Welcome To The Family Ch 15 Nightmare
A/N: This is a Death Note fanfic. I don’t own Death Note.
***
He felt so impotent.
The man’s grotesque face was contorted further into a dismissive sneer as he grabbed hold of Ryuuzaki’s long, greasy hair and brutally pressed the mouth of the gun up against his temple. All he could do was watch helplessly and hope to find the man’s name before he did what he kept threatening to do-end Ryuuzaki’s life.
(That wasn’t his. Ryuuzaki was his! His nemesis. His to play with, his to kill-his!)
Thirty five seconds ago Yamada Jiro’s fate was sealed-just five more seconds and Kira’s Judgment hammers down from the heavens (or rather from the security room in The Imperial Hotel). But if he had a mind to that would be more than enough time for Jiro to pull the trigger and end L’s life and reduce the World’s Greatest Detective and the smartest man Light had ever known to a nameless corpse. Light was seriously wishing there was some way to make the notebook work faster.
He shouldn’t care. L was Kira’s enemy. L had to die. It shouldn’t matter how L met his end. It just… it seemed cheap; it was far too easy-such a victory would always ring hollow.
Light knew he shouldn’t have written those names in the notebook (he knew it was as good as announcing that he was Kira) but… (Ryuuzaki, his father…) It almost frightened him that he scarcely had to think about it before reaching for a pen…
He’d deal with that later.
Light checked his watch again and fought down his rising panic. It should have happened by now. He glanced back up at the monitors and did a double-take when he realized that Jiro didn’t look like Jiro anymore. For a moment he thought he was looking into a mirror. No, that’s not right. You’d think he’d know if he had an evil twin or something. No, something was definitely wrong. Why was he having trouble recognizing the face of L’s attacker? Had he suddenly developed prosopagnosia or something? That was a frightening thought and would put a serious road block in his plans to be God of the New World.
The image flashed and shifted again and for a moment Light thought he was looking at a copy of L’s face gracing the features of L’s attacker. But that didn’t make any sense…
No. That’s not right either! Besides, I know L’s face! I know that pale and sickly grey-white skin, the large, thick lips, the almost goblin-like pointed nose, and those almost non-existent pencil thin eyebrows which he sometimes quirks, Spock-like when he’s irritated by the simpletons we are surrounded with. I know every bag beneath those bulging dark eyes of his (they look black but if the light emitted from the laptop screen hits them just right you can see that they’re really this deep shade of dark blue-like the evening sky or twin sapphires. That’s how I might describe them if I was prone to gushing about L, which I am not. And I know his moods. I can tell when he’s stressed, when he’s depressed. He hunches in even more than usual-sometimes there’s a slight flinch, as if waiting to be struck. Sometimes I wonder if someone hurt him in the past or if he’s neurotic all on his own. That’s not right. No one should be able to hurt the great and powerful L. I bet he’s a freak on his own. In any case I made sure to memorize every nuance, every detail-anything that might help lead me to truly knowing L-to discovering his identity, I needed to know that face so well I could sketch it in my sleep because I need to be ready for the day when I finally learned the bastard’s name and put ink to paper. That’s all. There’s nothing more to it. (…Shut up, Ryuk.)
More importantly… the matter at hand-that thing is not L. How could it be? L is there as the hostage being held at gun… no knife-point (when did it become a knife?) and that thing is holding the knife…
Perhaps his brain had finally managed to process the image but it still didn’t make any sense-it was almost like he was seeing a Shinigami with L’s face-except for the eyes (sanguine eyes, luminescent eyes, Shinigami eyes?) A Shinigami with L’s face-that had to be the most disturbing image ever, and yes that even included Mello’s wardrobe.
Light shuddered in horror at the sudden mental imagine of a Shinigami L following him around, incessantly whining at him for cake and candy like Ryuk demanded apples and then wondered what the hell his brain was doing when he was in the middle of a crisis-this was L’s life on the line here! (Er… not that he cared about L. At all. Of course not-that’s utterly ridiculous.) It was like a part of his mind had shut down and he’d gone into a fugue state when the Death Note had failed to work. The Death Note never fails! The only possibility would be human error and the God of the New World does not make mistakes! (At least none that are worth acknowledging-that “prank item” being real, Lind L. Tailor, Naomi Misora… none of that mattered seeing that it would all work out in the end.)
Light startled out of his ruminations when he realized that the monstrous mockery of L seemed to be staring right at him; somehow locking eyes with him through the security cameras.
It was strange.
At some point the hotel lobby had disappeared, becoming what seemed to be some kinky hospital bondage fantasy. L was suddenly wearing one of those paper hospital gowns and was strapped down to an operating table; the monster that shared his face looming above him. There was a taunt in the creature’s eyes as they shifted and became naught but demonic crimson slits.
