(no subject)
Title: The City That Never Sleeps
Rating: PG-13 (T) for language
Pairings/Characters: Near, Mello, and Matt, with cameos by President David Hoope and a bloodthirsty mob.
Warnings: Language, 9/11 references, slight New York bashing.
Word Count: 1,882
Notes: Three little ficlets I wrote for dn_contest. Might as well put them here, amirite?
Near strikes Hoope as the type of person who does things according to plan, you know, even though he’s foreign in every sense of the word (padding down the floor of the West Wing in socks, despite the cold) so when he announces in his colorless voice that he’d prefer a government sanctioned skyscraper in New York City, of all places, the President of the United States is surprised (as if killer notebooks weren’t enough). Surely he would prefer headquarters in the Pentagon, or at least in D.C., where the convex façade of the White House or the sweeping boulevards over the Potomac still inspire a sense of gridlocked American strength (he hopes).
He politely declines, no thank you, and repeats that he would like his headquarters to be in New York. Please, he adds.
And really, what choice does he have? This little (Hoope goes from 'anomaly' to 'creature' to 'boy' and then grudgingly to 'detective', in case the press gets hold of this, God forbid) is his country’s last line-only line-of defense against Kira. He has to keep him quiet and out of sight.
Still a little confused, the President allows it, calling up the governor of the East Coast metropolis, looking down at white threads the boy shed on the carpet from the frayed hems of his pajama bottoms, on the starred-and-striped shield covering the eagle’s breast.
Near, though, he has his reasons.
Of course, there are the obvious-doesn’t want to be connected to the government, it would be choosing a side, a homeland, an identity, not to mention it would be weak, to seek protection, he was almost L, and L would never hide behind a flag.
And then are the reasonable-most of the Provision has had liaisons there in the past, familiar with the rotten core of the infamous Apple, ribbed with subway tunnels and steam-belching sewers like the tracks of a gigantic worm.
And then there those strange little Near-isms, things only he knows, overripe memories and flights-of-fancy he never could let go of, even though he knows better.
It could be that he used to sit behind Matt and Mello on Saturday mornings and watch Spider-Man swing between the glass Manhattan sentinels, or Batman gliding through Gotham in his mask and cape.
(Although he’s since learned better, learned where real heroes belong.)
Or it could be, even, buried somewhere in his mind, the distant picture of crossing the Hudson in a car, under the crosshatched steel arches of the G.W. bridge, close enough to the glass window he could see his reflection, or the sense of looming neon behemoths in Times Square, flashing and colorful and so huge he doesn’t even remember the sky.
And so Near builds his fortress from the ground up, glass and concrete and so easy to fit into the horizon, high above the people, instilling his own sense of inverted vertigo and power, not one to be trifled with, as the world will soon find out.
Sometimes, though, at night, he stands by the windows when every one else has gone back home, and sees a flash of red and blue looping through alleyways, or the silhouette of a bat-winged shadow flying over the West Side Highway, and he allows the smallest of smiles to curve across his pale face.
Near has his reasons.
---
Mello takes the subway.
No, not the train, and certainly not the fucking Underground; the subway, sectioning the city’s underbelly in confusing multicolored lines, labeled after letters like they are.
The first time he slipped between the dark green lampposts and underneath the sidewalk he almost turned right back around. It was like walking into Hades tiled with broken white, swarming with people and smelling like musty rainwater and brimstone. The platform was hot as shit, the tracks permanently rusted, and the tunnels curving into black, scrawled with indecipherable graffiti (-painted delinquent legacies. Kinda like him).
But then the train arrived-a great rumbling steel snake, galvanized with hellfire and electricity, innards a dirty yellow, air rushing in its wake with a hushing whoosh, halting with a caterwaul that made his ears ache, finally stopping with a slight mechanical huff.
And he got on board, like everyone else, their eyes on the border between land and machine, where the ground was pockmarked to help the blind.
That day he rode it as far as he could go, staying in the cool belly of the screaming silver dragon for hours and hours and hours, by the end of it practically lulled into a doze by the rhythmic glide of the creature over the rails, the electronic two-note signal of the doors closing and opening.
Then he remembered this wasn’t the tube, and it would not take him back in a nice little circle eventually, and he hurried back out of the city’s infernal intestine, ending up somewhere in Washington Heights where the Dominicans on the corner were thankfully not hostile and simply just amused at the lost leather gringo who fell asleep on the subway.
But even that fuck-up didn’t daunt him, and he used one of Matt’s credit cards to get him a flimsy yellow MetroCard, his token to the dirty warrens beyond the turnstiles.
