warnings: nonsense! violence, body horror, excessive religious symbolism, and unhappy tidings. commas, commas, commas!
notes: i was quite a bit very lazy with the notes last time because i knew if i sat around agonizing over anything else for a moment longer i would never post anything, just like i hadn't for the past year. but here we are now and this all appears to be happening, so let's do it right, shall we? thanks to everybody who reviewed last chapter, either because you'd just discovered this fic or you've been waiting that whole sorry year for an update (i owe you folks the most thanks for maintaining an interest even now), it really gave me the gall needed to keep on keeping on. the chapter is longer (too long?), perhaps one of the longest to date, and the first quarter of it was written very early this year, and the rest was written, uh… in the last three weeks. the break-off point between those two time periods happens in the middle of B's scene with the eyeball (you'll know what I mean when you get there.) everything after that is fresh-grown fall/winter 2k15 writing style from yours truly. i hope the change isn't distracting.
the title of this chapter, apocatastasis means: restoration to the primordial condition. it is a concept that appears with different slants in different offshoots of the abrahamic religions, but in this case i'm taking it to mean universal salvation, or the concept that all things eventually return to god, sinners and the devil included. note that i'm neither a religious person nor a religious scholar and so my understanding of these things may be incomplete, and isn't intended to offend. i just find christian symbolism to be effective in the context of death note since it is so heavy handedly inserted into the canon.
major influences for this chapter include the history of hell by alice k. turner, and the entire discography of the antlers. i'm not saying you've gotta listen to wake by the antlers while reading the last few scenes of this chapter, just that i did while writing them and it makes them ten times better.
thank you for reading!
chapter thirty one - apocatastasis.
"Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better."
- Robert Frost, Birches
Syd hadn't actually believed that they'd send the helicopter until it had landed outside of the World War II hospital that had been serving as Matt's residence, plain black and nondescript, a thing that goes utterly unnoticed at Heathrow when they dock on the landing strip, but which draws a lot of uneasy attention in the seedier parts of central London where they're picked up.
"What, exactly, does the establishment that you come from do?" Syd asks Matt as their scant luggage—a rolled up sleeping bag, an excessively weighted suitcase full of computer equipment, and a plastic bag of snacks—is loaded into the plane by flight attendants that don't make eye contact. He only says 'come from' because 'work for' seems a silly thing to direct at a 15 year old.
Matt shrugs, his bag of pork rinds crinkling in his fist. "It's an orphanage."
"Oh," Syd says, even though that explains exactly nothing.
It's a twelve hour flight to Tokyo, but he doesn't think he's going to be able to sleep at all.
"Everyone, out, to the roof, go," L shouts, making himself audible over the murmur of panic, pushing himself back to his feet over B's tipped form that lolls, doll-like in a horror movie cliche sort of way, below him.
"What have I been saying this whole time?" Ide says under his breath as he pulls Matsuda up from his lurch and holds him steady, arm wrapped around his shoulder, and though he is snide and thorny, no help yet full of instruction, L doesn't tell him to shut the hell up the way he would like to, because there is not time and it is not a discussion. They need to go, now.
"Yes, Ide-san, you are a font of genius whose expertise we would have been well-suited to defer to. Now go, all of you."
The officers stumble over each other towards the exit, a quiet stampede. Glassy green light fogs the hallway, like street sign neons filtered through stained glass. At the end of the exodus line, Aizawa turns and asks, "What about Watari? The doctors? L? L!"
L blinks. He hears his name, title, as if through a tunnel or a badly tuned radio. B is grinning at him from the floor, legs strapped to those of the chair, spread wide and open in their ugly, unsuitably colored trousers. In his peripheral vision he can see Light going for the door, eyes wide and panicky, that gold-leaf command hardened into leaden terror.
Focusing, he says, "Aiber and Wedy will get them. Right?"
Wedy's gun has been drawn since the first instance of commotion, and Aiber stands stolid beside her, guard or guarded, it doesn't matter, he goes where she goes.
"Right."
L's already dodged out of range of hearing to catch Light by the arm as he follows Aizawa into the hall. "Not you. You're coming with me."
He huffs, shrugging out of L's grasp. "Convenient time to get clingy. And where exactly are you going, because it looks to me like you're just hanging around waiting for the building to go down, which, while not your worst idea ever, isn't exactly your be,"—
"Shut-up, Light." L grabs him by the wrist, bony and warm, and pulls him along to the chair. "Unlock him," he orders, tossing him the key to B's cuffs, before turning to snap, "Mello, go. I don't care who with, just get out. There are flares in the storage closet on the top floor. Shoot from the roof until you're seen and saved."
"But,"—the boy starts, but L has neither the patience nor spare attention to let him continue, just as Light mutters, "You've got to be kidding me," but still crouches down to do what he's told.
"Don't argue," L tells Mello. "You don't have the time or the intellect to win. Just get the hell out and, whatever else you do, keep anyone else from coming in." He swivels his glance. "Faster, Light."
B smiles at him from under his lashes, eyes just as jittery and mad when upside down. He says to Light, "Isn't that what they always say?" and is met with a grunt of disgust and a jerk at his wrist that sends him breathing in sharply and mumbling, "Mmmh, I do like it rough, how did you know?"
From the doorway, Mello calls, "You better not die." L would be touched if he had the capacity for such things, but instead feels quite empty of anything but broiling fear and curiosity, and he's more than a little relieved when Mello leaves off with, "At least, not before you've picked an heir."
"Big inheritance feud?" Light huffs noncommittally from his kneeled position, then continues on without waiting for an answer, "Are you really sure you want him on the loose?"
"No," L says, looking at B, seeing him, staggered, long-limbed, dead man's grin, and the way the unearthly light seems to part around him, like Noah's sea. "But I'm also likely to need his help."
Light crosses his arms, drawing his jacket tighter around him and they can hear the clatter of the team fleeing up the stairs, Mello yelling, "Wedy! Wedy!" into the steamy dim, and then the screeching of wheels, blond hair glinting over a gurney and the steel sound of a gun clicking awake. They're going to have to carry it up the stairs and L doesn't envy them, but he isn't particularly wild about his own lot in this situation. Nishikawa is cursing in the distance, taking God's name as much in vain as she possibly can.
The voices fade. Reality slithers itself further apart and L's eyes are getting tired. He and B and Light stand in a rough triangle, both of them angled away from each other and towards him. Misa is still somewhere in this building. The glow seems to be growing, spreading out to infect other things, cancerous teeth biting into every inch of the room. Maybe that's just his personal impending sense of doom.
B smiles coquettishly. "Whatever you say, captain."
Light grits his jaw. "We can't trust him."
"I," L says, because he knows that, of course; is emotionally compromised, but certainly not blatantly stupid, "can't trust either of you."
"And everyone who trusts you ends up dead." B's still smiling. "Lucky for me that I'm immune." L thinks he must be enjoying Light's seething glare, by the way he doesn't make eye contact, just basks smugly in it like sunshine, chin up, throat loose, shoulders hanging back. "So, what's the plan?"
L shrugs. Good question. "Find the source of the disturbance, Shinigami or otherwise, and try to contain it. Misa Amane is optional, but keep an eye out. She's blonde, about this high, speaks at an unearthly pitch and will likely run like a dog to a bone if we dangle Light in front of her."
B nods, reaching for an armful of flashlights, pocketing one, tossing one to L, and turning the other on. "I read her file." He licks his lips. "Only thing I like more than a girl in black is one with a body count. She and I are destined to be friends."
Light pointedly snatches the flashlight out of L's hands where it dangles, uselessly, at his side. The brush of their fingers jolts L awake, out of the stunning stupor he's falling into, and he's too busy blinking around at the walls, tilted at strange angles, bending off in wrong directions, slipping past the corners where they're meant to meet and form space, structure, and down and down and away.
"You're going to stay away from Misa," Light snaps, shouldering past them to the door, and L follows because he should have started them moving a while ago.
He reaches into his pocket. He still has the gun. B and Light sway ahead of him, seething figures in a long dim eternity, and he mumbles, inaudibly, "Does anyone else feel like they're in a funhouse?" Neither of them turn to look at him.
"I was given to understand," B is saying, "that you weren't much fond of her. Protective boyfriend instincts kicking in?"
The annoyance in Light's voice shows through clearly. "It's more that she's my only ally here. And," he adds, "she pays for my apartment."
"I see," is the last thing that L hears. "So, you're a kept boy, then?"
He doesn't stay conscious to feel the impact with the ground, but his last clear thought is that he ought to sit down slowly so as to avoid a concussion, followed the minutely panicked realization that there are no chairs in the hallway.
He wakes in what is, finding a balance between Dante's description and his own teeming dark personal perceptions of such a place, probably hell.
His head thrums with the rush of the room that is no room, only a black landscape spanning out around him in all directions, shaky and electrified, tired, physical strain overtaking, insides unsure of how to remain inside and outsides shrinking under the bright cold glare of the eternal emptiness that surrounds.
And there is the eye.
Black pupiled, with a colorless iris, and bright bright eerie whites. Just one. Not part of a set. Floating and excessively huge and staring right at him and into him with the distanced interest of a scientist staring through a microscope. It occurs to L that this is punishment for all of the microscopes he's looked through, data he's examined, things studied, pinned down like insects and picked apart. People he's done it to. He's in hell, he's in hell, and he deserves to be here. He bought his ticket with every sin and the suffering he will be dealt is deserved. His very existence demands torment.
