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Description
Abstraction

A Death Note fan-fiction

Disclaimers: The plot is getting weird because I’ve totally lost it and am attempting to recover it.  Sorry in advance.  Hey, at least I’m honest.

---

Page Five: Ethereal

---

The room was blessedly cold.  An odd sort of cold, surely – a cold that felt like it didn’t belong anywhere on earth.  But that might have been due to the strange, sudden relief from the burns marring his flesh, radiating heat until he felt as though you could effectively cook something on his chest.

He was healing, but it was a slow process.  The gag around his head cut into the corners of his mouth where the still burned flesh ached, blood mixed with other unspeakable fluids soaking the material around his lips.

Shuddering, Mello wondered where this cold was coming from.  He knew what was going on now, but had no way to tell Kira about it.  His half-glazed eyes slid over to where Light hung, dead again.  L was gone off somewhere, as he tended to do – not like there was any danger in any of his captives leaving.  Mello couldn’t move anything but his eyes.  Matt couldn’t walk, lest the tentative healing layers over his bullet wounds open and spill the blood that the Life Note had been kind enough to replenish for him.

Light would have the hardest time moving, considering that he had to have his limbs sewn back on before he could be brought back to life.  L had presumably gone to fetch equipment for just that very thing.

Mello tried to concentrate on the cold yet again.  The metal gurney beneath him was frigid, though it shouldn’t have been because of his body sucking the cold out of it to be replaced with his own ungodly body temperature.  He wanted to throw up, but was afraid to because of both the pain and what it would mean for loss of fluids.  He had heard enough about the Life Note from the man who had brought him back to know what was going on, but he knew no specific details.

He doubted L did, either.

Training his eyes back on the ceiling, Mello forced himself to concentrate.  It was hard to see anything, as his eyes had only recently begun to function again.  The cold seemed to be coming from the left side of his body, away from Kira and Matt.  He began to notice light from that side of the room, as well – a soft white light that countered the harsh fluorescent bulbs hanging over his head.

Slowly, Mello’s eyes shifted to the other side of the room and he froze.  It was advantageous that he was too shocked to scream, or he would have done so and hurt himself rather badly, in addition to waking Matt up and probably making him hurt himself.  But still, shock registered clearly in his eyes nevertheless.

Standing on the left side of his body, gazing blankly into the room, was a large creature, radiating the soft white light and the cold that Mello felt covering everything in the room.  The thing was androgynous, all white, with semi-humanoid features.  Its face was wrapped tightly in white bandages, a space ripped in the middle where an ice blue eye gazed out from a rim of utter black.  White hair fell around the bandages and the rest of the form.  The arms were crossed in the style of the Egyptian mummy, and more bandages covered the abdomen.  The bandages continued downwards to the legs, wrapping them individually as though to allow for movement.

Large wings, batlike but for their sleek white color, were folded behind the creature’s back.  The bandages of the face did not meet the bandages of the shoulder, and there were gaps in the wrappings around the creature’s body.  Everywhere a gap was visible, there was no flesh underneath – no muscle, no bone, no framework, as though the bandages were wrapped around absolutely nothing.

As though it noticed it was being watched, the creature slowly turned its entire head downwards to stare at Mello, fixing an unblinking cyclopean gaze on the young man.  The urge to scream disappeared, replaced by the urge to surrender consciousness.

Mello had always prided himself on his steel will.  It took a great deal to intimidate him.  It wasn’t so much the appearance of the creature – after all, Sidoh had barely made him blink – as it was the aura radiating from it.  It was an aura of pure, unadulterated emptiness, an emptiness from which death would be a blessed escape.  Staring into the ice blue eye was like staring into Hell itself, and though Mello knew his eyes weren’t working properly he could make out every horrific detail of the creature hovering above him now.

“Hello, Mihael Keehl.”  Neither visible mouth nor discernable movement of the jaw signified that it had been the creature that had spoken, and yet Mello was certain that it had.  As the voice filled the room, the strangest sensation filled the blond, and he began to feel as though all his worries were washed away.  The voice was distinctly male, yet it was the most angelic voice he had heard in his entire life.  It echoed oddly, as though bouncing off the walls of his own mind rather than those of the room.

