well, it's been just about 14 months since i've updated. how's everyone? i don't have a lot of explanations or excuses, because if i started in on them i'd never get done. this chapter has been written for a year. the writing style is outdated as far a my personal growth as a writer, but consistent with that of nights as a whole. following chapters, should they in fact, um, happen, will probably be in a noticeably different (hopefully developed?) style. sorry it took so long. my life was excessively full of events in the last year, my interest in death note dwindled, but i never stopped writing original work, so i'm not out of practice, just out of the loop.
i spent the last couple of weeks re-reading nights in its entirety. i cringed a lot. i was proud of some parts. sorry it took me so long to get here. i don't especially expect anyone to read this, or remember this fic, or care, but if you do? thank you, i apologize, i hope you'll like it.
if you don't remember what happened last time? man, just go with it. concrit and hatemail and all that is vastly appreciated. don't put any of your faith in me. but b? yeah, you can put your faith in him.
warnings for: gunshot wounds, violence, sexualized violence, hyper-sexualization of everything, bad writing, inane plot happenings, shinigami nonsense.
chapter thirty - three's company
"I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside."
- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Light is dirty and small and very lovely in the dark. L tries not to miss him but it's hard when they're standing face to face. B's collapsed on the floor and L doesn't know how long it will take him to reboot himself into proper gallivanting fashion, only that his trigger finger jitters with the eventuality of knocking the whole round into him if he has to. They should be hurrying but Light leans back against the wall and closes his eyes and L doesn't pick him up.
"I thought I was the killer and you were the catcher," he says. His eyes are closed but his lips quirk at the corners. "That wasn't a sex joke." He flattens his expression and shakes his head. "You've ruined me. You're such a hypocrite." Moments pass and B still doesn't get up. "Say something, dammit."
L doesn't know what to say. There are a thousand necessary explanations and twice as many unnecessary declarations and by all rights he should be locking Light to the nearest immovable fixture and leaving him to rot, the way you do with the condemned, divine or not.
He takes a couple of steps forward. "He's not dead," he says. And then, "You were always ruined. I think it's something that was innate in you." And he wants to square off, grim grins and glancing blows, nothing too solid but teasingly destructive, the way they grew into each other. His pegs only fit in Light's ugly holes, and vice versa, and so the pattern's shot when he drops his body slowly forward and rests his forehead on Light's taut shoulder. A nice place to rest. A nice place to die, if they had time for it.
"What are you doing?" Light's body is stiff under his, unsure of what to do with something gentle and without ulterior motives.
Maybe there are ulterior motives, but if he has them L can't keep track. Dear things are very hard to have and even harder to keep in line, and maybe he'll put Light in an electric chair and maybe they deserve to have a matching set, king and king, a grandiose end to a sad bad mad story, but right now what they have is their bones, their arms, their uncomfortable clothes and a dark hall and a dead body.
"Are you hugging me?"
"Be quiet," L tells him, dipping his head into the crevice under Light's jaw. He likes it there. It's warm and afraid and those things are what keep every hot-blooded animal alive. "Enjoy the moment."
Light snorts. "There's dried semen in my pants and a sideshow freak who looks remarkably like you dead on the ground beside us. There's not much to enjoy."
"No, there isn't," L agrees, and Light sighs and wraps his hands around his back and pulls at him like the longing, greedy little boy he is and has always been. L is the same boy, only older and deader around the eyes, but he feels it reflected back in him, like smoke signals exchanged in the grey crush of dawn.
Light grabs him and L grabs him back and they wade for a moment like slow-dancing freshman at prom. "I'm still angry at you," Light breathes into his hair. "I'm still going to make you pay for what you did to me."
"Back at you." L feels smothered and he doesn't mind it.
There's a bit of a cloying hiss and wince and laugh and L knows who's awake and who's hungry. From the floor, B grits, "Me, three," and L draws his knuckles softly, whisperingly cruel and he knows it but it's what he is and has to be, against Light's wrists and then pulls back.
Light doesn't seem to object, just slides side-longly out of B's immediate reach. The nice thing about Light, along with his thighs and his smile and his horrific idealism, is that he's all self-preservation. Unlike B or even Aiber, he wouldn't get in-between L and a bullet, and would in fact probably take photographs to commemorate the occasion. He's out for himself and that makes him very easy to keep track of in some ways, if slippery in others. He and L would both sacrifice the other for a stick of gum, and in this unapologetic betrayal there is a sort of communion, a pre-agreed upon forgiveness with every destruction. They signed a waver when wrapped in white sheets and then they strangled one another with it. There's so much more safety in the surety of unreliability than there is in seething declarations of loyalty.
L kneels down in front of B and points his gun, casually, wrist loose, like it might as well be a super-soaker and they're running ragged through quiet neighborhoods. "I'll shoot again if I have to."
B grins wide and lazy, like he's just woken up from a long nap. "Whatever gets your engines revving, kitty-cat."
L has an urge to laugh despite himself, but Light's presence drains it quickly. He's uncomfortable doing the whole song and dance in front of somebody else. It's like very grotesque PDA and he'd rather not have it documented by outside eyes that he almost sort of enjoys it.
He just tips forward on his toes and pulls back the torn scrap of B's shirt, examining the wound where it's sizzling back in on itself. B's alive, if not yet kicking, but he seems to still be in remission-mode, tissue stitching itself back together with just as much violence and, judging from the lock of B's jaw, pain as when it had been ripped open, as if on rewind. "We sent your blood samples off to be tested for abnormalities, but given that your physicals came back fairly normal when we were kids, I'm guessing that we won't find anything."
He can feel Light's frazzled energy hanging over his back, squinting down cautiously. "Careful," he tells L, "you don't know what you could contract from his blood."
L hesitates for a moment, not out of fear so much as wonder that he's never considered being squeamish about it before. B chuckles for the both of them and lifts his eyebrows up at Light, straight over L's shoulder. "A little too late for that, Kira. Whatever's in me has long been all over him."
L can feel Light growing tenser, coiled, behind him. His nervous energy is a power source that L is feeding on to keep his own locked down, mind in control. "I think I have to go bathe in bleach," he says, and L can't help the corners of his mouth twitching up as he continues on to prod at the skin of B's shoulder that is currently in the process of mending itself.
B coughs, blood bubbling out of his mouth to dribble down his chin like sick. "Besides," he continues, as if Light hadn't said a thing, "diseases and pathogens take to me about as well as bullets. I've never had so much as a cold in my life. My body rejects it. Sweet, huh?" He winces as L tries to peel apart the skin and hold it back from regenerating, eyes closing. "Like lemonade. I'm thirsty for something and there are pretty boys dancing like chandeliers above me but you're going to destroy me, aren't you? I'll crawl back but you'll just keep pulling your trigger. You think you don't need me now that you've glued your crown back together and forced it back on, so I'll have to dig up your skeleton again and fuck it and - "
"B," L snaps, jabbing him roughly in his wound, "stay on message. No time for daydreaming. You can write me a sonnet from your cell, but for right now I need you to focus on the current reality. The power's been cut, and assuming it wasn't you, I need to know who did it."
"You're asking the wrong questions. Tell him, Kira. I feel like my esophagus is about to fall out."
L lets up slightly on the pressure he's exerting on B's wound, distantly shocked at himself, as if he's watching some hapless child torturing a small animal, not understanding the connection between his touch and the pained yowling. B is supposed to be the one doing the hurting, that's his role, but L is so vicious and he mucks it up every time. He blinks down at the blood warm on his fingers, and then at Light, who's speaking quickly and concisely, rattling off information like a very uncomfortable encyclopedia.
