Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.
L, I was not surprised to discover, did not eat normal things for breakfast. He provided normal things for the rest of us, of course, but he never got near them himself. So while I shuffled through a cabinet for some health cereal (pushing aside the various obligatory sugar cereals), the sexy detective rifled through the refrigerator and came out with... a whole cake.
I stopped dead and stared at him. Trying not to sound entirely bitchy, I said, "Are you really going to eat that entire cake?"
"Not immediately, no," L said, not removing his eyes from the cheerful-looking pastry.
"Then why did you take out the whole cake? Don't you usually keep several individual slices next to an unsliced cake?" I kind of wished I didn't know that.
"There are no pieces there this morning. Only the whole cake."
He just looked bewildered. Maybe he didn't know where the knives were kept. Figuring I may as well be helpful, I reached around and removed a long knife out of a knife block. When I offered it to him, the bastard flinched.
"I'm not going to stab you, Ryuuzaki," I said crossly.
"It is simply a reflex, Light-kun, I assure you."
"Sure."
L accepted the knife, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, as usual. It would certainly be interesting to see how he could cut things this way.
Except he didn't. He just kept staring at the cake, knife unused in his hand.
Finally, the potential problem occurred to me. But no, surely...
"Don't tell me you don't know how to do this."
L flinched again. I was right. "Of course I know how," he said curtly. "It is not complicated, Light-kun, and I am certain that I have the mental capacity to grasp the concept even if it were."
I felt my smirk widen. "Oh, really? Then why aren't you cutting it?"
L cocked his head, but he still didn't take his eyes off the cake. "It is... not one of my strong points. The things I cut often fall apart. Normally this would not be of concern to me, but in this particular situation we are dealing with cake, of which, as you know, I am incredibly fond."
If the man weren't a genius, no one would put up with his quirks.
Incidentally, 'quirky' was far too nice a word for him. The phrase my brain usually provided me with was much less polite.
For whatever reason, though, as much as I rolled my eyes, it didn't actually bother me to take the knife from the fully grown man and cut the cake for him. Maybe it was the way he kept materializing on the other side of me, darting back and forth, watching me cut from every angle possible. Maybe it was the way he crouched on the floor at the end of the counter across from me, so that I could only see his huge, endless eyes and the top of his head as he gazed at his beloved treat some more. Maybe it was how he suddenly sprang to his feet and fetched a stack of plates. More likely, it was the way he was just being all-around adorable about the whole affair. Whatever the reason, though, I didn't mind, and I kind of enjoyed it.
It was here that my OCD served me well. I cut up the whole cake, and made every slice perfect and equal. Perhaps because of this, L was actually bouncing a little by the time I finished, and I couldn't help but laugh at him.
"Can I have a piece now, Light-kun?" he asked in his childish voice, staring at one of my perfectly proportioned slices of the white-frosted confection.
I picked up the plate L was eyeing (not that any of them were different, but maybe it mattered to him?) and the man's gaze followed. "Here you go, Ryuuzaki," I chuckled.
His face lit up and he took the plate reverently. "Thank you, Light-kun," he said solemnly.
I smiled, my heart doing some kind of flopping motion. "No problem."
Because L was busy with his cake (and because he just looked so darned adorable), I put the rest of the slices back for him and took the opportunity to paw through the refrigerator for anything I would actually classify as food. Eventually I had to give up and settle for the instant oatmeal I had spotted in the cabinet earlier.
By the time I sat down across from L with my steaming bowl, L had demolished his first slice and was already on his second. Clearly he was able to operate a refrigerator on his own. The thought make me want to vomit (the second slice at breakfast, not the fact that L can operate a refrigerator), but if something as simple as well-sliced cake could make L this happy...
He glanced at my oatmeal, munching away. "The granulated sugar is over there, Light-kun," he informed me, pointing.
I glanced automatically where he had indicated and then returned my attention to my food. "I don't want to sweeten my oatmeal."
L stared. "But... Light-kun... I can smell it. It is unsweetened."
"I'm not overly fond of sweet things, Ryuuzaki."
"I see," he replied after a moment. "Watari is that way as well," L mused, taking another bite of cake. "No matter how many times I offer him cake, he turns it down. Odd."
