🌧- For a heavy, emotional secret
L is After Beyond Birthday
In the beginning, there were two.
A, the first.
B, the second.
L, a distant mirage.
A's mission was simple: become L. B's path to worthiness was less straightforward; before he could become L, he had to defeat A. From the tender age of 8 until around a decade later when his rival drew his last breath, surpassing A was B's goal. His obsession.
A and B grew up in undeniable intimacy. Their status as the first and the best alienated them from their peers. For a while, they could be children and co-exist as something other than a pact of mutually assured destruction. Eventually though, the fierce competition came to define their relationship. Parents are often warned not to compare their children to one another to avoid breeding resentment or complexes of superiority. Unfortunately, Wammy's House did not find such advice relevant. They were judged like prize cattle.
Their identities solidified as foils to one another in this strange, manufactured world. A vs B, golden child and scapegoat, martyr and monster, opposing forces in perpetual conflict that would define The Prototype Generation as a venture in abject failure. They found common ground only in this curse of not being L.
B lived as A's shadow for the better part of his life. His horizon ended at A's back, even knowing he would die before he ever got the chance to succeed L. That timer ever-present above A's head reinforced B's developing sense that Wammy's House and by extension, Fate, had doomed them both. This only made B's mission to subjugate him all the more urgent; he spared no effort to prove they were equals as adolescent feelings of fraternity, desire and inadequacy birthed a twisted fixation. B would no longer imitate or chase A in death. His domination would be complete.
...This victory, when it came, was decidedly hollow.
Following A's death, B quickly realized that he did not want L's position - or A's, for that matter. He would not be Wammy's good boy and do L's bidding until the day he died. B could see the writing on the wall, the never-ending stream of younger children entering the orphanage. Were they ever going to let him succeed?
A and B, the prototypes, would never become L.
L. Who was L? Who was this person A died trying to become? Who was this person B sacrificed his entire identity to imitate? Was he even real? Was he flesh and bone and blood like they were? Of course he was...and that was the disappointing, devastating, destabilizing truth of it all. It was fundamentally impossible for L the human being to meet the standards of the deity B was groomed to worship. A and B were sacrificed not for a God, but a false idol.
They never stood a chance.
Following this conclusion, B found his resolve.
B did not want a future.
B did not want justice.
B wanted revenge.
B wanted L.
Transference is when someone redirects their feelings about one person onto someone else. B's obsession with his deceased rival became inseparable from his feelings for L. He only did what he was rewarded his entire life for doing, and L became the horizon he would follow to his death.
Not his position. Not his title. Him. His humiliation. His defeat. His destruction.
If A died trying to become L, B would die trying to defeat him.
It was Fate.
