He was the only fifteen year old boy who didn't wear his new school blazer the first summer of high school. Meanwhile his prepubescent friend Matsuda was more than happy to follow the example of all the other male freshmen and hibernated his narrow shoulders and stooped posture back into the furthest sweaty corners of those foam shoulder pads for the entirety of freshman year.
It was the only distinctive quality L had noted in the past month of painstaking observation. He had ignored his perfect marks, since those could be achieved by virtually everyone who had the self-discipline and his face wasn't all that attractive. The cheekbones weren't high and angular, but round and padded. which L could have learnt to accept as a mark of 'distinction' instead of an imperfection if it wasn't for the excess traces of androgynous flab which disrupted a perfectly shaped square jaw. To be fair the offending pockets of pudge only appeared when he smiled, but he was almost always smiling. With the added pounds of androgyny which weighed down every smile there came the compensation of dimples which 97.3% of the schools female population where more than willing to accept, but L wanted to iron them flat.
By the second year of high school, Lights face still hadn't acquired any of the angular definition L liked. Then to make matters worse even Lights distinction of being the only boy not to wear a blazer in summer no longer counted when his formerly prepubescent friend Matsuda, while not being genetically blessed with lights classic square shouldered square torso'd anatomical perfection, walked into school the first day of the second summer term in only the schools white button shirt with the first three undone to advertise the invention of a push up bar.
But sheer hard work was no match for inborn perfection. In fact L found that women tended to shun men who sought to improve their appearance by hair gel and gym membership cards. It was all artificial and didn't come with a guarantee, especially once bound to such a deceitful man by marriage he could choose anytime to suddenly stop buying hair gel and subscribing to gym memberships. So the forward thinking future housewives of Japan continued to edge past a slightly peeved Matsuda to bask in the sparkling social presence of Light Yagami.
Maybe it wasn't a coincidence that Matsuda has chosen to write an argumentive essay on how bullshit the story of the hare and the tortoise was for his English lit assignment. He made quite a decent job of it actually, really insightful and full of sarcastic humour. It came as quite a shock since L was so used to seeing really mundane but well-articulated neatly structured essays from Matsuda he usually just skipped ahead to the last word of the last paragraph on the last page and scrawled a lowercase A minus beneath it.
After class the next day, it was L who was the one to ask Matsuda to stay behind. The boy forgot himself and bore the same poor stoop backed posture from freshman year, all artificial confidence deserting him. But his jaw clenched in an attractive manner L had not noticed before, not exactly square like lights but so much more sharply pronounced, like an irregular V that bashed inwards at the sides to resemble a poorly handled package-no that was a crap metaphor-it resembled-
"Sensei"
Whatever metaphor he had been thinking of flinched back into a vacant crack in his mind at the sound of the plaintive sexless wail.
"I wanted to talk to you about your essay."
Matsuda's posture depressed into even more of an unattractive V shape with its only redeeming feature being the sweating hands he clasped to cover his sagging fly zip.
"I'm so sorry sensei! I was just in this really bitter mood when I wrote it, I tried to edit it but nothing I did made it sound presentable enough, so then I started rewriting it-but then there was this-"
"It was nothing short of excellent."
L said, sure to stilt the last word with the kind of flattering italics which bent so to the side they nearly touched the ground, with the easy grace of a submissive student bending right to the ground before his English lit teacher to brandish a pair of teddy bear patterned boxers like the ones he saw peeking out from above Matsudo's belt to reveal no less than an inch of butt crack.
He wondered if Matsuda picked upon the metaphorical auditory eroticism. Clearly he didn't, in the length of that single sentence the boy had gone from looking like an aimless plastic bag that had been drifting through the wind to a house of cards about to cave in.
Before Matsuda could pollute the earth with the after effect of hydrogen from exploding into a corny firework of joy, L spoke again.
"You didn't feel any sort of affinity with that tortoise did you?"
He wasn't trying to hamper Matsudas parade. He just preferred intelligent conversation that led to somewhere as opposed to the mindless stroking of someone else's ego. But his pupil didn't see it in the same light because his posture suddenly shot back up into ten times its classic frigidly erect state.
"What?!-No, it's just that the message in that story was so full of shit it might as well have been a motherfucking blocked toilet-hard work never triumphs over talent. Truly talented people can treat work ethic like some optional extracurricular and still get away with it."
Matsuda stopped for a brief moment-probably to think out some more appropriately theoretical hand gestures he could use to convey his next point as he'd used up the extent of his daily verbal quota.
"If it were real life that hare could've passed out into a fucking coma and he would've still woken up in time to win the race."
He finally said, appropriately accompanying every second word with some mawkish uninspired hand/arm gesture before shrivelling back into L's dreary doormat of an English lit pupil.
