Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

L is thirteen years old when Quillish takes him by the hand and directs him to enter the room to meet the children. Too old, perhaps, to be holding his guardian’s hand, but L had never been one to waste thought on social conventions.

The children in the room are so small, so young, maybe they want to hold someone’s hand too, L thinks but doesn’t reach out to them.

They’re staring at him.

L was accustomed to stares: uncomfortable glances thrown at him for his unapologetically strange mannerisms, widening of eyes when he said something the adults deemed impressive.

These children’s eyes were different.

The children weren’t disgusted, they weren’t impressed. They were reverent.

They were looking up at L from their stiff white chairs, dressed in their stiff white uniforms, like cherubs in the presence of their god.

The girl, Alternative, was sitting ram rod straight in her seat, mouth agape as she peered up at L through her overgrown, auburn bangs. Her hands had a white knuckled grip on her chair as if she had to will herself to sit still. L had never seen a child with such a serious demeanour.

The boy, Backup, clutched his little hands together as if in prayer, holding his breath, he gazed up at L, unblinking, with disproportionately large, saucer like red eyes. L almost recoiled at their unnatural colour before concluding that the boy must have some form of ocular albinism despite his dark curls.

They were both a little too thin. The girl was tall for her age, all long, pointy limbs and hollowed cheeks. The boy was smaller, babyfaced with delicate, boney hands.

Alternative and Backup, maybe they’d had names once, real names. Not placeholders marking them not as people but as substitutes in case of his death.

L was hit by a sense of revulsion.

What had Quillish done?

It was an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance to know that the same man who had so patiently raised him had also overseen the upbringing of these not quite people.

L shifted where he stood. The children shifted in tandem.

Quillish pulled out another little chair across from them and L sat on it, legs pulled up, comforted by the pressure of his thighs against his chest.

The girl looked at the boy, looked at Quillish and then back at L quickly, silently pleading for some sort of instruction from someone.

The boy remained unblinking, glassy red eyes flitting between L’s face and somewhere above it. L noticed that when he put his thumbnail to his mouth the boy copied the motion.

Everything about them screamed hypervigilance.

‘Hello A, hello B.’ He said, not wanting to dehumanise them with the full words, he was uncertain as to how to continue.

The girl bowed her head. Tears in her eyes.

‘L’ muttered the boy in awe.

They didn’t say anything else. Seemingly too starstruck, it was up to L to continue the conversation then.

‘How have your studies been progressing?’ He asked, he didn’t know anything about them other than their studies.

‘We’ve solved most of the cases you sent us to practice with correctly so far.’ Answered the girl in a reedy, anxious voice.

‘The last culprit cut out his victims faces.’ Supplied the boy.

L is hit with another wave of revulsion, suddenly imagining two little children kicking their legs at a desk, pouring over visceral crime scene photos.

It had felt okay when he had done the same at a similar age but seeing these kids, four years younger than him talk about it made it seem so much worse.

He didn’t say any of that, instead he said:

‘Well done.’

The children’s eyes got even wider at that if possible. The girl’s fingernails were digging into her palms. The boy was chewing on his lip.

L looked up at Quillish, what was he expected to do? Everything was overwhelming. He wasn’t good at talking to people, why was he given this task?

No response. He wanted to leave.

He took a quick breath through his nose and stepped off of his chair. Pushing it back into the desk.

The children’s faces crumpled as he turned away.

‘Keep it up.’ He muttered hoping to placate them as he left the room.

The door shut with a dull, heavy thud.

-

The girl had been thorough about her suicide. There was no saving her and it was clear that that’s what she had wanted.

She knew exactly what to do. How could she not? She’d learned it all in class when she was six years old.

The boy had been the first to see the body.

The body suspended from their bunk bed with a skipping rope above a pool of blood and razors and empty pill bottles and a gun.

A had always preferred the top bunk.

They’d found B, mumbling incoherently between dry retches, numbers and days and minutes and numbers.

He’d known this would happen, this was just like what happened with his mommy. He’d said.

Dead people don’t have numbers. His best friend was dead.

He was getting blood all over himself in his flailing. Blood on his hands, blood on his face, blood, blood, blood.

Mere exposure effect, thought L, clearly could not desensitise a child to the sight of a corpse when it was the corpse of someone they loved.

L had cancelled all of his cases when he heard the news.

A was dead.

He remembered her as the nine year old little girl without a name who always hid behind her bangs.

Looking into her casket, she was taller, more gaunt. A blanket was pulled up to her chin, hiding the evidence. Her face was strangely swollen, evident even with the concealer the mortician had slathered her in.

