Puppy Dog: a Beyond/L fic
Jul. 14th, 2023 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quicktimeeventfullA nineteen-year-old L wakes from a horrible dream and calls Beyond for a little reassurance. Beyond provides a flavour of comfort that belongs just to the two of them.
or
Maybe sometimes L can be just as fucked up about Beyond as Beyond is about him.
I'm flagging that this contains some graphic metaphorical imagery, primarily centred around insects/infestation, and some past graphic violence.
Anyway! Here's a story about L and B being mutually fucked up about each other, because teamwork makes the dream work.
What L is doing is wrong, and he knows this, although on paper it all checks out. He’s only a year older than Backup — nineteen to his eighteen, a difference which hardly matters — and he isn’t in charge, not really.
He has, yes, a certain authority. Backup looks to him for instructions about how he’s meant to be. That’s instructions not as in orders but as in the steps in an Ikea manual, about how all the pieces slot together. But L never asked for this. And really it’s Watari pulling the strings, when all is said and done. Watari has the money and the orphanage and he tells Backup when to go to sleep while L whittles away his time in a series of eerily formulaic hotel rooms, solving his mysteries, eating mochi and cake.
So he reasons it’s fine. Or else it’s close enough to fine that it doesn’t matter. Or else he doesn’t care, actually, at all, because if he can’t do this then he’ll have to unstitch his seams and crawl straight out of his body, skinned and dripping, all the nerve endings breathing in the air, because that’s how it all feels anyway, a hurt that runs through him and in him and which simply cannot be survived.
He wakes in the twin bed, shivering out of a dream that wriggles inside of him. It was a dream about hands. His mother’s hands, bushing against his cheek, gentle and sweet, holding him and pressing him down below the water. In his dream her black hair had hung, coiling towards him, her voice filled with words the way old fruit fills with maggots.
Watari is in the bed across from him, a dark shadow in the shallow moonlight that falls from the hotel’s curtains. Vulnerable, in his sleep.
He slips out of the covers, his bare feet cold even on the carpet. Quiet, he walks the six steps to the hotel door and slips his feet into his shoes, sliding his phone and his keycard and a handful of change off the counter and into his pyjama pocket as he goes. He cracks open the door, wincing at the sliver of light that falls across his face, then steps into the hall.
There is an eeriness to hotels at night. The hallways are always so bright and the doors seem to extend farther than they do in the day. Here, the walls are beige and are carpets criss-crossed with a pattern of diamonds. L rubs his eyes beneath the fluorescent lights, then shakes his head and pads to the end of the hall, through and down the stairwell. He gives a little nod to the concierge, then walks outside into the black night.
Outside there is a parking lot which looks vast in the dark, and stars above, spilling a dull grey across the sky. Past the parking lot he can see only the highway which bleeds into the overpass, but he knows the city is there, further on, its lights leaking into the sky. It doesn’t matter which city, really. After a while they all become the same. His mind gets so fuzzy with the miasma of them.
He walks around the side of the building, to where he’d seen a vending machine earlier in the day.
In the dark the machine glows fluorescent colours, blue and red and chemical green dripping out into the night. He buys himself a cherry coke then crouches beside it, backing himself into the little corner between it and the concrete wall. The metal of the coke can is wet with condensation. The water clings to his fingers, clammy.
He flips open his phone dials the number for the Wammy House.
Roger picks up immediately. Of course he does. No one but him and Watari have this number. He is always a priority caller.
“Hello?” Roger says, cautiously. He sounds muddy.
“Roger,” L says. His voice is brisk and efficient. What he feels is as though all the little things inside him are pressing up against his skin, in his throat, crawling along his bones and his veins, but his voice never fails him — it’s always ready when he needs it, sturdy and blandly authoritative, with the disinterested confidence of a telephone operator. “I need to talk to Backup."
There’s a little pause.
"L,” Roger says. “It’s three in the morning.”
L doesn’t care. He really and truly does not. “Wake him up,” he says.
