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Laura Moon (spitandviolets) wrote in vas_captio_rpg,
@ 2009-06-11 20:29:00

Entry tags:

!dropped, day 10, l lawliet, laura moon, location: gym

Who: Laura Moon and L Lawliet
What: Finding something very important that she allowed to get lost.
Where: The Gym / Makeshift Rundown Hospital
When: Around 10:00pm
Rating: TBD
Status: Active

Laura had been searching for L ever since she had made it out of the scraps of wood and concrete and metal that had once been the liquor store. It had been a very, very bad day. It hadn't started terribly, but it had sharply taken a turn for the worst. The worst part of it was that, once again, she was not by L's side in the face of danger. She'd failed, yet again.

With the ability to identify human beings by the light of their souls, it was not difficult to find him. There had been a few moments, though, while she was looking for him, burning like a torch in the darkness, when she was very worried that his light would be nowhere to be found. She should have gone with him, should have talked to him more about Light. After all, a dead woman was not enough to keep an intelligent, moody, fragile man in the world. Surely he had gone to off himself, she realized in hindsight; if he hadn't, he probably wasn't avoiding his death. Still, she had found him, theoretically. He was getting to be like Shadow. Someone could have thrown Laura into the ocean, weighed her down so she sank to the bottom, and blindfolded her, and she still would have made her way to him. So a little thing like an earthquake was definitely not enough to keep her away.

It was sometime in the early afternoon when she'd found him, but he was surrounded by people. Part of her was glad for that. She'd always said that he needed to get out more, that he needed to be with living people. The pit of her stomach, though, felt icy, like the emptiness was spreading, when she saw Merope with him. He'd reacted more kindly to her than to Laura herself when they'd found Light. Who was she to him? Laura found her startlingly creepy for a human being. Not wanting to reunite with him in front of a large crowd, she had stuck to the shadows, watching. He was amazing to watch, like her own personal ant farm. From where she was, she could only tell that he was hurt, not well. The details were lost in the distance. She had to get to him, but she had the patience to wait.

Once pitch black had set in and most people had allowed themselves to rest, Laura had slipped soundlessly into the gym. She had gone wholly unnoticed, and she'd slipped silently onto a seat beside the bed in which her detective was sleeping. Looking down at him, only a silhouette in the night, she couldn't help but give a sad, hopeful smile. He was alive. Barely, but alive.

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spitandviolets
2009-06-17 01:17 am UTC (link)

Her entire body stopped when he finally spoke. She had expected something bad, but she hadn't been expecting that. Her mouth was dry, and she was thirsty. A good deal of the formaldehyde was leaking from her body, and her moisture was disappearing. Overall, none of this was good. She needed water, to rehydrate her cells, but drinking would be perilous. And messy. She'd worry about it later.

Getting up, her mind blank, she grabbed the spike firmly in her hand. No point holding off on it. She needed to buy some time, and she needed to be able to touch him. Neither of those were possible with the spike still lodged half way into her chest cavity. Wordlessly, not making a noise, Laura yanked at the metal that did not belong. With more cracking and a disgusting sounding rip, the spike was removed. A hole the size of a man's fist was left through her middle, letting anyone looking at her straight on see right through her.

Laura took a seat on his bed once more and then laid down, curling herself back into him, but closer this time. Still, she wouldn't press into him. The hole was dripping a bit, and the last thing she needed was for him to get sick. She laid there in silence. The operation hadn't taken long enough for her to make sense of things. She'd been an insanely jealous person in life, making it even worse. Well, she'd started the day being no angel. She could go for broke.

"Oh," she replied blandly, blankly. Truth. She dealt in truths. As badly as she wanted to tell him that it was fine, to laugh it off and let him know that they'd both been silly in the face of adversity, that was the Laura who was alive. That wasn't the truth. That was something that was used to patch up holes and allow you to skate over them. "Yes, that is worse." She fell silent again, her fingers touching his hand. Her eyes stared blankly into the darkness.

