Chapter Text
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
(“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T.S. Eliot)
Artwork by pashmina-dhaage. Do not repost without permission.
“He passed away so quickly, didn’t he? Gone so soon.”
“They must’ve loved each other very much.”
“To die, holding hands and asleep… They aged together beautifully.”
Lawliet’s gaze hardens from underneath the crimson umbrella, listening to the strangers standing around them. They all stand in the graveyard, the ground littered with leaves and suggesting a vaguely sinister change of seasons, the clouds spitting cold rain at them with apparent contempt. Mihael tugs at the bottom of his suit jacket, coughing against the wall of frigid air that compresses against all of their chests, his sleeves too short and leaving his wrists exposed to the early springtime air. Mail sniffles slightly, his nose running, the allergens spinning through the air reluctant to allow him room to breathe. They stare at the hole in the ground, bleak and unforgiving, comprised entirely of dirt; it offers no answers, no consolation, except to remind Lawliet of his own longevity.
[In like a lion, out like a lamb, they always said. A preposterous expression. Everything was always a battle.]
And as such, those reminders can hardly be considered reassuring in nature; all the world provides is silence. Lawliet casts a sideways look at the pair, noticing the grey hairs at the sides of their temples, curling into the rest of their hair. He notes the wrinkles creasing on their foreheads, drawing maps and lines that speak of nothing more than their history together. His jaw tightens, but his expression betrays nothing.
What do I need successors for, anyways?
To live forever was to gain experience, and he was never going to need anyone else. The world was his book to learn, only he'd been reading it for quite some time.
Next to him, Nate murmurs:
“After these prayers, we should go. The ceremony’s almost over.”
Nate, at least, hasn’t started aging yet. Not Quillsh, either.
Lawliet presses his lips into a thin line and raises the cuff of his suit jacket to his lips, biting it softly and twisting it to straighten its fit, his teeth sinking into the fabric. Regardless of how long he’s lived, he never finds suits comfortable; they restrict the movement of his limbs, and he feels suffocated. Although, he must concede, the evolution of clothes through the years has certain wrought improvements. His twenty-first century plain, long-sleeved t-shirt and slacks are, by far, his preferred garments. They certainly beat the omnipresent wool of the Middle Ages, or the comparatively unnecessarily exuberant breeches and cravats of the dreaded colonial era.
And at least he no longer has to sport those ridiculous knee-high stockings. He narrows his eyes at the precise thought, and supposes that the presence of the suit jacket – while still dismal – is perhaps not as comparatively repugnant.
The rain sputters and slips down his neck, bypassing the umbrella and leaping to drench the back of his hair that never could quite be tamed. Nate, refusing to bring an umbrella, stands crooked among the tombstones, a ghostly pale figure. Mail and Mihael stand in stark contrast, somehow radiant and all sharp angles in spite of the atmosphere. The tombstones are like teeth seeping through the ground, bared at the crowd gathered around the casket and the priest droning on through the clouds, seemingly unaware of the apparent inattention of the crowd who, by all appearances, expresses desire only for the prospect of dispersing from the graveyard. Holy words are worth, irreverently, nothing.
The only word to describe Lawliet himself, he knows, is nothing particularly exuberant – he could be categorized merely only as fatigued.
It took him centuries and thousands of case examinations to learn, but life is nothing more than a game of patterns.
“Hey, there. Ryuzaki,” Mihael says quietly under his breath, his head tipped forward and his curtain of blonde hair falling over his cheekbones like it’s concealing a secret as he whispers the alias. It’s almost impossible to discern his scar from the angle at which Lawliet peers at him, but such a fact doesn’t erase the existence of the scar itself. “Where’s Quillsh at, anyways?”
“He stayed back at the orphanage. He proposed something about being there to sort through the utility bills for the month,” Lawliet murmurs evenly, his voice smoothly monotonous and hanging in their air between them. “He assured me it was a matter of the utmost importance.”
“Important enough to miss one of his students’ funerals? Damir would’ve cared very much.”
“I know. But…mmm. It would appear that it was rather important to handle such matters.”
