Chapter Text
He is thirteen years old, sitting at the kitchen table with his sister, eating the honeydew slices his mother cut for them. He is swinging his legs beneath him, unthinking, his body moving through the world unburdened. He is loved and he takes that for granted. He isn’t happy but he isn’t miserable yet, either, and he doesn’t know that he could be otherwise, doesn’t know yet to resent the dullness of his mind, the marrow-deep boredom that never goes away and which steals colour from everything he does. It makes it easier, not knowing, not having anything to miss. Years later he’ll look back on this time longingly, forgetting how sad he was.
He hasn’t yet started to bleed. His breasts haven’t begun to grow in; he is slow to this. This was when his body was still a loyal friend, protecting him from the inevitable for as long as it could.
He doesn’t know this yet but L is sixteen years old, trapped in the hell of his own home; he has already been starving and purging so long it feels like the entirety of his world. He is sure he is beyond help. He is just now smoking rolled cigarettes out the window of his bedroom, a thin red bracelet around his wrist.
L’s room is filled with all the objects he could want, doled out as apologies and bribes. Tithes to his kingdom, gifts from people he likes to imagine are his subjects — electronics and books about detectives and killers and children who find magic in themselves to whisk them away from their worlds. Sometimes he wanders through them and runs his fingers along the spines of the books, the plastic and aluminum of the laptop and music players that arrive at his feet with nothing but a word. Right now the air is cold on his skin and the smoke is acrid; he imagines it curling into his lungs, burning them black, a gift he gives himself. He imagines the tar settling in him just where he’d placed it, in this space no one but him can touch. He thinks he won’t live long enough for it to matter. He is correct.
Beyond is fourteen, mistaking his body for a weapon. He is in the backseat of a car in the town his husband will die in, cackling, a boy’s hand around his waist; he is imagining himself a knife at the boy’s throat and he likes this, likes the image of the world turned bloody around him. His lip is healing from where it had been split open in a fight and he is tonguing it, this proof that he’s powerful, that no one can catch him, that anything which happens to him happens by choice. They can hurt him but what does that matter. The car is going too fast but he knows he’ll be fine because he is eternal, untouchable. It careens past the house he will buy one day with his husband’s tithes, which is occupied, now, by the family who built the strange winding interior he’ll come to know, which he’ll wander through at twenty-two, its silence consuming him like a parasite.
Someday Light will learn parts of this. He’ll take what he can. He’ll hold what is there. He’ll imagine a life together that stretches into the past.
He can save them, in this imagined life. They can have time.
In the night, in the yellow bedroom Beyond had given him, he wakes starving.
He doesn't sleep much. Hunger keeps him awake -- not the sensation itself but the way his body snarls with it, the starving dog of himself demanding he stand and provide for himself, catch some soft-fleshed thing and tear it open and shove its meat into himself. His body doesn't know that this is a choice he's making; it doesn't know that it makes him powerful. It turns all his senses electric, lends an ecstatic brightness to the world, makes every scent sharp and present. His mind is dull but everything else in him has been whetted.
It is embarrassing, the persistence of his body. It is thrilling, too, to have this part of himself which demands he lives in defiance of his own choices, which will keep him safe despite himself. His body is the adult that takes him by the hand and says, listen to me and everything will be just fine. He hates its shape but loves its refusal to die.
He lies there, staring at the ceiling, and then he pushes himself out of the bed and walks out of the room and through the strange hallways and winding staircases of Beyond's home.
He doesn't want to turn on the light and wake Beyond, so he uses the flashlight on his phone instead. It turns everything strange and flattened. He feels as through he's breaking in. He is wearing red flannel pyjama bottoms and one of Beyond’s black wool sweaters, which feels strangely unguarded. His feet are bare.
When he reaches the kitchen he finds that it has been lit cold and white by the moon. The shadows are strange here -- long and dark and blurred at the edges despite the sharp contrast between the moon's white light and the black of the kitchen's black interior. He turns his phone off and slips it into his pocket.
Outside he can hear crickets chirruping and the trill of some animal he can't recognize calling to its mates. Inside the fridge which rattles and gurgles, this ancient thing.
He walks to it and pulls it open, blinking at the suddenness of the light.
It's well stocked. He is sure that Beyond did this for him, before he came, when Light had informed him that he was better. There's milk and fresh vegetables and fruit -- carrots and lettuce and radish and parsnip with dirt still on it and a box full of peaches. His stomach, empty, twists at the sight.
He feels a pang go through him. Beyond had done this, wanting to take care of him, and he'd ruined it before it had started.
