Chapter Text
L is seasick.
He’s keeping his eyes closed and lying on the couch, listening to his apprentices bicker and chatter on the deck just above his head. The window is open and a white curtain is ruffling gently on the breeze and waves crashing against the belly of the ship creates a white noise just beneath it.
Mihael’s voice rings clear above it all. Mail’s follows at a more reasonable volume, though still quite audible. L tries to tune them out, which means he ends up eavesdropping on the entire conversation.
“Weren’t we sent here by the Sovereign himself, weren’t we? You’d think the rich bastard would have a nicer boat to lend us if this case is really such a high priority.”
“He does, but not for us.”
“It’s bullshit! He acts like this is some huge emergency and then he can’t be bothered to put his money where his mouth is.”
“That’s royalty for you.”
“I’ll bet he doesn’t even pay the full amount when we’re through with it.”
“Men like that never want to part with their gold.”
“Spoiled brats, all of them. I heard that even the Sovereign's consorts are escorted in little carriages wherever they go. Imagine that, never letting your dainty little feet touch the ground.”
Spoiled brats indeed, L thought, daring to crack his eye open.
“He gets credit for hiring the world’s best detective,” Mihael says. “It makes him look like a concerned philanthropist.”
“And gives the families of the researchers hope,” Mail muses.
“All because one of them washed up on this island, too. C’mon, we’re not going to find all the bodies of lost fishermen. It’s kind of a dangerous job.”
“Not fishermen, researchers ,” Matt corrects in his most sardonic tone.
“Yeah, of course,” Mail snorts. “They get tons of immigrants that wash up dead on this island, trying to swim passed it to the mainland, but the body of one one dead researcher shows up...”
“I’m telling you, we’re not actually meant to figure this out,” Mihael brandishes a finger in Mail’s direction. “It just looks good to the families of those researchers, who are desperate and grieving.”
“We’re detectives, not fucking meteorologists or whatever, and we’re definitely not pirate hunters.”
“As awesome as that would be,” Mihael admits. “They’re just taking advantage of L’s reputation while we do all the work.”
“And what work are you doing, exactly?”
The wry voice of his benefactor and mentor, Quillish, is a welcome reprieve.
“I don’t mean now ,” Mihael answers, not sheepish at all, “Now is for tea.”
“It is?” Mail laughs, “I don’t see any tea.”
“Nor do I,” Quillish confirms dryly.
“I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”
“Rather, you hoped I’d be around to make some,” Quillish corrects, and there is the shuffling sound of his robes and the telltale grunt exertion as he sits down.
“Fiiine, I’ll make it,” Mihael huffs, chair legs scraping over the boards as he stands up.
It’s only because L wants tea does he decide to pry himself up from the pillows. He’s still somewhat dizzy from the roll of the ocean beneath him, but he hopes that tea will settle his stomach.
“Make enough for me,” L grumbles as he ascends the stair to the deck, rubbing at his temples.
“Yeah, yeah,” Mihael says as he slips past L and into the small kitchen compartment to put the kettle on. “Wait, Mail why aren’t making us tea? You’re my assistant. Get in here.”
“You’re already up!”
“Why did I agree to an assistant again?” L grouses, climbing into the chair across from Watari and resting his head on his knees. “All this bickering…”
“Whatever,” Mihael mutters.
The clink of the kettle being put on the stove comes a moment later. Mail sinks back into his chair and crosses his arms behind his head.
“Have you thought through any preliminary theories?” Quillish asks him after only a beat.
“Just the obvious."
“So you don’t think it’s mermaids?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Mihael snarks, stepping out of the kitchen with his hands on his hips.
“Well, I think it’s actually mermaids,” Mail says.
Mihael shoots him a sharp look. L rolls his eyes up to the sky, watching grey spread in perilous heaps across the stretch of blue.
“C’mon,” Mihael scoffs.
L looks back at him and notices that Mihael’s gaze is flickering toward his own, clearly interested in his take. Many people were, and his apprentice was no exception. The disappearances of research crews on the water is a popular mystery of late.
“Think about it, most of the ocean is totally unexplored!” Mail barges on, raising his hands up into the air. “If aliens exist in outer space somewhere that have developed similarly to us, and it’s statistically probable they do, then why not mermaids?”