This was where the true heart of the city resided, Mello was sure of it. Not above, on the numbered East/West streets and avenues and Broadway and shit. But underneath the manholes, along with the rats and fucking cockroaches-it was a soul. Womb of the Big Apple’s famous grit and grime, where people were at their truest, asses planted on the cool plastic or hands gripped around the metal poles. No fucking views out these windows, no spectacular panoramas of the Empire State Building and its pointy cousin Chrysler, just black, and the occasional spot of yellow embedded into the wall.
People slept, browsed through books, rustled the pages of the Times or AM New York-but most of them just sat there and let their thoughts take over.
That’s what Mello did; mulling over his latest plans, eyes alert underneath his furred hood as he traveled the burrows beneath the boroughs. Scheming, stewing, sometimes nabbing a chocolate bar from the subway level store beneath Port Authority and devouring it before it melted from the train’s hot breath.
He didn’t know why he liked it so much, like most things he liked. He couldn’t say why he liked chocolate or leather or motorcycles, (at least, not without sounding juvenile or...weak) or the hollow echoing percussion from some performer with his overturned bucket and intense talent, or the looping aerosol language of the vandals in dark colors of soot and dried blood, or the gaping maws of the antiquated tunnels, still there (while the buildings above them had their fluted columns cut and replaced with planes of tinted glass), copper green and leading into darkness.
Probably because it was kinda like truth. Like laws of nature, a gospel written in the webbed cracks of those dirty white tiles. The subway would always be there, even if the world above it changed, even if people died and the world became ash and the streets that roofed it caught fire and ran with blood, the tunnels would still remain, the eternal palmistry of this whole city, forever curling away into the dark.
---
New York City is one of the reasons Matt hates Kira, besides what he’s done to Mello and Near and himself and murdering L. Under Kira’s influence, the city has altered itself, its giant asphalt streets shifting under the looming sundial shadow of Kira, the rising son of Japan, far away to the east but still not far away enough.
He lived in Jersey, for awhile, taking the bus with the suit-and-ties, which was okay; at least it was quiet; although the presence of so many people unnerved him and he couldn’t even sneak a smoke.
He’ll never forget the first time he saw the skyline, dim and blue and gray, like the bottom jaw of some titanium alloy concrete entity-and the gap in its teeth, where two buildings used to stand.
You know that they screamed from their fire escapes, frightened as churchmice in their brick brownstone hovels, terrified of that slant-eyed Killer and his omnipresence. You know they shoved the corpses of men in orange jumpsuits into bags and shipped them onto barges out of Alcatraz, out of Rikers; dumped them to feed the East River's fishes. You know the headlines of the WSJ were just as frantic and noisy as the Posts’ big black fonts, coating sewer grates and the sleeping homeless.
Now, the scrolling red letters of news tickers around buildings reel off the names of the dead, and people are encouraged to say ‘rightfully so’ on the talk shows and the websites, and the flashing billboards and commercials mention his name like he’s some kind of marketing device, a staple in their society, a symbol of justice.
And it’s like, Matt feels like screaming in their faces-did you forget about the planes? Remember them falling from the sky, swooping towards the skyscrapers, and the earth became rubble and fragmented steel girders and the cloud was still there the next morning-
Because that’s what Kira is, what he represents, the sixteenth tarot card-the Tower, its turret crumbling, struck by lightning-you might say some divine hand, you might say inevitability but it all ends up the same way-in chaos.
He drove through the desert on the way here, a blonde riding shotgun, and they came out of it prophets, like in the Old Testament (without looking back at the gilded streets of Los Angeles, covered with white enamel like an insincere smile, lest they turn into pillars of salt) and still no one believes them.
Which is a shame, because he always liked the city-the crude language of the people, the accent grating and harsh from being bent around cement corners for so long, but not as bad is it was made to be-it was so ugly it was beautiful, like the long swoops of the Verrazano’s suspensions, or the green and purple iridescent throats of pigeons (doves that lingered so long in the soot they stained their white feathers permanently gray).
Now he watches the news from Brooklyn, because Mello doesn’t want him near New York, where the ruins are on the waterfront and the crowds are getting more uncontrollable by the second, and even on the television he can see their hearts burning in their chests, blood-hungry and bestial, waving pennants and baseball caps that used to support the Yankees and now only wave for that murderer hundreds of miles away.
They say they will burn the building to the ground, rip out its foundations with their bare hands, watch gleefully as it collapses-use it as a symbol of what is to come.
And Matt buries his head in his hands, blocking out the sound of their voices, because it reminds him of the metal drone of planes falling from the sky.
Near dwells above,
Mello below,
Matt in the midst,
Heaven, Hell, and Earth encompassed in one place-
the city that stays awake,
long into the night,
like they do.