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inmyownworld
2009-06-17 01:54 am UTC (link)

L waited for Laura's response, and quailed when she grasped the spike and tore it out, quickly and decisively. Combined with his earlier queasiness and the painkillers, it was enough to make his stomach heave. His insides felt like they were tearing each other apart as he turned over, gagging; only the fact that his stomach was completely empty saved him from vomiting in his cot.

Trembling, pale, and hoping that he hadn't torn his stitches, L curled into himself, realizing with a start that Laura was laying beside him. That baffled him. Maybe she felt ashamed, or guilty, or like she had failed him by leaving him in the arms of another woman when he was between life and death and needed her.

His thoughts froze when she blandly told him that his transgression had been worse. He blinked, wondering if Laura understood that he had been out of his mind with pain, and nearly unconscious from shock, when Merope had kissed him. He had been too weak to even turn his head at that point, so how could he have protested or prevented it? It was true, that he had wished that the woman holding him had been Laura, but Merope's thin arms had offered all that they could to comfort him, and the girl had kissed him because her compassion spilled over often into the realm of the physical when her heart couldn't contain it anymore. In L's mind, there was something profound about one human being reaching out to another simply because he was in pain, and it was, more often than not, purely platonic. That was how it had been. But Laura hadn't been there...

Laura hadn't been there.

The words were hollow and bitter. L swallowed them before they touched his tongue, closing the hand that Laura was touching.

"You have every reason to be angry at me." Though L disagreed with his own words, he had to know how Laura would react.

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spitandviolets
2009-06-18 06:30 pm UTC (link)

Surprisingly, Laura didn't feel...anything. Her whole body felt numb, but it wasn't quite numb. Not really. Numb implied a feeling of numbness, which she didn't have. It was very abstract, very strange. he looked at the gaping hole in her chest, yet it was just nothingness. That was the danger, she knew instantly: nothingness. One day, she would not even notice nothingness. That was the direction in which she was going.

She heard the retching sound, and she turned to him, not knowing what to do. Part of her felt guilty for making him do that. But she didn't have compassion, and she couldn't relate. She was the one with a gaping hole in her chest and her insides looking to get out.

"I can't be angry," she said. It was flat, dull, dead, blank. She wasn't even trying to put emotion into it. Her body was weary, and it was giving out. Her mind was the same, but thoughts came with the feeble state of her frame. Though time didn't move for her mind, it moved for her physical form, and tomorrow was coming today. "So you don't have to worry about it. Thanks, though, for letting me know that I have every reason to be, if it were possible." She seemed so flat, so distant, so far away.

Laura didn't like Merope. She hadn't liked her since the moment she met her in the clock tower. There was something creepy about her, and while that seemed hypocritical, she could not help the vibes that she got from the girl. She was the kind of girl that not even Laura had liked in high school, the one that hung around the outside of every group. And thinking of that kissing L was sickening. "She's a good substitute," she said, thinking out loud, because it was true. One look at that girl had told Laura that Merope was living with one foot in the grave and the other feebly placed on land. If L liked girls who were dead, sickly, pale, then her words were truth. And Laura believed it. That didn't mean, though, that she had to like it or approve of it.

She was collapsing in on herself, mentally and physically, and it was readily apparent. When she curled up, hugging her battered legs to her holey chest, she looked small, pitifully so. Memories were almost blinding here. If L wasn't there, the whole scene would be exactly what she'd done the day after they took Shadow. It was exactly what she'd done the day after Shadow had rejected her when she came back from the dead for him. When Laura didn't know what else to do, she gave up. And right now, she was giving up, her dead eye staring off into the darkness, her lips slightly parted, though no breath came out.

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inmyownworld
2009-06-18 07:47 pm UTC (link)

After all but sighing the words that expressed guilt L knew he had no reason to feel, L pulled himself upright, deciding that it was time to do something about the dehydration that was parching him. He was clumsy with weakness, and even opening the many-times refilled bottle was difficult for hands that shook too violently to hold it steady as he put it to his lips. It didn't sit easy on his protesting stomach.

