warnings: violence, gore, creepiness, unintelligible writing, made up mysticism? extremely late.
notes: i think i should win something for officially reaching the longest break between chapters in the history of the fic nights. *takes a bow* thank you, thank you. please no photos. no, but really, i would apologize heartily for the delay except it's not like it's something i didn't do on purpose. getting settled in california and with a new job and in a new town and a cat and my darling dear bae was something i wanted to put my full attention on, and so writing got set to the side for a bit. i also took up some interest in an original story of mine that's now at 20k and nowhere close to finished, but i figured i better dive into nights again now that i'm well settled. so, viola! (and for those curious, things are going great over here!)
i'd do one of those dorky 'previously' things that i so love, but i'm exhausted and i want to get this posted asap, so if you don't remember what happened last time (understandably), either go back and re-read or shrug and go forward with joyous hopefulness at the mystery of what the hell is going on!
i love you all and your reviews mean so, so much to me. thank you for reading.
chapter twenty nine - king eats king.
"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?"
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
They lie there, body melded against body, listening for further signs of catastrophe, but nothing comes but the jerk and hum of the auxiliary system turning itself on.
"Lovely," L says, and shrugs out from under Light, slipping, nude and constructed of dim hollows, to the floor where he scrambles around through the pile of mismatched clothes for his cell phone. He dials emphatically. Light sits up, watching him, feeling as if he'd dived into a pool of water and come out the other side in some sort of dark, floaty elsewhere.
"What's going on?" he asks, head rushing with suspicions that involve a dastardly twin L running amuck in a black catsuit raising havoc and mangling electrical boxes.
L holds up a finger, shushing him, and Light scoffs but follows the direction as a matter of convenience.
"Watari?" L grumbles into the phone. "Have you still got video?" There's a short pause and L's unkempt brows draw downward, as he crouches to pull on his trousers, phone tucked between his jaw and shoulder. "Well, then where are you?… Mello? You couldn't have at least gotten Wedy or Aizawa or someone sensible and not immediately post-pubescent to watch the feeds?" He rolls his eyes, switching the phone to the other side and plucking up a shirt - which may very well be Light's, but he's not going to correct him - with the other hand. "No, I didn't expect a midnight power outage, either, although I probably should have."
He grits his teeth, struggling with his shirt sleeves and missing the neck-hole every time, and grudgingly, Light stands and moves to help him. L winces at the first touch, warm hands on his back, and he tenses as if against a blow, but after almost dropping the phone, he relents and lets Light dress him with a roll of his eyes.
Light smiles. His whole body hurts, but he smiles, pulling L's long arms through their sleeves
"Look, call Mello and make sure everything's functioning properly and that B's still in his cell. I'll head over there in person, just in case. Watari? Watari?" He pulls the phone away from his ear, staring at the screen, which blinks Call dropped up at him. He redials, pulling out of Light's reach to move to the door. "Shit." He snaps the phone closed. "It's not going through. This - " He closes his eyes, scrubbing at his head like a mental patient. "I'll be right back. Stay put."
Light makes a sound of strained dissatisfaction, pulling his sticky hospital pants back on with a grimace. "Yeah, right, like I'm letting you leave me here to go get the tar beaten out of you by some discount copy-cat creep that you picked up on a Kabukicho street-corner?" He trips over the end of his pant leg surreptitiously as L punches in the code to unlock the door, righting himself quickly, then grabs his shirt up from the floor.
L doesn't say anything, pulling open the door.
"Who is he, L?" Light snaps, slamming his hand up to block the door. There's no way L's leaving him alone in here again. This isn't a conjugal visit. This is them, back together again. He's not letting him go so easily.
L closes his eyes, jaw locking, as if with restrained anger. Very slowly, he says, "Light, if you care about me at all, you'll stay here."
"Bullshit," Light bites out roughly. "I don't, then. I'm coming with you." He's a solid object, a force made of his own mind, and he's not letting L go anywhere without him.
"Fine," L says, jerking to face him, eyes heated and afraid, unlike how Light has ever seen them, "if you care about yourself or your own life, just listen to me for once." He swallows, wetting his throat with a rough sound, obviously panicking about something. About the man with black eyes and sharp teeth. "He wants to kill you, and he typically gets what he wants."
Light keeps his arm locked on the door, an immovable barricade. "What he can get is in line. He's not the only one," he says, looking L up and down, "who wants me dead."
L blinks at him, as if unimpressed, but Light can see that's cracking, he's - agh. Jabbing Light in his ribs, pressing into the still fresh wounds and sending him doubling over, clutching his abdomen. "Bastard!" Light shouts, as L slips out the door and slams it behind him. Falling against it, Light can hear him breathing heavily on the other side.
"You can get me back later," L says softly, and it barely makes it through the thick metal between them. As Light regains his breath and listens to the nearly soundless footsteps disappear into nothing down the hall, he supposes that was at least an assurance that they'll see each other again.
Aiber's phone isn't working, service completely gone, which shouldn't happen unless power is down through-out the entirety of the district, which it doesn't look to be from Wedy's wide window. After trying several different numbers and turning the piece of shit on and off twice, he slams it down on the side-table and breathes deeply, swigging down the last of his bourbon and then leaning over to shake Wedy awake.
He would let her sleep all night if he could, but circumstances align to fuck her over again and again, and as a fellow victim of such a curse, he knows the times and ways in which trouble cannot be avoided.
"Réveiller, mon petit," he murmurs against her hair, breath warming her cheek, and in the dim back-up lights he can see the pretty shadows of her eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks.
"Fuck," she says, in a gravelly, post bar-fight voice, and pulls a pillow over her head.
Aiber grins, pulling it away from her. "I share the sentiment, beautiful, but the power's gone out and my phone's not working and there's a very real possibility that we're in the middle of an emergency situation and no one's yet bothered to notify us."
After a moment's pause, Wedy opens her eyes and stares blearily at the ceiling. "Fuck," she echoes, more coherently this time. Aiber nods and she rolls over, pulling her own phone from the bag beside her bed, pressing buttons and swearing in a throaty night voice. She shakes her head, shoving her phone in the pocket of a pair of black sweats that she'd kicked off when they'd tumbled one another into bed, and then pulls her gun from the side-drawer, cocking it once.
"Well then," she tells Aiber, holding out her free arm for a hand up, "let's go find us an emergency."
Amane had been the one to scream, but from the video feed, it looks to have been nothing but shock at the power outage. She's curled up, knees to her chin, in her thin cellblock blankets, staring up at the ceiling with a look of frozen apprehension. Mello almost feels bad for her, killer or not. He used to separate people into piles, blacks and whites, but he's come to realize recently that people aren't laundry, and it's never that simple. Even Watson, rapist and betrayer that he'd turned out to be, had been kind to him and made him feel less afraid in London all by himself. Even if it had just been a lie and a manipulation, it had still counted for something.
And B, who makes him feel consistently uncomfortable and treats other people's lives like toys with which to amuse his childish mind, has saved and protected him from certain trauma and death, and helped him more than he'd thought people could or would help one another.
So, it's not simple. Misa Amane is not simple, and even if she is an unrepentant murderer, she is afraid and Mello feels for her.
He dials Watari's number on the phone that had been left with him, but there is no cell service and he switches to the landline, powered by the back-up electrical grid. He's barely halfway through the number, when the lights flicker and then go dark, the camera feeds fizzing out in a buzz of silvery static.
