard, a guard dog hulking in the shadows, barking at threats and maybe even using his blatant strangeness to distract from L's ineptitude. Instead, L had distracted himself, let B's presence drift into the back of his mind as an afterthought, a part of himself and of the situation not to be questioned. And it had, of course, as with all things and people not tightly monitored and controlled, devolved into chaos.
He's halfway to the bottom now, the sounds of his flesh slamming down on the metal of the stairs over and over ricochet into his head harder than he feels the collision, numbed out by panic and a quiet sense of shame.
He has been very stupid. He has done everything he has ever warned himself against, and he is paying for it now. Light is paying for it. And when did Light become the victim and not the villain? When did B become the attacker and not the protector? It's all so transient. L isn't even sure of his own role: leader, leper, or something else entirely?
He's almost to the bottom now. He has to move fast. Someone will die if he doesn't move fast.
Someone will probably die, anyway.
The man above him licks his lips, and spittle drips on Light's face.
"You're not as tall as I thought you'd be," he says, rotating his hips slightly, impatiently, like a child on a ride that won't go, and Light shivers, tremors of something gutless and terrified ringing through him. "No halo or ethereal glow or anything, either. Kind of a disappointment for a deity, honestly."
He looks so much like L, and yet so much unlike. As if someone had tried to sculpt L off of a drunken description, without ever having seen the man himself. He's a cartoon, over-exaggerated, bigger eyes, darker circles, wilder hair, more pronounced mannerisms. He's all in black, too, but he hadn't been, the other day.
Light is sure this is the man he'd seen in the car with L yesterday. What he is unsure of is everything else: the why and the how and the where did he come from? He's not even sure which way is up, at this point, or if it even matters.
"Who are you?" he chokes out, managing even in his fear to sound accusatory and inconvenienced. How dare you break into my cell. Get your own.
"Oh!" the man gasps, as if shocked and excited by the question, swinging his legs forward and changing the shape of his posture so that he is more sitting on Light than anything else, legs spread out to each side and crotch a few blatant inches from Light's face. "Oh, well that's a very complicated matter, isn't it? Who is anybody, really? I think I'm probably a thousand different things, depending on who you ask, and a thousand more if you ask me, but for the purposes of this conversation, all I am is what you perceive me as. So, really," he says, leaning forward to cup Light's cheek in a clammy, spine-shivering hand, "the answer to the question is up to you. Who am I?"
Light frowns. It's insult enough to be attacked while in a heavily guarded holding cell, but it's a mile worse for your attacker to then pummel you with pseudo-philosophy and a lot of overly familiar touches. "A crazy person, I'm pretty sure," he spits.
"Well, yes," the man says immediately, with the same kind of voice that Sayu uses to say, 'duh!' "Yes, I am that, but who isn't? That doesn't narrow it down, sunshine. I'm not asking you what your highly evolved little logical brain is telling you I am, I'm asking what you see."
Light blinks at him. He blinks back, batting doe lashes, a gesture that L has never done and will never do.
"You know what I see."
The man smiles, lips stretching to reveal glinting white teeth. "Yes, I do, but it's much more fun if you say it."
Light closes his eyes, doesn't want to give in to such a pointless little game, an impotent exertion of power, but also doesn't want to have his esophagus crushed any longer than he absolutely has to. So, he says, "L."
"Ding, ding, ding!" the man chirps, propping himself up on his knees again to lean over light, intimately, body covering his. "We have a winner."
"Where is he?" Light demands, exerting another attempt to free himself, but the weight on him is immovable, as if the man holding him down has a strategic pact with gravity itself. Maybe Light's just weak from hunger. Maybe it's another in a stream of hazy, nonsensical dreams.
The man giggles. It doesn't feel like a dream.
"Oh, you know, around. Off doing very important things, I'm sure, the way he does. Or else," he adds, eyebrows quirking merrily, "I killed him and stashed the body, and now I've come to do the same to you. Bury you both together and call it eternal love." He shrugs. "You never know."
Light grits his teeth, longs for the Note, for Misa and her eyes. His fingers twitch with the urge to punish. "If you were really here to kill me," he says, "I doubt you'd do all this speechifying beforehand. Besides, there are cameras everywhere. Someone will be here any second, and with guns. You're not going to lay a hand on me." He says it with more conviction than he feels.
Tilting his head to the side, the man sits back on his heels, as if studying Light. After a moment, he reaches out a hand up, pulling him respectfully into a sitting position. Light has just enough time to feel smug and gratified before the same hand is reeling back into a fist and slamming directly into his cheekbone, sending him flying back onto the floor, knocking all sensation other than sharp-shooting pain out of him. Another blow hits not a second later, harder this time, and he hears something crack, and can't hold back the animalistic yell that echoes out of his throat.