L glanced back at Laura, his eyes sharp and metallic, their raw redness giving the cloudy grey a more liquid sheen. He knew that she felt anger. It was one of the only emotions strong enough for her to feel, wasn't it? "Don't lie to me. You can be angry. You are angry," he said quietly. "Some things don't take a genius to understand. Because it's strong enough for me to recognize." When Laura said that Merope was a "good substitute," he shook his head back and forth for several moments, as if trying to help his brain process that absurd thought.

"What are you talking about? Merope is nothing like you," he said, looking for something to tear apart with his fingertips and settling for the nails on his left hand. He couldn't see Laura, because he was turned away from her, his head bent and his shoulders curled forward. It was a tried and true technique, useful when a man wanted to be alone in a crowded place. "Merope was here, though. Merope was here, since you were otherwise occupied and couldn't be. I asked her to tell you that I love you, since a point came when it looked like I would die. I thought we wouldn't see each other again, and that alone almost killed me."

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spitandviolets
2009-06-18 08:07 pm UTC (link)

"I can't lie. I don't lie. I don't have time for it." As far as Laura was concerned, right now, that she couldn't be angry was the truth. She didn't feel angry. That bothered her, though. Part of her wanted to scream, throw things, treat him like she treated Shadow if he so much as glanced at another woman at the mall or in a restaurant. She was jealous, and she had always known why she was jealous. To this day, though, she'd never said the words, never solidified it in her mind.

Rolling over to face him, she found that she was looking at his back. Her fingers reached out, stroking down his spine. Her mouth was dry, and his water looked good, but hell could freeze over before she'd ask him for some. He needed it far more than she did. It hurt her to look at him, to see him curled up like that, giving her the cold shoulder. Yet she couldn't help but feel that he had no right. After all...

"You know what I was," she said, her voice soft. She didn't want to bother anyone, and she hardly wanted even him to hear it. Her fingers lightly gripped at his shirt, but she let go after only a moment. "You know how I died, how I felt about the world. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean that my bad habits are. You can be angry, but I cannot apologize. I have been nothing but truthful with you."

He snapped at her, and it came out all wrong. Merope is nothing like you was how it sounded in her brain, and that was a bit shocking. She moved so slowly, stealthily, that he probably didn't even feel her move. Her weight was about 1/3 of what it should have been with all of her blood, half of her formaldehyde, and a limb missing. Seating herself beside the bed once more, Laura looked down at the ground. "You're right," she said, almost whispering in that odd tone of hers. "She is not a perfect substitute. She's a wonderful replacement. I'm glad she was here for you, and I am sorry that I was not."

She opened her eye, the one that he'd taken the glass out of. A strange liquid flowed down her cheek, and she reached up, touching at her eye. There was no eyeball there. It had been too damaged by the glass to maintain structure. Part of her was horrified. She moved her hair, hiding the right side of her face, but a few droplets slid from her chin and hit the floor. She lifted her hand, covering her eye. That would be a problem in the future, not being able to see on her right. Really, that side of her body was shot to hell. Sad, because that had always been her good side.

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inmyownworld
2009-06-18 08:35 pm UTC (link)

L was ready to tune everything out, and cave in to his childhood tendencies. It was the most logical solution, truly... removing himself from a bad situation would save him from being destroyed. What reason did Laura have to be jealous, of L or Merope? Everyone was kind to people who couldn't take care of themselves, everyone spoke and acted softly to them. Merope had responded to his pain, not his desire. There was a very distinct difference between the two, in L's mind, and he couldn't understand why Laura, knowing what she did about lust, couldn't see that. He could feel her hand, soft against his back, stroking down his spine, and then withdrawing.

"I know what you were. I love what you are, and I thought you loved what I am, too," L said, the words simple and precise. They were exactly what he meant, and he liked the way they came out. "I'm far from angry. I'm not sure what I am, but it's not that. I thought that I made you happy, the way you make me happy. Now I don't know what to think, except that I think I'm losing you." The words came straight from L's heart, so raw that it was as if someone had drilled a hole straight into the center of it and was extracting them piece by piece.