"Shit!" The phone goes dead in his hand. He's not sure what's happening, and not being able to get in contact with anyone is not going to help him figure it out. At least, at last review of the surveillance, everyone had been okay - all the prisoners in their cells, L slipping like a dirty white shadow out of Yagami's room and into the hallway, Watari moving silent and sturdy through the mid-floors where the medical staff were settling into their rooms, Aiber and Wedy roused alert by the outage, the officers waking each other up and whispering amongst themselves.
He opens the top-most drawer, feeling around, and coming up with a flashlight, which he flicks on and waves around until he finds the peripherally-noticed control switch encased in glass and labeled Emergency Auxiliary Generator. He assumes this qualifies as en emergency, takes a breath, and breaks the glass with the body of the flashlight.
When he pulls the switch the lights turn back on, though lowly in order to preserve energy, and he grins with momentary superiority, watching the cameras and monitors fizzle back into operation.
He's just flicking off the flashlight and moving back to the desk to call Watari when the power drops out again.
L had gone by Misa's room first, walking back to the opposite end of the hall, punched in the code, and stuck his head in. "Alright?" he'd asked, and she'd squeaked in surprise, but then nodded hurriedly. He'd left her that way, moving quickly to the stairs and down to B's floor.
He's in the landing between floors when the power goes out for a second time, and he prays to the gods of death and gods of anything else that Mello manages to figure out the emergency switch or Watari at least gets there shortly - before their prisoners realize that their cell doors are unlocked. When the lights flicker back on for the second time he snorts to himself, relieved that Wammy's seems to have imbued Mello with a few critical thinking skills, or else that getting the hell out of that place and living in the real world is what had done the trick, and he heads down the second flight of stairs.
Then the power goes out again.
They don't have anymore generators, and L's mounting suspicion of foul play turns into a certainty and he rushes the rest of the way onto B's otherwise deserted floor, to the maximum security medical room - which, in his initial designs, L had imagined Kira locked up in, if anyone - where he finds the door hanging open, the bed empty, and the medical equipment cast aside.
The message is blatant: catch me if you can.
L grits his teeth. He can.
After the lights go on and off for the third time, Light makes the decision to try his luck with the door.
It comes open easily, and he raises his eyebrows at the oversight, moving quickly out into the hall before another generator can get online and set the security system working again. It's pitch black on either side of him, the white wall straight ahead barely perceptible, and he squints, letting his eyes adjust, and moves in the direction of the darkness that looks slightly thinner than the alternative. Either way, he'll reach an end eventually.
L can't have gone far. Or, he can have, but Light's hoping that the alternating darkness and overhanging disaster had at least slowed him a little bit. It doesn't help that L had designed this building, surely knows every door and turn, and where all the 'watch you step' signs are located that Light can't help but miss in this darkness, knocking elbows with an offensive outshot of design that makes itself known, upon further investigation, to be a box containing a fire extinguisher.
He grits his teeth, shifting his weight the other way, the world becoming a little clearer with every step as the deep blacks fade to smudged greys, the whites of his hands slowly appearing before him as he moves along the hallway, which is either a tunnel in disguise, leading into the very depths of the earth, or else just appears that way for how slow he is going.
Then he sees her.
She's not who he'd been looking for, not even who he'd had in mind - left as he is to chase L after his every disappearance, pathetically, irredeemably - but once he sees her he realizes she was who he needed all along. Misa with her eyes, Misa his protector, knight in campy armor, whatever one wants to call it; the fact remains that she is a weapon, and one that he will gladly use to tear the bastard who had knocked him around like a punching bag limb from limb - B, the letter is B - and, as a bonus, get L in line.
There's just the pesky matter of getting her memories, and power, back to her.
"Misa," he says, hushed, the dark swallowing sound as well as it does light. He reaches a hand out, catching her around the arm, and she's warm and fizzing with something, a violence and a prettiness that she hadn't ever had before, like some kind of ornate, decaying statue.
His hand locks where it is, body stiffening up, as she turns to look at him. It's not Misa.
Running is the ideal, running is what boys who aren't Kira do, but Light stands there as this being, feral and gilded, turns to study him. "You're it," she says, in a voice like a church bell, and he wishes they were all there to see this, a true beast, a monster that they can pin their fears on while he ducks out of the spotlight.
He doesn't let go of her. "I'm a him, actually," he says, not letting the fear show in his voice. "You're the one who's really more of an it."
Her eyes are glazed over, trance-like, with a thin pink sheen. She smiles and she has too many rows of teeth, and he shouldn't be able to see so deep inside of her throat, shouldn't be able to see anything in this dim, but there's something about her that radiates a glow, ethereal and dirty, imperceptibly changing the way that the particles around her react to each other, lighting her up while leaving everything else dark.
Isn't that always the way of monsters?
She moves sharply, too quick, animalistic, a beast of prey going hunting, and her thin, clawed fingers are on his neck and her lipless mouth is pressed to his ear, mumbling nonsense in harsh and heady tones. He wonders, vaguely, how he can see her without having touched her notebook, but his whole intestinal tract is too busy crawling up into his throat for the thought to bother him particularly.
"Easy, easy," he murmurs, treating her as he would treat Ryuk, like a pet or a -
"Not easy. Never easy," she bites out, lyrically, like part of a song. "Do you know the one about the boy who went away with a bad man to a graveyard?" She switches tracts abruptly, as if taken with the tides of her thoughts, and Light grits his teeth.
Women.
"No," he says, calmly, placating, as her claws draw patterns on his neck. It doesn't hurt so much in the physical sense as it feels as if his blood is being slowly and soothingly drained. "I'm afraid I haven't heard it."
"It's a terrible story," she says. "It's my favorite. A little boy meets a man who he's never seen before, but the man is very nice to him, and says he's going to be his friend and buy him nice things, and since the boy is lonely and the boy is stupid, the boy goes away with him, to a beautiful spot the man knows. The spot is a graveyard, and in the graveyard there is a very tired girl who does not like to be woken, but she is woken, because there is screaming. Because the man strips the boy of his clothes, touches him in dirty places, and the boy tries to run and so the man stabs him. Has a knife just for the purpose. The man does this all the time, but never before on this grave. Never before within audible distance. The blood gets all in the ground and the girl drinks it because that's what she does now, and it makes her strong and it makes her homesick and so she crawls up out of her grave and she kills them both, unquestionably. She can't do anything but. Isn't it nice to be death? Don't you enjoy it?"
"I - " Light's not sure if she's asking him or if she even realizes he's there anymore. Her eyes have glazed over indelibly. "You're right," he says after a moment, swallowing thick and heavy, "that was a terrible story."
She slams him back against the wall and his whole body goes hot with pain, temples airy and throbbing, gutless stomach rolling with the sharpness, the utterness of the suffering. He's sick with how much he can't stop it. He really wishes unreasonably strong and violent people would stop seeking him out and doing harm to his person.
Maybe this is just what people do to gods. The masses with their pitchforks and torches, tearing down his temple.
"So, you understand now," the monster hisses, "why I have to go home."
"Yes," Light says, even though he has no fucking idea whatsoever where he's supposed to have gotten that idea. Story about a boy. Is that some kind of metaphor? Do Shinigami even deal in metaphors, or is everything literal? The blood is actual blood and the grave is an actual grave and the girl…
It rocks him back and forth and suddenly he feels much sicker and more afraid. "You really are the one who's been killing the children," he says, but it's not even a question anymore.