For a second L thinks Roger is going to argue. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. L is their little goose all golden. Someday they’ll cut him up, but not yet.
He waits, his heart pounding, those fingers crawling in his throat, until finally there’s a voice on the line. It’s hoarse with sleep, a little dazed, but eager too, a dog always pulling at its chain.
Backup has a deep voice, pleasant and coiling dark. “L,” he’s saying. “Are you okay? What do you need?”
L breathes out, heavier than he’d meant. Already it’s a relief to hear him. He’s the tip of the knife, pricking his skin to let out the bloat.
He doesn’t want to say what he needs out loud. He presses the edge of his coke can to his lips. He waits. There’s nothing, just the silence and the static.
Then B speaks again. His voice is on the edge, ready to help. “Do you need me to tell you?”
He doesn’t make L say what. Or else he doesn’t need L to say what. There’s no point; they both know.
“Yes,” says L. “Please tell me.”
L can hear the shift of Beyond’s clothes as he settles. The Wammy house’s phone is in the office, so that’s where he must be. He’ll be behind that heavy oak desk with all those papers around. It’ll smell like old varnish and those cigarettes Roger pretends not to smoke. “Okay,” he says.
And his voice is different now, suddenly. Smoother. More certain. L thinks of the way dogs look, in the first moments after their muzzles are slipped off.
In the case they’re working on just upstairs, he’d found a man who had chopped up a little girl and tried to feed the pieces of her to his dogs. But the dogs wouldn’t eat and so there had just been pieces of her all around, pieces of this girl, raw pink chunks rotting in the sun, and the dogs had played amongst them, yipping and licking. They don’t know the difference between this girl and any other meat. The man should have checked but he hadn’t. And so L had found him and bad things will happen to him, in return for the bad things he'd done.
The phone goes staticky as Backup shifts it closer to his mouth — L can hear his breathing, suddenly louder in his own ear. It’s steady, even, still heavy with the sleep L had dragged him out of.
“Do you know what you are?” Beyond says.
L curls tight around himself. “No,” he says.
“Pathetic,” Beyond tells him. He doesn’t spit it out. There’s no venom in it. He says it like a fact. “That’s what you are. A weak little creature. Useless, too.”
L swallows. He bites at the metal of the can, then presses down on the tab, breaks the seal, and takes a drink. He shuts his eyes. It’s very cold, and very sweet.
“Can’t do anything for yourself,” Backup says. “You always need someone carting you around. A minder. But are you grateful for it? No. Never. You bitch and you bitch and you whine and you whine and everyone’s fucking tired of you, you know that? They’re tired of caring for a pointless little insect like you. They pretend they’re not, but that’s only because they want things from you.”
He can hear the click-click-click of the phone’s spiral chord; Backup must be wrapping it around his wrist. His voice is going languid, now; he’s settling into it. His sleep-drunk tone is disappearing, replaced with this other thing, this predatory calm, the way animals will go glassy-eyed before they leap.
“And you know what? They’re not going to want things from you for always. You’re nice and shiny now but you won’t be forever. You’ll get lazy and complacent — you think you won’t, and you’ll try to fight against, but you will. Everyone always does. Or you’ll get all burnt out from all the ugly little things you need to look at. You’ll get dirty.
L inhales, sharp. He drinks again, sweetness and bubbles on his tongue.
“And guess what happens then?” L can hear it in his voice — he’s smiling, now. He imagines that expression, not cruel, never cruel, just a smile, sharp and bright, the hint of teeth. Not a weapon but a kitchen knife.
“I don’t know,” L says, although he does. He just wants to hear it from someone else. He needs to hear it from somewhere that isn’t his own head, so that it won’t be a part of him anymore, so that the words can belong to someone other than himself and those hands and that squirming mass of a voice he can’t refuse to swallow.
