A/N I took a break from finishing 'Those' because I really wanted to write one chapter in the 2nd person/write something about insomnia/attempt to go back to canon roots (but it'll have a twist). I'll probably continue it because I don't think it'll be very long, unlike some fics I won't mention. :) Massive thanks to Karina, who read over this mess for me and is the most excellent, kindest, wisest person to exist in our generation. I tried to take on your advice, K, but I think I could keep tweaking this to death and I got to the point that I was extremely done with it, so I thought I'd just post it as is. There are probably still multiple typos and problems but they'll just have to stay, I'm afraid. Cross-posted on Tumblr because it's a bit throwaway and drabbly.
Antifree
You told Light to shut up, and that's when he punched you in the face like he was punching through a wall. Before that, you'd simply mentioned the fact that he was Kira and maybe he could give a deeper insight into these new murders which appear to be similar to Kira's in execution but without his finesse. He'd started arguing in his meek, painfully respectful way, saying that he wasn't Kira, he wasn't a murderer, etc., and you told him to shut up.
Ryuzaki?' he said, and you looked at him, answering the name like it's the one you were born with, not having noticed him stand up. Then he punched you. The tired numbness you normally lived within must have made the impact feel like there was more force behind it, because when his knuckles hit the bridge of your nose, it felt like you'd been hit by a train. Your eyes felt like they bulged from their sockets for a split second before you're left with just a stinging pain across your whole face. Normally you'd have to be on your fifteenth cup of coffee before your body goes into this kind of hyperactive shaking, willing you to wake up, defend yourself and solve mysteries. Today, Light's cramped fist is your fifteenth cup of coffee, the reason you need to wake up, defend yourself, solve, and defeat, and also the reason you were bored and listless in the first place. He's the reason you're here at all and you resent him with everything you are, because he's oil slipping between the gaps of your fingers.
You don't like to be touched, particularly in kindness or from some concept of friendship, because there's something disrespectful about it. It's an intrusion when whatever emotion behind it prickles against your skin and forces its way beneath, trying to kindle some reciprocation you cannot feel. But whenever Light touches you in passing, there's only hate behind it, like in this punch. Hate you can cope with and it's nice to feel its vindication. It's the only truth about Light Yagami and almost like an admittance to you. To everyone else though, he's insulted and right to punch you. He pretends to be surprisingly sensitive and human.
Your face stung and grimaced as you grabbed the edge of the desk to give you some motion to spin around in your chair. By the time you faced him again, your leg was bent and prepared to strike him hard in his stomach and send him flying onto the floor. Perhaps not so surprisingly, the commotion which followed was centred on helping Light to his feet again. Matsuda offered his shoulder for Light to steady himself as he stood again, and Yagami-san asked his son if he was alright. Light told them all in his deceptively hard done to way, that he was alright, the Lord be praised, and he rubbed the back of his hand against his mouth while he looked at you scathingly. You didn't even hit him in the face but you wish that you had since he was trying to appear injured, like a victim of a brutal prison guard. You wish that you had more opportunities to punch him, but the mini-fights are always broken up too quickly for your liking. It never happens in private, you noticed. He's very careful to only do it when he has support and protection and the knowledge that any physical fight will be short-lived. The hatred boils thickly between you like a cauldron always in danger of overflowing.
There were no such enquiries about how you were, and even though you received no reprisals, you got the sense from the very pro-Light atmosphere that what you did was unjustified, while Light punching you was. His gift of manipulation even surpasses your own. The delicacy he employs in exploitation is almost a wonder to watch, since you've never had to do anything but give orders in your bluntness. Light's lack of power is actually his strength here. He makes more of a joke out of you every day and he does it all the time, securing and retaining respect which should be yours alone.
