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I say the phrases that keep it all going,
and everybody plays along
Richard Siken, Planet of Love
He wasn’t there when Misa died. Doesn’t know how she swallowed every sleeping pill in her house with a shot of vodka, twirled around, giggling at a specter in the air, the lighter-than-air layers of her dress spinning around her like a bottle. Like there was somebody there beside her. He wasn’t there, because he was with Light, escaping to the other side of the world, and Light was sleeping, and he looked very beautiful.
*
L hugs Light and jabs a dangerous amount of sedative in-between his tense shoulder planes while his nose is still nestled in his pale, artfully shaped collarbone, caresses his limp face and carries him, half-staggering, to the helicopter. He forgot to put on his mask, and when he inhales, the air screams in his lungs. He spits it out. There’s nothing to spit out. Doesn’t help. Light shouldn’t have burned the house down. Then he wouldn’t have to do this. Taste the air. Drug him. Et cetra.
After a moment of deliberation, he draws a smiley face with a whiteboard marker above Light’s eyebrows. His long lashes flutter against his cheekbones. His suit is buttoned to his throat, and it’s too small for him, falling apart at the seams, faded. Light still puts it on every day without fail. The long, pale arc of his throat is exposed, lungs pumping slowly, steadily. It’s lulling.
One year later, standing beside and around desolation, and he still looks very beautiful. He likes Light more than anyone he’s ever liked, but he doesn’t like Light. It’s a pity, he thinks, studying him, that he wasn’t born in the ancient times. Roman sculptors would have loved crafting his likeness.
Here he is instead. Scraping plates, breathing toxic air, wearing and re-wearing his only bad suit, letting his hair grow past his ears, dislocating bones and popping them back, losing sleep and scrabbling for the last pieces of autonomy and control, it’s interesting how desperation shapes the human psyche.
And if this isn’t desperation.
L unbuttons the top two buttons of Light’s suit, takes off his shoes, and settles down in his seat. The smell of burnt wood and ruination is heavy in the air, it’s the end of the world, Light-kun, our affordances are few and far between, he pushes his hair out of his eyes.
The helicopter splutters, and lifts.
*
Light wakes up and bites him.
L thumbs the teeth mark on his arm absently. “Ow.”
“Fucker.” He breathes, chest fluttering shallowly, eyes darting around, bloodshot. A cold wind blows in through rolled-open windows, coasting off his suit sleeves. “I can’t feel my arms.”
“It’ll wear off.”
“Fucker.” He repeats, without inflection. Like he’s saying it on principle. If L leaned his head on his chest right now, he wonders what he would feel.
He doesn’t reply. Watches Light compose himself. His overgrown hair is spread out around his head, like a halo. There’s barely any salt in the air - barely any salt at all - and his sinuses are mournfully intact. He remembers being here, one year ago, crouched in the shade, sand caught between his teeth, advising the president of China about the financial state of things through Aiber’s earpiece while Aiber did what Aiber does best, charming the wits, and then some, out of everyone and anyone as Elrado Coil, detective extraordinaire, as if he wasn’t just a proxy for L to physically be where he cannot, and will not. It’s an anniversary, of sorts. He was there because of Light. He is here because of Light, now.
Aiber is dead. Probably. He can name all the oceans in the world, but they are all functionally nameless now.
“Where are we?” Light tries sitting up, and promptly flops down, undignified. He closes his eyes and doesn’t try again.
L glances outside. “Why did you burn the house?”
“Where are we?” Light repeats. He squints, eyelids drooping pathetically, drugs still flush in his system. A little groggy. Half asleep. He sounds off-kilter, the way he always sounds when he slips poison into breakfast or smashes the windows or burns the corpses piled by the road or does something that L generally doesn’t approve of, and as a result gets sedated - put down, L snickered once, like a dog and Light punched him - with L’s meticulous collection of sedatives. According to science, people fall asleep easier next to people they love, although, he thinks, that’s not accounting for - them. Whatever this is. “You did something to my face. What did you do?”
Watari taught him at a very young age to count his blessings backwards, back when he was half a person, not yet complete. Half-hearted footfalls, a pair of grasping hands, a perpetually contracting ribcage. The other half was the criminology textbooks, bruising his under-eyes to crack cold cases from 15, 20 years back, the people he breathed next to and ate with and attended classes with that he never acknowledged until one became a suicide case and another a serial killer. He lives off the thrill, the adrenaline spike, craves it. Chemicals pouring in his brain. He’s addicted - yeah, addicted, that’s the best word, except he despises classification - to the chase. The catch is the afterthought. Here, at the end of the world, Light is his only available source.