“Then I come along,” Backup says. “Then they toss you in the trash and they replace you with a new and better model. And that’s me! Since A couldn’t hack it. They always tell you, you know, that you’re the first and that makes you better, but it doesn’t. It makes you disposable. Replaceable. Something made to be upgraded. Why would they get a second if you were so important? Why would they have me already if they didn’t expect you to die or fuck up so bad they won't want you anymore? You’ll make it to twenty but maybe not all that much more.”
L squeezes his eyes shut. Backup’s voice is bright, now; hoarse and glittering.
“And then it’ll be me, L. Just me. And you’ll be dead or left somewhere to die and that’ll be the way it was meant to be because it’s what everyone wants right now anyway.”
“Thank you,” says L, quiet. That’s the signal. They’ve never discussed it, but it is and Backup will know; he always knows.
Backup stops, immediately. When he speaks again, his voice is hesitant; it has that doggish eagerness to it, wanting to be scratched behind the ears and smothered with kisses. “Was that good?”
“Yes,” says L. “Yes. It was. Thank you. You did well.”
It feels as if he’s been deboned, like a fish, his back split and his spine dragged out with the rest of his skeleton trailing behind. He takes another drink.
"I wasn’t too mean?”
“You weren’t too mean. No.”
L can hear the chord clicking again and B tugs at it. “It’s all true, you know,” he says, just shy of defensive, like he’s trying to convince L he didn’t do anything wrong. “I don’t make any of it up.”
“I know.” He does; they see more than Watari seems to realize, Backup and him.
“But I wouldn’t say it like that, normally. I like you, even if no one else does.”
“I know that,” L tells him. He breathes out again, then drinks back the rest of the can, quick-quick-quick. “I should go now, Backup.”
He can hear rustling on the other end of the line. “Can you stay and talk for a bit?”
“No. I have to get back before Watari realizes I’ve gone.”
“Oh.” Backup pauses. “Do you think you’ll come back to visit soon?”
“I really don’t know,” he says, then bites at the inside of his mouth. He would like to see Backup again, in the flesh. “I’ll try, Backup. It’s difficult, the case we’re working on, so I might be able to convince Watari I need a little bit in between. But it’s complicated. You know this.”
There’s more rustling from the other end of the line. “Right. Yeah. I know.” There’s a breath, and then, “It’s just. I don’t feel real when you aren’t here.”
“You shouldn’t.” L says, flatly, and hears Backup inhale sharply. “You and I, we’re the same animal. You don’t exist without me, and I won’t exist without you, when the time comes. Other people are … but we’re not like them. It’s L and B. L then B. That’s just how it is. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
It’s easiest when they’re together, because then he can feel Backup’s bones against his bones and Backup’s hands in his hair, tugging, the hot flash of pain, the wet shiver, his teeth dragging against L’s skin, that shudder in his breath which belongs just to oratory of them, whispering in L’s ear, saying I know you, I know you, I know who you are.
But Backup forgets, sometimes. He starts thinking of them as two separate things.
Which isn’t fair. It leaves L with nothing but himself, his body all marred; he has to listen to all those wriggling things inside of him, this infestation, when B is right there, all fresh and new, hidden away from the world where nothing has ever hurt him.
L can reach out. He can touch him. He can take and drink from the clean and holy cup of B and then everything will be just fine, forever.
He doesn’t have to exist at all, if he doesn’t want to. Backup was always meant to become him, after, or at least to become L; if it will be true later then it has to be true now and so B can’t ever walk away from him, can’t ever be permitted to think that it matters when they’re apart, because it doesn’t, because it can’t, because L couldn’t stand it if it did, because the things that happened to him shouldn’t have been allowed but they happened anyway and he was so sick for so long, and he was so lonely, but then the world gave to him this perfect creature as an apology and it’s his, now. It’s his.
“I have to go,” he says, again. “We’ll talk again, later.” Then, “Goodnight, Backup.”
“Goodnight,” says B, quiet.
