So the World's Greatest Detective and His Lover's Father Walk into a Bar
Rating: T
Warnings: A single use of a homophobic slur, some references to sex, a pinch of violence, allusions to suicide.
Summary: Soichiro, determined to discover L's true intentions with his son, takes him out for a very brief and disappointing night on the town.
Disclaimer: Death Note and its characters are strictly the property of Shonen Jump, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata.
Soichiro Yagami had found them twisted up on the couch upon returning to retrieve his wallet. He had stood dumbly in the entrance, watching from some remote location outside of his head as they removed themselves from one another, as his son buttoned up his shirt, as his boss removed his hand from under that shirt, as he ran at his boss with his fist raised.
No one harassed his kid, whether they were the best detective in the world or some snot-nosed punk.
Sometimes they are both.
"Dad!" Light yelled, shoving himself between his father and the legs that were fully prepared to launch bare feet upside Soichiro's skull. "Dad, wait. L, don't kick him! I said don't! Cut it out!"
Soichiro supposed that he should have seen this coming, Light's near-perfect front of heterosexual dating life notwithstanding. Aside from the disinterest in Misa, long nights searching for Kira that had endured long after Higuchi's unfortunate roadside accident, the removal of the handcuffs, and the installment of said handcuffs in the first place, there had been those times when Light would invite his friends over for a night of...study who mysteriously wouldn't leave until the following morning while looking too disheveled and all too pleased.
Watari set the steaming cup of tea in front of Soichiro, smiling with a sympathy that could easily be mistaken for pity and a twinkle beneath his creased brow. L's behavior must have become old hat to him. It was Soichiro who should have donned the piteous look. Arms crossed over his chest, he nodded curtly but did not take of the tea. It was pettiness and a sense of betrayal that fixed his hands to the insides of his elbows. He thought he and Watari had some understanding between them, both being the fathers of boys with strange and beautiful and unknowable minds.
He watched L and his son sitting across from him, and the split-second glance shared between them of utter knowing toward his posture, his air, his expression of sobriety and fatherly exhaustion and felt a pang of jealousy.
Never in his years as a husband had he shared such a look with his own wife.
"Well?" he began gruffly. "Can I be assured that you are both using protection at least?"
For the first time in Soichiro's life, he witnessed Light living up to his name and glowing brightly for a few ephemeral seconds before taking of his own tea.
"Yes," L said casually, dumping no less than eight sugar cubes into his Earl Grey. And, not to be outdone on the humiliation side of things by his lover's father, added, "Even though we're both clean."
With a clearing of his throat, Light derailed that conversation train somewhere less rocky. "I know this is a shock, Dad," he chimed in, voice gentle and false, "and I want to say it is my hope— "
Soichiro's voice was a knife. "Light. Quiet."
His dear golden boy son looked momentarily as if he had been backhanded. L looked on, possibly with eyebrows raised. Soichiro own brow puckered. Not even this man's visual and presumably spontaneous reactions could be trusted.
He stared the two men down, his average brain assessing scenarios and mapping potential paths. He was no genius but he was still a detective.
He knew, even though deep down a part of him wanted to, interfering would mean losing Light who had so easily suggested his father tell his mother and sister that he had disowned his love-struck son as an explanation for his absence and he knew from one look, just from the half-a-second side glance L spared Light to watch him sip his tea and from the barest shadow of his curled lip, that L would do something more painful than kick Soichiro in the noggin to keep his boy at his side.
His sigh was weary and heavy and old. Young people.
But a detective's quest was for truth and justice, Soichiro thought to himself as he eyed L's tea cup and its journey to the malformed mouth that had been attached to his son's ne— no, no. Clear head, clear head.
He wanted to understand this. That was his duty, as a father and as an arbiter of justice. He shot up so fast, the couch almost tumbled backward.
"Get up," Soichiro commanded, head tilted down so that L could only see the glare from the lights flash over his lenses.
Light frowned, setting down his tea. "Dad— "
"That is enough out of you," Soichiro said stiffly. "Ryuzaki, I want you to come with me."
L, head so tilted to the left at that point that Soichiro suspected that his son had fallen for an owl, blinked at the man, took three sips of tea, and stood. Light looked all at once mutinous, shocked, and anxious. Soichiro wondered briefly when was the last time his son had fit so much emotion on his face.
Oh, yes, of course. When he had had a gun pressed up to his temple.
Shrugging at Light, L shuffled over to him with a slight grin that Soichiro might have called "impish" and slipped into his sneakers. The chief recovered quickly from his surprise at the man's cooperation. After all, to L, detective work was not about Justice. It was pulling the thread from a sweater and watching it unravel, cutting into a chocolate to check its filling, making a slit in the wrapping paper five days before Christmas and peeking at the package.
