Warning: Light/Mello, sex, swearing

Echoes

Right from the beginning, there was a part of me that wanted nothing more than to see him go up in flames. Everything about him hit me in that raw, central part of my mind, the part that had lain dormant for years, and reawakened the icy determination inside me. It was delicious, the hatred I had for him. How he cut his hair like a woman, spoke like a man, dressed like a whore yet was barely an adult- yes, I hated that. How he moved like a man of height and strength, him with his skinny matchstick arms and legs- I hated that. How he called Kira supporters mindless sheep yet wore the image of his own god around his neck like a badge of honour- I hated that, hated it with a frenzy I could not let him see. It was all too much: such stupid hypocrisy and simple blindness to the facts of the world in one of such intelligence. I wanted to change him, turn him towards me, and failing that, destroy him.

Brittle, that was the word for him. His nerves and his temper first- they snapped even before mine did. As we made our way around the corner of the stairs and up into my rooms- a process made torturously slow by the way we were bound to each other by our lips and hands and the way every movement was twisted into a struggle for power and pleasure- I was thankful that his hatred for me burned just as strongly as mine for him. I fell onto my bed with him hot and tangled between my fingers, and I was grateful for his fiery centre of fury and for the way he held me close against him with his teeth and nails. It was the sort of embrace I had expected from him.

Brittle was also the word for his body. His limbs felt unreal under my hands and his bones protruded from them in the same way his insecurities and his weaknesses protruded from his mind. As I closed my hands about his upper arms, they felt like driftwood. I could have snapped them.

But I didn't.

He told me later, standing clothed and facing away from me as I lay on the bed, that I had taken nothing from him that he had not made the decision to give. It sank into me like inevitable poison but I did not express my anger.

"You're a lot more stupid than I thought if you think I didn't realise that."

He laughed. "Jesus Christ. And to think you've lived out your cute little life unchallenged for so long. Everything you say reveals more than it would take to get you locked up."

I shouted after him as he left- something about taking his Lord's name in vain. The sound of his laughter rang through the corridor.

I was left lying on my back listening to the echoes of him, feeling as if my skin had been stripped off. And yet I did not feel exposed and my raw scratches did not sting; I felt exhilarated and delirious with loathing. Yes, this was something I had missed. Perhaps I was transparent, but I would never let him see how much I had been craving someone like him. Someone I could beat down as he beat me down: with fists, words, teeth, claws, and at the centre of it all, with sex. We would see, at the end of it, which of us had been crushed into the finer pile of dust.

The second time I saw him, he had cut out all pretences and was waiting in my bedroom for me, pacing like a caged animal. It would have had to happen this way; I had now way to contact him, and we both knew there was unfinished business between us. This time, he pulled me down onto the bed like a man who expected no resistance. I had been planning to fight this, tell him that if he wanted me he would have to put in some effort- a lot of people wanted me, after all. But the motions were too natural and the sensations too easy to become lost in. I submitted to his force that night, allowed his energy and emotion and the way he had with his hands to sweep me away.

I could see the triumph in his eyes as he dressed himself afterwards. He had no concept of the nature of war if he thought one victory made him the superior being. He was even more naïve to assume that sex was my weakness.

"Still carrying your god around your neck?" I asked as I watched him fasten his belt.

"Still expect yours to save the world through mass murder?" he responded.

I almost reacted until I realised that he would have had to be even more blind than he appeared at first glance in order not to figure out that I believed in Kira's ideals. "At least I know my god exists," I said, keeping my cool. I could fight on these terms.

He snorted as he sat on the bed to pull on his boots. "Kira's made it clear he's willing to kill innocents. That doesn't seem very godly to me."

"Doesn't it?" I said. I sat up and slid my hands around his hips. "Killing for the greater good, allowing some innocents to die to save the rest, sacrificing the few for the sake of the many… That sounds very godly to me." And I flicked his rosary with my thumbnail.

He flung me off, whirled around and pinned me to the mattress with one skinny forearm. I could not prevent my eyes from wandering upwards to rest on the barrel of the gun pressed to my forehead.

When he spoke, his voice was as soft as I'd ever heard it, and it was then that I knew just how deeply my words had sliced him. "You fucking bastard. I could kill you right here."

It could not be denied. And yet, after a few seconds, he scoffed quietly, tucked his gun into his trousers and left. This time the corridor rang with nothing but footsteps moving further away.