And then he took his chair next to you again and the normal calm resumed, as it has until now. Even at night, you insist on being chained to him so you can each be a burden in every way. He must have no opportunity and no privacy if he's to be beaten. At first, he slept in a solitary cell at night and you watched the live camera footage, but it wasn't as psychologically effective as having him chained to you 24/7. He finds it even more humiliating and more like the persecution that you intend this to be. Light is now at a disadvantage from being alone with you. There is no one now who'll break it up and coddle him and he knows it.
This case wasn't as straightforward as you'd anticipated. You'd rather not be literally chained to your case and frustrated by lack of proof for so long, since you'd generously expected it to have concluded two months ago. But you had your murderer and surprisingly had patience to spare until guilt decided to rear its stupid head. Its head would be Light Yagami's: Seventeen-year-old Japanese student with impressive grades and good looks and charm and humility and every positive which society deemed ideal but which you couldn't give a shit about. Yes, on the surface Light Yagami was ideal to the point of being the most boring individual you've ever met. He was so hateful in his perfection that it was difficult to figure out whether it was any particular attribute or, as you thought, that it was him as a whole which was despicable, and you're positive that you're not the first to think so. You also discovered that he was void of any real personality and humour, and that the only interesting things about him was the rot inside — rife with the arrogance of the mentally unstable — and his previously unheard of talent for killing criminals at will from his tidy bedroom. You occasionally look at Light Yagami and imagine having his brain in a jar in your trophy room in Winchester.
A lazy shuffling sound makes your dry and gritty eyes shift to your left. He always lies facing the wall in his silence like he's just a wrinkle in the sheets. You ignore him when you have nothing to say to him because he's easy to ignore, and ignoring you is his way of coping with the awkwardness of being chained to you. That would be understandable enough. It might also help him temporarily push aside the reminder that you suspect him of killing more people than several medieval battles put together. That would also be understandable, but Light Yagami is insane. You can only try to understand him through introspection. How would you feel? How would you react? But it's not as easy as that, because you would never be in his position. Yagami is overrated but only you can see that. Everyone else thinks that he's the Second Coming and that you're Lucifer, but his only gift is bullshit and an ingenious way of murder.
Yagami is also very repetitive, and the circle of accusation and denial is like a single moment trapped in time, repeated on a loop. You know what he's going to say before he says it. You know that telepathically you're having completely different conversations. He looks at you and thinks: 'You're a bastard getting in my way. Get out of my way!' and you think something similar. Yagami is a murderer and a liar — two very complimentary bedfellows and nothing new to you, it's just that he's better at it than most. You've reached a kind of status quo while you wait for something or nothing to happen. If nothing happens, he thinks that you'll have no choice but to admit that you're mistaken in suspecting him, and if the murders start again, you'll have to admit the same thing. What he doesn't realise is that, whatever happens, you're still sure of his guilt and he's fucked. His fate is decided, but you underestimated his patience. If it carries on like this the chances are that you'll still be sitting here in a year's time like siamese twins joined by metal entrails, because a case isn't over until it's proven.
He sighs provokingly within your peripheral vision. All he does is sigh and lie. His act of normalcy with only the least offensive weaknesses of humanity he'll put on for show or sympathy might fool everyone else, but you know that he's a horror whose brain pulses with murder and self-importance and nothing more than that.
If he didn't sleep then he'd be more likely to make mistakes, you'd decided. Sleep deprivation has an interesting list of symptoms. Now you couldn't remember what it was like to be without them, but someone as cosseted as Light Yagami would feel even the slightest inflicted hardship and his mind would shatter like glass through oppression crushing his pride. So, when Light had been exactly where you'd wanted him to be – like an insect with clipped wings in that cold cell – you began another experiment, as you'd done with Misa Amane. You'd turned up the external volume in the cell and mumbled questions into the microphone day and night, occasionally ripping open crinkling foil packets and scratching your fingernails on the mic like an eternal mini thunderstorm to tear at Yagami's nerves and to keep him awake. Considering her low intelligence, Misa Amane's loyalty prevented her from cracking for a surprising length of time, and when she did crack, she begged for death. Interesting. These are all important facts you've noted down on the filing card system in your mind. With Light Yagami though, there was no mental breakdown; just emphatic denials and puppy dog stares imploring you to listen to him, polite requests, minor irritability, polite apologies for the irritability, acceptance, understanding, and weight loss – all of which you ignored.
