[fic] Rust (Light/L), Death Note
Title: Rust
Rating: R
Pairing/character(s): Light/L (and a tiny glimpse of Light/Misa, too)
Word count: ~2,500
Disclaimer: It belongs to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, not to me. Put down your death notes.
Summary: Some links are meant to be eternal, despite how rusty they are.
Spoilers: You name it. It's probably here.
Warnings: Morbid talking, some sex and lots of angst.
Notes: You'll want to know that this story follows the anime series' events, not the manga's. You may also want to know that this was originally written in Brazilian Portuguese, my native language, so I apologize for the possible weirdness in some of the sentences.
Thanks to: my beta laria_gwyn, for being the sweetest and the best one in, like, everything. Remaining mistakes are mine.
Life is like a chain. A sequence of links connecting pictures and actions, faces and touches of those we got to know during our existence. Then, there are those moments, those situations that skim down like warm water over icy metal, branding and changing its surface. Moments, often trivial ones, that are responsible for provoking adverse reactions. They’re unreal and incoherent regarding their true nature. They're foreign bodies that don't belong there. But they change the chain. They disturb it.
As times marches irreversibly onward, some of those links break and, finally, fall apart. A shy noise echoes out, echoes a brief trembling, like a last breath, as they touch the ground. And soon they're all forgotten. They matter no more.
Some links are meant to be eternal, though. Those which don't break apart. Doesn't matter how rusty they are.
I felt the pain hit me in waves, over and under and all around. I knew it was over, and at the same time I refused to admit to myself that it had happened that way.
I lifted my head without realizing how hard it would be. But my head felt like it weighed a ton as I let it fall back, my neck bruised by the stairs.
I could see him and yet I knew everything I saw was actually nothing but my brain starting to shut down. A torrent of little uncontrolled and inappropriate electric pulses. I could hear him, too. And his voice was exactly as I remembered it. It was still the same, after all these years. Nothing had changed. Not a single cadence, not a single tone.
"Ah, Light-kun. You have that look in your eyes. This one. Again."
I couldn't see his eyes, as they were shielded by the shadows on his face. That pale skin, like a corpse.
My body let out a spasm as I laughed at the very idea. I felt the blood spill from my exit wounds. I knew I was going to die here, by the hands of some idiot, bit by bit and in pain. I knew I was going to agonize over all the decisions I had made. But I also knew I was too proud to feel regret.
I knew I didn't have anything to feel regret for.
And I knew he was going to watch me die, with his deep, numbed gaze. An accomplice to his own murder.
"Yes. It was you."
L always knew he was right.
I must confess I didn't concern myself with small details such as how I was supposed to eat or sleep while having my wrist held by that chain. The thrill of being fooled by my own father in order to get my said "freedom" was still pumping through my veins, making me feel that that tiny sacrifice would be nothing compared to all the months I spent locked up.
He looked as worried as I did.
We were the last ones to sleep on that first night, quartered inside a plain simple room, two beds with a little space between them, just like in a cheap motel. No room for luxury. As the night wore on, the noise of the chain disturbed me even more than the feeling of the cold metal against my skin. He didn't stop moving, giving the chain little pulls, as he rolled around on his bed. Eventually my exhaustion beat the irritation and finally I fell asleep.
I woke up only to feel lost yet again. I opened my eyes and noticed the erratic, little movements he made as he walked into the adjoining bathroom, his body bent over, his bare feet leaving footprints on the hardwood. I stopped by the door, looking sideways, as he took off his clothes and stepped into the shower box. I noticed, too, in the corner of my eyes, the firm lines of his ribs marking his back and his pelvic bones. The purplish veins under his skin.
I was forced to step into the bathroom as he closed the box's door, pulling in the chain. And I stayed there, stood over the white and icy tiled floor, without a single clue about what to do as I waited for my turn.
I shivered as some warm drops of water touched the skin of my wrist, as they slipped through the chain's links.
