Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/9396524. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: M/M Fandom: Death_Note Relationship: L/Yagami_Light, Beyond_Birthday/L Character: Yagami_Light, L_(Death_Note), Beyond_Birthday, Watari_|_Quillsh_Wammy, Soichiro, Matsuda_Touta, Aizawa_Shuuichi, Mogi_Kanzou, Misora_Naomi, A_ (Death_Note), Amane_Misa, Ryuk_(Death_Note), Rem_(Death_Note) Additional Tags: Emotional_Manipulation, Psychological_Trauma, Blood_Kink, Fighting_Kink, Biting, Homosexuality, Insanity, Cruelty, Anal_Sex, Anal_Fingering, Blow Jobs, Obsession, Obsessive_Behavior, Stalking, Dominance, Sadism, Animalistic, Grinding, Inappropriate_Erections, Inappropriate_Humor, Gore, Sexual_Violence, Consensual_Violence, Threats_of_Violence, Gun Kink, Knifeplay, Violence, Crime_Fighting_sorta, Dark, Alternate_Universe -_Canon_Divergence, Angst, Sociopathy, Rough_Sex, Rough_Kissing, L_is_a Dick, Isolation, Crime, gangs_probably, Dark_Past, Past_Child_Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug_Abuse, Mass_Murder, i_dont_know_what_else Stats: Published: 2017-01-20 Updated: 2017-06-15 Chapters: 2/? Words: 1859 ****** Ribbons, imagined cosmic entrails ****** by Craft_Logically Summary B and L are dead, together they’re alive   or, Light wants to be the only killer in L's life. ***** Favorite Record ***** B was insane. B was him cast in the light and he was doomed to the shadows. Or blessed, it was easier to see himself as one or the other but, he was such an indescribable shade of grey. . . . .  it was no wonder B laughed at him. Like he was now and had been for the last 5 minutes.   B’s laugh was piercing with a raspy undertone that scraped his flesh from his body. Unveiling him B would say, that's all B ever wanted to strip off the layers surrounding L in every sense. Sometimes it worked, but if anything B had just bought him a new wardrobe that he was becoming disturbingly comfortable in. One should not be comfortable in anything they know is tailored by a mass murder. But he really must digress, the situation is spiralling in such a unusually destructive way. B’s always had a penchant for that, it's part of why he still has L’s interest after all these years; his insanity, oh B’s insanity. It's was chilling, fascinating and at times utterly hilarious. At the moment it was proving to be all three, as well as greatly arousing. “Make them stop Lawlie pleaaassssse” B drew out his last word, crawling towards L, inhumanly jerking about as he did, he looked possessed. Them . . . the cacophony, inexorable manifestation of B’s childhood and the games they played. It was killing him, pushing it’s way out at an uncompromising speed. The rippling underneath his skin barely contained as it made to burst, was swelling his form and dribbling out the seams; it’s why he was there. B was always honest in what he said, always playing a game with what was unsaid. He was almost as good as L, but B let’s his emotions run. The game requires none. L meets these requirements. It’s not that he lacks emotions, it’s that he barely feels them. Emotions are fading ghosts and he is alive, so why bother with the dead. He has B after all, a carefully crafted conduited he could never fully predict. B really was his favored destruction: that special flavour of broken, captivating his mind and touching something in his soul. How could it not? B’s edges were jagged and broken in the most peculiar way, it was bound to draw a few onlookers. L was not included in the onlookers. He was the only one jagged enough himself to become a participant. Other than A, but she had died during the climb, so she didn’t really count. She thought, she could smooth the points, to soft hills. They impaled her, and grew from her blood; he took a bath and wondered how it would paint him. Pushing her over hadn’t, been easy. Her footing had been sure and hopeful, but once the right spot was found. . . it was all about the slow application of pressure, and he watched her shatter, and fall. B’s edges impaling what was left of her, it was glorious to watch. A’s remains fell, and the fault lines in B appeared, they bounced off him, and then fell again, and the fault lines grew fault lines and broke off into a gaping wound. Transfixed was inadequate at the breaking of the chrysalis; it demanded so much more. B tore into him as he shattered, shrapnel burying in a frenzy to fuse with his anatomy of angles and plains unknown, for nothing was more exciting to a genius, than the uncharted landscape of his field. ***** Chapter 2 ***** He’s following him down dark corridors and feels ridiculous doing so because it’s so 50’s noir; sacrifices must be made for the sake of the game. He’s fifteen and he hates anything repetitive, which is what this game is getting, B being a full inch taller than him is an added insult. 50’s noir films are so trashy that he thinks he might just fuck B on the table in his room; room 17, and he’s cliche. He’s not cliche, he decides as he slinks after B. He’s just too high out of his mind to think of anything better, like all the possible repercussions of starting his pointillism career in a dingy hotel with moldy foundation and a highly unethical past, there are, he muses as B unlocks his door, better places for it. Then again, patterning his fingerprints across the wall and signing it in the bottom right corner with bullet holes, Lawliet, is such a tempting thing he’s not sure it can wait. A man walks by, in his forties and reeking of cigars; it can wait. Art is nothing without the people, and these he drifts by the man's room, right next to B’s and smiles, are not people. He pulls out a card silently and opens the door feeling cigar fumes wash over him as he steps in, feels a dead body look at him as he turns with his step, to close the door behind him. His eyes slowly move up the door as the breathing behind him gets faster, louder, filling the room with something besides the threat that walked in. He stops and is still, aside from the slowest smile he’s ever had crawl onto his face. The badly stained diagram, showing how to escape the building, in case of emergency, is directly in front of him, perfectly at eye level. “A? Don’t disappoint” is the last thing he ever says and means. All the other words after that, he muses on his back in a hotel, as the sky crashes down through the ceiling like the drugs in his system, were badly constructed lies.   