Work Text:
Lines, My Lovely
UchidaKarasu
When Harry celebrated his forty-fifth birthday, L finally told him.
Before this, though, they were sitting at the graves of Harry's parents in Godric's Hollow, something they always did on Harry's birthday, and the wizard was crying. The tears, just as heavy and heart-wrenching as the first day they had come here, flowed down his ageing face, and L silently wiped them away with his fingertips. Despite the years, despite the fact that he was now the same age as Harry (for the next three months, anyway), his hands still looked as smooth and unblemished as always. He had aged well, Harry liked to say, but his hands were void of all the signs of time that showed elsewhere on L's body.
L watched Harry weep, and despite the fact that it was terrible to watch him in such a state, L never stopped thinking how uncommonly lucky he was that he had held onto this beautiful man for a little over twenty years.
When they were walking back towards the village to the inn they had rented, L mentioned almost off-handedly, “My mother's name was Klara Domashevich.” There was a stillness surrounding them, almost suffocating when he thought and focussed on it, but then again, it could've been because L was finally letting go of something that he had held onto for the near five decades of his life. No matter how many years went by, no matter how happy he was with Harry by his side, it was always hard to open up a little more than he had previously.
Perhaps it wasn't as big of a deal as he was mentally making it out to be, but then again, severity of painful memory or ordeal was all in the eye of the beholder, or in L's case, the ear of the listener.
He continued slowly, lifting his face to the misty drizzle coming from the English sky as he walked, “She was a Russian woman who lived outside of St. Petersburg, in a city called Volkhov. She had been seventeen when she met my father, and from the intel I've gathered, a happy woman despite the war.”
They continued walking in the light drizzle, the rainfall refreshing on their skin, and L tightened his grip on Harry's hand, taking in the comfort he himself had just given Harry at the foot of the graves. He hesitated, wondering how to proceed without making Harry cringe, but he figured that'd happen anyway, and in true L Lawliet style despite the years, he said bluntly, “My father, a man named Stephen Lawliet, raped her and she became pregnant.”
There was a long pause. They bypassed the inn completely, L barely taking note of it, and continued down the road into the woods surrounding. The rain wasn't falling as thickly in the trees, due to the rain being caught on leaves and branches, but they could still feel thick droplets hit their jackets and heads occasionally. L still registered vaguely that he was still a bit hungry, maybe for some cookies or perhaps, dare he say it, that honey-dipped chicken Harry had brought to one of their many homes (hideaways) and forced L to try.
Some things did change. L could look at himself in the mirror and see the changes. The soft lines around his eyes and lips, the silver-white streaking very, very thickly now throughout his heavy mass of dark hair, the look in his dark eyes that spoke simultaneously of good times and terrible ones instead of just the latter. But some things didn't change, like his clothing or the simple fact that he didn't like shoes and socks.
“Stephen Lawliet raped and killed almost forty women in Russia over a period of fifteen years. He tortured them, dismembered them after he was finished with their bodies, and then dumped the bodies in churches and graveyards across St. Petersburg. It was his unparalleled talent for evading trouble and staying hidden, and his cleverness, that kept him from getting caught, but then he did. My mother was the one that got away from him instead of following the same sadistic pattern. She escaped him, saving herself.”
Harry had changed quite a bit, and yet not at all. Sometimes L wondered if he was still in his early twenties, with that love of life and youthfulness simmering in every action he made and every word he spoke, but his appearance begged to differ. The grey (not white, like L's own but grey which made him old, L liked to say to Harry's chagrin) was not as widespread as L's own, focussing around his ears in some sort-of distinguished way. His ridiculous circular glasses had been replaced with rectangular frames, framing those magnificent eyes with more justification to their beauty. The lines around Harry's eyes and lips were more defined (also to Harry's chagrin), showing years upon years of laughter and teasing. L liked them, even though it betrayed how their time together was coming to an end, but they would leave a good legacy behind regardless, and wasn't that worth it?
“She testified against my father, but because of his profession as a highly successful lawyer and his good standing in the government, as well as the simple fact he donated billions of dollars to relief efforts, no one believed that such a distinguished man could do such a terrible thing. There was no evidence anyway, because he was meticulous, and with the war, they weren't going to arrest and waste money on a trial. He was perfect at what he did, and the government needed his money. So she fled out of the country when it was clear he wasn't going to prison, fearing for her own safety.”
They walked into a small clearing and Harry flicked out his wand, conjuring a plush armchair from nowhere after casting an overhead charm to cast the rainfall away from them. It never ceased to amaze L every single time he witnessed Harry, or anyone else for that matter, doing a simple spell or concocting a mundane potion. L had gotten quite good at potion-making over the years in an attempt to be a part of it all, since he didn't have to be a wizard to complete them. It was L's own way of being magical like the love of his life, except he was a lot better at making potions than Harry was. Harry blamed Severus Snape for that, but L refused to acknowledge it.
