Where Are They Now? (5 Year Edition)

[dead_black_eyes]

This meme was done before in this game, right here, and that is where I am stealing it from. But instead of giving characters the option to return home in this hypothetical scenario, the war is still going on five years from the current date in-game, and BREW still needs everyone.

The question is, what has happened in those five years? The children have become adults, the adults are just a little older without being old, and goodness knows a lot can change in that amount of time. Maybe you're thriving, in your business or your partnership. Maybe not. Either way, with no end in sight, life goes on in the city named after Death.


INSTRUCTIONS

-Post with your characters(s)
-Write a short blurb about what has happened in five years. Love, heartbreak, sickness, wealth, what was in the cards for your Weapon or Meister, and what has it shaped them into? Set a scene for the present.
-Tag others in the scene they kindly set.
-Profit$$$$$$$$

Comments

[dead_black_eyes]

L wasn't dead, and he was, therefore, both present and reachable to a a degree. But like most things that concerned him these days, it was a compromise. He could be seen and touched and spoken to, but he didn't always remember or understand.

He set the pieces in place meticulously. When Mello and Bakura played chess with him, he set up both colors, commandeering any aspect of the visit he could handle 100% competently. That began and ended with chess, essentially.

"Not easily," L agreed, his tone neutral and soft. "But you sell yourself short. You're a good chess player. It's never easy..."

Along with so many other things.

"I haven't been faced with the prospect of a game this exciting for a long time. Do you remember when we were fighting him, Mello, and he was trying to stand in our way? We were just trying to make a better world."

He set up the pieces more quickly, a troubled expression flitting across his pale face.

[want_the_world]

I don't think you remember it the same way I do anymore, Mello thought, but he wasn't going to say it. Every visit, he had to bite his tongue a few times, or more, to keep himself from saying something that would betray that he knew how disjointed L's perceptions of reality had become. Another lie he only pretended to believe himself. If glossing over his lapses mattered to L, Mello had never been able to tell. Trying to gently bring him back to reality had a way of backfiring even on good days, and Mello had learnt, reluctantly, that his efforts to give what he thought was help could actually do more harm than good.

He was aware, too, that this was essentially a drawn-out mourning process for someone who wasn't dead. Everything about it felt like utter shit; no wonder he felt he ought to visit more, but couldn't bring himself to do it.

"I have a realistic appreciation of my skills," he said, hoping to sidestep the more problematic topic entirely. "I'd wipe the floor with almost anyone but you."

[dead_black_eyes]

It was getting less and less reliable to start sentences with "do you remember" and expect a good result. Many of their experiences just weren't shared anymore, and if they were, it was a bizarre, fractured, alternate timeline that made no sense in the context of the actual events that Mello recalled.

Several moves, as if all had been accepted and forgiven, and then the roof caved in. L dropped his rook; when he mixed up his identity and then it returned, it was like being punched in the chest, or, perhaps more accurately, kicked in the teeth, because it felt cruel and unfair and insulting. It was one of those moments where he knew, fully, what he'd lost, and it was in those moments that he had no idea what to do with himself.

I hate it here. I hate this so much. I can't stand it and I would do anything to make it stop. I'll give you money, I'll give you information, I'll give you whatever you want if you just bring me a cyanide capsule.

Of course, he couldn't say something so selfish and hurtful to his successor, especially not on a good day. Even if he spent his most lucid moments practically obsessing over it. So the spell was endured in silence, withdrawal and a quick, shuffling retreat to the room's far corner, where he faced the wall and bowed his head and stayed wilted that way for a full minute.

Then he collected himself, returned, and resumed and finished moving his rook as if nothing had happened.

"It's not so bad here, you know. Considering."

[want_the_world]

Mello could only watch in alarm and concern as L retreated. He kept his silence, afraid any offer of help would only make things worse.

Sometimes when this happened, he thought he could guess L's thought process. But sometimes, like now, he had no idea what had caused the collapse. Delayed reaction, maybe, though Mello hadn't detected any outward signs of L realizing the mistake he'd made.

For any Wammy's alumnus, but especially for Mello with L in this specific circumstance, the inability to understand made everything harder. Of course he knew that by definition, mental illness made people irrational. There was still a part of him that wanted to deny the obvious, because damn it, L should've been able to fight it.

Mello couldn't bring himself to agree wholeheartedly. He'd only accepted the necessity of this because L himself had argued for it.

"It's just for now. I'm not about to let anyone else take over my closet. It'll be ready for you when you get out of here."

