hope you feel better soon! for the h/c requests, i would give Anything to see beyond get some soft, soothing human contact. maybe during the period where he’s recovering from the burns?
hi hello thank you for this excellent prompt!!!
L comes to visit once. Just once, and for such little time that for years later Beyond will be half-convinced he imagined it.
He is lying in his hospital bed, staring up at the vast whiteness of the ceiling, handcuffed by the wrist. He has been released from the burn ward only recently, his skin healed enough that the slightest infection no longer carries the chance of killing him, and he will soon be transported to the prison where he will live out the remainder of his days.
They have given him nothing with which to entertain himself -- no comfort for a killer, and certainly not one who stabbed out the eyes of a child -- and so the only thing he has to to occupy himself with is his pain, which is heavy and layered, which moved through him in waves and fractals -- sharp pain, heavy pain, pain which flows like a river; he has acquired all types. He had not known before that there were so many varieties. It is exquisite and horrible and the medication they drip into him does very little to blunt it.
He does not want to be here. He does not want to be anywhere. He wants, primarily, to be dead -- that had been his goal and it isn't fair that he was interrupted in his acquisition of it. He is sure the guards clustered by his door feel the same.
He is staring and staring when the door opens and someone steps in.
He does not bother to turn and look; he is tired of the nurses and the doctors. He lets them do what they want, lets them move his body like a doll's.
He hears the footsteps of the person coming closer, then feels his bed sink towards him as they sit.
This is not what nurses do. He turns.
It's a pale boy, wan, his hair all a mess; he is wearing a white shirt and pale blue jeans and he is staring at Beyond with big wide eyes, something in them very much like sadness, although -- Beyond thinks, with no small degree of self-pity -- it cannot possibly be that, because why would L be sad for him.
L is younger than he'd remembered. Smaller. More a boy than a god.
"Ryuuzaki," he says, his voice soft. Not Backup. Not Beyond, the name that no one has ever used for him but which is scrawled in red above his head. The name he had used for himself, which he supposes is the one that L must think he wants. "You've got yourself in some trouble, hm?":
And then he lays the back of his palm against Beyond's cheek, on the one miraculously unburnt patch of flesh.
It's so soft, this hand. It's so gentle. He hasn't felt anything like this in years. He isn't sure he'll ever feel anything like this again. It's the touch of someone who loves -- not as a lover, not as a friend, but something more esoteric, something he can't catch.
He sinks into the touch, lets it take him. The comfort it brings is nearly as layered as the pain.
"Oh," says L, his voice almost a melody. "I'm sorry, Ryuuzaki. We should have done more. I wish it hadn't come to this. I don't -- I don't blame you."
And then he takes his hand away.
His voice had quivered. Beyond had heard it. He's sure that it was a lie. And yet. It's a mercy, in its way.
Beyond turns to watch him as he leaves. A small boy, just a person, who has just given him a gift it had never occurred to him to want.
He will remember that touch for a long time.