If he bothers to reach a little deeper, breaching the superficiality of the whole the-world-is-ending-and-you’re-the-one-I’m-with shebang, he could be in love.
He grins as unsettling as possible. “We’re at the beach.”
*
L doesn’t remember much - doesn’t want to - but he remembers this:
“Hey, L.” Misa sang, perched on the bathroom counter, tapping a pencil to a fresh notepad page. The world was ending and she was planning her death like a party. Picking her best dress. Rehearsing a final resting pose. Re-bleaching her hair. “Light isn’t going to come, right?”
L was hovering in the corner, mostly there because he had nothing better to do, nowhere to be, the end of the world awfully, comically boring. He thought about lying, but there was the strange, exhilarating nihilism, a side effect - a package deal - with the world ending, and all that, and he couldn’t be bothered. “No. He isn’t.”
“That’s okay, though.” She said absently, after a pause. Pursed her lips, blinked softly. Her false lashes were so caked with mascara that they crumbled on her cheek. “How does that look?”
“You look beautiful.” He told her honestly.
She made a face. “I know that already. I mean, twenty years from now, when you think about me, will you be able to think of me like this?” She smoothened the pleats of her skirt, put down her notepad, sat up a little straighter. There were lipstick swatches on her inner wrist and empty, toppled bottles of bleach on her lap and Hello Kitty hairclips pushing her bangs out of her eyes and L remembered thinking she just meant her expression, but yes, he would remember her like this, I will remember you, Misa Amane.
Nostalgia is also a side effect of the world ending. Everything is a side effect of the world ending. Even himself.
“Tone down on the mascara.” He advised her.
“I know that.” She pouted. Scrawled something down on a page. L could read the capitalised heading upside-down: ROMANTIC LAST WORDS. “Hey, can you tell Light that I love him?”
“He hasn’t even visited you yet.”
He didn’t have the heart to tell her that nobody, and especially not Light, would be there to hear her last words, but she probably already knew that. Light performs for the people, but Misa made herself both the performer and the stage, smiling for dust motes and dead trees and the empty roads, pretending on principle. That’s all there is to her, he thought: peel back the skin and there’s nothing underneath. Showgirl, model, killer.
She hummed a meaningless, empty tube. Yesterday she killed the man that had inhabited the house on the hill in Tokyo for the past 28 years, and L thought it was grimly amusing, dark humor, haha, so he didn’t reprimand her.
“Love is supposed to be unconditional.” She told him.
He pitied her, then. “Supposed to be?”
“Mhm. Misa is strong enough to play her part, but it’s okay that Light isn’t.” She hopped off the counter and frowned at herself in the fogged up mirror. “It’s understandable. He’s been through so much, I feel so bad for him! Do you think this shade of blush is unflattering?”
He looked at her, didn’t have the heart to laugh, didn’t have the heart to therapise her, just didn’t have a heart at all. Love is, not supposed to be, but him, of all people, correcting her, of all people. He wasn’t that hypocritical.
This is not his best memory with her, or even the latest, but her notebook is tucked into the innermost pocket of his coat, and sometimes when Light is sleeping he flips through it and rereads and rereads he’ll love me better when I’m dead scribbled like an afterthought in the margins, beside a stapled slip of paper detailing flesh decomposition rates, and knows that this is the one thing that he will never share with Light.
It’s like an inside joke he’ll never be a part of, and that notion is incredibly amusing.
*
They have to wait a little longer because the drug isn’t wearing off. L sticks his head out the windows, tastes acrid air, imagines the dead, bloated carcasses of fish waiting to greet them at the beach, regrets sticking his head out the window, and curls back inside. He puts a hand on Light’s thigh. He’s very warm.
Light bats him away. He puts his hand a little higher. Light bats him away again.
“Really.” L huffs.
“You know.” Light starts. He’s looking at nothing. The cadence is upbeat, but his voice is completely empty. “I still don’t remember anything.”
“No.” He says immediately.
“Fucker.”
“You’re too fond of that word.”
“It’s the end of the fucking world. Just let me - touch the Death Note. Just for a second. Who do you think am I going to kill?” He laughs hoarsely. “You? Kira is nothing at the end of the world.”