The creature turned his attention back to Light, though continued to address the burned man on the metal gurney.  “This is spiraling out of control,” he said slowly, shaking his head a bit. “A Life Note is not meant for this purpose… it is not a tool of destruction.  The side effects of bringing a person back to life are inevitable, but the Note is not meant for revenge.”

Slowly, the body began to rise – as the head was not actually connected to the shoulders, but more hovering a few inches above them, it stayed put.  After a moment, the shoulders connected with the jaw and the head moved upwards, no space left for an assumed neck, and when the body stopped rising, the head continued to its original position.

As the creature floated over the gurney, Mello felt the horrendous cold pass over his abdomen to his right side, leaving his left side horribly, horribly hot.  But he was too distracted to care.  What the fuck was this thing?

“What the fuck am I?” the creature asked quietly, and Mello started, his body screaming in protest at the automatic reaction.  The blond was positive he had not spoken, due to the gag around his mouth, but the creature had just repeated his thought.

“I, Mihael Keehl, am V’ko of the Hachi Tenshi.  The Shiroi Tenshi, if you must know.  And, yes, I mean ‘Tenshi’ as in Angel,” he added, a note of amusement in his voice.  “Not an angel in the sense of your Archangel, of course… You were thinking of Sidoh, a Shinigami of the Death Note.  Just as the Life Note is the antithesis to the Death Note, so are the Tenshi to the Shinigami, though they greatly outnumber us.  There are, as the name suggests, merely eight of us – eight Life Notes in existence, never really meant to fall into human hands but completely useless to all but humans,” he said with an ironic laugh.

This was odd.  But if the creature had some kind of telepathy, Mello would just have to isolate his thoughts into what he wanted to know.  If this creature had answers… He shifted his gaze to it, wondering.

“I cannot tell you what will happen,” V’ko said after a long pause as he listened to Mello, shaking his head slowly.  “But I can only be seen by you, Mail Jeevas, and Yagami Light… if he recovers,” the white creature said, looking at each in turn.  “You see, while a Shinigami can be seen only by those who use the Death Note, a Tenshi can only be seen by those who are revived by the Life Note.  The man who revived you cannot see me.  Though he was, in fact, brought back to life by my Note, he relinquished the ability to see me the moment he brought Yagami Light back to life.”

So… this creature was bound to the Life Note as Shinigami are bound to the Death Note.  Mello was in pain, yes, but none great enough to hinder his thought processes that severely.  Of course, there was always the possibility that, after the current events, he had simply gone insane.  Yes, that was quite a likely scenario.

He certainly felt insane at that particular moment in time.

V’ko didn’t respond to Mello further.  Instead, he glided across the room to where Matt lay and peered down at him.  The redhead’s breathing was irregular, understandably, and as the Tenshi had gotten near him he had begun to shiver.  After a moment, the creature backed up slightly before turning and floating over to Light.  The blood had stopped flooding the ground about fifteen minutes ago, but the liquid still shone underneath the lights from the ceiling – they froze in solid puddles of red as V’ko passed over them, crystals of white appearing where the blood met the floor around the edges.

A click resonated through the room, the sound appearing to be louder due to the cold.  Mello’s eyes flicked to the open doorway that led to the experimentation room and, surely enough, a moment later L entered with a bag slung over his shoulder.  He froze as he stepped in before frowning, noticing the severe cold spreading across the floor with his bare feet.  He set the bag down and left again, and about five seconds later Mello heard the click of the heater turning on somewhere overhead.

Without speaking, V’ko hovered backwards into a corner and sat with his knees pulled up, his hair pooling around him on the ground as he stared. He still didn’t touch the ground.

L re-entered and stared at Mello, before looking at Matt, then finally Light.  Shrugging to himself, he picked the bag up again and began walking to where Light was before he froze again, staring at the pools of frozen blood.  He cast Mello one more look before pressing down on the foot pedal of Light’s bed and leaning him backwards.  He picked up the arms and legs that had fallen to the ground and began situating them carefully, extracting stitch thread and surgical sewing equipment from the bag he had brought.

Mello turned his head away as L began to stitch Light’s body back together.