The weight holding him down disappears, and he rolls to the side clutching his face, too overloaded with the weakening head-rush of agony to do anything but curl into himself. He doesn't know what he is thinking, mental processes reverting to the instinct to run, hide, get as far away as possible, but before he can even manage to move, a sharp kick collides with his back, rocking his insides, and he howls.
He thinks he's going to throw up. He thinks his nose is broken. He thinks he sees L out of the corner of his teary eye, but, of course, it's not L.
He's rolled onto his back, gentle hands suddenly brushing his forehead, a voice hushing him, kind and comforting, and he squints up with something like hope, just a little bit of hope, but he knows before he even sees that his fantasies are not and will not come true, especially not like this. L has never been so soft with him.
The man he doesn't understand the existence of, but loathes fiercely and without regard for identity, smiles soothingly down at him. "Nice guess," he hums, "but wrong, wrong, wrong." He clears his throat, bending down to face him exactly, all features lined up in a perfect mirror. "Now, Light, unless you wanna play another guessing game and see which one of your organs I can eviscerate the fastest, you are going to tell me everything that you know about Death Notes, Shinigami, and L Lawliet. Alright, baby?"
The words flow into him and pool thick and heavy in his skull. He doesn't know quite what's happening, but it's starting to all piece together under a common theme. L is such a fucker and Light should have killed him when he'd had the chance.
"I," he gasps, breath choking him up with the effort to form words, "I'm going," - he hacks a cough - "to write your name right next to his."
The man doesn't look surprised, just tilts his head condescendingly. "Fine," he says. "Bury us together. Call it eternal love." And then he reels back for another hit -
But it never comes.
Light braces for it a few seconds longer than he has to, even after the rush of air and the thunk beside him. It's laughter, bubbling and mad, that makes him squint his eyes open. The same shape hulks over him, a jagged silhouette in blacks and whites, wide eyes and a gaunt, oppositional chin, but it's drained of its cartoonish over-embellishment, back to the stark, sad man that he knows and has various unbalanced feelings towards.
The world slows to an intermediary period, memories of dim mornings and hot breath, laughing about death and planning ways to kill each other. All the love or hate or otherwise he's got stored up in him bleeding out as if through a wound.
"L," he gasps, trying to sit up, but it gets choked out on a whisper and his limbs quiver, ribs aching. His head is so hazed he can barely tell the ceiling from the white spots clattering across his vision.
L doesn't even look at him, just goes straight for the man, or monster, or whatever it is that's writhing back onto his feet beside where Light's trying to regain a few, or any, of his motor functions. There's a sharp sound, the smacking of flesh coupled with a cheery yap of laughter, and a hard thunk that shakes the room, making everything fuzzier than it already is.
Heavy breaths and scuffling, there's a fight going on and through his eerie dips in and out of consciousness, Light becomes half convinced that he is a participant, going through the motions of violence that toss him turbulently around the room, sending his head spinning. It's only the rough collision with the wall and L's yell of, "Goddammit, B!" that rouses him enough that he realizes that he is collapsed on the floor, same place as he had fallen. The blood from his nose is dripping into his mouth.
"L, L, L, darling," the man who isn't L titters between grunts, "you're, ah, getting your hands all dirty. Where's the armed guard? Where are your little toy soldiers? I'm sure they'd love to play with me."
Light tries to sit up. He wants to watch. He wants to see what's happening. L is protecting him, maybe. L is fighting on his behalf. That's the fantasy, at least. The reality is that he is at least here, in existence, not disappeared or out to sea, lost across streets a hundred miles wide, as he had been. That's something.
"You're not as fun a playmate as you think," L grits back, hacking a cough. His voice is not silky or smooth, none of the low lit conspiracy in it that Light has come to expect. He sounds like he's just crawled up and out of his coffin, through rot and grave dirt, just to be here and to do this.
"Gonna kill me now?" the man goads, like he's asking for a present.
The sound of flesh hitting flesh has stopped, breaths roaring hard but slowing, and Light tries to sit up to get a better look at the situation. Everybody is running around him, and then nobody, and then everybody again. As his eyes focus, the crowd dwindles to two. They are both L.
"Don't worry," one of them - the one who is not really L, but rather squirms after him like an overly-ambitious shadow - says. "I didn't do him any lasting damage."
"I hope you'll grant me pardon if I say I don't believe that at all."
