Work Text:
Sometimes, L thought it ironic that B almost killed himself by self-immolation because:
B was a tempest and sometimes L felt like a boat at sea, frantically trying not to capsize in the waves, but other times L was the waves themselves, playing joyfully in the wind of the storm, happily capsizing any boat that dared to brave them at their worst.
B was a siren and L was Odysseus, desperately pleading with his men to let him go free and drown in the ocean of his own making. L thought he wanted nothing, needed nothing, but B was his perfect drug, a criminal and a lover twisted up in an unholy union and dressed up with an ever-changing face and eyes that saw far too much. Sometimes, L thought he would never be able to regret knowing him, would never be able to regret wanting him. Sometimes it was better to want nothing at all.
And on occasion, in that fragile space between the end of one case and the itch for the next, B was also like the eye of the hurricane that was their lives. When L was shaking apart after giving in and getting another hit, when L was desperate for any distraction from his brain that was constantly racing on, and on, and on, when B saw something that shouldn’t exist and couldn’t not think about it and they curled up together until they resembled an ouroboros and couldn’t quite tell where one of them began and the other ended and B was whispering, “ Lawliet ” in his ear, sickly sweet and terribly fragile.
It was so unfair that B almost died in a fire because to L he was a ravaging storm, a force of nature that could destroy anything that had the audacity to get in his path. And it was true, in its own way. Eventually every storm dies out, gives up to the unrelenting nature of time. And B was always living on stolen time, was always acutely aware of how much time everyone else had, and even if he didn’t know how much time he had left, B was the romantic, he stole every moment, until he had no choice but to collapse.