But it's here for him now.
He takes out a peach and rubs it clean on Beyond’s sweater, then takes a bite.
The flavour pours into him; it's sweet but sharp, the fuzz prickling on his tongue. His mind sings with the juice. He is always so thirsty. He drinks water as much as he can but it's never quite enough. Something to do with electrolytes, or carbohydrates, or one of the myriad things missing from him. He eats the whole thing quick, crouching in front of the fridge, turning his fingers sticky, and then he's left with the pit.
Stymied, he looks around him. He can't remember where Beyond stores the compost. At last he walks to the sink and washes it off until it's as clean as he can make it, then puts it in his pocket.
He's still hungry. He looks through the cupboards until he finds the eggs and some oil and a pan to heat on the stovetop.
He makes himself two fried eggs with mushrooms on the side and a slice of toast from a thick sourdough loaf and a cup of orange juice, thick with pulp, which had been in a glass bottle in the fridge. His heart is pattering.
It is a normal meal and he eats it sitting on the counter in the moonlight. He feels better when he's done. Sated, his body full at last, the knife of hunger diminished. He could eat more — he is always ravenous — but it doesn’t hurt. Sometimes he feels worse and sometimes he doesn’t. He lies to himself and others, pretending its always worse.
He wonders if maybe he’s been faking it all along. There was nothing wrong. He'd been looking for attention and he'd found it in vulnerable people. He'd led L to his death, and he's leading Beyond there too by pretending he's just like them when really he's only playacting. They'd thought they could do all these things and stay as healthy as him when really he eats just fine. He frightens his parents because he’s a liar and a selfish brat. He is a knife after all, slicing open the people he loves.
Instinct tells him to walk to the toilet and shove his fingers deep into his throat but he doesn't want to, not really. He feels just fine. He's okay. It hurts when he does that -- his stomach cramps and his shoulders ache and it makes his nose run until he can’t breathe. He doesn’t want to hurt. He isn’t strong after all. It doesn’t bother him the way it should, which makes him feel bad; it’s more proof he’d invented the whole thing. He looks into himself to stir up the guilt but it’s not there. There are just these facts about himself.
He washes the dishes and puts them in the rack.
He doesn’t want to go back upstairs and crawl in to the bed because that seems like a waste of the rare clarity of his mind. Instead he opens the door that leads into the yard and walks out.
It's colder than he'd thought it would be. It clings to his body, this cold, tunnels right inside him. All he's wearing are his pyjamas.
The yard looks white. It's eerie. It takes him a moment to realize it's the moonlight reflecting off frost; he hadn't realized it was cold enough for that.
Barefoot, he steps into the dirt. Stupid, this. He could step on something. He is an indoors animal; he doesn't have the callouses to protect him. But he walks out anyway, into the grass and towards the goats.
The pen is empty and for a wild, panicked moment he thinks they've escaped. He'll have to go back in and tell Beyond that the animals he and L had loved are gone. But then he sees one sitting by the pen, its legs folded up under itself, calm and asleep. It’s a faded shape in the dark. If he doesn’t look right at it it disappears. The others must have put themselves to bed.
He watches it for a while. Its sides rise and fall, the motion heavier and more abrupt than a person's. It looks so peaceful. He considers climbing over the fence and waking it but that seems wrong. It should rest. He wants to feel his hands against its fur but it has its own business to attend to.
Around him the crickets are cacophonous; the trilling animals have fallen silent. Maybe it's because of him or maybe they would have anyway. He's only a visitor to this world.
He looks back. The white of the frost is broken where he’d walked. Good, he thinks. He likes the idea of leaving a mark, even if it’s going to be gone by the morning.
He should go back.
He wishes he could share this with L.
Without any separation between the thought and the action, he pulls his phone out again and takes a picture of the goat. His fingers are sticky with the peach pit; he hadn't managed to wash all of it off.
His flash goes off, bright and harsh. The goat’s ears flick but it doesn’t wake. The sound of the crickets quiets, but only for a moment. He looks down. The photo is blurry, flattened and ugly but visible. He sends it to L.
The image stalls, the wi-fi poor out here, then sends. He stares down at his phone, at the message on Line, which sits there unread, and then he puts it back in his pocket and walks back to the house, following the dark line of his own footsteps, and up to his room, where he crawls into his bed and pulls the blankets over himself. The hems of his pyjama pants are soaking and covered in dirt. He should care but he doesn’t. In the morning he’ll attend to it but right now he’s tired; he curls around himself and breathes in the dark until sleep takes him.