I woke up out of the blue in the middle of the night, without realizing I had even fallen asleep. I could hear dripping noises.
My muscles were alert and quickly, I straightened up. By my side on the bed, Misa rolled over in her sleep, a stained lipstick smile from a cheerful, fake dream imprisoned on the corner of her mouth.
Her naked skin never gave me more than a few, flinching moments of satisfaction, but even now after all this time, I still couldn't stop thinking how wrong it all was.
I had said that before. To him. Years before. At the time that suggestion wasn't even mine.
"I just couldn't play with someone's feelings like that."
L never believed me, obviously. Although, I thought, he wanted to.
I discovered that the noise was coming from the bathroom's faucet, carelessly turned off in a hurry, without thought. A trivial action like so many others.
I squeezed the metal and, unconsciously, I closed my eyes, enjoying the cold feeling against my skin. I pictured myself holding the chain's links and I remembered doing that before, years before, to control the sounds threatening to leave my lips.
I squeezed the metal hard and, as I opened my eyes, I asked myself if at some point between us there had been feelings that were worth playing with.
In the beginning, I chose to pretend I didn't notice it, the fact that he took a few more minutes than he used to on the fifth morning we were stuck together. I pretended not to notice the barely disguised noises, the steady rocking of the chain, the water drops slipping through the metal.
But I knew he noticed that I did notice. He noticed that I turned my face away when it was my turn to take a shower. When I purposely avoided touching him.
First, when the same situation happened again, two days later, I started to wonder if maybe he wasn't doing it just to irritate me. Then I shook my head, annoyed by my own stupidity. After all, he would never care enough to do something just to bother me. It was more likely he was doing just what he wanted to do, as he always did.
As the days passed, he stopped trying to hold back the noises. And I stopped pretending nothing was happening. Driven by curiosity, maybe by boredom, I started to look at the box, instead of just keeping my eyes on nothing.
And I felt my face heat as I watched the slim body pressed against the misted glass, his back to me. I noticed the white fog slipping from the glass door's crack, opened by the wet chain. And I started to understand and to know, even before it would happen, that I always saw his shoulders tense up, his dark, wet hair pressed hard against the glass.
Took me days to allow myself to do the same.
And I always knew he watched me, too.
I used to believe... I do believe... I still believe... in a better world. A righteous world. I challenged more than a handful of immoral moralists, incapable of seeing past their inadequate notions of right and wrong. I ended up standing against someone whom I thought of as flawless, a role-model, for most of my life, wishing that in the end he could just accomplish a last whim of mine.
But I didn't regret it. No. Not even that.
I think that, now, maybe I just should have tried a little harder to make the only person who was capable of understanding me to see the world the way I did. Rich and full of good people who deserved to live safely.
But it was his vision that motivated me, in the end, more than justice itself.
I wanted to prove that I was better than him. That I could beat him. That he was wrong. But we evened the score and now, we both hung over the same abyss side by side, held up by those links covered in rust. The consequence of all the mistakes we had made, of all of our contradictions and unwillingness.
"Light-kun, I don't think I can sleep anymore."
I felt my eyes closing, slowly. I heard the sound of bells so, so far away. I thought about what he had said to me such a long time ago. That really should have been a wedding.
His face was close to mine and his breathing caressed my skin. I could see him, even if I was absolutely sure I had just closed my eyes. The trembling from the chain that kept us in place mingled with the bell's distant noises.
I asked myself if it was raining out there.
I could feel the water drops slide against the skin of my wrist.
So many times I surprised him watching me with curiosity. Probably just waiting for the second I would reveal myself as a maniac who would strangle him with that chain.
"What do I need to do to prove you're wrong about me?"
And he knew - he was the only who was really sure - that that time I couldn't do anything to prove that. To prove he was right about me. A certitude that even I didn't have. He was the only one who knew and, even so, it was he who opened the bathroom box's door at the end of the fourth week and, instead of leaving covered in a towel as he always did, he pulled the chain a little bit, a silent invitation.