“Do you believe in Bigfoot, too?”
“I believe that something approximately like Bigfoot could conceivably exist based on the crazy shit that does actually evolve on this ridiculous ass planet.”
L mulls this over briefly.
“Fair enough,” he says after a moment.
“Mermaids it is then,” Quillish agrees sagely, giving a curt nod.
Mihael rolls his eyes.
“Not that mermaids aren’t cool as hell, but they can’t actually exist,” Mihael stops talking when the kettle goes off, and retreats to get the tea tray.
L thinks he would have definitely fallen over and smashed all of Quillish’s china, where he left up to the task. He can feel the ocean roll beneath him and he has to close his eyes briefly.
“My money is on pirates,” Mihael continues, setting the tray down.
L opens his eyes and watches Quillish carefully pour the water into each of their cups. He sits up and they each proceed to doctor up their tea to their tastes as Mihael keeps on.
“The bodies that have washed up on the island are always just drowned, no sign of struggle, none of them tied up,” L tells them, tilting his head.“Polite pirates.”
“Alright, I guess it could be some kind of Bermuda Triangle situation too,” Mihael concedes thoughtfully, “but we found the ship, just none of the crew members were on it. That’s not typical.”
“None of this is typical,” Mail says, “Which is why I say mermaids. ”
“The islanders don’t think Kira is a mermaid per se, though their legends do seem to have a disproportionate amount of merfolk. They are a sea based culture, their entire way of life is based around their ports and water systems in alliance with the Sovereign,” L explains quietly, plucking up sugar cubes one by one and plonking them into his tea. After a moment, he wiggles his fingers to be mockingly ominous. “They believe he is a God of the Sea, seeking revenge on the evil doers who have polluted their waters and therefore their fish supply. They say it is a creature that ‘illuminates the water in all colors’, though I can’t be certain of the translation. ”
“So they definitely have mushrooms on this island, that’s what you’re saying,” Mihael snorts.
“And I thought this trip would be boring,” Mail says.
L stirs his tea and smiles without humor. “Some of them are thankful for the disappearances, and even pray to Kira in hopes he will hunt others.”
“Thankful?” Mihael frowns. “What, because of the oil spill?”
“Which one?” Quillish inquires with a pointed sip of his tea.
Mihael purses his lips briefly, then waves a hand.
“Researchers aren’t the ones who caused that though. They’re scientists.”
“The villagers assign their own motives to figments, and I don’t exactly blame them for their feelings on the matter,” L sighs. “As soon as there is evidence of the unnatural, I will accommodate my thinking.”
L shrugs and continues.
“For now, the ocean is full of observable phenomenon that have made crews go missing for centuries. There is no need to create imaginary troubles when the world is rife with tangible ones.”
“But I really want it to be mermaids,” Mail refutes, in a playful yet sensible fashion.
“I hope to convey this without invalidating the experience of the island villagers,” L drawls as he sets down his teaspoon delicately. “but they are uneducated, poverty-stricken, and are said to drink the salt water. More likely than the existance of a completely undocumented sea creature is that their mythological belief system, combined with sickness, malnurishment, and a distrust of science, has convinced them of the validity of their hallucinations.”
Another swell in the water beneath the boat makes his insides flip.
“Drink,” Quillish reminds him, “It will settle your stomach.”
L finally lifts his cup to his mouth. It’s immediately apparent that there isn’t enough sugar for his liking and he lowers his cup to his tea plate to add more.
“After that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” L explains idly, “When one believes in ghosts, every creak in the floorboards and wail of the wind is evidence of the supernatural.”
The names of humans are not important to them so much as their ability to distinguish one from the other for the sake of strategic planning.
Assigning code names based on distinguishing characteristics is useful for the sake of keeping track, though they would not know how to describe such code names to humans. Nor would they ever need to.
Their language is rarely verbal. The way their people communicate is only sometimes audible - clicks and whistles, mostly - but in more cases, body language, touch, or purely sensory based electromagnetic pulses are best for the situation.
Loud, Mild, Wisp, and Low are the closest approximations possible for these four. The quality of voices is all they has to go off of, and they're just humans, so they refuse to linger too long on naming them.
Humans are rotten creatures, after all.
Their own name is non-verbal, one that can only be sensed electromagnetically, and therefore one humans will never truly hear and never truly say. It is less of a word than a phrase, or a concept, and they like that about it.
