Ashes and Bonfire - a DN ff
Originally posted by crowseye at Ashes and Bonfire - a DN ff
Guess who's back in the fandom... LJ won't let me post this story in one piece, so I had to split in two parts, but it's just a long one-shot, not a chaptered fic.
Title: Ashes and Bonfires
Pairing: Raito/Mikami
Warning: Explicit slash
Wordcount: 8219
Disclaimer: Death Note belongs to its respective owners; for the translation of Matsuo Bashō’s frog haiku I use Donald Keene’s version.
Summary: A story about new beginnings and old hurts. Why would God need a plan B? Raito/Mikami slash. AU.
Ashes and Bonfires
It was the language, Teru thought. With his fluent, impeccable English and very good French, Raito Yagami was clearly expecting to master this small, irrelevant language, to conquer it like a mighty emperor does a weak kingdom. Yet it showed resistance; whenever he was forced to speak it, the words for which he searched so desperately turned out mangled and distorted, bereft of meaning. Despite that, he always managed to get them what they needed. They had food and shelter, and the community seemed to have accepted them. To manage all that alone, after their only protector had disappeared, with not a single experience with the language and local culture, should seem admirable. Somehow, it didn't.
A man and a woman were standing just a few steps outside his window, arguing, he presumed. But one could never tell with these people. For all he knew, it could be a perfectly friendly conversation, or an exchange of pleasantries about weather. She wore a long green skirt, glaringly unmatching to her orange top, while his clothes were rather non-descript, except for the big shiny curved knife at his belt. Framed by the iron bars of the cellar window, they presented a complete view, and their raised voices sounded like crows cooing and thunder and car brakes. All the vowels and consonants were in their places, fitting there as snugly as a leather glove on a hand and somehow, this was perfection. He, the fallen God, Raito was achingly imperfect, and his fumbling with the language gave it away. Among other things.
The man, whom he suspected to be a brother or a cousin of one of his fellow loggers, now held the knife in his left hand, idly swirling it in between his fingers. This was the moment when, in another life, he would reach for a simple black notebook and write the man's name in it. Here, the woman just laughed, made a rude gesture and walked away. The man stood still for a while, then put a hand in his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and took a drag, his eyes swaying downwards, to the cellar window. When he spotted its inhabitant, he greeted him with a crooked grin.
A pile of ash fell down from the cigarette, twirling slightly in the breeze, and Teru followed it with his eyes. Two hundred and eighteen black names on every white page in the black notebook, white always goes first and if you know how to play, you win. That was his world, black and white like the little television he and his mother used to have, and now - all there was left was this gray ash, and nothing made sense anymore.
Their eyes met, and the man uttered a word in the language, a word so simple that even Teru understood.
But this is not how the story starts.
It could start in many different places, but it would probably be best to say that it starts in the warehouse.
On January 28th, the New World should have come. What came instead was the cruelest disappointment a man can experience - Teru thought he had found God, truly found him and was acknowledged by him, here on this Earth, but this illusion was shattered by words and bullets. What came next he remembered through a red haze. His desperation made him stab himself with his pen, and although the injury wasn't that serious, he lost quite a lot of blood, as he was told later. Later, when he was recovering in a private hospital somewhere, when he was also told that there was a plan B. That Kira's God complex didn't prevent him from making precautions, in case the meeting in the warehouse didn't go well. The plan that secured both his and Kira's survival was complex, as could have been expected, and Styrin explained it to him in a loving detail. But that was completely lost on Teru; his unseeing eyes were staring past the tubes stuck in his arms, past the Caucasian man with unsettling watery-blue gaze, past the high, narrow window letting in fragile and spidery rays of pale winter sun. When he heard that Raito Yagami took in account failure as an alternative and prepared for it in advance, enlisting the help of an organization that was supposed to be long since eradicated by his own hand - something just broke in him. It wasn't as painful as seeing what he saw in the warehouse, but in some way it was worse, because this time, his mind wasn't clouded like it was before, dimmed first by anticipation and then, for one unforgettable moment, by sheer ecstasy. Now his mind was crystal clear; he was so sane it hurt.
Why would God need a plan B?
Teru realized that Styrin was talking about his country again, the place where he was going to get them, one way or another, and interrupted him:
"When can I see him?" he asked, and his voice came out rusty with disuse.
Styrin made an indiscernible gesture with his hand, one that seemed strangely foreign.
"Soon," the gangster said. "When he is ready, he'll send for you."
He left not long after that, leaving Teru to his thoughts.
The meeting was awkward. Of all the scenarios he made up during the two weeks that had passed since Styrin's last visit, awkward was not one of them. He expected… well, something, although what that might be was hard to pinpoint. The child in him expected miracle. The bitterly disappointed, sobered adult hoped for an apology. The loyal servant expected precise orders.
Instead, he got awkwardness.
He was sitting on an uncomfortable metallic chair, repressing the urge to fidget.