---

How many days had it been?  He wasn’t keeping track anymore.  He had gotten used to the idea, in the short time after Kira’s death, that he wouldn’t have to worry about these sorts of things for a very, very long time.  He would just take a few easy cases, cruise along for a while, and recover after all the hell he had gone through during the Kira case.

Apparently, that was not meant to be.

Sighing to himself, Near twisted a strand of hair as he stared at the card house on the table in front of him, waiting for a report.  He had sent a few of his best men out to see if they could locate anyone who looked even mildly suspicious to see if they could get any leads.  Whoever had done the robbery was a professional, and more than likely had a criminal record of some kind.

“Who would do this…?” Near muttered, frustrated.  A moment later, a phone rang and he felt the receiver pressed against his ear.

“This is N,” he said calmly as he began to construct another house in front of the first.

“We think we may have found something,” a male voice said.  “We saw a man in the warehouse district, and he was carrying a large black canvas bag.  He disappeared down an alleyway, and we followed him as best we could, but he went into a building and locked it.  What do you want us to do?”

Near stayed silent for a few moments, thinking carefully.  What did he want them to do?  He wasn’t sure.  If that was the bastard who had done this, then he wanted the men to break into the building and just start shooting.

Mello must have worn off on him.

“Bug it, if you can,” Near said, his voice revealing no doubt of whether or not he thought they could do it.  “If it really is the one who did this, we need to find out what’s going on and, if possible, why he did it.  We don’t have any leads to follow right now, so we’re just going to have to work with what we’ve got, and that’s not much.”

“Sir.”

The line went dead the next moment, and the phone was taken away.

Sighing, Near stared at the card in his hand, turning it over between his fingers.  When they bugged that building, what would they find?  Assuming that it was the man they were looking for, it was doubtless that they had found some kind of psychopath.

But there were all different kinds of psychopaths.  Each one had to be handled differently, though all had to be handled carefully.

Sighing, Near rubbed his forehead.  He just wanted to find who had done this, put them in jail, and call it good.  It was a shame that it never happened like that.

Reaching up, he grabbed one of the cards at the bottom of his first card house and pulled it out, watching the cards fall silently.

He would find what was going on.

He knew that.

He was positive.

Description
Abstraction

A Death Note fan-fiction

Disclaimers: The plot is getting weird because I’ve totally lost it and am attempting to recover it.  Sorry in advance.  Hey, at least I’m honest.

---

Page Five: Ethereal

---

The room was blessedly cold.  An odd sort of cold, surely – a cold that felt like it didn’t belong anywhere on earth.  But that might have been due to the strange, sudden relief from the burns marring his flesh, radiating heat until he felt as though you could effectively cook something on his chest.

He was healing, but it was a slow process.  The gag around his head cut into the corners of his mouth where the still burned flesh ached, blood mixed with other unspeakable fluids soaking the material around his lips.

Shuddering, Mello wondered where this cold was coming from.  He knew what was going on now, but had no way to tell Kira about it.  His half-glazed eyes slid over to where Light hung, dead again.  L was gone off somewhere, as he tended to do – not like there was any danger in any of his captives leaving.  Mello couldn’t move anything but his eyes.  Matt couldn’t walk, lest the tentative healing layers over his bullet wounds open and spill the blood that the Life Note had been kind enough to replenish for him.

Light would have the hardest time moving, considering that he had to have his limbs sewn back on before he could be brought back to life.  L had presumably gone to fetch equipment for just that very thing.

Mello tried to concentrate on the cold yet again.  The metal gurney beneath him was frigid, though it shouldn’t have been because of his body sucking the cold out of it to be replaced with his own ungodly body temperature.  He wanted to throw up, but was afraid to because of both the pain and what it would mean for loss of fluids.  He had heard enough about the Life Note from the man who had brought him back to know what was going on, but he knew no specific details.

He doubted L did, either.

Training his eyes back on the ceiling, Mello forced himself to concentrate.  It was hard to see anything, as his eyes had only recently begun to function again.  The cold seemed to be coming from the left side of his body, away from Kira and Matt.  He began to notice light from that side of the room, as well – a soft white light that countered the harsh fluorescent bulbs hanging over his head.

