The Afterlife Is A Mini-Mart

Internet died so I ended up writing this but the editing process was a mess because I was swamped with work and also Very Overstimulated so excuse me while I scream into a void trying to unwind somewhere in this city or something.

When Nate River dies, he wakes up in a mini-mart.  

It’s been a long time since Nate River has been in a mini-mart. He remembers he has been to one, once, before Wammy’s, totting after his mother, but he hasn’t been in one ever since he’d been orphaned. No one would let a small child loose in a mini-mart by themselves after all, mostly because everyone fears the mess said child would make, although Nate thinks he probably would have only stacked tea boxes, at most, or tore out the puzzle pieces from their packagings.

So when he wakes up in a mini-mart, a basket and a cart already in hand, still in his more casual pajamas (okay, they’re just the baggiest shirt and pants he could find, but people reacted to them better in public than just him in plain pajamas), he blinks, looking around at the aisles of items stacked to uniform perfection that it’s almost creepy.

He tries to find the exit, of course, but the mini-mart is huge, and he tires himself out by the time he finds himself in the cereal section that he has to sit down to rest his legs.  

He stares down at the Koko Krunch that’s right across him from where he’s sitting down. Koko seems to be mocking him, too cheerful on the label.

“Tired?” someone asks, and he turns to see someone with a cart, only hers is full, but it’s mostly just of toilet paper rolls.  

He nods.

“Where were you going?” the lady asks. She looks at all the cereals stacked on the shelves, goes to pick one up, and scrunches her nose. A fellow cereal hater, then.

“I was trying to look for the exit,” he says.  

The lady chuckles, and then turns back to him. “Oh, hon,” she says, “There is no exit.”

Nate stares at her, for a moment, and then licks his lips. They’re too dry, he notices. He also notices he’s parched. “Perhaps you just haven’t found it yet.”

The lady laughs. “I’ve been here for years, kid, and the place is huge, but it’s easy to get used to once it’s been a while. It’s mind-numbing though, surprisingly,” she says, “But no exit.”

“There might be one,” he says.

“Most likely not,” she says, “There’s more people here than you think, and between all of us, no one’s found an exit.”

“Maybe you just don’t know where to look,” he says, standing. He’s not about to be deterred by someone saying there’s no way out. There always is, he just has to find it. Perhaps death isn’t as boring as he thinks it is.  

(Oh, he knows he’s dead. Mini-marts have always had an air of being purgatory around them, and so he isn’t surprised he got thrown here, although he doesn’t know if this is supposed to be Heaven, Hell, or anything in between.)

“Another hopeful one,” the woman says, shaking her head lightly. She puts one of the Koko Krunch boxes into her cart. Koko definitely looks too gleeful this time. “Well, good luck looking for your exit. We’ll probably see each other around here, so tell me how it goes the next time we meet.”

She starts to go, turning, and Nate looks down at her cart full of toilet paper, and then at the lone box of evil cereal in her basket.

“How long have you been here?” he asks, reaching up to take a lock of his hair and loop it around a finger.

The woman smiles at him. “Thirty years,” she says.

Nate stills. He watches her go, too cheerful for someone who’s been stuck in a mini-mart for thirty years. He looks back at Koko in slight horror, not that it’s really prominent on his face.  

This time, the cereal mascots on the boxes actually laugh, the sound echoing down the aisle.

-

“Hello, good morning, how may I help - ” Nate watches Mello freeze as he looks up from under the rim of his ugly green cap. The man looks less scarred, less burnt, but the hatred in his eyes when he sights Nate remains the same after all this time, even when he’d been shocked at first. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m dead,” Nate says, “To no one’s surprise.”

“Yeah, how long did that take – twelve, fifteen years?” Mello says. “Go back to the land of the living and piss off.”

“I’m trying to find the exit and if it’s to the land of the living, then so it shall be.”

Mello throws his head back and laughs. Nate’s never seen him do that, and he takes a step back, deciding Mello could probably bite his head off from how much he’s opened his mouth to laugh.  

