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The Other Side of the Mirror	By : evisceratinglilly Category: Death Note > Yaoi-Male/Male Views: 3379 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note or any of its characters nor am I making a profit out of this fanfiction.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
I don’t fear anything… I’m not afraid of anything. Fear is absurd; fear is weak; fear is downfall.

Fear is for those of the weak-minded, not withholding the mind capacity and brain space capability to formulate cogent thoughts and brilliant conversations—fear is for the inane and only the inane are capable of letting fear conquer and bask their lifestyle.

For only those who live in fear will eventually be destroyed by the fear of themselves within to go outside without the ability and courage to confront that thing that will kill them the most psychologically—internally.

The weak hearted won’t stand a chance against humanity—it’s a miracle they survive everyday without being pummeled by a 3 ton semi-truck cruising at a careless, fast pace down the streets.

Or worse—eliminated by the wrath of the almighty pretentious Kira, self-proclaimed god and divinity for those who follow under his rule and suck up to his glory.

What they don’t realize that even a simple otherworldly piece of paper with the magic ability to kill in command with just the scratch of a name and a picture of a face isn’t an act of justice and will never be the act of courage to stand up to the world’s rotten scum crawling like the dirty vermin they are, scavenging around humans to steal from those who make a living out of their own lives—those who were raised and born innocent in the eyes of justice, who only served their purpose to contribute a little more to this decaying piece of scrap called Earth.

They don’t realize that the act within itself was a product of fear, a product that if by killing other criminals crawling about, creating this illusion of fear to make humanity live by, is fear itself warped into a justified system mentality of the insane.

By killing these criminals, the perpetrator slowly eliminates the percentage of fear inflicted in every day living and the increased probability of their demise by these humane monsters—because nature can’t simply be stopped, it’s a natural disaster and way of life that has to occur and only a brilliant mind wouldn’t think of creating some other device to stop the forces of nature’s wrath to help their well-being and secure their existence in land.

Eventually, every living creature, whether mortal or immortal, whether old or young, whether pretty or ugly WILL die. It is the natural established way of life—it’s the cycle we were born to live and repeat perpetually and it is the cycle we will keep living regardless of unnatural beings populous outside of our dimension.

Every little ideal behind this theory is a product of simplistic fear—fear eventually consumes and turns psychosomatic and ruins the mentality’s way of healthily gearing.

By fearing everything there is to be feared, fear itself becomes a part of your being… and living in fear is being a coward and missing all life’s purpose of living at all and enjoying the state in which we experience the wonders a mind thoughts can reach and what we can all create…

L had followed that leading trail with the empty bottle of jam towards the library. To his disappointment, however, there was absolutely no trace of anything he was hoping for to pop up, grab him and take him away like he had deduced.

What a great disappointment.

And since he wasn’t about to waste more time on this pathetic attempt to rise someone from the dead every paranoid brilliant head in this manor had believed was roaming around ghostly causing chaos, he busied himself back in the path to his chamber in another attempt to place his mind to think—that way, he wouldn’t forget to ever do so.

No cases to work on—had to keep the brain busy.

Sugar break was over. Went better than he expected except for that little stunt his lover pulled.

He should have seen that one coming.

Where had he gotten that book, however? Light had never answered that question. He had pulled off the same shitty attempt L’s stupid routine defaulted as evasive maneuver whenever a situation wasn’t convenient for others and they weren’t as privy as his head was to the theoretical—and probably almost 100% true—situation.

However, it seemed that the sugar withdrawal—even when calmed by the rescued attempt of shoving pastries of every kind and filling after the butler had peeked at L in the kitchen (a shock and a first)—had taken some toll on him before rescuing his stomach from such a devastating aching feeling of hunger.

That was strange.

But the woozy feeling was there, hazing his view and attacking his mongoloid structure, staggering him down the hallway to a nearby bathroom—and by bathroom, it meant a bedroom-sized room with all the luxury and pricy convenience a bathroom of his stature and liking could withhold. Probably something that would go perfectly with Light’s high class, pompous personality.