That's the real L. All the others, the ones that arch around the room like kaleidoscope patterns, are just ugly copies. He likes the ugly original, body clenched, glancing concertedly in Light's direction as he dodges each blow systematically, countering with a few jabs of his own. The bright hallway lights cut in through the slit of the doorway, slicing across the claustrophobia of the dark. L's skin is grey and luminescent, moving like a spectral blur at the edges of his vision. Light tries to say his name but doesn't know if he succeeds, the word - simple and monosyllabic as it is - doubling back on him, flooding his already overwhelmed senses in a cocktail of disorientation and stunted longing.
"Really," the other letter says, the one who leads the dance with his laughing, bleeding performance, "cross my heart. I don't have any intention of killing him before he tells me what I, hah, want to know."
Light's hand twitches up toward them, their battling figures a dreamscape out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn't think he moves at all.
"And then?" L asks, voice catching, a thunk against the far wall following shortly. It feels like the last word on the last page of the book. There doesn't seem to be any more story after that. Light grasps for it but he can't touch it at all. His hands feel papery, throat parched. He wants to drown in pen ink.
He doesn't stay conscious long enough to hear the answer to the question.
"And then," B says, grin spreading like marmalade on toast - crumbs that dirty Persian rugs of an early morning, fire crackling, storm outside; all the trappings of a Victorian horror novel, with twice the artistry of most of them - "I'm probably going to pull a bit of a cliche and devour his soul." He shrugs jauntily. "That's what death gods do, isn't it?"
L's got him pinned to the wall, hand twisted in the scruff of his t-shirt, body crushing him top to bottom in a mix-and-match of unequal limbs. "What," he says, without intonation, or even full understanding.
The cavalry arrives a moment later, thundering out of the lax elevator and down the hall to Light's cell, and L doesn't get an answer to the question that he hadn't quite asked.
Everything happens at once: Wedy with a new gun and a team of armed reinforcements at her back, pointing it at both of them; Soichiro yelling, kneeling over his son and calling an ambulance that L knows Watari will politely turn away at the door; Aiber trundling noisily through, demanding to know what this is all about. He needs a haircut, L thinks, in the midst of the chaos, and supposes he could probably use one, too.
Maybe he'll shave it all off, just to see if B will follow the example. Just to see if Light will still pledge his heart. As if he would at this rate, as if it's still intact enough to lend out.
"Don't shoot," L says to these events, while they are still happening, "unless you absolutely have to."
Wedy meets his eyes and reality catches up with itself, noise filtering in through the blood rushing in his ears and everyone is talking so much, about so much, questions and no answers - "What happened?" "Who is that?" "Is Light-kun going to be okay?" "Are we in danger?" - and it's so much to keep track of that, stepping aside to let B down so that he can enter the fray more fully, he doesn't register until a moment too late exactly what look Wedy is giving him.
Charlie's Rogue Angel, Aiber sometimes calls her, and L has never seen the film in question but had extrapolated the meaning of the nickname enough to appreciate it. It's fitting now. Always the rogue, and always the finest soldier. She never betrays, but she never takes an order to heart. She doesn't take this latest order at all.
Wedy shoots. She shoots once, twice, again and again until the whole of her barrel is emptied into B's chest, abdomen, throat. Her mouth isn't set grimly, doesn't seem more than casual, but here eyes are sniper-sharp and merciless. Mercy is such a foreigner in this place.
Beyond sputters, looks down at the dark blood soaking his white shirt, and then back up at her with bright, frozen eyes, still locked in their gratuitous smile. He deserves nothing less than this, L knows, and this knowledge plasters itself across the leaking crevices of his mind at once, spackling everything closed, clamping down on the raw panic that rises tidally in him, threatening to crash and bring down the whole house. His tower, built to last, and he's about to die, B's about to die.
Someone is yelling. Maybe more than one person. The sound blocks out everything else, screaming like white noise through his head, and the image of B falling forward on his knees and slowly crumbling down to collapse face forward on the ground right over L's bare feet plays like a silent film reel. It's practically in black and white.
It's not happening.
But, of course it is, of course this is reality and he, in his eternal realism, is corroding at the center of it, a star in this old movie, and the only one left standing. Light is passed out bloody a few feet away and B is more than passed. He feels like the band-aid has been ripped off too soon and all that's underneath is raw flesh. The wound is still bleeding, never healed. B's blood is getting on his feet, the ends of his grey jeans.
"Don't shoot," he says quietly to himself, frowning, because what a stupid thing to say. But it's done, it's done, this has been coming for years and he couldn't do it so it's good that Wedy did, isn't it? Isn't it? Now he just has to get her to put another full chamber in Light and all of his loose ends will be -
"I had to," she says firmly, walking over to him. L thinks maybe shrinking back would be overkill, but he has an instinctual urge to do it, anyway.