“There’s no exit, dipshit, you’d think you’d catch on by now,” he says. He takes one of the paper cups behind him and goes to fill it up with expresso shots. Nate supposes you can’t die of heart attacks when you’re already dead. He watches Mello chug down the entire thing. “I’ve gone through the whole place during one of my trips to the Courtesy Desk bathrooms. No exit. I’m just lucky I don’t have to shop for eternity, or work cashier anymore.”

“Perhaps you haven’t found the exit yet,” he says.

Mello takes off his ugly green cap and slams it on the counter, but as it’s made of cloth, it just flops on the surface uselessly with a little thwap. “Fuck you. There’s no exit, and I’m not saying that because I couldn’t find it because I’m second best or whatever you’ve gotten into your head again this time.”

“I’m merely saying perhaps you haven’t looked enough,” Nate says, “Are you able to leave your post?”

Mello looks to the side briefly and then frowns. “No, I can’t. Not permanently or outside of breaks, anyway. Not unless I get a demotion or a promotion for, I don’t know, being behaved. I got moved last time because I yelled at too many people.”

“And you got relegated to barista?”

Mello throws the empty coffee cup at him.

“Mature.”

“There’s no exit and I’d bet my sad excuse of an afterlife on it,” he says. “Matt’s never found an exit. A hasn’t either, and not even fuckin’ L has found it.”

Nate raises an eyebrow. “Who’s here?”

Mello starts walking to the back room.

“Mello,” Nate calls out.  

“Piss off, sheep.”

“Mello, stop being a child.”

Mello only flips him off, but then stops and turns to him to look him up and down. “Wait, you’re a shopper, aren’t you?”

Nate tries to parse the meaning of his sentence, but given he doesn’t have a clear idea of the rankings here in the mini-mart, if there even are rankings, all he says is, “Yes.”

Mello laughs again. Nate waits for him to be done, but given that being dead means no one has any need for lungs, Mello laughs for a very long time.

-

The mini-mart, despite being a mini-mart – although Nate only knows this is a mini-mart because he simply knows it is, the way one knows things in dreams despite there being no evidence pointing to it – is gigantic. He doesn’t know how long he has been here, but he reckons it’s at least been a day, but all he’s managed to find are the cereal aisles, the biscuits aisle, the milk aisle, and the juice aisle, which has too many brands and too many flavors. He doesn’t know how the aisles stay so pristine, and the shelves remain so uniform, when he’s never seen an employee tend to them, but perhaps that has something to do with this place being the afterlife.  

Still, there’s always the possibility that he always just misses them when they clean and restock.  

He finds no exit, but he doesn’t find any end to the rows of aisles, so his first objective is to find one end to the building. Where there are walls, there are doors, so if he can find a wall, he can trace along it, and hopefully, find a door out of here.  

He doesn’t know what he’d do when he gets outside but he’ll deal with it when he gets to it.  

He leaves his cart behind a few hours after he finds the little cafe in the grocery where Mello works, kind of, but then walking around without anything to hold or fiddle with makes him restless, so he turns back, only to find his cart waiting for him right beside a shelf.

Curious. A little unnerving, but he’ll take it. So he does, and he wanders the halls with the cart, never taking anything from the shelves.  

He sees the lady again when he passes by the bleach aisle. This time her cart isn’t filled with toilet paper, but milk tea powder.

“Oh, hello,” she says when she sees him.

“What are you going to do with all of those?” he asks.

The woman looks down at her cart and then giggles. “Drink them, of course. There’s a lot of upsides to being dead, and it’s that capitalism doesn’t work so you can hoard all you want. If I’m lucky, I get to fall in line at one of the nicer cashier’s lane.”

Given that this is a mini-mart, having cashiers should not be a surprise, but because Nate’s never seen any cashiers, he’s sort of forgotten about them.  

“Which way are the cashiers?” he asks. Perhaps he can ask them about the exit. Employees are supposed to have a break room, yes?

The woman glances at his cart. “You’re not going to find them on an empty cart, hon.”

Nate frowns. “What does an empty cart have to do with it?”