A whirl of black entered and blurred underneath the mirroring glass’ level. The detective had to wash his face, break more sense into his body—perhaps shove down more sweets down his gob before he resorted to catatonic critical thinking mode.

Hopefully, the extremity and excessive amount of consumed sugar would get his body going again with affirmative insomnia to survive by in this hellhole.

What was he thinking bringing his lover along with two of his successors in the same living space?

Perhaps he had calculated his ability to handle this situation a little better than he thought he could… stress didn’t take toll on L ever—he was too sugary-induced, childish and mellow to even let such a silly thing as frustration caused by the people he had learned to love throughout the years get to him.

But it had… and that was the bad thing, wasn’t it?

These moments of realization were the things that often killed him on the inside…

And that gut-wrenching feeling it brought upon him when his mind resorted to faded clips of the past with the dreadful copy that wanted to surpass his being as the world’s greatest criminal creating the world’s most unsolvable cases. Of the secret things they allured of each other and yearned to do that were fabricated as hate in the world’s eyes…

Of the imagery that happened during the night, the scare tactics that made L restless, the dreadful secrets lying behind the closed doors of his closet, the sealed space underneath his bed or the lit patch of darkness creeping in the corner of the room, mocking him while endlessly searching for the switch to shut down his brain and make the voices stop from telling him grotesque things a human child like him should never hear in his existence…I am the one you should be fearing…

Sticky notes on the bed with random meaningful exerts only they knew how to accurately interpret as a message for their next course of action.

“There is nothing to fear—I fear absolutely nothing.” Splash of cold water cascading smoothly down the planes of his daunt face.

Stop lying to yourself. I am THE One you fear.

“I have no fear.” Another wavelet of water rippled at the break of contact with his face, saturating stray locks of hair peaking in from the back.

After every refreshing feel of water caressing his face, his eyes would close, and that overly comfortable feeling of wanting to keep them that way would wash over.

When did he need this much sleep? L never slept—sleep was rare in his life and highly unnecessary. It only deprived his mind of the endless high-strung whirl of thoughts that restlessly traveled through his head.

Then why did his eyes kept shouting comforted-electrifying feelings to the nerve signals in his brain as if sleep was a very essential thing at the moment?

More sugar—the answer.

He just needed more sugar to keep awake. When was the last time he greedily consumed towering amounts of sweet, cart after cart, to indulge his palate and satiate the addictive crave his body usually ran on?

Just more sugar in monstrous servings. He would be on it without a second thought or hesitation.

“Fear doesn’t exist.” His brain reverberated back to the topic of fear, replaying the self-recited and created soliloquy to eliminate all thought of that dreadful nightmare of his shadow ever existing and showing him what fear actually was.

All meaning of fear was gone.

“What is fear?”

There was a sudden impact from the back of the shower and a loud slam! visible in the sliding motion of the shower’s glass door, causing all shards to collapse into the floor.

There was such a lovely symphony about the pattern in which the glass impacted the floor and screeched loudly in his ears that brought all memory back in a gasp of flashing fluid movement—one word that could carve along the atop of his head, one word that would corrupt his world forever: F E A R.

“I am Fear.”

L twirled around just in time for the big blackout that followed through and flooded his eyes, shutting off the crucial rational part of his brain and sinking him down to an unconscious sleep where even dreams and nightmares couldn’t haunt him with the word fear… with the feeling fear, with the person Fear.

* * *

There was a horrible blur, followed by an impact of too much meshing, watered down colors and washed out scenery. Everything was melting together in one terrible whirlwind of warped imagery and a wave of vertigo and dizziness struck him like a wall back down to the flooded darkness…

…which was the last thing he remembered happening after a loud, ear-splitting noise behind him.

Where am I? But that was foolish to ask, only the words didn’t spill from his moving lips.

“You move your lips but the words, they just fall to the floor…”

There was that voice—that monotone voice much alike his (extremely similar, lack of inflection and enthusiasm checked) that had sounded disembodied but had been clearly spoken somewhere behind him in the momentary shock of impact and then shut down.

Wait. That line… it was familiar…

You lie awake with the hope that it’s all in your head..