"It's a Shinigami. Or a girl named Sadie Markovitch. I'm not really sure which, or if they're both the same thing. B says it was because of his blood, which, by the way, can we talk about this for a second?" He gestures erratically at B, who winks up at them like a showpiece, delighted to be injured and abhorred if it means he gets the spotlight. "I mean him. Your subhuman twin who popped up out of god knows where to do what? Make my life twice as gross and creepy than it's already been thus far?"
L straightens, not having any place to wipe the blood from his hand, and ends up just holding it tucked to his chest like an a breakable object of uncertain value. "We don't have time for this right now," he says.
"Well, make time," Light snaps, "because he tried to give me a blowjob while I was interrogating him and I really don't know where you find these people, L." He's flushed and clammy and panicking more than he's really letting on, and L knows him well enough to see it, and knows B well enough to believe him.
He shrugs. B is wriggling like larvae freshly hatched on the floor by his feet, sticky and sickly and grotesque, and L and Light watch on in mute disgust and interest, the men of science with their lenses and their hypotheses, goggling at something that either cannot be explained or else refuses to explain itself.
"More or less the same place I found you." It's mostly a metaphorical approximation, but it is accurate. The both of them had originally come from Tokyo, and here they all are now, reunited with this stark, bright, illimitable city.
B arches his shoulders back, concaving inhumanly on himself, and then tittering up at Light's expression of dim horror, "Only he found me first."
"Shut-up, B," L says casually, as Light snaps with a bit more punishment, "Shut-up," and it'd be a cute sitcom moment if they weren't all varying shades of doomed and tainted with ugly, irredeemable affection. They glance quickly at each other and then quickly away, still almost embarrassed of their similarities.
B watches with starry eyes and he's dancing on the edges of lucidity for a show and a show only. L knows he's awake inside, and he's probably angry. "If you want to calm the beast you have to feed it."
Light's nostrils flare and he's obviously wondering if this is another blowjob thing. L says, waving his gun, "I have four more rounds, so I hope you're hungry." It's barely more than a vague shape in the dark, not enough light to even cause a glint.
"No, no, that's too rich and heavy. I want something pure, like they have at church. Body and blood, you know the drill."
His wound has sealed itself and L assumes he's only still on the floor as a sort of game, and so it's important to play this very carefully. "Don't talk to me about church," he says, and kneels down again.
"L," Light snaps, gripping his shoulder to try to pull him back. "What are you doing?" It might be outrage and it might just be that it's too dark for him to see properly.
"Feeding the beast," L says, slowly, lullingly, and he knows what B wants and he knows what he has to do to make him talk. It was always games like this, tricking and taking and then taking back, hungry minds and grasping hands and all the denial in the world. L leans in close enough that he can see his eyes. This feels pornographic, like he's performing, and he is, for a live and livid audience and this is quite a pathetic jab if it's all B is looking for, to make Light jealous and hope that L feels bad. He dips his head down and stops briefly to wipe the blood off of B's mouth with the hand that's already dirtied, then moves close as close can get, like they're going to touch, like he's going to let him have what he wants.
The other hand moves so quickly and B opens his mouth, straining up for scraps of love or something like it, desperate to be haunted and consumed as well as to haunt and to consume. He's the the monster skittering between the pages of every storybook, but he is also a twenty-two year old convict with no face of his own, only a trembling voice and claws and a desperation burning so bright and ugly in him it sometimes snuffs every other part of him out. L feeds the flame. L shifts and pulls his face back, instead shoving the gun into B's parted lips and taunting him with a meal he doesn't want.
"I'm not," he says, "messing around, Beyond. This isn't a game. People have died and will die and I need to do my job and sort it out, so will you please, pardon my rough manners, tell me what the hell I want to know?"
B's eyes goggle at him, glassy and amphibian, and L wants to lay him down to sleep, wants to drain and destroy him just as much as he wants to set him gently on his feet and beg him for forgiveness, because a part of him knows that the only reason he's doing it this way is because Light is watching. There would doubtlessly be violence, but alone L might have gone ahead and kissed him, might have spread over and on and in him and pulled all the answers to the riddles and the keys to the locks out with shaking, loving, hating hands, instead of the impersonality of a gun and a threat. His lips spread obscenely around the barrel of the gun, mouth wet and open, and if L had room enough in his body for it he might be a little turned on right now.
Light is grinning over his shoulder. "This is extremely suggestive," he says, voice slick and satisfied like the honey that drips from him in his power-high moments.
"Thank you," L replies flatly, "Japan's top honors student, for that productive and insightful commentary." His hand shakes a little as he speaks and the gun knocks around in B's mouth, jutting at his throat and making him spasm with pain where he's cornered under L's body.
Light says, with a tone of awe that makes L force his grip steady, "You're such a vicious person."
L doesn't know what to do with that so he takes it and folds it up and puts it in his pocket. B grins as well as he can do around the barrel and L knows what he's doing before he's doing it, but it's really simple, he's made it really simple for him and all he has to do is curl his lips in and suck, coiled-down body jutting upwards in the middle parts, and this might as well be torture porn. His hips move toward L's and his eyelashes bat in a farce of kittenish seduction.
"Don't do that," L says, but he's already doing it. He wouldn't be surprised if B bit the gun right out of his hand and swallowed it. He plants his bloodied hand down on B's chest, shoving him back against the wall, and B's teeth knock the gun with a ricocheting clink and he laughs but it's garbled, demonic, like it's going through a modulator and L feels it and he feels Light's hand hovering over his shoulder, but not touching it. Maybe he doesn't want to be a participant. The spectator seats keep him clean.
"This is gross," he tells L, nearly casually, as if he's never been so down and dirty.
L's too old and too tired for this pettiness and there's a part of his mind that's floating in some conjoined ether with B and B's body and B's blood and the shadowy dips where B's eyes should be, pulled into cavernous exaggeration by the lack of light, hollow and skeletal, a familiar night time landscape where there are trees and sky and cigarette smoke from the pub they would camp out behind, telling horror stories both real and imagined, pushing and pulling each other in the way the moon would pull the tides if the ocean was bone dry.
But the part of him that has been sparked new and alive, torn from his past like a decent passage from an otherwise terrible book and taped, with sure and tremoring hands, Light's hands, to a thin collage of grand ideas and master plans, kissed shyly and hatefully on his forehead, reinvented but different in no ways perceptible, made new as one is through a cheesy baptismal ceremony in some bullshit new-age religion: that part can't stay still or quiet.
He turns his head, only for a moment, just long enough to bark, "Well then, why don't you wait in the other room while Mommy and Daddy have their grown-up talk?"
He knows it's the wrong thing to say both because Light will collect it, tie it like a fine white string around his neck later and watch him choke, and also because the momentarily heated shift of L's interest gives B enough leverage to, in that split second, jerk his head sideways, knocking the gun from his mouth and wheeling his curled up leg around to jut up and into the tender parts of L's gut.
L's thrown off balance but maintains his hold on the gun, though it does him very little good when he's elbowed in the back and has his feet kicked swiftly out from under him, falling flatly and gaspingly forward on the cold tile floor that greets him like an unwanted guest. Light swears and it's more graphic than L's ever heard him, but even so he hopes that he sits this one out and doesn't get himself even more damaged. He's about as good without his little black book as a headsman is without his axe, and B's the Hydra who keeps growing back twice as bad no matter how many times you cut him down.
