an lxlight drabble for tumblr user deathnoting. the prompt was: lxlight, taking place in some country that isn't japan.
Sevilla
In Seville, the blood oranges are rotting.
It is late summer. A solemn newscaster on the television warns of a heat wave rolling in from North Africa. L and Light spend most of their time splayed across the tile floor of the kitchenette, sharing one laptop. Outside, the oranges drop, leaving pink suicide-stains on the sidewalk. The scent is pervasive and bitter, accumulating in their hair and clothes and bed sheets.
L has Light doing menial tasks; namely, interviewing witnesses over the phone while posing as the chief of police. For seven days, there have been sightings of a ghost ship, moored off a port on the Guadalquivir River. The surrounding neighborhood has reached a level of apocalyptic panic, but Light is having difficultly corroborating even the most general details about the ship's appearance.
"There's nothing to this," Light finally snaps, strung out on lukewarm espresso. When he'd begun working for L, Light had expected to be uncovering vast conspiracies, dismantling organized crime syndicates, recovering stolen masterpieces. Instead, he's spent seven months trailing L across the globe, chasing rumors and occult artifacts, attempting to quell L's newfound fixation on the supernatural.
When L doesn't immediately answer, Light continues, "It all sounds like mass hysteria to me. There are groups of parishioners praying on the docks. The bishop is predicting the end of the world."
"Did he give a date?" L asks, swatting a fly away from his caramel custard.
Light can't think of anything sufficiently terrible to say to that. They sit in silence for a moment, listening to the rattle of an elevator climbing through the hotel walls.
Three weeks ago, they had been in Gaborone, investigating reports of an enormous jackal that had torn seven poachers to pieces. Before that, it had been Nova Scotia, where locals claimed a wendigo was sucking villagers into the sky. Light's memories of his last year in Tokyo are pale and inconsistent, but he has seen enough of his own case files to know that L is hunting shinigami, or something like them.
"Mm, you're right," L finally concedes, absently twisting his mug against the kitchen floor. His cheeks and forehead are flushed. A sullen, introspective L is like a tremor before the ground cracks open. "Let's think of this as a vacation, then."
All Light knows of Seville is what he sees through the window — minarets that tear into the underbellies of low clouds, the silhouette of a Moorish fortress on the hilltop. L leans in and nips at the soft pulp of skin behind Light's ear. His hair is slightly damp, and cool against Light's cheekbone.
"I was reading about green lights seen in the skies above Denmark."
"Stop that," Light says, "You just said we were on vacation."
"It's a very short vacation."
Sometimes, L's voice feels like a rubber band, snapping against Light's wrist. Tomorrow night, they will be board a business jet for Copenhagen. After that, perhaps Tangiers, or Salzburg, or Singapore. But tonight, they are in Spain, and Spain is the country of lovers, and murderers, and survivors of war — of which, they are all three.
The appliances in their hotel room hum a comforting white noise, the same in every city they pass through. L's left hand undoes the top buttons of Light's shirt, while the right closes windows on his laptop. L kisses Light like they are poised on the edge of an old argument. L kisses Light like he is the source of all his irrational fears.
L kisses Light like he is as bitter as the oranges, piled on the streets below them.