savetheearth | {004} Log: White Day [CLOSED]

There's sudden, ringing laughter, and Lazarus starts to glare at his bewildered doppelganger before he realizes that the broken sound came from him.

It's a relief to talk about it like it's real, not some phantom that everyone sees but ignores to be polite, and it's just a touch overwhelming. The color in his cheeks deepens, and he thinks about apologizing, but his posture and expression communicate pretty clearly that his inappropriate reaction wasn't voluntary or one intended to ridicule.

He swallows the tight dryness in his throat.

"It can happen to anyone, you know. Every single person alive can reach that point if they go past a certain threshold or experience enough loss. We're OK though. We're OK."

Misa startles, sitting up abruptly at the laugh. She stares at Lazarus in confusion, readying to defend herself if he's daring to make fun of her for sharing something so personal— but it doesn't seem like that. He looks just as surprised by the sound as she was, and the deepening blush on his face makes it clear that he isn't proud of the outburst. Slowly, Misa relaxes her raised hackles and moves past preparing for a fight.

"Mhm... we're okay."

He looks so pathetic like this, crouched over and flushed. There's pity in seeing him this way, but there's also a recognition that they share more things in common than could ever be expected. More than even they know, if these echoes are anything to go on.

They're both messed up. Lazarus just wears it on his sleeve, while Misa has learned to bury it. On an impulse to cheer him up, Misa leans over and pecks him on the cheek.

"You're right. We're just fine."

He would never make fun, he's just... not always the best at expressing emotion or reacting correctly. He's intensely glad that Misa seems to be able to pick up on that, and her kindness and understanding are yet another relief, even if he does end up looking rather pitiful.

The kiss comes out of nowhere, and he stiffens, hugging his knees tightly to his chest. The simple, harmless gesture isn't the sole reason, though; it's the fact that it was a veritable floodgate to possibly the largest single chunk of information he's gotten about his past life. Voices, hints, insight... and most of it is fairly chilling. His hand flies to his cheek, but his face is frozen, confused and horrified.

His doppelganger is similarly stricken, more by the volume of information than by the content of the memory.

This time the strange sense of déjà vu and displacement in the pit of her stomach doesn't throw Misa for a loop the way it did before; the feeling is there and then gone in an instant, and something lands on the stair beside her. Misa glances down to see the glossy cover of Eighteen Magazine, a pop starlet she doesn't recognize staring up at her with a bubbly smile.

"Did you feel—" Misa begins to ask, before seeing the expression on Lazarus's face. So he echoed something too, and not something physical. Why kissing him on the cheek caused dual echoes is something Misa has no small degree of curiosity about, but figuring that and the magazine out can wait.

"Lazarus, hey— it's okay," she reassures him, setting her hand on his knee. She doesn't miss the fact that his doppel seems to be affected too, which opens all sorts of other new questions, but he isn't her main concern. "We're still right here."

He continues to blink and stare straight ahead for a few seconds, processing the voices and the faces they belong to just as much as he's processing what was said in a different life. It sheds some light, at least, on what their dynamic was, but what's a delicate way to share it with the person who's efficiently unlocking parts of him he's not had access to until now?

Her reassurance gets him to turn his face slowly toward her. Is it OK? He can't be sure.

"A memory," he says blankly, as the hollowness of echoing slips away and he starts to feel solid and present again. "You were there, so was he, and... there's a lot to it."

His eyes pass to the magazine in Misa's hands. "What is that?"

Misa watches Lazarus process the echo with worry and curiosity vying for dominance. Whatever it is has obviously affected him profoundly, and she wants to be delicate with him but she also wants to know. She gives his knee a comforting squeeze when he turns to look at her.

"So all of us were there... This? Oh, it's just a magazine," Misa says, holding it up for him to see. The text is in Japanese and she assumes he won't be able to read it. "I don't think there's anything special abou—"

She cuts off abruptly as he eyes land on one of the smaller features toward the bottom left corner of the magazine. 'Exclusive Look At Model Misa-Misa's Film Debut!!! Page 41' That... that couldn't be related to her, could it? Mystified, Misa moves her hand off of Lazarus's knee to flip through the magazine to the appropriate page. A picture of her, complete with newly blonde hair, smiles back. She is wearing some sort of flower crown and fairy-like gown with costume wings situated on her back, grinning and flashing a peace sign at the camera.

Misa stares down at the picture for several long seconds, transfixed, Lazarus's echo forgotten for the moment. Seeing her twin is... eerie, to say the least. This is the woman she's turning into? A model turned movie star? Her Other might as well have been a princess.