L was impressed. Yes Matsuda spoke, he spoke very often but that was rationed to only one or two short sentences at a time. Most of which were just trivial commentary on the sidelines of someone else's long dragged out opinion. But all the same, Matsuda had evaded the question and gone into a long rant of his own. L took that as an unspoken yes.
"So why do you even bother trying to catch up if it's clearly so painful? The higher you climb the harder you're going to eventually fall."
L mentally cringed at having to have to put such a biased slant on his own views to prod a substantial response from his now favourably subtitled unpredictable dreary doormat of an English lit pupil. But luckily Matsuda was too self-degrading a person to be able to lift his head from his hands and observe flaws in someone other than himself.
"I'm not vain enough to try compete with Light. It's too depressing to even try, he puts in way less effort than I do and his test scores are the highest in Japan meanwhile I just manage to scrape out high B's and the occasional A minus. As I am now I'm already lying on dirt, so I don't have anything to 'fall' from."
L ignored the obnoxious spoken quotation marks since he himself had crossed a line with his own insensitive questions. There was only one more left to ask.
"Was there ever…" L began just wetting his toes with the suspense yet to come, "an affair between you and Light Yagami?"
It was the breaking point for L was beginning to think of as an unwavering tolerance.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Sensei."
Matsuda's jaw cemented into a steely defiance that confirmed he would not be humouring any more intrusive questions and left the room, leaving L alone with his forgotten stack of textbooks.
On top of his chunky books for physics and chemistry lay a small paperback. The sheaf of pages dangled halfway out their spine when L turned it over to read the title. 'Les Fleurs De Mal'.
Somewhere in him, something suddenly nudged his conscious to whisper; that maybe right now it would be natural to feel some pity for his poor pretentious wreck of a pupil. While no such pity came to dug at his heartstrings, L did have something of an obligation.
So he pocketed the brutally well-loved piece of text and resolved to have a very important discussion with Mello once he got home.
"Tadaima".
Yuriko Touta winced as the sores on her chapped mouth broke out into a helpless smile at the revival of her only sons long awaited presence. Matsuda's eight hour school days had started to stretch on even longer after he was nominated as deputy of the student council president. Yuriko tried not to feel too hurt when he began sacrificing an increasing number of his afternoons at home with her in favour of devotedly shuffling piles of paperwork for the beloved president of the student council committee. Light Yagami. Yuriko tried not to resent the boy too much for managing to keep her son so well under his thumb when he'd never quite been able to fit fully under his mothers. Even as a child he'd often complacently nod his head at her before racing off into another muddy adventure once her back was turned.
Yuriko was aware few other mothers struggled with such intense lonely aches and irrationally possessive feelings once their children matured into late teenage hood. She knew Sachiko Yagami, a classic example of the typical middle aged Japanese housewife would've only smiled wanly and fondly reminisced with Soichoro over their sons lost childhood years. Maybe if she was feeling indulgent she'd also have permitted herself a brief cry once her husband retired to bed. But then she would've unlocked the glass cabinet beneath the bookcase, pushed those precious little trinket boxes engraved with soppy titles such as 'my first tooth' and 'my first hair' to a corner and stashed Lights toddler photo's back in beside Sayu's. Then next day she would return to happily smoothing ruffles in trivial domestic matters, such as dropping of her husband's forgotten bento to work, ironing Sayu's school uniform and setting the table for customary weekly dinner with the in law's.
Yuriko Touta had no such familial occupations to distract herself with. She'd no formal qualifications or work experience to make her suitable for any of the jobs a city as ambitious as Tokyo could offer to her. If her health wasn't so poor she would've gone on to collage to attain the right pieces of paper for something she wanted to do. She wasn't sure what that something was. At the age of thirty, when she'd just given birth to Matsuda she thought she did. And she had for a while at least, but she soon realised being a mother wasn't a conscious role. She was still Yuriko Touta, and being a mother should've only been one her many attributed qualities. Over the past three years that role had been forced to become a lot less active than it used to be. Her sudden overall passivity scared her into taking on a number of short lived hobbies to prove to herself that Yuriko Touta had as powerful an identity as Matsuda's mother.
These hobbies had included cooking six course Italian meals, knitting, fixing clocks, gothic calligraphy, chess, attempting to learn fluent Spanish, and her current favourite; cactus farming.
She kept her most recent one on her bedside so hopefully she'd sometimes forget to water it. It was her fifth cactus in the past month and so far the only one to have lasted an entire week. She'd kept the past four on a shelf above the kitchen sink so she wouldn't forget to water them. The decision had backfired when in turn, each had swelled twice their normal size before turning such an unattractive pus coloured yellow she'd been forced to throw them away by day five.
But today her son needed her again. She knew it by his hollow eyes and half-hearted greeting. She couldn't help but feel perversely happy to be needed once more.