He didn't look even remotely uncomfortable as he raised his arm, touching me with his fingertips. And I didn't pretend I didn't like it. I just squeezed the chain between my fingers, hard, asking as an afterthought, if all that water wouldn't end up rusting it over, sooner or later.
I touched him back, afterward, as I felt his lips on my neck, making a strangled noise in the back of my throat as I shut my eyes.
And for a few minutes the only noises coming from inside the bathroom belonged to the water falling and the trembling of the chain links. The sound which kept us together, then. The symphony that slid over us, slowing, changing things as it wished.
"I don't really think it's a problem."
It wasn't.
It never was.
After all, you're gone before me.
Though he hadn't said a word since we left the chopper and, once we went back into the building, we broke free from the chain, I always knew he noticed that.
I didn't know if it was the look on my face as I touched the note. Or my reactions when beholding the Shinigami. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was both.
An absolute conviction.
We slept in separate rooms, then, and I didn't have to stay inside the building if I didn't want to, even if I planned to continue in the investigation. I noticed him watching me from the corner of those deep eyes, numbed by certainty, that whispered that he knew.
Still, it was you who knelt before me and toweled my feet dry.
I didn't have any idea what time it was the night I opened my eyes and realized he was standing next to my bed. I also didn't know what to do when he didn't move, my eyes covered in sand. Unconsciously I gave him room to lie down, too. His long and slender fingers pierced under my pajama shirt with the same urgency that I sunk my hands in his dark hair, so messy and still so soft, pulling him closer, covering his lips with my own.
I wasn't surprised by the sweet taste of coffee, not even with the way he slid his tongue against mine, like he was licking a particularly cold ice-cream. I didn't mind the fact that he kept his eyes alert, his irises wide open, as I shifted my body to cover his, forcing myself between his legs. Even as I thrust inside him for the first time, though he did bite his lower lip hard, he just blinked at me, slightly indifferent, letting out a moan so small and so composed that I could almost think it a mistake.
My body was lighter when I finished and I fell on my back against the mattress, he by my side, and I asked myself what I was supposed to say to someone in a situation like this, even if silence seemed like a better option.
But I couldn't stop, didn't matter how I wanted to, I just couldn't stop a stupid smile from curling on the corner of my lips, cruelty pulling the skin out, as I felt him turn around and hold me hard by my waist, laying his head against my chest. His breathing quieted and settled.
I fell asleep feeling the heaviness and coldness of the chain which didn't let our wrists separate for even one second.
I fell asleep certain he wouldn't ever cease to think of me as a murderer.
I noticed the light slipping through the roof of the old warehouse. I asked myself how much time it would take for them to find me. I wondered what they would do to me, to what was left of me. My eyes were still closed and I couldn't understand how I was even able to see.
I heard the clamor from those who still believed in Kira. I rewatched the scene where the most loyal had lost his faith. I went back to an almost remote and forgotten past and remember the warning, said in such a mocking way, like it was anything but a bad joke.
"Neither to Heaven... neither to Hell."
Maybe it meant that I would stay right here. That my mission was that noble. Too huge to be shortened by other people's hands.
But the bells' noise had ceased, even if I could still hear the chain's sounds. I could feel one of them as it restrained my wrist. My body's weight held by metal. The abyss of emptiness lying beneath my feet.
"If you knew that all would end just like this, would you have acted the exact same way? Would you have done the same things?"
I knew the question was nothing but a trick. That any answer would doom me forever. But I tried to open my mouth to speak up, even so. My last chance, maybe.
That was when I felt the pain hit me right in the chest. Too hard. Too intense. Hollow. Soundless.
And eternal.
There were no more sounds. Of bells or chains. All I had left was the feeling of being wrapped inside a layer of wrong decisions and trivial actions.
"You know, I don't think that has changed anything."
