None of it is; if it's a joke, it's a cruel and humiliating one, and L is betrayed, and angry, and bleeding out as he runs on fumes alone. Even his omen is forsaking what truly matters, here, and the sting of it eclipses what screams in the severed stump in front of his makeshift tourniquet.
Even alone, even if he can't maintain it for a full minute before he inevitably slides to the floor, he'll stand in service of what truly matters. He can be the only one, just like last time, when everyone betrayed him through treachery or stupidity and let a mass murderer win.
I'm right. What matters is I'm right... I wasn't wrong, I'm right I'm right...
The giddy singsong pinging through his brain is shattered into pieces by a voice he can't name, but knows in every fiber of himself. Clinging to the armrest with his remaining, bloody hand, he slips down beside the couch before he thought he'd have to, hollow eyes staring, his own voice stolen by the commanding power in Paul's.
It's not that the Voice sounds like a Shinigami. It's more of a feeling, the pierce of being seen by yellow eyes and marked. And who is he to stand against a god of death? He's the one who tried, and fell; that's his legacy, that will always be his legacy.
The effect lingers even after the sound has crumbled and dropped away. Paul sounds like a scared boy again, baldly telling the room what he can't lose and plaintively asking if he's being punished.
L shakes his head, which lolls sideways against the couch's armrest. He'd never, not intentionally. Even punishing Paul accidentally is still a kind of power he's convinced he can't possess, even at his strongest and sharpest when Paul still believed he could learn something of value from him.
He doesn't know how to be beloved, watching with the bewildered anxiousness of a draft horse who has broken a leg and suddenly become a burden and a liability. Is guilt the punishment that Paul perceives? Or the pain that he should have swallowed with drugs that could blot it out for them both?]
no subject
None of it is; if it's a joke, it's a cruel and humiliating one, and L is betrayed, and angry, and bleeding out as he runs on fumes alone. Even his omen is forsaking what truly matters, here, and the sting of it eclipses what screams in the severed stump in front of his makeshift tourniquet.
Even alone, even if he can't maintain it for a full minute before he inevitably slides to the floor, he'll stand in service of what truly matters. He can be the only one, just like last time, when everyone betrayed him through treachery or stupidity and let a mass murderer win.
I'm right. What matters is I'm right... I wasn't wrong, I'm right I'm right...
The giddy singsong pinging through his brain is shattered into pieces by a voice he can't name, but knows in every fiber of himself. Clinging to the armrest with his remaining, bloody hand, he slips down beside the couch before he thought he'd have to, hollow eyes staring, his own voice stolen by the commanding power in Paul's.
It's not that the Voice sounds like a Shinigami. It's more of a feeling, the pierce of being seen by yellow eyes and marked. And who is he to stand against a god of death? He's the one who tried, and fell; that's his legacy, that will always be his legacy.
The effect lingers even after the sound has crumbled and dropped away. Paul sounds like a scared boy again, baldly telling the room what he can't lose and plaintively asking if he's being punished.
L shakes his head, which lolls sideways against the couch's armrest. He'd never, not intentionally. Even punishing Paul accidentally is still a kind of power he's convinced he can't possess, even at his strongest and sharpest when Paul still believed he could learn something of value from him.
He doesn't know how to be beloved, watching with the bewildered anxiousness of a draft horse who has broken a leg and suddenly become a burden and a liability. Is guilt the punishment that Paul perceives? Or the pain that he should have swallowed with drugs that could blot it out for them both?]