Yeah, that’s exactly it. It was all in his head. Probably the lack of sleep and the signals of his body trying to shut down and get some rest had blinded him into unconsciousness and he was dreaming. He had even gone to the point of hallucinations of imaginative and very surreal sceneries before unwillingly succumbing into the shut overload of his brain.

Oh, what the human brain was capable of—everything could seem so real and so solid when it wasn’t… so believable and so very tangible.

Insanity at its best~

“I dreamt of the day that I could see you again, L Lawliet.”

The detective, still hazy from the blow on the floor, probably a tad confused and having trouble even registering the strange location he had found himself at—it didn’t seem like his manor at all from what he could depict between the futile squint of his eyes—averted his head in the direction that voice had been coming from to no avail—there wasn’t a body to accompany it.

Funny thing was that nothing was drowned in darkness as he had expected it to be when his vision began to clear a little bit more—his head still cloudy from beforehand.

There’s no relief in the dark from what isn’t there, but you don’t feel alone.

His eyes averted, after all the dizzying tomfoolery his vision was causing him, towards other places, piecing together that he probably was in an abandoned building of sorts—a hospital, most likely. All the paint was peeling from the walls, dulled, gray and almost ash-looking. The plaster was cracked, the foundation didn’t look very stable—it had a couple of good years on years upon it. There were empty, tattered beds nearby and rusty IV poles circling around them from once upon a time…

He took sudden notice of the plaster molded into a bed from the floor right in the middle of the room and a rush of panicky static flooded his inert limbs. It looked like it had been freshly made—the color didn’t quite match all the washed out and abandoned looking surroundings.

And from behind it emanated a mirroring image, peaking with wild black tufts of hair (even more bewildered than L’s, spiked higher and electrified looking) and two pair of raccoon-esque wide eyes gawking endlessly in the same direction—directly at him… only this time, like his dream from a while back, they were a bright, rich milky red.

And they were gazing endlessly into his soul—if he even had one—or at least it seemed like it.

How could he ever forget that crazed, bewildered look from the gangly copy that terrorized and influenced every single stream of dreams he caught whenever he found the ability to fall asleep?

That imagery was forever engraved into the most crucial, vial and essential brain cells that structured what was his… well, his brain.

The thing on the other side of the cement bed loomed over the corner and all of a sudden spider crawled his way through its length, stopping abruptly in a crouching position, leveling face-to-face with the all-too-morbidly curious stoic detective, marveling in his own expressionless way at this creature.

“Lawliet… I’ve waited so long for this moment. To touch your skin… to feel what it feels like to be you. Oh wait…”

“I think you have that part covered.” L choked—the first words he had managed to even speak after long periods of silence and quiet talk to himself inside his mind.

“I’ve longed to touch your face, L.” The man reached out from underneath him with a spindly arm and bony, pallid fingers like a demented loon unleashed from a mental hospital, shivering at the very moment his fingers began to reach the slight heat radiating from the blood pooling over the detective’s face.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Weren’t you?” The response was quick, witty, devoid of emotion and flat from the opposite man with the red eyes. It had that same hint of snark L often inflicted whenever he wanted to end a conversation people insisted him for.

Touche. Wammy’s finest foolish technique to solve murder cases—faked deaths.

“No one can escape—“

“—the wrath of a Death Note, I know. But I’m very much alive, aren’t I?”

That he was… L could feel Beyond’s fingers slowly stroking in circling mannerisms across his defined cheekbones and lowering to his jawline, reaching across his neck—a very soft spot that had him unwillingly shifting in thought with slight arousal—and tangling the length of the fingertips along his hair.

If L was any kind of animal right now, he would be a cat…

And he would most likely be purring very loudly for more.

Beyond seemed to know that little piece of information because his fingers began caressing slowly, motioning up and down across his skull and between those dark locks of hair before taking a wild grip and pulling the detective upward, giving him a nice full view of his attire—he wasn’t wearing the usual copy cat attire like everyone or even him had expected him to… no. Instead, he was dressed in a dark button-up shirt covered by a green and black vest and topped with a red tie and jeans.