"I'm sorry that you weren't here, as well. I wanted you to be. I wanted you to hold me while a shovel was being extracted from my liver."

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spitandviolets
2009-06-18 10:08 pm UTC (link)

"You thought?" she said, almost too hastily. For someone who had no inflection, it was a bit telling. She leaned forward in the chair more, and her eyes studied the floor of the gymnasium. It was so old and run down that she couldn't even tell what the marks on it were supposed to be anymore. She assumed basketball had once been played here, as in every gym in the world, but she didn't know if that was the case with this one. She remembered, briefly, gym class. Special ed gym was definitely something to behold. That was why, most of the time, she spent her time on her back on the catwalk in the auditorium with boys she shouldn't have been seeing or smoking out behind the snack shack near the football field. But such memories didn't have any right to be in this place, in this time.

She fell silent, thinking. So he didn't know what he was, either to her or at her. But he said he wasn't angry. Well, that sounded like angry, just a very veiled version of it. He thought that she loved him. He thought that he made her happy. He didn't know what to, currently, think. As she looked down at him, fragile and hurt, she knew what he meant about losing. Laura, though, knew that she had already lost. It was the same as that first night that she'd come back to shadow. Humans were awful about that, weren't they? Miss one important event in their life, like getting out of prison or having a shovel removed from a liver, and they were all bent out of shape about it at you. They didn't even want to bother with you anymore.

She sat there quietly. She felt poorly that he'd been impaled. It was her fault, too. She shouldn't have been so concerned about preserving her body from the heat. "You made me vain," she said, bluntly. "You left this morning and I didn't go with you because I wanted to prevent my body from decaying more rapidly due to heat and injury. I wanted to stay as beautiful and lifelike for you for as long as I could." Obviously, the same fucked up gods of fate that had been laughing at her where she'd come from were still here, and they must have been having a good cackle over this one. "Look at us now." She was destroyed, expired, on her way out, and she had broken the one promise that she'd made him, that she would always be there. He didn't know how he felt anymore, and that was as good as saying that he didn't love her anymore. They were, after all, the same thing. You didn't half love people. You either loved them or not. It was an on and off thing.

She rose to her feet, and she leaned down slowly. Laura lifted his shirt, and she saw the stitches that ran over his skin. They made her feel guilty. Her fingers reached out, but she stopped herself. They reminded her of the autopsy scar that she...used to have...on her chest. Now, there was a hole. And there were some feeble strings that held the skin over her collar bones together. Leaning down more, she brushed her icy lips over his wound just once in a soft kiss that said "heal." She pulled away and slid his shirt back down once more. Her hair had completely fallen into her face, hiding her from view. She looked rather ghoulish, truth be told, or like some sort of Japanese ghost from a horror movie. Moving slowly and silently, she turned away from him, her back to him. She could not, though, make her feet move more than a few paces.

Go, her mind screamed. There isn't an "us" anymore. You failed, and he doesn't love you. How could he? You're disgusting, even if he says your beautiful. You will never be as ugly on the outside as you've always been within. And the worst part is, after all this, you're still just you. You're still completely boring and unremarkable. You hold no great power. You can't even save the people who are counting on you. You're no superhero.

Unable to move another step, Laura crouched down and curled into herself. Her knees were against the hole in her chest. Her hands lifted, and she covered her face with her palms. Nothing came out, but her body shook and trembled silently as she hovered there, inches from the floor. Laura could only feel strong emotions. This one was sorrow.

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inmyownworld
2009-06-18 11:11 pm UTC (link)

In actuality, L truly wasn't angry. He felt pulverized and embarrassed, and a little bit emasculated, knowing that, like Laura, he couldn't get angry. It was a deep sadness, like his ribs were shielding a black hole that drew him deeper and deeper into himself every day just to escape the agony of not knowing why he couldn't be the only one that caught Laura's eye.