Little boy goes away with the bad, bad man. How? How how how how is this happening, how is she doing it, why does he feel like his organs are spilling over into one another, congealing into a choking mass. Maybe because they are. Maybe everything is literal.
She acts like he hadn't said anything. "You have my ticket home. Give it back."
"Okay, okay," he says, even though he doesn't know what he's giving. His notebook? Does she want his notebook? That's what she'd taken from Misa, isn't it? "Take whatever you want."
"No, you have to give it to me."
He can feel it being taken, a sort of tug of war against an unknowable force, bright and strong and swallowing him, making his head fizz, his ears pop, the darkness around him burn and bubble up and he's not letting go, he's not letting her have it. He's not sure if that matters. He feels as if he is going to die here, but if she takes from him what he has spent so long earning, leaving him with holes carved out where his purpose, his rage, his worth should be, then continuing to live would be little more than a painful farce. He is terrified of death but he is maybe even more terrified of reverting to nothing, an emptied carcass of a beautiful god.
But even empty can fill itself again, and even without his memories he has the base potential to become once again. The cessation of his existence leaves no room for requital, and as this monster tears his self open from the inside and spills his knowledge and his guts and his trembling power all over the shadowed floor, he longs for nothing so much as he does to punish. The way that he is destined to. The way that he created himself to be able to.
He's going to let go. Live to fight another day. L will help him. L will hate him, will condescend to him and laugh and burn him up, but he will help. Light's hands aren't around anything so he doesn't know what surrender specifically entails in word or in action, but he feels his rancor wilting, the strings holding his bones together loosening - he could fall, he's going to fall - he's -
He falls. Not in any bright metaphorical upheaval, though. He falls on the floor, cool linoleum, back knocking against the tiled wall, and the monster falls beside him, hair a mess and screeching silently in a cacophony that digs down into Light's head, pinching and devouring his nerves, making the world itself feel sick and heavy.
And then L.
But of course, it's not L. The letter is B, which doesn't seem to make particular sense, going from L to B or B to L and skipping the C through K that belongs in-between. But there he is, ragged and rampaging, body similar in the broad strokes to L's, but in the details all wrong. He's on the monster and he is biting it, clawing, everything animalistic raging out of him and onto her, and she roars back, making dizzy waves in the atmosphere around them that shake Light down and have him holding onto the wall for fear that if he lets go he will slide away into nowhere.
B doesn't seem to even notice. He pins the monster by her scaly arms, straddles her as he'd done to Light not a day ago, and it's a marvel to watch, like something on the safari channel, beast against beast, devouring each other in some primal ceremony of the natural - or unnatural - world.
B seems to be winning, nasal breathes streaming out into high-pitched chuckles, a mad and underhanded sound that terrifies Light even as it shields him. Then the monster starts to laugh, too, rhythmically, beautifully, like the choirs of heaven beaming down upon them, a sinister and dream-like sound that overpowers B's, drowning out everything. It's still so dark but the whole hall is filling up with hazy lights. The monster doesn't seem to care that she's losing.
B stops laughing, very suddenly, and says something that Light does not understand, but that the monster seems to:
"Sadie?"
And everything turns upside down.
She climbs on top of B, knocking the axis of the earth out of balance so that everything sways in her favor, the light devouring the dark with glinting hungry teeth, and Light doesn't know that he shouldn't prefer this, in fact thinks that - given the substantially larger injury that one had given him over the other - he should side with the monster. Especially since she seems to be winning. But she wants to take away his Note, wants to take away him, and he knows that the important bits will fade away to nothing if he lets her, if he lets go.
Best to surrender and live to fight another day, but even better to come out victorious in the first place, and so he finds his feet, though he knows not where, struggles to pull himself up on the wall, fingers scrabbling against the tiles, then knocking shoulders with the metal box whose acquaintance he had made previously.
He smiles, although it seems to tear his skin, and as the struggle behind him reels into a discordant chime of light and dark, unearthly forces devouring one another, he jabs his elbow into the glass protecting the fire extinguisher, rips it out and - going from memory; pull, aim, squeeze, something, something - extinguishes.
The white chemical spray gets all over the monster's back, and though it doesn't seem to do any outright harm, it distracts her for long enough for B to jerk, head-butt her, and flip them over so that he is on top again. He grabs her, reeling back for a hit, and Light watches in satisfaction -
As she sinks through the floor, her ghost lights trailing after her.
"Fuck." B scratches at the floor, as if trying to crawl through after her, but it makes nothing but a low, sharp sound. "Fuck." They're left in the dark again. B falls forward, resting his forehead against the floor. "What the fuck."
Light doesn't know what the fuck. He doesn't know what to do. He's gotten rid of one monster, only to be left with another. Pull, aim, squeeze, sweep, that's it. He's got it.
He pulls, he aims, he squeezes, he sweeps, and he lets the spray jet at B this time, pelting him endlessly with his only line of defense. One can't be too careful.
Wedy has two guns and she gives one to him, which Aiber holds away from himself by the barrel the way one would a particularly slimy and poisonous insect, his sweaty fingers making streaks on the cool metal body.
"I would give this back to you," he says, to what might be a doorframe, "if I knew where you were." The dark is heavy and blanketing, suffocating them into small, singular cells of unknowability, even as they're directly next to each other.
Wedy scoffs. He can feel her moving down the hall ahead of him, but her footsteps are silent, the cat-burglar in her awake and ready to pounce. "Stop squinting. Let your eyes adjust. Haven't you been through high-conflict night-training?"
Aiber follows, cautiously, but he can hear his slippers brushing against the ground clearly, as if the darkness is exacerbating the echo, letting the sound spread out as far as the eye can't see. "Yes," he mumbles. "That doesn't mean I passed."
"And L still kept you on?" she asks, voice low and slim, slipping back to him like a tiny messenger, but still conversational, as if she's barely winded by the situation.
Aiber shrugs even though she can't see him. "Must have been my good looks. Can you please take your gun back now?"
"No," Wedy tells him flatly, stopping but not announcing this decision, so that Aiber bumps hardily into her back and has to steady himself against the corner that they're parked at. "Hand," she says, voice sharp, but not overly chiding, and he dispiritedly slides his fingers away from the edge of her breast where they had come to rest. "You'll need it," she continues, picking up the earlier thread of conversation like nothing has been said in the interim, "if we get separated. This place is huge and we're more likely to find Watari or L if we split up."
"Actually," Aiber says, skipping to catch up with her as she darts gracefully around the corner, beginning to become a clearer shape even through the claustrophobic dim, "we're more likely to be brutally murdered. Haven't you watched any movie ever?"
"As soon as I hear dramatic fight music, I'll start playing the heroine," Wedy tells him, motioning him forward with some sort of coded hand gesture that he supposes he's meant to interpret as come on. "But until then, let's both assume for consistency's sake that this is real life."
Aiber follows, shifting his grasp on the gun. "Well, if you want to take the fun out of it. Which way should I go, then? The surveillance room is up, but most everyone else is down, L included, I'm pretty sure. It's really a question of whether you want me to parley with Senior or Junior."