He very much looked like a Gothic version of a high class schoolboy… and some horrible crossover with school girl seeing he was very much sporting some 6 inch tall platform boots.

How could L be sure this was all really real, though? Not just a few minutes ago, he had been having an internal argument about reality and fear—all of this could very much be a product of his imagination, of some self-induced hallucination or delusion (probably extremely potent if Beyond Birthday seemed this real and he was in another location other than his manor) powerful enough to make it seem and feel like a real touch and like his long term enemy was there in the flesh from the dead, trying to do…

What was B actually trying to do with him? He wasn’t brought here for nothing.

The bewildered man’s free hand roamed toward the detective’s temple, prodding several times, making him wince internally while he refused to let the sharp pain shadow his features.

“Believe me, your boyfriend has nothing on me.”

“Why are you dressed as a schoolboy, Beyond? We’re not in a classroom.”

“Good question.” With a forceful shove against the concrete, L’s head impacted the side but not hard enough for the reverberation to induce him back into unconsciousness like the last blow had.

Out of the hazed blur from the harsh hit, however, he could see B—walking very much like him in that bent position, dipped halfway into himself and one had cradled into himself to thumb his lower lip—disappear from this room.

What was he looking for?

His curiosity had stopped once another loud noise distracted him enough to peek over the plaster bed in the middle of the room and marvel at the opened archway of this room.

Beyond was finally looming into view, hauling around with a rope a few inanimate objects that seemed very much like chairs only they shaped into something odd at the top… L could only describe them as those desks provided at high schools so students could sit in while in class.

B was bringing in desks to make this a classroom.

What kind of sick twisted game were they going to engage in now?

One thing L didn’t have to worry about, however… Beyond wasn’t out there, setting himself as the serial killer known world-round, killing to get his attention. He was there—seemingly in the flesh unless he was having some horrible and very much surreal nightmare—distracting the only person he wanted to surpass in this world and the only person that would ever match to the intelligence credited to him by being brought up in the first place to Wammy’s.

Why?

Wammy’s was the place where the brilliant minds of the world stemmed from—that’s why.

Kira, unfortunately, was one of those loopholes that constantly appeared in contracts whose mind had not been extracted into the orphanage to attain the brilliance that could have been L’s equal… even with a warped mentality of a wannabe god.

But what was he thinking about Kira for? This was B they were talking about!

This was B--the “Backup.” The little orphan with the bright crimson eyes picked up near a dump next to the hospital bend to become L’s replacement because Quillsh Wammy—otherwise known as Watari—didn’t want such a brilliant mind to go to waste…

Why just have one when you could make a copy in case the other were to mysteriously disappear—or worse, die—right?

Look at how that brilliantly worked out.

An opulent, aptly self-deemed the world’s greatest sleuth and mirroring gone wrong.

But was that really the reason behind all of this secretive past that had L cowering at the mere sight of the looming Beyond, settling chairs across the room in neat little patterns—making it look almost as if it were impulsive, something someone wasn’t supposed to notice, just very routine—with an air of impending doom rearing in the detective’s direction.

“Lawliiiiii. Lawliiiiiiii… Lawliet.” There was a small stroke of his fingers against the hard plane wood of the desk and a familiar stick of red goo plastering in a small mound of glob atop it.

Everything happening at this moment reeled the detective’s head back into place—the turn of events were slowly shifting, as if someone had hit the slow button on his controller. The scenery had just locked into a whole new level of surreal and ringing familiarity, dizzy spells from confusion was one considerable explanation to this… utter madness.

Yes. Utter madness was the only reasonable—and feasible—answer to all of this other worldly mumbo-jumbo. Like being in Wonderland—Tim Burton style. Only the whimsical colors that gave the psychedelic effect of hallucinating by consuming one too many narcotics was lacking… so far.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the bewildered double decided to once again creepily scuffle his way into L’s view, leveling into a crouching position, holding the familiar point against his knee and thumb against his lip.

L hadn’t the slightest suspecting clue as to what he was about to be subjected to, but knowing Beyond—anything goes.