Slowly, Mello’s eyes shifted to the other side of the room and he froze.  It was advantageous that he was too shocked to scream, or he would have done so and hurt himself rather badly, in addition to waking Matt up and probably making him hurt himself.  But still, shock registered clearly in his eyes nevertheless.

Standing on the left side of his body, gazing blankly into the room, was a large creature, radiating the soft white light and the cold that Mello felt covering everything in the room.  The thing was androgynous, all white, with semi-humanoid features.  Its face was wrapped tightly in white bandages, a space ripped in the middle where an ice blue eye gazed out from a rim of utter black.  White hair fell around the bandages and the rest of the form.  The arms were crossed in the style of the Egyptian mummy, and more bandages covered the abdomen.  The bandages continued downwards to the legs, wrapping them individually as though to allow for movement.

Large wings, batlike but for their sleek white color, were folded behind the creature’s back.  The bandages of the face did not meet the bandages of the shoulder, and there were gaps in the wrappings around the creature’s body.  Everywhere a gap was visible, there was no flesh underneath – no muscle, no bone, no framework, as though the bandages were wrapped around absolutely nothing.

As though it noticed it was being watched, the creature slowly turned its entire head downwards to stare at Mello, fixing an unblinking cyclopean gaze on the young man.  The urge to scream disappeared, replaced by the urge to surrender consciousness.

Mello had always prided himself on his steel will.  It took a great deal to intimidate him.  It wasn’t so much the appearance of the creature – after all, Sidoh had barely made him blink – as it was the aura radiating from it.  It was an aura of pure, unadulterated emptiness, an emptiness from which death would be a blessed escape.  Staring into the ice blue eye was like staring into Hell itself, and though Mello knew his eyes weren’t working properly he could make out every horrific detail of the creature hovering above him now.

“Hello, Mihael Keehl.”  Neither visible mouth nor discernable movement of the jaw signified that it had been the creature that had spoken, and yet Mello was certain that it had.  As the voice filled the room, the strangest sensation filled the blond, and he began to feel as though all his worries were washed away.  The voice was distinctly male, yet it was the most angelic voice he had heard in his entire life.  It echoed oddly, as though bouncing off the walls of his own mind rather than those of the room.

The creature turned his attention back to Light, though continued to address the burned man on the metal gurney.  “This is spiraling out of control,” he said slowly, shaking his head a bit. “A Life Note is not meant for this purpose… it is not a tool of destruction.  The side effects of bringing a person back to life are inevitable, but the Note is not meant for revenge.”

Slowly, the body began to rise – as the head was not actually connected to the shoulders, but more hovering a few inches above them, it stayed put.  After a moment, the shoulders connected with the jaw and the head moved upwards, no space left for an assumed neck, and when the body stopped rising, the head continued to its original position.

As the creature floated over the gurney, Mello felt the horrendous cold pass over his abdomen to his right side, leaving his left side horribly, horribly hot.  But he was too distracted to care.  What the fuck was this thing?

“What the fuck am I?” the creature asked quietly, and Mello started, his body screaming in protest at the automatic reaction.  The blond was positive he had not spoken, due to the gag around his mouth, but the creature had just repeated his thought.

“I, Mihael Keehl, am V’ko of the Hachi Tenshi.  The Shiroi Tenshi, if you must know.  And, yes, I mean ‘Tenshi’ as in Angel,” he added, a note of amusement in his voice.  “Not an angel in the sense of your Archangel, of course… You were thinking of Sidoh, a Shinigami of the Death Note.  Just as the Life Note is the antithesis to the Death Note, so are the Tenshi to the Shinigami, though they greatly outnumber us.  There are, as the name suggests, merely eight of us – eight Life Notes in existence, never really meant to fall into human hands but completely useless to all but humans,” he said with an ironic laugh.

This was odd.  But if the creature had some kind of telepathy, Mello would just have to isolate his thoughts into what he wanted to know.  If this creature had answers… He shifted his gaze to it, wondering.

“I cannot tell you what will happen,” V’ko said after a long pause as he listened to Mello, shaking his head slowly.  “But I can only be seen by you, Mail Jeevas, and Yagami Light… if he recovers,” the white creature said, looking at each in turn.  “You see, while a Shinigami can be seen only by those who use the Death Note, a Tenshi can only be seen by those who are revived by the Life Note.  The man who revived you cannot see me.  Though he was, in fact, brought back to life by my Note, he relinquished the ability to see me the moment he brought Yagami Light back to life.”