[dead_black_eyes]

L had four possible ways to wrap up the game within two moves, nine possible ways to wrap it up in three, 24 possible ways to end the game in four moves, and he chose one of 128 ways to end it in five, just so it would go on a little longer.

"You want to tell me something specific. Your visits started out being relatively frequent, once a week, and they've been falling off steadily since. We're at three weeks, now, not counting the deviant week you felt guilty and doubled up... but we've reached the point, Mello, where we are approaching a one-month frequency. In short... with our last visit two weeks ago, and the preceding visit having been three... something has happened. That's right, isn't it? Or you wouldn't have been back for another week, at the earliest."

Say it's right, or I'm flipping the board after two more moves.

[want_the_world]

"You're right." Mello felt a wave at guilt at hearing the data that proved his visits had dropped off so dramatically.

"I'm sorry, I--" he trailed off, and made his move, pretty sure playing out the rest of the game was a formality at this point, though he couldn't see exactly how L was going to beat him yet.

I've been busy, he could have said, but that was a lie he wouldn't tell. He could have found time, if he'd been determined enough.

"Near and I just need a witch soul to reach Death Scythe. That's what I wanted to tell you."

[dead_black_eyes]

Not that L was keeping score, but he'd always had a head for numbers, similar to Near's aptitude. There were so few things to count these days, now that he'd mastered the new routine at Shady Graves, and his boredom manifested in keeping track of patterns to an extreme, even insane, degree. Though most would agree that it was depressingly appropriate, given his surroundings and his reasons for being there.

"Don't apologize." He cut off his successor in a quiet, clipped voice. They both knew Mello's reasons and non-reasons. There was grieving, and then there was an unhealthy inability to let go of the past, much like the one that had driven L to the state he was in.

When Mello delivered the good news, he blinked, clearly surprised, but it was more difficult than usual to decipher his expression. Perhaps it was most like a strained kind of happiness; L hadn't been so far from Deathscythe, before everything had fallen apart. Certainly not so close as one soul... but with both Gamzee and Light helping him at different points, one as his official Meister and the other as a sort of illicit affair, he had made short work of a large portion of the other souls he'd been required to collect.

Was it 12 he had left? 13? Only 4? While he was adept at counting the distance between his friends' visits and the tiny skulls on the nurse's scrubs, he'd lost track of what really seemed to matter, in the long run. But he couldn't dwell on it; it was better to focus on the fact that, as part of his legacy, Mello and Near's success was his success, and it was therefore cause for celebration.

"Is that so? Congratulations... I always knew that you could," he said, a smile lighting up his pale, tired face like a voltage too high for the bulb containing it. "I... suppose that was the goal, eventually. I'm glad that you could reach it together, in this world, since you didn't have the opportunity in the last one. But since we're looking forward, and not back... what's next, for you and Near?"

[want_the_world]

While Mello was proud of the success of his and Near's partnership, he wasn't without mixed emotions himself. It was hard to keep from feeling that they were eclipsing L before he'd had a chance to shine as brightly as he could have done in Death City. He tried to tell himself it was good to see L smile, but in truth, it was also a bittersweet reminder of how seldom that happened now.

Chess game relegated to a low priority for the moment, he gave L's question the thought it deserved. This milestone had served as a goal, towards which progress could be measured, but the war had no such signposts to tell them they were getting closer to their destination.

Mello's priorities had shifted, too. When he thought about his future, he envisioned it in Death City, having finally accepted that even if BREW were free for him to make it, the wish he'd intended to make for so long broke the rules of this world and the one they'd come from.

"Keep fighting. That's all we can do. Until the war's over, there's not much sense in planning as if we'll stay here."

Though for the last couple of years, Mello had been doing just that.

[dead_black_eyes]

Isolated as he was, and shielded from the best and worst of the news (both constituted change, and both were therefore dangerous), L didn't know what was going on with the war beyond what he could speculate. And the nature of such speculation, unfortunately, was that it was soaked in so much paranoia and delusion that it was immediately invalid. Orderlies weren't secretly Witches, and the crows outside weren't Kishin Eggs, even though the illusion could be tragically convincing.

"Thank you for bringing me such good news. With one more Deathscythe on our side, the war can't go on so much longer. Please give my regards to Near?"

It was L's way of saying that he was getting tired, moving his knight to effectively end the game. No matter how glad he was to have one of his successors visit him, he couldn't tolerate any visitor for very long.