The audio crackled to life. “Care to join us, Kira?” The L-thing asked; his voice was gravely and deep, like a raven’s cough.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?” the creature cooed, the tone adding a kind of bored derision to his words as he far too casually plunged the knife into the detective’s heart.
“L!” Light shouted as he awoke with a start; his chest heaving as he gasped for air.
Just a nightmare.
Well, at least he hoped it was a nightmare and not the start of some weird sex dream.
“It was just a nightmare,” Light insisted; irritation bleeding into his voice as Ryuk giggled inanely from his corner of the room (his roommate obviously assumed it was that sort of dream.)
Light scowled as his eyes refocused upon the sights of his dreary and dusty bedroom-the one he had chosen because it had formerly belonging to a psychotic killer. (Now however it belonged to God.)
Light scowled at the dust motes dancing in the moonlight. Normally Light would very meticulous (as in obsessively tidy-his mother would settle for nothing less) and clean any room designated his to perfection but he hadn’t bothered cleaning it like he would had it been his own room because he’d been occupied with other things and it’s not like he planned to stay here very long. This wasn’t his room but his cell-let someone else clean it.
Damn, he felt dirty even thinking it. But it was also a strategic move; he could tell when someone had entered the room by the way the layers of dust would be disturbed (most frequently it was “small kid and robot” tracks.)
As Light finally got his breathing under control and his eyes adjusted to the dark he vowed, right then and there, that that was the last time he ever agreed to attend one of Matt’s late-night study sessions that involved pizza laced with suspicious-looking herbs. It had only become necessary this time because since Mello and Matt still weren’t talking to each other Light had ended up partnered with Matt in Computer Science Class. (Matt’s project was utterly brilliant! Now if he could just break the multiple encryptions on it, it would do much to further Kira’s goals…)
Light concentrated on taking in long, slow breaths and banishing the disturbing images from his mind.
How dare that nightmare monster do that to-!
Something is clearly wrong. Ryuuzaki should have at least contacted me to gloat by now. It’s what I would have done...
Though he was rarely wrong, Light admittedly needed more evidence than just his gut feeling to convince his jailers of the unpleasant truth-that something must have happened to L.
Light again sternly reminded himself that regardless of any personal feelings on the matter L was Kira’s enemy and he really shouldn’t care if L was lying dead in a gutter somewhere… but then again, he justified it to himself since he was pretending to be Ryuuzaki’s good friend it would be more suspicious not to be worried, so…
That was why he’d begun that job during Computer science class yesterday which Matt had christened “The L Stalker 6.0.” (Light didn’t ask about what happened to versions one through five or who attempted to create them though he was sure there was a story there.) Even if all this turned out to be nothing or, more likely, just some screwy manipulative tactic of the detective’s the program would still come in handy later. (It better not be just a manipulation or…or Kira would… kill him even harder than he had been planning to before for embarrassing him and even making him feel concern for the bastard!)
The problem was that L was L-the detective was so very secretive, Light was pretty sure that at this point no one, not even these kids… especially not these kid who hardly ever met him, knew L like he did (well, except for Watari. Watari probably knew L better than he did but the old man was unquestioningly loyal to L and so Light kind of doubted that the old man would be willing to have a heart-to-heart with a Kira suspect. Which was a damned shame; Light imagined chatting with the elderly gentlemen over a cup of tea, looking over L’s embarrassing baby photos, and oh-so-casually learning L’s full name. And his full name would probably be something plain or embarrassing like Lyle or Larry and he would have changed it to just an initial to make himself look cool because a say… “Detective Larry Melvin Poindexter” didn’t quite strike the same sense amount of awe and terror as the great and powerful “L” does.
“Well…”
Light was abruptly torn from his thoughts, he jerked from his place sitting up in the bed when he heard someone speaking to him and it wasn’t Ryuk.
“That must have been an… interesting dream, Kira.”
Light slowly turned to lock eyes with his super-persistent substitute stalker. The pale boy seemed to take on an ethereal glow, illuminated by the silvery light of the moon through the window and just like L the boy’s unnerving, coal black eyes tracked his every move though, as usual, the almost L-like sense of menace was kind of ruined by the fact that the boy was clutching a blocky toy robot like a security blanket.
“What the hell-” Light began with a snarl but stopped, his words tapering off into a groan. It was too damned early to deal with this crap. Light took a deep breath and tried again, this time remembering to keep a firm hold of his mask of civility… and sanity. “What are you doing here?”
Near rubbed his eyes with his free hand and whined “I couldn’t sleep” and in that moment Near looked like just a child instead of the current bane of Kira’s existence. It made Light wonder which of them was the better actor.
