Author's Note: Love and cookies to all reviewers; I promise to reply better when I'm not shirking various duties and being a bad child. Enjoy. x)
III. Order and Sanity
Socks were important. Socks could tell you a lot about a person—their color, their material, hell, their cleanliness; all were indicative of the character of their wearer.
Maybe that was why Ryuzaki was the wildest enigma since the Loch Ness Monster had been spotted in the Bermuda Triangle—because he had no damn socks.
Truth be told, however, Light really couldn't care less whether his socks were going to be black or white on this particular Apocalyptic morning. It was just that he needed something to do other than stand there watching Ryuzaki dress.
He tried to clench his fingers around the edge of the drawer as inconspicuously as possible. Watching Ryuzaki dress. Was there a more rewarding act of partially-condoned voyeurism in the wide and twisted world?
Well, there was watching Ryuzaki undress. But if he started thinking like that, started letting himself imagine, started picking out the details of the vivid picture threatening to swim into focus in his head, he would lose his mind, and that would be a bit of a waste.
He looked at his knuckles where their pale peaks rose from the drawer front. They didn't seem to be inclined to talk about it, either of them. Rather, they seemed to be inclined to tiptoe around it and avoid even the minutest mention of what had, unequivocally and not-quite-regrettably, taken place the night before. It was like walking on eggshells—or perhaps the shards of broken lightbulbs.
Struggling not to cringe, Light snatched a pair of white socks after all and sat down on the bed to tug them on, the chain thrumming gently through the air between them.
The chain. It was because of that damn chain, linking them, tangling them, forcing their personal bubbles to collide and then merge into this ungodly opalescent union, this uneasy collaboration, this ineffable tension that darted about his ears like a mosquito with a vengeance. It was because of the chain. It had nothing to do with his sentiments and susceptibilities, nothing to do with the things he'd dreamed without ever hoping, nothing to do with Ryuzaki's damp hair in his tremendous storm-cloud eyes.
Certainly none of that.
He laced his shoes, the bows perfectly centered, the loops even on either side. Order. That was what he needed, what the world needed, what was missing here. Order, and sanity.
Ryuzaki was waiting for him, clothed again, looking no more or less unkempt than usual, and Light followed him out into the central meeting room, with its striped couches and rows of computer screens—dark now as they waited, humming, to be fully roused back into life.
As Ryuzaki attended to the intricate business of breakfast, as the plain black coffee in his plain black mug sacrificed its steam to the air about them, as the clock ticked with gusto, Light adjusted the pages of the newspaper spread before him to give the impression that he was reading it. He even went so far as to send his eyes skimming over the lines, though of course his mind was elsewhere.
Namely, in the Realm of God-Help-Us.
It had happened. That was the basic certainty. It had happened, in a strange, unprecedented explosion-collision of two independent entities; in a crushing of skin on skin; in a shimmering of the trails left by exploratory tongues, and it couldn't be reneged now. And the fact that they refused to discuss it (not that Light would, in a thousand lifetimes, have begun that conversation) indicated, quite succinctly, that it was never going to happen again.
Ulcerous disappointment nibbled at his stomach lining. Of course he didn't want it to happen again. Of course he didn't want to stumble towards the warm, bleary haze of sleep with his arms curled almost protectively around the man perched on the chair opposite his. Of course he didn't want that incorrigible hair tickling at his eyelids, long-fingered hands clenched loosely where they rested against Light's collarbone.
His inward smile was bitterer by far than the unmitigated coffee surrendering its warmth to the air.
Why would he want that?
It was to be expected. If the world's greatest detective was to fall in l—was to have a rela—was to… develop… an affinity for someone, it wouldn't be some uppity kid who criticized all his habits and tried to undermine his theories.
Besides, if Ryuzaki didn't still harbor suspicions that Light was Kira, there wouldn't be a silver chain coiled on the tabletop.
What it came down to was that he wished he could remember it better, because it was an isolated incident.
"Light-kun?" Ryuzaki prompted.
Light glanced up and moved automatically to pass the sugar.
"Do you remember how it was that we came to be inebriated last night?"
That stopped his hand halfway to the sugar bowl. He stared at Ryuzaki, the primary lingual centers of his brain boycotting coherency all at once. He suspected a conspiracy, or at least a union strike.
Apparently they were talking about it.
"I don't recall consuming anything unusual," Ryuzaki was musing, thumb at his lips. "Do you?"
Oh, God, the things Light wanted to do to that thumb.
Light swallowed, something of a trial at this juncture. "I don't remember," he coughed up on the third attempt.
Ryuzaki nodded thoughtfully. "My recollections are hazy at best." Did he mean the process of getting drunk, or the entire—thing? The entire night? The entire—experience?
Light needed to quit now before his precipitously-warming face set him on fire.
"Alcohol would have burned out of a cake," Ryuzaki was musing, largely to himself. "We would have tasted it in tea." Absently, he pushed his plate away with one hand and commenced licking crumbs from the fingertips of the other.
Light was beginning to wonder when emergency rescue crews were going to notice his face and try to extinguish him.
"Maybe it'll come to us," he suggested, his voice sounding surprisingly level. He picked up his coffee mug, mentally gauged its contents against cold motor oil, and knocked half of it back in a single gulp despite the frightening similarities, shuddering heavily as it oozed down his throat. "You want to get back to business?"
It was probably the whole post-one-night-stand thing, but everything sounded like a double-entendre today.
Ryuzaki blinked at him placidly. "I am ready when you are," he announced.
Light cringed.