Raito Yagami was half-sitting, half-lying on his bed. His fingers were absent-mindedly drumming against the light green mug with the lukewarm tea he was cradling. Teru's own tea stood on Raito's nightstand, forgotten. His whole attention was focused on the man in the bed, his gaze drinking into the shadows under his eyes and around his mouth, as though they could provide the answer to all his questions.
Yagami was talking, in a low, melodic voice, talking about that country. But it was very different from what Styrin was telling him before. Styrin was describing the defunct political system, the underworld workings, the reasons why this country was just ideal for them to hide in and bide their time. Curiously, Yagami didn't even touch a subject like that; he was talking about the native music, the long, thin pipes that produced a strange, haunting sound, especially when played in the valleys, the mountains with narrow passes and deadly avalanches coming in April and May, when they were no longer expected, some sort of delicious, but awfully smelly cheese-
Teru was tired of sitting on the uncomfortable chair, his body lately unused to any but horizontal position. He wished he could tune that voice out, to erase that beautiful, but completely irrelevant picture that was being painted for him. But it was impossible. No matter how strong his wish, he was still latching on every sound that left that perfect, shaded mouth.
Teru had always liked flying. He enjoyed the feeling that it was, contrary to many people's fears, the safest, by all means the fastest, and since he always flew in the business class, also the most comfortable way to travel. He enjoyed the little rituals it entailed - the female flight attendant, pretty in that sterile, advertising way that doesn't rouse any desires, the emergency exit is placed on your left, smile, please fasten your seatbelts and turn off your electronic devices, tea or coffee?
He was originally quite pleased with the notion of flying; things were looking too dangerous for that for a while, and they were considering taking a boat and then using the Trans-Siberian Railway, but eventually it turned out that the danger of exposure would be even higher, so they settled on flying.
Disguised and equipped with all the necessary fake documents, they managed to cross the security and get on board, in economy class where the college students leaving for a study exchange, who they were trying to impersonate, rightly belonged.
While the plane shook in another violent turbulence and the baby two rows ahead of them gave out a long wail, Teru was reconsidering his opinion on flying. The former prosecutor's eyes were fixed on the white mass of clouds outside the tiny window, but the muffled sounds from the neighboring seat involuntarily brought him a clear picture of his former God, retching into a brown paper bag as though it could save his life.
The doctors were right. You are in no shape to travel. He thought of pointing that out, but eventually decided against it because he found it pointless. As he did a lot of things these days, actually.
"Do you have a tissue? I've run out of mine," a voice asked him, trying to sound matter-of-factly but instead getting out rather shaky.
Teru wordlessly handed him the object; when they hands brushed, another turbulence started, even worse than the last one. Although his seatbelt was fastened, Raito Yagami still instinctively grabbed for something to support him; it was Teru's hand. The cold, clammy fingers clasping around his wrist felt like steel handcuffs.
The scenery was quite pleasant. It was not picturesque with vine-covered little houses with shingle roofs and cozy gardens, nor was it dramatically romantic with steep hills, black lakes and castle ruins. Well, maybe the village looked more inviting in the spring and summer, but now in late winter the naked, stern trees, grayish ground and unfamiliar figures wrapped in thick woolen coats and jackets didn't make him think of any documentaries he saw on life in Europe, which were mostly the kind of travel guides that makes one feel like planning a holiday. Here he was reminded of homelessness, of exile, which was exactly where he was.
Houses were on the small side, usually only one storey high with deep running cellars used for storage, full of apples, garlic, pickles, wines and strong spirits. There was a school, two pubs, a convenience store and three churches, which struck him as curious, for the village had but a few hundred inhabitants. There was a bus stop, but they were to learn that hardly any buses came here. The closest larger village, where the post office was, lay fifteen miles away, behind the gray hills; and it was a long way from any major town.
Styrin told them to wait in front of one of the houses and went inside. It was a rather shabby building with light yellow cracked walls and with casement windows in a desperate need of a new paint job. There was no front garden, which, as Teru noted, was the case with most of the houses here, but behind the house lay a generous yard, going down in a gentle slope. Shortly after, Styrin reemerged with a small elderly woman with darkish, wizened complexion, leaning heavily on her cane.
"This is my mother," Styrin introduced her, but didn't tell them her name. Well, Teru couldn't really blame him. "She will take care of you while I'm gone." The old woman didn't say anything at all, and her face, reminding him of an old apple, didn't show any expression. Styrin had already explained to them that he would have to leave immediately for supplies and weapons, but hearing that was one thing; to actually see his dark blue, Soviet-made angular car disappear down the hill felt strangely disheartening.
"He is not coming back," he felt like saying. "Don't be childish, of course he is," Yagami would retort, "why would he bother to help us, to take us all the way here? If he wanted to betray us, he could have done it in Japan."
But Teru wasn't thinking about betrayal. What he was experiencing resembled the feeling he used to have as a child, when his mother took too long in coming back, and he stared onto the dark street, waiting for the familiar coat - the beige one, the blue coat she only wore for special occasions - to show up and separate itself from the flow of passers-by by heading to their front door. Sometimes, when the silence in the small flat was oppressing him, tightening his throat, and there was no beige coat to be seen, even though the flow of passers-by had already broken down into a diminishing number of hastening individuals, he felt as though his mother would never come back, that something terrible happened to her. One such evening, his fears came true.