“I locked the door,” Light stated irritably.
“I picked the lock,” Near shrugged while folding the plastic parts of his robot up into a truck to so he could obnoxiously drive, or rather scrape it around the floor making “vroom-vroom” noises.
Light just rolled his eyes. “Of course. Because privacy means nothing to you people.”
“I assumed you’d be smart enough to know that mass murderers don’t get privacy.” The white-haired boy flashed him a creepy grin. “But I suppose it’s a point in your favor that you look so very innocent when you’re sleeping.”
“Only when I’m sleeping?” Light teased lightly, allowing a roguish smirk to grace his normally stoic features.
“Naturally, Kira,” said Near, rolling his eyes. “So, was it predictive?” the albino asked suddenly.
“What?”
“Your dream.”
Oh yeah, there was that line of bullshit he fed them about having psychic dreams. He really needed to remember to keep his story straight. Making stupid mistakes-that’s how idiots get caught and he was certainly no idiot (and if he had to change his story later he would at least have to have a really good excuse for lying in the first place.)
“I hope not.” Light answered honestly.
“What was it about?” Near asked, again sounding innocent enough but Light was familiar enough with how L operated to know the game and this line of inquiry was in fact a direct attack against him. The questions would come, tenacious and unyielding, and they would continue until his interrogator was satisfied. Until then they’d just keep gnawing away at him with the persistence of a dog worrying at a bone. Light found that in this scenario it was best to give them something to focus on rather than allow them to focus on ferreting out what you want to keep hidden. Also in his current role as Light Yagami, son of the Chief of police and the innocent wronged best friend of L, he would have no reason to lie about this really and it was best to disabuse the various perverts spying on him of the notion that he had been having a sex dream about L.
Light and took to fiddling with the blankets in an attempt to mask his reactions and because surely a “best friend” would be worried… “I saw L’s death.”
“How did you do it?” Near prodded.
“It wasn’t me!” Light shouted irritably, not even having to fake his annoyance. “It was this other guy-he kind of looked like L except he had red-eyes…”
Near’s grip slipped on his robot-truck in surprise and his truck went shooting under Light’s bed. This almost went unnoticed as Near had nearly gone into a sort of “super-thinking trance” upon hearing this latest revelation. Mello, with his big mouth, had mentioned the L.A.B.B. murder cases to Light but Kira should have no knowledge of what B looked like. Of course that did not preclude the possibility that he somehow learned it on his own… Or maybe Kira really did have psychic powers.
Near idly made to chase after his robo-truck but was stopped by a sudden hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t. It’s nasty down there-I’ll get it,” Light insisted.
It was already well-known that B had made many hidey holes beneath this room to store his gruesome trophies but it wouldn’t do if Near noticed that one of those hidey holes was recently used. Of course he had been careful but careful wasn’t good enough-he had to be perfect. These kids weren’t the detectives he usually deceived (though so far they seemed to be just as easily manipulated) but they were L’s protégés-best not to underestimate them. He wasn’t about to be done in by a dust mote being out of place. (He liked having it nearby and within easy access in case he needed to use it but perhaps it would be for the best if he moved it from its current hiding place to the old church today. Yes, that did seem like the best secondary hiding place.)
“Here you go!” Light declared; turning on the charm as he produced Near’s errant toy.
“You have a spider in your hair,” Near observed. The child prodigy watched in amusement as Light jumped and made an odd strangled sound before coming to his senses.
“Opiliones, said to be the most venomous spider in the world…”
Using Near’s robo-truck, Light batted the offending creepy-crawly out of his hair and onto the ground and followed this up with a thorough smiting with his sneaker so that it’s little spider guts were now ground into the floor boards.
Ha! Take that! As if a pathetic little bug could ever take down the God of the New World! Light smirked down victoriously at his latest victim.
“…But that’s a myth,” Near continued in a bored, lecturing tone. “Opiliones, commonly known as the harvestmen or the daddy long legs, are quite harmless. It’s actually physically impossible for them to even bite humans and they eat many harmful insects. I notice you did not hesitate to kill it, Kira.”
“Oh for the love of… You said it was dangerous!”
Whatever Near was going to say was interrupted by an incessant pounding on the door.
Light sighed, straightened out his black and white fuzzy skull and cross bone pajamas (not his usual choice, honestly, whoever picked out his wardrobe had a sick sense of humor) and went to answer it. When Light opened the door and an exhausted and harried looking Matt spilled into the room. Matt stood their shaking in the doorway for a moment before gripping the lapels of Light’s pajamas in his desperation and began shouting at them with a manic and slightly spaced look on his face.
“You were right! He’s gone!”
***
Previous Next