L's chin stutters against the ground, his senses jittering with the blow, and he's clawing himself back up if only for another hit when B's bare foot crushes down on his spine, locking him to the floor. His abdomen feels like it's too big for the skin it's locked under, flesh suffocating his insides, and then B's other foot comes to rest on his back and the pain is ragged and hot and crushing but it's something that he knows how to funnel, a thing he was built to withstand, but the humiliation of being stood on is a little blinding and the rage that boils up in his trigger finger comes to a screeching peak.
"You okay down there, Daddy?" B hums, coquettish and glinting with the superiority of a child taking the upper-hand in a playground game.
L would very much like to respond by shooting him in the face and, given B's proclivities, he would probably very much like him to, just to know he'd struck a nerve with his wriggly pale toes, but then the pressure is thrown off balance, and L scrambles up and out from under him as B falls sideways against the wall under Light's hands.
"That's for my fucking nose," Light snarls, arm jutting back to fly out again and slam into B's cheekbone, and there's none of the coiffed schoolboy prettiness left in him, just a dirty angry animal, jumping into the grown-up games like it's all old hat to him, and L is honestly a little bit proud.
I made that, he thinks, because even if Light dug himself a rough outline from stone, L is the one who hunched long hours over it, carving in the intricacies of terror and ruthlessness, the maddening luxuries of the fight and the win, like an artist laboring over a masterwork.
Light keeps hitting and B writhes under it in what is either ferocity or enjoyment and L shouts, "Move!" as he points the gun up, and Light listens, turns to see him and dodge out of his line of fire, but just as L's exerting the pressure on the trigger, B moves too, tackling him like a rowdy dog on its owner and jerking his wrist backwards, and it's all back to square one.
Except the clang of the bullet nesting in the tile wall never comes, and there is a hushed grunt of something human, something pained, and a metallic sound as something falls, and footsteps, shaky and unhurried, like whoever it is still hasn't quite realized they've been shot.
L pushes himself up and squints at the dark, can't make out a face, just some shadows that are less deep than others, but B must see something he doesn't because he grins from where he's collapsed next to L, posture going lazy, and he calls out, "Nice of you to join us, Quillsh." Then adds, with a snort, "Well, maybe not so nice for you."
And of all the people in this building L would not have minded shooting, Watari was not on the list.
Touta is the one who answers the door.
Everybody is huddled like disaster victims, but in cliques, the cops separate from the doctors separate from the loose, undefined group that is held together only by being L's. Orders had trickled down the ranks that they were to regroup here, and even though Nishikawa and her nurses were meant to be kept out of the loop to prevent a panic, the gunshots from the lower levels had sent her barging after them, nightdress askew, squinting up from her diminutive height and demanding that he and Ide, whom she'd particularly referred to as "a couple of uniformed dandies," tell her what's going on. They hadn't, but they probably would have had they known.
Watari had gone out to investigate the shooting alone, to no one's satisfaction, but he'd had a rifle so he'd had the last say.
Aizawa paces. Ide reads a magazine like he couldn't care about any of this, but his hands are trembling. Mogi makes coffee, quietly, dutifully. Aiber and Wedy huddle together, whispering and almost laughing, and Mello, the boy, hangs around at their edges like he's not sure if he's invited. Nishikawa is cursing indiscreetly to the pretty, timid nurse at her left about L. Touta is doing nothing, and saying nothing, and so when there is a knock on the door, he is glad for the occupation.
What he expects is maybe Light, pale and scruffy, escaped from his shackles to put this situation to rights, or else L, angry and bedraggled, hunching in with an explanation and a solution. Maybe Misa in her prisoner's garb, skipping prettily, assuring them that everything will be fine, the electricians are en route, it was just a system malfunction - three system malfunctions - and that there is nothing to worry about.
What he gets is shoved out of the way as soon as the he turns the lock, hit with the sharp smell of flesh, and L is there twice, and Light is there once, and Watari only looks half there.
"Oh my god," Touta says, dumbly, because he always says the things that everyone else is too smart and serious to say, and he doesn't know what to do, or where to put his hands, so he just holds the door open, fingers clammy against the handle, same as any date he's ever been on.
"What the hell happened?" Aizawa demands, and Touta thinks, that's better, he should have said that.
No one is answering, though. L just says, "Move," chasing Ide off the largest sofa and knocking away the selection of decorative pillows to make room for Watari to be set down. B - the violent, dangerous, supernatural criminal that is meant to be locked up in a straightjacket and a cell right now - has got him over his shoulders, in a sort of piggy-back stance, Watari's slumped shivering body being lifted off and deposited on the sofa like a bit of luggage. There's blood on both of them, more than enough for one person. There's blood on L's hands, like finger-paint. There's a thin band of it circling in smudges on Light's wrist.
"Fuck," Wedy says, pulling her gun from its holster and turning to B, "what did you do?"
The man that is a monster puts a hand to his chest, as if wounded by the remarks, and maybe he's going to speak, but L cuts him off in a curt, controlled tone that spells underlying panic. "Shut-up. Not now." He flicks his eyes to Nishikawa, who is watching on with keen interest, like a bird of prey spotting its lunch. "Doctor, do you have any equipment with you in here?"
She shakes her head, walking over to inspect Watari. "Just my hands, Ryuzaki."
He nods fiercely, reactively. "Wedy, go with one of the nurses and bring whatever we're going to need, and quickly." He looks around at the rest of them. "Anyone have a knife? Somebody get me a knife."
Wedy reaches into her boot and pulls out a small slip of a pocket knife and tosses it over to him before turning, with the pretty-eyed nurse, to follow orders like the professional she is. Touta is still holding the door. He lets it go after her with a clank that is drowned out by the din of voices.
"You shouldn't have moved him," Nishikawa snaps, as she holds the fabric of Watari's shirt away from his chest so that L can cut it.
"I know," L says. "Someone please bring one of those flashlights over here. No, closer."
"I insisted," someone breathes, slow and rough and wheezily, and Touta takes longer than he should to realize that it's Watari. But that means he's alive, that means this is okay, they'll all be okay, everything will turn out and -
"I tried to contact emergency services," L rattles off, "but there's no landline or cell phone in the building that will work, and the system has gone into shut-down, which means that none of the entrances or exits will work without specific clearance from the override back-ups, and the back-up system is down, too. The only other exit is the roof and since the elevators aren't working, that'd be an even steeper climb than it was getting him here."
"Should we send someone up there?" Ide asks.
"No," L and Light both say at the same time, and then stop off, nearly embarrassedly, but there's obviously no time for this sort of tomfoolery, and Light covers quickly by mumbling, mouth thin and shoulders stiff, "It isn't safe."
"It seems we have an intruder," L tells the room at large, though his voice is hushed and wispy, "and not of the wholly human variety." Touta looks at B. Everyone, actually, looks at B, who just raises his eyebrows and maybe blows a kiss, but it's hard to tell. He's slumped down in an armchair, feet kicked up on the coffee table, and he's staining everything but he doesn't really seem to care. "No, I mean another one." L yanks back the room's general attention. "It's best to stay as close together as possible. Where is Wedy with my equipment?"