"You go up," Wedy tells him, as they approach the door to the stairwell. "Find Watari, figure out what the hell is happening, and get him to work some of that old inventive magic and fix it. I'll head down and try, if at all possible, to get some answers from the masses."
"Fine, fine," Aiber says, resignedly slipping the gun into the pocket of his dressing gown, feeling like a Hitchcockian leading man, except not quite sober enough and a little too prone to walking into walls. "Should we have a signal? You know, something to tip the other off if we run into trouble. With the power down, it's very possible that Yagami's on the loose, or worst case scenario, that very excitable and unkillable Birthday fellow, and I'm really not up to dying tragically tonight on top of everything else."
Wedy rolls her eyes. He can't see them, but he can tell, the way he can tell when she's hungry, or in a good mood, or on the rag. She exists so quietly and beautifully, the perfect soldier, but he knows her crying in her pajamas, knows her teenaged beauty queen photos and the way that her mother sucks her dry, softly and without really meaning to, and how Wedy lets it happen because she's too used to it to do anything else. He knows how her hands feel with diamond rings on them, and how much heavier they make her punch, and how to kiss her so that she stops telling him all the ways that he is wrong and starts telling him, with her hands and her breath and her cold clear eyes, that he is okay.
She rolls her eyes and says, "If I hear a gunshot, I'll come running," just to tease him, just to spoil him, just to promise that, if not happily ever after, they'll live.
She is, endlessly, his savior, and he just hopes he doesn't run into anything he'll need saving from.
He's a terrible copy. Light, stiff with terror and clutching his fire extinguisher like a shield, follows him anyway, up the stairs and out of the cell block, down halls he hadn't even known were there and then up more stairs, his stringy pale face a beacon to follow through the slippery dark.
When they finally stop for a breath, B counting off on his fingers and scribbling invisible markings with the pad of his finger on the wall, as if working out some detailed inner math equation. "How is easy," he mumbles to himself, voice dull and not overly remarkable, nothing like the slithering whisper he'd put on when he'd assaulted Light. "Why's not so hard, either. The question we need to ask is: when? Or rather, why did it take her so long? It's been years. She was always smart. It shouldn't have taken her so long." He turns back to his imaginary chalkboard, scribbling again.
He doesn't seem to particularly notice that Light is there, and annoying as that is, it leaves open a very convenient opportunity for Light to brandish his extinguisher and back him, as violently as he can manage, flat against the wall that he's so preoccupied with.
"I don't mean to interrupt," Light says, though he's pretty sure he's snarling a grin of satisfaction that suggests he very much does mean to, "your very important nonsense, but I think this is about the time that you're going to explain to me exactly who you are, where you came from, and what the fuck is happening." He juts the nozzle against B's chest. He hopes it hurts.
B blinks, looks him up and down, as if he's only just noticed him. He doesn't seem particularly shocked or startled by Light's threats, rather he tips his head to the side, like L would do - stop it, stop it, stop stop you're a bad copy stop - and says, vaguely, as if making an objective observation, "I could take that, feed it to you, and watch it burn up your intestines."
The fear isn't heavy or drowning the way it had been with the monster, but rather lightning fast and skating past the edge of his skin, like sharp little goosebumps. It boils in his but he blinks it away.
He says, jaw grit and wrenching out a stolid resolve from the deepest stores within him, "Go ahead." He doesn't break eye contact.
B shrugs, eyebrows popping, and for a panicking second he looks like he's actually going to take Light up on the offer, but then his eyes dart back to the blank space on the wall that he had been studying before, as if seeing some invisible notes to himself there that Light can't, and his body language droops from threatening to conversational.
"What did she say to you?" he asks. He pushes off the wall, knocking the fire extinguisher aside with an easy brush of his hand and backing Light up so they're standing face to face in the rough middle of the corner hallway they're in.
"What?" Light says, even though he knows, feels it tickling just beneath his flesh. "I don't know, something about - " he stops suddenly, lips sealing themselves. "I can't remember."
"Oh, pretty baby, that's very much bullshit," B says, and then reaches up and brushes Light's hair out of his eyes, gently, like it's nothing.
"Maybe," Light bites out, wincing at the pet name more-so than the touch, "if you tell me what I want to know, it'll come back to me."
B is taller than him, and he droops in angles over Light, like some sort of hulking grotesque statue on the eaves of a Victorian church, worn and vicious and curiously still. He says, "I could torture it out of you, don't you think?"
Light's not going to disagree with that. His pain tolerance is low and this isn't especially important information to hold onto, it's rather more the act of standing up to this brutish interloper, and letting him know that for all his madness and bloodthirst, he cannot corral a god, nor bend him to his ugly will.
So he says, "Not before L finds us," voice hard and as superior as he can get it, "don't you think?"
B droops a little. Then, quickly, all in one smooth move, he takes the extinguisher from Light's hands, casts it off to the side where it thunks loudly against the floor, and swings an arm around Light's shoulders, clutching him close. Light thinks briefly and vividly of dying here, with a bad copy and no answers to any questions, his paradise still under construction, all the grand and beautiful things inside of him swept away into the nothingness that waits, with hungry hungry teeth, on the other side of whatever border he'll be forced through. Without L, without Misa, his father, his sister, his mother, his childhood home and the city he grew up in, the world he's torn himself open in order to save. Everything devoured by this man.
He's ready to fight. He's ready to claw his way out of the grave that's being dug for him. Up through the dirt, just like the monster's story, just like the boy and his blood and the bad man, just -
B doesn't kill him. He doesn't even try. He leans back against the wall with Light at his side and says, "My name is Beyond Birthday, I was born in Tokyo in 1981 to parents unknown and raised in my early years by a pair of occultist foster parents who died under suspicious circumstances when I was five, and shortly thereafter taken to Winchester, England to live in an orphanage for gifted children, where, according to the official file, my 'already unbalanced temperament and criminally violent tendencies' were 'exacerbated by the competitive atmosphere and exposure to troubling stimuli,' resulting in my running away at sixteen, involving myself in a variety of nefarious pursuits, and landing myself a nifty jail sentence in the city of angels, which I recently broke out of in order to travel back to my hometown and run amuck with the locals." He gives Light a rough pat on the back. "Now, your turn."
"Wait," Light says, turning to look at him, "then where did you and L - "
"Ah, ah, ah," B interrupts, pressing one clammy finger to Light's lips, "it's tit-for-tat, this for that. I answered your first two questions, now it's time for you to answer two of mine. It's only fair. It's your game, champion, don't tell me you don't know how to play."
Light winces, head jerking back away from the touch. He's very touchy, this guy, physical in ways that L isn't even when they're fucking. He seems to fully inhabit his body in ways that Light hadn't realized until just now that most people don't.
He smells sweaty and cold. It's gross. Something about England flickers in the back of Light's mind and he half hopes that L finds them and half hopes he doesn't.
"She just," he starts, resolving to play the game until such time as it becomes inconvenient, or he has ample opportunity to strangle this Beyond character with his own shirtsleeves, "she said a lot of weird things. I don't know. She wants something from me but I'm not sure what. I was a little distracted being mortally petrified to really take notes."
B leans forward and… smacks him on the head. "Lie."
"Ow, fuck," Light grits, swatting him away, and it's more the insult added to injury that stings than the blow itself. "Are you 12? Get off of me."
"I'm ageless," B says, stroking his face, voice silky and mocking.
"You're full of shit," Light tells him.
