The water water is so cold/ It poisons anyone who calls/ A loving hand and daring kiss/ Now watch here's everything you miss
It's getting hard to look away/ It's not your real face anyway/ This smile's too easy to disperse/ Et moi je prie pour une averse - Christine and the Queens, Narcissus is Back
1 of 8 or so Chapters
An Oleander Sweetness
As a woman of nearly incomparable intellectual worth and one who had solid interpersonal walls up - L Lawliet was not usually one to get mixed up with popular young women like Light and Misa.
L knew these details about the female Kira suspect and so much more: Light Yagami was a brilliant 17 year old college student who wasn't trying to be a model but she nevertheless had an 1,000 plus member online fan club who traded her candid photographs while swooning and overreacting via emoticons.
Light was certainly worth that interest, she had long pin straight auburn hair down to the small of her back with side-swept bangs, sparkling amber eyes and a perfect smile that her fans claimed could set anyone's heart at ease. She wore an expensive Omega timepiece which had been sent to her by an anonymous fan and she kept her fingernails tidy with clear gel polish. She preferred simple but elegant skirt and button up top combinations from Armani Exchange. She owned an alarming amount of cashmere cardigans. She wore a tawn Burberry leather briefcase with a minimalist logo. She presented herself at all times as refined; she kept a dignified bearing and perfect posture. At home she kept to a tight schedule and there were only minimal signs she wasn't above human foibles- she'd hid a stash of potato chips and cola for herself and she played nintendo video games with her younger sister. She studied and did her school work diligently. She ignored the social media messages she received from would-be suitors and even, it seemed, friends. But Light Yagami was more complex than this still because something never felt right to L. After weeks of bugging her place, she was still met with the nagging feeling most the routine was for show.
Maybe even those stupid potato chips were for show. The girl looked adorably awkward eating them while studying. It was almost as if she'd never really eaten potato chips before. She ate them with a little flourish of her hand as if each individual chip were valuable. The way a person would eat perhaps a truffle or cherry cordial.
This nagging feeling L had solidified when Light had perused a pornographic magazine for women. L felt assured then that her suspect must be onto her. There was just no way someone with a 158 IQ was buying a porno rag in the age of the internet. These were just enough comfortable details to set L at ease that Light was a regular college hopeful but the detective was not that oblivious.
As for the second Kira: Misa Amane was 19 years old and a triple threat idol by trade. She was famous enough for her product-moving cuteness that agencies often sent her abroad for gigs because no one else could find her like. L had figured out Misa, her motivations, her preferences and her likely future actions within half a day of bugging her place. She'd liked the occult since her parents had been murdered and it gave her a sense of power over her confusing aftermath. She admired Kira for killing criminals of the sort who had murdered her family. She was obsessed with gothic lolita culture, sexy underwear, expensive make-up such that she spent half her income on these things. She responded to all social media messages like it was her job. Perhaps she felt it was. L found her boring but admittedly her shoulder length blonde hair and dark brown eyes couldn't have been set into a cuter visage. Mostly it was like watching a puppy follow Light around to the detective's eyes. Her feelings toward the woman veered between mild attraction and deep annoyance. And any of that attraction... well put that down to Misa being truly stupidly cute and helpless such that watching her made people, even people like L, feel protective.
No. L didn't know how to begin to relate to women like Light and Misa. L's profession was such that the people she socialized with throughout her days were typically either older law enforcement officers, many older, normal-looking experts in every field of study, and the gifted orphaned children she helped sponsor with her extravagant funds through Wammy's House in England.
So they were both a few statistical deviations away from the average look of people in her life. And... Light Yagami, in addition to being possessed of great natural beauty, may well have been the only intellectual peer anywhere near her age that she'd ever encountered in real life.
She couldn't understand most women - all the time they were willing to waste on physical appearance and moderating themselves to be attractive. The way L dressed was in simple loose fitting levi's jeans and a plain white t-shirt. A combination both purposefully misleading and profoundly simple. She didn't want to ever spend time thinking about her wardrobe. She'd had most mistake her for an owl-eyed young boy with no self-care routine though she was a 25 year old woman with impeccable personal hygiene.
She counted on her self-presentation also making her a foreigner to other people's desires. It was still a patriarchal world, especially Japan - humankind hadn't evolved enough yet to understand that gender was not destiny and her gender was a liability when many people already wanted to control her for her famous mind.
L wore no make-up, she never made any attempts to cover her natural black circles, she adorned herself with none of the trappings of her gender like jewelry or complicated shoes, she hated shaving, and she'd only ever let her father-figure Watari tend to hair when the mop of it grew truly wild.