“Think about it this way – you don’t go to the cashier when you’re not buying anything in the first place,” she says, smiling, and to Nate, for a moment, she seems to be smiling too widely. Or maybe that’s just because he’s not used to seeing people smile.  

But it does make sense, in some backwards, convoluted way.  

“And the coffee shop?”

“The in-store shop?” she asks, “With the nice young man?”

“I doubt Mello is nice.”

The woman laughs. “Oh, not him, the other one. With the ridiculous goggles,” she says, “The coffee shop is part of the store. It’s a bit of a quirk of it, I suppose.”

Nate hums. He wants to question the logic of this store, but given that it’s the afterlife and it’s a store when this all shouldn’t be possible in the first place, he holds his tongue.

He eyes one of the bleach containers idly. Cleans in one wash, it claims, or your money back.

He pats his pockets down for a second, and then frowns further when he realizes he doesn’t have any cash on him.  

“If you’re worried about money, no need,” the lady says. He thinks that she’s going to lend him cash, but she does nothing, just stacks fabric conditioner into her cart. “The cashiers will know what you have to pay for.”

The wording makes something cold run down his spine, but it’s probably a draft.

“Alright,” he says. He grabs a bottle of bleach, dumps it in his cart, and decides he might as well shadow the woman for a while. She’s bound to get to the cashier eventually.  

-  

She does. There’s long lines of people waiting at counters as far as he can see, and he actually has to take in just how huge the store is, for a moment. He wonders how many people are here, shopping. He wonders how many cashiers there are, even, since there’s so many customers.  

The lady falls in line at counter 7. He follows.

Past the counters, he can see a bunch of tables, and by those tables, chairs. Most of the tables are full, which isn’t any surprise, especially since apparently, when one’s checked out, they’re supposed to go there. Maybe that’s close to the exit, but if the lady has gone there and hasn’t found an exit, then perhaps not too.

He can’t find a wall close to it either. It just seems to stretch forever.

He hunches over a little, already beginning to get irritated.

The line they’re in moves fast, at least, despite not being any longer or shorter than the ones on either side of it. He waits and watches, bored, as everyone else loads up and checks out whatever they’ve decided to hoard, and tries to see what they pay with, but every time he sees what they fork over, he seems to forget it in the next blink. One moment he’s watching intently as one man hands over (his keys, his life, his daughter, his heart, his innocence, his wealth, his soul, his sins) something, and the next, the man is gone, and the next customer starts dumping their items onto the counter.

The lady in front of him gives the cashier a friendly smile and then starts placing her milk tea packets, and Nate watches as she does so, but then looks up as someone says, “Oh my fucking god, you have got to be kidding me.”

The lady only gives that a passing glance, and the cashier, a young man with wild dark hair and even darker circles under his eyes, doesn’t even look up, just continues idly swiping the items past the scanner. The bagger, however, at the end of the counter, narrows his eyes at Nate.

Nate stares back at him, somehow surprised. Light Yagami has certainly seen better days, but this appears to be one of the more average ones.

“You,” Yagami says, voice laced with so much venom it’s nothing short of him already having kicked the bucket that Nate still remains standing.

“Yagami-kun, please refrain from vaulting over the counter,” says the cashier in a monotone voice as he swipes the 36th packet of milk tea.  

“I wasn’t going to, shut up,” Yagami says glaring at the man, and then back at Nate. “Finally dead, huh?”

“Everyone dies eventually,” Nate says. “Nice to see you here, Kira.”

Yagami just snarls. The cashier looks up at Nate curiously but then continues to do his job.  

The steady beeping of the scanner fills the awkward silence as Yagami and Nate stare each other down. The lady, still somehow nonplussed, opens her purse and hands over something that immediately escapes Nate’s attention, and then waits patiently as Yagami stuffs all of her milk tea packets (and one lone fabric conditioner bottle) into a plastic bag.  

“Retail suits you,” Nate says when he’s finally done.  

“Being dead suits you, although I was hoping you’d piss off into nonexistence somehow,” Yagami says.

Nate puts his lone bleach bottle on the counter and the cashier swipes it past the scanner and prints out the receipt. He hands it over to Yagami who quickly stashes it into a plastic bag with the bleach bottle.  