“She fled to Japan, where she thought she would be safe from both the war and my father. She had no money, no prospects, and like all hopeless runaways during that time, she sold herself for passage, stopped eating in exchange for whatever narcotics she could find. She periodically wrote letters and even made the occasional phone call to family back in Russia, but she never told them where she was. Perhaps she was embarrassed by her condition, or perhaps she was scared that my father would find her and finish the job he started. Either way, she was off the grid.”
When they sat down, Harry first and L curled up on his lap with his nose buried in Harry's damp coat, L wondered why he was telling him. Did it even matter? It was most likely the fact that it was the last secret he had, and on such a day as Harry visiting his own parents' graves...was it not appropriate to divulge the last thing he had kept to himself over the years? His own parents—L's own father, the exact breed of man he had spent a lifetime trying to atone for. Maybe getting justice elsewhere with other murderers and rapists would make him less likely to be like him. A constant reminder, such as L's last name, only enforced that. They said psychotic and psychopathic traits were genetic and environmental; he had to keep himself on the opposite side of the spectrum even if it was a far-fetched worry.
“I was two months premature. I interviewed the doctor in Japan who was responsible for my delivery, once I discovered his name, when I was twenty-one. I didn't expect him to remember, but he did. He remembered me, even if he didn't remember me.”
They had never married, Harry and L. They didn't need to. They didn't need a slip of paper to tell them that their love for each other was the lasting kind, the type that never ended even after death. After all, how could it end? Harry was famous, and his relationship for a man the public only knew as Ryuzaki (the first name of many that Harry had been obligated to call him in public over the years) was famous in its own regard. It was widely accepted now that Harry wasn't going through a phase with L, because it was relatively clear that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, even to people who didn't know them.
It had taken the Wizarding public three years to finally catch a glimpse of what the famous Harry Potter was doing with his life, and L had been a part of that with gusto. It would've lasted longer, their secrecy in their relationship, if it hadn't been for a particular desire on L's part. He didn't want to be famous just because of who he loved, and he certainly didn't want the attention. The only reason he had finally showed his face to Harry's (and now L's) world was because he simply needed to. Harry could only do so much within the law without causing an international incident, and L needed confirmation for the children in the Race for the Letters to have intimate information on the Wizarding world.
Petitioning the Wizengamont to allow an orphanage full of Muggle children to learn extensively about their world without fault was rather important in L's eyes.
“He told me that she had come into the hospital in the late hours of the thirtieth of October, something I still can't believe he remembered after all those years despite the way he did remember. He said that she had been thin, emaciated, and had that air of beauty before illness and drug use had stripped her of it. He hadn't even known she was pregnant until she had collapsed and they had found blood and...dilation during a routine examination. So they had moved her into a room and started preparing for delivery.”
A bird, perhaps a raven, cawed in the distance, its call a lonely and echoing sound in the pitter-patter of rain surrounding. It sent shivers down L's spine, not exactly pleasant ones but not eerie ones either. It was just...intense, in a way, in the otherwise silent forest save the rain.
“He doesn't remember the time I was born and when the hospital I was born was burnt down in 1982, the certificates of birth were all lost. But he does remember that it was Halloween, because there had been festivals in Atami, the city I had been born in, and he remembers what year it had been because it had been the first series of festivals since the war had begun.”
The bird cawed again and the shivers came back, so L burrowed closer into Harry's chest, inhaling his scent deeply. That was another thing that L would never tire of, Harry's scent. Musky, male, and simply Harry.
“My mother, despite living in Japan for the few months she was there, didn't speak any Japanese. I'm sure she knew some, just out of necessity, but I figure that she lived in a predominantly Russian area, probably in Tokyo itself. The doctor told me that she didn't speak any words, regardless of language, until after I was born. They had told her that I was a boy and showed her to me, and he said that she said a phrase in Russian, calm and almost indifferent. He didn't remember what she said in our language—” There he went again, calling Russian his language, but in a way it sort-of was, even if he didn't like to admit it. “—but one of the nurses had been proficient in Russian and had translated it to Japanese after...it happened. The doctor, well, definitely remembered that.”
He had tried to teach Harry a few other languages after the Kira case had ended. After twenty years, Harry was proficient in English, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, Norwegian, German, and Mandarin Chinese (although that had taken Harry forever to learn, but it was important in their line of work to know how to speak the language, since it was one of the global dominants). He could haltingly speak some Dutch, Swedish, and Afrikaans, at least enough to get by.