"You mean my equipment?" Nishikawa says, hands moving swiftly and delicately over Watari's wounds, not quite touching the afflicted area - a nasty bullet tearing up his shoulder - but preparing the places around it. "You're going to have to step back and let me do my job, Ryuzaki."
"I have full medical training and field experience," L starts.
"I don't care at all. You're filthy, your hands are shaking, and your emotional attachment to the patient will make you sloppy." She pushes her glasses up her nose, losing any interest in L or his impending, teeth-grit response, and looking back to Watari. "Can you breathe alright?"
He nods. "It's not much harder than usual. There's no exit wound, I know that much." He hushedly shares his insights into his own medical condition, which is impressive and a little worrying to Touta.
He's only ever been in a situation like this once before, and he had been eleven and home alone when the house next to his had burnt down. He'd stood gawking out on the street with the rest of the neighbors, getting in the way of the firemen and the ambulances, being shooed this way and that. He had barely known his next-door neighbors at all, had never spoken to them in more than polite hellos and goodbyes, and a few tittered endearments to their miniature schnauzer. The dog had died in the fire. The wife had died in the fire. Touta is not sure if she'd been pregnant or if that had just been a tragic embellishment he'd added through-out the years of quivering through this story in his head. The husband had been brought out on a stretcher, burned and mottled and crying out, and somehow the information had become confused and Touta had nodded along to whatever was asked of him, and so everyone had mistaken Touta for the man's son, and brought him with them in the ambulance, and had him hold the man's hand. Touta hadn't even known his name. He'd kept saying, "I'm here, I'm here, it's gonna be alright," to a stranger.
It had not been alright. The man had died in surgery and Touta had called his parents from a hospital pay-phone, pulling them out midway through his older sister's clarinet recital to come pick him up.
"Sloppy," L repeats back, like he doesn't quite understand the word, but he doesn't argue any further.
Watari is stabilized and moved to one of the bedrooms, leaving the sofa bloodstained and Light slightly disappointed. He would have quite enjoyed the fallout of L having killed his own handler, the struggle and the self-reflection, leaving him quivering and rife with self-doubt, like a freshman with low self-esteem that Light could coax into bed. Just as well. Light can coax him anyway. It would have been nice to have Watari out of his hair and off the hit list without having to lift a finger, but he can always put a pillow over his face while the cameras are still down if he needs to.
They've gone into the hallway bathroom to wash, as the plumbing is still working and it's hard to keep order when your fingers stick bloody to everything. B had needed it most so he'd been cuffed and led off by Wedy and Aiber to clean himself in one of the dark apartment bathrooms. Matsuda had been sent to bring Light a change of pants, but he hasn't come back yet.
The water is cold, needly and hissing its way out of the faucet. There's not really a reflection to see in the mirror but he watches L's, anyway, and imagines that L is watching his back.
"You should tell them," Light says, wiping his hands on L's sweater because the blow-dryers are out of service. L doesn't seem to notice or care, but when Light speaks he blinks flatly at him over his shoulder.
"Tell them what?"
Light sighs, leaning back against the wall as L scrubs carelessly at the skin of his palms. "You know what. For how long do you think you can sit on the fact that you shot Watari? It'll only come out eventually, and make you look even worse than you do now for not being upfront about it. Which, if you want to know the truth - "
"I don't," L snaps, ducking away from Light's fingers as they reach up to cup his chin. He keeps washing his hands even though they look clean, water sluicing baptismally over his skin. "You just want them to distrust me."
Light rolls his eyes. "They already do." He reaches over to shut off the sink. The water goes hot before it goes off and L winces, but doesn't jerk away. "I just think things will be better with all the cards on the table."
"You want to lecture me about honesty? Really? That's charming." Light can't tell if L is grinning at him in the dark, but the bite of his words suggests an ugly snarling humor, the kind that Light likes to breathe in and rhapsodize about. He shakes off his hands, then wipes them on his shirt sloppily. There are dark flecks of blood still there but L doesn't care because L never cares about anything, and Light kind of likes them.
He stands up straight and pulls L's hands into his, as if to examine them. It's not as if he can see much in the dark, but the feel is what matters. He's tensed, the tendons in his wrists coiled for action. Maybe he'll hit Light. Maybe again and again and again. There's so much going on that there's not even a slip of opportunity for that, but he craves it like he craves water. He's parched for it. This is what he'd missed and what he continues to miss. There are too many people around.
"I'm lying to protect them," he tells L. "They wouldn't understand the truth. They'd try to stop me and I'd have to kill them. You're just trying to protect your reputation. It's different."
L scoffs. He jerks like he wants to pull away, but it's a game of ego and of resolve, as everything with him is, and he instead traces unyielding patterns on Light's knuckles with his thumbs, writing ugly love poems and refusing to be cowed. "Really? So, you'd off your own father if he found out about your identity?" He doesn't sound shocked. He probably isn't, more likely he's hoping that someone is listening around the corner and and will hear the incriminating response. Light had been sure to lock the door, though, and he's kept an ear on it the whole time. He's not an amateur and L's attempts to trip him up are almost a little insulting.
They should be past this, and he only forgives him on account of recent trauma, which he'd caused for himself, with his trigger finger and his need to play dirty with the skeleton that's wormed its way out of his closet.
Light says, melting into the soft stroke of L's skin against his, "I'd do whatever I had to to save the world. It would hurt me, but I'd make the sacrifice for the greater good."
"How very selfless of you. And what about me? I'm standing between you and your bright future. Aren't you willing to make a sacrifice of me?" He's speaking loudly, not mumbling the way he does, being very blunt and open, which means he's hiding traps and triggers in the spaces between his fingers where Light's slot in nicely. He's never not baring his teeth, even when his mouth is closed.
Light smiles at him. "You're… a work in progress."
"Am I?" L lets go of his hands. "You still think you're going to be able to sway me over to your side if you bat your eyelashes for long enough? Did the scene on the street not make an impression?"
Light's jaw grits to think about that, so he doesn't think about that. "I already have you. That was just posturing. You were feeling powerless and you wanted to prove you were still in the game. Fine. We're playing. We'll always be playing." He takes steps forward. They always end up in bathrooms, cupboards, cramped quiet rooms, taking up each other's space. "You couldn't get rid of me if you wanted to, and you don't want to. I'm in you. You're in me. Bring all the old boyfriends around that you want. It doesn't mean a thing to me."
L blinks. Maybe he's surprised that Light had out and said it, naming his ploy and thus rendering it powerless.
He doesn't step back, but he looks like he wants to. "That's not what B is. Or maybe it is. He's what I can't get rid of. You're an amateur parasite compared to him. He's been sucking my blood like a leech since we were kids. Does that make you jealous, I wonder?" He takes their proximity then, like a bind, power power power, he goes wild for it. He'll use anything to reel Light in and pin him down. "Or is your ego inflated enough to buoy you past the competition?"
They're so close now it's stifling. "There is no competition."
The pieces of L's eyebrows that have grown in quirk and he nods. "Ego it is."
There's a tired terror but it's mounting into tension, pulling them in. L's taller than him when he stands up straight, which he does now. Only by a bit, their lips are still more or less across from each other. Light has a scab on his that their sex earlier had set bleeding again. He should let it heal, he should stop aggravating all of his wounds.
There's a heavy knock on the door, dropping down in between them like a cool, swallowing dunk, washing the stain of attraction into a diluted alertness.
"Ryuzaki? Light?" Aizawa calls, with his usual disinterested irritation, though it's prickling with edges of panic, the kind that crawls out during midnight emergencies. "Are you done in there?"