He has never believed in God, not even when he was very young, and he has never believed in the devil, but that hasn't stopped the devil coming for him.
He tries to speak but it withers in his throat. Human speech is just noises arranged in a pattern that drills itself familiar into your skull. Words are not real. Letters are not real. L is a made up thing.
He wonders when he will be allowed to die.
And the eye blinks, as if in response, as if it knows him and can hear him think and feel his feelings and know what he knows. Does he know anything? He really believes in this moment that it is all a hoax and that he has never known anything. Facts are made up, too. The universe was a joke and every event is a tremor of laughter echoing from the beginning, the source, but none of it means a damned thing.
He is seen he is seen he is seen and he is not loved or respected or kept or remembered. No one will regret him being gone.
But that's—no, that's not true. B, if anybody. If B is anybody. If B isn't an imaginary friend, a ghost that he made up to haunt him. B, if he is real, has missed him his whole life. And Light…
Light's a fucking asshole.
And then he blinks back at the eye that blinks at him and the fog, though it lays heavy and devouring over him, shifts a little, breaking, showing him a tiny taste of reality and he realizes, triumphantly, all in a rush, sweeping in out of the nowhere that surrounds, that it doesn't matter if nothing matters, because he is not alone in this universe, and if they all get together and decide on something—on the alphabet, on the law, on definitions of evil, and on definitions of love—then that makes it something. He exists and he had fainted and he's being stared at by a giant demonic eye and he's a bit fucking miffed, actually. This is sure inconvenient.
You're no God, the eye says to him, without a voice, but he feels it echo through him and he feels it pluck at his veins and it makes him a little angry, a little jealous, because no, of all things, he was never that, never tried to be.
So, squaring himself up, dredging up enough awareness to speak, he bites back, "You're a giant eyeball. You're in my building and there's no place for you here. Set me down and put me back."
Wrong one. Need another, it groans to him, and it sounds very tired and ravenous, and not very intelligent. If this is a Shinigami, it's on the lower end compared to the models that he's seen.
"You want the Shinigami that's been tormenting the city of Tokyo? Fine by me. You have leave to take it."
Need to find it. Need to look for it.
L's going to make some crack about it probably being quite good at looking, and then kindly offer to be its guide, dependent upon the agreement that it set reality back on its feet and see to it that none of his people—they're all his people, the whole rotten lot of them, for this purpose, at least—are hurt. But before he can manage to speak again, he's forcibly ejected from whatever otherworldly plane he had been yanked into and drops back to the level earth that he had been taken from.
Breath rattling through him, waking sweat-slick and cold and gasping up with a tremoring agony that shivers his bones and his blood, sets him still and blurry, but cognizant, into his body on the floor of the taskforce building, B and Light standing over him and squinting down with cautious relief.
"I've never been so glad to see either of you before," he says, before his voice has really grown back, so that it comes out shaky and muted. "We've got quite a problem that might turn out to be quite a solution."
And then, before he can properly continue, or hear what's said to him, a rushing in his ears overtaking the sound of their responses, everything outside of him dimming and thrashing, he turns over on his hands and knees and throws up.
B kneels first, going down quick and spindly before Light can even consciously decide whether or not he wants to display the weakness of concern, and has his hand on L's back and strokes with a brutish tenderness that disgusts Light, makes him want to rip him away and cut him open and take out whatever is in him, whatever he owns that makes him so forgivable, so irresistible, and parse it apart and swallow it and have it so that they can be wholly done with Beyond Birthday, any mention or acknowledgement of the beast that calls itself that, and move onto a more comfortable two-seater world with no room for anything but he and L, absent of interlopers and false prophets.
But he doesn't move and B is still stroking L's back while he retches. The smell is disgusting and Light can't even get that close.
"What's wrong with him?" he asks, quieter than he means to be.
"What isn't," B replies, and Light doesn't think it's the time for smart remarks and is going to say as much, but B continues unperturbed in the next moment. "He's obviously suffered some sort of profound physical shock to the system. Don't know why he fainted. He's not usually such a lightweight when it comes to the macabre, but it might just be overexposure to unearthly fumes. If the obvious extrapolation is correct and I'm part Shinigami—let's say, on my mother's side? I really don't like to imagine one of those big grimy flying things sticking it to a little human female—"
"Alright," Light snaps, looking up and down the hall for any sign that they're heard, that something is there and to listen, "yes, I get it, you like to say shocking things. You're like him that way. Your point?"
B smiles and stands up, leaving L on the ground, groaning and held up by weak arms. He's got something in his hands and it glints in the greenish glow and Light only chastises himself then and there, when he remembers, for not realizing that L still had the gun and going for it first thing when he'd gone down.
B clicks the safety off and on playfully. "I'm like him in a lot of ways." He winks and it's horrible. He's absolutely horrible and there's nothing at all attractive about him and Light would sooner give Misa a firearm than this fucking idiot. "But yes, assuming I'm part Shinigami, that would make me somewhat resistant to any powers they've got over humans, right?"
"Conceivably. What about me?"
"Well," B says, gesturing aimlessly with the gun while he speaks, "in your case it's a tolerance, isn't it? You write in that thing every day, you've probably soaked up some of the good old death rays into your body. Like a trapper who rolls himself in animal feces to lose his scent, make himself undetectable. Congratulations, darling. You're practically one of us."
He claps Light twice, gently, on the cheek, and his hands are clammy and L is barely just starting to sit up below them, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, and honestly, he looks gross, like a cloth wrung fully of water and left limp and dried out. Light wants to cover him in his arms, doesn't care for the smell, but L is a guardian, a shield that can sway B this way and that, and one that will surely demand back his gun.
Light jerks, with evident disgust, out of Beyond's reach. "So, what are we supposed to do? Carry him?"
B jags his eyebrows up. "Bridal style? I don't think you can manage that, actually. A bit too waifish yourself, aren't you? Delicate little teen idol. No matter. I've got him. I'm good at getting him and, don't worry your pretty head about it, I'll get the gun, too. Just model walk beside us and I'm sure it will help a lot."
He's in the process of lifting L up and Light knows it won't lead anywhere useful, knows he'll get himself beaten like before—there's an inkling of a hope that L will be cognizant enough to stop it, to use whatever hold he's got on B to reign him in and make him behave—but still he hits him without regard to the inevitable consequences, and the satisfaction of landing a solid punch on his cheek, rattling his skeleton, sending him off his feet, is so viscerally and overwhelmingly satisfying that any resulting unpleasantness feels very much worth it at the height of the adrenaline, the collision.
His fist hurts quite a lot and B tumbles back, losing his hold on L but maintaining the one he has on the gun. And L, heap on the ground that he is, mumbles, "Light?" up at him, and something that may be, "Not now."
And B, of course, laughs and laughs, squinting the eye on the side that had been hit and smiling glassy with the other. He points his gun at Light and he might shoot and he might just be playing another topsy turvy mind game, but either way, it doesn't matter in the end, because he frowns, and he squints, and he is in obvious grueling physical pain, and then his grip goes loose and his shoulders slack and he falls, from his half-kneeling perch on the ground, face-forward, unconscious, the gun dropping from his hand and clinking brightly across the floor.
So much for his resistance theory.
B gazes into the abyss and the abyss gazes back, in real time, big tired angry eye and nothing else in the whole world around them, and he feels at home here, more well-situated than he ever has in the rambling inanities of human society, the chemical make-up of the world around him, laws like gravity and displacement and things he could intellectually puzzle out but never quite feel on an intuitive level because there is and has always been more than that in him. And of every little boy and girl whose parents tell them they are special, more than average, destined for a grand future and big big things, of all the golden children, Light Yagamis with their bright ideas and unceasing confidence in their particular destiny, and tiny serious atheist children, L Lawliets, who believe nothing innately of themselves but carve out a destiny with delicate white raging hands, it is he, Beyond Birthday of the made-up name and made-up identity, wearing a cellophane-thin human mask, hiding there in plain sight, who is the thing that is more.
He is more than human, or he is less, but the answer is simply that he is not. He is something else entirely, parts inside of him not lining up with the others, skin not snug over the bone, but tight, too tight. His bones are too large. He'd always felt he was born in the wrong body, should have been L's body, should have been his twin, but perhaps that was just projection of a clueless childhood homelessness, selflessness; not in any sense of generosity, but simply meaning an absence of self. He was nothing defined until he was L's—copy, mimic, stalker, friend, enemy, killer.
But K is for Killer. B is for Beyond.
The beyond, when he meets it, blinks at him and tells him in a language that hurts him and thrills him, grim green pulses of it rocking his human corpse, You're a God.
He laughs because he has never pretended to be that. He doesn't make any sound. The black doesn't echo but sucks away noise as if into a void, airless, quality-less, nothing but him and the sight which sees him. "Oh, am I? Of death, I think, if anything."
You belong Below. You are the scum of the under. Downstairsman. You may stink and speak like a human, but you are not so small nor so dispensable, and I do not smell nor hear. I see only and I see that you are a blasphemous creature. You should not exist at all, but especially not here, and you cannot enter the Above.