The experiment would have continued with or without Kira's apparent re-emergence had you not been landed with an annoying task force which included your suspect's melodramatic martyr of a father. All roads led to Light Yagami, and as if you're dealing with a vampire coven, you reason that if you kill the master, the rest will die, too. There's a strange mix of frustration and admiration for someone you reluctantly see as a worthy adversary. That will end when you win and he loses, because then he'll just be like all the others. Worthless even as a diversion for you. You envy his efficient way of killing and hate that you can't understand how it's done.
You sit up on the bed clutching your bent, cramped legs to your chest. Sometimes your hands contract suddenly like your body is trying to remind you that it's there. Something's always begging for attention in the form of aching bones, stabbing muscles, tidal nausea, throbbing head, and eyes fighting against you to close, but you take note and then ignore it. You run on a fuel of caffeine, glucose and will power, and you know that science says that it will kill you. Every case is another apple seed in your gut, so you're just overdosing slowly on cyanide, one case at a time. One day your body will burn out but the engine will still be good for another hundred thousand miles or more. It's a shame that chassis and engine will both have to be scrapped and that something inferior will have to take your place.
To have some revenge against a body which does nothing but let you down, you press your lower back into the edges of the headboard to keep yourself awake in the darkness like a security camera on standby. Sitting on a bed for a certain number of hours a night is your only allowance for Light's assumed need for sleep. You use that time to listen closely for any admittances from his unconsciousness, but they never come. Light is like a dead man when he's asleep. His heart beats and his lungs draw in air which is filtered and expelled automatically to pollute the air you breathe, but he is so unnaturally still that you only take that as further proof of his unrepentant guilt. If Misa Amane knew how incredibly boring and dead he is then maybe she'd see beyond his gleaming sports car appearance. You can't give a shit about things like that because they lie like book covers, but you secretly resent him for the attention and immediate undeserved respect and idolatry it brings him. What has he done? Killed few people and put streaks in his hair? You've killed a few people in the name of real justice, but Misa Amane always looks at you like you're a disgusting freak. It doesn't upset you. You're the world's greatest detective without equal and you're not even twenty-five. The best company you've ever found is your own.
While Light wastes the absurdly long hours, you plan the next day as far ahead as you can and in such detail so that when it happens you'll be as prepared as a dedicated actor. You review the days which have passed and any nuances and hidden meanings you might have overlooked. Your eyelids are heavy but you force them open as wide as you can like they're propped up by toothpicks. You might have slept for a while if Light wasn't there, but as it is, you can't take such a risk. There is some suffering involved but there's no other way but total vigilance. No one else could be trusted to watch Kira as closely as you can. Light Yagami has chosen a very stupid temporary sanctuary in the branches of a tall tree to hide from the wolf, but the wolf knows that he's there and will wait below until Light's inevitable fall. You've never lost, you keep reminding yourself. It's impossible that you'd lose to a high school student of all people.
When you're feeling despondent, which is easy to do in the dark, you remind yourself of The Test. A facade for forcing Kira or the Second Kira to show themselves was your plan of having Soichiro Yagami make them think that he was going to execute Light in an honour killing. He'd held a gun at his son's head and pulled the trigger, as you'd instructed him, and very well acted, too. Light Yagami was terrified and your veins shook and thrilled with anticipation like violin strings in a climax of sound as you waited for the winning moment you've always fought for since you were a child. But the test didn't work for some reason; Soichiro Yagami didn't die. It wasn't what you'd expected and hoped for, but despite it not being your objective, it was still gratifying when you caught the faint but acrid smell that no one else seemed to notice when Light-kun was brought back in his apparent innocence. Kira had pissed himself.
