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The warehouse swallowed Light up as he stumbled towards it, fingers reaching for concrete cold like a prison, lunging towards rooms cast in a faraway yellow that didn’t shine but dim. His limp arm hung heavy, heavy like steel. Clutching his shoulder tight, he didn’t stop, carrying on even if not smoothly: The sidewalk ran along identical-looking doors to a perfectly rectangular exterior. Symmetry, perhaps, could imply that there was another way out of this building, off of the straight path he had been following. Of course, maybe Near had anticipated, but it would at the very least complicate the search.
The entrance he stopped before stretched out an industrial ocean before him; perilous, but he had crossed greater lengths. Nothing was over, that went against the definition of an entrance. A way out, a way to where he wanted to be: that’s what this was. He relaxed his hand a little, driven to error by the shakes and cramps of his fingers, and at once a lump of blood falls into his palm. The air cuts into his wounded arm worse than any knife, halting every idea building in the back of his head. As he regrips the wound, his mind comes back to him, the gears of an unrelenting maths turning through his mind even as the red turned out of him.
He didn’t hear spattering of blood on the ground; some faraway train of thought screamed that it must be spurting, oozing, trailing out of him, too fast, too fast, but the idea never quite reached him—like a deer who could hear a horn blaring but never discern what was coming. Like a deer, he was crushed with the urge to freeze, pushing forward still was like moving mountains. A demented calculus telling him that this was the way to go, even as his insides wrenched with every step.
Maybe it was the shadows that tore him apart: framed by the exact shade of sunset which had watched him walk each night to cram school. The impression hung still on his shoulders even as he stumbled further into the warehouse, gold-cast tears mixing on the ground with splatterings of blood. Each step unfolded old memories: ones of a kid who weighed down by textbooks, not sin. Ones where he could go anywhere, not bound to walk any one-straight-line path.
He remembered a Light who could break down a bookshelf into a whole universe, peering into a sea of curiosities and nuance with a never-tiring excitement, only to remember that there were rows and rows of bookshelves in his neighbourhood’s library alone. Stacks of books towering over his desk, guarding an unbreakable spark in his eyes. The world had seen so wide then: each moment the churning of physics equations, the song of old poetry, the politics of everyday life. When everyone else heard lone notes, he heard symphonies. He grew used to the infinite comfort of being special, of being better. The world had been so much fuller before he charged himself a life sentence of winning.
How could he have known, just a child, that there were things he didn’t know? That when people told him he knew everything, it was only hyperbole; that there was some body of wisdom held by the everyday man that couldn’t be chalked up to common foolishness? So then it was true: he was always right, he always needed to win. Raised more by his own ego than any real human.
Had it struck him on this same block, a lifetime ago, the idea that there was no way out of this story? Maybe this was where the story had begun, one lonely day after cram school, wishing that a glimpse of the living world might pierce its way into his prison of esteem. Years without sleep had chipped away at his memory; he couldn’t tell when he started shutting the world out.
The stairs were so much harder now, when had they gotten so hard? He wasn’t quite sure how the stairs fit into his escape plan. Trying to walk back, figure out how he had gotten here. Unable to keep up with his own calculations, now—he was never one for showing work.
Feet placed in trust, he pushed on up the stairs, once, twice. Hunched over, he started to see just how much blood was pouring out of him. A trail, a yardstick. He had remembered, a millennium ago, watching criminals bleed out like the blood pools were synced with his watch, growing like their own clock. His own little 40 seconds, was it?
But that couldn’t be. Those fates, those deaths—for criminals, and criminals alone. His crimes weren’t fueled by necessity or greed, he was not like the common man; He wanted to become Napoleon, that is why he killed. He killed for the chance to become something greater: a force who could change the world. Was he not the force who wiped evil from this dying world? No one had the audacity to do wrong under his rule: To be counted with the petty thief was an insult. Yet still his time counted down.
He stepped again, but was met with falling. Crashing onto the concrete, shock surging through his wound. The concrete felt cold against his bare cheek. Gasping and sputtering, he used his one good arm to roll onto his back.
And there L stood, watching.
He stood the same way he always did, hunched over, hands in his pockets… Like nothing had happened, like nothing had changed. Like Light wasn’t almost the same age as him now.
Big eyes, staring into his in all different shades of monochrome. He was like a black and white photograph cut and pasted into a bloody new age. So faraway, wasn’t he? Light hadn’t seen his face in so long, when had this life gotten so long? Light couldn’t find the words, his mouth hung barely open and filled with iron: The words hung unsaid, like the smell of red.