I kept him alive, even after learning his name. Perhaps it was stupid. After all, everything in his manner screamed threat, just as everything in his movements screamed sex. I could have wiped him out in an instant, in a heartbeat.

But I didn't. I didn't want to defeat him in that way, leaving me with nothing but the cold, certain knowledge of his death. I did not want him to be cut cleanly out of the world, as if under anaesthetic. I wanted to watch him die. I wanted to hold that pretty face in my hands and touch his skin as the life left him; to see the reverence in his eyes as their spark died away; to hear his hushed voice accept me as his saviour even as his breath ended and his blood ceased to flow. I kept him alive for that and for that alone.

The third time I saw him, his clothing was broken up with stark ironic white in the form of bandages, tied across his face and torso as if holding his very skeleton together. He was cornered and wounded, damaged by his own sin. He had been bathed in fire, and I ate up the knowledge.

His hips were narrow and he felt bonier than ever, but I did not treat him with care- if he broke it would be his fault for coming too close to me, and for issuing a challenge he was not equal to. I took him in my hands, and while his teeth clamped into my shoulder I tore off his bandages and exposed him to the air; his wounds were red, with barely a layer of skin to seal them off. He shuddered when I touched them, and I could have dug my nails into the charred flesh and ripped it away from his bones.

But I didn't.

"You were caught," I said afterwards. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him lick his lips: for once, he had not got up and dressed immediately but had lain beside me for a while, collapsed onto the mattress with his limbs sprawled almost casually across mine.

"Yeah," he said at last, "but I'm not beaten yet."

And after that I did not see him again. It took me far too long to grasp that the little bastard would not return- how could he leave so much unsaid and undone between us?- and longer still to realise that through it all, neither of us had made the pretence of asking the other for his name. I still did not know, would never know for sure, whether he suspected me or just hated me with a passion he did not fully understand- or why he did not shoot, that night when he had me pinned beneath his body and his hands were shaking on his gun like its surface was scorching him. Certainly he did not spare my life because of a lack of evidence against me- he was the sort for whom a personal conviction is the same thing as evidence- and despite all his religious affectations there was no such thing as mercy in his world. The decision may have been made out of respect- not for me, but for L, who after all would not have wanted me to die before my guilt could be proven to the world. Or perhaps he simply wanted to break me the way I wanted to do to him.

None of it mattered when he finally re-emerged, battered, scarred and defiant, like a hellish phoenix- or simply like a man who does not know when to give up. The plan had to be his: it had his forcefulness, his recklessness, his blind lack of reason sewn into its very fabric. I knew that whatever had happened to push my plans off their rightful path, he was behind it; and as soon as I received the telephone call- the panicked, nonsensical words of a woman who just saw her own mortality reflected back at her in the metal of a gun- I knew that he could not be alive.

I restrained my anger- at myself, for letting him vanish, and that woman for killing him, at him for hatching this scheme and allowing himself to die before I could achieve my victory over him- smothered it all beneath layers of fake confusion and concern, a skill I had cultivated into an art form over the years. The only expression of rage that I allowed myself went through my hand and into the ink that killed my spokesperson. An undignified death, but no worse than the one she had given to him. To die of a heart attack, quietly, in the dark, killed not even by my pen but by that of my follower: it was shameful and strangely, I felt he did not deserve it. All along I had given him the personal touch. The hate shot directly into his eyes, hands on his skin playing a melody of contempt, promising him death with every kiss pressed tightly to scarred flesh. The game had been cut short and robbed of its conclusion, and I smouldered with the triumph I had been denied.

And yet when I got out of the car and gazed upwards, even as I reeled, eyes swimming with smoke, and shielded my face from the heat, my mind was stung with the perfection of it. An ancient church, walls crumbling, roof long gone, its structure collapsing unheeded. I could not have done better myself. Somewhere inside he was burning after all, little wounded devil in a chapel of flames, probably still bearing his sacred dying man around his neck. Had he known he would die on that day? Was this a message to me? Or had whatever gods favoured me set up the scene in all its sick poetry, right down to the long plume of fire that leaped upwards as I first cast my eyes over it, scorching me with its dry heat?

Perfect indeed.

So why, that night, did I lie on my back like he had just left my bed, turn my eyes into the corners of the room, and listen to the echoes he had not left behind?

Author's notes: SO I'M STILL KIND OF OBSESSED WITH THIS PAIRING. Reviews would make me love you forever and ever.