But he didn't tell Yagami any of this, of course. What would be the point in that?
Yagami, using the basic vocabulary he learned in the hospital and revised on the plane between the bouts of nausea, introduced the two of them, using their fake names. The woman didn't offer them any introduction of her own; she merely nodded and beckoned them to follow her inside. Again, Teru couldn't blame her. His eyes saw her name, of course, and he would divulge it to Yagami later if asked, but he couldn't think of any gain this knowledge could possibly bring them.
In the house it was quite dark, and Teru thought that the windows needed not only to be painted, but thoroughly washed as well. The old woman, leading them forward in a sluggish pace, was obviously unable to handle the house anymore. Finally they arrived to the kitchen, and Teru's suspicions were confirmed. All surfaces were scattered with pots and dishes, some empty, some covered in dried up food, all kinds of cooking utensils, bottles, empty or half-full, newspapers and other sundry items. The room smelled of food, decay, old age and medications.
The old woman pointed at the table and they sat down, cleaning the space right in front of them by shoving the items in the way to the edge of the table. She handed them two plates, which were adorned with the blue onion pattern common in these parts and thankfully clean, and used a ladle to load them with a dish she took from a big brown pot. It was some kind of potato dish with a lot of stewed vegetables and some smoked meat. It tasted surprisingly good, given the state of the kitchen. The same could be said about the strong tea she brought them afterwards - so strong, actually, that Teru supposed it was laced with something, but he was too thirsty to care.
While they ate and drank, the old woman was busying herself around the kitchen, probably cleaning, all the time mumbling to herself. He was sure he caught the name "Andras" a couple of times - Styrin's first name - but as for the rest, he didn't understand a word. He looked at Yagami who, even in such a place, was comporting himself so elegantly that he somehow managed to give the impression of a man enjoying a sophisticated meal in a high-class restaurant, but the other man just shrugged his shoulders. The language skills he had acquired so far obviously didn't extend to mumbling.
Never mind the actual words, from her tone alone Teru still had some idea what she was talking about; she was probably complaining about all sorts of people her criminal son brought to her poor home.
This hypothesis was confirmed later, when they were lead to the cellar that would serve as their dwelling. For a cellar, it was quite spacious, with high ceilings and solid floors. There were two beds, a couple of seedy mattresses, a simple table with two chairs and an indiscernible amount of empty bottles and cigarette butts. For a brief moment, Teru was shocked by a realization that he, an excellent prosecutor, university-educated, honorable, useful member of the society, was to take refuge in a criminals' lair. This thought managed to invoke in him the red blur of images from the warehouse, the familiar feeling of insanity tugging at his consciousness, and he willed it away with all he had. Instead, he concentrated on his immediate surroundings, breathing in the dampness rising from the walls and staring at the pool of light the high-up window in front of him painted on the dirty floor.
"Not exactly a hotel suite, but it will do," he heard Yagami say, and a moment later there was an unmistakable thud of a human body hitting a bed. He looked at the other man, who uncaringly splayed his limbs across the unclean sheets, his eyelids closed and surrounded by the shadows of fatigue Teru had grown used to see there. Then his eyes turned to the other bed; he too was tired after the long flight and a bumpy ride in Styrin's weathered car, but he couldn't bear to touch that bed, let alone lay down on it.
It was much later when Teru, too, could recline. It was pitch-black outside, and not much lighter inside, as the whole space was lit by a single bare light-bulb hanging from the ceiling.
While he was cleaning, Yagami occasionally thrashed from side to side, letting out something resembling a moan, but didn't wake. Not that Teru took any unnecessary caution to ensure he wouldn't; he gathered all the bottles and they made horrible rattling noise as he carried them away, putting them in the garbage can in front of the house. He briefly mused over the possibility of waste sorting here and then dismissed it as unlikely. He disposed of the cigarette butts and other debris and then swept the floor with a broom he found in a tool shed adjacent to the house. Just when he was half-way through with the sweeping, the old woman came in, probably roused by all the noise, and looked at him strangely.
Well, I don't think that any of her previous guests did this, Teru thought, when an idea occurred to him. As fast as possible, lest the woman leave, he finished the sweeping and took the dirty bed sheets from the unoccupied bed. He handed them to her, first making a grimace and then joining his palms in a pleading gesture. She nodded in understanding, took the dirty sheets away and soon returned with two clean sets. Teru bowed his thanks and she said something most likely meaning "you're welcome", first words she said directly to any of them.
He made his bed, but if before he felt too clean to sleep in such a dirty bed, now the situation was reverse. He went to a smaller room, where he had previously spotted a sink. Definitely not a hotel suite, but at least it was something. He washed himself as best as he could, brushed his teeth and then returned to the main room, where he turned off the weak, but stern light and finally lay down. As he lowered himself, the half-healed wound he gained by stabbing his chest with a pen began to throb, probably from the extortion, and just like on other such occasions the images from the warehouse threatened to overflow his mind. Most of the things that could possibly serve as a distraction were now covered with darkness, except for the white walls, dimly glowing in the dark. So Teru looked at them, trying to count all the cracks he could make out in the dark, breathing in the dampness and imagining how he would cover them in fresh paint, doing it with own his hands, for the first time in his life. This idea gave him a strange, new kind of pleasure.