"That, too." B drops down, very suddenly, out of Light's line of sight, hands rolling along his legs, stroking the material of his somewhat crusty hospital pants, seductive in an grimy way, and when he goes for the waistband Light feels both sick and horrified and amused at once.
The audacity is actually kind of impressive. "What are you doing?" he asks, even as B pulls on the tie at his hips and the answer is fairly obvious. He wants to kick him off but he's a little bit frozen in stark awe.
"Giving you some incentive to play right," B tells him, fingernails sharp and grabby, brushing his skin like kind knives with softly destructive intentions, and it's another catastrophe but a funnier one, the sitcom hijinks version of a supernatural thriller, unlikely blowjobs and hair tickling his thighs and he half thinks about just letting him do it, with the vague hope that L will arrive and will see and will be madly jealous and take him away and stay with him and not keep going away, breaking out of his cages and building them back around Light.
The other half, that isn't fatigued and lonely and tired, the part that is hungry to eat the sky and all the stars in it, won't let this little beast touch him without the assurance that he will be devoured back. Light's so long been pretending not to have teeth that they have retracted. He's got to bite, though.
He's going to bite.
He knees B in the head just as he's grinning at the come stains inside of the seams and he crashes backwards with a guttural laugh, and Light walks purposefully forward, waistband falling down around his thighs still and he lets it. He steps on B's chest, bare feet digging into his abdomen, and he can feel the squishy organs pulsing underneath him.
"Alright," he says slowly, command flowing back, finally something he can conquer, "I'll play. But fair warning, I'll win."
B looks maniacally pleased by this development. "I should have known," he seethes, grinningly, "you'd be a little jet engine with no wheels and all wings."
"That makes no sense," Light tells him, pulling his pants up finally and kneeling down to straddle B's chest, feeling that familiar wriggling power high low within him and letting it seep through all of his veins and infect every cell with its pale golden taste.
"It does," B says, drawing his fingers teasingly along Light's tensed calves as they rest on either side of him, "you just have to feel it instead of think it." That doesn't make any sense either, but it doesn't warrant extensive rumination, because in the next moment B's moved back to tit-for-that, this for that, and he's gasping breathily, like he's sexually excited by it, "Tell me what she said, tell me what she said, tell me what she said, tell me - "
"Christ, alright," Light huffs, cutting off the childish repetition with a press to B's throat. "She told me some horror story about a boy in a graveyard and his blood and drinking it and murder and it sounded like some pretentious high school goth phase crap, and I would have written it off as as much if she wasn't, you know, obviously a Shinigami."
B bucks up against him. "Shinigami." He says the word like he's trying to chew it out of the air and swallow it inside of himself. "Tell me about it. I wanna know about death. I am death but I don't know enough about it. I haven't read the pamphlets and they wouldn't let me on the tour. I drank detergent when I was four years old and the pearly white gates told me that I would forever be too young and ugly to die, but I think they were just jealous because I was brighter and I had half a map of the cosmos in me."
It's this moment exactly, and miraculously not before, that Light realizes that Beyond Birthday is actually and legitimately certifiable and that it isn't just an act, or if it is, the act is built upon foundations of madness already there in the marrowy center of his bones.
"It's my turn," he says, shifting his weight lest B forget who the one on top is now, "my question." He has to frame this precisely, nothing so simple as, 'Where did you meet him?' or 'How do you know him?' He settles, after itchy moments of B watching him think, on, "What is your relationship to L?"
B grins wide, tipping his head back, as if he's seen something on the top of his head and is trying to get a better look, like a dog chasing its tail. Light presses down on his abdomen, jerking him flat and back into his line of sight. He makes a throaty huffing sound and bites his lip.
"The same relationship that a comet has to the sun it orbits." He rocks his hips up, and he doesn't give Light time to ask for clarification, moving on quickly to a mirror question of, "What is your relationship to L, princess?"
Light grits his teeth. He's going to play to win. "Same principle," he says, "except I'm the sun and he's a black hole." He can feel B's pulse flickering under his flesh, in every muscle, live and breathing for all his ghostliness of manner.
B leans up. Light's afraid for a moment that he's going to kiss him, except then he stops, breathing warm and slow in Light's face, "Suns become black holes, dumbass."
The kiss still would have been more insulting.
Light snaps, "And comets are tiny, meaningless bits of spacial matter that get swallowed up and destroyed by black holes."
"Are you saying," B titters, batting his eyelashes in a way that is in no way reminiscent of L, and instead reeks of burlesque and the feigned moans of whores, "that you want to swallow me, Kira?"
"I was more focused on the destruction part, actually," Light bites back.
He's going to say something else, something to tear the skin right off of this man's pale imitation of a body, but then the blood drains from the air, the pulsing hum of life overtaken by a cloying disease, sweet and endless, eternities of deep golden glowing pale nights, mornings where bodies burn up, and he feels sick and he feels like he could choke and quite suddenly, the juvenile snipes feel like a dead weight, bricks in his hands and he'll drown. He hurriedly scrambles off of B and up against the wall, trying to hide.
"She wants my Note," he grits, voice hissing sharply through the mounting white noise, that meshes into grey noise, which meshes into his head and makes dizzy light shows.
B sits up. He's kind of got bedhead and he doesn't seem ardently affected by the depleting oxygen in the room and the rot that's replacing it. "'Scuse me?"
"She wants," Light whispers to him, then hurriedly shuts up, because talking about the Death Note is as good as admitting his identity as Kira. Does that even matter anymore? Who is he pretending for? The investigation team wouldn't find him guilty even if he literally stood on L's dead body clutching the Notebook and proclaiming victory - which is an oft-cherish fantasy that's now being spoiled by its relationship to this moment. "It - she - do you even know what a Death Note is?"
B waves a casual hand, rolling himself closer to Light like a child playing war with its fellows, sticks as guns and kitchen counters as barricades. "Diary you use to kill and get your jollies off, yeah. Merrie filled me in."
"Who?" Light snaps, but it doesn't matter. He switches gears quickly. It's encroaching, death sneaking up and whispering sweet empty things in his ears, sounds like gasping patients on their deathbeds, and the cool quiet of a still grave at night. She did not have a still grave. They should run. He says, "We should run."
"I didn't know God was a runner," B remarks, creeping close along the wall to sidle up beside Light.
"Yeah, well, God has self-preservation instincts," Light snaps back, pulling him along by the arm, in a slow crawl against the grey tiling.
"Sounds very human of him to me."
They pick up a run after that, but not steps after they turn the corner, they stop, Light's feet slowing sharply even as B pulls ahead, not hesitating for a moment. Light lets go of him, lets him walk forward, lets him approach it.
The kid's got a dumb haircut, the sort that parents give first graders against their will to try to make them look respectable, as if a 6-year-old could be anything but a mix of the worst personality traits gleaned from its peers, loosely fastened together to form a weeping, laughing, hungry, shitting little brute. This child is doing none of those things, and will do none.
He's lying flat on the floor, arms spread out like he's playing dead, except the room has death carved into it, left like a signature. The monster's presence is fading but what she's left in her wake is swallowing and apparent and Light feels sick, doesn't know her name, couldn't use it, but itches for his Notebook just to release his crawling rage and the thick drowning pain in his throat. He's parched. The room is parched. The child is dead.