L snaps the phone shut. He stands. He tips the can to suck the very last bit of sugar out, then carries it back with him out of the night and into the hot bright light of the hotel, where he tosses it into the bin beside the concierge’s desk and walks back up the stairwell towards his room.
or
Maybe sometimes L can be just as fucked up about Beyond as Beyond is about him.
I'm flagging that this contains some graphic metaphorical imagery, primarily centred around insects/infestation, and some past graphic violence.
Anyway! Here's a story about L and B being mutually fucked up about each other, because teamwork makes the dream work.
###
What L is doing is wrong, and he knows this, although on paper it all checks out. He’s only a year older than Backup — nineteen to his eighteen, a difference which hardly matters — and he isn’t in charge, not really.
He has, yes, a certain authority. Backup looks to him for instructions about how he’s meant to be. That’s instructions not as in orders but as in the steps in an Ikea manual, about how all the pieces slot together. But L never asked for this. And really it’s Watari pulling the strings, when all is said and done. Watari has the money and the orphanage and he tells Backup when to go to sleep while L whittles away his time in a series of eerily formulaic hotel rooms, solving his mysteries, eating mochi and cake.
So he reasons it’s fine. Or else it’s close enough to fine that it doesn’t matter. Or else he doesn’t care, actually, at all, because if he can’t do this then he’ll have to unstitch his seams and crawl straight out of his body, skinned and dripping, all the nerve endings breathing in the air, because that’s how it all feels anyway, a hurt that runs through him and in him and which simply cannot be survived.
He wakes in the twin bed, shivering out of a dream that wriggles inside of him. It was a dream about hands. His mother’s hands, bushing against his cheek, gentle and sweet, holding him and pressing him down below the water. In his dream her black hair had hung, coiling towards him, her voice filled with words the way old fruit fills with maggots.
Watari is in the bed across from him, a dark shadow in the shallow moonlight that falls from the hotel’s curtains. Vulnerable, in his sleep.
He slips out of the covers, his bare feet cold even on the carpet. Quiet, he walks the six steps to the hotel door and slips his feet into his shoes, sliding his phone and his keycard and a handful of change off the counter and into his pyjama pocket as he goes. He cracks open the door, wincing at the sliver of light that falls across his face, then steps into the hall.
There is an eeriness to hotels at night. The hallways are always so bright and the doors seem to extend farther than they do in the day. Here, the walls are beige and are carpets criss-crossed with a pattern of diamonds. L rubs his eyes beneath the fluorescent lights, then shakes his head and pads to the end of the hall, through and down the stairwell. He gives a little nod to the concierge, then walks outside into the black night.
Outside there is a parking lot which looks vast in the dark, and stars above, spilling a dull grey across the sky. Past the parking lot he can see only the highway which bleeds into the overpass, but he knows the city is there, further on, its lights leaking into the sky. It doesn’t matter which city, really. After a while they all become the same. His mind gets so fuzzy with the miasma of them.
He walks around the side of the building, to where he’d seen a vending machine earlier in the day.
In the dark the machine glows fluorescent colours, blue and red and chemical green dripping out into the night. He buys himself a cherry coke then crouches beside it, backing himself into the little corner between it and the concrete wall. The metal of the coke can is wet with condensation. The water clings to his fingers, clammy.
He flips open his phone dials the number for the Wammy House.
Roger picks up immediately. Of course he does. No one but him and Watari have this number. He is always a priority caller.
“Hello?” Roger says, cautiously. He sounds muddy.
“Roger,” L says. His voice is brisk and efficient. What he feels is as though all the little things inside him are pressing up against his skin, in his throat, crawling along his bones and his veins, but his voice never fails him — it’s always ready when he needs it, sturdy and blandly authoritative, with the disinterested confidence of a telephone operator. “I need to talk to Backup."
There’s a little pause.
"L,” Roger says. “It’s three in the morning.”
L doesn’t care. He really and truly does not. “Wake him up,” he says.
For a second L thinks Roger is going to argue. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. L is their little goose all golden. Someday they’ll cut him up, but not yet.