When he next opened his eyes, it was almost noon, and he woke up to a sight of Raito Yagami sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, some kind of cake and a book, which Teru recognized as a textbook on the language of this country. His face was still pale, but the signs of fatigue were now less prominent, partly because he obviously washed himself and changed into fresh clothing. He looked perfectly at ease in his new surroundings.
At the sound of Teru's feet touching the floor, Yagami turned to face him.
"I'd wish you a good morning, but I don't know whether it'd be still acceptable at this hour," he said good-humoredly. "Thank you for making this place habitable. Also, I guess your orderly nature has warmed the heart of our old woman; look what she made us," he said pointing at the coffee and cake. As Teru approached the table, a truly wonderful smell of freshly brewed coffee and pastries filled his nostrils. It tasted just as wonderful; he couldn't remember when was the last time he had breakfast this good.
When his rapture over the breakfast subsided, he became aware of the eyes watching him and looked up from his plate.
Having his attention, Yagami handed him a single sheet of paper. Before Teru could focus on the meaning, he felt a stab of envy at the beauty of the characters. His own handwriting was rather neat and tidy, but he could never achieve such flowing elegance.
"As you see, it is a list of suggestions on what needs to be done with this cellar. I think we'll be staying here for a while, so we should make this as comfortable as possible," Yagami said and Teru finally started to pay attention to the contents.
Most of those things he had himself thought of - to get a proper shower, to do something about the toilet (Yagami said that Mrs. Styrin told them to use the outhouse in the garden, which he claimed to be in a dreadful state), to find something like a wardrobe to put their clothes in and some shelves for other things, and - he read this with an inappropriate feeling of joy - to paint the walls. There were also some ideas that didn't occur to him, like adding a small kitchen corner so they wouldn't be dependent on what Mrs. Styrin brought them.
"Do you agree? Do you have anything to add?" Yagami asked.
Teru gave a short nod, waited a couple of seconds and then shook his head. Yagami's eyes slightly narrowed at the sight, but he didn't comment on it. Instead he said:
"When we are finished here, I think we should start helping the old woman. We could only benefit from that."
They set to work and found out what the phrase "manual labor" really meant. Even after they - especially Raito - managed to more or less recover from their wounds, it was still hard. For one, it was very different from a gym work-out. Muscles he didn't know he had hurt him at the end of the day, and first couple of days he went to sleep totally exhausted. When they finished the alterations of their cellar, which itself took much longer than expected, they moved to work upstairs. Teru thought that it just needed a lot of cleaning, but it turned out that more than that was necessary.
The floor in the hall was molding so they had to redo it. Yagami took a long time measuring and drawing plans and persuaded the old lady to buy boards. When the boards arrived, Teru knew with one look that the length was not right. Yagami pursed his perfect lips in a vain attempt to hide his disappointment.
"I'll get us a chainsaw," he said finally. After some more haggling with the old lady, a man appeared with the required instrument. Yagami said his thanks, but eyed the saw with an obvious distrust. "He didn't bring any protection glasses," he mumbled, holding the saw as gingerly as one might hold an infant who just soiled himself.
Teru made a gesture for Yagami to pass him the chainsaw. When the other man complied, he silently started to saw the boards. With the smell of fresh-cut wood in his nostrils and the roaring sound successfully isolating him from the rest of the world, Teru felt happy, just like before when they were painting walls.
Then there were windows that needed replacing, chimney falling apart, unstable plumbing… Yagami half-jokingly suggested that it might be easier to just knock this house down and build a new one, and Teru could see his point. But little by little they saw the house change under their hands, to the obvious delight of Mrs. Styrin.
Whenever Yagami had a little time left, he used the opportunity to study from his language textbook. Sometimes in the early morning, when Yagami was still asleep, Teru would take the book to read it himself. In the bright morning sun those words seemed fresh and full of life.
Yagami practiced his conversational skills mainly on Mrs. Styrin; Teru didn't practice at all, instead watching Yagami's efforts at communication that often resulted in misunderstanding with the old woman, who would then smack her lips in obvious distaste and walk away, her cane hitting the ground with angry thuds. To see Raito failing at something left Teru feeling incredibly pleased, but he didn't show it. He made an effort not to show any emotions at all, including those that were roused in him by the other activity Raito practiced in his spare time - writing into a small notebook. Teru was sure that it wasn't the Death Note in disguise, but that didn't make it any less sinister. Who knew what kind of ideas or schemes were being confided into its pages? What kind of destruction would it bring? To think that he too once shared this delusion made him feel sick.
Sometimes Yagami would seek an eye-contact with him, daring him to ask the nagging question, but Teru always stubbornly averted his eyes. Ignorance was safer.