“Do everyone a favor and never shop here again,” Yagami says as he all but shoves the bag at Nate’s chest.

“Yagami-kun, the customer has yet to pay,” says the cashier.

“Ask for his entire existence to cease.”

“If that were what I needed to ask of him, I would, but alas, apparently the cost for a bleach bottle is his greatest fear, so what is it - ” The cashier glances at the monitor for a second  “ - Nate River?”  

Nate can’t help but flinch as the man says his name. Yagami, the bastard, looks like he’s enjoying his discomfort.

“Do I have to say it?” Nate asks.

“If you wish to keep the bleach bottle, yes,” the man says.

“If I don’t?”

“Security will escort you from the premises.”

An exit, Nate thinks. “I see. And do they take you to the manager?”

“Oh, you do not want to talk to the manager,” Yagami mutters.

“No, you get put in the blacklist,” says the cashier, “For two weeks. Which is agonizingly boring since time doesn’t work right in here.”

Nate thinks it over for a moment. “A blacklist isn’t what I think it is, is it?”

“What do you think it is, Nate River?”

“A list of people not allowed to access services or goods the establishment provides,” he says, “But you’re saying it ominously, somehow.”

“Correct, getting blacklisted takes on a more sinister form here,” the cashier says.

“Try it, Nate,” says Yagami.

Nate huffs and sighs. It’s saying a fear that cannot be used against him, even though he might be discomfited, or being blacklisted, whatever that entails.

“I...” he starts, hesitates. Yagami’s watching him like a hawk, entertained. He sighs again. “I hate the idea of being irrelevant.”

Yagami starts snickering. The register dings.

“Thank you, enjoy your purchase,” the cashier says in the same monotone as before, and it’s only now that Nate notices the circular tag on his chest that has a smiley on it. It says, Hi, I’m L Lawliet!

Oh.

“Oh my god, I hate this job, but this has got to be one of the best things that’s ever happened to me in here,” Yagami says. He’s wiping away tears from the edges of his eyes. “Funny thing, Nate – since you never worked as Nate and only as the third L, guess what? You are irrelevant.”

“I am not,” he says.  

“Keep telling yourself that,” Yagami says, “But here’s the thing – I made history. And I’m written in it. I left a bright mark on it because of what I did. But you? A spare and a scrap, and the one people are going to hail isn’t you. It’s L.” He momentarily fixes a glare at the cashier, who just looks bored now and is waiting for both of them to be done. Yagami isn’t done yet. “Nobody’s ever going to know who Near or Nate River is. It’s always going to be L, L, L.”

Nate only stares him down. He says nothing, instead looking at Yagami, at his ugly peach and green uniform, and the ugly green cap on his head that’s like the one Mello had worn earlier.

Then he takes his plastic bag and gives it to Yagami, bleach bottle and all.

“For your attitude,” he says.  

And then he walks away towards the tables, or perhaps it’s the cafeteria, intent on finding the lady from before.

-

He doesn’t find her again. There’s too many people in the cafeteria, and when he asks some of them if they’ve ever found an exit, or at least seen a wall to this building he can trace towards a door, the answer remains the same. That there is no exit. Although a few of them note that now that they think about it, they’ve never seen a wall on the building either.

So Nate asks about the sections of the building.  

The left, apparently, is the deli aisle, run by a sweet couple who everyone likes. They like talking to people who would listen, and will often tell you how much they miss their kids, although they don’t want their daughter to be here so soon yet.  

A little further into the store is the cafe, where some of the shoppers take breaks in case they get too tired walking around. It’s a circular mini-building with a break room inside, and it’s the only structure with walls anyone has seen. Five people work there. There only used to be four, but then one of the cashiers got kicked off of cashier duty and relegated to barista (Nate can guess who that is).

To the rightmost side is the Courtesy Desk, but no one ever goes there for fear of re-death. Or double death, really. Apparently things that shouldn’t be there, or are there, but do not blend in with everyone else in the building, run the Courtesy Desk and everyone is too scared to talk to them.