Harsh and worn out, like rust.
Rating: R
Pairing/character(s): Light/L (and a tiny glimpse of Light/Misa, too)
Word count: ~2,500
Disclaimer: It belongs to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, not to me. Put down your death notes.
Summary: Some links are meant to be eternal, despite how rusty they are.
Spoilers: You name it. It's probably here.
Warnings: Morbid talking, some sex and lots of angst.
Notes: You'll want to know that this story follows the anime series' events, not the manga's. You may also want to know that this was originally written in Brazilian Portuguese, my native language, so I apologize for the possible weirdness in some of the sentences.
Thanks to: my beta laria_gwyn, for being the sweetest and the best one in, like, everything. Remaining mistakes are mine.
Life is like a chain. A sequence of links connecting pictures and actions, faces and touches of those we got to know during our existence. Then, there are those moments, those situations that skim down like warm water over icy metal, branding and changing its surface. Moments, often trivial ones, that are responsible for provoking adverse reactions. They’re unreal and incoherent regarding their true nature. They're foreign bodies that don't belong there. But they change the chain. They disturb it.
As times marches irreversibly onward, some of those links break and, finally, fall apart. A shy noise echoes out, echoes a brief trembling, like a last breath, as they touch the ground. And soon they're all forgotten. They matter no more.
Some links are meant to be eternal, though. Those which don't break apart. Doesn't matter how rusty they are.
I felt the pain hit me in waves, over and under and all around. I knew it was over, and at the same time I refused to admit to myself that it had happened that way.
I lifted my head without realizing how hard it would be. But my head felt like it weighed a ton as I let it fall back, my neck bruised by the stairs.
I could see him and yet I knew everything I saw was actually nothing but my brain starting to shut down. A torrent of little uncontrolled and inappropriate electric pulses. I could hear him, too. And his voice was exactly as I remembered it. It was still the same, after all these years. Nothing had changed. Not a single cadence, not a single tone.
"Ah, Light-kun. You have that look in your eyes. This one. Again."
I couldn't see his eyes, as they were shielded by the shadows on his face. That pale skin, like a corpse.
My body let out a spasm as I laughed at the very idea. I felt the blood spill from my exit wounds. I knew I was going to die here, by the hands of some idiot, bit by bit and in pain. I knew I was going to agonize over all the decisions I had made. But I also knew I was too proud to feel regret.
I knew I didn't have anything to feel regret for.
And I knew he was going to watch me die, with his deep, numbed gaze. An accomplice to his own murder.
"Yes. It was you."
L always knew he was right.
I must confess I didn't concern myself with small details such as how I was supposed to eat or sleep while having my wrist held by that chain. The thrill of being fooled by my own father in order to get my said "freedom" was still pumping through my veins, making me feel that that tiny sacrifice would be nothing compared to all the months I spent locked up.
He looked as worried as I did.
We were the last ones to sleep on that first night, quartered inside a plain simple room, two beds with a little space between them, just like in a cheap motel. No room for luxury. As the night wore on, the noise of the chain disturbed me even more than the feeling of the cold metal against my skin. He didn't stop moving, giving the chain little pulls, as he rolled around on his bed. Eventually my exhaustion beat the irritation and finally I fell asleep.
I woke up only to feel lost yet again. I opened my eyes and noticed the erratic, little movements he made as he walked into the adjoining bathroom, his body bent over, his bare feet leaving footprints on the hardwood. I stopped by the door, looking sideways, as he took off his clothes and stepped into the shower box. I noticed, too, in the corner of my eyes, the firm lines of his ribs marking his back and his pelvic bones. The purplish veins under his skin.
I was forced to step into the bathroom as he closed the box's door, pulling in the chain. And I stayed there, stood over the white and icy tiled floor, without a single clue about what to do as I waited for my turn.
I shivered as some warm drops of water touched the skin of my wrist, as they slipped through the chain's links.