Go to Part 2/2
Guess who's back in the fandom... LJ won't let me post this story in one piece, so I had to split in two parts, but it's just a long one-shot, not a chaptered fic.
Title: Ashes and Bonfires
Pairing: Raito/Mikami
Warning: Explicit slash
Wordcount: 8219
Disclaimer: Death Note belongs to its respective owners; for the translation of Matsuo Bashō’s frog haiku I use Donald Keene’s version.
Summary: A story about new beginnings and old hurts. Why would God need a plan B? Raito/Mikami slash. AU.
Ashes and Bonfires
It was the language, Teru thought. With his fluent, impeccable English and very good French, Raito Yagami was clearly expecting to master this small, irrelevant language, to conquer it like a mighty emperor does a weak kingdom. Yet it showed resistance; whenever he was forced to speak it, the words for which he searched so desperately turned out mangled and distorted, bereft of meaning. Despite that, he always managed to get them what they needed. They had food and shelter, and the community seemed to have accepted them. To manage all that alone, after their only protector had disappeared, with not a single experience with the language and local culture, should seem admirable. Somehow, it didn't.
A man and a woman were standing just a few steps outside his window, arguing, he presumed. But one could never tell with these people. For all he knew, it could be a perfectly friendly conversation, or an exchange of pleasantries about weather. She wore a long green skirt, glaringly unmatching to her orange top, while his clothes were rather non-descript, except for the big shiny curved knife at his belt. Framed by the iron bars of the cellar window, they presented a complete view, and their raised voices sounded like crows cooing and thunder and car brakes. All the vowels and consonants were in their places, fitting there as snugly as a leather glove on a hand and somehow, this was perfection. He, the fallen God, Raito was achingly imperfect, and his fumbling with the language gave it away. Among other things.
The man, whom he suspected to be a brother or a cousin of one of his fellow loggers, now held the knife in his left hand, idly swirling it in between his fingers. This was the moment when, in another life, he would reach for a simple black notebook and write the man's name in it. Here, the woman just laughed, made a rude gesture and walked away. The man stood still for a while, then put a hand in his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and took a drag, his eyes swaying downwards, to the cellar window. When he spotted its inhabitant, he greeted him with a crooked grin.
A pile of ash fell down from the cigarette, twirling slightly in the breeze, and Teru followed it with his eyes. Two hundred and eighteen black names on every white page in the black notebook, white always goes first and if you know how to play, you win. That was his world, black and white like the little television he and his mother used to have, and now - all there was left was this gray ash, and nothing made sense anymore.
Their eyes met, and the man uttered a word in the language, a word so simple that even Teru understood.
But this is not how the story starts.
It could start in many different places, but it would probably be best to say that it starts in the warehouse.
On January 28th, the New World should have come. What came instead was the cruelest disappointment a man can experience - Teru thought he had found God, truly found him and was acknowledged by him, here on this Earth, but this illusion was shattered by words and bullets. What came next he remembered through a red haze. His desperation made him stab himself with his pen, and although the injury wasn't that serious, he lost quite a lot of blood, as he was told later. Later, when he was recovering in a private hospital somewhere, when he was also told that there was a plan B. That Kira's God complex didn't prevent him from making precautions, in case the meeting in the warehouse didn't go well. The plan that secured both his and Kira's survival was complex, as could have been expected, and Styrin explained it to him in a loving detail. But that was completely lost on Teru; his unseeing eyes were staring past the tubes stuck in his arms, past the Caucasian man with unsettling watery-blue gaze, past the high, narrow window letting in fragile and spidery rays of pale winter sun. When he heard that Raito Yagami took in account failure as an alternative and prepared for it in advance, enlisting the help of an organization that was supposed to be long since eradicated by his own hand - something just broke in him. It wasn't as painful as seeing what he saw in the warehouse, but in some way it was worse, because this time, his mind wasn't clouded like it was before, dimmed first by anticipation and then, for one unforgettable moment, by sheer ecstasy. Now his mind was crystal clear; he was so sane it hurt.
Why would God need a plan B?
Teru realized that Styrin was talking about his country again, the place where he was going to get them, one way or another, and interrupted him:
"When can I see him?" he asked, and his voice came out rusty with disuse.
Styrin made an indiscernible gesture with his hand, one that seemed strangely foreign.
"Soon," the gangster said. "When he is ready, he'll send for you."
He left not long after that, leaving Teru to his thoughts.
The meeting was awkward. Of all the scenarios he made up during the two weeks that had passed since Styrin's last visit, awkward was not one of them. He expected… well, something, although what that might be was hard to pinpoint. The child in him expected miracle. The bitterly disappointed, sobered adult hoped for an apology. The loyal servant expected precise orders.
Instead, he got awkwardness.
He was sitting on an uncomfortable metallic chair, repressing the urge to fidget.
Raito Yagami was half-sitting, half-lying on his bed. His fingers were absent-mindedly drumming against the light green mug with the lukewarm tea he was cradling. Teru's own tea stood on Raito's nightstand, forgotten. His whole attention was focused on the man in the bed, his gaze drinking into the shadows under his eyes and around his mouth, as though they could provide the answer to all his questions.