No, no one knows how they got here aside from that they died. No, no one knows how one gets assigned to shopper, barista, cashier or bagger. No, no one’s been able to leave their station or the building.  

“I did hear some people go to Walmart Greens, sometimes,” one of the strangers had said, and everyone had given them odd looks. They just proceeded to rip open a packet with a tea bag and ate the bag dry. Afterwards, they spoke again. “It’s kind of like purgatory, I guess.”

“If that’s purgatory, what is this?” Nate had asked.  

They had shrugged. “Not heaven, that’s for sure, even though capitalism doesn’t exist here.”

“I mean I hear whoever pisses off the Courtesy desk employees gets sent to an IKEA, so,” someone else had said.

“Ah,” Nate says.  

When he’s exhausted himself from wandering around the cafeteria – and one curious thing he’s noticed is that he can get tired from walking and yet never feel drowsy – he sits at one of the tables and wishes he’d gotten himself something to fidget with. Or maybe some food just to get some taste into his mouth.  

He eyes the counters and the little entrance to the store again, tapping his fingers on the table idly.

He stands and heads there.  

At least it’s easier navigating when he knows what he wants this time. Something to fidget with. Some toys. Some food. A couple of things to stack so some yogurt cups might be good once he’s emptied them out of their contents. He wonders for a moment how things stay cold once people have bought them, or how they cook perishables once they’ve gotten them when there’s no stoves they can use here.

Unless they buy some? He’s passed by an appliance section. Maybe some of the people here just build little forts at tables in the cafeteria. He should try that.  

He goes back to get two more baskets, and then swaps his baskets out for a bigger cart, placing his items inside, and then once he’s done with what he wants to test making a fort with, he hunts down counter 7 and falls in line, even when there’s a lot more people here than it had been the last time he’d been here.

To his surprise, it’s not L and Light at the end of the lane, it’s A and B.

“Oh, my god, Near?” A asks, blinking up at him and adjusting the ugly hat on their head. They lean forward to get a better look at him. “You’ve grown.”

“You haven’t,” he says, equally surprised to see them.

“Oh, that’s because I died young, it happens,” A says. They start swiping his purchases down the scanner. B automatically packs them up, although he does give them a flat look at their choice of words. A giggles. “He’s sore about it.”

“I’m not,” he says. The man looks less burnt too. More like he had been when he’d still been in Wammy’s, although his hair’s still long enough to tie up.  

Nate frowns. “You’re younger,” he says.

B’s flat expression doesn’t change as he answers. “I died inside young.”

“Oh.”

A laughs so hard they nearly fall off their chair.  

When they calm down and Nate stops staring at B wondering to what to say to that, they ask. “How long have you been here?”

Nate thinks it over for a moment. “I don’t have a watch. I’ve lost track of time.”

“That’s dead-speak for long enough,” A says. “Were you looking for another cashier? You looked surprised to see us.”

“Yes, I was looking for...L and Light Yagami,” Nate says.

A scoffs. B snickers.  

“Yeah, the counters swap out sometimes, don’t be fooled by the numbers,” A says. “And we can’t leave our posts so we can’t talk to other employees  - ”

“We don’t get paid,” B points out.

“ - unless they’re the counters beside us, but I have heard that L’s here,” A says.

“Poor bastard finally kicked the bucket after so long,” B says.

“We celebrated. We’re bitter.” A swipes the last of Nate’s yogurt cups. They cheerfully pass B the receipt. “That’ll be your still-beating heart!”

Nate blinks. Once, twice. “Excuse me?”

“Your still-beating heart,” A says. “Capitalism doesn’t work here, but at the same time it does and it’s going to rob you of your identity slowly but surely.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what worse – being stuck here until Courtesy Desk kicks you to barista status, or being slowly eaten alive by the corporation,” B says. He ties up Nate’s bags and tapes the receipt on one of them.

“Courtesy Desk kicked Mello out of cashier duty?” Nate asks.

“Yep,” A says. “He got too snippy with the customers. First offense is always being docked down to barista.”

“How is that a docking?” Nate asks.

A and B share a look for a few seconds.