He waits, his heart pounding, those fingers crawling in his throat, until finally there’s a voice on the line. It’s hoarse with sleep, a little dazed, but eager too, a dog always pulling at its chain.
Backup has a deep voice, pleasant and coiling dark. “L,” he’s saying. “Are you okay? What do you need?”
L breathes out, heavier than he’d meant. Already it’s a relief to hear him. He’s the tip of the knife, pricking his skin to let out the bloat.
He doesn’t want to say what he needs out loud. He presses the edge of his coke can to his lips. He waits. There’s nothing, just the silence and the static.
Then B speaks again. His voice is on the edge, ready to help. “Do you need me to tell you?”
He doesn’t make L say what. Or else he doesn’t need L to say what. There’s no point; they both know.
“Yes,” says L. “Please tell me.”
L can hear the shift of Beyond’s clothes as he settles. The Wammy house’s phone is in the office, so that’s where he must be. He’ll be behind that heavy oak desk with all those papers around. It’ll smell like old varnish and those cigarettes Roger pretends not to smoke. “Okay,” he says.
And his voice is different now, suddenly. Smoother. More certain. L thinks of the way dogs look, in the first moments after their muzzles are slipped off.
In the case they’re working on just upstairs, he’d found a man who had chopped up a little girl and tried to feed the pieces of her to his dogs. But the dogs wouldn’t eat and so there had just been pieces of her all around, pieces of this girl, raw pink chunks rotting in the sun, and the dogs had played amongst them, yipping and licking. They don’t know the difference between this girl and any other meat. The man should have checked but he hadn’t. And so L had found him and bad things will happen to him, in return for the bad things he'd done.
The phone goes staticky as Backup shifts it closer to his mouth — L can hear his breathing, suddenly louder in his own ear. It’s steady, even, still heavy with the sleep L had dragged him out of.
“Do you know what you are?” Beyond says.
L curls tight around himself. “No,” he says.
“Pathetic,” Beyond tells him. He doesn’t spit it out. There’s no venom in it. He says it like a fact. “That’s what you are. A weak little creature. Useless, too.”
L swallows. He bites at the metal of the can, then presses down on the tab, breaks the seal, and takes a drink. He shuts his eyes. It’s very cold, and very sweet.
“Can’t do anything for yourself,” Backup says. “You always need someone carting you around. A minder. But are you grateful for it? No. Never. You bitch and you bitch and you whine and you whine and everyone’s fucking tired of you, you know that? They’re tired of caring for a pointless little insect like you. They pretend they’re not, but that’s only because they want things from you.”
He can hear the click-click-click of the phone’s spiral chord; Backup must be wrapping it around his wrist. His voice is going languid, now; he’s settling into it. His sleep-drunk tone is disappearing, replaced with this other thing, this predatory calm, the way animals will go glassy-eyed before they leap.
“And you know what? They’re not going to want things from you for always. You’re nice and shiny now but you won’t be forever. You’ll get lazy and complacent — you think you won’t, and you’ll try to fight against, but you will. Everyone always does. Or you’ll get all burnt out from all the ugly little things you need to look at. You’ll get dirty.
L inhales, sharp. He drinks again, sweetness and bubbles on his tongue.
“And guess what happens then?” L can hear it in his voice — he’s smiling, now. He imagines that expression, not cruel, never cruel, just a smile, sharp and bright, the hint of teeth. Not a weapon but a kitchen knife.
“I don’t know,” L says, although he does. He just wants to hear it from someone else. He needs to hear it from somewhere that isn’t his own head, so that it won’t be a part of him anymore, so that the words can belong to someone other than himself and those hands and that squirming mass of a voice he can’t refuse to swallow.
“Then I come along,” Backup says. “Then they toss you in the trash and they replace you with a new and better model. And that’s me! Since A couldn’t hack it. They always tell you, you know, that you’re the first and that makes you better, but it doesn’t. It makes you disposable. Replaceable. Something made to be upgraded. Why would they get a second if you were so important? Why would they have me already if they didn’t expect you to die or fuck up so bad they won't want you anymore? You’ll make it to twenty but maybe not all that much more.”