"No? Not an angel, am I?" B grins and the sight touches him, on the skin and inside, deep inside like fucking through every centimeter of his skin, tangy like rot and gold, serenity so sharp and demanding as to pull him downward. He can feel the urge to dive below the thin curtain of the underworld, so far and inconceivable in day to day life, suddenly easy to take by its hand and crawl inside of.
He is at the precipice. A hundred thousand sticky black fingers tug at his ankle and he can't see them because he can't see anything but the eye, but he feels them.
Made up word. We don't trifle with human concepts of grace. There is only the Above and the Below and the degrading, transient, mortal middle. That is where you live. Come away.
"To where I belong? Gonna take me home, huh, baby? Buy me dinner first, at least. Wine and dine and then maybe, maybe, but not before. I don't think I'm nearly done here on Earth."
You have no choice. You woke the holy powers. You annoy them. You are wreaking havoc and turning the tides of human reality all wrong. You will burn a hole right through to the other side if you go on. I am the first of the repairmen, but there will be more. You are greater than human but still slime, still small, still crushable and filthy. I have no hands to crush you. I am a Watcher only, but what follows eyes is nose and teeth. Throat and gullet. You will be swallowed out of existence, unmade, if you refuse the invitation.
B wriggles a little but the black has him, noxious and sacred and he feels as if the atoms that make him up are being agitated, tickled hazy and unhappy, and he snaps, "Hey, hey, no deal, daddy-o. Stop it! You're just a grunt-worker, aren't you? Heaven, if it is heaven, or an approximation of it, that you're from, wouldn't send a hotshot down here to deal with our silly mortal messes. You don't have that sort of power. Don't tickle the tip if you're not down to put the whole damn thing in your mouth."
He wags his tongue but he doesn't think an inhuman otherworldly monster with no sexual organs will really understand the euphemism.
Can't unmake you, true. Can't grow a mouth to eat you whole, but can grow tethers to pull you down to the lower realms. Sent here to do that. You're too much trouble.
"See, mister—well, you're not a mister, are you? But that doesn't matter—thing is, I think you've gotten yourself all confused. Makes sense if you haven't got a brain connected to that optic nerve of yours." B licks his lips, wonders how to spill the beans best and then just tumbles over, can't contain so many jolly good twists and turns in himself. "I'm not the one causing all the hubbub down here, bub. I might not belong and I might not be wholly human, but I'm just a Shinigami blend, aren't I?"
Abomination.
"Yeah, yeah, abomination. That's me. But Sadie, Sadie? Sadie's the real bride of Frankenstein in the equation. She's not even a halfsie, she's a whole new mess. Baby was just a human girl like any human girl, if a little buzzed in the head, and then she died, like she was destined, like all humans are destined, but yours truly"—and he bats his lashes he for effect because he knows he'll be seen—"went ahead and got some real wrong baddie blood on her corpse because, hey, if it brings me back to life, would it not work just as well for any of the pretty corpses of my pretty comrades? And, well, good old girl came back, but not quite right and not quite human and not quite Shinigami and not quite anything anybody's ever seen before, even you, I'd bet, with your big black eyes. And she's gone all haywire and floats around like a halloween costume shop liquidation sale, killing children and rolling reality around between her skinny yellow fingers and it's real inconvenient for me and mine, but probably even more so for you and yours. If you're taking anybody downtown with you, it ought to be her."
The eye, otherworldly horror that it is, blinks at him. Sadie, Sadie?
"If that's what she's calling herself still. If she's calling herself anything. Names are so fickle. That fancy little notebook demands them, and I'm treated to a constant encyclopedia of them in live technicolor, but they're not really more than trappings, clipped on, shined up, but separate from the thing itself. I am not my name. What I am doesn't have a name, it's fleshy, nebulous, distracted, it has no patience, it feeds on everything and everyone, it stretches outward, encroaching, and leaves bloodstains on the curtains, but it is not and will never be the words I made up and stuck to it. There's no way they can kill me. Nothing can kill me, not even you."
The eye glares at him, slow and hazed. Maybe it needs glasses.
The way to kill a Downstairsman is to rob it of it chief function, to convince it to give life instead of take it.
B chews his lip. The skin there is familiarly raw. "You mean save a person, instead of kill them? How very touching. I imagine that isn't the most common occurrence in the whole universe, huh?"
Of course not.
"You're not much for sarcasm, are you, Blinky?"
My purpose is to watch. That is all.
"Then how about you wait around for the body count queen to show herself to you before you cart me off to hell, yeah? Make sure you've caught the right fox before you skin it?"
Abominations cannot be trusted.
"Neither can giant, conscious eyeballs, either, fas as I know, but I'm letting you have the benefit of the doubt. Don't squander it."
The air, if there is air, and not just writhing effusive emptiness, vibrates with the force of his watchful friend's distrust, rage, feelings, feelings if a thing like that can feel, and what can feel and what can't? Animals are said to only act on instinct but B used to watch the cats in the town, their eyes, their loneliness and distance, and if instinct is what that is then they are all instinct, poets and artists and politicians making speeches, microphoned voices massaging the crowd, it's all just reaction, one thing, one thing, another, colliding, encompassing, reducing, destroying, straying, staying, quiet times, mornings, looking at someone who is beside you and seeing them see you, it's all just neurons firing, brain waves sizzling, amping up the voltage, and then kaboom! Kablooie. Anything that speaks has a heart, and the eye sings music in his head, to a tune he's forgotten, a tune his mother used to sing, oh, if he'd had a mother, she would have sung it.
He can't die, or he can, he might, he never has before, but he's never seen a thing like this, either, and nothing really happens until it happens, and you're cold, dead, dearly missed, hardly missed, whatever, he won't stake the claim with any surety that he cannot die, but he thinks that he will not, not now, not in this spaceless place, without the other half of the cosmos. One is in him, swallowed down, wafting in his guts, but the other half is outside of him, retching on the floor in the hallway, sick at Kira's feet, and if B's gonna go he's not going alone. If the abyss wants him it will have him whole.
So, he won't die. He's decided against it. The only other option, then, is mettle, suavity, a means by which to dredge up some charm and make the thing that stares him through and through dance to his own tune, by his own lips. Conviction is an art, and he'll show them a masterpiece.
The Watcher can only see one thing at once, the song titters in his head. I will set you down to look upon the other, Sadie Sadie, but you must know that if you have spoken falsely, you will plucked up again, and you will be dashed from this plane without interrogation, without time for spinning tales. At least one must return with this one, or the Above will sizzle with blessings, and the Below will boil, rising from the seas, dark dead things long past returning on the tides of the unrest you have caused.
B is getting a little heady with it. He'd had apocalyptic dreams as a child, and he lives apocalyptic realities as a grown man. "Neat-o."
The eye glares, the space around him wobbles, noiseless, and then mounting, bleating, the rush of the colorless growing colorful, and haywire, and green, green like a witch's brew in a storybook, green like the vast South American jungle, the river at first light, the river and all the fish bones and his small white hands plucking them up and sucking their flesh. Monster is the word, but his body is bones and sinew, he runs like an animal, he eats, he shits, he even sleeps, sometimes. He's been so lonely for so long, and his arms have been ready.
Where he falls is between two boys in mismatched clothes, in the green light, in the press between worlds, the part of the song where the bow breaks and the baby falls, and L is sitting up, lucid, but harried, and Light is standing, staring down at both of them, stiff like rigor mortis, and Sadie, Sadie is yelling in the distance, cursing him, her long legs, her hours, her tortured and torturous mind, ambitions fought and then lost, and a fall in the kitchen, something as harmless as the kitchen, and it's gone and all she has is a grave and a yard, and then him, his blood, and suddenly rage. Why rage, though? Why rape? Why not just death?
He blinks and his eyelids hurt, eyeballs dry, he'd been staring that whole time, unable to look away. The building jitters and then stills.
"What did you say to it?" L asks him, and he just smiles and lols against the wall behind him, grinning at them both, at Light and his bare feet on the cold floor, his anemic panic, his stillness, his aborted concern, and L drained, L an unholy man reeling from a holy experience.
"Oh, just fed 'em some of the old Birthday family charm," B trills.
L squints at him, almost giddily, overwhelmed by the cataclysm of the, well, world beyond. "There is no Birthday family."
"No charm, either," Light scoffs at them both, squatting down uncomfortably beside L as if to stake claim on some by-now vastly unimportant territory. "Now, can one of you invalids please tell me what the fuck is happening?"
"Earth is being invaded by a giant eyeball."
Light's mouth twitches a bit and if B hadn't already fallen down he can bet he would be getting knocked on his ass right about now—or at least, the very gentle boy would be trying again to get him there—but Light just flits his line of sight along to L, the grit of his jaw begging that someone, him of all people, take the moment seriously.
B is entirely too chuffed when L nods and says, "More or less."'
Misa is floating.
The psychic in the old town, and her table, and her cards, big rocks on her fingers, glinting, excessive, weighty and beautiful. Mama loved her rings, and would ask at the emergence of every new one about the origin, the price—too much, too much, if you want a ring like that, Misa-Misa, you'll have to find a man to buy it for you—and then she'd sit in her chair, cross her ankles, set her fake leather purse to the side and spread out her palms. Your lifeline is short, Amane-san. And her ringing laugh, all bedazzled, but hollow and blue and porcelain on the inside, she'd hit the same notes when she'd cry, and Misa in the corner, Misa with her coloring books and her blurry eyes—she refused to wear her glasses then, and they hadn't yet gotten her contacts—and all she could see was the glow, ambient, wavering.