“Man, you have never been to a cafe or talked to a barista, have you,” B says, amused. “Poor people are deader than retail workers, I think. They have to wake up at ass o’clock in the morning and deal with irate people at said ass o’clock in the morning, including the ones that can and will yell at you despite getting their orders right.”

“Or grab the wrong drink and yell at you when it’s clearly not their drink,” A says. “We usually just get complaints for coupons, and then I have to remind them no one gets coupons unless they die in a massacre here.”

“And if they insist?” Nate asks, trying to process what they’re both saying through the shock.

A is still cheerful. “I get to hit them with my choice of item of their purchase for first offense,” they say. “I call Courtesy Desk on them for second.”

“And they get sent to IKEA,” B says.

“And they get sent to IKEA.” A nods.

“I...see,” Nate says. Sometimes there’s things he just doesn’t want to learn, he’s decided. “My still-beating heart?” he asks, circling back to the topic.

“Yep,” A says. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt too much. You do want to pay, yes?”

Nate looks at the bags of yogurt cups and knick knacks. “I suppose.”

“Okay,” A says, leans over, and thrusts a hand straight through Nate’s chest, bypassing ribcage and muscle. Nate makes a noise not unlike someone choking on their own blood and shock. When A pulls their hand out, red and dripping with blood, a lump of flesh cradled in their palm, he nearly stumbles to the ground.  

“See?” A says. They open the register, and to Nate’s surprise, it isn’t filled with money. There’s nothing in it at all. Not nothing in the sense that it is empty when it should be filled with something, but that he’s staring at a blank space where he can’t even see anything reflect the lights overhead. No shadows, no lights, no physical surface. Just nothing. A drops his bloody heart into it and slams the register shut. It dings. “All done.”

They wipe their hands on their peach uniform, and Nate looks down at his shirt, where there’s a huge red stain. As he breathes in, he feels the air rattle in his empty chest.  

“You can probably call for an actual break for that,” B says, pointing out the mess on A’s shirt and hands.  

“Breaks are allowed?” Nate asks. He’s still staring at the blood on his shirt. Some of it is spreading down to the hem of it.  

“When you have legitimate reason to ask for one,” A says.  

“Uh-huh,” Nate says. He picks at his shirt lightly and makes a face. Disgusting. He needs a change. “Are there toilet rooms here?”

“Right next to Courtesy,” A and B both reply.

“Thanks,” he says. He picks up his bags and heads back to the store entrance begrudgingly. Time to find some clothes to change into.

-

He doesn’t know where Courtesy is, even if he’s been told its general direction. The mini-mart isn’t really very mini, and though he’s realized this a while ago, it’s really starting to hammer itself into his head when he goes for the right side of the building for hours and finds no Courtesy Desk.

How does anyone get anything done here?

“You okay, dude?” asks Matt from where he’s leaning on the counter. He slides Nate a cup of coffee. “Mello told me you were here, don’t worry about it. But you okay?”

“I’m dead,” he says.

“Okay, well, are you okay for someone who’s dead?” Matt tries again.

Nate takes his coffee cup and opens up the top to sniff it. He takes a sip. “I could be in cleaner clothes,” he says.

“Yeah, yikes,” Matt says, scrunching up his nose as he looks at Nate’s shirt. “What organ did they take?”

“Heart.”

“Oh, heart?” Matt makes a face. “Boy, am I glad I never got to be a cashier.”

“Were you a bagger then?”  

Matt shakes his head. “Oh, no, I’ve always been a barista,” he says “It’s better here, I don’t have to collect payment. Everything you buy here is charged along with what you take to the cashier.”

“Mm.” Nate takes a bigger gulp out of his coffee. “So, theoretically, one could live here on coffee alone and never go to the cashier to pay?”

“Kind of. I’ve never seen someone try it. They get bored of the store eventually,” he says.

“I’d test it, but infinity in this store does sound dull. I’m not allowed to open items within it, correct?”

“No, you’re not,” Matt says. “Courtesy Desk would have your head.”

Nate raises an eyebrow. “Have you seen the Courtesy Desk?”

“The area or the entity?”

