Work Text:
Love makes sense of a senseless world.
Misa picks up the dress from the dry cleaner’s on a pale blue Wednesday morning. She smooths down the sharp creases of the pleats and pulls the buttons through the button-holes. They rest snug against her spine. The stockings are brand new, not yet split with inevitable runs, and the shoes are shined black, stinking of leather polish.
She fastens the cap to her head, draws neat black lines around her eyes, and paints her mouth in secret-spilling red. The sleeves of the dress are so wide that she has to hold her arms apart from her body. She moves through the city like a doll made to walk around. When she catches her reflection in the windows of passing cars, she is as satisfied as she is terrified. The look of cold determination in her eyes keeps people out of her path.
She arrives at the investigation headquarters just before it starts to rain, and she can hear the patter of it on the roof while she sits in the gray waiting room and watches the blades of the ceiling fan whir above her. Over the intercom, Watari informs her with staticy politeness that Light is not presently available.
“I’m not here to speak to Light,” she tells him, calmly. She had rehearsed these words. She had rehearsed everything.
They let her through security after that. There is not exactly a rush to Aizawa’s steps as he leads her down the hallway, but he regards her with a level of engagement that he never has before. They all want the words that are stuck inside her throat. This kind of power is unlike the other kinds.
L doesn’t look like he’s showered, or even moved, since she last saw him. The door is shut with soft emphasis. He glances up from a screen as she takes a seat in the chair across from his. She has never been alone in a room with him before. She has only been alone in a room with his voice.
“I trust that you’re enjoying your freedom, Amane-san?” The words are flippant but the tone is deliberate.
Misa did not factor small talk into the bargain, so she skips past it. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
L angles forward in his chair, balancing on his toes. His neck cranes away from his body. “Yes?”
“I need to tell it to you, even though you already know.”
“Yes?”
Misa breathes in once through her nose. A world dissolves between her fingertips, snuffed out by the power of her—yes, her—voice: “Light Yagami is Kira.”
L does not blink, does not shift. The last word hangs between them in the cavernous office, flickering against the chrome, bruising the tile.
“Yes,” he says, after an extended silence. “He certainly is.”
—
She found them after school. The first thing she noticed was the big white space on the wall and the circle of displaced dust. She had been so long accustomed to everything in her house being exactly in its place that she had taken for granted that any part of it was movable. She took off her shoes, spit out her chewing gum, and poured herself a glass of water before she realized that the television was supposed to be there, and wasn’t. The rest of the clues came more quickly: missing stereo, trampled rug, garage door left open. She went into her parents’ bedroom thinking of the safe in the back of their closet.
When she saw the heels of her mother’s feet sticking out of the doorway, it took her a long time to understand what she was looking at. She stood in the hall and listened to the screeching laughter of the kids living on her block, chasing each other through the streets, living out scenarios of their own invention. She had a class trip next Tuesday, and she needed one of her parents to sign her permission form.
She needed one of her parents.
She went into the bedroom and looked at her father where he lay by the windowsill, the back of his head sticky with dark blood. She sat down beside his body. She knew she was supposed to call somebody, do something.
She knew there was a lot she was supposed to do
—
Misa can feel the change in her value. Their bodies tilt toward her in every room, and she is treated with a new and diligent hospitality. L doesn’t want her out of his sight, but he never says so. She doesn’t bother asking to go home, or to have any of her things brought to her. She feels unalterable, sealed forever into this single outfit, this made-up face. She makes only one request.
She knows they are watching on the camera. She knows the room is tapped, every dip of her voice transmitted, closed-captioned, and submitted to the record, but she speaks her mind, anyway.
“I didn’t do it for you.”
Rem hulks above her but casts no shadow. They are bodily incompatible, misaligned: one so big and slouching, the other stiff and small. There is no way for them to gracefully touch, or even so much as face each other. Misa’s neck strains, chin pointed on an arc of false pride.
Rem’s vast shoulders fold down in devotion. “Of course you didn’t.”
“I didn’t do it for me, either.”
Cat-eye blink, twitching lip. “No. You have never been selfish.”
“I have been selfish,” Misa argues. “I have. Everything I’ve done until now has been for myself. On his orders, yeah, but only because of how following his orders made me feel. Don’t treat me like I’m some kind of saint. I’m not. I’m not.”