L tilts his head, face open expectantly, though in the most locked and fastened way, mask firmly stitched on. "It's like they expect to find us with our pants down," he mumbles. "Come in, Aizawa!"
The knob twists, making a clunky metal noise, but nothing comes of it but aggravated grunting and Light tries not to smile, but doesn't put in enough effort to succeed. "I locked the door," he tells L, moving to undo this bit of mischief. "I didn't really know whose pants would be where." As soon as the hinges creak Aizawa in, the glare of his flashlight blurs Light's eyes, wiping his expression clean. He rebuilds it, painting his eyes and mouth in stripes of nervous sobriety. "Do you have a change for me, then?"
Supposedly he'd gotten bloodstains on his pants, and no one had asked to see evidence. Maybe they'd known better than to hope.
"Do I look like a delivery boy to you?" Aizawa snaps. It's hard to see him where he is behind the light, and Light doesn't lower himself to squint. It gives you crow's feet. "Matsuda's practically ironing your slacks on the coffee table." He turns his flashlight on L, like an interrogating officer breaking up a couple of kids on a late night. "Watari's asleep and expected to recover alright, assuming we can get him to a proper hospital by morning - "
"Unnecessary," L says. "I've known him to get on fine in even more dire circumstances with uglier wounds."
Light's not sure if that's the truth, or if he's just trying to keep everyone calm. Either option seems too gentle for him.
Aizawa frowns. "Fine. But everyone's scared, and cramped, and we want answers. Ide's half ready to storm every possible exit and no one knows where Amane is. Whether you like it or we like it, you're our leader and as you're the only one who has even the vaguest idea of what's going on right now, your presence is damn well required."
"I actually think Light has a better idea than I do," L tells him, moving into his slump. "He had quite a nasty experience down in the lower cells. That's what he gets for not staying put in his room, I guess."
"And that was all before Ryuzaki arrived," Light adds, plastic smile twitching into frozen life on his face, "and we had a nasty experience with a gun."
L doesn't blink, but Light knows he's spackling up the ramparts, mounting his canons, ready to defend and attack. Hungry for the war. He tilts his head, says, "How's your nose doing, Light-kun?" and shuffles forward a little, impotently expressing his superiority through feigned disinterest.
Light follows, like the good boy he is. "Could be much worse. Like your neck. I hope that's not bruising." He barely restrains himself the urge to stroke the marks he's left, if he's left marks. It's hard to tell in this light, but it's okay. He can imagine them.
Aizawa does not seem impressed by the display, probably preoccupied with the issues of actual merit - life and death, safety and fear, tiny mortal things - but his eyes still bulge a bit when L slumps past him out the doorway and says, offhandedly, jerking his head in Light's direction, "He's Kira," before continuing out into the hallway.
Light follows like the babysitter he is, shrugging at Aizawa as if they're at a similar loss. "He's moody."
Aiber can see ball sac. He murmurs to Wedy, as B bends down to turn on the shower, "I can see ball sac."
"My sympathies," she tells him. "Just keep an eye open and make sure it doesn't escape or attack, and we'll be fine."
He's holding the flashlight, she's holding the gun, and B's bleeding pink water all over the clean white shower tiles. The glass is getting foggy but it's still easy to make him out. Beyond Birthday, serial murderer. What a stupid name. What a stupid career.
"You like what you see?" he calls, from behind the pane that separates them, sidling up to it, body pressing obscenely to the glass, showing everything, rippling in full color. Aiber's met strippers with more shame. "There's a resemblance, isn't there? I modeled it after a certain bombshell we all know. Bomb-shelter? Bomb? He's one of those." He jerks his head back in the spray, the white curve of his throat ugly and bright and, yeah, it does look a bit like L's.
Aiber doesn't say anything. Wedy examines her nails.
"I wouldn't eat for days and days when I was a teenager to stay as scrawny as him. I took up smoking so I wouldn't grow any taller, but I don't think it worked. I would have burned off my fingerprints and stenciled his in if I could have. You wanna know what sacraments are? I have lists and lists."
When L had sent them off to guard the beast while it licked its wounds, he'd ordered that they not engage with him, but Aiber tends to take L's directions as gentle suggestions most of the time, to the detriment of almost nobody. Wedy scoffs and rolls her eyes when he asks, "Why'd you want to look like him so badly?"
B turns off the shower. The clanging of the faucet sounds like a horror movie's prequel to the action scene. "I wanted the outside to accurately represent the inside. He's in me. There's other stuff in there but I don't like it as much."
Aiber hums. "That's almost romantic."
"Oh, I'm a real romantic," B says, grinning, and steps out of the shower, dripping on the floor as he shakes out his thick strands of hair. He smells like Aiber's coconut shampoo.
Wedy throws a towel at him, which knocks him quite comically in the face before falling into his hands, and he examines it like some sort of foreign and threatening object before unfolding it, wiping himself down, and then wrapping it around his hair, making a girly salon turban. Below, he's naked and a little bit horrific, ribs jutting, bones stuck together like a precocious child's kindergarten estimation of the human body. Aiber can definitely see ball sac now.
"Yeah," Aiber agrees, "I'm sure the 14 year old girl whose eyes you gouged out would agree." He squeezes out a smile. "I read your case file."
"Did it give you nightmares?" He pulls on the pants that he'd been lent. After going through the line up of present officers, they'd found Aiber to be the only one tall enough to provide bottoms, and Ide the only one skinny enough contribute the top, so he's got a pair of peach slacks and polyester button-up that's surely seen better nights. It's an affront to the eye of anyone with a bit of taste, and Aiber had tried to push the corresponding beige silk shirt and peach dinner jacket, but they'd looked far to loose to fit, and even the pants need a decently scrunched belt to sit right on his hips.
"Not half as much as this outfit," Wedy murmurs. She's making fists with her free hand, twisting her wrist compulsively, and Aiber knows the hunger and how it burns her. She needs a cigarette but this room is too cramped for it and she's too serious to need anything. "The LA case was kid stuff. L doesn't even usually take on murders with such a low body count and so little money involved."
"Gee, I sure was lucky, wasn't I?" B says disparagingly to the mirror.
"Hurry up and stop preening. You're never going to be pretty." Wedy's already moving to the door, slipping her nearly empty pack out of her jacket pocket with the shaky hands of dependence. She's beautiful in the half light, like a Hopper painting, all thick jewel palettes and blonde sadness. She's fragile in her way, like all of them, but she'd bleed out from battle wounds before letting herself be, so he will be her weakness and she can be all strength.
Aiber snorts. The night is too dark and heavy for such kindness, but here it is. There is a ghost in here with them and its glorified cousin is winking at him with a shiny black eye.
"I think she has a crush on me," he says in stage whisper. Aiber knocks him in the back with the flashlight and prods him along, shaking his head and trying not to become fond of anybody. He's got too munch sentiment in him already and anymore would tear his seams.
The boy's name is Matt and Matt has no last name, no money, and no home, but what he does have is a shit load of weed, coffee, and cigarettes, and it's over a communal meal of the latter that he and Syd get familiar.
"I never met him in person, but he was well known back at - where I grew up. With Mello. There were a lot of stories, and I'm pretty sure most of them weren't true - like the drinking blood, or the rat one, or, ew, there was all this about obscene things done with kitchen utensils - but it's a fact that he killed three people in Los Angeles in 2002, and he was in prison up until a few weeks ago, when he escaped and left behind two corpses and some really weird art room contributions. I've been reading every online news publication about it. He's causing quite a sensation in the US indie zines. I think it's the name."