"Tell me happier news, Uranaishi."
And then Misa would be sent out of the room, and when her mother came out after her, thirty, fourty-five minutes later, she'd be bleary-eyed, wobbly, and calm.
Misa is floating. She thinks she is a witch, she has done a spell upon herself, she is free, she is weightless, she will flutter on out of here and into the open night like a balloon all filled with air, and she will go, she will go, she will—
She is being held. Something is holding her, invisible, formless, but immovable. Her muscles are starched tight and she has never been strong, she has never been a fighter, but she rumbles and she roils and she has been through too much of this shit, cells and bonds and men through microphones who think they know things, they don't know things, there is nothing to know, there is no such thing as fortune telling, no spirit possession, no floating around over tables, no great truth, no crystals, no secrets that haven't already gone viral, just messes, and messes, and cold hands stripping her of her clothes, putting her in scrubs, bringing her cups of water, and the endless interrogation to which she never has anything to the say.
But something is holding her.
Her throat hurts, crisp and cold, underutilized, and when she screams it doesn't come out in words, no pleas, just noises, animal, vicious, and she shakes, she quakes, she will not go soundless, she will not go at all.
The grip that has her shifts and she shifts with it, silenced by the jostle of her body against the nothing that locks her in its grip, and then there is something, sensation, thin and papery, not hands, not skin, on her arm and then everything rushes in at once, and she sees the pen, and she sees the page, and she sees the body count rise one at a time, so fast, blood, blood, on her hands, on the front of her dress, and her sheets, and his sheets, and him hating her in the bed she bought him and knowing how and why and what she has done, where she got her iron and her fight, and who put the weapon in her hands.
"Rem," she gasps, small, minute, barely out of her, could be a meaningless exhalation, could all be meaningless, except she's told now that it's not, and she's taught her own history, in her own voice, well, what a beautiful way to die. "Rem."
"I'm here, Misa." She hears the flutter of pages and Rem's skin is cold, fishy, foreign, and consoling. She smells like nothing and the beating of her wings makes no sound. At the beginning there was a little girl with blurry eyes, and here, here is the end, here is the girl is grown, but still she can't see, everything is dark, everything is suspended around her in caverns, and she can't see the bodies, she's never seen their bodies, but she doesn't think she would feel pain if she did, doesn't think she'd feel a thing, and doesn't feel a thing, except this: cold skin, callouses on her fingers, unwashed, sweating, hidden in the depths of the night.
She wraps her arms around Rem, holds and is held, and asks forgiveness from a lesser god.
There has never been anything of human experience, life in the world, among the people in hats and jackets and tennis shoes, to prepare her for the eventuality of transcendence, of meeting another world and becoming part of it. Rem is alien, inhuman, not earthly at all, but she is a comfort, even as she says, lowly, voice so heavy, always dripping out of her, "Misa, we need to get you out of here."
"I forgot," Misa murmurs, unable to take hold of a thought and make it stand still in front of her, "I forgot you."
"It doesn't matter now. You're in danger. You are hunted. One has already attacked you, and the other, the worse, will be looking for you. The Note stains you with a particular coloration, a disfigurement, if you will, in the Grigori's eye. It will not see your hair color, your body, your hands, only the shapes that the Note has left on you through your use of it. If it mistakes you for the Abomination, it will take you down with it, into a world in which you do not belong."
"The,"—words and words that she doesn't understand, concepts like hell blurry inside of her—"what?"
"Abomination. A sacrilegious creation, born of a human and a Shinigami. Sickening. Or, anyway, the natural order of things is sickened by it, the universe itself quakes at its existence. Balance is threatened, and a lot of long-winded rhetoric of the like, and though the universe looks the same as it ever has to me, the King will not sleep again until the Abomination comes home and the Upstairsmen leave us be."
It's like literature, the kind they make you read in school, convoluted, skimmed over, too many words she doesn't recognize. "A Shinigami and a human can—? Ew, that's…."
Rem makes no expression. Her grip on Misa's waist loosens slightly. "Whatever you think it is, it is. We have no time to debate specifics. What matters to me is preserving your life, and for that, we need to leave this place."
"What about Light?"
Rem flicks her eye unsubtly over her shoulder. "He's… gone."
Misa feels the chill creeping up her back. She doesn't want to go to the underworld, or whatever, but she will not run while he fights by himself. "You're lying to me, Rem. For a god, you're not very good at it." She flexes in the clammy grip that stills her, testing her bonds. One prison after another, and it's always the love you don't want that follows you, holds you in its arms, tells you things, tells you it will save you, but it's lying.
Nothing will save you, you have to be the savior, you have to put on your boots and hold your pen tight.
"Put me down, Rem. I need to find him. I need to protect him."
Rem's grip doesn't let up. "You must know that there is absolutely no way I'll do that. I'd rather he die and you loathe me for it eternally than let anything happen to you. You are worth so much more than him, you deserve so much more than what he gives you. I don't mean my love, which is indecorous, otherwordly, and foul to you. I mean your own life, your movies, travel, a man who will be kind to you. Anything but him. You deserve all the slim beauty of this human plane, and none of the horror of his world and mine."
"This world is his. I'm his. I need to do this, Rem. I don't want my movies, I don't want kindness. I want love, everything terrible, everything angry, unfair, and cruel. I know it's not good, I know it's not what I deserve, but it's what I want. If I can't save him, then there was never any hope for me, anyway. I am his shield, I'm his eyes, I'm a small goddess, but I know death. I have its stain on me. If he goes to hell I'm going with him, and I, like,"—she smiles, she can charm her way through anything—"really don't want to, so I have to keep him here, too."
Rem isn't listening, doesn't understand, couldn't feel a human thing like this, this physical ache, lit deep in her throat and burning up the rest of her. There is nothing for Misa but devotion, devotion is what keeps the ache in check, keeps it from destroying her, consigning her eternally to her bed, her shuttered windows, grey evenings, grey mornings, flashbulbs, magazine covers, it's all a blur, it's all meaningless, and this here is what every girl past fifteen longs for: meaning. She has a quest and a purpose, somebody belongs to her, even if he doesn't want to.
But Rem, Rem doesn't understand.
"I'm sorry, Misa," and she is, she is, maybe, but her selflessness is selfish, she's just doing what she thinks is best, hypothermic hands holding her locked to her chest, swimming through the black hall toward the stairwell, sorry, so sorry, and she's not really sorry yet, but she's gonna be.
Misa is a screamer when she's not stock still, and she does what she can do and howls. "Let me go, let me go, let me go! Somebody help me! Light, Light! Help me!"
Rem puts her hand over her mouth, and Misa thrashes, biting at her fingers, too intimate, she feels amphibian, she feels like the swamp ghosts that Mama believed in, and she rattles Misa until her voice trips up and her bones twist loose inside of her, fibula swapping for tibia, skull tilting sideways, there's something here with them, there's something in the black and it smells like heaven.
"You can't have her," Rem shouts to whatever is fizzing there, catching slowly alight, long stick of hungry dynamite.
A voice, not human, garbled and slick and whispery, blows in from the other end of the hall as Rem starts moving backwards: "I'm here to help you."
Of all things, it is definitely not Light. Misa's struggle fades into a cling, and now she can think of no greater terror than being put down, tiny fingers digging into Rem's recently rejected skin. She wants to fight, she wants to protect, but she has no notebook, no eyes, just plain brown like she was born with, and there is something horrible here with rows of teeth and lullabies between them, and it wants to sing her to sleep, and it wants to eat her.
"Oh my god, oh my god," Misa breathes.
"Shhh." Rem's lips are in her hair. The hallway is getting warm and Misa tries not to think of hellfire, tries not to think at all, just stay very still and hide under the bed and wait for the bad things to leave you, small and ashamed, in their wake.
"I'm here to give you back your book," the voice says, and then the view skitters, everything hazes up for a moment and begins to glow, and then there is someone there, something slim and delicate and for all the gaseous unease of the moment, shaped like a regular woman. "I thought I wanted to go home, but then I saw what's seeing me, and they want to drag me back there, they want to punish me just for existing. It's not my fault—fault—fault." She skips, like a scratched CD, jerks a little, flies out of proportion, grows wings, grows claws, shakes, shivers, then ceases, woman again. "I was made. You chose."
Misa's shaking her head, her body is cold, her hands feel disconnected from the rest of her, like accessories she'd strapped on. Her pen-fingers are searing, icy, but she can't grasp the pain, she can't tell if she's really feeling it at all or if her body is in a state of lock-down, brought on by fear. Rem's holding her so tightly. Rem is afraid, too.
"Get away, Abomination," she whispers, thinly, she cannot lie at all.
"Sister, sister, there's nothing you can do to me. I'm nothing that has been before or will ever be. I am sacred. I don't bend to your name games. I don't do it by hand; he gave me claws."
"You're well-documented. You're well known. Your kind used to run rampant on the earth, before the Great Below enforced stricture upon the couplings of humans and gods."