Thirteen years old. Jesus Christ.

L felt a twisting guilt, maybe because he hadn’t reached out to the children, maybe because he hadn’t told Quillish to stop, maybe because for some reason, he wasn’t crying.

B was in the back of the chapel. L had been ignoring him, unable to come up with a way to comfort him.

He’d never been very good at that kind of thing.

The boy was wearing jeans and a long sleeved white shirt, soaked red where he’d been lying in the blood, clinging onto the feet of the body.

He had refused to change into anything else.

The clothes, L thought were the same as what he himself always wore, presumably chosen out of some messed up desire to imitate him.

It was like looking into a bloody, distorted mirror.

The boy had been sobbing earlier, loud and babyish, begging for attention, eyes screwed up as the stained glass spilled coloured light onto his face.

He’d stopped now. Now all he did was stare at L. Taking heaving, shuddering breaths through his nose.

His eyes were the same colour as the blood.

‘I hate you.’ He spits.

‘Oh.’ Says L. He’s so out of his depth. What can he even say in this situation?

‘Why don’t you ever do anything?!’ The boy shrieks.

‘If-if you’re so- how could you let this happen?! All I- all she wanted was to be you! How were we ever supposed to live up to it?! You’re supposed to be able to do anything but you don’t! I hate-‘

The boy is hyperventilating. Stumbling over his shaky words.

‘I’m sorry B.’ L says, reaching out a hand, to do what, he’s not sure. Something comforting? The hand is slapped away.

‘I don’t know what they’ve been telling you but I need you to know I’m a person B, not a God.’

Despite his words the guilt gets worse, it’s no excuse, he had the power to do something.

‘I’m a person too! I have a name you know! No one uses my name! She had a name too!’ He’s screaming the words breathlessly, gesturing to the casket.

He’s hitting L now, it doesn’t hurt much, the boy is small for his thirteen years and isn’t hitting hard.

Suddenly he stops, looks up at him, above him, at him again with wet eyes and a deranged smile.

‘L Lawliet.’ He says, and nothing else. Intonation suddenly eerily calm.

L feels like his heart stops, he freezes, there is no way this kid would know that.

‘How..?’ L asks.

‘I can see things other people can’t.’ The boy says wetly.

‘I could tell you when you’ll die too…’ he mutters. Something in his voice sounds demonic, devoid of humanity.

L pushes the kid away at this, taking a step back. He doesn’t want to know that. He doesn’t want to know that. He doesn’t.

L is about to run away, avoid the words, when, instead of the expected date he hears a whimper.

The kid is looking up at him from the floor now, curled up in a wounded way, maybe he’d pushed him too hard.

The manic expression has reformed back into something more shattered.

L can’t bring himself to leave. Instead, he crouches beside the boy and pulls him into a stiff, awkward hug.

‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’ Is all he can think to say.

They stay like that for half an hour until B passes out, L lowers him onto the stone floor and makes his exit.

He leaves the cold, still children in the chapel, one of them has disappeared by the time the sun has set.

Chapter Text

L was sitting in the burn ward of a stiff white hospital, in a stiff plastic chair at the bedside of a young man, handcuffed to the stiff metal bed.

There was bleeding through the bandages where the metal met the flayed skin of his wrist.

This room had three separate kinds of locks on it.

The man could not walk. Despite this, L had deduced that all of these measures were entirely necessary.

The doctors had kindly offered L a bulletproof glass barrier with which to distance himself from the man but he had refused it.

He could not sever that inch of human connection, not even for his own safety.

Retreating to preserve his own comfort had made a monster of him, he would not continue the pattern.

It had been six years since he’d last seen him, yet, B did not look so much older than he had when he was thirteen, but for the burns.

Really, nineteen was still very young but Beyond looked younger, fourteen or fifteen maybe.

There was a tragic sort of perpetual neoteny to his features.

Big eyes, small upturned nose, straight eyebrows, round face.

No matter how hard he tried he could not look like L, a real adult, one with longer, sharper, older features.

‘Beyond.’ Said L, not Backup, not B, not the boy.

Beyond swallowed thickly, L could tell talking would hurt him, as most things tended to when you burn yourself alive. Self immolation was usually done in protest, so L supposed it fit.

There were many ways in which a person could self destruct, B had always been one to take these things literally, Roger had said, L supposed he would be thrilled to know that they had that in common.

He watched Beyond pull himself into a modified version of L's sitting stance, as close to it as his extensive burns would allow.

It was strange, L thought, to see his own gestures reflected back at him, his own gestures but, perhaps, a little more childish, stunted, they were more akin to how he had acted as a young teen, L realised, Beyond must have memorised them during their first meeting.