Yagami was talking, in a low, melodic voice, talking about that country. But it was very different from what Styrin was telling him before. Styrin was describing the defunct political system, the underworld workings, the reasons why this country was just ideal for them to hide in and bide their time. Curiously, Yagami didn't even touch a subject like that; he was talking about the native music, the long, thin pipes that produced a strange, haunting sound, especially when played in the valleys, the mountains with narrow passes and deadly avalanches coming in April and May, when they were no longer expected, some sort of delicious, but awfully smelly cheese-
Teru was tired of sitting on the uncomfortable chair, his body lately unused to any but horizontal position. He wished he could tune that voice out, to erase that beautiful, but completely irrelevant picture that was being painted for him. But it was impossible. No matter how strong his wish, he was still latching on every sound that left that perfect, shaded mouth.
Teru had always liked flying. He enjoyed the feeling that it was, contrary to many people's fears, the safest, by all means the fastest, and since he always flew in the business class, also the most comfortable way to travel. He enjoyed the little rituals it entailed - the female flight attendant, pretty in that sterile, advertising way that doesn't rouse any desires, the emergency exit is placed on your left, smile, please fasten your seatbelts and turn off your electronic devices, tea or coffee?
He was originally quite pleased with the notion of flying; things were looking too dangerous for that for a while, and they were considering taking a boat and then using the Trans-Siberian Railway, but eventually it turned out that the danger of exposure would be even higher, so they settled on flying.
Disguised and equipped with all the necessary fake documents, they managed to cross the security and get on board, in economy class where the college students leaving for a study exchange, who they were trying to impersonate, rightly belonged.
While the plane shook in another violent turbulence and the baby two rows ahead of them gave out a long wail, Teru was reconsidering his opinion on flying. The former prosecutor's eyes were fixed on the white mass of clouds outside the tiny window, but the muffled sounds from the neighboring seat involuntarily brought him a clear picture of his former God, retching into a brown paper bag as though it could save his life.
The doctors were right. You are in no shape to travel. He thought of pointing that out, but eventually decided against it because he found it pointless. As he did a lot of things these days, actually.
"Do you have a tissue? I've run out of mine," a voice asked him, trying to sound matter-of-factly but instead getting out rather shaky.
Teru wordlessly handed him the object; when they hands brushed, another turbulence started, even worse than the last one. Although his seatbelt was fastened, Raito Yagami still instinctively grabbed for something to support him; it was Teru's hand. The cold, clammy fingers clasping around his wrist felt like steel handcuffs.
The scenery was quite pleasant. It was not picturesque with vine-covered little houses with shingle roofs and cozy gardens, nor was it dramatically romantic with steep hills, black lakes and castle ruins. Well, maybe the village looked more inviting in the spring and summer, but now in late winter the naked, stern trees, grayish ground and unfamiliar figures wrapped in thick woolen coats and jackets didn't make him think of any documentaries he saw on life in Europe, which were mostly the kind of travel guides that makes one feel like planning a holiday. Here he was reminded of homelessness, of exile, which was exactly where he was.
Houses were on the small side, usually only one storey high with deep running cellars used for storage, full of apples, garlic, pickles, wines and strong spirits. There was a school, two pubs, a convenience store and three churches, which struck him as curious, for the village had but a few hundred inhabitants. There was a bus stop, but they were to learn that hardly any buses came here. The closest larger village, where the post office was, lay fifteen miles away, behind the gray hills; and it was a long way from any major town.
Styrin told them to wait in front of one of the houses and went inside. It was a rather shabby building with light yellow cracked walls and with casement windows in a desperate need of a new paint job. There was no front garden, which, as Teru noted, was the case with most of the houses here, but behind the house lay a generous yard, going down in a gentle slope. Shortly after, Styrin reemerged with a small elderly woman with darkish, wizened complexion, leaning heavily on her cane.
"This is my mother," Styrin introduced her, but didn't tell them her name. Well, Teru couldn't really blame him. "She will take care of you while I'm gone." The old woman didn't say anything at all, and her face, reminding him of an old apple, didn't show any expression. Styrin had already explained to them that he would have to leave immediately for supplies and weapons, but hearing that was one thing; to actually see his dark blue, Soviet-made angular car disappear down the hill felt strangely disheartening.
"He is not coming back," he felt like saying. "Don't be childish, of course he is," Yagami would retort, "why would he bother to help us, to take us all the way here? If he wanted to betray us, he could have done it in Japan."
But Teru wasn't thinking about betrayal. What he was experiencing resembled the feeling he used to have as a child, when his mother took too long in coming back, and he stared onto the dark street, waiting for the familiar coat - the beige one, the blue coat she only wore for special occasions - to show up and separate itself from the flow of passers-by by heading to their front door. Sometimes, when the silence in the small flat was oppressing him, tightening his throat, and there was no beige coat to be seen, even though the flow of passers-by had already broken down into a diminishing number of hastening individuals, he felt as though his mother would never come back, that something terrible happened to her. One such evening, his fears came true.