It was perhaps the only show of truth or self-doubt that Light was capable of, you thought. Maybe he'd worked it out and decided to side with the probability that it was a trick. One thing you're sure of is that it wasn't parental love which stopped him from killing his own father if he felt that his life was at risk. That would be as likely as Light not being Kira at all. It must have been combatting a red herring with a red herring, though why Misa Amane hadn't killed Yagami-san was still a mystery. She was an impatient, lovesick fool who would sacrifice anything including herself to save a boy she had nothing in common with and who actively disliked her. You have to take notes about all this shit because any one of these petty, personal intrigues could be the lead to the final win, but it's very degrading. Sometimes you're so sick of this case that you just want to just shoot everyone involved and blame fairies.
Misdirection is the key to survival. Never attack what your enemy defends, never behave as your enemy expects, and never reveal your true strength. If knowledge is power, then to be unknown is to be unconquerable.*
Of course it is. That's how you've kept yourself alive. Light Yagami must be doing the same.
"Ryuzaki?"
Oh. The complaint. You look towards him and realise that he beat you again. You didn't notice him move and sit up next to you. It's not an important win but it's a win against you none the less. Stop slacking. You're L, aren't you?
"Light-kun."
"Could you loosen my cuff a little, please?" he asks. You can make out the soft features which are so attractive that it's like they've been carved and nurtured for admiration, and you want to punch him and cut him up until he looks as rotten as he really is. The perfection is another joke of his to hurt you and declare so obviously that he's better than you are, like you'd care about such shallow virtues. But you've seen this same face looking so harsh and vicious in its ugliness that it's almost unrecognisable. It's the face of Death. The simpering way he's looking at you now is a lie covering a skull with a snarling, hungry, hateful grin. No one else seems to see it, but that's why you're L and they're not.
In the darkness, a muscle twangs, lifting the corner of your mouth in a spasm it won't commit to.
"No, Light-kun. I cannot. My apologies."
Another sigh and he turns over to lie on his side again. He pulls at the chain which joins you and rubs his wrist so that the cuff around it chinks. Your throat closes and you purse your lips.
"Is it causing you intense pain?" you ask.
"It's just uncomfortable. It's alright. I understand."
"Good, because a suspect shouldn't be comfortable. Don't you agree?"
"I guess," he sighs. Always sighing.
You now blatantly watch him, not just from the corner of your eye so that he's blurred and unfocused, partially obscured like a double exposure against the outline of your ski slope of a nose. He strokes down the hair on the back of his head like he's comforting himself, but you picture his scowling face being warped at being denied. He's not used to it because he's a spoilt brat like you are. This is what gives you a greater understanding of who he is, because as much as you don't want to admit it, he's very much like you.
Light – Kira – shifts under the covers like any other person and any other murderer. Anyone is capable of murder and creating the most insane, illogical excuses for murder. You've never cared about the meaningless reasons or excuses because why people do the things they do is uninteresting and incidental. You care about winning battles, being right, being proven right, being justice and bringing order. It's all you are, it's in your blood. At the moment, you've declared a stale mate which became boring before it even began. It became boring when you first read the news articles and Interpol case notes, because even though this new and creative killer offered a better than average challenge, you knew that he was still a murderer like any other. You would find him and condemn him like the thousands of murderers you've pointed your godlike finger at in the past. Kira would be handed in with proof and in chains, like the enemies of Caesar in Ancient Rome were paraded through the streets. Light rattles his chain like it's a last rebellious fit of an angry ghost. Humiliation should always come before execution, and you're looking forward to seeing Light Yagami suffer both.
You wait until Light's breathing becomes quietly steady, preparing for sleep. If you can't sleep, why should he?