It is a term for the glow from the sun when their kind are too close to the surface. It’s correlated emotions are a paradox, something like danger, and something like beauty.
The humans call them Kira, and they can’t help but like that name too.
Enough sailors have met their gaze and uttered it as their last word for them to know for sure.
Their heart pounds against their chest while they listen to the newcomers speak from the water below, holding onto a rivet in the siding. Farther away, they sense the humans’ heartbeats too.
The water rushes against them in a way it never does when they swims under the surface, tickling their neck in a series of steady splashes. It is pleasantly warm up here. Though they know that such temperatures foretell a storm, they enjoy it anyway. They will need to move to calmer waters soon to avoid the havoc caused, but they are prepared; they have a freshwater retreat near the island’s most southern waterfall that has yet to fail him.
They note the words that are familiar as the humans chitter at one another.
After years of listening in on humans, they have grown to recognize some of their words, often used phrases and the like, but just hearing hasn't given them too much to go off of. Much meaning is lost on them, but then, meaning is not why they are here.
The few words they know well - like sea , and water , and ship , among a few others- are those they have discerned from an old map that had fallen from one of the dead sailors hands. The visuals had helped them understand humans’ rudimentary grasp on directions and ocean travel.
They also know the written symbol for a particular group of humans, though they do not know what sound is assigned to it. There is a feeling attributed to it, however, an emotion linked in their memory the likes of which made the water seem to boil around him.
The symbol had been on that map, the red ideogram, the crooked cross.
As it was on every ship that Kira brought to justice, as it was on this ship as well.
This boat is not a research ship, however. It isn’t large enough, and doesn’t have any nets. They’d been observing it for some time, and hadn’t seen so much as a wire.
“Kira.”
The word singles itself out, even though Low does not project when speaking. It is as though they talk around a mild obstruction.
“Kira,” agrees Loud, among a flurry of other harsh sounds.
These humans aren’t here with nets, which is odd, but they might be here for him.
The nets will come later. They always do.
Kira takes a gulp of air and then disappears back beneath the surface. The newcomers have not proven themselves to be a threat yet and a storm is on the horizon. They need to eat something.
They see Ryuk in the distance, a dark blur in the water. Their acquaintance is close enough to the surface that their dorsal fin will be sticking out.
The shark gapes their jaw, asking in their way, ‘ will you kill them?’
Kira is low enough in the water to risk flashing an ambivalent hue in Ryuk’s direction.
‘ Maybe’ the glow says. They may not be researchers, but they are still human. They are always more harmful alive than they are dead.
The shark closes and opens their mouth again, expelling a burst of air. It’s a brief glug of a sound that if they didn’t know better, they would think was a laugh.
Kira conveys a sense of urgency with a brief beat of green, ‘ time to go’.
They can’t breathe down below anymore, so before long they have to peak their head back above the surface of the water to take a gulp of air. There will be a long journey through a winding cave that leads to their waterfall. The brackish water there will be a nice change from the muck out here, and although the promise of a storm is never without its anxieties, they find they are looking forward to it.
The ships will all be docked. Humans rarely venture out in such weather, so they will be able to rest before their next swim into the deep.
Soon they are swimming farther into the rock foundation than Ryuk can, their ray-finned body moving through the cave with slippery ease. It takes perhaps five minutes for them to make it through to the cave system, at which point they have to break the surface again for air.
This is always where they have to be the most careful. The estuary is close enough to the village that they have occasionally surfaced for air here and seen humans in the distance. They try to wait until they are close to the waterfall, so that the drum of it overwhelms any sound that might draw human attention. Not all is avoidable, but they have not been caught yet.
Their biofluorescence can sometimes slip out of their control when they are short on breath, which is more and more often. It was so much easier when they could breathe in water too, but there is no use brooding over what has been lost.
It is another series of seconds before they reach the falls.
At first, their skin is too slick to climb up the rock, their hands unable catch a grip. Oily fingers claw frustratedly for several seconds before they find a spot porous enough to dig their fingers into.
They heave themself up, and their stomach heaves immediately after. What comes out the same colorful metallic substance that coats their skin and scales. It slides down the curve of the rock and back into the water, a bead of something viscous reflecting prisms of light.