hullo! I wanted to ask since you are now in the stages of writing a few parts of Hortus Conclusus, if you’re willing to share a few line or WIP scenes?? Totally don’t have to if they’re not ready yet but I’d love any breadcrumb you’d give :3
Helloooo, thank you so much for this ask!! Right now, I don't have the best scenes to show, considering right now I'm writing a lot of smut for the Hortus Conclusus fanfic (sue me haha), but I do have a 1k+ snippet I can show you that doesn't give any major spoilers, even though it's unedited and has quite a few grammar mistakes:
L’s mouth tasted like verdigris, and it was only then when chasing the flavor of rust with his parched pink tongue that he realized he had actually licked blood from his own lip. He had bitten it, as he watched. He filled his aching lungs with recycled air from his thankfully air-conditioned ‘chamber’ and exhaled, sighing just for the sake of filling the dizzying hush that came with being completely and utterly alone.
L, luckily, did not have any chains around his wrists, a small mercy Light had granted, though he suspected it was less out of the generosity he held not-so-close to his chest, but rather that he had given up on trying to restrain those appendages weeks ago, a concession to his fruitless thrashing. That being said, he did have a chain around his ankle, akin to those medieval prisoners in oil paintings at the Louvre, a cold kiss from his 21st century jailer. A witch, chained to an iron weight and cast into the raging river. Crime? Heresy against God, communion with the devil.
Well, that was what he imagined witches had felt. Though, they were burned at their pine-wood stakes. He wondered what it felt like. To burn. He knows Beyond knows, the sensation of flesh splitting from thermal cinder, into blossoms of blisters, skin recoiling into layers of yellow-bellied fat that melts as smoke siphons into the cold contaminated air. The body discovering, second by millisecond, exactly how much agony it could possibly take. Ash turning white, candle wax under orange flame.
Sometimes L suspected he would've made an excellent witch. Him too, he had always been an outsider, ‘abnormal’ and that is indeed what the angry mob of peasantry went after with worn steel pitchforks and torches, after those women and men who were peculiar, and oftentimes, intelligent. He fits the mark. Bullseye.
Even as a child, his body felt like an animal, that couldn't be domesticated, even unto himself. Watari tried, but even then he never fit into the mold of 'human,' sitting the way he did, purple bruised knees tucked tight to his accordion ribbed chest. Bare scalded feet on the flat seats of shellacked chairs. Sucking on fingers, dipping them, saliva-coated, back into the brown sugar, the icing sugar, the maple sugar the flavored red and pink ‘sugar.’ Black pigmented hair like smoke bush erupting in every direction, trying to flee his dandruff scalp.
His skin, untouched by the sun's lustrous beams, possessed a thin translucence; blue veins ghosted beneath it like roots, beneath snow, branches the shade of blue mist shrubs in winter.
He could picture the accusations, embarrassingly, with ease. Look at him, Something isn't right. He isn't like us. He could hear the words from the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches; "we, the aforementioned judge. assign to you such-and-such a day for the continuation of the questioning under torture, so that the truth should come from your own mouth."
Light once said he was the devil. L, the one apostate against Light’s reign. He always knew how to flatter him, giving him such a grand poetic title. But if he is the devil, where is his legion? his vermillion trident, his all-consuming fire, whether it burns him or not? All he has is a chain, enough rope to hang himself with. Chiaroscuro, a miniature reliquary in the graphite dark.
Now, how he wished he could see the chief of the NPA, Soichiro Yagami, and say to him in a told-you-so manner; “Look at what your son has become.”
Oh, right. Soichiro is dead. He killed himself a month into his own son's confinement. What did Light stand to gain from that arrangement? Did he really think his foolhardy father, after a month of isolation from his own family, brought on by his own family would accept his son with large open arms? After spending his year and sacrificing his healthy brown hair for grey caused by strangulating stress from trying to catch him, the very thing he came home and embraced?
But then Light pointed the finger, and turned the blame. Say he was the one who had corrupted him first. What a load of bullshit that was. Punctuated words wrought from his unshakable self-righteousness L once could admire, once could relate to, before the 19 year old who had a fetish for religious iconography decided he wanted to try his sleight of hand, a hand that's never done a hard day of labour, at playing God.
L does not believe in God. But he believes in monsters, and has known that ever since he was the seasoned age of six years old, and a monster told him he was ripe for the plucking. He had the eyes of a man and the ironed robes of a priest. The man-thing said God loves everyone, including him, all he had to do was prove it. The priest smelled a bit like frankincense, but that was ultimately overpowered by his ‘Givenchy Gentleman’ cologne. L remembered this because the smell stayed in his crooked nose for years.
L’s never had a good relationship with that particular supreme being, as if he could ever have a relationship with something that didn't exist. Most of the kids at Wammy’s didn't either, he certainly wasn’t special in that regard. He recalls like it was yesterday the time one of the staffers, a Jehovah's witness who had come from the sun-bleached landscapes of rural America to the gothic rain soaked Winchester of all places, tried to hand the children pamphlets.
Beyond, the customary suspect, riled them all up to start a bonfire in the courtyard using the cheaply photo-copied leaflets. It was a small act of apostasy, that felt, for a moment, like power, like they were all, god. In that regard, amongst many other traits they unfortunately shared in common, he understood pampered golden boy Light Yagami.
But he vowed to appear not to, because it would be cruel to Light, for cruelty's sake. Light had levelled the playing field to granulated dust, so L had no choice but to follow the same philosophy he does, 'an eye for an eye'. In his defense, Light played out his capture like a Norwegian fairytale, where a troll-king locks the princess in a tower, seemingly with the goal of being stuck with him forever.
Only if the princess was an ugly 25 year old man and the troll was a beautiful self-proclaimed deity. In those stories, the princess always outwits the beast, or is saved. L can only hope the source material stays accurate when translated to real life.
Thank you again for the ask! I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with this new writing style.
I had to edit the post to make it shorter since the original snippet I was going to show was too long, I also don’t know why it’s formated that way, it’s all one continuous scene but when I tried making it a quote it broke. Oh well, that’s what I get for trying to use tumblr on my phone.
Upper Rhenish Master - The little Garden of Paradise
Maestro dell’alto Reno, Madonna e santi nel giardino del Paradiso, (1410-1420), tecnica mista su tavola, 25.6 x 32.8 cm, Städel Museum, Francoforte sul Meno