Edited 2015-03-28 00:09 (UTC)

To say that he's affected, even profoundly, is something of an understatement. The young man, and even his doppelganger, both seem fairly stricken and more than a little bit rattled, but both are attempting to recover as quickly as possible, even as L sorts through all the implications of what he's echoed back.

It helps to divert his attention for a moment, and he does so, staring at the issue, eyes flicking over the characters with definite comprehension. Not only does Lazarus speak perfect Japanese, but he reads it fluently, as well. "Film debut?" he asks, canting his head sideways. "She was a movie star?"

In addition to... what? The 'Second Kira?'

"It looks like it... it says she was a model first, she won some sort of popularity poll in this magazine. Then she moved on to star in a romantic drama."

Misa is halfway through skimming the article before she looks up at Lazarus, confusion settling over her features. "Wait, you can read this?"

He nods briskly, leaning closer as he continues to read and corroborate what she's saying about the story. "Yes, I can. I echoed back the Japanese language a long time ago, as you may have guessed... among others."

It's the least improbable or surprising thing about this to him, and he continues reading voraciously, wondering if another echo is going to be set off by this.

"I definitely prefer the blonde hair," L's doppelganger says, bored now that he's been completely excluded from the activity they're mutually engaged in.

"I guess that makes sense... we were talking in Japanese in my last echo," Misa murmurs, continuing to skim the article. She hadn't really thought about it; Japanese was the default in her mind, it only made sense for memories to be in her native language.

The doppelganger is thoroughly ignored as Misa continues reading about her alter-ego's one-in-a-million life.

It's been a rough year between her manager's arrest for drug possession and Misa-Misa's subsequent mysterious two-month disappearance, but sources have denied her involvement and insisted she simply needed a break from the entertainment world. Some are even saying it was all a publicity stunt! Whatever the reason,

Misa's eyes go unfocused, words blurring together and room falling away. Everything is dark, everything is silent. Her eyes are covered, and her entire body aches like she's been standing in place for hours. Her back is pressed against something hard and flat, her bare feet forced apart by shackles on her ankles. Her arms are folded against her stomach by what feels like a straight jacket, and she can feel additional restraints at her crotch, her breasts, her hips, her neck. Her legs are completely bare up to mid-thigh, she is cold and stiff and hungry and parched and she can't see anything but blackness. She is going to die like this.

Misa screams, heart racing as she comes back to the stairwell crying, magazine on the ground. She instinctively curls inward on herself, hugging her legs with her head against her knees. What was that? She tries to breathe but can't, shaking and gasping with the ghost feeling of a strap against her neck.

"I'm very comfortable with it..." he says, and it occurs to him that maybe he should offer to switch over for her, if that would make things ultimately easier. Though he is bad at handling distress in all but his closest of friends (with whom he has a nearly preternaturally adept touch), he is grasping for ways to make this situation somehow better and less stressful for the girl.

I can attest to that...

What had he meant?

His eyes scan over the words; though he's a speed-reader, Japanese is not his native language and it takes a fraction of a second longer for the characters to fall into meaningful order in his thoughts. Once they have, though, the pit is dropping out of his stomach again, and he's in the dark, settled on a couch and staring impassively at a blonde girl, trussed and restrained. He sees everything. He watches her suffer and sips his coffee. He munches sugar cubes while she sobs. She won't die here, but she will wish for it, and he feels nothing as she begs, her terror glancing off his black-ice eyes like twin indifferent mirrors.

This echo is different. It leaves him freezing, trembling with the cold as if he's been pulled out of a frozen lake. His doppelganger is lauging, the girl at his side screams, and that empty feeling remains, filling slowly with the empathy that Lazarus feels where his preinacarnate perhaps couldn't. As his doppelganger glances Misa over with new knowledge of what she looks like in intimate and compromised positions, he looks away. What can he say? What would it mean, what does she know about his role in her torture?

"I'm so sorry," he says, horror and chill flash-freezing his tone. "I am so sorry..."

Edited 2015-03-30 13:55 (UTC)

Misa doesn't respond immediately, shaking her head back and forth as if denying the out of body experience entirely. She can't stop crying, and doesn't try to, focusing instead on breathing in and out and squeezing herself to keep from falling apart.

The doppelganger is laughing. At her, no doubt. The sound fills Misa with anger and embarrassment at being seen like this, but she can't find it within herself to pull herself together or tell him off. Not yet. Not with that terrible black void in the forefront of her mind, cold and miserable and hurting in so many ways. It had felt like something out of a horror movie, and Misa can't decide if not knowing what she looked like is for the better or if it makes everything that much worse.

Eventually she manages to tilt her head to the side, looking up at Lazarus with red-rimmed eyes. She tries to say something but stops short when her voice comes out alien, a strangled croak that is a far cry from words. Misa clears her throat, looking down again and letting go of her legs to wipe at her eyes. How shameful, letting them see her like this, maybe even letting them see her like that.