B's tilting his head to the side, like L except it doesn't matter, L or no L, B or any other letter, everything is heavy and small and suffocating and all the world's ugly pieces are lining themselves up, interlocking and spelling out in festering symbols the war and which side will win. Justice will not prevail. There is not justice here. Death is not something that can be organized in neat rows and lines on a page. Death is splatter-paint, abstract and ugly. The pattern is that there is no pattern and the truth is that there is no truth.
B chuckles and Light will kill him with his bare hands.
"You're a monster, too," he chokes out, wanting to turn away, wanting to cover up his eyes, plug his nostrils, drown out the rising horror soundtrack that's playing in the background.
"Yeah," B agrees, "but this kid isn't dead."
Light's thoughts snap back into focus, like the key in the lock, the numbers lining up, stars falling back into their constellations again, the planets back in alignment. Here is justice. It's singing hymnals inside of him. Such a sharp switch, but he is such a sharp man and his emotions play haywire games inside of him, shaping the world in shades of dark or light, alternatingly.
The light has triumphed. Justice is a thing that breathes.
"He's not dead," he sighs, letting it whistle out on a breath. This means everything is salvageable.
"Uh-huh." B nods, straightening up and away from the corpse that isn't a corpse, for as blue and cold and gone as it looks. "He's not even real."
Justice dims again, and utter confusion drowns it out.
Syd goes to Edmund's precinct only to find him off for the day, struggles with his unpaid cell phone bill to make a call to his apartment, and freezes halfway through haranguing a despondent customer service representative when he spots the smudged hand-drawn likeness tacked up amid the sea of lost dog flyers and amber alert notices. He flips his phone closed.
Mello looks cleaner and more well kept in the drawing than he had last time Syd had seen him, with a proper haircut and everything, but it's the same boy, same doubtful eyes and thinning cheeks, the barest remaining hints of baby fat showing his youth. He understands serendipity, here and now, even though it's gritty and tired and far too caffeinated, nothing like the daisy fields and sunshine in the images that Sadie had painted in his head, of a beautiful world that made beautiful sense.
"Everything will turn out," she used to say, in her tiny dresses, hair lumped messily on top of her head, balancing the shop's books in her reading glasses at 5 AM, while Syd would pace the length of their apartment panicking about money. "Serendipity, Sydney. These things have a way of ending up okay."
He'd believed her. He'd kissed her while the sun came up.
She'd died a few months later and he'd cradled her head in his lap and sobbed, wringing out the belief and the comfort and the kindness that had worked its way into him through her, like tears wrung from a handkerchief.
He draws his finger along the scrawl of contact information at the bottom. Have you seen this boy? There's no phone number, just an email address, and Syd goes to the public library and sends a very confused and surely off-putting email to the owner of the drawing, hoping that strange information will still count as valuable information.
Hello, my name is Sydney Grauss and I have seen the boy in your picture. Name of Mello, as far as I know, or maybe Mihael. He stayed with me briefly and he and his companion, who I know to be extremely dangerous, extorted help from me in their travels. I'd be happy to tell you where they went, but only on the condition that you meet me in person and discuss the matter with me fully. There's information that I can't relate unless I know you can be trusted.
After some deliberation he adds, Sorry, at the end of it, and then sends if off, hoping for a speedy response.
Within ten minutes her gets a reply that is only an address, which with Google and a lot of squinting at maps he pins down to an abandoned hospital that's been the scene of two gang-related shootings and is commonly used by teenaged squatters and down and out businessmen making the commute to work everyday from a dirty mattress on a dirty floor in a room shared by a dozen other luckless sorts of their ilk.
It takes him a dull metro ride and a lot of wrong turns and sidelong glances at dangerous looking men with tired eyes sitting outside of shopfronts smoking before he finds it, big and bulky and corroding in an eerie tucked away corner of the city. The white brick front is spotted and grey, and from the date of establishment carved into a stone placard on the broken gate, it had been a World War II hospital. No one stops him from walking in and he can hear a radio blaring top-40 hits from the caved in doorway.
Room number 117 is what the address specifies and that's where he goes, steps slow to avoid being lost in the claustrophobic halls. It's so pale and dim, like a mausoleum, but at least it's long lost its hospital smell, the thick cloying scents of spliff, liquor, and grime long having overtaken it.
When he gets to the right door, he knocks, first softly and then with increasing vigor. "It's Syd," he says. "Sydney. Grauss."
He gets no response and the door doesn't open, but the situation he's in now and the reasons why he's here are not something easily set aside, so after bracing for the worst - man with a gun, man with two guns, Beyond Birthday returned as his tormentor and housemate once again - he turns the knob and goes in.
He'd prepared himself for a vast and varied assortment of somebodies in this room, but what he finds is nobody. There's just a computer, hooked up to an assorted mass of complex machines and fans, like a scrapheap version of an electronics store. The computer is on, and text is blinking on the screen. Otherwise, the room contains a slept-in looking mattress, a selection of dirty mugs, and what looks like a stack of car magazines.
Are you really alone? the text says.
Syd looks around, spying the camera attached to one of the many devices with its blurry green light flashing beside the lens.
More text appears on the screen, as if from some sort of instant messaging program. You can speak.
"Yeah," Syd says loudly and slowly, "just me."
Are you unarmed?
Syd snorts at the screen, giving the computer a disbelieving look. "What are we, in a Bond film? Of course I'm unarmed, Christ."
Turn out your pockets.
Syd rolls his eyes but does as he's told. He's not quite afraid, although he probably should be, because if this really is the sort of MI6 shit that it looks like it's shaping up to be, there's no doubt they'll have the capabilities to get a message to the Japanese government, or at least to track down Beyond Birthday and have him give Syd a ring. There's a pack of gum and 60 pence in his jacket pockets and nothing but lint in his trousers.
"Satisfied?" he grunts at the camera, like its glassy face is truly that of the person or persons giving out these inane orders.
Almost. You're obviously not a threat. Syd frowns as the words appear on the monitor as they're tapped out at an unreasonably quick typing speed. My only other question is how you knew Mello's real name?
Syd frowns. This doesn't read like the speech pattern of a secret agent, too personal and informal. "Mihael?" he asks the camera.
Yes.
"That's what B called him. Uh, Beyond Birthday, his companion. That's actually what I came here to talk about. I need to get in contact with him, only he's somewhere in Japan with your Mihael and that cop bird, and…. " He slows to a stop as closet door, until now shrouded in the corner's shadows and out of notice, opens up and a boy who looks roughly Mihael's age, if that, rolls out on half of a broken gurney with a laptop sitting on his crossed legs and a cigarette hanging out of his chapped mouth.
"Wait, Beyond Birthday, like, the serial killer?" he snaps at Syd, not bothering with introductions. He's freckled and his eyebrows naturally arch in such a way that make him, no matter the contortions of his facial expressions as he speaks, look continually surprised.
"Uh," Syd says, not quite sure what he's stepped into, but fairly certain it's nothing to do with MI6, "yeah, probably."
Aiber's dressing gown is hanging open and L can see his ball sac, as well as the glint of the gun that's pointed straight at him. "Identify yourself," he yaps into the dark hall, and L slips fully out from behind his corner.
"You've gone very Robocop all of a sudden, haven't you? Point that somewhere else." He ruffles his hair, hoping that the sweat-soaked, I've just fucked a condemned criminal look isn't overly obvious in the dim, but even if it is, he's confident that Aiber will set aside his unrighteous tirades for a time when every dangerous personage in the building isn't on the loose.