Somewhere in that deep, crushing place, he knew that he wasn't the kind of man she was used to. He knew that he was smaller, frailer, gentler, and sweeter than the forceful male ideal. He cradled his elbows when he walked, treading softly without a swagger, and he rescued spiders with the same hands that trembled when they unhooked Laura's bra, rather than manfully crushing them with his shoe. No... L didn't even wear shoes. Even the feet he planted against the surface of a challenging world were vulnerable.

He allowed himself a moment of self pity, of introspection and thought. He could have died in that perfect grave he had excavated while thinking about another slender young genius. He could have died waiting for a doctor to save him from his anguish. He could still die of blood poisoning, infection, or hemorrhage. His eyes stung, pricking shamefully, as he imagined Laura walking into Gambit's arms the moment he was gone. Maybe she already had, even while he held on. But such thoughts could only haunt him while he was alive, he realized. Unlike Laura, when he died, nothing would remain except his flesh and bones. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust... feed the worms, as all things must.

There would be no pain. No sorrow. No doubt or feelings of inadequacy, no abandonment, no secret tears. True, there would be no love, but watching Laura turn from him, he thought that maybe that was true already. It would only take a little longer to relieve himself of all emotional responsibility. Glancing at the syringes nearby that contained his personal supply of morphine, he realized how easy it would be. In this miserable place, where everyone needed a doctor and doctor's were scarce, someone self-medicating would scarcely draw attention. He bit the tip off a syringe, filled it completely with the drug, and began looking for a decent vein in his thin arm, wondering which one would be the quickest route to his heart.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Laura shaking, her body racked with violent tremors that resembled sobs. He had never seen her like that before. He glanced down at the needle, and back at Laura, struggling with himself, both feeling and seeing such complete sorrow that it wasn't a terribly difficult thing to slip the needle into his vein. He would take this slowly. Little by little, he'd kill the pain in his side and in his soul.

"Laura." A plume of deep red as he pulled back on the plunger, announcing that he'd found a good one. "I don't want you to be sad. I don't want you to cry." Slow, gentle pressure. Stinging, subsiding to drowsiness. "I want you to know that I love you. I'm glad that I got to say that... I'll love you for the rest of my life." His thumb was steady, his side was painless. His eyelids and limbs were heavy.

His pain regarding Laura did not change. It only got worse as his pulse slowed and his vision darkened.

He dropped the syringe and what remained of his ultimate retreat from what he felt he couldn't face. He couldn't see where it had fallen and shattered, but he hoped that enough had remained inside the syringe to keep him alive. Because, in all honesty, he wanted to live, and he wanted to live with Laura.

"You make me happy when skies are gray, and you'll never know..."

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spitandviolets
2009-06-18 11:48 pm UTC (link)

The moment she heard movement behind her, Laura collected herself. What was he doing? If he was trying to get up, she was going to put him in his place. She stood and turned around, her face completely dry except for the remnants of her right eye. It was a gory sight, and he probably got a full view of it when she rushed to his side. Her body was so mangled, and her mind was so cloudy, that she got there just a moment too late. The glass was already breaking when she was half way on his bed.

"L!" she said, wanting to cry out, wanting to yell, but finding no way to do so. That was one thing that death had taken away, and it blew. She didn't know what to do. Her remaining hand felt idle. Somewhere out there, in the pharmacy, the hand on her other arm strained and fretted, for it was still active via the magic that kept her existing. Her eye was wide, and she gathered him into her arm. Holding him closely to her chest, her gaping chest, she shook him gently. She didn't want to hurt him. "L, you stupid idiot, look at me. Open your eyes and look at me. For somebody so smart, you're pretty stupid."

She set him down like he was made of glass. She was moist, and her formaldehyde was on his clothes. About that, she felt bad. She didn't want him to get dirty. Being sick was enough, but sick and dirty was horrible. Nobody was around, really. That was the point of her visiting at this time of night. She was on her own.