"Not me, not me. That's big brother. I can taste it in him, two halves, equal weight, the dead and the living, but I am not any of that. I was born to a couple in Wiltshire, Mary and Leroy Markovitch, I played in daffodil fields, I went to college, I baked banana bread, I loved things and I was loved. I died loved. Your soul escapes your body, you know, when you die, and floats above it like a mist, and slowly spreads out, sweeping over everything, silent, forgiven, and at peace. At least, that's how it was for me. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but looking back, I think I was the weather. I think I was a light drizzle over London and I fell into the soil and I grew into the plants, the grasses, the parks, I was a tree, I was a hillside. Then I was in my body again, and I was starving, and I moved all wrong and I slept, I slept and I dreamed of the little boy in the old house, and the other boy in the biggest room, and the storms, the creek water, the mud, the silence when he went away. There's a part of him in me. I am not myself, myself is dead, I am the otherworld's. I heard crying from above me and the otherworld asked me to do what it does, and I made death. Violent crime. People die every day. He killed them on my grave. I might never have come out if he hadn't. It was a chance mistake. It was anyone, any moment. I crawled up and I killed them both because the blood asked me to. I don't want to go to hell, I want to go back to the hillside."
Misa is confused about the words, the flow of them all, and the voice that says them, the growl unfurling with each syllable to end girlishly, soft, if viperous, but a person's voice. Hell is said by a woman, standing naked at the end of the hall, warm golden light spilling off her in thick clouds, like a dust storm in an office building. As she moves, the air around her blurs and sharpens, like a camera out of focus, and if Misa blinks she sees teeth and terror on the insides of her eyelids, wings, hair long and knotted, monster, monster come to catch her.
"Misa," Rem almost growls, protective—if Misa is the shield then Rem is the shield's shield—moving backwards.
"Rem." Misa is quivering. She has no weapons, she only fights with words anyway, and how do you kill a thing like that? Eden straight out of the garden. Eden coming straight for her throat. "Rem, run."
Rem doesn't run; she flies, and she flies fast, but the light moves faster.
The green fog has faded out, so that it's now only a tint, and they move like soldiers, shoulder-to-shoulder, down the stairwell, checking in on each floor for any sign of life, or death, or the unspecified cosmic intermingling of same. B hops ahead, taking the stairs three at a time, and whistling, so as to tip every semi-sentient creature—eyeball or nostril or what have you—off to their approach, and Light can only wait two impatient minutes for L to shut him up before realizing it isn't going to happen, and snapping, "Please, stop."
B dribbles his bare feet down the last few steps to the landing between floors, where he settles, jutting his head to the right so that his neck twists at an odd angle. He looks just as deformed and dastardly as Light is sure he intendeds to.
He says, glancing between the two of them, "Not that I'm counting my chickens or my ducks or anything of the sort, but I sent Jeepers Peepers after Sadie with a pretty detailed suspect description, so I figure either it finds her and drags her down to play in the red hot flames, or else she gets wise and runs for the hills, in which case the eye will go on after her and we're all in the clear. It's a win-win. You're welcome. We can go celebrate with drinks." He winks, he is pure caricature. "L's buying."
L blinks mildly at that, the bulk of him still apparently unconscious on the hallway floor.
"Or," Light says, disgusted that he has to talk to B like an equal, that his partnership with L has suddenly grown a third leg, a bum leg—one of those genetic deformities that one, if one has wealth and sense, gets amputated—"and here's where I'm putting my money: you both have suffered some kind of communal psychotic break and we're even more doomed than we were before."
B's breath is hot and he moves too fast, between shadows, to stand a step down but eye-level with Light and grit in his face, "You don't have any money, Kira. You're awaiting trial. Your assets have been frozen."
Light doesn't even get time to dredge up a punishing one-liner in response, because L is more awake than he pretends to be, stronger than he looks, and he grabs B casually by back of his collar and pulls him down the stairs again like a misbehaving dog, away from Light, his new favorite chew-toy. "No, they haven't," he mumbles. "There will be no trial. He's as good as convicted."
That's not a difficult reality to contend with, has always been the state of things, as long as he has known L and L has known him, but the way that he says it, the indifference, the calm, the low voice he uses to speak to B and B only makes Light rankle, makes him want to grab L by the scruff of his neck and remind him just whose altar he's been praying at all these months, whose eucharist he's subsisted off, who has granted him indulgence upon and indulgence and washed him clean of every sin.
Light is above jealousy, but it swims below him and he can see his reflection in it. He clears his throat. He will make noise until L looks at him and nowhere else.
"What?" L says, all too casually, glancing back at him as he pushes B on ahead, forward, forward, they've got a quest or some such nonsense. "It's not like this is news. Who cares, anyhow? I'm with you on this one. We're certainly all doomed. Seas boiling, heavens roaring, you heard what B said. The four horsemen are on their way and if we don't sort this soon, the world will end, or something cliché like that." He's being facetious as ever, but there's also the slim part of him, which hides in his jaw, in his finger bones—like a saint—that means it, that says: this is all meaningless, take me to your prison, tie me to your bed, bring me breakfast, I'll show you the wasteland.
Light has seen the wasteland.
"Oh, have a little faith, will you?" B chirps, squirming out of L's hold to dance his way to the doorway, a heavy metal thing, one and then another, and they keep on looking, but what are they even looking for?
"I'll have no such thing."
L's haughtiness is overtaking his apathy.
"I told you, I took care of it."
"And what," L snaps, suddenly fully awake, blurring back into focus, "if Sadie does escape, and elude capture, at which she has thus far proven herself immensely proficient, and goes back to terrorizing the children of Tokyo for obscure and convoluted reasons, then is it still a win for us? What if this really all does upset whatever tenuous axis reality is sitting on, and our world is sent spinning into the void? Are we fine with that?"
"Of course not," Light supplies, because he doesn't think B's answer is one that either of them want to hear. But maybe it would do L some good, maybe if he heard the full bark he'd decide to put the dog down, or failing that—as any attempts at such have been more or less futile—stop treating it like it's human.
B rolls his eyes, stands on his hind legs. "If I could just get her to sit still in a room with me for a while, I could talk some sense into her."
"You couldn't talk sense if your life depended on it," Light grunts.
B lunges at him again, stopping short so as not to invite L's ire, no doubt. "The Watcher—that's what it called itself—wanted to take me away to the underworld with it, and I talked it out of that, didn't I, pretty? And try to remember that, unlike the rest of you, I'm not in any actual danger." He looks at L then, attention dragged inevitably back to the skinny thing in the dirty clothes. "In case the dozen or so bullets I've eaten in the last twenty-four hours didn't make it clear yet, this is a public service announcement: I'm fucking immortal."
"Yeah, let's talk about that for a moment, shall we?" L says, dry, derelict, and more than a little annoyed. "You're immortal. You're some otherworldly god-like, godless Shinigami hybrid creature, am I correct?"
"The Watcher called me an Abomination." B looks perfectly pleased with the title.
"More than apt. And you've been this, what? Always?" L scrubs at his hair, slumping down the stairs to poke his head into the 19th floor hall and, finding nothing of interest, ducking back in. "That's how you knew my name when we were children?" He doesn't look at B and he doesn't wait for a response. "Christ, I always thought it was just a wildly brilliant intellect and the kind of research and deductive abilities that I couldn't have imagined having at that age. I thought you were really this enormously brilliant genius. I was goddamn terrified of you, in the beginning, sure that you would usurp me. Why did you think I told them to send you back to the streets? It wasn't just the weird touching, after all. I had a fairly strong stomach for the indecent even at that age. There I was, jealous as all hell, and you—you're just a big cheater."
B's grin is spreading, macabre, hellish—he looks like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights personified in semi-human form—but it drops at that. "What?"
"You have magic powers," L says. "I did and continue to do everything on pure grit."
He's right, in a way, but his superiority is stifling, and even though Light loathes to make an ally of B, he prioritizes antagonizing L as of higher importance. So he tells him, "Everyone is born with a different set of tools innately at their disposal. Your photographic memory is just as much of a cheat as the ability to, what, automatically know names? That power is totally useless without the Death Note."
L laughs, a weird sort of effusive comedy infecting him, infecting the room, because his mood becomes theirs and his whims are what sustains them, and no one man should be able to have so much power without even washing his hair or tying his shoes. "You would defend him," he tells Light, "being the ultimate cheater. A magic killer notebook is about the cheapest cop-out weapon I can think of."
Light's heard this one before, and he's only insulted at being placed on the same tier as B, who says, gripping L's humor with his skeletal hands, "I think it's kind of neat."
Light glares at him. "Please get off my side."
"As far as I'm concerned," L says, chewing at a hang-nail on his pinky, "we're all on our own sides, but they need to be dispensed with at present. As I said, I don't trust either of you, and I am not going to be lenient in future, but you also have far more knowledge and experience with the otherworldly than I do or could. If we want to get out of this with everyone alive and intact, let's quit squabbling and go find Misa, before she gets eaten by your dead girlfriend."
Light knows what he's trying to do, realizes he'd spoken up in the first place with the intention to. He's uniting them in an odd way, insisting upon a connection—the Note, the eyes, their relative position in regards to L—that is supposed to force him to accept that having B as a good dog on a leash is vastly preferable to the hound chomping at his heels. He wants to take his two opposing forces and combine them, make a weapon out of what was once romance. He's using them, and Light boils quietly with discomfort.