“Yes, me.”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know. If I knew how Kira’s mind worked, you’d be dead a long time ago.” L says, but by a long time ago he means one year ago, and that’s the closest admission he’ll ever give. Light asked him why did you save me one year ago, and he couldn’t answer. He’s beyond shame, but the experiment hasn’t stopped. He’s the fish-eyed scientist and Light is lab rat plotting its escape, and the dead are watching, watching, waiting to see what will happen next. Light Yagami as Kira. Light Yagami in the apocalypse. Light knows this, he knows, but L also knows that Light will take the shallow interpretation, I would have captured you a long time ago, because he is a coward. It’s endearing. “I’m not fond of dying. Besides, you’ve tried killing me before. With poison in my food. Your argument is not very convincing.”
Light doesn’t reply, so L asks again, “why did you burn our house down?”
“Our? Are you trying to appeal to my overwhelming compassion and gratitude towards you? Because I have none.”
“Don’t be a tsundere.”
Light looks horrified. “Please don’t ever say that again.”
“I won’t if you tell me why you burned our house down.”
He props his hands behind him, and seems pleasantly surprised when they obey. “Why wouldn’t I burn the house down?”
“Because you were happy there.” L says. It’s too simple to be the truth, and too honest to not be.
Because the world ended, and they didn’t, and L was marginally happy. The doors had wind chimes and the windowsills had plastic potted plants, fake heads knocking whenever rain pattered on the glass panes, cats chasing cats around until they died off one by one, and outside there was dry earth to bury them and the slumping rows of dead lining the roads had a peaceful, surreal quality about them. There were blankets to strangle with and chipped bowls to eat out of and chairs to fall asleep in. He could dust off the dust that fell on everything, and, fine, maybe the halls were haunted, but he’s had a lifetime being a phantom and Light is good at fitting in, if anything, and L thought that Light was content too, if domesticity could kill, you’d be the first victim, but they were alive, alive, alive.
He probably shouldn’t have acted on his anger, though. The usual drugs wear off a lot faster, and it’s not fun when Light is functionally immobile.
“Because I was alive? I have standards, you know.” Light’s eyes flash. “Every time I did something you disliked, you would fucking drug me.”
Because he’s scared. There’s one other person with him at the end of the world, and he’s never lonely, but he’d rather not be alone. He still prefers Kira, but he can’t afford to have Kira right now. Maybe he will, one day, because he’s running out of sedatives and Light is always running out of every room he enters, every door he passes through, straightening his collar only in front of mirrors, toweling away sweat but never rolling up his pants. It’s his insurance, that Light won’t flee from the destruction he causes, as he tends to do.
“The house was made of wood.” L feels obliged to point out. “Setting fire to the corpses right outside would endager us to.”
“They stunk. It was disgusting.”
“The house didn’t stink and it wasn’t disgusting.”
Light doesn’t answer, so L pushes on. “So it was symbolic? Burn the bridge, burn what you don’t like, et cetra.”
But L already knows.
And Light knows that he knows. Honestly, it’s hilarious that he bothered entertaining L this far. He closes his eyes again and doesn’t answer. L watches the slope of his nose, the faint pulse beyond his eyelids. The smiley faces smile about nothing good, everything bad.
*
In Tokyo, there is a hill, and there is a house on the hill, and inside the house on the hill in Tokyo there is the decomposing body of Misa Amane, draped in a wedding veil, larvae eating through her hand-picked lace patterns, her boots polished dark and dangerous and buckled to the knee, spiders weaving webs in the crook of her elbow. I want to pick how I die, she told him once, it’ll be lovely and romantic.
L thinks its ridiculous, absurd. Comical. In death, she achieved the one thing that Light will never have himself.
*
“Ew.”
“Ew you.”
“You’re so immature.” Light rubs his eyes, squints. His motions are still a little sluggish, lagging a beat out of pace. His back is straight but his ankles are dragging, him who is always so picky about his appearance. “That’s still disgusting.”
The fish are turned belly-up, glistening, pure white. The distinct foulness of rotting things wafts off their jeweled eyes. L presses the mask closer to his nose, thanks the nameless gods that his shoes are intact.