'Everyone keeps trying to tell me that I did this because I wanted to surpass you, but they're just making assumptions, I didn't want to be better than you, I wanted to be worse. To be so bad that not even you, the worst person in my world could understand it. Did I succeed?' He asks, pleads, digging his fingers into the sheets to stay upright.

L knew all of this already, of course, there were very few things he didn't understand and Beyond was not one of them, but, he'd give him the satisfaction of believing he'd 'won', if only to keep him docile in prison.

'You murdered people. You killed a little girl in cold blood, Beyond, so yes, you are, objectively, a worse person than I am.'

'No.' Beyond says, blinks hard, shakes his head, like a kid who’s babbling was misunderstood, then continues.

'No, on that basis we would be equals, have you forgotten what you've done?' He whispers, leaning forward, too close, invading L's space. 'We’ve both looked a sweet, little, thirteen year old girl in the eyes and made the conscious choice to kill her, L Lawliet. Only one of us had the decency to make sure she didn’t suffer as we did it.'

L had nothing to say to contest that in a way that mattered. He could argue numbers, tell B that he was a brutal serial killer while L had only the blood of one child on his hands, indirectly, at that, but it would be a lie.

He blamed himself for Beyond's murders just as much as he blamed himself for A's suicide. He had walked into that room knowing that the program would ruin the children, left with that knowledge cemented and had made the choice not to do anything.

It was a strange cognitive dissonance to feel that this evil boy, who, after everything, according to all logic, really should not deserve anything at all, deserved an apology. An honest one. L wasn't good at honesty, but he'd try.

'You were little children.' He manages. 'I saw that, being around you, even thinking about you made me uneasy, I was frightened by you because I knew I had been doing something very similar at the same age and I hadn’t realised it wasn’t right until I saw the two of you. I am deeply sorry Beyond, that I knew, yet I made the decision, out of my own desire to continue to lie to myself, to do nothing.'

'Stop it. That doesn't make any of it better. Please don't lie to me. Please don't pretend to be a real person, not after everything.' Beyond replies, distress evident in the way his eyes move, glancing over L's head, reading, calculating, returning to eye contact then repeating the motions again, like a tic.

'I am a real person. That's not something you can ever understand because of how you've been taught, but I am, and I hope it brings you some solace to know that it haunts me, that day in the chapel. I see it behind my eyelids whenever I close my eyes. It will be the last thing I think of when I die. You know exactly when that, is don't you? That's what you told me. You can remember that date now, and know.'

'It's not fair. You'll outlive me. You'll probably be the one to kill me, won't you? Like you did to her?'

'I won't.' He says, he cannot be certain.

-

When the coroner called, L knew there would be no time, this time, to attend the wake, he was much too busy saving the world, trying to stop the person that had killed Beyond, the person who would kill them both.

Trying to stop Kira or trying to stop himself? He wondered.

Perhaps it was both.

The ringing of his burner phone sounded so similar to the ringing of the bells in the tiny chapel next to Whammy's house that he immediately dismissed himself from the investigation room to go somewhere private, ignoring the pair of eyes that followed him, narrowed, calculating, as he did.

L picked up the phone with two fingers held it precariously to his ear, he knew who it was without checking the number.

'Don't cremate him.' L said quickly, the voice changer in the device echoed his words back to him distorted.

'Beyond and A. Bury them together.' He told the coroner. 'Take A's body out of the orphanage grounds and bury the two of them somewhere else, don't bury them in that place, don't bury them in white, and, no matter what may come to pass, don't bury them with me.'

L was not a religious man but he had experienced first hand things in this world that were seemingly inexplicable. Beyond's sight had been something more than psychosis and an outstanding ability to predict, the supernatural elements of the Kira case all but confirmed that.

So, with this in mind, he felt the need to honour the dead in a way that suited them, just on the off chance that there really was an afterlife.

The irony of him being the one to choose these things was not lost on L. The irony behind him making choices on the behalf of these dead children who had had no choices in life that didn't link back to him, just to assuage his own guilty conscience, was bitter.

But he did it anyway, because, hadn't inaction been the root of it all?

-

L dies of a heart attack at twenty five.

It is nothing unexpected. Mere hours earlier he had heard the chapel bells toll death, ringing from the rooftops of a different continent to the orphanage, carried by the rain.

This is how it felt, he thought, to know what is coming, to be powerless to stop it.

But.

He died happy, in the end.

Because even as stained glass windows and stained, glass children flickered across his failing vision:

A sinister light shone down from above, and with it, the truth.