Alternately, B seems tickled by the manipulation. He bats his eyelashes, and coos, "He started it."
"And what exactly do you think is going to make me want to help you at all if you're telling me I'm bound for execution in the end, no matter what I do?" Light asks him, disguising his aggression behind resignation.
L keeps walking, makes transient eye contact, doesn't take it seriously. "I didn't say execution, I said conviction. I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with you, or if your usefulness outweighs your flight risks. I've thought about taking away the Note and your memories with it, but I think you'll be a little too for me dull without your murderous intentions. I really have no idea right now, and I'm trying not to think about it."
That rankles, and he's not sure which part most of all, only that he is excessively casual, that either he is hiding his torrential emotion on the subject, or has, in classic fashion, disguised it so well that it's become lost somewhere in the folds of him, and Light will have to dig down and drag it up again, and wrap him in it, and chain him to the air conditioner.
B says, jaunty as ever, "I've got two words for you: sex slave."
L, who has never missed a beat in his whole miserable life, unblinkingly responds, "We've been there."
Light, uneasy, itching for his Note, the gun, any source of power, nods. "Done that. It gets old quickly."
Quake, boom. This is one of those times when the world could end. They come along through a flash and a fever, they come along through other people, sometimes, or—as in this case—other worlds.
Misa is who they're looking for, and Misa they find, flying out of the tunnel with Rem behind her, beside her, on her. It's hard to tell, it's a blur, it's all glowing different colors and things that aren't feel real. L's own melodrama is small in comparison to the vast cosmic debacle that's being enacted here and now, in real time, the most recent moment in history, if time is in fact linear, if it is anymore than a construct, a series of presents perceived and organized by consciousness. He is small beside existence expanding in all directions. He is one of the most powerful men in the world, but only this world.
Light grabs him by the arm, bony fingers, self-preservation. B runs forward.
If ever there is a cataclysm, B runs forward. He does not withdraw, he does not assess, he does not plan his way around possible outcomes, and he does not fear death. L doesn't, either, tells himself he doesn't, and asks only the question, behind every question: what next? What, if anything?
Light fears death. He is afraid now, and L takes his hand—jittering, jittering, small heartbeat—and how laughable, how embarrassing to admit, the unwavering care that L feels for him, whatever respective state of captor and prisoner they find themselves in at each given moment. Light's palms are sweaty, he could never have been a supermodel. He is built upon fear of death, his life's work springing from fear of evil, and yet here he embodies both, eighteen years old, far too young to have any properly formulated identity as of yet, but he has those two things, and he has L's hand.
"Light!" Misa calls toward them, voice flying with her, shaky and careening, a silken windy thing in a hospital gown—he has Misa, too, even if he doesn't want her; she cannot be dispensed with—and as B passes her, galloping toward the light, into the terror, he calls, in the moment that they are transitorily parallel, "Nice ride!" suggesting, in the same vein as the rest of his muddled Shinigami magic, that he can see Rem. Then he's past them, Misa jerking her head around to watch him for a half second, before she turns back. "Light. Light! I knew it! I had to come back and save you!"
"I'm fine, Misa," he says, dropping L's hand to go to her, and he is not cold, he is in a singular expression and tone of voice for once the sweet prince that she tries to disguise him as, consigned with a longing for the familiar through the trauma of the foreign. "What are you running from?"
L puts the same question another way: "What is he running towards?"
B turns a corner and the light bends with him, following him, shadows in reverse, and L has nothing left to him but to turn that corner also, and to see what is waiting, with teeth and tongue, the mouth of hell, like the old medieval caricatures, yawning and hungry, and maybe it will be just like the stories Father Gregory read to him as a boy, God's kingdom a thing made flesh, and the devil alive and suffering, as in Dante's hell, or many-limbed and wicked, as in Tundal's. More likely, it will be nothing so saccharine, nothing previously conceptualized, but a universe the scope of which cannot be measured, a night unlike their night, a night painted in orange, in green. Beyond Birthday belongs in such a world, perhaps, but L doesn't want him to go just yet.
He's not sure if he moves, or if Light simply reads the intention on his face, because he's deserted Misa—inevitably, endlessly a disappointment—to block L's path.
"Don't go after him," he says. He's not even looking at the sparks, the torrent that engulfs. "He doesn't need your help. He'll live."
"It's not worry," L sniffs, a little undermined by the supposition that he intends to be B's savior, a little uncomfortable with how deftly it strikes the nail on its head, "it's curiosity. And even if he can't die, there's a good chance he'll piss off the otherworldly powers enough to get himself carted off to hell, or whatever the nondenominational equivalent is."
"And you expect to do what to the Shinigami henchmen? Wag your finger at them? Hit them with a life sentence? A gun's not going to do shit against something that powerful." Light's jaw is stiff as he speaks and he is virulently afraid. "We should go to the roof with the rest of them, regroup at a safe place, and plan our next move from there. Sadie has to be stopped, but if B's right—and it pains me to say those words—then the other realm, realms, whatever, might just do our job for us. If not, then we figure out a way to take her down, later, once we've all gotten out of here alive."
He thinks of nothing but preserving his own life. He understands sacrifice only as an offering to a god, something to be given him, not possibly a thing that he could give. He is selfish and he is small and B is vicious, has more blood, blood everywhere, and ligaments, tissue, vertebrae, but he gives everything of himself in each passing moment, brush with death, brush with life, he is a sacrifice. L owns him. All he has of Light is what he has taken, locked up, and held fast to.
He is disgusted, and unafraid, and annoyed.
"Yes, and I'm sure you won't take your first moment outside of this building to make your daring midnight escape?" he snaps, brushing past so that their shoulders knock heavily.
Light stumbles, and makes a grab for his arm. "You're really worrying about that at a time like this? Do you think Kira matters more to me than stopping this monster?"
Misa is watching them, L knows. Light's hand on him and L's lip curling, disgust, disgust, hold onto the bile it will keep you from folly, and he supposes she wonders if that's true, if Light will set his vision aside for any interim, as if there is anything more important.
L knows the answer. He says, "Kira matters more than anything to you. Your life matters more than anything to you."
Light rolls his eyes, he looks hectic, and his grip on L's skin ramps up to a jerk. "Which is why I want to get out of here, so I don't lose it. So you don't lose yours."
L is sickened by what a lie it is, and even more sick with the truth. Light is not his savior, he has never been anyone's, and in his head it must paint like a mural upon the wall of this moment, his heroism, his love, la-dee-da, how fucking picturesque, except it's hollow, it's hostile, he is grabbing at L with a child's hands. He doesn't need a protector, though, he needs a warrior. He needs a god of wrath, of fire, he needs all of the otherworldliness the Death Note has instilled in him to rise torrential and rain upon them like heaven's deluge.
He doesn't need Light Yagami in this moment, he needs Kira. He doesn't need love, he needs justice.
Sadie's gone all rabid. She's not half the charmer she used to be and she puts her hand through his sternum besides. Just fades in, like a cheesy 90's ghost, except her can feel her fingernails in his ribcage, clawing at his heart, the blue veins and all that viscera, and he thinks he'd like to see it in her hands, like to see just what he's made of, but before it gets out in the air he's lost his patience for the searing pain and he's trading one sin in for another. He grabs her by her Miss Britain hair and kisses her like the Dickens, like every hero kisses every heroine, like he'd kiss L if they had that kind of story with that kind of ending, but there is no ending, that's the funny part, there's just cycles and cycles and new villains to old stories. In the first round she was the saint, the purest sacrifice and he bathed in her blood like one of the classicals at the Bacchanalia. Next he bathed her in his blood, and made her a rising god like him, and now she's here to bring him down to the grave dirt they made her eat, as if that was his fault. If it'd been up to him, he would have cremated her, but Sydney would never hear it.
She kisses back. He thinks she must have missed him, like a butterfly misses its chrysalis. She had any manners, she'd thank him for the good turn he'd done her.
"Oh, Sadie, Sadie, Sadie." He's riled. Her body's all wrong, flitting in and out of focus, and if he looks good and hard he can see her true form, her rotten corpse, her bulging red eyes and her melancholia, dastardly and warm, and her skeleton seeping all in his marrow. She's almost him, this monster girl, this heartfelt beast, and that turns him on a little. "You've made such a mess and now the holy things are cross with you. Why did it have to be little kids, huh? Why couldn't you kill investment bankers or something? That would have been far more forgivable."
She bites him. He bleeds into her and it's still the cycle, only sped up and in real time, him into her and her into him, until they are just the same creature, with two heads and two hearts and no will but to destroy itself. He would like her to strip him down so that his body can be on her body. He remembers her in softer shapes. He remembers her without all the poison. She sucks and sucks his blood until he's sure he turns blue and then he smacks her in the face.
She shuffles back, light dimming, shoulder blades jutting, she has wings but they're shrunken, malformed, not quite a monster and not quite human, just like him. He's never ever known a thing that was just like him before. L is what he'd molded himself after, but only because he'd known that the real thing was all wrong, and needed to be carved out and replaced with the closest thing to mortal perfection he could find.