He pauses. “Both.”

“Never seen the area. We have a bathroom here.” Matt points towards the break room. “The entity, I’ve seen in shadows.”

“O...kay,” Nate says, hesitating. “Can I use your bathroom to change?”

“You can’t use items inside the store,” Matt says.  

Nate sighs. “Is Courtesy Desk inside the store?”

“Yes.”

“And the bathrooms?”

“Right outside of the border between Courtesy Desk and the store.”

Oh, thank god, he thinks. Otherwise, this would have been ridiculous. Nate looks at the clothes he has in his cart. He sighs. “Where’s the Courtesy Desk? And don’t say to the right, I’ve been heading there for a very long time.”  

Matt points to his right. Nate groans.

“Hang on, I’ve got someone who’s been there before – Lin! Linda, I need your help,” Matt calls out. Nate slowly raises his other eyebrow. Linda is here?

“Yeah,” Matt says. Oh, he’d said that out loud. “How long ago did you die?”

“Very recently,” he says.

Matt shrugs. “Maybe you took a while to wake up. Linda says she died in the House War.”

“I wasn’t aware there was even a House War,” he says, practically hearing the capitalizations.

Matt shrugs again. “Time sucks. Oh, here she is.”

Linda’s tying her hair back up into its net and hiding it under a cap when she reaches the counter. She definitely looks older than Nate remembers, but Nate hasn’t been to Wammy’s House in a very long time, and it will continue that way for the foreseeable future, unless finding the exit here means being resurrected despite how long it’s been he’s stayed here.  

“Oh, Near!” she greets, eyes alight with the excitement of a friend seeing someone familiar for the first time in a long time. Nate wishes briefly he had the same excitement. Instead he just wants to run and huddle under a couple of blankets until he’s left alone. “It’s been a while.”

“It has. How long has it been for you?”

“A couple of years,” she says and waves a hand. “You’ve just recently died, I hear from Mello?”

“Yes,” he says. “I think it was an ambush.”

“While on a case?”

“Yes. A bullet from a sniper,” he says.  

Linda winces. “I’m sorry.”

He only nods. “I didn’t feel it. I’m not even sure if it got me in the head or the heart. How about you?” he asks, and then wonders if that’s too tactless, but Linda answers with the same easy air she has.  

“Bombing,” she says, “I was a casualty in the House War. Didn’t have a side or was even in the line-up for successors, but, wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I...see,” he says. “You’ll have to forgive me but I don’t remember there being a war at...Wammy’s. I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to here.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Students competing for the crown and going out of hand, but honestly, that should have been expected a long time ago.”

Now that he has to think about it, it should have. He ignores the fact that Linda doesn’t explain when this war happened and why he’s never heard of it.  

“Who started it?” he asks.

Linda shrugs. “Everyone had ideas. I wasn’t alive long enough to see if any of them got to be confirmed,” she says, “It’s hard to get around this place, so I can’t really check who’s here and who’s not.”

“I see,” he says, and fidgets, because he doesn’t know what else to say to that.  

“What did you need me here for?” Linda asks, turning to Matt, then back to Nate.

“Oh, yeah, Near wants to know where Courtesy is,” Matt says. “You’ve been to the bathrooms, you know where it is.”

“Oh! Of course.” She ducks down to grab some napkins and a sharpie from under the counter, quickly sketching out a map to hand over to Nate. “Notable landmarks are the shampoo, the wafer biscuit, and the toothpaste aisle.”

He nods as he takes the drawn-on napkin from her. “Thank you.”

“Oh, and don’t let Courtesy Desk see you,” she says. “They can get...irritable.”

He decides not to ask what that means and only thanks her again, before quickly steering his cart towards the directions she’d given him.  

It takes a while. A long, long while, before he even catches sight of the aisles she’d told him about, and the shape of the building made in a similar fashion to the little coffee shop inside of the store. On one side of the building is a counter with the words Courtesy Desk painted on top of it, and there’s a dark shape draped over the counter, unmoving, although it appears to be breathing.  