B seemed to agree with the sentiment—his next course of action was rash and bold, dragging down whatever trace of poking fingernails could sink into the wooden fixture of the desk’s hold to create such horrible, screeching noise trilling three times louder and warping 4 times its crescendo reach through the echo of the abandoned rooms.

It would normally cause anyone to cringe at the mere pick-up of this particular timbre—the ability to handle it so carefully in such a surprise action was equal to the probability of none whatsoever. L, however, defied the natural, conquered the unnatural and made the impossible very believable and tangible—naturally, the stoic expression was kept down to that akin to a painting on the wall of an emotionless portrait. The noise had not caused him to phase at all.

Of all things to think that would bother L, this would be considered in that small little possibility of an arsenal, but the only thing that got his heart visibly racing, causing the relaxed shoulders to tense and give little quick rising-falling motions was the scuttling of Beyond’s contortionist limbs stop-motioning over the floor in his signature spider walk—toward him.

And it wasn’t just the mere sight of some amorphous figure scattering toward him horror-movie style that actually knocked some sign of humanity into him (or even the oh so lovingly bewildered expression lifting the already unnatural contours of his face, highlighting only the definitions while sinking the rest in those darkened depressions the light couldn’t possibly reveal) but more so the small object holding place in his closed palm—it was something that could only be described as… as a rope with spikes?

In one fluid movement, L was agilely on his toes, dragging them anywhere they would carry him as long as it would be far away from the atrocity B seemed to be.

Beyond was more agile—and basically better at everything that L was—and promptly caught up, angled his body in a way so his feet would land in the right direction yet his torso was still twisted touching the floor, carrying him in the same spider crawl that had gotten him this far in the race. Once he decided he was close enough in range, the rest of his body followed the natural flow of human behaviorism and straightened up before coiling and tackling down his unduly sugar-consuming beloved, pinning him down in the same quick maneuver and strategic way he had used to fly up to him in a matter of seconds.

“Where did you think you were going, sssssssssssssssubject?” B inhaled deeply into the detective’s ear, quickly engulfing his mouth with a nice amount of rope and spike avoiding rupture to the skin tissue in any area while knotting the back with intends of keeping it there securely.

L, bound from any true form of communication, gazed upon the countenance of his captor through half-lidded eyes, observing with the same bored expression he did everything his irises could capture. It was strange, however, that small churning in his stomach, consuming and tugging up hairs through the length of his arm and the back of his neck, crushing gears in his mind he never thought possible. Beyond was a thing to fear—a creature out of a horror movie, the brand of insanity that cautioned distance (by at least a thousand feet or so)—and yet, the mongoloid detective sat there, marveling the spindly figure of his shadow with a glint of ardent desire… the only one a captive could have for a captor—Stockholm Syndrome.

The sensation wasn’t anew, wasn’t freshly discovered nor was it newly meddled with—L’s curiosity (and B’s) took to new horizons normal human beings couldn’t ever think of reaching—yet that unbridled emotion of curiosity, of mystery, of forbidden and all things wrong and unholy known to humanity was undeterred and made the sensations a whole new field of discovery… just like the sensations of having Kira, the most prohibited fruit in the Garden of Eden, young and uncorrupted was.

It seemed Beyond could read his mind as his eyes were sharpening to a deadly, scorning gaze of rejection, of feeling second best to a teenager who was ignorant and knew nothing of the wonders and brilliance his own doing could lap a million times around his. “Lawliet…”

An excruciating painful maneuver courtesy of the monster in his personal closet proceeded—a painful twisting of the upper torso while the rest remained poised albeit in torturous strain—in order to drag him like a useless pile of sloppy black mop across the grimy, years-of-unattended-cleansing floor towards one of the many propped desks in file line just like in classrooms.

Raising L by his legs the next, B continued to prop his lover in a brute mannerism, picking up by one arm like one would an oversized doll towards the sitting platform at the bottom of the desk, being careful of keeping his legs trapped and squeezed against his torso to then proceed and place them flat-surfaced against the platform commonly utilized for writing as his arms, tied, remained behind in the small opening behind the wooden spine of the chair’s making.

“Now Poppit, what subject would like to be taught first, hm?”