"Rabbit," she murmured. Laying down next to him once more, her head on his chest, she pressed her empty shoulder socket into his uninjured side. Her eye leaked onto his chest. "Rabbit, stop this. Stop it. I'm sad because I'm guilty. Because I am horrible to you. I left you alone when I went out to find you food after we made love. I wasn't there to stop whatever happened to you while I was out. I wasn't there when you were hurt by Bob. I wasn't there when you were stabbed by a shovel. I dragged you away from the body of your dead friend, and I wasn't there to console you because I was locked up inside of a freezer." Her hand gripped at his chest, gently squeezing at his shirt. Sliding into her bra, she pulled out the coin, looking at it. It glittered even in the dim light in the clinic.

"I know how much you love me. And I know that I will love you forever. You've got a piece of me that I can never have back, and I don't want it. I will love you even when there is nothing left to me whatsoever. When I am nothing but a ghost, I will still love you. I just want you to be happy, L. And I've failed at that, too, because I've failed at everything else. I've never done anything but take from you."

She wanted to tell him why she was jealous. But that was one secret that she was convinced she'd die with. It was too painful. But he was ending it all, and he was singing, and he was the one who wanted her to be loved. So he deserved the truth. "I'm jealous of every girl in the whole world. Because if you see them, you'll notice that they're interesting without having to try. I've never been interesting. I like being dead because it gives me something unique." That one was stolen from Gambit, because he saw the truth, and it was messy. "If you see anyone besides me, in any way, you'll eventually realize how unremarkable I am. And then what do I do? Go back to being a phantom. I couldn't stand that. I couldn't go on existing if you didn't see me as special anymore."

"I've failed you over and over," she said, clenching the coin. Her hand rested on his chest once more. "But not this time. I'm here now. And you're going to be fine. Because I love you."

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inmyownworld
2009-06-19 12:29 am UTC (link)

The world looked different without pain. Sounds blended into each other harmlessly, and his skin and spirit started to go numb. He stared straight ahead, desiring nothing, mourning nothing, feeling nothing.

Please don't take my sunshine away.

Laura was there; he could feel her, smell formaldehyde and traces of her perfume, and she was embracing him tightly. Dimly, he wondered if things were better, if he had repaired everything, or if it was just his faulty perception of the world under the influence of a powerful narcotic.

He opened his eyes, struggling somewhat, looking into Laura's face. No wonder other men noticed her... she was more than beautiful. She was the most beautiful. Exotic and fragile and fearsome and ghoulish and gorgeous. He blinked; his heartbeat was slow, and his mind was only partially functioning, and his body felt like it was made of lead, but he was with it enough to understand that Laura was with him. He needed her, not because he had injected a large amount of a dangerous drug into his system, but because, truly, he had been alone for a long time.

He wanted this. He wanted to lie next to Laura and listen to words overwhelmed by clear love. He was not dying now, but he was beloved, and he felt it to the core of his being. He had to make Laura understand both of those things before she panicked and mistook him for the King of America.

"Stop. Don't be... stupid." For once, L's brain moved more slowly than his mouth. "You're here now. You love me. I... am happy." he didn't notice any kind of mess on his clothes, only that Laura was there and that they were touching and that he needed this. "Don't... fail. Not a phantom. Laura Moon. Only sunshine." Was he making any sense? Why were the ballads and flowery prose spinning in his head only make it out sounding like a very sappy Rorschach?

He held her close, her lightweight body feeling fragile even through his dulled senses. The coin rested between them, maybe keeping him afloat even though he was relatively certain he hadn't killed himself with morphine. "Please... don't leave... wait until I am asleep before you go." he looked into her eyes, his own ringed by dark circles in a paler-than-usual face. "I'll be fine, but don't leave. If you leave, I'll go away, too." he stroked the stump of her arm thoughtfully.

"I'll find your arm and your water tomorrow. I'll let a doctor put it back on. Then I'll get metal, and latex, and rubber, and I'll make your body last forever. You're so special..." he sighed softly, nestling his cheek against Laura's shoulder. "I'm happy to be alive in a world that has you. I'm going to wake up tomorrow. I promise."

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