New York City is one of the reasons Matt hates Kira, besides what he's done to Mello and Near and himself and murdering L. Under Kira's influence, the city has altered itself, its giant asphalt streets shifting under the looming sundial shadow of Kira, the rising son of Japan, far away to the east but still not far away enough.

He lived in Jersey, for awhile, taking the bus with the suit-and-ties, which was okay; at least it was quiet; although the presence of so many people unnerved him and he couldn't even sneak a smoke.

He'll never forget the first time he saw the skyline, dim and blue and gray, like the bottom jaw of some titanium alloy concrete entity—and the gap in its teeth, where two buildings used to stand.

You know that they screamed from their fire escapes, frightened as churchmice in their brick brownstone hovels, terrified of that slant-eyed Killer and his omnipresence. You know they shoved the corpses of men in orange jumpsuits into bags and shipped them onto barges out of Alcatraz, out of Rikers; dumped them to feed the East River's fishes. You know the headlines of the WSJ were just as frantic and noisy as the Posts' big black fonts, coating sewer grates and the sleeping homeless.

Now, the scrolling red letters of news tickers around buildings reel off the names of the dead, and people are encouraged to say 'rightfully so' on the talk shows and the websites, and the flashing billboards and commercials mention his name like he's some kind of marketing device, a staple in their society, a symbol of justice.

And it's like, Matt feels like screaming in their faces—did you forget about the planes? Remember them falling from the sky, swooping towards the skyscrapers, and the earth became rubble and fragmented steel girders and the cloud was still there the next morning—

Because that's what Kira is, what he represents, the sixteenth tarot card—the Tower, its turret crumbling, struck by lightning—you might say some divine hand, you might say inevitability but it all ends up the same way—in chaos.

He drove through the desert on the way here, a blonde riding shotgun, and they came out of it prophets, like in the Old Testament (without looking back at the gilded streets of Los Angeles, covered with white enamel like an insincere smile, lest they turn into pillars of salt) and still no one believes them.

Which is a shame, because he always liked the city—the crude language of the people, the accent grating and harsh from being bent around cement corners for so long, but not as bad is it was made to be—it was so ugly it was beautiful, like the long swoops of the Verrazano's suspensions, or the green and purple iridescent throats of pigeons (doves that lingered so long in the soot they stained their white feathers permanently gray).

Now he watches the news from Brooklyn, because Mello doesn't want him near New York, where the ruins are on the waterfront and the crowds are getting more uncontrollable by the second, and even on the television he can see their hearts burning in their chests, blood-hungry and bestial, waving pennants and baseball caps that used to support the Yankees and now only wave for that murderer hundreds of miles away.

They say they will burn the building to the ground, rip out its foundations with their bare hands, watch gleefully as it collapses—use it as a symbol of what is to come.

And Matt buries his head in his hands, blocking out the sound of their voices, because it reminds him of the metal drone of planes falling from the sky.

Near dwells above,

Mello below,

Matt in the midst,

Heaven, Hell, and Earth encompassed in one place—the city that Peter bought,

the city that stays awake,

long into the night,

like they do.

A/N: Last one for now. Goodness, that last one is dark. Why can't I write anything cute? At all?

'The city that Peter bought'--Peter Stuyevsant or however you spell it, traded with the Indians for the island of Manhattan in exchange for fourteen dollars worth of goods, I think.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm in a bit of a slump with Miserlou. Sticky ending. And my beta just went from boot camp to camping so everything I write is horribly lacking in the grammar department. Blah.

x0x0 Raven