"How do you sleep at night, Light-kun?" you ask, reaching for your thermos of sugary coffee. Your shoulder audibly pops out of its socket but is masked by the sound of Light switching a reading lamp on and turning under the sheets, leaning on his elbow to face you. Even in the room which is still little more than shapes in shades of dark blue and grey silhouetted against a chemical light, you can see and feel the hate radiating from him. It gives you more life than caffeine ever could. You're right and he's wrong and he might kill you in the dark for it but you'll always be right and he'll know it. If he kills you now, everyone will know it, too. It will still be proof and you're so tired that what it would entail for you doesn't matter as much as you know it should. You just smile slightly for a millisecond and then frown as you unscrew the thermos. "I'm just admiring your ability to sleep at designated times and for a designated time. I meant nothing by it, if you thought that I was referring to the multiple murders on your conscience."
As was most often the case when there was no one else around to hear him defend himself or say something politically correct against your methods, Light doesn't argue or complain. Your coffee splashes musically into the little metal cup like a relaxation CD of trickling streams or someone having a piss in a forest while you sense Light's burning anger peak but find no adequate release he could allow, so it deflates and dies with another aggrieved sigh. Once he turns his back on you again and has fallen back into his former position, he pulls the covers as far over his head as he can.
"I think that a successful serial killer must be a very nice person to talk to," you continue as pleasantly as you can. "Actually, I know that to be true, nine times out of ten. You have to be socially equipped otherwise you wouldn't be successful in the first place. And under that niceness, what a commanding rage you must have. I have to remind myself often of the catastrophic activity which you're responsible for. Because you are so nice," you say, making it sound like the mocking insult it is.
"Of what you accuse me of being responsible for."
"Yes, of course. I apologise again," you smile. "Light-kun?"
"Yes, Ryuzaki."
"Are you angry at being dependent on your parents, Light-kun? Because of your resentful feelings but inability to risk taking out your anger against them? Is that why you find substitute victims to temporarily quell your rage and frustration which would otherwise consume you?"
"Shut up, Ryuzaki."
"Or perhaps it's like an addiction. Your apparent righteous motive is definitely false either way, because I believe that you would kill anyone, you don't need a reason beyond compulsion and possibly sexual satisfaction. You create meaning to justify your urge to kill — it's not unusual. I'm not suggesting that you haven't selected adequate targets most of the time, but it's not for someone like you to do it. That's my job, Light-kun, and I'm very good at it. I'm a world renowned detective sourced by crime agencies across the globe and you're a high school student. Who do you think is going to win here? Are you unable to confess because you feel that you'll be humiliated and executed in front of the eyes of the world?"
"No, Ryuzaki."
"Because I can't deny that that would happen but you shouldn't let that stop you from confessing. I would expect it to be quite cathartic for you, if only for a short time."
"I have nothing to confess because I've done nothing wrong. How many times are we going to do this?"
"As many times as it takes, Light-kun."
"Forever then."
"Not necessarily. There's a strong likelihood that I will have you and Misa Amane executed regardless and prove your guilt that way, when Kira dies with you and the murders stop."
"You can't do that."
"I can. I'll stake my reputation on it and that would be all that would be necessary."
"It's illegal. And the murders won't stop," Light says assuredly. The murders won't stop because he's arranged for them to resume, you think, scowling. Waiting for him to trip up has gone on too long. Sometimes you have to trip them up yourself.
"The murders stopped when you were first put into my custody; quite out of character for Kira and disrupting a pattern which until then was uninterrupted."
"That's a coincidence."
"Is it? Do you think that he's on holiday? I hope he's gone somewhere relaxing. It might calm him down so he'll stop killing people."
"Kira must have found out that you have me in custody and he's exploiting the opportunity to frame me."
"By laying low? But Kira is arrogant. He'd feel no need to resist his calling. He hasn't before now. Maybe he died? Hit by a bus and taken up to Heaven by angels."
"Maybe he has died."
"Or maybe it's nonsense and you're trying to convince me like you've convinced everyone that you're innocent despite evidence to the contrary," you snap.
"There is no evidence."
"There's enough to convince me and that's what matters. Would you like me to take you with me wherever I go, like this? Chained to me, like this? I don't. But you and Misa Amane forever held under my custody until one of you admits guilt is an alternative plan."