The expected silent answer from the detective, remaining as un-phased as ever, showing no titillating signs of ever giving away the slightest twinge of pain to satisfy Beyond’s sadistic demeanor gave the tell-tale gaze filled with empty emotions only one would be able to pull—and still refuse to show no pain even though the burning sensation was there, the sensation of contorted muscles that weren’t supposed to bend that way.

“What’s that? I can’t HEAR you, Lawliiiiiii.” B emphasized promptly with a twist of his own arm in the right direction to L’s wrong direction, sending heating pain felt deep within his bones, red ribbon-like welts already tainting the detective’s creamy skin tone.

Still silence from the stoic lover.

“Kay Lawli. If you’d like to be taught about the necessities of binds and the applicable horrendous torture as a mean of punishment this world needs… if you insssisssssst~”

But L still remained silent, which was slightly worrying the wild black tuft that was Beyond’s frame, dwarfing to his potential over the chair in hopes of getting even the slightest twinge in his copy.

The sleuth wouldn’t budge. This meant old games of yore, fun and wonderment that warped B back to those days in tattered playgrounds when still at Wammy’s. Those dangerous games no other student could have the imagination to even conjure up and put to play—and better than an overly curious tot for pointy, shiny things that would potentially harm and scar into adulthood.

The type of games that only L and Beyond would handle playing because their sadistic thirst were never fully satiated by just skull-cracking over towering mounds of case-file papers and profiling criminals.

B made it clear in the quick posture of his shoulders and the tense of his muscle tendons that his beloved was going to suffer through some serious hell even if he didn’t respond properly to the torturous ministrations. The bewildered razor squint of his eye, the knit between his brow and the shadowing of his features said as much.

... Even if L’s monotonic expression was becoming quite tedious at this point.

“Now…” The black monster placed a painfully square scrap of paper right on the desk. Black squares seem to fill at random while others kept blank with small numbers at the top corner of some.

“A crossword puzzle?” The detective finally spoke, still in the same inert state, tied up in between intricate loops and knots only a mind like Beyond’s could come up with.

Just like all the other clues that led to the next victim in the LABB case.

“Your amazing observing ability doesn’t seize to amaze me, Lawli.” The darkened copy spoke flatly, eyelids dropping in the same bored expression as his mirror currently the guinea pig of this experimental torture.

“But yes, it is a crossword puzzle, but not JUST a CuHraWssssSSsWuRD puzZle, lovely—“

“Of course because everything you do, Beyond, is not just that simple—like Kira.”

And L just didn’t go there. Again with the comparison against something so filthy, mundane and ignorant. How could someone like Beyond, who went through all the extremes and whose intelligence surpasses that of the greatest minds of all time—can even be compared to Einstein sans the insanity and psychopathy (psychopathic) that warped in there, somewhere—could be compared to that of a mindless teenager whose brilliance was wasted in blood-lust, power, pretense and narcissism.

Beyond at least had half a mind and the ability to see people’s life span and name at all due times was just the perk he had against the almighty Kira. And he didn’t even have to trade half his life span for it. Ha.

A pen and a killer notebook were nothing compared to the nightmares Beyond Birthday could be in a person’s life.

L knew very well that flagrant comparison would tip B off the edge—the edge he wanted.

“If you want to survive, Lawli, I suggest you keep your comments to yourself.” There was that dripping edge, sharp as a knife of insane and dangerous borderline on Beyond’s tone. It was clear and crisp, dropped to the last bass note he could reach—like the interchangeable dissociation Sybil had with her personalities, having the ability to mimic the voices perfectly or that other wardress from Session 9.

Simon’s voice was something that gave even chills up Beyond’s spine. And to think it belonged to a woman. The chills got worse with the thought.

And back to the aloof entertainment he was—B walked over to the giant white board (just like in classrooms) and produced a black marker from his jean pocket. Immediately, after tipping the cap off with a squeeze of his teeth, he began scribbling a slew of mathematical problems and algorithms accompanied each by a different letter of the alphabet.