She kept a studied gender neutral accent. She bound her modest breasts to where they laid completely flat every morning. Any attention they may garner her might have been detrimental to having the most effective possible professional relationships with the many men she worked with on a daily basis.
And thus, she came across as asexual. Not because she was; rather, she wanted to give off that impression. Truly sex was normally the furthest thing from her mind… but it was not completely off-putting to her to entertain her own human needs. She hadn't lost her virginity ever. She wasn't necessarily interested in doing so but she would occasionally get herself off.
But in her mind, she was a girl despite her carefully gender neutral self presentation. She was at peace enough with her gender - she simply didn't like to and didn't need to deal with any of the societal bullshit of being a girl.
She worried that because she had kept a great, though unintended, distance from exceptionally attractive people like these two girls all her life… that Amane and Yagami-san's status as an intellectually mismatched but smokingly hot secret lesbian couple affected her in a way where she might well be losing her objectivity to judge them.
They were both younger than her by more than five years. She had never seen her investigative intrusions into others' personal lives as being morally wrong. Her intentions were never anything other than serving justice and helping the world rid itself of more complicated problems; but for the first time in her life she was frightening herself. Her growing interest in the two female suspects of the current investigation; in particular, her snowballing interest in Light Yagami was feeling further outside of her control all the time. The Tokyo University genius insidiously became a soothing second voice in her head even though she'd before she'd as much as met the college co-ed in person.
Prior to this happening she had observed suspects with near total detachment. She'd had always been driven by her pure intentions to resolve the cases she took on as expediently as possible and she was perfectly capable of viewing other people as pawns to be moved. Yagami-chan's natural charisma and multiplicity of possible motives was turning her continued detachment from a natural tendency into a daily herculean effort.
She'd known she was miles away from objectivity now. She'd known she was compromised since she'd had to lock herself in her bedroom in the middle of her work day with her hand over her mouth to massage her own cunt soothingly after watching video footage of the two girls kissing each other on a date.
She'd supposed they felt safe to show affection under the cover of darkness at the back of a quiet movie theatre in Shibuya. But L had been able to see everything as if they had done it in broad daylight because of the night function on the camera she'd ordered installed as soon as she'd tracked their movie ticket purchase.
An executive decision was made on her part before she made an untimely adjournment to her bedroom that day. She'd deleted that scene on instinct before the others on the Japanese task force could look over it - the rest of the police force assigned to the case would not ever be viewing this video especially Matsuda-san who already had an unhidden thing for Light Yagami.
Perhaps it was for the privacy of undisclosed sexuality of the two suspects that she didn't want to share the soft-core intimacy she'd caught on video.
But it was likely more self-oriented than that, so that the task force didn't ever see her reaction when she watched it. She wasn't a natural actress capable of perfectly schooling her features like Light Yagami so clearly was. And she wouldn't ever be able to watch this without growing hot under the collar.
The two suspects had been careful in public. It had been the first sign of non-platonic physicality she'd ever seen expressed between the two unlikely 'girl friends'. But it made clear the two had done more than kiss before. The familiarity with which they caressed each other was on par with a couple. The much smaller woman leaned into the fit tennis player who started tweaking her right nipple under the skimpy cloth of her long sleeve half tee-shirt.
In those moments, Light'd shed her perfect upstanding good girl routine like a second skin and hadn't kissed Misa sweetly or serenely either; it had been as if she'd intended to devour the petite woman. The idol returned that kiss with visible admiration and longing.
They broke a long make-out session to breathe and Misa leaned in to whisper something to Light that L had to rewind a couple times to lip-read enough to interpret what was being communicated between them.
Misa twirled Light's long auburn hair on repeat with her index finger, and whispered, "Don't you dare date anyone else. I'd have to kill them."
Light simply smiled a little too warmly in response to the threat as if humoring the idea. She said nothing in response but she did get a little more rough - she pulled the smaller girl by her pigtails up to resume kissing her.
The percentages for them being Kira as a pair ticked way, way up in L's head. And if L had shown the video to the other members of the task force they would have agreed it was a suspicious thing for Misa to whisper… but they never would be seeing this recording.
The detective couldn't tell if her twitchy fingers typing in the code for permanent deletion had been an exercise in protecting the young women… or the first sign she was already defeated.
After even as the case sped forward like an inevitable train crash… This secret of the girls' romantic entanglement became a bit of critical information she'd then regularly hid from the men assigned to the Kira case. Even when she took Misa hostage after she found her prints on the envelope for the tapes she would delete the parts of the video where the woman was begging for Light to come save her or at least come kiss her one last time.
Light Yagami hadn't been necessary to moderate once she was on her own though because she never let on that Misa was anything more in her eyes than a close friend and an idol whose singing voice she'd admired.
