Poem.
All right, all my little fangirls. This is yet rabid rambling from the feral fool which is me. More angst. More evil Raito. But slightly less so. Anyways, THIS IS NOT A SONGFIC. This is a poem fic. Which is probably just as bad. The poem is mine. That means that, for once in my life, I can actually say DON'T YOU DARE STEAL IT!!! COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ahem.
Anyways... I'll let you read it now.
I have never wanted anything more
Than to sit outside your door.
L sighed. It simply wasn't fair. The criminal psychopaths had it easy. THEY never lost any sleep over ethical dilemmas. Especially not ones that they themselves caused. L found himself envying them.
L was used to not sleeping. He was, after all, an insomniac. Still, under normal circumstances, he always had something to do. He could do work or play Pac-man or Tetris or something. There was always SOMETHING he could do to occupy his mind. But not now, oh no, not now. It was too dark for reading, and of course Himself wouldn't allow L to have a light on. Or have his laptop. 'The noise would disturb him', he said. No typing, no reading, no anything even remotely entertaining.
"Why don't you try and sleep like normal people?" That little grin… That smirk that just…
L wasn't going to think about it. If he thought about it, he'd get all irrational again, like he had when he had decided to chain the two of them together. What had possessed him to do that, again?
Oh… I remember. He smiled quietly into the smothering darkness of the hotel room. I wanted to watch him sleep.
He had, of course, completely justified this. People mumble about all sorts of things in their sleep. Hopefully, Raito would say something incriminating himself beyond a shadow of a doubt. So far, though, he'd only talked about his family, school, and someone named 'Ryuk'. And Misa. When he started talking about Misa, it was usually a sign for L to get out of the way. Raito usually got rather… violent when Miss Amane entered into his thoughts. And not in the usual tossing and turning sort of way. In a totally-randomly-beating-the-crap-out-of-L-in-the-middle-of-the-night sort of way.
Despite all the scandalous family gossip that slipped through Raito's lips when he slept, he never said a single word that raised L's suspicion of him even a micro percentage. It was getting rather annoying.
Still… There where benefits. The endless unconscious hours Raito needed to function provided L with endless hours to just sit and stare. And really, who wouldn't want to stare at him? He was just plain pretty. In the dull red glow of the alarm clock, he seemed almost too perfect to be real, like something out of a sci-fi movie. Something you could look at, something you could dream about, something you could even touch if you got really lucky, but something you could never, ever have.
And really, that was exactly what Raito was. Something beyond L's long reach.
Perhaps that was why L loved him.
But what I want and what I need
Are two different things indeed.
L didn't really have a problem with his feelings towards Raito. After all, he hadn't ever bothered to learn any of the other stupid limitations society placed upon them all. He liked Raito, and that was that. Why even bother thinking about it? Even so, it did create certain issues. Like this whole chained-together thing. If L hadn't had those feelings he would never have even considered something so incredibly inconvenient. There were other ways to watch him without being physically chained to the boy.
Even taking his new-found bias into account, the handcuffs were a stupid thing to do.
He heard Raito stir beside him, letting loose the quiet stream of muttering that usually precluded the majority of Raito's dreams. He groaned, curling around himself into a strangely L-like foetal position. L blinked his dark eyes, uncertain whether to stay and listen for a confession or run for cover. Raito groaned again, clutching huge fistfuls of sheets in his tightly balled hands. This was not behaviour L had seen in him before. This was something altogether new.
L leaned in closer, watching with interest. He remained tense, however, readying himself to leap out of the way at the slightest utterance of anything that sounded even remotely like 'Misa'.
The seconds ticked by, and Raito showed no signs of homicidal rage. In fact, he almost seemed to relax. He relaxed his death grip on the sheets, his breath coming in more evenly. L had almost given up and classified this as yet another random occurrence when he heard something whispered ever so softly. He really wasn't sure he'd heard it, so he leaned down just a little bit closer, listening intently.
"Ryuu…" Raito sighed. L felt the enveloping heat of his breath against his own lips.
"Ryuzaki…" He groaned, his eyelids fluttering.
"Ryuzaki!" He cried, his eyes flying open.
Against my will I'm coming in.
All sorts of crazy things begin.
Time froze. Raito looked at him and L looked back and there was a long, terrible moment when there was nothing at all inside his brain. It simply ceased to work.
L pressed his lips to Raito's, crushing him, devouring him. Before either of them really absorbed what was happening, Raito was kissing back. L felt the boy's fingers gripping the much-abused fabric of his shirt the same way they had gripped the sheets. His own hands were tangled in his hair, mussing the perfect locks almost vengefully.
Slowly, though, the war between them became more like a siege. Slow and steady and ever so slightly sloppy. Then the siege stalled. They clung to each other, neither daring to move. To move now, with conscious purpose and design, would be to admit that this thing had just happened. If they did that, then they would have to deal with it.