"Jesus, L," he breathes, shoving his gun back into his overly embellished paisley pocket and sagging against the closest wall. "You should really look into getting an immortal nemesis who doesn't look exactly like you. You nearly gave me a heart attack, which, of all ways to go, would be my very least preferred."
L leans next to him, even though they don't really have time to waste, because he hasn't been alone with Aiber since he'd gotten back and he thinks that he might be the only person who really and truly missed him, and that's owed some measure of deference. Or, no, no, he's not owed anything because L does not owe, L makes himself a thing which common sentimental bonds have no hold on, but he feels it, the pull. He leans next to Aiber and it's hard to see his face but he's just as wide and strong and sad and longing as he's always been.
"He's not my nemesis," he mumbles. "Or immortal," he adds quickly, "at least not definitively." He holds out his hand. "Gun?"
"Please," Aiber says, plucking up the thing and handing it off like a very unflattering accessory that's being necessarily discarded from the ensemble. "And at this point, I'm more willing to believe the unbelievable than anything else. Judging from patterns."
L blinks at him. "I missed you," he says, and he'd like to think he hadn't meant to, but he had. Sentiment, oh, sentiment. Once there's one hole in the hull the whole thing sinks quickly.
"Now that," Aiber says, after a pause where he seems to hold himself back from something, "I can't quite manage to believe."
"I had a lot of time to think while I was gone."
Aiber snorts but it sounds forced. "Yes, I'm sure thinking was exactly what you and Yagami were doing."
L rolls his eyes. "Yes, fucking," he says, pushing off the wall and gesturing Aiber to follow, which he does wordlessly, "but not as much as you might think. Imprisonment is hardly as glamorous as one might assume. Do you know how long I went once without brushing my teeth?"
"I'm pretty sure I don't want to."
At the corner they stop and L holds up a hand, ducking his head around to make sure the next hall is clear. "Where's Wedy, anyway? I thought the two of you went off to get reacquainted after the panic died down."
"We split up," Aiber says, following him, "cover more ground, classic horror movie set-up, I know." He moves so he's slightly ahead of L, facing him as well as one can in the near pitch-dark. "You're changing the subject."
"There's a lot of subjects to get through. I'm rotating to save time." L feels it rising in him and shuffling the deck is the only way to avoid dropping everything and having to play a long, dirty game of 52 pick-up. He doesn't have time for this right now. When everyone is back in their cells and the power is on, his ducks in a row and his rows in nice even columns, then they can fully talk about this. Then he can press his forehead to Aiber's and forget for a bit about the ugly things that he needs more than the pretty ones.
"I do love you," Aiber says, outright. Maybe it's easier when he can't really see L's face.
L says, "I know," because he doesn't know how to say anything else, and Aiber laughs and shakes his head and he looks heartbroken in that calm, drunken way he has.
"You're such a fucker," he tells L.
"I know."
They move quietly further down the hall, a mute recognition hanging full between them, like luggage mutually carried. "It's not simple," L says, after a bit. Aiber is not an honest man but he is a good man, and L has never been loved by one of those before him. He's not the same as Light or B, but he's got his own category, set aside. It's not fair to him and it's not fair to anybody. "We don't have time to hash it out right now. Right now there are three killers on the loose in this building, not including the ones that are on my payroll. I need you to go and find Wedy again and then go to the main room of operations and wait for myself or Watari to show up and brief you. In fact, get Mello and the whole of the team, if you can. It's safer if everyone's in one place."
"And the doctors?" Aiber asks, swallowing the orders like familiar medicine.
"Leave them. Maybe put a guard on their floor, but I want them as little involved as possible. The fewer people who know the nature of the situation, the better."
Aiber nods. "Sir, yes, sir." He's teasing but L knows he'll take the orders seriously.
"And Aiber? We'll talk later. When this mess is sorted out. Over tea, or something." L feels awkwardly like he's setting up a date and Aiber smirks at him like he knows it.
"I'd rather drinks," he says.
L shrugs. "I know you would. Fine, I'll see you then. Please don't die."
He moves towards the stairwell that will take him up to the equipment room where he can maybe pick up a flashlight or two, and he can feel Aiber's eyes on his back and he hopes they're not forgiving. But, of course, they are.
"Back at you," he calls after L, and L catches the words and keeps them in his pocket, then opens the door and closes it behind him. Hello to the wasteland.
B's sitting cross-legged next to the body, like he's a child and it's a stray pet that he's claimed as his own and is trying to coax into action. He grips the boy's face, peels open his eyelids to watch his dead eyes goggle, and says, "She had this computer program - it was shit, on Windows 98 or something - but she'd make digital renderings of cell decomposition and growth and then play them on a loop in the background while Syd made dinner. She set one series to a Kinks album. It was an art form to her, I think, even if she pretended it was a joke. She was all smiles in front of him but I had a few long, dark, drunken conversations with her where I saw the parts that wanted to destroy the world and regrow it. She was an amazon somebody raised in captivity and Syd was supposed to be her freedom, but even that was just a bigger cage."
He looks up at Light. He's got this enthralling way of speaking that makes Light grit his teeth and stoutly refuse to become enthralled.
"Death was her real freedom and that's why I followed her home. I wanted to kill her for so long, just let her out of her stifling body, but I had to wait for the numbers to match up, and even then I didn't lift a finger. She just tripped." He bops the dead boy who is not a dead boy on his nose. "The universe is so funny."
Light has so many questions he could ask, and he wants to, but instead he tells. "You're a psychopath."
B tips his head to the other side. "So are you."
Are they in first grade? I am rubber, you are glue, etc., etc. There's so many more important things going on but Light can't help himself. "Psychopathy," he starts, "is defined as not only an inherent lack of empathy, but - "
B rolls his eyes. "Don't quote your textbook at me. What the word really means, when applied, is: you're not like us and we don't know what to do, so here is a box, crawl into it. Mental disorders are just labels they stick on things that are scary to try to make it seem like they understand and can quantify them. You might really be a god and I might really be a prophet, but they'll stick us in the nuthouse either way because there's no room for holiness and horror in this world anymore. You have to keep it in the shadows if you want it to keep."
Light blinks. He doesn't like this and he doesn't want it. He wants L, who argues with him on terms he understands, level ground. B sounds like he's talking out of the sky, and not in the good way. He knocks it aside, because there's too much going on.
He points at the child. "Explain this. Explain her. I don't have time for more riddles and neither do you."
B stands up, swiftly, all in one move. "I was getting there." He latches a hand onto Light's arm and pulls him down, so that they're both crouched on opposite sides of the dead body, and Light lets himself be pulled because there doesn't seem to be anywhere else to go. "Smell it," B orders.
Light wants to feel sick but he doesn't and he's not sure why. This is sickening. "You've got to be kidding me."
"Okay, don't smell it, I'll smell it for you." He leans forward, takes a big whiff, and then breathes it at Light. He can feel the hot air on his face but there isn't a smell. He's not sure what he's meant to be looking for. "Death has a scent. I don't mean rotting corpses, I mean death. Deep and dark and fleshy. This smells like computers."
Light frowns. "Computers don't smell like anything."