L squeezes his eyes shut. Backup’s voice is bright, now; hoarse and glittering.
“And then it’ll be me, L. Just me. And you’ll be dead or left somewhere to die and that’ll be the way it was meant to be because it’s what everyone wants right now anyway.”
“Thank you,” says L, quiet. That’s the signal. They’ve never discussed it, but it is and Backup will know; he always knows.
Backup stops, immediately. When he speaks again, his voice is hesitant; it has that doggish eagerness to it, wanting to be scratched behind the ears and smothered with kisses. “Was that good?”
“Yes,” says L. “Yes. It was. Thank you. You did well.”
It feels as if he’s been deboned, like a fish, his back split and his spine dragged out with the rest of his skeleton trailing behind. He takes another drink.
"I wasn’t too mean?”
“You weren’t too mean. No.”
L can hear the chord clicking again and B tugs at it. “It’s all true, you know,” he says, just shy of defensive, like he’s trying to convince L he didn’t do anything wrong. “I don’t make any of it up.”
“I know.” He does; they see more than Watari seems to realize, Backup and him.
“But I wouldn’t say it like that, normally. I like you, even if no one else does.”
“I know that,” L tells him. He breathes out again, then drinks back the rest of the can, quick-quick-quick. “I should go now, Backup.”
He can hear rustling on the other end of the line. “Can you stay and talk for a bit?”
“No. I have to get back before Watari realizes I’ve gone.”
“Oh.” Backup pauses. “Do you think you’ll come back to visit soon?”
“I really don’t know,” he says, then bites at the inside of his mouth. He would like to see Backup again, in the flesh. “I’ll try, Backup. It’s difficult, the case we’re working on, so I might be able to convince Watari I need a little bit in between. But it’s complicated. You know this.”
There’s more rustling from the other end of the line. “Right. Yeah. I know.” There’s a breath, and then, “It’s just. I don’t feel real when you aren’t here.”
“You shouldn’t.” L says, flatly, and hears Backup inhale sharply. “You and I, we’re the same animal. You don’t exist without me, and I won’t exist without you, when the time comes. Other people are … but we’re not like them. It’s L and B. L then B. That’s just how it is. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
It’s easiest when they’re together, because then he can feel Backup’s bones against his bones and Backup’s hands in his hair, tugging, the hot flash of pain, the wet shiver, his teeth dragging against L’s skin, that shudder in his breath which belongs just to oratory of them, whispering in L’s ear, saying I know you, I know you, I know who you are.
But Backup forgets, sometimes. He starts thinking of them as two separate things.
Which isn’t fair. It leaves L with nothing but himself, his body all marred; he has to listen to all those wriggling things inside of him, this infestation, when B is right there, all fresh and new, hidden away from the world where nothing has ever hurt him.
L can reach out. He can touch him. He can take and drink from the clean and holy cup of B and then everything will be just fine, forever.
He doesn’t have to exist at all, if he doesn’t want to. Backup was always meant to become him, after, or at least to become L; if it will be true later then it has to be true now and so B can’t ever walk away from him, can’t ever be permitted to think that it matters when they’re apart, because it doesn’t, because it can’t, because L couldn’t stand it if it did, because the things that happened to him shouldn’t have been allowed but they happened anyway and he was so sick for so long, and he was so lonely, but then the world gave to him this perfect creature as an apology and it’s his, now. It’s his.
“I have to go,” he says, again. “We’ll talk again, later.” Then, “Goodnight, Backup.”
“Goodnight,” says B, quiet.
L snaps the phone shut. He stands. He tips the can to suck the very last bit of sugar out, then carries it back with him out of the night and into the hot bright light of the hotel, where he tosses it into the bin beside the concierge’s desk and walks back up the stairwell towards his room.