"I'm not a murderer. At some point you'll have to accept that you're wrong," Light says tiredly.
"I don't anticipate that happening. I know that you're guilty; I just need to prove it," you reply, animated and forceful through being so pathetically challenged. It's almost funny how easy but stubborn he is, but instead of laughing or even smiling, you bite down and chip at your thumbnail. "It's very annoying."
"Maybe if you let go of this obsession of yours and followed other leads –"
"Obsession does seem to come in a boxed set with you though, doesn't it, Light-kun. Misa Amane's obsessed with you, probably countless other misguided young women, and now I am obsessed with you, apparently. I really wonder what people see in you."
"I wasn't saying that –"
"Because your personality is very much like white bread. Looks nice, tastes nice, but has absolutely no beneficial nutritional value and causes bloating," you say spitefully, though you feel no relief. Light is quiet for a few moments, during which he lets out a deep sigh like a dying breath.
"Thank you, Ryuzaki, I feel much better now. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Light-kun."
Your eyes close as your arms strain against the continued denials and patronisingly polite dismissiveness. You allow him go to sleep, and all that time you sit there and think and wait and plan how, after this case, that you'll describe Kira as a stupid, selfish child and that will be all you'd say on the matter. Locating Kira was supposed to be the difficult part, but it had been almost disappointingly easy. The difficult part was proving his guilt, and you still can't understand why. You give in to internal temper tantrums, silently shouting that your word is enough. Why isn't it enough that L is positive he has Kira in custody, why do you need proof? The truth is that nothing more would be needed. You wouldn't need to try that hard to convince anyone who matters, but you want proof. You want to prove to everyone why you're right so you can put a strong tick and 'case closed' stamp on the case file and leave no room for any uncertainty. You can't allow Kira to keep that or anything from you. A long drowned out accusing voice tells you haven't done that yet because you've missed something. You've failed. That's why you're chained to him now instead of working on another case while he sits in a cell waiting for his trial and the rope. You've allowed Kira more than that win on the tennis court, and the thought makes your shoulders and spine slump.
You feel the time go, maybe hours but everything stays in stasis. The sun is still over the Atlantic but you're awake, anyway, it makes no difference to you. You grasp onto ideas and work through them and lose them in a beeping heartbeat on a monitor until you're left where you started with no progress made. Light turns over, still asleep and unguarded but now facing you. The chain rattles delicately, and you shift closer to him with an idea which seems more reasonable that smashing his teeth in with your thermos. When you move, his eyes flutter and the lids pull themselves up slightly, just checking, then open like shocked and screaming mouths. And you stare back at him with dark craters for eyes only inches from his face.
"Have you ever had a sexual experience with another person, Light-kun?" you ask him quietly. You have long fingers which are often somewhere they shouldn't be, and now they're forcing their way beneath Kira's waistband. Kira can't move and cannot compute, but you try to keep a straight face as you watch his eyes grow wide and shining in his slack face, his lips part so he looks like the lucky idiot he is; slow in understanding something which doesn't require a brain cell. His breath catches in his throat and he grabs your hand in panic. He's so boring acting like he's his father's age unless it suits him or if you stick your hand down his pants. "Is this the closest you've ever been to it? You know that it doesn't count if it's with me. It'd just be part of the investigation, between us."
"What are you doing?"
You feel your eyes squint at him with a sudden synchronicity. He's just like B but dishonest. More intelligent, maybe. Clearly better looking and his insanity isn't theatrically obvious, but like with B, you get the sense that if he did anything it would only be because he couldn't kill you. His brain is buzzing with confusion, and the hatred and power you have over him in this moment is like a shot of adrenalin straight in the heart. You speak to him in English.
"I bet you think you're pretty slick, don't you."
* The quote in the middle is from Star Trek, surprisingly. I found it somewhere and thought that it was by some Roman philosopher, but no, it's by a Romulan, apparently. I have no regrets.