Matt can blow smoke rings if he tries enough times, and Syd watches on with a vague sort of outgrown jealousy. The teenage version of himself would have been shaken with fits of envy.
"Well, it's a stupid name," Syd says, taking his own uninteresting drag. "No small wonder he didn't tell Sadie about it. She probably wouldn't have brought him home if he had. Beyond Birthday. The fuck did he get a name like that? And who thought up Mello, while we're at it?"
Matt taps his ashes into an empty cup. "You're called Sydney."
"It's a family name," he snaps back. The whirring of Matt's various computer systems sounds a dreary backdrop. He takes another sip of coffee and it's not strong enough. "Look, I know you probably don't believe me, and you don't have to, but Jesus, do you know anyone who could get me in contact with B? Anyone? I'd take an aged aunt or something, I really would. I just need to talk to him."
"Yeah, yeah," Matt says, waving the hand without the cigarette in it. "To tell him about your dead girlfriend going all zombie, I know. Whether or not I believe you is moot. You've seen Mello and you've seen him safe, so right now you're the best friend I have in the world."
"You lucky dog, you."
"Do you have a phone?" Matt shrugs off Syd's self-deprecation and it's hard to tell if the kid is faking self-possession or if he's just on some sort of prescription downer. Might be both.
Syd tosses him his banged up flip-phone. It's several years outdated. He hasn't been able to afford a new one or cared to, ever since -
"She's cute," Matt says when he opens it. Sadie is the background wallpaper. He hasn't changed it since before she died. She's in one of his shirts and nothing else, smiling on an early morning with a cardboard box under one arm and a beer gripped by the neck in the other hand. They'd rescued a pigeon with a bum wing from certain death in the park at the end of their block the day before and named it after some composer, Syd can't remember which one now, and she'd been trying to get it tipsy so that she could examine its wound.
"That can't be good for him," Syd had laughed, flipping open his phone, capturing the moment as just one in the ever-growing stack, stretching back to when they'd first started dating - taken with polaroids and film cameras, when that was all there was - and on infinitely, or so he'd thought at the time.
"It's no good for anybody," is all she'd said back, "and we still drink it right down."
"I know she's fucking cute," Syd snaps, leaning over the mattress they're sat on either side of. "Give that back."
"No, whatever, hold on." Matt holds it out of his reach, which is humiliating for Syd, because they may as well be the same age, rowdy children arguing over a toy. He grumps, but he lets it go. "I don't have one of my own. I need to call h - the place I live."
"Is B there?" Syd mumbles, not bothering to hope very much, because fat lot of good that's ever done him. He sips sulkily from his cooling coffee mug.
"Doubt it. But if anyone's going to know how to find him, it's Roger." He punches a number into the keypad, messes it up, swears, and does it again.
"Who?"
Matt shushes him, holding up his palm, and waits silent for a few minutes before breathing out and saying. "Grady? Fuck, Grady, it's me. No, Matt, you twat. Yeah, yeah, having a grand old time out here. Listen, can you do me a solid and put Roger on?" He rolls his eyes, glancing at Syd like he ought to sympathize. "I don't care if he's not in his study, find him. This is fucking important. Sir. It's about - shit, it's about B." There's a pause and then whoever's on the other end of the line starts speaking very loudly. "No, I haven't run into him, but I think Mello has. No, I didn't find him - no, shut-up, you try going on a manhunt with a 300 pound budget. I barely made it to London. I just, I met a guy and he's met Mello and he was with a guy who called himself B and fits all suspect descriptions perfectly, and he made them up passports so they could fly to Japan, and now there are extenuating circumstances and we really need to find them and - "
He cuts off and raises a smiling eyebrow at Syd, tilting his mouth away from the phone and stage whispering, "I got this."
Syd nods condescendingly, but he's really rather hoping that has. He's tired of trying to get it all himself.
It's a quarter of an hour of being switched around between different people and needling information and answers, before Matt stops his mumbled demands and bites his cigarette. "Oh," is all he says, before making his goodbyes and hanging up.
"He's with Elle," he says, but he doesn't look at Syd and he might not even be speaking to him.
"What?" Syd mumbles, slumped forward on the mattress where he'd been for the last ten minutes. "Is that good?"
Matt shrugs and pats out his cigarette. "It means they'll be easy to get in contact with. He's going to call me back once he's checked in with Watari in Tokyo."
"Brilliant." Syd doesn't know quite what that means or who that is, but it's nice to have help, even it is from some punk arse kid who smells like a dispensary.
Her dresses are always too short and she's always too drunk, tripping, elsewhere. She could have been brilliant if she'd decided to, but instead she's settled into comfortable mediocrity, and she pays her bills and watches her shows and sings her songs and takes home strange little boys, grasping out from her small world into the warm writhing sea of infinity and plucking him in her skinny hands, bitten-down nails making half circles on his skin.
He fucks her against the refrigerator one day while Syd is at the market and she gets her lemon-lime chapstick all over his face. He tells her that he didn't think that infidelity was quite her thing, and she laughs, high as a kite, and mumbles, "It's not cheating if I pretend you're him."
They don't use a condom and he mumbles, "I hope you're pregnant," against the warm skin of her throat, gasping and reeling from the shock and horrific pleasure of being wanted and had instead wanting and having.
She cups his cheek when she can get herself to move and tells him, looking deeply, probingly, dizzily into his eyes, "You are such a bloodthirsty little fiend. I'd abort it." She kisses his lips, pulling him back on her, and she is ten years older than him as of last week, and ten years prettier and less brittle, and he forces himself into the thin membranes surrounding her thirsty soul.
"I'd carve it out of you before you had the chance." He's flaccid and she's come twice and they're not even really fucking anymore, just writhing against each other, getting pleasure from the proximity and the depth of ugly feeling.
"You say the most horrible things."
Her shampoo smells like oranges.
"I am the most horrible things. You still keep me. Why do you keep me, Sadie, Sadie?" Sadie Lillian Markovitch. It's the name above her head and it'll be the name on her tombstone. This is just another second ticking by on the countdown clock. He's gonna kiss her grave dirt. L won't die soon or soft enough, so B has to get his kicks elsewhere. He has to learn death back and forth, hone himself, make ready, sharp and quiet like a blade to slice his way into the right man's flesh and touch the arteries where they pulse. He's kneading himself into proper shapes and Sadie is part of the mold.
"Syd likes you well enough," she tells him, fingertips to his face. "And we like the help."
He laughs. "You should have just gotten a dog if you wanted a pet to play with."
She shoves him off , roughly, and he stumbles back a few feet into the middle of the cramped kitchen, rattling the dishrack that hangs on the nails Syd had drilled into the wall. "That's disgusting." She smooths her hair back, slowly, as if thinking, and then fades into a smile and he smiles back. "I'm going to wash. Syd will be back soon. Tuna salad alright for lunch?"
He nods and she kisses him on the head like the dog she doesn't want.
B is handcuffed to a chair in the center of the room for nothing but posterity's sake. L's fairly sure he could break out of the restraints if he had the casual urge, and that's why L still has the gun that put a bullet in Watari tucked in the back of his pants.