Rem’s hand is as large as her face, fingers strong against her jaw. Being touched by the untouchable makes all the hairs on Misa’s arms stand rigid. Love makes sense of a senseless world, but love itself is senseless. Misa doesn’t squirm or even second-guess when Rem lowers the graying mass of her torso, straining the elastic musculature around her spine, draped in the air like an unmanned marionette, and presses their lips together. Her mouth is as cold and crisp as the sea.
She kisses Misa like she is some kind of saint.
Misa trembles on the inside, but her doll-arms hang straight and her doll-legs are locked at the knees. Rem’s enormous palm cupped around her cheek is the only thing that holds her standing.
“The world owes you so much,” Rem breathes against her face.
“I didn’t do it for the world.” Her lipstick has left an obscene smudge on Rem’s pale mouth. “I did it for him.”
—
No fingerprints, no recordings, just the testimony of the neighbor, which wavered under pressure from the defense attorney, eventually falling flat. Misa hadn’t seen him, but she knew him. There was something in the arch of his shoulders, the angles of his knees, that made her flesh crawl even before they pointed him out to her as the defendant. His eyes wavered from fearful to smug, depending on each turn of the hearing, and Misa felt her insides mirror his in perfect inverse; his terror was her joy, his joy her terror.
When somebody kills your parents, you are forever connected to that person. There is an invisible string that attaches your hand to their throat. Misa didn’t know that at the time. She didn’t know that if you yank hard enough, they will choke. If you put your two hands together and pray, they will choke.
On the day that the murderer of her mother and father walked free, Misa prayed to God for his death even though she did not believe in God. Not yet.
—
“What do you think will happen to him?”
L’s room stinks of body odor, black tea, and too much dust singed on the hot thrum of too many computers. His silhouette hunches against the light that creeps between the blinds. Somewhere in Tokyo, a college student is being handcuffed and put into the back of a car by a helmeted police squadron. Somewhere in Tokyo, the course of world history is changing.
L sniffs, scratches his chin, glances up. “I hope I won’t shock you if I say that he will most likely be put to death. I will push for life imprisonment, as I believe that his intellect and vision could, given enough time and rehabilitation, be of monumental use in my line of work. But please don’t be optimistic. The International Court of Justice will almost certainly vote unanimously for his execution.”
There is nothing tender in his voice, but she can see it in the twitch around his mouth, the directionless fumble of his hands. He, too, is prepared to grieve.
Misa nods carefully. Her head does not feel attached to her neck. “I understand. But that isn’t what I meant.”
L’s mouth opens, then closes. He doesn’t appear confused.
“I just wonder where you think he’ll go. Rem says that humans don’t go anywhere when they die, but, for some reason, I feel like he’s an exception. I feel like he was never really one of us, anyway.”
L swallows. She can hear it across the cool, dim room. “I’m sure he feels the same way,” he says. “I’m sure that was where the problem began. But, in the end, I think he will find, and you will find, and even I will find that none of us are really at all special. He may be special to us,”—and here, for a moment, there is a tremor in his voice,—“he may seem otherworldly and large, but to death he is just as small and insignificant as anyone. To death, none of us are special.”
—
When the man who held a knife to her throat clutched his chest, tripped over his own feet, and died, Misa was more confused than grateful.
She steadied her feet, forced them to walk her home, showered, slept, woke up the next morning and continued to eat, to work, to live, but she could not shake the feeling that the wrong prayer had been answered.
—
L lets her say goodbye.
Light’s wrists are bound at the base of his spine, his ankles corded together. Exhaustion crumples the lines of his face, not usurping his beauty, but aggravating it. He does not look ready to tell any truths. He does not look ready to die.
“Misa,” he says. “Misa, Misa, Misa.” He keeps repeating it. His voice loses cadence, the end of her name slurring into the beginning. “Misa.”
“Shhh.”
“Thank god you’re here. I need you to do some things for me. I need you, Misa.”
“I know,” she says. “Shhh.”
She wraps her body around his. The seams of her dress strain with the contortions. She feels him stiffen, but for once he cannot shrug her off or pull her in, cannot control the weight and depth with which she clings to him. She feels his heartbeat, quick as a rabbit’s. She feels his fear like it is a part of her.