Sadie hits him back and it's like a punch from something twice the size that she looks, and a lot more angry than she has any right to be, considering what a favor he did her. B falls flat against the wall. He thinks he wouldn't mind if mortal perfection came around the corner and gave him a hand right about now.
"I was the long night," she tells him, in a voice that rings in his head, so quiet, a voice that speaks through her nails and hair, dead cells, it's all dead cells, and he wants to kiss her again.
"You still are," he breathes up at her. He wonders where his wings are, and if he could grow them this late on in life if he tried.
She shakes her head, hits him again, so hard that his nerves jam up, piling altogether, and it hurts, it hurts like nothing has ever hurt him, and his head sings French choral music, and his body fumes and pulses, and Sadie says, "You woke me. I want to go back to sleep. B, B, B. Put me back in the ground. I want to go back."
Her teeth are all sharp, shark-like, there are rows of them, and he knows she is afraid of the other world, the one below, the one that demands her, but she must know she'll be happier there, like a fish set back in water, existing on a plane which her being understands. He has never been allowed such a luxury. He won't let them take him, because he has something to stay for, but all that's left here for here is Syd back in London, and he's a waster, he's too simple to know her if he saw her. He's not worth the effort of remaining.
"You're going to go home," he tells her. He's trying to be comforting, but it's not a speciality. The wounds on his face which would normally heal are being held open by her hand. He's not sure, but she might be crying.
"I don't, I don't. The thing that's meant to take me isn't human at all. I'm still human. I have to think about it. I have to work hard, but just because I'm corrupted doesn't mean I'm the corruption. I don't, I don't, I don't."
She's more mad than she's ever been. He takes her hand, slowly, slowly, brings it to his mouth and kisses the back. His mouth is filled all with flies, he thinks, like the devil's, and he will lull her to sleep and she will get what she wants, he thinks.
Then the green light comes.
The lights around the corner are fading. L is missing the climactic showdown, or maybe this is the climactic showdown. He shoves, and Light stumbles back, and he keeps shoving, because it will work, it will move the immovable, it will get him to rage the way that L needs him to.
"You understand that you cannot run, don't you? There is nowhere for you to go. I was hoping to keep the matter hushed, to not make a martyr of Kira in front of the stage of the world, to put a beautiful face on death and fan the flames of fringe fanaticism growing in this country and across the world, but I will if I have to. If you escape, I will plaster your mugshot across every television station, newspaper, and online bulletin, and for every Kira supporter there are at least ten people who view you as a tyrant, or a threat. You will be hunted, and you will be found. I will not let you out of my sight, whether I see you to the execution chamber or not. Even if you live, your life will be nothing like it was before, and you will be granted no freedom, no liberty, and no peace." He bares his teeth, he feels sickly, and little bit proud. He doesn't know if he's telling the truth, but it doesn't matter. "Still don't want to see me dead?"
Light pushes him then, towards the corner, and there it goes, off they go, towards rapture, or annihilation. "I do see you dead," he snaps, he looks pained. L knows how to pain him. "For every memory I have of you, in beds, in parking lots, from across the street as they dragged me away, I have another one of you dead, conjured in the same moment. Every time I look at you, I think of ways I could kill you, but I never have. I always save you at the last moment, and if you die for this, for him, do you know how much time I'll have wasted on preserving your sorry life?"
He hates L in this moment. He rocks so easily in between emotions.
"Then I guess you'll just have to follow me, and keep me from harm, won't you?" L tells him, and it's all going swimmingly, or it's all going horribly, and it doesn't matter which because Light's fists are balled and he wants to fight.
"Or, more likely," he spits, "we'll both die."
He grins a little, then, and L matches the expression, and maybe it should be an agreement but L feels, in the short moments he is allotted to feel anything at all, that they are not looking at one another, but reflections of themselves, and they are each seeing different things, and drawing different lines, and painting different views of paradise. His is earthly and grey and still, like this building would be if they were the only people in it. Light's, he believes, but cannot know, is more frenzied, warmer, and fully saturated. The apple is so ripe it drips when you bite into it, gets your mouth, your fingers, your neck sticky, makes your head buzz like a drug, and leaves you feeling hungrier than before once you've eaten it.
These opposing principles are something that they should sort out, but there is no time now. Light marches on past him and L decides he'll save his lecture for the prison cell.
Misa is not nearly so discerning. "You can't," she squeaks, brittle, breathing heavy, and shakes in Rem's grip until she is set down, like a cat who cares nothing for the affections of her owner. "Light, we have to go. She's not like a criminal, she's not like anything." She grabs at him and he shakes her off, not even looking back at her. He is set now on finding the battleground and coloring it with his fallible hand, and everything else has become hollow and peripheral. "There's nothing you can do, you or L," she cries, and then, as if encompassed by the force of his rage, and feeding her own with it, "and I—if you two die, then I'm dying with you."
Ever the third wheel. "Your bravery is admirable, Misa," L says, "but I'm sure Rem won't allow it."
She doesn't wither like she should. "Rem doesn't control me. Light doesn't control me. And you certainly don't control me. I get a say, and I get a choice, and I get to fight if I wanna fight, and there's nothing any of you can do to stop me. If Rem wants to keep me alive, she's got to keep all of us alive. After all, she still has her Death Note. Right, Rem? The monster took mine, and,"—
"Mine's still at my apartment." Light interrupts, but he's stopped, he's listening to her in a way that he surely doesn't ever. He looks to L, a slant of sullenness drenching his vigor for a moment. "Unless you had those cops who took me loot the place for it?"
He shakes his head. "As if I'm going to let anymore civilians touch that thing? Not likely. I was planning to go get it myself, when things were all sorted. I still will."
Light's expression wrinkles, and he snaps, "Things are going to be a lot harder to sort without a proper weapon, but yes, excellent thinking, very tactical. We're all going to be sucked into hell, but thank god Takashi at headquarters won't be able to see Ryuk floating around. I'm so glad your priorities are straight as ever."
L feels that he may have inadvertently made himself too much the enemy. He sighs, shakes off the insult, and mumbles, "Rem, will the Note be at all useful in killing or deflecting these things? A Death Note can't harm a Shinigami, as far as my understanding extends?"
Light breathes something about that not being, "very far at all," that L chooses to politely ignore, and which is drowned out besides by Rem's lofty, and altogether more pertinent, drone.
"The Abomination is trying to return the Notebook to Misa," she says, gliding in between Light and Misa to serve as a sort of protective barrier. "It seems to believe that the Watcher, called Grigori by the human religions which have no true concept of its power, has been sent here to take it—her, I think it was once a human woman—to the Below, because it is the unspeakable, but that it will become confused by the breadth of Misa's association with True Death, and take her instead, as it can see only the imprint of the otherworld upon her humanity, and confuses such commingling with the unholy crossbreed that is a true Abomination."
The lights are further off, and B is far away by now, chasing them, catching them, maybe swallowing them up and holding them in himself. He will glow, perhaps, when L finds him, if L finds him. He says, "So, what you mean is that any human who has used the Death Note is in danger of being mistaken for this Sadie and taken away by the celestial clean-up crew in her place?"
Rem nods. "Essentially. The more exposure to the Note, the more danger."
L looks to Light, expects to find his fear ignited again, but what he is is cold, locked down, and if he is panicking it is behind doors that he has structured out of every hateful thing that L has ever said to him, and every fated right to rule that he has ever designed for himself. He says nothing.
L says it for him, glancing from Light to Misa, "So, then, perhaps the two of you should leave."
"Suddenly concerned for my safety?" Light is glowering, but it's diminished. He's looking at something far away, something shimmering that L can't see, and L is afraid of he knows not what, only that it is coming, it is almost here, it is—
Just around the corner.
"Yes," he tells Light, because it is the honesty that will hit him most. "Don't gloat about it. Go. I'm giving you my leave. Run away if you must. I'll catch you and cage you back up later. As long as you're on Earth I'll know how to find you. Go."
"I don't need your permission," Light says with even-toned hostility, but he's not going, he's not going anywhere and L will realize shortly after that he should have made him, that this is the moment where he has to save him, but he doesn't, not then. Light pushes past him, past Misa, toward the fury.
"Light," Misa starts, thinly, and then drops off, little shoulders hiking up, little girl in her hospital gown, her hair flat and unwashed over her shoulders, make-up long faded or smudged into blurry grey shapes beneath her eyes. She looks at Light's back and then she looks at L, as if she is feeling the moment, too, as if she knows the words he should be saying as well as he doesn't.
"I'm staying," Light continues, and he's faded into the cutting shadows so that only the bottom half of him is visible, and his feet are planted firmly forward, and he was always going to live within the war, since the first moment he picked up that fucking book. "I'm going to find Sadie, and I'm going to destroy her, Notebook or no Notebook. Anything that wants to drag me off this plane and into the next is very welcome to try. Now, are you coming?"
L doesn't waver. He's missed all his lines. He misses the weight of Light's cheek under his fist, the resistance, and denial, and bone. He walks after him. He has never had a death wish, he has only had a fantasy, and the face of this fantasy leads him around the corner on bare feet.