Harry was utterly terrible at Slavonic languages. Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian...he was rubbish at them. He had picked up on a few words here and there, but it wasn't enough to have satisfactory conversation with delegates or governmental officials of the countries with such languages.
It drove Harry crazy not being able to pick up on the languages that L considered his best and most native. Despite being born in Japan and living there for almost five years, he had been relatively slow when learning due to being unmotivated during his younger years. He hadn't spoken to anyone (as far as he knew) while living in Japan, making all of them believe he was mute, and the first words he had spoken to another human being had been in Russian, which had been far more easy to learn than Japanese had been.
Perhaps that was just the Slavic blood in him. Maybe it was because the Russian language had always fascinated him, even when he had been younger. Perhaps it was because he hadn't been as scared and as determined to hide under the shadows of others in Russia as he had been in Japan. His childhood in Japan hadn't been terrible, not like the his childhood in Russia had been, so he wasn't sure why he considered himself to be Russian despite what country he had been born in.
Well, the years of impressionability were between four and nine, as determined by scientists, and he had predominantly lived in St. Petersburg during this time, so perhaps that was why.
L opened his eyes, blinked, and then shut them again, forcing himself to continue with his story rather than lose himself in memories. “He said that he could still remember what she said word-for-word.” L paused, hesitating, but Harry squeezed him softly and he finally said in a shaky voice, “She said, 'Look at him, the demon child, looking just like the devil.'” Again, L paused, and then he whispered the Russian translation, “Посмотрите на него, демон ребенок, глядя, как дьявол.”
The bird cawed again, but he was too lost in the memory of that doctor's tale to register the shiver down his spine.
“Maybe I really did look just like my father back then too,” L continued. “I don't blame her for her reaction either; my father raped her, tortured her, and then frightened her enough for her to leave her family, her friends. Because of his actions toward her and women like her, she fled the country, got into drugs, and essentially ruined her life, just because she valued her life enough to run. It just didn't turn out the way she had expected, and because of that, she was bleeding out after giving birth to me, the offspring of her worst nightmare, and she wasn't even done yet.”
Harry was tense below him, and instead of not knowing what to do to comfort them both like back in the days of the beginning of their relationship, he wrapped the love of his life in his arms, burying his nose in the tender juncture where Harry's throat met his shoulders.
In the blunt way only L could pull off about personal facts of his life, the detective said, “She said that, so calmly and indifferently, and then she grabbed a scalpel from the medical tray proper and stabbed me behind the ear with it.”
Harry didn't speak, but he didn't have to. He just shook in L's arms, holding him so hard back that it was almost painful but L didn't care. He loved being so close to Harry that he couldn't even breathe. It was comforting, in a way that making love to him was not. A closeness, but not entirely the same kind of closeness.
“Then...then she went into labour again,” L continued, and he could feel more than see Harry frown against his heavily streaked, black-and-white hair. “She was in labour with me for hours and hours, but she had my...sister in less than two after I was born, the doctor said. They had strapped my mother to her bed considering what had happened to me first, just for the sake of keeping the second child safe, but it didn't matter anyway. The girl was born stillborn.”
Harry let out a sound that was a mix between a sigh and a groan at the same time the bird cawed again, and L pressed his ear against Harry's strong chest, listening to his heartbeat thump steadily. L's own heart slowly reached the same tempo, and for a long moment, they both just listened to the drizzle and each other's breathing before L was comfortable enough to continue.
“My mother died almost an hour after having my sister, from haemorrhaging. I barely survived surgery, and the doctor called it a miracle having survived it so young. I don't think it was a miracle, though, for I don't believe in miracles. It was just meant to be. I exist to stop criminals, to bring balance into this relatively dull but imaginative and brutal Muggle world. I exist to make sure that Kira doesn't come back through other means, even if Raito and Misa are both dead and gone. I exist to make sure that the world always has the L name to look forward to in this world, to make sure that it isn't as hopeless as it all seems. And...I was meant to love you, to make sure you didn't go crazy running away from all the women who still want to have your offspring.”
Harry tutted under his breath and pulled L's face away from his chest. Straddling Harry's waist, L stared deep into Harry's emerald green eyes, feeling that same overwhelming sense of love he always experienced when he was with the love of his life.
Harry wiped a few of the tears that had slipped out of L's eyes (no, it's rain, because I don't know how to cry, even after all these years, but dear God that's a lie), and whispered, “I love your lines, my lovely.” He traced the gentle wrinkles around L's eyes that betrayed the detective's age and desire for immortality, and finally brought their lips together. For a long time, they just absorbed each other through soft, delicate kisses that spoke of more comfort and love than words ever could, and then they broke apart, gasping for the sweet air freshened by rain. The raven's caw echoed in the air once more, a tragic sound that was lost completely on the two beloved in the middle of the clearing.