L didn’t need any more input or any on the matter—he immediately puzzled all the pieces together at what he had to figure out which was doing the math to get a new alphabet letter and subtract to get the difference which would be where would he had to place the letter on the crossword puzzle.

That wasn’t complicated at all.

At least not for such a mind as L’s—raised by brilliant Quillsh Wammy codename Watari.

Kira could do this with his hands tied. Whoops.

“What’s my punishment?” Panda eyes squinted.

“What ever do you mean, Eru?” And Beyond was saying his name as Kira would say it on purpose. Turmoil triggered thick among the both of them and it had been a long, invisible trip since the LABB.

And L had found Kira—his new proclaimed lover and equal mind. He knew that if Beyond were alive (back in the Kira-reign days where he whole heartedly believed Light had jotted B’s name in one of the profiled criminal cases) that a newfound jealousy would soon flourish. L was his and only his—Beyond had staked his claim back when he was suppose to be that “Backup” in the first days at the Wammy orphanage.

That detective was to be his and not the other way around. B wasn’t going to be anyone’s replacement (ha, Kira took the reign, self-loving bastard.) A mind quite like his—there was a reason why Watari had picked him specifically; A couldn’t step up to the pedestal and hone in the appropriate talent needed for the job, obviously. Idiot killed himself—wasn’t going to go to waste in being a mere replica for another in the molding stages.

That was unacceptable.

“You know perfectly well what I mean, Beyond.”

And that he did—but feigning ignorance was always much more fun than anyone else put it out to be.

“You’re not going to just up and not punish me after all this trouble you’ve gone through to put up a measly set up—there’s always another side to things with you. It leads to something. You know I will be able to solve these and give you a fully answered crossword paper in a matter of minute and all the answers will be right—so I ask again, what is the punishment?”

B looked smugly, like a kid caught in the act and unafraid of getting so.

“No, Lawli, it doesn’t work that way. I don’t get to tell you what you’re going to get in punishment. Just try to solve the puzzle, pumpkin.” And even though L remained belligerent, B dragged his horrible posture in the direction of the desk.

“It’ll just keep leading to clues… and more clues. And one to the next in an perpetual CYYYYYc—“ but the raccoon looking mongoloid suddenly found himself stripped of air, strangled by one of the cords aptly across his stomach that snaked between a loop into the intricate back-pattern of the hand where it was designed to be tightened at ease to constrict vital areas—and it hit home with that one.

“I couldn’t hear you, Lawli-pop, what was that?”

And his expression was mixed between holding in the strain and painful coil of the rope asphyxiating his lungs and the quizzical calculations his mind was racing at a billion miles per hour solving the string of mathematical equations scribbled all over the board.

L must have understood chicken scratch himself because both even had the same writing style—barely legible.

“Can I at least have my own hands to write?” And that wasn’t such a plead as it was a demand to be released to play along B’s cruel games.

But B remained relentless in his decision of keeping his long-lost lover tied down and restrained like a pup wanting to escape.

“No,” came the scratchy notes Beyond could reach to intimidate—just like the monster in the closet he was.

All what was left to use was his mouth… oh fun.

Gingerly picking up the pen like a pro with his mouth, the detective immediately began jotting down individual letters in each provided blank square—having photographic memory, the bastard—until he could make out the letters.

Every word was a soup to form a sentence. How creative of his copy.

L finally spit out the pen from his mouth, “L, did you know? Maggots like to eat… dead corpses.” L’s expression remained unsurprised as it always did. But one thing he had to realize—these same structured words had come from Kira when he had manipulated those prisoners to write individual letters to puzzle together in hinting that death gods did exit and that they ate apples.

Meaning Beyond had a clue in it back when the investigation was ongoing, when he thought he was still rotting in jail until the day almighty Harbinger Kira came with the self-righteous pen and looped elegantly Beyond Birthday’s name in the death note.

Which meant…

“You read my files on Yagami Light.”

“You think so, Lawli?” And Beyond gave the kind of telltale smirk in where there was so much more meaning hidden behind the whole situation than JUST reading the case files—but didn’t say as much. Only Lawli hadn’t figured that out yet—the most conclusive and correlated answer was that B had peeped into those hidden files L still kept as trophy for capturing the opposite of justice, what was brought to this world to purge by his hands.