"You saw?"

She isn't quite ready to think through the implications of that. Maybe Lazarus is just reacting to her outburst and doesn't know the context, but something about the horror in his voice suggests otherwise.

There is no language like Japanese for apologies; they are a veritable art form, Lazarus understands, a different one for every occasion at every level of formality. The one he needs is one that expresses both his remorse and his helplessness.

Moshi wake arimasen.

I have no excuse for myself.

He has the words, but not the voice. It sticks in his throat in a heavy lump, and he swallows it, imagining it wet and leaden and slimy in his stomach as a young woman sobs beside him.

L's doppelganger chuckles darkly. "'Saw?' Certainly one way to put it. I'm into it, by the way... All those straps, the blindfold, definitely watching y--"

He's interrupted mid-sentence by Lazarus staggering to his feet, striding forward and twining the chain around his forearm to shorten it. Before he can protest, the doppelganger is getting kicked in the face so hard that his head almost spins 180 degrees on his scrawny neck, and he's knocked to the tile floor where he stares dazedly and then scrambles uncoordinatedly backwards.

Misa cringes at the doppelganger's commentary. For everything she just felt to be sexualized, is he even human? But then, as much as she doesn't want to think about it, part of her has to wonder if it wasn't planned that way. The placement of the straps, the fact that she was practically naked from the waist down with her feet held apart. She shivers, hugging her arms and feeling terribly exposed all over again.

Obviously she was kidnapped by some psychopath. A deluded fan, probably, since the past-her seems to have been famous. But why did Lazarus echo the scene back too? His other had been a detective, maybe he rescued her. Except the way the doppelganger said it, 'Saw? Certainly one way to put it.' But how can she trust anything he says anyway?

It's simultaneously jarring and a relief when Lazarus strides forward and kicks his double into silence, though for a moment Misa fears that he really has broken the idiots neck. Maybe she doesn't mind so much now, but the consequences could be...

Any relief is short lived. Her stomach drops and her mind is filled with a new scene, a large bright room with the trio from before, not again. Her vantage point is that of someone hiding behind a couch as L and Light square off against each other, wearing those damn handcuffs again. "I have just realized something..." L says, "I wanted you to be Kira." Light punches him in the face, and L retaliates by kicking him in the jaw.

"No more," Misa mumbles, pressing her palms against her eyes until she sees spots. If another echo happens she is either going to puke or have her head explode, possibly both at once.

Some of the doppelgangers insist that they are just like everyone other human, they just entered the world by different and unconventional means. L's doppel has never made any such claims, actually seeming to revel in his maliciousness button-pushing and insensitivity to sickening subject matter. The kick is something Lazarus believes fully that he deserves, and it's driven by the desire to put a stop to whatever all of this is. The dizzying volley of echoes is going too far, he can't even sort through all of them they're coming on so quickly. He's furious, breathless, shaking, but the second his foot connects, he's just made it worse for all of them. He's reeling in in horror before his doppel has even hit the floor, and he's covering his own face with his hands and hanging his head even as his doppelganger is scuttling warily away from him.

He couldn't agree more fully with Misa. He can't take more, either, and he's at the limit of his ability to weather it.

"Go..." he murmurs, gesturing toward the stairs rather than the door. He's not dismissing her, just begging for some space, just for the moment to give them both chances to recuperate before they subject themselves to more of this so quickly. "There are rooms upstairs, take whatever one you like, we'll... we can talk later, about this."

At first Misa thinks he must be talking to the doppelganger, but when she glances up and sees Lazarus pointing rather than undoing the cuffs she realizes that he is talking to her. Go? As if any of this is her fault, he's the one that started that one—

Biting her lip, Misa turns away from him and gets to her knees, gripping the rail tightly enough for her knuckles to go white before making any sort of move to stand. He's right, they need to be apart from each other, they need to end whatever terrible train of echoes is unfolding. But it still hurts being sent away like this when she wants nothing more than to cuddle up and be held by someone. Sniffling, Misa wipes at her eyes again and starts to make her way up the stairs, going slower than she would like. Anything else feels like it would be dangerous. She needs to pull herself together.

"Bring tea," Misa mumbles, before stopping and turning her head to be heard better. "No, bring hot chocolate. With marshmallows."

With that, she finishes climbing the stairs and shuts herself in the nearest room to cry herself dry and wait for the echo-induced vertigo to pass.

At first, Lazarus feels horrendously guilty. He can see in hindsight how the words and gesture could be interpreted, far from his intention but certainly abrupt and harsh. He's raking a hand through his dark hair and preparing to apologize, but as she's making her way up the stairs looking every bit as lost and sad as a kicked puppy, she makes a request and gives him a chance to make it all better.