The sand still looks like sand but the ocean is completely black. Foaming, frothing waves teeth the shore, scrabbling over slick juts of rock, spitting out more fish for every few it sucks back in. If he trains his eyes on the horizon, the endless futility - of everything - catches up to him so fast that his head spins. Vast wide desolation. It’s terrible and it’s comforting and L steps forward, sand crunching. He was here last year because Light wanted to, and he can hardly believe it. Kanto, before Kira, after Kira, teetering on the axis of everything.
“Ew.” Light emphasises again, but, after a dramatic sigh, he follows L in. He looks so out of place in his buttoned suit and slacks that L laughs and laughs and coughs, ribs rattling, poisoned air caught in his lungs.
Light doesn’t thump his back but he glares and that’s the same thing. “Why are we at the beach?”
“Don’t you like it here?” L says, half-joking, half-serious.
“No.”
“Did you know,” L starts. “Misa admitted to me that she was Second Kira before she died?”
Light doesn’t say anything. It’s sad. He used to have so many things to say. His expression betrays nothing, but this time L does jolt forward, tipping his head onto Light’s chest, spine curving, and he feels the animal there thrashing, thrashing.
Light shoves him back immediately. “Don’t do that.”
“I asked her about you, of course, but she maintained that you were innocent.” He cards a hand through his hair, feels the rejection in his bones, it’s funny, it’s so funny. He remembers her insistent pitch, tea spilling over the porcelain handles, how they once had tea and porcelain handles. “It’s strange. She definitely knew that giving herself up definitely implicated you as well. Perhaps she thought - no, gambled - that I wouldn’t do anything, since the world was ending. Or, maybe, her gamble was that I would, and save you.”
Light snorts. He stops moving, swaying on the sand, blinking into the distance. His hair blows across his forehead. It’s very cold and very hot all at once. “Save me?”
“Japan is stable now, but back when it happened, it took one of the worst hits. You would have been dead if I hadn't taken you with me.”
He’d flown them to Wammy’s and barged inside on his authority and spent three days relearning its architecture, spoon-feeding Light watered down chicken stock while he sweated and thrashed and yelled on the bed L had slept in a lifetime ago - how cyclical - explaining the situation until Light stopped trying to actively kill him whenever he crossed the room and sat by his bedside, sleepless but not sleepy, running on fumes but he could have gone on forever. He felt all the dead buried there, the blurry pieces of his past. He’d never learned A’s name past the letter, never comprehended Beyond, but Light was there, so he simply let it all go. He already had, a very long time ago.
That’s why they’re here. The sedatives, the suit, the hands. The irrational insistence. He lets go of things he doesn’t like. Light cannot, so he represses, and controls. Misa wanted to be a martyr, to be had in death the way she couldn’t when she was alive, but Light, above all, wants to live. Even now. Especially now.
He burned the house because that’s what he could afford to do. And because he trusted that he would survive it. That L would make sure he - they - survived this. The dynamic isn’t healthy or safe, but nothing is healthy or safe anymore. Poisoned water, poisoned air, the heart of the disease sprouting from the earth itself. They’re making use of what they have. One year ago, that would have been called resourceful.
And it’s exciting. “You drugged me then, too, when we were at Wammy’s.” Light laughs bitterly. “You seem to love doing that. Would it kill you to trust me?”
“It might.”
“I won’t leave.” Light says, uncharacteristically honest.
“You value your life.” L nods. Puts his hands in his pockets. The wind is caustic but it’s nice. He appreciates it. He appreciates Light. “I respect that. And I forgive you for burning down the house. We can always get a new one.”
Light’s laugh tumbles into a sob, and then back again. “My little sister is dead. My family is dead. You won’t let me have the Death Note, because you don’t trust me.”
“Yes, and I want you to live. Kira wouldn’t last in this climate.”
“You’re the only one I have. The other human colonies won’t let anyone in.” Light walks forward, stops, sneers. “This is ridiculous.”
“Light-kun.” L says. The smiley faces above his eyebrows twist whenever his facial muscles tick. If he died, he would probably go to hell, but, they’re both already here, trekking through damnation and back. He’ll find a house and Light will burn it down again and he’ll find another, and they will survive. Maybe one day Light will drug him, but he won’t kill him, he knows that much - something about affordances - and he doesn’t name the feeling in his chest but in another life, it could be love.
Light turns, looking hopeless, looking hopelessly beautiful.
“Light-kun.” L repeats, looking at Light, always looking at Light. “We’re going to be fine.”