Nate catches a glimpse of the other side, where several people are entering, and hope that’s the comfort rooms. It’s past the red-ribboned barrier that marks the border of the store and the cafeteria. He turns his cart to a line for the cashier.  

And ends up face to face with L and Light Yagami again.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Yagami says.  

L only looks slightly amused (and by that, Nate means there’s absolutely no change to his facial expression aside from some brief burst of manic glee in his eyes) as he starts scanning the clothes Nate has in his cart.  

Yagami eyes the bloodstain in Nate’s shirt. “Did someone decide to maim you?”

“Eighty-seven percent, Light-kun,” L says, just to get a rise out of Light.

It succeeds. “Fuck you, Ryuuzaki, we’re both dead.”

“I wasn’t made aware some payments would be made with human organs,” Nate says, “I was hoping it was only mildly humiliating and traumatizing admission to self-deficiencies.”

“What did you have to pay?” Yagami asks. He shoves a shirt in a bag harshly.  

“My heart,” he says.  

L actually pauses, and then snorts. Yagami laughs.  

“Okay, which casanova swept you off your feet? Or did you just get another one of the more trigger-happy cashiers?” he asks.

“It was A, actually,” Nate says. L pauses again, and then resumes. Yagami, meanwhile, makes a face.

“It’s another one of his spares, isn’t it. How many of you are there?” he asks.

“A and B are from the first generation,” Nate says instead, “The first and second children.”

“Dear god, you’re all tasteless with your naming schemes,” Yagami says, “Leave it to you to make kids feel important by naming them letters of the alphabet because the detective they were going to be replacing had a letter for an alias.”

“Putting it that way makes it sound like a cult,” L says.  

“If only you were actually important enough to warrant one.”

There’s a thump and Yagami hisses, bending over a little. L shifts in his seat, lifting his leg up from when he’d shot it down to kick Yagami in the shin.  

“It wasn’t our job to make them feel important. I didn’t even have a direct hand in the successor program,” L says. “It was Watari’s idea.”

Yagami just takes off his cap and throws it at him.  

“Ninety percent.”

“Get fucked.”

“No thanks.”

It’s slightly surreal to watch one’s childhood idol bickering with the person who killed him, especially when said person is probably the only one in existence Nate’s come the closest to hating. Still, considering Nate’s still having a hard time finally putting a face to a name (and a hard time considering that L doesn’t even really look at him and just treats him like every other customer he’s had to deal with), he thinks he’s doing pretty well since he hasn’t had a bit of a breakdown yet.

There is something he’s been meaning to ask.

“L?” he starts.  

L only hums a little and swipes the last shirt past the scanner.

Nate opens his mouth, closes it, and then says. “Mello said you weren’t able to find an exit.”

L looks at him a moment, and Nate realizes just how dark the man’s eyes actually are. It’s slightly terrifying paired with the hobo getup.  

“It is difficult to leave a station once you have been relegated to it,” he says, “Possible, but difficult. You have to get past the entities embodying the Courtesy Desk to get anywhere.”

“I...see,” he says, “But you have looked?”

“Yes.”

“But with no results.”

“Not yet,” he says.

“He’s been here at least thirty years,” Yagami points out.  

“When we’re supposedly here for eternity, what’s thirty years?” L says.  

Yagami ties up the bag and nearly chucks it at his head. “Payment and receipt, Ryuuzaki.”

“Mm. Spleen.”

Nate blinks. “What?”

“They want the spleen,” L says. He says it so casually that Nate slightly misses A’s too-cheerful demeanor. That could have been mistaken for madness easily. Casual violence is unnerving.  

“Who’s they?” Nate asks.  

L only points to the dark shape that’s draped across the counter of the Courtesy Desk. When Nate mouths a little ‘ah’, like he understands, he leans over his chair to stab his hand into Nate’s torso and take out his spleen.  

Nate looks down at his shirt, which is getting bloody again, while L drops the spleen into the void of the register.

“Welcome to the afterlife, River,” Yagami says, grinning too wide. “You’ll get used to it.”

Nate fixes him with a glare and grabs his bag. He’s definitely getting out of here.  

“I refuse to.”