But he didn't tell Yagami any of this, of course. What would be the point in that?
Yagami, using the basic vocabulary he learned in the hospital and revised on the plane between the bouts of nausea, introduced the two of them, using their fake names. The woman didn't offer them any introduction of her own; she merely nodded and beckoned them to follow her inside. Again, Teru couldn't blame her. His eyes saw her name, of course, and he would divulge it to Yagami later if asked, but he couldn't think of any gain this knowledge could possibly bring them.
In the house it was quite dark, and Teru thought that the windows needed not only to be painted, but thoroughly washed as well. The old woman, leading them forward in a sluggish pace, was obviously unable to handle the house anymore. Finally they arrived to the kitchen, and Teru's suspicions were confirmed. All surfaces were scattered with pots and dishes, some empty, some covered in dried up food, all kinds of cooking utensils, bottles, empty or half-full, newspapers and other sundry items. The room smelled of food, decay, old age and medications.
The old woman pointed at the table and they sat down, cleaning the space right in front of them by shoving the items in the way to the edge of the table. She handed them two plates, which were adorned with the blue onion pattern common in these parts and thankfully clean, and used a ladle to load them with a dish she took from a big brown pot. It was some kind of potato dish with a lot of stewed vegetables and some smoked meat. It tasted surprisingly good, given the state of the kitchen. The same could be said about the strong tea she brought them afterwards - so strong, actually, that Teru supposed it was laced with something, but he was too thirsty to care.
While they ate and drank, the old woman was busying herself around the kitchen, probably cleaning, all the time mumbling to herself. He was sure he caught the name "Andras" a couple of times - Styrin's first name - but as for the rest, he didn't understand a word. He looked at Yagami who, even in such a place, was comporting himself so elegantly that he somehow managed to give the impression of a man enjoying a sophisticated meal in a high-class restaurant, but the other man just shrugged his shoulders. The language skills he had acquired so far obviously didn't extend to mumbling.
Never mind the actual words, from her tone alone Teru still had some idea what she was talking about; she was probably complaining about all sorts of people her criminal son brought to her poor home.
This hypothesis was confirmed later, when they were lead to the cellar that would serve as their dwelling. For a cellar, it was quite spacious, with high ceilings and solid floors. There were two beds, a couple of seedy mattresses, a simple table with two chairs and an indiscernible amount of empty bottles and cigarette butts. For a brief moment, Teru was shocked by a realization that he, an excellent prosecutor, university-educated, honorable, useful member of the society, was to take refuge in a criminals' lair. This thought managed to invoke in him the red blur of images from the warehouse, the familiar feeling of insanity tugging at his consciousness, and he willed it away with all he had. Instead, he concentrated on his immediate surroundings, breathing in the dampness rising from the walls and staring at the pool of light the high-up window in front of him painted on the dirty floor.
"Not exactly a hotel suite, but it will do," he heard Yagami say, and a moment later there was an unmistakable thud of a human body hitting a bed. He looked at the other man, who uncaringly splayed his limbs across the unclean sheets, his eyelids closed and surrounded by the shadows of fatigue Teru had grown used to see there. Then his eyes turned to the other bed; he too was tired after the long flight and a bumpy ride in Styrin's weathered car, but he couldn't bear to touch that bed, let alone lay down on it.
It was much later when Teru, too, could recline. It was pitch-black outside, and not much lighter inside, as the whole space was lit by a single bare light-bulb hanging from the ceiling.
While he was cleaning, Yagami occasionally thrashed from side to side, letting out something resembling a moan, but didn't wake. Not that Teru took any unnecessary caution to ensure he wouldn't; he gathered all the bottles and they made horrible rattling noise as he carried them away, putting them in the garbage can in front of the house. He briefly mused over the possibility of waste sorting here and then dismissed it as unlikely. He disposed of the cigarette butts and other debris and then swept the floor with a broom he found in a tool shed adjacent to the house. Just when he was half-way through with the sweeping, the old woman came in, probably roused by all the noise, and looked at him strangely.
Well, I don't think that any of her previous guests did this, Teru thought, when an idea occurred to him. As fast as possible, lest the woman leave, he finished the sweeping and took the dirty bed sheets from the unoccupied bed. He handed them to her, first making a grimace and then joining his palms in a pleading gesture. She nodded in understanding, took the dirty sheets away and soon returned with two clean sets. Teru bowed his thanks and she said something most likely meaning "you're welcome", first words she said directly to any of them.
He made his bed, but if before he felt too clean to sleep in such a dirty bed, now the situation was reverse. He went to a smaller room, where he had previously spotted a sink. Definitely not a hotel suite, but at least it was something. He washed himself as best as he could, brushed his teeth and then returned to the main room, where he turned off the weak, but stern light and finally lay down. As he lowered himself, the half-healed wound he gained by stabbing his chest with a pen began to throb, probably from the extortion, and just like on other such occasions the images from the warehouse threatened to overflow his mind. Most of the things that could possibly serve as a distraction were now covered with darkness, except for the white walls, dimly glowing in the dark. So Teru looked at them, trying to count all the cracks he could make out in the dark, breathing in the dampness and imagining how he would cover them in fresh paint, doing it with own his hands, for the first time in his life. This idea gave him a strange, new kind of pleasure.