"Chief Soichiro Yagami never acted like this, therefore there was fun to be had," was the chief's first guess at L's current mentality. Or not, Soichiro thought, revising his theory at the amused glance L threw to his fretful son.
He had a feeling he had always been onto something with the sadist thing. His hands curled into fists.
"Then," L announced in that dull voice that now needled Soichiro like nothing else, "come with you, I shall. Watari, the limo."
Yagami senior held up a hand. "No limo. I will drive."
Another owl's blink, and then he saw it— a blink-if-you-miss-it shift of weight from one foot to the other. Discomfiture. Soichiro would treasure his small victory but he is still chastising himself over his earlier pettiness.
L retrieved a lolly from his pocket. "Very well," he said blandly. "Let us be off."
The bar was not a saloon straight out of the American frontier but it was not exactly high class, either. Soichiro strode over to the bar, L padding after him. There, they ordered their drinks and then, at L's insistence, sat at a table in the back.
Soichiro had chosen this bar for its Western flair on purpose to put L at ease but it seemed as if L couldn't have been more uncomfortable if he were crouched on a bed of spikes. His thin fingers drummed on his knees as Soichiro pretended to gaze at the menu. Though none smoked where they sat, his throat itched to convulse under the sway of great, hacking coughs just to stifle the silence. Even when their drinks arrived, the oppressive air hanging over their table did not leave.
The rice shōchū did much to loosen Soichiro's tongue. "When," he gruffed, "did this start?"
L stopped making a face in his nigorizake. "'This,'" he muttered, biting the pad of his thumb. "'This' began... " He trailed off, watching the other man's drink disappear.
Soichiro waited and drank and waited and drank some more. L trailed off some more. Soichiro had a strange feeling that L kept repeating himself but it was hard to keep track. Sometime after his second round, the penny dropped.
"Ryuzaki," Soichiro said as best he could, "if I didn't know better, I would think you have no intention of clarifying when you developed feelings for my son and wish only to take advantage of my increasingly intoxicated state."
Just barely, L leaned forward, interest glinting in his black eyes. "That is correct," he said around his thumb.
Soichiro pushed his shōchū aside. "I want to know," he slurred, letting his tongue slip and slide foolishly around in his mouth, "when you realized you were attracted to him." His large hands gripped the edge of the table so hard, he felt for sure he would leave ten indentations.
The shift occurred again, more pronounced now that Soichiro was guaranteed to forget it. L sipped again his drink, sipped it again, realized what he was doing, and also put his drink aside. "It just happened," he shrugged after a long pause.
A vein in Soichiro's forehead threatened to pop. "'Just happened'? Ryuzaki, you see everything. You remember everything. When did you decide to pursue my son? When you saw his picture? When you saw how smart he was? When you saw him shower?"
Another shift. "Chief Yagami, please lower your voice."
Chief Yagami raised his voice. "I want to know. I have to know! No, I should know."
Someone shouted for him to shut up. L waited for the bar to return to a suitable level of din and gave the chief a long look. "Light really is your son. Very emotional, the two of you."
Soichiro sputtered. "I—I am concerned—"
"Understandably so," L interrupted softly, "but he is also an adult."
"The age of majority in Japan is twenty."
"Actually, very recently in fact, it was changed to eighteen."
"I am his father."
"I know," L said, as softly as he had before.
"You've known him for eight months. I've known him all his life."
L waited.
"Why does he look at you like that?"
L cocked his head. "Like...?"
"Angrily," Soichiro rasped, "apprehensively, fondly." He groped around for his cup. It had somehow wound up across the table, in front of L. "Like he doesn't give a damn what you think of him. No, like he knows it won't affect a thing between you."
L only nursed his drink.
Head lowered, Soichiro rubbed his temples. "He changed when he went to high school."
"Yes," L agreed, and Soichiro hated how he knew that L knew the reason why and that he, Chief Soichiro Yagami and father of Light Yagami, would never know it for himself.
As L washed down his drink with a few licks of his lollipop, Soichiro wiped his glasses with a napkin.
When L addressed Soichiro again, his speech was careful and slow. "Are you sure you want to know?"
Soichiro swallowed. "Know?"
"Your son. His true heart."
His son? Of course, he wanted to say but his tongue had become an lead weight.
"There is a lot," L murmured, "about Light that you do not know, that he does not want you to know." He leaned in over the table. "I wonder if you could handle it."