He's incredibly grateful. In the midst of all this horribleness, it's doable and accessible. He nods hurriedly, shooting her one last glance while she's still in view.

The rooms upstairs are small dormitories, some with only one bed (Lazarus' is like this) and others with double that number. They've all been minimally outfitted for livability and comfort, with mattresses, sheets and blankets on the bed frames and general toiletries in the desk drawers, but ultimately, they're pretty spartan, and the light fixtures haven't been redone since the 1970s or earlier.

Approximately an hour after the altercation, there's a knock at the door. "Hey, Misa... I brought the hot chocolate and..." he pauses, clearing his throat. "I came alone. The custodian's watching him to make sure he doesn't get up to trouble. May I come in?"

By the time he arrives Misa has cleaned herself up. Her face is washed and she spent a good amount of time staring at herself in the mirror, trying to get used to the blonde. She pulled the pigtails out, feeling silly, but otherwise looks the same as before except calmer. She has relieved the one bed in the room of its comforter, huddled with it clutched around her shoulders.

She is composed. But not fully recovered, by any stretch of the imagination.

"Come in," she calls, draping her legs over the side of the bed but not standing up. It's a relief to hear that neither the doppel nor the chain that started all of this is with him.

The moment he gets the go-ahead to enter, he's doing so, turning the knob and peering cautiously into the room. He looks wan and run-down, and while the volley of echoes haven't aged him physically, his eyes convey a dull, jaded lifelessness that wasn't present before.

He pulls the room's folding metal chair away from the desk, situating it close to the bed where Misa sits wrapped in a comforter, and offers her first the hot chocolate, and then a tied-off bag of mini marshmallows that is half full.

He's silent as he does so, watching her with his hollow gaze, ultimately leaving it to her to make the first comment whenever she is prepared to.

Despite the fact that she was the one who left their last encounter sobbing, somehow Misa feels like Lazarus looks just as bad as her, if not worse. She almost doesn't want to ask what it is he's seen... but she has to. That's the point of this, to get everything out there and try to figure things out together.

She accepts the hot chocolate and marshmallows, offering him a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. Putting the bag down on her lap, she pats a spot on the bed next to her. The folding chair looks spectacularly uncomfortable.

"We're probably going to be here a while."

He sits forward in his chair, but his movement and attention are focused downward rather than forward, and his elbows press against his knees as he clasps his now-empty hands.

"I think you're correct," he answers softly. "I think the best way to approach this is to acknowledge, first, that we are an amalgam of those people and ourselves, and we're formed primarily by the choices made in this life and not the last one. Can we move forward with that understanding?"

Misa tilts her head, a little confused by his words and uncertain if Lazarus is refusing to join her on the bed or if he just didn't see the invitation. Her gaze drops to her lap and she fiddles with the bag of marshmallows rather than offering again.

"Yes... that sounds right. I don't think I'm that same person from the memories, even if I feel what she does, but we are similar."

She drops a few marshmallows into her hot coco, watching them start to foam and dissolve, and blows before taking a small sip. "I guess we should start with saying everything we got back."

He in fact was completely oblivious to the invitation; if it had been a little more blatant, he may or may not have accepted, but he continues on as though he has no clue what she was offering.

He waits for her to take a sip of her hot cocoa and propose saying everything, which is admittedly daunting. He swallows. "Everything is a lot... are you quite sure? I admit that I feel somewhat responsible for making you cry, and that bothers me. I'm a very detailed person and I don't... really want to make you experience that again, intentionally or not."

"It's not your fault," she assures him, shaking her head a little. "I remembered something awful because of that magazine, but... we can't help that. It's better to try to figure out what we can from it."

She takes another sip from her mug before continuing, licking her lip to avoid a hot chocolate-mustache. "I'm confused, about our... the relationship between your Other and mine, what it was. I got back some things that don't seem to go together at all. It seems like maybe... a love triangle?"

She isn't sure what else to make of echoing from kissing him, L's comments in the memories, or him fighting her boyfriend.

The reassurance is comforting, at least. Even if he's not sure if she'll still feel that way at the end of this conversation.

"I don't know," he confesses, staring at his hands. "I will admit that there seems to have been some familiarity there that goes beyond what a normal acquaintance would feel for another, but... as you said, you had a boyfriend. Light Yagami. Maybe one party had feelings that were unrequited, or something like that."

I wonder who it was.

"So, it started when your hair turned. Judging by things I saw, it was because you saw the handcuffs, wasn't it? I got those back from an echo months ago and I think they are the same pair."

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