“Misa,” he repeats.
She strokes his scalp, presses a kiss to his temple.
“Misa.” He is beginning to panic. “Misa. Get off of me. There’s so much to do. There’s a lot to fix. Are you listening?”
His body was always an unanswered question, remote and holy. Now she feels the points of his hipbones and the sallow slope of his spine. He is too thin, run ragged, propelled by will alone. He is not perfect, not quite sane, but there is something transcendental in him. Even after he is gone, the mountains will quiver in his wake. The oceans will boil. She will cry and cry and cry. She has her funeral dress picked out.
“Misa!”
He thrashes. He does everything he can to shake her off; she does everything she can to hold on.
“What are you doing? What have you done? What the hell have you done?”
She draws her knee up around his bound legs. The heavy leather of her shoe drags against his ankle, up his calve. She wraps herself around him and holds on as tightly as she can for as long as she can. Soon they will come and get her. Soon L will lead her down another long hallway.
“I love you more than God,” Misa says.
“How could you do this to me? How could you do this to me?” His voice is ferocious with fear, snapping, breaking, coming apart. She imagines her name in his penmanship. She imagines his name in her’s. “How could you do this to me?”
She knows how, but she does not think she could explain it to him, so she just holds him for as long as they allow her to.
—
When the right prayer was answered, everything inside of Misa changed shape. Two different friends called around the same time and told her to put on the same channel.
“You’re not going to believe it!” said one.
“It’s karma! It’s straight fucking karma!” said the other.
“It’s not,” Misa said. Her hand was shaking, bobbing the receiver against the side of her head, sending static down the line.
“Misa, are you okay?” the phone said.
“… acquitted earlier this month on one count of armed robbery and two counts of murder, he was found dead in his home early this morning. Although the official cause of death has yet to be determined, heart attack is strongly suspected. Many of the body-counter websites unaffiliated with the police have already attributed the incident to Kira, adding it to the mounting tally of this afternoon’s prison deaths…” the television said.
“It’s not,” Misa said again, although she had forgotten what she was arguing against. The heavy thing that had lived in her stomach for the past several months, growing heavier day by day, was suddenly gone, and the weightlessness threw her off balance. She felt as if her feet were no longer touching the floor. “It’s not,” she said again, but she wasn’t really thinking of what it was not.
She was thinking of what it was. She was thinking that God was real, and that he loved her very much.
—
The elevator only goes so high, and then there is a staircase. Misa’s ankles are weak in heels this high, so she climbs slowly. She is in no rush. From up here, Tokyo is quiet. The people on the streets below do not look like individuals, but a blurred mass, shifting in color, changing shape, thinning, thickening, constant and incomplete. The cars glisten in the sunlight. The buildings cast stiff silhouettes against the horizon. Mount Fuji waits patiently in the distance.
If it were possible to undo a prayer, would she do it? Would anyone? It is easy for her to stand on the roof of the investigation headquarters in crisp stockings and freshly painted nails, and know, given all the bodies tucked under her belt and the names held under her breath, what shape the world should take and what shape it should not. It is easy to realize that justice was always just a mispronunciation of grief for her and rage for him, and, in two wholly separate ways, love for both of them.
She loved the bones in his face, the effort in his grin, the quiver of his hands, the sure gospel of his voice. He loved her kills. He loved her deaths.
For L, she has left a confession, two Notebooks, and the Holy Bible. For Matsuda, a signed poster. For her mother and father: red flowers, a month’s salary’s worth of them. For Light: she leaves.
She doesn’t jump, she just steps. She has thought about this moment for long enough that the reality of it is underwhelming. She doesn’t fall, of course. It’s a neat trick. It’s a grip so tight it bends all the bones in her palm, but the pain is just as riveting as the height, and when her dress floats up around her on the current of the wind, hair whipping in her face, she lets out a laugh hard and bright enough to shock the pigeons.
Rem’s lips twitch, fingers tightening around Misa’s hand. They don’t stay still, but float, up and up and up, fingers intertwined. The city shrinks. The world shrinks. The air is cold, thinning, hard to breathe in, but Misa is not sure she needs to breathe. Misa is not sure of anything, except that she will not fall. Rem will not let her fall.
To death, she is special.
—
fin.