Work Text:
It’s dark outside. He can see it; the curtains aren’t drawn and so the night invites itself in, curling like tendrils of cold brightness from distant stars through the windows and into the corners of his room. He remembers that the stars greeting him now are already dead. It’s only that the long journey- from their galaxies to hit the edge of his face, or the pen lying on the table that glints under their gaze- has hidden the fact that they are corpses. He looks out at them. Maybe they could make eye contact. From one dead thing to another, in the most breathless hour of the night.
Normally he wouldn’t be dead. He’s carved out of stone in the daylight. Something like a statue; alive under the gaze of someone weaker, softer, more malleable. He carves himself hollow at night, and that is when he is dead.
Late- like this, like this bleakness and blankness and emptiness, late like this- is the moment in which he rots. It’s when the moon: his namesake, which he bears only as he bears anything else; in appearance- is central, and unavoidable, that he is allowed to become a foul thing. It’s the darkness; the sleep deprivation that makes me feel like this, he tells himself, though his mind is dagger-sharp as at midday, once I sleep a moment, I will not be putrid at all. The marble coating is solid. It is not a casing for decay. That is what he tells himself while he ignores the festering of flesh behind his eyes.
He shakes. He promises himself it is not in fear. He hasn’t got anything to fear; fear cannot fear anything at all. He has become fear, now. He does not fear himself. The shaking is unassociated with any emotion at all.
A book. There is a book in a drawer where the freezing light shards can’t reach. They stab at the outside, futility, but they can’t pierce the innards. He starts, and he stands, and it strikes him that perhaps he could prove that he is not dead. He could shake away the rot in one action, and be rid of it forever.
The beams of light are from dead things hanging deceitfully in the sky. Therefore, to confirm he is not dead- he will never be dead- he opens the drawer. He does what dead pieces of light could never, and removes the dog-eared old thing to hold in two hands, to gaze at and then for the hundredth time put a hand to the leathery black front cover, as if to open it.
He knows that if he turns it over, it will fall to the right page.
He doesn’t want to. He’s proven his point now, to the unfeeling sky, if not to the putrid feeling that still clings around every one of what might, faintly, be bones in a human body, susceptible to breaking and crashing and falling from things; from chairs, from grace. He doesn’t have any reason to check. The name won’t disappear just because he decides not to read it.
In that way, couldn’t not reading it be one last victory? His triumph so secured he doesn’t ever need to bother in the menial task of checking what it really was that struck a brain through the middle of its thought, in the end. It could be another moment of clutching the soil over his body- which is rotting too, maybe at the same pace, if only the gnawing at him would slow a little. Another moment finding each trivial thing reminding him that fear and hatred are inextricably meshed forever and for all eternity, but he’s built himself as only one half of that whole. He is the fear. Hatred is nobody. He is hatred now. And how he hates it. He hates hatred like he fears fear: never, unless the night is dark and he has left the curtains open so that the moon can look back on the creature that bears its name. The creature is fear, and it pretends to be hatred because it is afraid.
Blinking, he flicks to a page. A line. A name.
L Lawliet.
He removes the page, the line, the name, with his exhale. It tears out like breathing comes to a dead thing like him. Perfectly.
For a moment he considers destroying it the same way as the slice in his watch that was used to reinstate his power, by letting the paper melt on his tongue. But there’s too much of this one. He couldn’t soak it in enough red wine to remove the bitterness of ink; so flawless in its use, but like coffee grounds in taste from where it drew the lines in the book.
No shredder would ever be fine enough to remove that awful, grotesque name forever.
His eyes glide softly to an unlit candle.
Quietly he strikes a match and feeds its flames from match to candle, from candle to paper. He pinches the corner of the page in such a familiar way it makes his ears ring. Ring like sirens, not bells.
The flame is beautiful. So is everything it touches, the way it curls in on itself as it destroys, and it makes the ash itself burn up and mingle with the air of the room. L Lawliet is in his chest, smoke in his lungs, as he disintegrates entirely. He watches with a strange fascination- or less strange, just fear admiring a beautiful thing, maybe- as the fire creeps closer and closer to his thumb. His eyes shine with anticipation as it finally reaches out to him and-
-he drops the thing. The lick of pain it gave rebounds on his skin, mockingly. He scowls deeply, and blows harshly on the charred crisp that was once a tiny corner of paper. Only the section that was pressed between his fingers is still grey, instead of black like the eyes that it finally closed. It flitters helplessly across the table under his breath, and the cinders at its edges go dark. Gently, he pushes down on the small burn mark on his skin with his other fingers, almost marvelling at the injury. Burned, by fire.
Burned, but not reduced wholly.
He must be alive. He isn’t fear and rot and the moon and dead and hatred and fire and hollow and making eye contact with corpses of stars through his window. He is burning. He is alive.
He is alive only because the candle means it is no longer dark.