B winks at him. "Now you're catching on. This is too perfect, too clean and crisp. It's like a horror movie set. Death is never like this, and I'd know pretty well because I've been on both sides of it. There's a different scent here, like a well. Something leading us down, down, down, but even that's superficial." He rolls back on his heels and squats like L and Light thinks it makes him look unbearably stupid. "She's pulling off a drama here, what I don't understand is why."
Light stands up. Now that the corpse isn't a corpse, the place where his empathy had been just feels hollow, like a sinkhole. "Yeah, neither do I. Remarkable, the things we have in common."
B rolls his eyes and stands with him. "Her name is Sadie Markovitch. She was a girl I knew and a girl who died."
"You killed her." Light isn't asking a question.
B shrugs. "No, but I watched her die."
"You let her die."
"Like a policeman lets a speeding comet crash to earth and destroy it? Death is inevitable. Now do you wanna play backs-and-forthies all day, Kira?" B's voice is nasal and flared slightly at the edges. "Maybe wait for her to actually off somebody in the building? I always thought L's corpse would be kind of a marvel to behold."
Light scoffs. His fingers tingle at the edges. B is leading him around the corner and he's letting himself be led because standing stolidly in place wouldn't really get him anywhere. "You're disgusting," he says, more out of propriety than anything else, and a moment later B abruptly turns them arounds and drags Light back around the corner.
There's nothing there.
The hall is empty, creepy in a cheap '60s thriller sort of way, but there are no little boys with pale little faces. Light feels something twitch in his gut; the absence of a body is almost more terrifying than the body itself.
"Yahtzee!" B cackles.
His voice echoes and maybe she can hear him and maybe she's coming. Maybe they should turn tail and run, but Light can't spare a thought to order his feet to move. The strings are tying themselves together, forming loose patterns that weave themselves tighter with every passing moment. The grand, glorious, choral moment where the heavens open up, light shines down upon the mere mortals - mere monsters - and everything is kind and everything makes sense. The pen is placed in his hand and the paper under his fingers and his only task is to write the words.
"The children," Light says, and then doesn't say anything else.
B turns to him with an eyebrow cocked. "Yes?" he prompts. "Aren't you supposed to be the brightest student in the country, genius IQ and all that? I'm sure you can string together a more complex sentence if you really put your mind to it."
"Shut-up," Light snaps. "I'm thinking."
"And woe is the cruel soul who interrupts such a sacred activity," B titters, leaning in close so that Light can feel his body heat. It's distracting and sort of gross on top of that. He closes his eyes and lets his understanding settle.
He says, "That's how she's been raping them without genitals and killing them without a weapon." He grits his teeth. "It doesn't make any sense and I hate it, but if she can transform reality to make it look like she's killed them, then - "
B's shaking his head already. "That's not how it works, babydoll. It's not a parlor trick. When you play with things on the molecular level, it's not surface or disguise, it's an actual transmutation. Something becoming something else. You're talking about the Tokyo child killer case, right? Yes, I watch the news, and no, the pretty fairytale you're spinning in your head is not how it's going to turn out. The children are still dead. Just because the path from point A to point B - " he wiggles his eyebrows when he says his own name, " - is not one you're familiar with, doesn't mean it didn't happen."
Light nods, letting the shining things drop out of his hands before he can get too tight a grip on them. It makes sense, almost, in a quaint way that he hadn't expected it to. "It's like the Death Note," he says, momentarily letting all thoughts of antagonism and competition go to make room for pure intellect. "It kills people through no traceable mode and doesn't fall in line with the commonly accepted rules of reality, which makes those rules void." He starts pacing, overtaken by his sudden interest in an application of scientific principles to what he'd always considered just as unexplainable as any holy relic. "If it's possible to contort reality through cell manipulation - or even some other way that we haven't even considered yet - then that's probably exactly what the Note does. It's a tool for it, easy for anyone to figure out and use, like a mass-produced household item for every common Shinigami that can't manage it on their own. But then - "
"She's not a Shinigami, though," B interrupts. His brow is scrunched down a bit but, fortunately, he seems to be following. "She was a person, a plain Jane human being just like you. She's only what she is now because of me and my blood."
Light turns to face him. These words are a wrench in the smooth-running works, getting his splendid, clean theories all dirty. "What do you mean?" he snaps. "What's so special about you?"
B is grinning at something over his shoulder and Light thinks a cataclysmic assortment of things that all pile up on top of one another, obscuring specifics and morphing into a conglomeration of: she's right behind you you're going to die maybe it's L maybe it's heaven's gate maybe he's just grinning because he's crazy maybe you're crazy maybe monsters maybe gods.
He's about to turn but then B says, "I'm so glad you asked," and there's a sound like a firework and a sluicing through the air beside him and B is falling back, clutching his shoulder and laughing as blood soaks bright red through his shirt. It looks black on his hands. His jaw's locked with what might be pain but mostly he looks cheerful. "Jesus, Wedy," he grits, grin forming, but then it drops off.
It's not Wedy. L's voice, thin and casual, says, "No, I'm actually neither of those people," and he slumps out of the dark and past Light's shoulder, the fabric of his shirt brushing the fabric of Light's. How romantic.
He looks about the same as he had, if slightly gaunter, as if the shadows in the building have worn down into him, making hollows where there were none before. He dangles his gun like it's an accessory, the sour smell of powder and smoke following him like cologne.
Light says, "You look like shit."
L jerks his gaze up to him, as if involuntarily, and his hard edges are trying to be hard but he can see where they've fallen soft. He looks relieved. "You, too," he says, and Light finds it comforting even though their whole relationship is a crapshoot and he shouldn't.
"What?" B grumbles from where he's slumped, blood smearing the white wall. "No flirtation disguised as insult for me? Don't I look like shit, too?"
"No," L says, and his voice is so empty that there's gotta be something in there. The limousines only have tinted windows because the people inside want to hide. "I have something else for you." He points his gun at B and B points his teeth back at him.
"It won't kill me," he hisses, but he's starting to panic and Light would feel bad for him if he wasn't busy feeling infinitely superior and quite a bit relieved.
"Good," L says, and pulls the trigger.
Temelechus counts out blessings. The underrealm has left him sticky with its shadows and he bathes in the dew of the Great Above and washes himself clean, the names dripping from him like teardrops. He doesn't speak but he is heard by all, but for the humans, who, rather than quivering in awe and terror as they ought, rhapsodize and revel, singing their short songs and dancing their short dances before being snuffed out like candles in a dark room.
The universe is a dark room but the Above is outside of it, the light shining in the windows, every so often blessing terrified mortal surfaces with its splendor.
This will be one of those times. Temelechus counts out the Watchers and settles on one who is both stout of build and simple of mind to go and collect their fierce little friend on Earth. "Bring me the Abomination," he orders. "If there is more than one, bring more than one. Lift its deathly stain from the human realm so that we may no longer suffer the absence of harmony in our glorious kingdom."
The Watcher floats before him, eyeless but all-seeing, and groans its compliance.
Temelechus waits a few moments, praying to the pale and misting air around him for patience, but after a further few moments, snaps, "Now, please."
tbc.
end notes: what do you mean this fic has an actual plot now? no. i stoutly refuse to believe that. anyway, i hope the update was enjoyable and can say with certainty that the next won't take half so long. thank you for your patience and for sticking with me on this wild and heartily uncomfortable ride. i really really appreciate all feedback and interest in this story.