"Shouldn't we give him the same set-up?" Aiber had asked, pointing a unsubtle thumb at Light and speaking in a voice that was many things, but most notably loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room.
"Priorities," L had answered, which had seemed to quell everyone's raging unease to the degree that they could all stand to be in a room together.
B is the defendant and L is the judge and the prosecutor. The officers sit in an uneven line off to the side, having pulled the rest of the armchairs away from the bloodied sofa, a hapless, makeshift jury. At either side of L, his pale executioners stand stoutly, Wedy with her arms crossed and Aiber practically hanging over L's shoulder. Light doesn't fit into the court scenario. Light doesn't fit at all and shouldn't be here, but he's sitting with one leg crossed over the other in a roller chair off to the right, watching with slitted, curious eyes.
He's cleaner than he had been but he still doesn't look like his usual prom king self.
"So," L interrupts, stopping B midway through his colorful and grinning account, "you had sex with a pretty girl in a kitchen one time. Who hasn't? I fail to see how this is relevant."
Matsuda stiffens visibly at who hasn't, and Ide slaps him on the back, but it's easy to tell that everyone is uncomfortable. The room is crinkling with it. Quietly, the far door opens and Mello slips in, folding himself into the shadows at the edges of the room. He gives L one stiff nod, and he takes that as confirmation that Watari's doing decently enough for this glorified interrogation to continue uninterrupted.
"I'm getting there, beautiful," B smarms, dripping into lazy posture in his chair. He looks like a botched portrait of some dreary count or another, a fop in bright colors, swathed by the deep blacks of the room and the hard sting of the yellow flashlight glow. They'd found a hardy stock of them and now they line the edges of the room like lanterns, making the scene even eerier than it would otherwise be.
No one seems to take well to the pet name. Light aims his chin higher in the air and Wedy rolls her eyes and Ide looks like someone's just informed him of some grim and embarrassing news and he's trying to hold in his outward reaction.
L does what he wouldn't otherwise do for the sake of the unexpected and smiles. "I can and will torture you for expedience," he says lightly.
B tilts his head to one side and everyone else in the room may as well be a figment in that moment. "Your mere presence is torture."
L's eyebrows raise. "I can leave."
"Come closer." B doesn't have a free hand so he beckons with his chin, jutting and unshaven, a blade gone dull.
L stays where he is. "Tell me what I want to know, and maybe I will."
They have a matching set of eyes, black on black. They don't honestly look that much alike but for that feature, but B is a mimic by trade and he'd honed himself around that one pinnacle shared trait, carving the rest of himself into a fine white match for the set. L looks at B and looks nowhere else. B looks back. B has never once since the they met looked away.
From the far corner of the room, L can hear Aizawa's mumbled, "This is about to get weird, isn't it?"
And, of course, it does, in roughly the following sequence:
"Where did you meet Sadie Markovitch?"
"At a bar. Where does anyone meet anyone these days?"
L takes a step forward.
"Why did you speak to her?"
"She spoke to me first. She was pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way, and very handsy, and she was set to die in three and a half months."
L stops mid-step. Everyone is watching them but if he feels that pressure he won't get anywhere. They're gladiators in their stadium and the crowd is just a roaring sea in the background, crashing against their edges, hungry and angry and shouting its curses and prayers to the oblivious gods above. L is the centerpiece and B is the center and he'd get down on his knees and suck his cock if that's what would get him answers. He would maybe do it anyway, just for shock-value.
"What does that mean? You planned to kill her? You did kill her, I assume?"
"You would assume, and I would have done, but that wasn't the game. I just saw the numbers. I see numbers. I see names. Backwards, sometimes, or else I'm just backwards, but they're always there. I tried to blind myself with cleaning solution when I was nine. Roger got very angry. I really wasted a lot of wood polish for no good reason, he said, but it seemed like a good reason at the time. My eyes healed, though, just the same."
"I remember," L says, and he does. Being eleven and wheedling out of Watari through means of distanced manipulation the reason for B's absence from the dinner table, all the while maintaining a facade a complete and utter disinterest and general relief at not having to deal with his constant prodding belligerence and ploys for attention. He'd made a game of sitting at his bedside as quietly as possible and managing not to be heard or sensed, the bandages around B's eyes a convenient filter through which to hide his investment. Inevitably he'd be found out, and B would call out, "L?" somewhat smugly, but quivering, like he'd been strung between superiority and inferiority, an eyeless empty thing grasping with claws at the world around him. L had started to suspect that B would just routinely say his name as a matter of course every few hours or so.
Then the bandages had come off and he had been fine. Must have not gotten it as bad as it had seemed, the doctor said, and everyone had bumbled around their superstition and chosen to believe him.
"You made a miraculous recovery," he continues, and it's a joke between all of them now, because of course he did. "What do you mean you can see names?"
There's a mutter, morphed surreptitiously into a cough, from the back end of the room. L turns and blinks at Mello, who's wiping his mouth with the back of his fist and pointedly looking at the ceiling, the floor, and anywhere but L himself. He sighs. "What, Mello?"
"Nothing. I just… " He falls back against the doorjamb, arms crossing, rearranging himself into his usual posture of feigned disinterest and delinquency. "I'm kind of surprised that you don't know and I do. I mean, I met him last week, and you've known him since you were, like, ten."
"Eight, actually," B puts in.
"Shut-up," L says, unmoved and not even looking a B, but he's jittering a little on the inside. Just how many previously unknown variables can be in play here? "Know what?"
Mello opens his mouth, but grinds his jaw to a slow stop as he stares past L's shoulder. He juts his chin in B's direction, and loathe as L is to have his line of questioning directed by a fifteen year old who thinks he's hot shit because he'd held a gun one time without even shooting his own arm off, for these sorts of things, it's true that going the source itself - even when not notoriously reliable and straightforward - is more likely to yield accurate intel.
"The last secret." B licks his teeth with his jagged, white tongue. "I waited 17 years for you to figure it out and I would have waited twice that if it meant you'd pursue it out of genuine interest in my complicated inner-workings, but I suppose I'm not allowed to keep it, anymore, huh?" He bites his lower lip, chewing it idly. "I suppose this is the emotional equivalent of a full cavity search?"
"You only wish."
"I sure do."
"Goddammit." Aizawa's clenched fist rattles, where he's obviously straining to keep it as still as possible, against the coffee table. "Stop wasting time. Just tell us what the hell is going on so we can stop it and go home already."
B sits up in his chair, elbows to knees, and bats his eyes at him. "Shuichi Aizawa," he says. He flicks his eyes on down the line, officer to officer. "Hideki Ide. Touta Matsuda. Kanzo Mogi." He turns to face the rest of them. "Mihael Keehl, Thierry Mo - "
"Stop," L says, voice quieter than he means it to be, but sharp enough that it does the trick. B stops, posture slumping into a self-satisfied heap of marrow and concave bones. He's almost as lovable as he is hatable.
"What?" he laughs. "Afraid Kira will take notes?" He shoots his eyes, dilating from pinpricks to bullets, like a beast catching sight of its prey, to Light. "I'm pretty sure he doesn't have his notebook with him right now, L."
"Cute," Light snarls gently from his chair, hands crossed across his lap like every good school boy's shining example, scout's honor personified in his every look and gesture - but L isn't paying much attention to that now, even if B had been right about his reasons for cutting the list short.
He stands, the room following him with every available eye, and walks softly over to B, who stares up at him like he's Christ come down to lay a blessing, and that's a look he knows and isn't afraid to crush with his fists and his fingers and the stilted movements of his hips. Maybe not in front of the crowd.
