dirty angel

Her voice rings, tears, fades into silence as the sky remains unlightened by white wings, and a freezing wave of hatred almost knocks her off her feet.

Wait, yes. Yes. If she falls —

She’s already at the edge. She steps up. She looks down and down and down. It’s not scary, not at all; it wouldn’t even hurt for long. Not the point, though. She slides her right foot forward by the length of her big toe, then her left, then her right, then her left, and then she’s teetering and —

There: Misa keeps her eyes open, even if all her tilting skewing vision shows her in that dizzying flash of weightlessness is angles of white bone that solidify into a ribcage and claws digging into her bare shoulders, pressing her down, the asphalt of the rooftop pricking her skin.

“What,” Rem hisses into her ear, “are you doing?”

Misa grins. Even without a mirror she can tell it’s ugly on her. “What do you think?”

“I am not your suicide barrier, Misa Amane.”

“Oh, really!” A manic laugh wrenches from her throat. “Really! ‘Cause I wouldn’t have guessed!”

“...Are you angry?”

Is she? Everyone’s always just assumed.

“Obviously,” she decides.

Rem has retreated somewhat, her grip loosening as she twists her head away. Somehow her talons haven’t broken skin. Misa wishes they had; it’d be an easier thing to be mad about.

“I erased your memory for your own good, Misa.”

“I know that,” Misa spits.

“...I didn’t want to kill you.”

“You,” Misa says, “are a terrible excuse for a Shinigami. You know that, right?”

Rem bows her head, tendrils of hair brushing cold over Misa’s chest, and says nothing.

It’s hard to stay angry. No, it’s very easy to stay angry, it’s just hard to take it out on her. She doesn’t make it any fun.

“You could have told me,” Misa mumbles.

“What?”

“You could have explained the memory loss thing to me. I would have said yes.”

Rem lifts her head only enough for Misa to see her bitter smile. “I couldn’t have known you would.”

“You thought I’d want to die anyway?”

“I didn’t want to take the risk. I couldn’t very well ask you right then what your determination to die was contingent on. I thought perhaps you considered the toll to be irrevocable.”

It takes her a moment to remember irrevocable. She never liked school. “Then you should have killed me.”

“Misa,” Rem sighs, the melancholy fondness in her voice like a knife pressed against her throat. Like the knife soaked in blood. Like her parents’ killer, smiling. “I could never.”

“You’re a coward,” Misa tells her, not daring to move as Rem uses one claw to brush the fluid leaking from her eyes. One twitch and she could be impaled. “You’re such a fucking coward. You didn’t ever want me to remember, did you?”

“You’d be free,” Rem whispers.

Free. Misa Amane, free. Oh, she’s just too funny.

“I hate you.”

“I prefer it to you being dead.”

The claw is too close to her jaw for her to feel comfortable speaking, but she grits out the words anyway: “I don’t want you.”

“I know,” Rem says. “I was planning to leave you alone.”

“You were watching, though.”

“Can you forgive me for not wanting you to splatter on the pavement after your first hour remembering your boyfriend as his full self once more?”

“That part’s fine,” Misa decides, and props herself up on her elbows. Rem draws back to allow her room. The wind whistles through the gap between their mouths. “But we’re never talking again.”

“As long as you never do this again.”

“No,” Misa snaps, standing now. “It’s none of your business if I want to die. I don’t even have your notebook anymore.”

“But...”

“But nothing!”

The sky quiets. They face each other. Cold air, solid ground, piercing golden eye like a false sun.

“I’ll miss you,” Rem says.

I’ll miss you too.