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Misa-Misa got hit by a car, once, she tells him, through the flicker of the candle in the centerpiece. She had to practically beg him to take her out, because he's always so busy, busy, and she isn't sure why she's telling him this now, but it just feels right. Raito was looking so terribly disinterested before, like he was just going through the motions for her sake, like he would rather be anywhere else, and she couldn't bear it. With most people, this would kill the mood, make the date weird, but Raito usually enjoys morbidity if nothing else, and with the prohibitions on talking about Murder Notebooks and Kill Counts in public, this is the best she's got.
She's not sure if he already knows, he should already know because Raito knows everything, but it's something that they've never talked about.
He leans back in his chair, and looks at her, warily, in his black suit and perfectly knotted tie. She had tried to help him with it, that's what the girlfriends all did in the movies, but he'd shrugged her off when she tried to put her arms around his neck. Said that he'd tie it better, that she'd just make a mess of it, anyway.
What happened? He asks her slowly. She's not sure if he really cares, or if he's just humoring her, because humoring her would be the proper thing to do, and Raito's so very proper. He swirls the wine in his glass, and Misa imagines a tsunami over a city. She'd once read about something called a butterfly effect, stumbled across a web page when looking for butterfly hair clips; and Raito's already magnified so much, names on a page to deaths on a street, that she can't imagine what consequence every action has on the universe.
Misa blinks and her eyelash extensions are scratchy on the tops of her cheeks.
Misa was walking, and wasn't looking at the street, she says simply, and it came out of nowhere.
Well then, Raito reasoned. Misa surely learned a valuable lesson about looking both sides. Did it hurt?
Did it hurt? Misa thinks to herself, had it really hurt?
She had hit her head really hard, bruised her legs, and her frilly dress had ridden up to show her underwear as she got splayed out over the windshield, but the pain was muted with the adrenaline, she just felt really numb because she wasn't really sure how to react, whether to burst into theatrics, or to brush it off completely. Misa was an actress, not a very famous one yet, but she still played pretend for a living, and she fabricated identity after identity until she didn't know who she really was anymore, like a Russian doll extending into infinity. It was just like playing a magazine quiz where she purposely chose the answers that led to the results that she wanted.
Like, today she had straightened her hair, and worn dark lipstick and a simple dress. Yes, Magazine-San, I am elegant and refined. Yes, Raito, you can talk to me like you talk to Takada, Kiyomi 23,1,9,46,10.
Misa couldn't remember what she had chosen to do on that day, but it had gotten her swaddled in a blanket and carted to the hospital, anyway. Her manager had to pick her up early the next day, and she got a couple bouquets of flowers from some of her fans. It hadn't really hurt as much as it had ached.
Misa nods, once, twice, and then stops. Realizes something. Not really she says, hesitantly, It just felt like loving something that doesn't love you back.
Raito looks at her with amusement, Little Misa, so uncharacteristically poetic, so grown up in someone else's shoes, speaking a language that she doesn't fully understand. Do you think I'm a car crash? He asks, cocking his head and smiling, smiling wide.
Misa does, and it was the funniest thing in the world, because her parents were dead, and Gelus was dead, and L was dead, and Rem was dead, but Misa had survived the robbery and the crash, and the stalking, and imprisonment, and she just wouldn't die. Misa's life-span has been halved, and halved, but she doesn't seem to stop attracting fatalities.
She wonders if she'll survive Light, too, or if he'll grow tired of her and write down: Amane, Misa on a black book. After so much excitement she wonders how she'll finally go.
You think I'm a car crash?
I do, Misa says earnestly, knuckles on the table and Bambi eyes. It's an altar kind of I do, all the white lace and diamonds and roses that she doesn't have.
She has to let him hear it, at least once.