So… this creature was bound to the Life Note as Shinigami are bound to the Death Note.  Mello was in pain, yes, but none great enough to hinder his thought processes that severely.  Of course, there was always the possibility that, after the current events, he had simply gone insane.  Yes, that was quite a likely scenario.

He certainly felt insane at that particular moment in time.

V’ko didn’t respond to Mello further.  Instead, he glided across the room to where Matt lay and peered down at him.  The redhead’s breathing was irregular, understandably, and as the Tenshi had gotten near him he had begun to shiver.  After a moment, the creature backed up slightly before turning and floating over to Light.  The blood had stopped flooding the ground about fifteen minutes ago, but the liquid still shone underneath the lights from the ceiling – they froze in solid puddles of red as V’ko passed over them, crystals of white appearing where the blood met the floor around the edges.

A click resonated through the room, the sound appearing to be louder due to the cold.  Mello’s eyes flicked to the open doorway that led to the experimentation room and, surely enough, a moment later L entered with a bag slung over his shoulder.  He froze as he stepped in before frowning, noticing the severe cold spreading across the floor with his bare feet.  He set the bag down and left again, and about five seconds later Mello heard the click of the heater turning on somewhere overhead.

Without speaking, V’ko hovered backwards into a corner and sat with his knees pulled up, his hair pooling around him on the ground as he stared. He still didn’t touch the ground.

L re-entered and stared at Mello, before looking at Matt, then finally Light.  Shrugging to himself, he picked the bag up again and began walking to where Light was before he froze again, staring at the pools of frozen blood.  He cast Mello one more look before pressing down on the foot pedal of Light’s bed and leaning him backwards.  He picked up the arms and legs that had fallen to the ground and began situating them carefully, extracting stitch thread and surgical sewing equipment from the bag he had brought.

Mello turned his head away as L began to stitch Light’s body back together.

---

How many days had it been?  He wasn’t keeping track anymore.  He had gotten used to the idea, in the short time after Kira’s death, that he wouldn’t have to worry about these sorts of things for a very, very long time.  He would just take a few easy cases, cruise along for a while, and recover after all the hell he had gone through during the Kira case.

Apparently, that was not meant to be.

Sighing to himself, Near twisted a strand of hair as he stared at the card house on the table in front of him, waiting for a report.  He had sent a few of his best men out to see if they could locate anyone who looked even mildly suspicious to see if they could get any leads.  Whoever had done the robbery was a professional, and more than likely had a criminal record of some kind.

“Who would do this…?” Near muttered, frustrated.  A moment later, a phone rang and he felt the receiver pressed against his ear.

“This is N,” he said calmly as he began to construct another house in front of the first.

“We think we may have found something,” a male voice said.  “We saw a man in the warehouse district, and he was carrying a large black canvas bag.  He disappeared down an alleyway, and we followed him as best we could, but he went into a building and locked it.  What do you want us to do?”

Near stayed silent for a few moments, thinking carefully.  What did he want them to do?  He wasn’t sure.  If that was the bastard who had done this, then he wanted the men to break into the building and just start shooting.

Mello must have worn off on him.

“Bug it, if you can,” Near said, his voice revealing no doubt of whether or not he thought they could do it.  “If it really is the one who did this, we need to find out what’s going on and, if possible, why he did it.  We don’t have any leads to follow right now, so we’re just going to have to work with what we’ve got, and that’s not much.”

“Sir.”

The line went dead the next moment, and the phone was taken away.

Sighing, Near stared at the card in his hand, turning it over between his fingers.  When they bugged that building, what would they find?  Assuming that it was the man they were looking for, it was doubtless that they had found some kind of psychopath.

But there were all different kinds of psychopaths.  Each one had to be handled differently, though all had to be handled carefully.

Sighing, Near rubbed his forehead.  He just wanted to find who had done this, put them in jail, and call it good.  It was a shame that it never happened like that.

Reaching up, he grabbed one of the cards at the bottom of his first card house and pulled it out, watching the cards fall silently.

He would find what was going on.

He knew that.

He was positive.