"L?" someone says, perhaps Lights, perhaps not, but either way he ignores it.
He kneels down in front of B's chair, only one leg bent, like a hushed proposal in front of an awed crowd. He wants them to be eye level, he wants to be able to see, when he asks, "You have the Shinigami eyes?" so quietly that no one else in the room could possibly hear it.
B shrugs, lips parted, still and bent towards L like an eager marionette. "They're my eyes. You might just say I have Shinigami."
L's brow cinches. "You have a Death Note?" It's a stupid question. Of course he does, but of course he can't. Not unless he's had it since he was a child - which, honestly, might account for some of his prepubescent irregularities -
But then B shakes his head, a gentle twitch, and someone in the room coughs uncomfortably because maybe it looks like they're about to embrace and maybe they are. "Never even seen the damn book before."
L's lips open and close. Suddenly he doesn't want everyone else here. Maybe just Light, the three of them alone with death and the question. Questions. Much more than one, but there's only a few that seem important right now.
"How?" he asks, stupidly, a little louder than he should and he knows it grabs the room's general attention, which is straining as it is to hear them.
B doesn't smile but he might as well. He says, "Don't know. Still wanna carve me open and probe around for answers? I'll hold the stethoscope."
L should step back. His skin is tingling with the promise of discovery, a breakthrough in a life long conundrum, all that he's never allowed himself to wonder about writing itself into a solution for him. All he has to do is follow the breadcrumbs. He barely even cares if B is the one picking the loaf apart and throwing it.
He might actually pull him into a separate room and get slicing, only then the building quakes, the darkness spits out a thick gob of white light, and everything turns into the bright, hazy luster of a near death experience. The room feels like it's been splintered, like a mirror version become real, and he falls forward onto B, who's chair tips back and hits the ground, just as there's yelling from the room down the hall and Light shouts raggedly, "Everybody stay calm!"
Absolutely no one takes the order to heart.
It takes longer than Matt would like, but shorter than he expects, for Roger to get back to him. Syd is puzzling out the complex mechanics of Pokemon: Yellow when his phone rings, startling them both out of the anxious stupor that they'd, without any other recourse, fallen into.
"Matt," is how Matt answers, because it both circumvents the need for introductions and confirmations and eliminates any thoughts of conversational pleasantries.
"What exactly," Roger asks, obviously equally as uninterested in beating around the bush, "does your source think that Beyond Birthday intends to do in Japan?"
Matt raises an eyebrow, then switches the phone to speaker, so that Syd can hear, too. "Does it matter? Whatever it is, it's bad news, like front-page, bodies-found, no-suspects bad. Why? What did Watari say?"
Roger sighs long and uneasy, the breath whistling through his nose, and Syd looks at Matt like he'd for some reason suspected this unflappable source of complex international dealings to, well, not sound like a Life Alert commercial. Too much to hope for that the bastard had read, or even rented the miniseries of, Tinker, Tailor, and comparisons to George Smiley will likely be completely lost on him.
"Well," Roger tells them, "the customs department at Narita shared that they do, in fact, have record of a man fitting B's description - traveling under the name Rue Ryuzaki - entering the country three days ago."
"Rue Ryuzaki?" Matt repeats, more than a little disbelievingly. He glances at Syd, who just shrugs. "You're kidding, right? I thought this guy was supposed to be a super genius type. I know from experience that high IQ doesn't necessarily mean loads of common sense, but he'd have to be a fucking idiot to use the same alias that he did to do the crime that he was convicted of and on the run from the jail sentence for." He's a little bit surprised that Roger doesn't call him on his language, but desperate times, he supposes. Matt rubs at his temples. "How'd he even get in the country? Japan's locked up tight and that name's gotta launch up every red flag in the book, knowing L."
Roger swallows. "Yes, well, it's supposed to, but apparently a few weeks prior to Rue Ryuzaki's arrival, Japanese customs - and only Japanese customs, it seems; I'm in the process of checking with other countries - received orders from L to not only waive the suspicions attached to the name Rue Ryuzaki, and also a number of other aliases Beyond is known to use, but to most definitely let him into the country, ignoring any similarities he may have to any wanted criminals on the international no-fly list."
Matt blinks. He looks up at Syd and he can tell they're thinking the same thing. "Someone wanted him in the country," he says.
"Precisely."
"But I thought L was missing. Presumed dead?"
"He was. And though Watari recently sent word that he's turned up, at the time the order went out, he was still MIA."
Matt is shocked that L is even still alive, though not especially that Roger had neglected to mention as much until now. Need to know basis bullshit, and all. He supposes he should allow Mello an I told you so when he finds him. He clears his throat. "So, whoever was acting as L at the time gave the order. Can't you just ask Watari about it?"
"That was the intention," Roger tells him, tone slanting grim, "but we've been trying every number, e-mail address, and pager in the book for the last several hours and he's not answering."
Ryuk scratches at his chin with one jagged claw, catching it on his leathery skin with every alternating movement, then letting it go again. "I don't think you're really allowed to do that." He'd wanted to say as much when they'd swooped back in from the Shinigami realm and straight into Misa's cell, to drive off the heretical Abomination itself from its plundering of her mind. He hadn't really known the protocol on that, though, or if there even was any.
He definitely knows there are rules against touching humans that can't see you, though.
"And you're not really supposed to go around dropping your Note, or anyone else's, to earth. And yet." She's stony faced as always, carrying Misa Amane's unconscious body in her arms like the Christian savior in the arms of his mother, post-death, the iconic image of sacrifice and sacrament, or whatever.
Ryuk floats after her.
"Yeah, well, if the Upstairsmen had been sniffing around back then, I probably wouldn't have done it," he tells her. "I just wanted some fun. I don't want to be unmade."
"Then," she says lowly, voice unmoved despite the heaviness of the conversation, "maybe you shouldn't be following me around. I'm getting Misa out of here, whether or not I am made to suffer for it later. As I understand it, you have no such attachments, so you'd be best served to sit back and watch from a safe distance, the way you always do."
"Hey, I'm just trying to help you, you know," he calls after her, slowing a bit in the middle of the hall.
"And I'm trying to help her, which is more important." She adjusts her grip on Misa, glancing briefly back at Ryuk with her one glinting eye. "Vile and virtuous things are gathering in this building, and whichever conquers the other, I don't foresee the by-standing humans coming out unscathed. They never do."
"Yeah, well," Ryuk tells her, huffing, "that's kind of just how the universe works, right?"
"I don't care."
That's almost a little admirable, or would be if he knew how to respect emotion, or respect anything at all, and he's going to maybe tell her something which communicates that general idea, without being too supportive, should any Upstairsmen be listening for his betrayal. He's only opening his mouth when he feels it, the ground and the air and molecules holding it all together opening up, slithering, arcadian light filtering in through the gauzy cracks in the reality of the now. Something crawls down from the Above.
He could have spoken if he'd needed to. He wouldn't have been heard.
What they've sent is a Watcher and, even, he supposes, a simple human with far less ingenuity than, say, Light Yagami, could probably figure out what such a being's primary function is.
tbc.
let's just wait and see if i can do it, shall we? finishing this fic will give me a very satisfying sense of closure, like finally slaying the beast. cheers, and i hope it was not a huge disappointment to anybody, and if so, well, i accept that. thank you for reading.