I shrugged. "A lot of people are like that. Anyway, it's really not that bad. You should try eating something without sugar, sometime."
He tilted his head thoughtfully. "It's virtually impossible to find food that does not contain sugar, Light-kun. Even what you are eating contains maltose."
"You know what I mean, Ryuuzaki."
He considered this, then conceded. "I suppose you're right. And perhaps I should sample something that is not sweet."
Was I about to witness The Great and Powerful L eating something that wasn't laden with table sugar? I spooned a small taste of my (admittedly) cardboard-oatmeal. "Do you want to try it?"
I watched as he hesitated, part of me doubting that he would take me up on the offer, but eventually he nodded. I held the spoon out to the hunched-over older man. Instead of taking the spoon like most people would from something who isn't a close friend, L climbed up onto the table and leaned in to eat it off the extended spoon.
Again, I thought, he was being too adorable for his own good. He had moments that I was sure would warm the heart of even Kira himself, not that I'm Kira. And of course, his lips wrapping around the spoon- his tongue and lips that were talented from all that ice cream, all those lollipops, and licking the frosting off of doughnuts- was reminding me of an issue I still had and my previous, internally proposed solution.
He sat back in his chair (crouched back onto his chair) and almost twitched, making the face I had seen once when he had forgotten to add sugar cubes to his coffee before drinking it.
"I take it you don't like it," I observed pleasantly.
"As usual, Light Yagami cannot be fooled," he grumbled, taking a large bite of just the frosting part of the cake with an almost-angry 'nom' sound to make up for the oatmeal.
"Well, I'm still glad you tried it. It's good to try new things."
Trying to ignore that double entendre, we finished our breakfast in silence.
L was watching me eat, cringing at my unsweetened oatmeal but also seeming fascinated by something. Had trying a bite of something not sweet made him lose his mind and become fascinated with people eating? More importantly, was there oatmeal on my face? How embarrassing would it be to go out to the main investigation room with a lingering hard on and oatmeal on my face? That's Light Yagami, the boy who gets way too excited about oatmeal.
Worried that my drifting thoughts might be showing on my face (and right now I was picturing him doing extremely naughty things to me), I tried to focus on eating. Then I noticed how dirty eating off a spoon was. I mean really. Just because there were some common motions between eating off a spoon and...
Actually, this was really not the time to think about it. Breakfast? Come now.
Damn. Bad choice of words, again.
The moment I was done, L jumped to his feet and dragged me by the chain to the investigation area. No one else was there yet because it was still stupidly early in the morning. In the past, I would have said that it was impossible for me to successfully eat breakfast at like two in the morning, but apparently I can do it.
L sat right down, forcing me after him.
It was a long day but I couldn't focus, and as a result I got absolutely nothing done. I wrote a few pointless but very long emails as the other taskforce members arrived, Googled a few statistics about recent heart attacks, and dug deeper into the dustiest, most obscure corners of the internet for any rambling, useless Kira website we hadn't come across yet. I discovered that someone in the United States had made a MySpace for the serial killer (how quaint), and that he had 542,117 friends, including that guy who was automatically everyone's friend. For lack of anything better to do, I decided to point this out to L. L ignored me and I sighed, and somehow, eventually, to my immense relief, the day actually ended.
As people were staring to go home for the day, Matsuda stood up. "Everyone! I have an announcement to make!"
Aizawa covered his face with his hands and groaned. "Really, Matsuda?"
Matsuda's smile faded a bit, but he would not be silenced. He held something up, a DVD case, apparently, and across the front was written something in English. "I want us all to watch this movie." I tilted my head to read it at the angle at which he held it, but L, quicker with English for obvious reasons, read it aloud first.
"Matsuda-san, isn't it in poor taste for the Kira Investigation Team to be watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre?" he said monotonously.
There was a moment of awkward silence.
Maybe I could use this to fuck with L. That would be fun, and it might even release some of the tension in my shoulders that has been giving me pain lately. So I said, "I don't know, Ryuuzaki, I would kind of like to see it. I mean, you can keep working if you want. We can just drag a TV over here."
I could feel L's ice cold glare on the back of my neck and I almost chuckled. He hated to be the bad guy. Made him feel too much like who he thought I was.