I woke up out of the blue in the middle of the night, without realizing I had even fallen asleep. I could hear dripping noises.
My muscles were alert and quickly, I straightened up. By my side on the bed, Misa rolled over in her sleep, a stained lipstick smile from a cheerful, fake dream imprisoned on the corner of her mouth.
Her naked skin never gave me more than a few, flinching moments of satisfaction, but even now after all this time, I still couldn't stop thinking how wrong it all was.
I had said that before. To him. Years before. At the time that suggestion wasn't even mine.
"I just couldn't play with someone's feelings like that."
L never believed me, obviously. Although, I thought, he wanted to.
I discovered that the noise was coming from the bathroom's faucet, carelessly turned off in a hurry, without thought. A trivial action like so many others.
I squeezed the metal and, unconsciously, I closed my eyes, enjoying the cold feeling against my skin. I pictured myself holding the chain's links and I remembered doing that before, years before, to control the sounds threatening to leave my lips.
I squeezed the metal hard and, as I opened my eyes, I asked myself if at some point between us there had been feelings that were worth playing with.
In the beginning, I chose to pretend I didn't notice it, the fact that he took a few more minutes than he used to on the fifth morning we were stuck together. I pretended not to notice the barely disguised noises, the steady rocking of the chain, the water drops slipping through the metal.
But I knew he noticed that I did notice. He noticed that I turned my face away when it was my turn to take a shower. When I purposely avoided touching him.
First, when the same situation happened again, two days later, I started to wonder if maybe he wasn't doing it just to irritate me. Then I shook my head, annoyed by my own stupidity. After all, he would never care enough to do something just to bother me. It was more likely he was doing just what he wanted to do, as he always did.
As the days passed, he stopped trying to hold back the noises. And I stopped pretending nothing was happening. Driven by curiosity, maybe by boredom, I started to look at the box, instead of just keeping my eyes on nothing.
And I felt my face heat as I watched the slim body pressed against the misted glass, his back to me. I noticed the white fog slipping from the glass door's crack, opened by the wet chain. And I started to understand and to know, even before it would happen, that I always saw his shoulders tense up, his dark, wet hair pressed hard against the glass.
Took me days to allow myself to do the same.
And I always knew he watched me, too.
I used to believe... I do believe... I still believe... in a better world. A righteous world. I challenged more than a handful of immoral moralists, incapable of seeing past their inadequate notions of right and wrong. I ended up standing against someone whom I thought of as flawless, a role-model, for most of my life, wishing that in the end he could just accomplish a last whim of mine.
But I didn't regret it. No. Not even that.
I think that, now, maybe I just should have tried a little harder to make the only person who was capable of understanding me to see the world the way I did. Rich and full of good people who deserved to live safely.
But it was his vision that motivated me, in the end, more than justice itself.
I wanted to prove that I was better than him. That I could beat him. That he was wrong. But we evened the score and now, we both hung over the same abyss side by side, held up by those links covered in rust. The consequence of all the mistakes we had made, of all of our contradictions and unwillingness.
"Light-kun, I don't think I can sleep anymore."
I felt my eyes closing, slowly. I heard the sound of bells so, so far away. I thought about what he had said to me such a long time ago. That really should have been a wedding.
His face was close to mine and his breathing caressed my skin. I could see him, even if I was absolutely sure I had just closed my eyes. The trembling from the chain that kept us in place mingled with the bell's distant noises.
I asked myself if it was raining out there.
I could feel the water drops slide against the skin of my wrist.
So many times I surprised him watching me with curiosity. Probably just waiting for the second I would reveal myself as a maniac who would strangle him with that chain.
"What do I need to do to prove you're wrong about me?"
And he knew - he was the only who was really sure - that that time I couldn't do anything to prove that. To prove he was right about me. A certitude that even I didn't have. He was the only one who knew and, even so, it was he who opened the bathroom box's door at the end of the fourth week and, instead of leaving covered in a towel as he always did, he pulled the chain a little bit, a silent invitation.
