Tumblr of CoralFlower on ao3! I'm in my 20s. Do not they/them me, anything else is fine. Overuse of she/her will get them put back up on the high shelf again 🔪
L is on their porch. Who else would it be? Light steps out to block the doorway with his body like it would actually keep L out of the house if he wanted to enter.
"Matsuda says you died. Badly."
-----
"You're not interesting when you're perfect."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
L smirks, expression childish, a flash of Near across his face.
personally i think getting christianity lore wrong in fic is just not a big deal. and in my true heart i think im a better person for not knowing these things (even though thats ridiculous) and i think the world will be a better place when only scholars and historians have a "basic" understanding of christianity
The second time Misa meets Light, she reminds him that he never told her what to do about her friend who she had send the tapes to Sakura TV.
"Like I said, I'll do anything for you, so if you think it's better that I kill her -"
Light makes a face and it's something like a grimace so Misa hurries through the rest of her sentence.
"I'll - I'll do whatever you say."
"If you kill her it'll defeat the entire purpose of setting things up so she can take the fall," Light explains slowly. Misa can tell from his tone that he's annoyed she hasn't thought about this, but she has thought about it. If she hadn't she would have killed her sooner.
"Right, that's what I thought," she says so he doesn't think she's completely stupid and discard her, but something bothers her about his expression. The conversation moves on and she sees his shoulders relax.
-
"I probably shouldn't tell him, right?" Misa glances up to where Rem floats along beside her as they walk to the bus stop.
"Tell him what?"
"About Hiro and Souta and Hokuto and Midori."
"Why would you tell him about those people?" Rem asks. "They aren't criminals and he doesn't know them."
Four people is a short list of exes, Misa is sure. She wasn't even dating Midori, but she was her best friend when they were in their third year of middle school and they held hands enough times and told each other enough secrets that Misa thought she'd better count her too, to be safe.
"I did it for him," Misa says, can hear the whine in her voice while she's saying it. "So there wouldn't be anyone else on my mind. Not that anyone else could ever be on my mind now that I've met Light... but I wanted to show that I'm - that I'm serious. That nobody else exists to me now. That they really are dead to me. Dead..."
"You've already promised to do whatever he asks," Rem says. "I'm sure he's convinced of your loyalty —"
"That's not what I'm talking about, Rem," Misa huffs. "It's already done anyway. I can't go back in time and un-kill them. You told me that there's no way to erase what's written in the Death Note, remember? I do pay attention when you talk to me, you know." Well, mostly.
"What difference does it make if you tell him or not, then?" Rem asks. Misa rolls her eyes. Shinigami don't understand anything.
"What I mean is, I probably shouldn't tell him, because..." Misa hesitates. "Because he might get upset with me."
"Because they were innocent?" Rem asks.
"Don't say that," Misa squeezes her eyes shut, turning the corner toward the bus stop. "I don't know why, okay? If he did the same for me I'd think it's so romantic. But Light, he... I don't know. Maybe I should wait until he loves me to tell him something like that. He's just a boy now after all. He only recently graduated from high school. They say men mature slower than women, right, Rem? Maybe he's just too young to understand the nuances of the human heart. He still lives with his parents and everything."
recently was telling my girl about a tweet i saw from some guy who'd throated a rifle modded to shoot out vodka because i was like :) isn't that hot :) and he was like (pained) babe do you know how many solvents people use during the manufacturing on those things to keep them from rusting. and i was like o h and they're probably all soluble in an ethanol-water mix and he was like y e s
viewing light yagami through the lens of american evangelical protestant frameworks and democrat-republican dualism instead of the specific context of early 2000s shinto-buddhist japan still recovering from the worst economic depression modern japan has ever seen is probably the most cut and dry example of american ethnocentrism in weaboo spaces I’ve encountered in a hot minute really
Beyond Birthday is an exceptionally average man with an exceptionally weird name.
Except, no. That isn’t quite the case either. It’s a bit of a misnomer to claim that Beyond was in any way average, at least when looking to any degree below the surface.
That surface-level mask was, however, nearly flawless. Bland and uninteresting, sweetly endearing in a way that added up to nothing, the type of boy you’d take home to your parents and they wouldn’t be able to remember the face of afterwards. It had almost turned Naomi away at the start, flicking through dating app photographs so generic they could’ve been repurposed stock images. It was everything she wasn’t looking for after Raye, after the complete and utter destruction of her fairytale daydreams about living a normal and peaceful married life. As a little girl playing with dolls she had never considered the possibility that she might be the one leaving her fiance hanging at the altar. But what is life if not a continuous train of terrible surprises? Where you find out that, more than anyone else, you are not the person you thought you were?
Beyond Birthday had plain black hair which he kept plainly and neatly cut, a plain face with a small nose and boring jawline, and a sweater vest so milquetoast and typical she only remembered he was wearing it while in the process of looking at it. He had a job so asinine and lifeless she’d forgotten it nearly the second the words came out of his mouth, and lived in an apartment complex so lacking in notability that she had lingered around the doorway for five minutes trying to find the right building before realizing she was already outside of it, thereby rendering herself a full three minutes late to their date, as Beyond himself was quick to point out.