L wasn't sure about Raito, but he wasn't ready to do that just yet.
"Ryuzaki…" He felt Raito's lips move against his. Raito pulled him closer, wrapping his arms all the way around L's smaller frame and crushing him to his chest.
"Uh… Raito-kun?" L whispered, mentally beating Raito while trying to get through what might have been years of therapy in a matter of minutes.
"Yes, Ryuzaki-kun?" Raito smiled, pressing his forehead against Ryuzaki's.
"I can't breathe." He gasped.
Raito paused. He frowned. L could feel the skin of his forehead scrunch up. Raito's grip loosened, almost as if he were suddenly unsure of what he was doing.
"That… Isn't how it's supposed to go."
L paused. He wasn't even going to begin calculating the possible meanings and/or implications of that statement. He could only keep seven different thoughts inside his head, after all.
"This isn't… This isn't a dream, is it?"
Ah. That would explain why he wasn't having the same difficulty assimilating this as L was. Up until this point, he didn't think it was real, and therefore, none of his actions had any consequence.
"N…no." L gulped.
"Shit…"
L couldn't have put it better himself.
And yet, Raito didn't let him go. L assumed it was because he was now trapped in the same near-paralysis as he himself had been in before.
L's thoughts had nearly sorted themselves out by now, and he was beginning to analyse this strange new development. Things were suddenly beginning to make sense. All the little incongruities he had noticed before started to fall into proper order.
And still, Raito didn't let him go.
Enough time passed that L began to feel uneasy. It felt, suddenly, as if Raito was never going to let go. As if Raito wasn't trying to make an action plan, wasn't trying to think of a way out of this situation like L assumed he would have. It was as if he had already decided what he was going to do and was only trying to justify it.
As it turned out, that was exactly what he was trying to do.
But even though I might resist…
Raito slid his hands down L's back, taking a hold of his upper arms. He rolled over, forcing L onto his back. Raito crushed their lips together again, sliding his arms down L's palms to grasp his wrists. He swung his arms over L's hips, straddling him. L experienced another blank moment. This one was different than the other, however, because before, the moment had been followed by a feeling strange calm, of a weight off his shoulders. This moment was followed by a kind of terrified panic.
Once he retrieved full use of his senses, he did his best to fight back. While he could hold his own with Raito when they were on roughly equal footing, Raito now had every advantage. L couldn't push him off.
Raito chuckled quietly, brushing his lips against his ear.
"What are you doing, Ryuu-chan?"
"Let go of me, Raito." L hissed.
"No." Raito nipped at the tender lobe of his ear. "I don't want to."
L paused for a long moment. He wasn't entirely sure what Raito's intention was. Was he playing one of his games? Or was he really…
"Please, Raito."
As soon as the words passed through his lips, he knew they where the wrong ones. He felt the hitch in Raito's breath. He felt the shudder course through the boy's body.
"Please what, Ryuu-chan?"
"Please let me go."
But Raito wouldn't.
You had to know…
L never knew the world could be so totally hot and yet so totally cold at the same time. His body was boiling, the blood evaporating in his veins. Everywhere Raito touched there was fire. The burning was inside him too, spreading deeper and deeper with each and every thrust. But even as the heat was consuming him, part of him was preserved, protected from the flames by layers upon layers of ice. What Raito was doing to him… it made his mind burn with hate, anger, fear, shame… passion. Every emotion swirled together until it was nothing but one congealed mass inside him, eating away at what was left of him like a ravenous cancer. At the same time, at the core of him, the core of what he was, the ice was as strong as it ever was. Stronger, even. Like wrought iron, the heat of the forge could not melt it, and what did not kill you…
The cold inside him was logic. Rationality. And it understood. It knew why Raito was doing this. The kernel of reason left intact within him knew exactly what sort of twisted logic and backwards reasoning Raito had used to make this ok, to make this all right. After all, L had kissed him first. He had wanted this to happen, or he wouldn't have kissed him.
But L hadn't wanted it. He hadn't even really wanted to kiss him. He had never had any particular urge to that effect. He had had passing fantasies, he supposed, but most of them never went any deeper than having an actual friend.
But… why had he done it, then? Why did he stop fighting? Why did it feel so good? Why did he moan and writhe and cry? Why did his hips move of their own accord, driving Raito deeper and deeper inside him?
And why, when it was all over and Raito lay next to him, their fingertips just barely touching, did L's restless insomniac brain finally just slip deep into the vast dark void of sleep?
The answer is apparent to any idiot who bothers to look, the little cold place inside him said.
I needed this.
Thanks go to my wonderbar beta, SlvrSoleAlchemist, who is my hero and whom I worship. Go read her MattXMello fic, Impossible Mello. Right now. Or I shall beat you to within an inch of your life. Really.
Reviewers get cookies and hugs and my undying love. Especially those of you who say more than "is rEly kool, me liK."
With love, Jiia