Lawliet watches, grey eyes keen on the ground and sharply analyzing the scene as the priest reads a few final words from his ridiculously ornate bible gilded with the intricacies of vibrant reds and golds. The oversized mahogany casket holds the bodies of the two lovers – how else could they possibly be laid to rest? They were each others’ only Ones. They lived together and so they died together, wrapped in an eternal embrace. Instead of filling Lawliet with appreciation, the sentiment just exhausts him. Perhaps there’s nothing more to call it other than mere indifference, but he has no room in his stomach to feel remorse or loss regarding Damir. It’s almost certain that Quillsh feels the same – almost a one hundred percent chance. Quillsh has seen too many successors rise and fall with the years.
But Lawliet no longer has to calculate. The numbers are all lined up in his mind.
It’s no wonder he’s such a brilliant detective. There are only a finite number of patterns the world can follow, and no such patterns have had the grace to lead him into a pit in the ground.
None of this surprising. Only tired.
He runs a finger down the line of his jawbone, and finds himself chewing on his thumb – an old habit that no amount of time could erase. He closes his eyes and feels the rain lacerate the skin of his face, feeling in his soul that his life and every second of its duration are channeling the fate of the old prince, Hamlet, gossamer and reluctant in every capacity. The cells of his body are taking their time, because, after all, there will be time.
Artwork by rippernik. Do not repost without permission.
They may as well be ghosts – he and Near and Quillsh. They don’t belong in the land of the living with Mihael and Mail; perhaps that’s why they choose to view the world as an experiment, to toy with its mechanisms and mysteries like clock makers.
We may as well be ghosts... We're in the graveyard, already halfway there.
“Time to go,” Mail mutters under his breath as the priest closes the bible; he’s always one for constant movement, like his skin is itching for him to writhe with motion. But he’s correct – the impractical and ungraceful task of actually lowering the casket into the ground will happen after the party of onlookers has all but entirely dissipated, and no one is eager to continue to be soaked to the bone in the name of commemoration.
The scene is one of indifference. Lawliet casts a final glance at the coffin holding his student, Damir, and his wife; they were each other’s undoing, the seam rippers that tore each other to shreds and stitched each other back again until they were one entity. Damir gave up detective work to take care of her and their children, and worked at an ordinary day job – trading brains for surrendering to his cardiac muscles. And other sorts of muscles, Lawliet supposes. Perhaps it’s risky for he and the others to show their faces at the public ceremony, but Mihael had insisted it was only polite to attend to pay tribute to the mind of such a hardworking gentleman, lack of recent detective work be damned.
It is important, he supposes, to note that he is not merely cynical. Rather, he is indifferent. At least, this is the word by which he bases his thoughts. He closes his eyes and tilts his head to the side, staring out at the bit of sky not covered by his bloodred umbrella, grey eyes searching the equally blasé heavens, his mouth a thin line of determined solitude. The sky is the same throughout the ages; granted, the positions of the stars have changed somewhat – as he’s studied astronomy extensively – but the earth is a constant. In such a sense, he considers himself to be one with the bones of the world.
He lazily pulls at the sleeves of his suit once more and, watching his students move to leave, feeling his cells move like all the inner mechanisms of a clock, follows.
Business as usual.
Lawliet’s body itself is a timepiece, frozen like the cover of a watch, rejecting the abstraction that he might be a bomb waiting to melt at any moment and in turn accepting that he is being buried alive in a silent, unmoving tomb that paradoxically refuses to smother him at all.
He hasn’t aged a single day over eighteen.
And I never will.
Quillsh Wammy wears glasses in front of his clear blue eyes, but just for aesthetic appeal rather than necessity. “You get tired of your own face, after a few hundred years,” he jokes, and Lawliet never laughs, only purses his lips. “You need to do something to change it up.”
Lawliet supposes Quillsh is determined not to find his One; or something of the sort. He’s never found interest in someone, not even casually; he buries himself in work, studying all sorts of topics so that he may guide the students of their orphanage. The orphanage that doubles as an academy.
They call it Wammy's House. Lawliet finds himself sarcastically protesting on occasion, curious as to why it was never called Wammy and Lawliet’s House, but of course they both know the answer; it’s been a few centuries since the name Lawliet was last used as a means of identifying the detective, but people would still recognize it, especially those few who were still around. They all crossed circles, soon enough, if they had been around so long. The ones who could still remember and pass stories along generations were dangerous.