Her ability to switch between involved and uninvolved so easily should have worried L more than it did.
It only took a couple weeks sleeping in a California king sized bed chained to each other for Light to be the one that started to question the purity of L's research motives into her being Kira. This was after waking up one too many times to the detective's intense staring.
"Ryuuga," She started in at 1 am, addressing 'L' by the 'dragon' pseudonym which they both know couldn't be a real name, "What's keeping you up these nights? Is it too hot to sleep near me?"
"You snore like a freight train. It's horrible." She lied which made Light laugh incredulously.
"I feel like that's something Sayumi would've teased me about by now, or that my mother who checks in on me regularly would have sent me to the doctor about long ago." Argued the young woman sounding genuinely affronted because she knew she did no such thing.
"Yagami-kun is defending herself to me as passionately as usual. Does she have to be so perfect? Light's need to come across as flawless is typical for the megalomaniacal."
"I'm not perfect Ryuu… but, I'm definitely not Kira and I definitely don't snore. I'm on defense because you won't let go of your accusations even when we both know they are false." She looks down pointedly to the slighter, shorter woman's chest. "Why don't you unbind those ridiculous bandages before sleeping? Little things like others' breathing may be less likely to wake you if you aren't constricted."
L shook her head that she wouldn't do so; to which Light groaned exasperatedly. Then unexpectedly, Light reached out to dig under L's large white bed shirt to grab at the offending bandages making the detective gasp and squirm away but then froze as a soft hand touched a tender part of her waist in a way that sent a shock through her body.
"Don't tense up like this is some kind of a big deal. You've seen my chest too."
Yes, she many times she'd seen Light's enviable hourglass-shaped body nude on camera, the showers in HQ were bugged too, but a fear to be naked in front of the taller, more solid Japanese woman wasn't why she was frozen. Light had put one satin-smooth manicured hand on her waist to steady her and had lifted her oversized white bed shirt up so that L's simple Calvin Klein white boy shorts and binding… so all of that could be seen. L worried, flushed, that perhaps her white panties were the worst kind to disguise the evidence of encroaching arousal. She had never thought about their flimsiness before the most beautiful charismatic young woman in Tokyo had been trying to set her breasts free from their bindings.
L tried to meet the other woman's amber eyes to communicate her feelings. She couldn't catch them. Light was no-nonsense about her assessment that L could sleep soundly if only freed from the bindings, so there she was now seriously unbinding L chest and wrapping the remainder of the long bandage around her own shackled wrist.
Once L's modest breasts were fully bared to the younger woman - she reached out to pull L's cotton bedshirt back down over them. L wasn't about to let this interaction end without calling out the behavior for what it could be interpreted as; she grabbed Light's wrist where the bandages were pooled.
Then Light met the dark fathomless pools of L's eyes. Even in the low lighting she thought she was communicating pretty effectively that she was turned on, flushed as she'd become.
"Do you like what you see?" For L this was bold, and she bit her lip in a way that she'd once read expressed sexual desire. It was the most forward she'd ever been with another human being but she took to the new role comfortably.
Light's mouth opened a little like she wanted to speak but thought the better of it. In a knee-jerk response she glanced the detective who was still bared to her from the waist up and down.
"Are you trying to turn me on ?" She said seemingly humorlessly but she pulled Light's wrist in, wrapped her other arm partially about the girls back to urge her down and up towards her own waiting, hopeful mouth.
Light struggled away probably not even fully understanding that L was seeking a first kiss between them; but she was blushing. Even in the low light L could make out her flush.
"That was super unprofessional." Light Yagami said after she had gotten back to her side of the bed and she'd caught her breath. She adjusted the brown terry cloth headband she slept in to keep her hair in order and moved to the end of the bed to lay back down so that the chain between them was practically taut.
L generated a percentage in her head then in a new category she'd created for this hopeful but insane thing happening between the two of them now. The younger woman wanted L as well - probability was 76%. But she'd explore that later. She needed time to think about Kira, Light had definitely been Kira at some point and she probably still was; she needed time to make peace with her gods - justice, logic and humanism- before she started a relationship with someone who believed they were one.
She pulled her bed shirt back down and chastised the younger girl, "Says someone who just undressed me without asking."
"That wasn't for... you are kind of an asshole!" Light said turning away from her and putting the elastic bindings at the side of the bed. "I was only doing it because I was worried for…" The sound of Ryuuga's slowed breathing paused her in her justifications.
Light turned to the detective and finished the sentence. "You." L was curled up in a tight ball, her skinny toned legs tightly squared against her freed chest. She had pretended to be conked out and she was snoring loudly.
L knew that Light wouldn't fall back asleep again for hours.