For the eye to see, it must need to be in its empty place, because here, out in the world, with the halls, and the linoleum, and the blown fluorescents, it is only a blur, a misting gaseous thing, like bad vision. It speaks with the same voice, and B hears it in his head the same way Sadie must hear it in her's when she shudders, flickers out of definition and across the hall, making gashes in the green light which thickens into almost globulous reality, semi-solid, like a membrane.
Cease. Twice is the profane in this space of matter, but indistinguishable. Be still so you might be held in judgement and known.
B is still, B relaxes, lets not only his physical movements slow, but his inner vibrating diatribe of violence, devotion to violence, devotion, devotion. He lets it still, lets it be seen. He has, for once, nothing to hide. He sees the hallway before him and then it switches, fading fast into the black wasteland and the Watcher that judges, then back again with sickening velocity, as if he is being plucked up and thrown down again at first glance. He unlearns his stillness, stands up, and understands why.
Sadie is dodging, she is not still, she is rattling her cells out of the quietude that the Watcher needs in order to pick her up and look at her, and she does it knowingly, instinctively. Those are his own instincts she has, B thinks, and grins, and is proud, even as he hopes she'll trip up, fall and be caught and carried off. No hard feelings, but he refuses to go in her place, and he'd really rather the world not end just yet.
Cease, the eye demands, but she doesn't.
B runs after her, skipping, Sunday hopscotch, it's all a game and he's a runner, he's got springs, but she shivers out of his fingertips and across the room, unforming and reforming for a millisecond as a woman, Eden, the garden made flesh. She doesn't wanna go home, but's somebody's gotta.
"Slow, baby, slow!" B calls into the filmy breadth of the hallway, but she doesn't speak back, of course. Her voice would make her too solid, and able to be caught. "Sadie, listen," he tries, can appeal to the human side if not the darker one, "why do you wanna stay in this world, anyway? It's not so grand, you know. Everybody dies here, except you and me. Your mom, your dad, your brothers and sisters. Hell, maybe you were an only child to begin with. Maybe that's why you found me in that bar, and brought me home. Because you wanted a brother, wanted to have something that held you as you held it, not like Syd, Syd who you loved,"—careful, carful,—"love, but who you owned. You still own him. But he'll die, too. You wanted something equal to the torrent you felt inside of you, so you took me home and you died in front of me, showed me something sacred, so I showed you the same. We're just like brother and sister now. I'm the only thing on this plane that can understand you, and you know it."
It's getting hard to move, the matter is so thick, it's hard to breathe, the whole place is swamped in it, the elsewhere, the visions of the sacred made fleshy, vile, and real.
He hears them coming around the corridor, they're arguing, and he only has one moment before the humans come and muck it up. He says to her, "But I'm not the only thing in the universe that can. All your brothers and sisters live down there, die down there, and if you go then you won't be alone, you'll be understood." He's not sure he believes it. She's a halfsie, just like him, she'll never fit anywhere, but he says it because he's never advertised honesty as one of his virtues.
He thinks it's going to work, even if she doesn't want to go, because she stops, she settles, just long enough to say, "I don't want to be understood. I want to be forgiven," and it should be enough, it should be all the time that the Watcher needs to pluck her up, and it is, he can feel its strength, its ferocity, the hunger, the hunger, but—
It misses. The scene's all mucked up, more bodies, more matter, spreading the vaporous green ocean thin with their life, their voices, solid footsteps, heavy things, they blur the image and Sadie slips out of reach, becoming again indistinct.
Too many, too much. Cease, cease, cease!
The Watcher is suffering with the complications and B spins fast, is going to bark at them, measly little earthly things, ruiners, they chase away the dark with pitchforks and torches, they scream at the ghosts, they pray to idols with no ears and think they will be heard, and they ruin him, they tear at his skin, they lock him in white rooms for his sanctity and he is going to—
He doesn't. He looks at L and he can see him, tinged green, tired and awake and ready to fight, an admiral, a judge, a boy in the wet English winter, who takes all of the grim horror of his humanity and holds it and names it and eats it and keeps it inside of him. B could never go. B could never leave him. Mortal perfection, mortal perfection, he's not perfect at all, he is a terrible mess, and he will age ugly, or die young, and who will sing his eulogy, but B, but B? This is why he lives on earth, why he corrodes on earth. He is his eulogy singer, and he won't let it end yet.
"Glad you all finally made it to the party," he calls back to L, to Kira, to the smaller Kira, to the greying god. The party quivers with their entrance.
Light runs, so L runs after him. The whole place is turning old, changing shape, not the building he'd built in the first place, not a building, not a place, and not a concern, at the moment. It all moves too fast. B calls something sardonic and indistinct at them but it blurs in the space between and settles outward. The sounds L hears are too long and far apart to make any sense.
"Stay back, I'm saving us," Light bites at him and, if the audience will believe it, shoves him, full force, still angry, or, less likely, out of some protective instinct which he's just grown in the last five minutes. Whatever the cause, it's unexpected enough to send L stumbling sidelong, frowning, giddy with the placelessness, the pace, his steps skidding over a ground that flickers in and out of solidity.
He hears it, played again and again like a skipping record, You're no god you're no god you'renogodyou'renogod. He can't see the eyeball anywhere, can't see Sadie, only mounting desiccation, and Light melting into the scenery. Rem flies past him. Misa is whispering something, or screaming, he can't tell, he can't breathe in here. He's no god; he's not like the rest of them. He's never used the Death Note a single time in his life, has no splotch of any world but this one on him, and he's not jealous, he's not incensed, but he loathes to be safe, protected, held back from the fight. King in his ivory tower, sure, king behind a keyboard, but he comes out to play, he knows how to play, he knows how to win.
He feels sickly and transparent. When he stumbles again, something catches him, holds him up. It's not Light, but he can see Light, he hears the voice, booming, Cease, cease, cease, cease! You're obscuring the image!, and sees something burn up in the center, sees something move, the boy in hospital clothes and the naked woman, still in one instant, and Misa screaming and screaming, B's hand on him, rigid, bonding, the only weighty thing in a room without gravity, and he shakes, he shakes, it's happening, it's coming. Quake, boom.
That's the moment that he knows, for certain, and all he can think is how he should have seen it before, that look in him. But how could he have? Light has never before, in his whole sorry, stilted, beige life, done anything brave. L's still not even sure this qualifies, or if it's just for all that gold that he thinks he's going to touch.
He grabs Sadie. He's not really sure how, he doesn't have the strength, but he has the will, and she must feel it in him, how devout he is, how he deserves this. He has known since the moment he first saw the Death Note, held it in his hands, just a book, just paper, that he would get there one day. Heaven is built of paper, heaven isn't real; this is.
He holds her, skin and bone, volleying between the two, he holds her and says, "Run. I'll take your place," and he smiles in the way that always gets the girls to do what he says. She smiles back. He can see into her throat and he can see bodies, amorphous, pulsing, visceral and small. He is disgusted, so he drains it. He is above emotion.
She disappears, and he feels nothing but the overwhelming glory he had called upon himself from the first name, when he yells, "I'm right here! Look at me, I'm right here!"
L can't hear the words but he can feel them on his skin, little abrasions, microscopic jolts, Take me with you, they say to the sky, the building is gone, they're out in the desert, they're in a swamp. Everything is glowing. None of the science fiction novels he's read or will read can do it justice. It's not something he can comprehend. I'm the God you want, Light is yelling, his lips are moving, the words are vibrating, disconnected, as if through a modulator.
L tries to chase him, and B's grip tightens on him. L is sickened. Somebody's always trying to hold him still. He bucks, rabid, angry, so angry, and runs. It's hard to move, heavier on him than it is any of them. He is not one inch a holy thing.
Misa's running, too, and she gets there first, grabbing Light's arm, but he just knocks her off without even looking, he isn't looking at any of them. He's staring up into what must look like salvation to him, and the eye, it's here now, it's staring back.
L opens his mouth and says nothing. He doesn't move. He doesn't touch him, he doesn't try to stop him, he doesn't miss him, he won't miss him. He won't miss him. Misa is crying, and scrabbling and fighting, messy thing, and Rem grabs her around the middle and holds her back.
I'm the God you want, everything of Light breathes up to his glorious purpose, his bright golden glowing shitshow, his stupid fucking kingdom finally fucking come. Pray for the sinners, yadda, yadda. L had grown up in a church. L had never once believed in God.
Something shivers in the air, and Light finally looks away from the sky, and he smiles, the utter imbecile. It's too fast, or it's slow motion. Time doesn't move right here, time doesn't listen. He smiles at L and L just shakes his head.
He still doesn't believe in God.
The room short circuits, everything gets very bright or very dark, or either way, he can't see, he can't hear, Misa's gone quiet, it all has gone quiet, and when it all snaps back into being the place is a place again, just another grey building in the Tokyo skyline, everything is dark, simple, calm, and without glistening energy. Misa is gasping quietly. Sadie is gone, the Watcher is gone, and there is a body on the floor, the body of an eighteen year old boy, like any eighteen year old boy, anybody, just a body, empty, discarded.
tbc.
end notes: no, this is not the end. i've still got a few long chapters and a time-jump left in me, if anything, and no, nobody is dead (so far), if that's what you're thinking, so don't panic. i'll try to update again within the month, but december is the busiest, if not as cruel as april, so we'll see. thank you all for reading. any and all comments and critique are appreciated.