When he next opened his eyes, it was almost noon, and he woke up to a sight of Raito Yagami sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, some kind of cake and a book, which Teru recognized as a textbook on the language of this country. His face was still pale, but the signs of fatigue were now less prominent, partly because he obviously washed himself and changed into fresh clothing. He looked perfectly at ease in his new surroundings.
At the sound of Teru's feet touching the floor, Yagami turned to face him.
"I'd wish you a good morning, but I don't know whether it'd be still acceptable at this hour," he said good-humoredly. "Thank you for making this place habitable. Also, I guess your orderly nature has warmed the heart of our old woman; look what she made us," he said pointing at the coffee and cake. As Teru approached the table, a truly wonderful smell of freshly brewed coffee and pastries filled his nostrils. It tasted just as wonderful; he couldn't remember when was the last time he had breakfast this good.
When his rapture over the breakfast subsided, he became aware of the eyes watching him and looked up from his plate.
Having his attention, Yagami handed him a single sheet of paper. Before Teru could focus on the meaning, he felt a stab of envy at the beauty of the characters. His own handwriting was rather neat and tidy, but he could never achieve such flowing elegance.
"As you see, it is a list of suggestions on what needs to be done with this cellar. I think we'll be staying here for a while, so we should make this as comfortable as possible," Yagami said and Teru finally started to pay attention to the contents.
Most of those things he had himself thought of - to get a proper shower, to do something about the toilet (Yagami said that Mrs. Styrin told them to use the outhouse in the garden, which he claimed to be in a dreadful state), to find something like a wardrobe to put their clothes in and some shelves for other things, and - he read this with an inappropriate feeling of joy - to paint the walls. There were also some ideas that didn't occur to him, like adding a small kitchen corner so they wouldn't be dependent on what Mrs. Styrin brought them.
"Do you agree? Do you have anything to add?" Yagami asked.
Teru gave a short nod, waited a couple of seconds and then shook his head. Yagami's eyes slightly narrowed at the sight, but he didn't comment on it. Instead he said:
"When we are finished here, I think we should start helping the old woman. We could only benefit from that."
They set to work and found out what the phrase "manual labor" really meant. Even after they - especially Raito - managed to more or less recover from their wounds, it was still hard. For one, it was very different from a gym work-out. Muscles he didn't know he had hurt him at the end of the day, and first couple of days he went to sleep totally exhausted. When they finished the alterations of their cellar, which itself took much longer than expected, they moved to work upstairs. Teru thought that it just needed a lot of cleaning, but it turned out that more than that was necessary.
The floor in the hall was molding so they had to redo it. Yagami took a long time measuring and drawing plans and persuaded the old lady to buy boards. When the boards arrived, Teru knew with one look that the length was not right. Yagami pursed his perfect lips in a vain attempt to hide his disappointment.
"I'll get us a chainsaw," he said finally. After some more haggling with the old lady, a man appeared with the required instrument. Yagami said his thanks, but eyed the saw with an obvious distrust. "He didn't bring any protection glasses," he mumbled, holding the saw as gingerly as one might hold an infant who just soiled himself.
Teru made a gesture for Yagami to pass him the chainsaw. When the other man complied, he silently started to saw the boards. With the smell of fresh-cut wood in his nostrils and the roaring sound successfully isolating him from the rest of the world, Teru felt happy, just like before when they were painting walls.
Then there were windows that needed replacing, chimney falling apart, unstable plumbing… Yagami half-jokingly suggested that it might be easier to just knock this house down and build a new one, and Teru could see his point. But little by little they saw the house change under their hands, to the obvious delight of Mrs. Styrin.
Whenever Yagami had a little time left, he used the opportunity to study from his language textbook. Sometimes in the early morning, when Yagami was still asleep, Teru would take the book to read it himself. In the bright morning sun those words seemed fresh and full of life.
Yagami practiced his conversational skills mainly on Mrs. Styrin; Teru didn't practice at all, instead watching Yagami's efforts at communication that often resulted in misunderstanding with the old woman, who would then smack her lips in obvious distaste and walk away, her cane hitting the ground with angry thuds. To see Raito failing at something left Teru feeling incredibly pleased, but he didn't show it. He made an effort not to show any emotions at all, including those that were roused in him by the other activity Raito practiced in his spare time - writing into a small notebook. Teru was sure that it wasn't the Death Note in disguise, but that didn't make it any less sinister. Who knew what kind of ideas or schemes were being confided into its pages? What kind of destruction would it bring? To think that he too once shared this delusion made him feel sick.
Sometimes Yagami would seek an eye-contact with him, daring him to ask the nagging question, but Teru always stubbornly averted his eyes. Ignorance was safer.
Go to Part 2/2