So he goes by all sorts of aliases, these days; for his clients, he introduces himself as L, or Coil, or Deneuve; he’s little more than a legend to anyone in the general public. Whenever he interacts with people in a more casual fashion, he sometimes adopts the name Ryuzaki, or something more benign. He sheds names like old skins. When he finds a new name, he pretends he’s being reborn. He knows that some people venture to believe in the concept of reincarnation; even though Lawliet finds that ideas proposing the factual existence of afterlives are somewhat implausible, the ideology behind such stories intrigues him, and he pretends that each new name he borrows belongs to a new life. The mirror, however, dispels any such hopes.
He rarely shows his face, when he’s working. Otherwise, they would all know that he was immortal. His clients and the media, they’d recognize him. They would undoubtedly figure out that he had been alive for ages, never growing a day older, his grey eyes trapped in their youthful yet exhausted prison and his hair an indelible jet-black hue of ink, his pale skin set like marble. He also wouldn’t dare risk his life, presenting his face obviously to potential criminals.
So, Lawliet works from within Wammy’s House. He uses his computer to communicate with his clients for solving some of the most curious cases of heinous, unpredictable activity.
His office comprises a quiet corner of the mansion, his room stuffed with books along the shelves, a grand piano nestled in the corner. If he sleeps, he sleeps in the armchair lined along the wall; but he rarely bothers with rest.
Although he’s been alive since the fifteenth century, the world holds too much for him, and he is constantly working on perfecting his mind.
He doesn’t wear glasses; he’s not like Quillsh. He doesn’t care enough for his exterior to even want to change it.
It’s been six hundred years.
L Lawliet has never found his One.
His parents had both been aging together when they had him; grey hairs lined the roots of their heads and they had begun to feel something ancient pulling at their bones and dragging them into the quietness of sleep. They taught a young Lawliet about the mechanisms of the world – that everyone ages until they’re eighteen years old, and then they stop aging until they’ve found their One, their soulmate. Soulmates – they age together, and die together.
They died when Lawliet had been eighteen for two years; but they didn’t die of natural causes. Their home had caught fire while Lawliet was out working, his mind reaching for the early glimmerings of philosophy that he managed to grasp. He was so terribly sharp, even before he learned to train his mind.
He didn’t cry when he found that they had died. He steeled his resolve, and moved along, grateful for the small miracle that at least they had been together. After all, there is no agony quite akin to that of Ones who die separately – they are constantly bound to be lost, one without the guidance and love of the other: a perpetual agony of mistaken paradise.
Lawliet didn’t cry when he went twenty more years without any traces of aging lacing his body. He found that nothing pulled him deep in his stomach; nothing compelled him to melt underneath someone’s gaze, and nothing begged him to submit to the merits of love or lust. He found himself intrigued by puzzles and philosophy, so he buried himself in such things, the pieces of the world fitting together as he sought with all of his mind to understand the fundamental questions that provided the cornerstone for the phenomenon of existence. Learning and working simultaneously, he was somehow wholly unsurprised when he woke every morning with no wrinkles or lines gracing his face.
Forty more years passed. Then, sixty more after that.
The world changed in front of him, and still nothing.
In the seventeenth century, Lawliet – ever the pragmatist – began to suspect that he was simply not going to find his One.
He attended too many funerals of friends, and learned that such events compelled him into preferring solitude. Knowledge, at least, wasn’t likely to be buried underneath the ground, or wait for a sinkhole to open and lure for him to fall in.
What is more important than justice, than life?
Kindness.
Increasingly heavily preoccupied by solitude and leading a wholly lackluster existence, Lawliet was grateful to find Quillsh Wammy in the 1800s. Quillsh was working as a candlemakers’ apprentice, and Lawliet worked at a bookshop, perpetually plagued by the existence of knee socks. Quillsh, also rooted in the age of eighteen, stopped by the shop every day to engage Lawliet in philosophical conversations about the different merits and methods of teaching in the present, and Lawliet – eager to oblige – shared his various perspectives with Quillsh, engaging and challenging his own intellectual and deductive abilities by playing devil’s advocate and sharing his personal opinions in equal capacities.