"I—"
"You confined yourself to a cell and vowed not to leave until your son was exonerated. You drove a van through Sakura TV headquarters and threatened its head director. You can be...an intense man, Chief Soichiro Yagami. Especially where your feelings are concerned."
"I could handle it," Soichiro whispered.
"There is darkness there," L stated bluntly. "An ugliness. Do not lie to yourself, Chief Yagami. You do not want to see it."
Throat lining wholly desiccated, Soichiro could not even swallow this time.
L drained his cup. "But that is everyone, isn't it? That's me, that's you, and that's Light. Everyone is human, or something like that." He sighed. "A pity."
A pity, a pity, more's the pity. Soichiro knew his ugliness—a shiny gun barrel kissing the side of his son's head, whose fear-drenched back pressed up against the backseat with promises of murder-suicide dancing sweetly in his ears, all in the name of love. He could guess at L's—limitless resources, a mind matched only by the man he had vowed to place on Themis' scales, a title with power and influence and the only injustice he had ever been intent on ending was the obscene lack of entertainment for his brain.
He could never guess Light's. He did not dare to.
He watched Soichiro, who stared blankly and drunkenly back. Sensing the end of the conversation, or wanting this outing to be over already, more like, he stood up. L, too, eventually got to his feet. They left behind only two empty cups, some money, and some faint indentations. Once Soichiro figured out that that was indeed glass standing between him and the exit, they were good to go.
"Tell me one thing, Ryuzaki," was his slurred request. "Just one—"
"Hey!"
A man just as drunk but far more grizzled than he lumbered out from the shadow of the bar. "Was that you carrying on in there before?"
Soichiro bowed his head. "Yes. I am sorry."
"Well, keep it down next time," the man grumbled.
Soichiro was ready to apologize forty additional times when the man opened his mouth again.
"No one else needs to hear about you having a homo son."
Although it was a temperate December so far, everything froze— time, L, Soichiro's heart.
At any other time, Soichiro might have set his jaw and turned away. He, a man of Justice, would have told the drunkard off for disrupting the harmony. He would have treated the situation with his cool head firmly on his shoulders.
At that moment, Soichiro's head was anything but cool. It was the only thing that had not frozen because it burned like hellfire.
Fueled by alcohol, the lingering trauma of that July afternoon, the terrible images of this owl of a man touching and knowing his son, the dawning horror in understanding even minutely a past and future of dealing with bile like this on top of a hundred secrets sealed inside you, and the nagging thoughts over which boy was it whom Sayu had been "twittering" about so fondly this past Sunday, Soichiro's fist aimed straight and true at the stranger's face, but not before L had delivered a swift kick to the very same stranger's gut. Soichiro stared.
"I must confess," L said carefully as he swayed, "that I may be drunk as well."
They staggered away from the fallen man, who moaned and clutched his abdomen.
Soichiro remembered as he opened his car door. Right. Drunk. He worked to shed his tongue of fuzz and static as he watched L dial Watari.
"Ryuzaki," he said when he had hung up, "at least tell me this."
No shifting of feet this time around—only tensed shoulders and a gaze of jet-black.
This he had to know. If he did not get the proper answer, the right answer, the only answer he needed, he would interfere. Even if it meant losing Light.
Soichiro hardened his stare and straightened his back. "Do you love him? Do you love Light?"
There was no hesitation. "Yes."
"Will you take care of him?"
An immediate response. "Yes."
"If you are lying, if you hurt him, I will come after you. I don't care how many of your cronies you send. I don't care how smart you are or how much of a genius you are or how much money you have. Even if I die, I will curse you until my last breath. Do you understand?"
Again, no hesitation. "Yes."
Soichiro released the breath he had trapped within him. "I will see you this Saturday at dinner." And without giving L the chance to decline, he turned away and began to walk home.
Parents, good parents, do not care who their children are as long as those children are good and happy, Soichiro reasoned. It was not only he who had been robbed. Sachiko and Sayu too had been denied the chance to look into Light's eyes and read with but a glance the lost and pained soul there, if that chance had been available to any of them in the first place.
But maybe, maybe now, with a son whose eyes finally light aflame at the prospect of another morning, he could establish something. Not an understanding, no. Soichiro did not think that he could ever understand his son who would choose a sentient riddle as his mate nor clasp so readily to his chest this same riddle that had put him through the wringer all for naught. But some connection, some bond. Soichiro would like that.
Despite the ugliness, Soichiro liked to think that Light was good, good enough. That Light was happy. And that was all a good parent could ask for. By a luminous and great moon, Soichiro walked home.