He didn't look even remotely uncomfortable as he raised his arm, touching me with his fingertips. And I didn't pretend I didn't like it. I just squeezed the chain between my fingers, hard, asking as an afterthought, if all that water wouldn't end up rusting it over, sooner or later.
I touched him back, afterward, as I felt his lips on my neck, making a strangled noise in the back of my throat as I shut my eyes.
And for a few minutes the only noises coming from inside the bathroom belonged to the water falling and the trembling of the chain links. The sound which kept us together, then. The symphony that slid over us, slowing, changing things as it wished.
"I don't really think it's a problem."
It wasn't.
It never was.
After all, you're gone before me.
Though he hadn't said a word since we left the chopper and, once we went back into the building, we broke free from the chain, I always knew he noticed that.
I didn't know if it was the look on my face as I touched the note. Or my reactions when beholding the Shinigami. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was both.
An absolute conviction.
We slept in separate rooms, then, and I didn't have to stay inside the building if I didn't want to, even if I planned to continue in the investigation. I noticed him watching me from the corner of those deep eyes, numbed by certainty, that whispered that he knew.
Still, it was you who knelt before me and toweled my feet dry.
I didn't have any idea what time it was the night I opened my eyes and realized he was standing next to my bed. I also didn't know what to do when he didn't move, my eyes covered in sand. Unconsciously I gave him room to lie down, too. His long and slender fingers pierced under my pajama shirt with the same urgency that I sunk my hands in his dark hair, so messy and still so soft, pulling him closer, covering his lips with my own.
I wasn't surprised by the sweet taste of coffee, not even with the way he slid his tongue against mine, like he was licking a particularly cold ice-cream. I didn't mind the fact that he kept his eyes alert, his irises wide open, as I shifted my body to cover his, forcing myself between his legs. Even as I thrust inside him for the first time, though he did bite his lower lip hard, he just blinked at me, slightly indifferent, letting out a moan so small and so composed that I could almost think it a mistake.
My body was lighter when I finished and I fell on my back against the mattress, he by my side, and I asked myself what I was supposed to say to someone in a situation like this, even if silence seemed like a better option.
But I couldn't stop, didn't matter how I wanted to, I just couldn't stop a stupid smile from curling on the corner of my lips, cruelty pulling the skin out, as I felt him turn around and hold me hard by my waist, laying his head against my chest. His breathing quieted and settled.
I fell asleep feeling the heaviness and coldness of the chain which didn't let our wrists separate for even one second.
I fell asleep certain he wouldn't ever cease to think of me as a murderer.
I noticed the light slipping through the roof of the old warehouse. I asked myself how much time it would take for them to find me. I wondered what they would do to me, to what was left of me. My eyes were still closed and I couldn't understand how I was even able to see.
I heard the clamor from those who still believed in Kira. I rewatched the scene where the most loyal had lost his faith. I went back to an almost remote and forgotten past and remember the warning, said in such a mocking way, like it was anything but a bad joke.
"Neither to Heaven... neither to Hell."
Maybe it meant that I would stay right here. That my mission was that noble. Too huge to be shortened by other people's hands.
But the bells' noise had ceased, even if I could still hear the chain's sounds. I could feel one of them as it restrained my wrist. My body's weight held by metal. The abyss of emptiness lying beneath my feet.
"If you knew that all would end just like this, would you have acted the exact same way? Would you have done the same things?"
I knew the question was nothing but a trick. That any answer would doom me forever. But I tried to open my mouth to speak up, even so. My last chance, maybe.
That was when I felt the pain hit me right in the chest. Too hard. Too intense. Hollow. Soundless.
And eternal.
There were no more sounds. Of bells or chains. All I had left was the feeling of being wrapped inside a layer of wrong decisions and trivial actions.
"You know, I don't think that has changed anything."
Harsh and worn out, like rust.