Although Lawliet checks himself and subconsciously examines Quillsh for signs of aging, he finds none.
They became inseparable, perhaps on principle.
Once, long ago, Quillsh had promised Lawliet that he'd stay with him until the day one of them was no longer alive.
In the present, Lawliet pours over The Picture Of Dorian Gray. It’s been one of his favorites since its debut, near to the turn of the twentieth century. His brain comprises a sort of poetry as he lets the lines soak into his skin –
“’You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit’…” he whispers to himself. “’Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes…’”
I suppose that holds some merit. Tired eyes, tired hands, lips unbitten and fatigued of the monotony.
The book is undoubtedly rife with beautiful lines, but he is somehow unaffected by their worth; perhaps it’s not unlike his experience with letting the rain bleach him earlier, in that capacity – perhaps he’s incapable of viewing anything with the sort of emotional lens that might allow such things to be lent to greater meaning. All he can consider is that at the moment, he hasn’t chosen to occupy himself with any cases, and it’s not unlike he’s staring at the hole full of dirt from earlier, standing on the precipice of it and feeling himself want to fall but being wholly incapable of letting himself surrender.
Lawliet understands the world, but he’s frozen. He’s not like Mihael and Mail, in their finite conjoined allure; and he’s not like Damir, literally buried with his sins. The irony of his condition is that he shares the relative – perhaps temporary – promise of immortality with two others, but their emotional isolation leaves him as alone as though he were the only one of his kind.
Lawliet had solved his first case as a detective in the late 1800s, and he’s been solving cases ever since. The first one - it had been some sort of murder mystery, a question of who did it. He was roped in to solving more cases by his town’s police force soon afterwards, and he found that the mental stimulation pumped new blood through his veins. The rush from it was greater than that accompanying puzzles, accompanying than word games.
In the late twentieth century, perhaps inspired briefly by a bout of lackluster optimism that he could potentially meet his One, Lawliet – and eventually Quillsh – were convinced that there should be a chance for successors to take his place in the event of his aging or death. They founded Wammy’s House and took in orphans from all across England, but still, there were no signs of aging that graced Lawliet.
He was learning to know better. He had been learning all along.
All along, he hadn’t cared who it would be. At the beginning, he had just wanted it to be someone.
Lawliet isn’t sure what he aspires to reach, any longer.
Simply to be.
He’s still flipping listlessly through the pages of Dorian Gray’s woes when Quillsh knocks on his door, running his hands through his pale blonde hair, cheeks flushed. “Lawliet,” he says, breathless.
Lawliet doesn’t lift his head, just flicks a page over lazily. “Mmmh.” His fingers and arms are the hands of a clock, pieces of a puzzle, omnipresent and steady – and still somewhat sticky from having snacked on strawberries coated in sugar only hours earlier. He’s changed back into his typical white shirt and blue pants, a fit that more suitably accompanies his level of comfort – the glow from his computer screen, proclaiming an ornate letter “L” on the display, reflects onto his shirt and illuminates his chest.
It’s as though his room is timeless, but he’s still a timepiece. He feels the seconds resting on his bones like dust. But –
“It’s about Beyond,” Quillsh whispers, ducking into the room and checking the hallway, ensuring that no one could overhear their conversation. “He was found…dead. In his cell.”
Instead of the moments slowing, they seem to quicken.
Lawliet’s eyes flick up dangerously, the rest of his body entirely, unsettlingly still as he crouches in the chair, legs tucked underneath his abdomen, the toes of his bare feet twisting and curling as his mind races. “Did he –"
“He didn’t find his One,” Quillsh says softly. “You may be interested to know…he died of a…heart attack. But there’s more than that… I think you’re going to want to see this.”
For a brief, almost cynical, moment, Lawliet thinks he hears his heart beating clearly in his ears, like the universe is whispering to him that these moments carry more weight than any of the ones from the past six hundred years.
He knows enough about the calculations and probabilities and polarities and dualities of the world to attribute such absurd sensibilities to his mere imagination.
Funerals can do that to people.