"That's the spirit, Light! What about you guys?" Matsuda asked, unsurprisingly oblivious to the temperature of the room, addressing Aizawa, Mogi, Misa, and my father.
Aizawa spoke for all of them. "Not interested. Have fun."
Matsuda sighed and drooped. "Alright. Well... see you tomorrow, then."
The hopeful expression Matsuda gave L as the older men left had the desired effect, and my amusement level was rapidly rising. L looked longingly at his computers for a moment longer, then sighed slightly, his shoulders falling a good inch, and focused his attention on Matsuda.
"Very well, we will watch the movie."
Matsuda's bright smile lit up the room, and I stifled laughter as L inwardly resigned to what he knew was inevitable.
*Chainsaw sounds*
*Screams*
*Maniacal laughter*
My plan had backfired a little, but just a little. In my eagerness to annoy L, it hadn't really sunken in that I would have to watch the movie, as well. The three of us watched as a man with a chainsaw hooked a shrieking woman up on a meat hook. Matsuda clutched a plushie of Misa close to him (I wondered if I was socially obligated to make a stink about that), openly shaking, watching with huge eyes as the cannibal onscreen began to hack at a body. Japanese subtitles flashed across the screen, but Matsuda clearly wasn't reading them anymore, too horrified by the, well, massacre.
L and I, however, were nowhere near as frightened. Also, to my dismay, he didn't seem nearly as annoyed as I was hoping he'd be.
"The dialogue and the subtitles disagree," L mumbled quietly to me.
"What, you can't follow?" I said, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow. I frowned when blood splattered across the room in the movie. "Arterial splatter isn't that powerful," I added to L's criticism under my breath.
"I am perfectly capable, Light-kun, I just do not appreciate the discrepancy. And you are correct about the arterial spray."
We watched with mild interest and amusement as the movie played on.
"That is impossible," L commented in a whisper.
I chuckled quietly, dampening the sound with a hand over my mouth so as not to distract from Matsuda's "enjoyment" of the movie.
"This whole thing is ridiculous, Ryuuzaki. We're just going to have to accept that or we'll drive ourselves insane pointing out everything that's wrong."
A very small, mischievous smile touched L's lips and I had to resist the urge to touch them too. "But it's fun."
"True."
Needless to say, no detail got past us.
When the movie finally came to an end, Matsuda was left on the couch, limp with exhaustion from fear. We would probably have to listen to Matsuda complain about being scared for days now... but at least it had inconvenienced L, even if it hadn't really annoyed him. Plus, it had been kind of fun.
"Guys... I'm going to bed," Matsuda said weakly. He hefted himself off of the couch and stumbled in the direction of the stairs that would lead him closest to his room, jumping a mile straight into the air then breaking into a run when I cleared my throat.
"We should probably follow him, Light-kun," L said boredly. "It is quite late."
Within ten minutes of that statement, we were in our bed, and L was actually lying next to me.
"Are you intending to sleep tonight, Ryuuzaki?" I asked, honestly curious. I had never seen the detective prone before, and it was interesting. He lay like a normal person, making it the only thing I had ever seen him do normally.
"I will most likely not be sleeping. I find it comfortable to lie down from time to time. Is that so unreasonable?"
"No," I replied. "I was just asking."
"Oh."
I turned over to my side, away from L, trying to ignore the gentle clink of the chain between us. I closed my eyes. The moment I did, images from the movie flashed unbidden through my mind. My eyes shot back open.
Apparently I had jumped, because L's voice sounded from nearby. "Light-kun?"
"I just flashed back to the movie. Nothing to worry about."
"Unrealistic as it may have been, it was intended to disturb its audience and I find that so far it has been successful. I have been thinking about it as well."
"Yeah."
I closed my eyes again, forcing the violent fictional deaths out of my mind. I replaced them with the first thing that popped into their place... Unfortunately the first thing that popped there was Naked Ryuuzaki, which was very counterproductive to sleep. I forced that thought out too and the next thing my brain supplied me with was the Kira case. That was always good. Just focus on (Ryuuzaki's arms) catching the serial killer that apparently agreed exactly with my own morals.