Frankly, the fact that she had ended up on the date at all was a stroke of luck, the stars and planets perfectly aligning to allow her cat to dig his claws into her leg at the exact instant that she happened to be scrolling past his profile. Certainly, ghosting probably would’ve been easier. An accidental superlike is an annoyance, perhaps a particularly awkward one, but not the end of the world. But, still…
There was something else under the surface.
“Are you going to finish that?”
She shoves the plate of jam tarts across the table without a second thought, blinking out of her stupor.
Beyond Birthday was a stranger. They had exactly one conversation through text and two conversations through calls, all of which culminated in this exact meeting on this exact date. She knows that his name is the real one written on his birth certificate, that he was born somewhere in England but lived in “alternative circumstances,” that caused him to never develop the accent outside of rare instances of words like, “chthonic” or “eschatological,” and that he claims to have a bit of a sweet tooth but subtly gags every time he tastes anything even slightly sugary. This final point is confirmed shortly after she pushes said plate of tarts across the table, sharp eyes catching the way his jaw clenches and throat rushes to swallow as soon as the food enters his mouth.
She can’t understand why he would bother to lie about such a thing. But then again, she never was all that good of an FBI agent.
She finds Beyond much more pleasant to deal with in bed, with his face down in the pillows and his back arched into the mattress, ass up in the air. His moans are very high and endearing, honest in a way that he isn’t otherwise, and very, very different from Raye, a highly appreciated change of pace. She kisses the back of his ear and quietly praises him when he squirms, and then holds him in her arms and brushes the hair back from his face when they’re done and he falls asleep long before she would ever be able to.
She doesn’t quite know why she accepts a second date. Usually, fucking on the first was a good sign that the relationship simply had no room to last. She shows up at his apartment at the usual time regardless, this time half an hour early to make up for her previous mistakes. He scolds her for intruding on his private time. Their date begins with a trip to a jewelry store where she sits, silently fuming, in the white leather chair they keep at the back of the store for tired old husbands and over-enthusiastic holiday shoppers, waiting impatiently as he picks out the single most expensive silver watch in the store and then gets on his knees to clasp if around her wrist himself.
She doesn’t know much more about him by the second date, and doesn’t gain much knowledge either. But, luckily, what information she does have becomes very relevant when it comes to enacting her own revenge by teasing and edging the pleasure out of every square inch of his body, holding him down until he whines so loud she has to stuff her own t-shirt in his mouth to keep from waking the neighbors.
The next morning she offers him breakfast as an apology. He accepts, tersely, and then fucks her in the bathroom in front of the mirror, hiding his face in her hair while he pins her up against the counter.
At some point, she simply stops leaving.
It’s everything she ever wanted with Raye, but three steps to the left. Twisted, unusual, perverse. This isn’t the way that things are supposed to happen, and this isn’t the type of man she’s supposed to fall for. He’s perfect and average and she likes him for all the wrong reasons, for the lies and the temper and the borderline psychopathic ease with which he describes the process of how he would theoretically enact a series of murders, betraying his own underlying anxieties and weakness in the process but staring at her like he’s trying to see if she notices. Below the surface is something convoluted and tangled and jagged, and she delighted all too much in the fact that she had found what she had sought, a mutual, greater evil to drown out the call of her own insecurities.
Naomi Misora never liked herself all that much.
But perhaps, in this, she can find something she wants more than to keep hating herself.
"spoiler culture" actually no one made me this way and i didnt absorb it. i am just like this. if you tell me what happens i can no longer bring myself to put in the effort to experience the media myself. i have such limited time and energy and you just gave me the payoff for free. what the fuck do you actually expect to happen in my brain as a result of this??? (rhetorical, do not answer, do not be a smartass)
shipping a consensual, safe & sane pairing all the while i'm shaking my head in disapproval so the audience knows i still love wildly toxic abusive fictional dynamics
"why when someone mentions trans butches is it always transmasc butches? why are there never any transfem butches" well you also post about how you think all masculinity is toxic masculinity so if i'm being honest i think you probably treat transfem butches like shit and they don't like interacting with you
“what’s with the endless talk about he/him transmasc butches but there’s never the same for transfem butches” well see it’s actually the same reason there’s seemingly a dearth of AMABed nonbinary people! it’s because you treat them like fucking dogshit!
everyone in the trans community, including way too many trans women who call themselves transfeminists, plays this funny little game where if you’re transfemme you have to look as close to being a cis woman as possible and if you don’t it means you have internalized transmisogyny or you’re idolizing transmisogynistic caricatures. there’s “no” transfem butches because if you want to be masculine and transfem, you simultaneously have to deal with all the people who think you’re a predatory man and all the people who think you only want to be butch because you don’t understand your gender and the way it’s oppressed well enough.
it’s harder to find masculine trans women because being a masculine trans woman fucking sucks. ask me how i know this
light: oh my god i forgot to act like a normal teenager what would a normal teenager do right now. what do i do. i’ve let my guard down with L and he’ll find out that i’m actually strange and perverted and deviant and repulsive compared to every other person in society. how do i act now. do i act like he noticed or do i ignore it. shit. shit i’ve made it clear in my mannerisms that i am not a normal teenager. i have to act normal. i have to be normal. be normal. be normal. be normal.