"You had to - you just killed a man!" someone is yelling. Maybe Ide, or Matsuda. Someone is coughing. It might be Light. Sirens. L hears them in his head, mingling with the church bells and mounting towards an ugly crescendo. "There are laws against this sort of thing, you can't just - "
Wedy tucks her gun, empty and useless as it is now, into the waist of her pants. "There's something you have to see," she says, kneeling down next to B - B's body - but still looking up at L, "and sooner is better." She sounds so casual. L wonders if that's how he talks about death and has an errant urge to punch himself in the face.
And Wedy, he wants to punch her. He's not even a puncher, but it feels like the easiest thing right now, just swing and swing until his body stops working. First he has to move.
Aiber comes slowly, uncharacteristically sober, over to them and crouches down beside Wedy. He presses his fingers to B's pulse, a formality more than anything, but then B's looked dead since he was born so better to make sure he's not faking. He was always so good at that, playing dead, playing the villain, playing anything; roles and roles and games and games. Maybe this is just another one.
Aiber removes his hand, obviously unsurprised by what he's felt. "Well," he says in a voice like a narrator, like this is the story and he's telling it because somebody has to, "today has been morbid."
If L had less of a stomach for this sort of thing, he'd turn around and throw up. It'd be satisfying, his performance for the shocked silent audience that's watching them. Encore, encore!
Carefully, as if not to displace some precious valuable - precious dead thing - L slips his feet out from under B, examining the warm, wet places where he's splattered in blood. Everyone's looking at him as if waiting for a cue as to what to do. He's waiting for room the stop shaking.
From off-center of the commotion, Light coughs again, body wracking helplessly under his father's unsteady hands, and everyone turns, more or less at once, to look at him. This is a new show, new star, and L feels relief for half a moment before some sort of accidentally activated protective instinct kicks in, and he turns sharply to the amassed officers and says, "We need to move him. I have a private doctor on call who I'm sure Watari has already contacted, so we'll get a room set up for that, as this one is no longer suitable."
He doesn't acknowledge B's dead body. He doesn't think he can.
"Wait, L," Wedy says stolidly from the floor. He ignores her.
Soichiro stands."I've called an ambulance," he begins. Everyone lining up to make their protests.
"He's not leaving this building," L pronounces, without looking at him, and starts toward the door. He has to get out of here. It's too small a cell and he needs to wash his feet. Someone needs to wash his feet.
"You don't have the authority to decide that," Soichiro calls after him, breath uneven, speech spattered with pangs of his rage and disbelief. L doesn't dignify the assertion with a spoken response, just levels a glance over his shoulder that he hopes, through its disinterest, communicates exactly how much authority he has, and exactly how impossible it would be for any of them to try to stop him doing anything.
Just like Light had, before he was beaten and bloody on the floor, L has far more power than any one person rightly should have. And right now, he wants to drown in it. He wants to drown himself. He wants -
"Wait, goddammit," Wedy says, grabbing him suddenly as he reaches the parting sea of taskforce officers. He hadn't even noticed her get up. Blood on her clothes, on her wrists. How utterly ridiculous, like a bad goth band, the lot of them painted red and smelling like flesh. Her nails dig into his arm and he stops even though he could shake her grip.
He turns hurriedly, fully prepared to demand an explanation in ten words or less, but he doesn't get that far.
Someone's coughing again but it's not Light. That's not Light's cough. Too nasal, too harsh, too familiar.
Fever chills and bowls of luke-warm chicken soup and drooling on the bedclothes. Sickness had traveled around Wammy's house in his youth like paint on a child's hand, wiped on everything and everyone he touches. B and L had been bed-ridden and confined to their own rooms for spans of days, even weeks, but B would always sneak out at night and into L's, to share his suffering, make it communal, make it another of a whole history of games.
L knows his cough just like he knows his laugh and his yell and his handprints.
L knows a dead man from a live one, but there's a twitch of movement from the body that Aiber is still next to, muscles arching into action, and L knows that when Beyond Birthday pushes himself up into a kneeling position and grins at L, he is more that likely the latter.
Well, Aiber's words echo back at him, suddenly patently hilarious, today has been morbid.
tbc.
end notes: wow! because this whole 'b's dead, oh no he's not' thing doesn't happen every other chapter. oh wait. oops.
but okay, i just honestly hope this installation was passably decent, and also that you cherished its relative normalcy because next time? it's about to get weird. weirder. the canon shinigami realm is so fucking weird that i honestly couldn't help just going with it. see you then, beauties! and, as always, thank you for reading and for any and all reviews!