He wakes up with blood stains from his bleeding nose, on the carpet of a five star hotel in Paris. He slowly pushes himself off the carpet and to the bathroom, only to end up in front of the mirror, hair matted and greasy, staring at his slit wrist and wondering at the outcomes; they’re all. . . far too overdone, for his taste. Later he's not sure when or how he broke the mirror, but he knows for certain, he wasn't trying to kill himself when he sat on the railing of the fire escape and fell backwards, or had he leaned? either way it hardly matters. Within a few hours he’s gone a ghost in the system and on the phone discussing the details of his flight to Tokyo with Watari.           His hair is clean when he stops at the next hotel, not that it matters he owns this one anyway. Architecture is bitch, but like a dead mass murder, it’s fun to fuck around with.   20 minutes later he’s finished snorting a bag of blow and regretting nothing, while ruminating on the many species of rats in the world and how impractical the Canadian government is; its been a long week. He moves across the room silently, feeling the carpet brush against his feet like Ferdinando Carulli - Sonata Op. 5 hums through the air, B’s favourite composition piece, “the best composition piece created by a French composer” was the most disturbing thing he ever heard come out of B’s mouth. Whimsical never had been his thing, that was B’s quirk. Cocaine and mind games was L’s, with just a dash of morphine and a splash of Benzodiazepines.   Halfway out of the bathroom, he stops and realizes he left a large sum of his drugs in Paris. “Shit” he looks down at his chest and watches his skin move in the light, his ribs are valleys, his chest a pristine sheet of snow; Watari enters the room and sighs, he looks up skeletal orbital cavities and bloodshot eyes with overly dilated pupils not helping him any. “Do you have fun destroying the only reason you’re not dead, or incarcerated for that matter?”  the question is posed as if he were speaking to a lord, in England he would be “my mind  works awfully hard, wouldn’t you say it deserves a little pampering?” his answer is posed like a snake about to bite. Watari it seems is uncaring of the threat in the room “pampering your brain would be sleeping more than a couple hours every 5 days, not taking increasingly interesting combination choices of drugs” he sniffs at the end of that one, and L’s too tired to bite. He’ll need to quit for this case anyway, better to let Watari think he’s won one than that he never got through at all. He sits in his chair and slowly draws his legs up to his chest nibbling his thumb thoughtfully as he becomes a character, one that will be set for the remainder of his time in Japan, one that should have been decided in Paris. He’s always been good at characters, maybe that’s because it made every interaction a manipulation, something the young him adored, something the 24 year old him is fucking tired of. The moon dips low in the night and cool air rustles through his hair as he stays in that position, fixated on the smudge in the corner of the left side of the window. When the sun peeks up over the buildings of Tokyo and birds start chirping to each other, he stays in the same position and stares, it’s only when Watari comes 2 hours later that he moves; “shall we begin, sir?” He doesn’t respond. L instead, stares with empty eyes at an innocuous smudge then shifts, slowly. The only tell of his shift, the creak of the chair before he slowly, deliberately agonizingly, reaches out with his arm and stabs his thumb down on the smudge, tilting his head as far as he can to the left without altering his body’s weight distribution. A muffled thunk marks the end of the intolerable screeching sound one’s skin dragging across  glass makes; Watari is silent unflinching the whole time. L picks up his hand at the same time as his head and flicks his arm to rid himself of the substance he picked up from the window. Then slowly brings the offending limb back to his body, wrapping it around his knee, he pauses for a fraction of a second in turning his head to Watari, eyes wide and naive with large black bags under them when he gets there “yes, I think we will” his eyes drift away and his thumb finds it’s way to his mouth, under his teeth. Watari doesn’t react to his now lilting monotone, he only moves across to the other side of the room and begins unpacking equipment. The room is engulfed by the clutter of noise as bags crunch against each other and metal clanks dully.   L thinks the snow falling outside in roaring wind, eclipsed by twisters of sand, might only be in his imagination; dead bricks are ringing in his head as withdrawal, crawls under his skin, like ants, like Beyond Birthday slinking into his frame, making carnality and homicide the same thing, until they weren’t, until it ended, and L was so confused about the tectonic plates of his brain he ran to Berlin to make waves.     He misses Beyond, like snow touches concrete; inevitably.     Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!