“It’s the only feasible explanation, Beyond.”

“Or is it?~”

But even before dear panda-Lawli could give any more in-depth thought to the real situation, school-boy B (all elegant and poised now) wiggled a finger in his direction, pulling on another string of loose rope dangling from behind the chair to constrain his beloved’s windpipe and shut him up—not that ever said much, but he liked to be heard.

“But now that you figured out clue numero uno, Beloved…” bloody red eyes averted to the outer skirts of the room, more towards the swallowed threshold that seem to lead to another level of hell more than it led to abandoned rooms of a mental hospital, and back to the mop of black hair bewildered and untamed and that covered practically most of the other’s face. “Now I give you the reward.”

Cue for loosening the rope and untying the patterned loops across the space of L’s back and gap between the desk.

In one clean swipe, L was back to the floor, dragged like a little Asian whore across the room psycho-style towards more grimy rooms and finally down a tattered looking staircase that spiraled to an underworld.

He wondered if this was the climactic point in where he would get eviscerated and taken over—or rescued magically like in those fairy tale books that gave hopeless standards to hopelessly romantic girls and fruitcake sentimental boys with one too many estrogen in their system.

Every leveled fall was a new stinging pain to a different disk in his back—but endurance was his willpower and nothing could make him crack the monotonous expression that he’d held through all these years of being a brilliant sleuth.

About to black out from the drag alone, the scenery suddenly changed. If any place could get any more grimier, disgusting, putrid, packed dust of years and years of build-up—it was the basement section of the mental hospital which was designed just like a regular hospital… a mortuary for the mentally ill.

Outside of the level, there were probably stacks of skeletal remains buried deep down all graveyard-like to make them look more humane. Ha.

“I brought us a present. It took me a while to really find where it was—and you can’t imagine the amount of hours on end it took me to dig this up let alone the horrible damage I caused to my nails and skin. BUT aAaAnnnythIiIingGg for my Lawli-cakes.”

L watched as B walked over one of the metal panes, pulled up a file where remains had been placed neatly—and freshly placed, too. It didn’t have any dust nor was it a mere skeleton even though there were seeping parts through horribly mangled flesh where drab bones could be seen.

“There’s still laugh on the woman yet!” And like a scene from Interview With a Vampire, B proceeded to mimic Lestat DeLioncourt’s dancing with the progressively rotting corpse whose flesh—now more visible to L’s peripheral—wasn’t exactly fresh and mangled, per say. There were uncorrelated discolorations on random patches of the skin way too contrasted and a lot of it looked… sewn together.

And it finally dawned on L the twisted gift that B had in store for him.

“You like, Lawli?” Twirling the woman’s body, B sashayed a long step in his direction, bringing the structure closer.

“Beyond… what is that?” But Beyond needn’t to further explain himself. L had puzzled it all together.

“Oh, c’mon, Lawli! I tried my HArrrrrrrDeeesssT to look for the right type of skin color but got distracted by all the other pretty looking ones and put this together. However, the facial features should paint the correct picture.”

And it did. However horribly Beyond puzzled all those skins—he didn’t even want to imagine what amount of victims he skinned for this project alone—he was a master at piecing other things together into a beautiful artistic creation…

It was Naomi. The skeletal structure of what used to be Naomi, patches of what was left of her skin that maggots had not touched and other people’s skin that was left to Beyond’s whimsical idea to work at his wit.

And L didn’t know if to be disgusted, or if to be scared...

-------------------------------------------------------------*******

Hey guys! I know it’s been such a long while and I know that some people might kill/hate me for delaying this chapter for THIS long before posting it.

But my muse was horribly interfered with during those months I delayed the chapter for and a lot of shit went on that practically deprived me from posting. That and I’m just an emotional rollercoaster and can’t ever predict when my muse will work or not.

Sorry! But I hope you liked this chapter where I introduced Beyond.

I was going to leave it in a cliffhanger buuuuut decided against it. So you’ll find out next chapter! :D
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The Other Side of the Mirror