Agreed exactly. Agreed (Ryuuzaki's skin) to the point where it was almost scary how similar we were. If I was Kira...
Yes, I would (Ryuuzaki's ass) do it precisely the way Kira was doing it. Killing criminals and those who deserved to die.
But there was a difference. I would never allow myself to gain the reputation of a god. No, that just complicated things. And (Ryuuzaki's fingers) it was, I knew, exactly what made Kira wrong, even when I agreed with what he was doing. L (Ryuuzaki!), me, and Kira all had the same end goal in mind: a world free of crime and where the weak could live safely. L (who really had a nice body) and I, however, didn't believe we had the right to kill to achieve it.
But did the ends justify the means?
Yes.
But still, any nobility in Kira's mission was voided by the God complex he seemed to have... (Ryuuzaki. Ryuuzaki. Ryuuzaki. Ryuuzaki.)
I was almost asleep when a tremendously loud sound ripped through the air, sending me flying straight up and whipping towards L, who did the same thing at the same time, and flung my arms around the nearest entity, screaming "CHAINSAW!" in unison with someone else. I felt arms around me, too, and swung my head around, terrified, desperate to pinpoint the location of the cannibal who had clearly broken into our room and was now going to kill us and then slice us to pieces and then eat us and then...
My senses quickly returned to me. I relaxed, although I didn't let go of whatever I was holding. "Oh. It's the generator downstairs. I never noticed how much it sounds like a chainsaw," I chuckled nervously.
Who, as I was now aware, was the 'thing' that I was holding and that was holding me.
After a moment, I heard L say tightly, "I have come to the same conclusion."
"I thought we were smarter than this. How old are we? We're not children. We shouldn't have been frightened by a movie."
"If I may, Light-kun, you smell excellent."
That one brought the sexual tension back. We were still holding each other, and really quite tightly, our faces pressed together cheek to cheek. This was the closest I'd ever been to the man. My already racing heart picked up a bit more.
"You do, too," I observed. He smelled like laundry detergent. Strange. I would have expected him to stink. But really, since I had more than seen that he showers...
Awkward. Silence.
"I'm hungry," I lied suddenly, releasing him quickly and jumping out of bed. "Why don't we go downstairs and get something to eat? That should distract us from the sound of the generator."
"Good idea, Light-kun," L agreed monotonously.
This time I led, and didn't stop until we were in front of the refrigerator. "Cake, I assume?" It wasn't actually a question, and I already had a plate halfway out of the fridge.
L gave his 'justice will prevail' smile. "Naturally."
The urge for sweets struck me, as sometimes it does, especially after trauma. "I'll have some as well," I mused.
L stared at me as I passed him a plate of the cake I'd sliced earlier, and especially as I took one for myself. He didn't even look away when I sat down across from him and began to eat it.
L shuddered as he watched Light slide the pastry off the fork with his teeth.
Light was eating cake. This didn't happen often. No, not often at all. He felt his pants getting tighter, when he had barely recovered from earlier today. But... Light was eating cake. Light, who was already dangerously attractive, and who was his primary suspect for Kira, was actually consuming cake. Right in front of him. He didn't even normally eat sweets, and then he just jumps right to the best sweet of all- cake- with no warning or time for L to prepare to deal with it?
So sexy.
No, primary suspect.
Might as well be Kira.
Of course, he didn't have proof of that, or any reason to believe it other than his gut, so could he really be blamed if...?
"Ryuuzaki?" Light asked carefully. "Are you alright? You haven't touched your cake, which is unusual for you."
He had frosting on his lip. The man. Had frosting. On his lip.
L began to sweat. He would really have to either get new pants or go on a diet, or at least think more, because his previously loose jeans were now cutting him in half and it seemed like they had been doing that a lot lately, especially since meeting Light. Maybe being around Light caused him to eat more because of stress. Stress could change your metabolism and-
"Ryuuzaki?"
Light noticed the frosting on his lip and removed it with a finger, licking the finger to get the coagulated sugar out of the way.
L moaned quietly.
Kira. Kira. Kira Kira Kira. Kira. The one who kills people. The serial killer who it's your job to catch. And this is probably that very serial killer.
Light put down his fork and looked at him more closely, honestly concerned now. "Ryuuzaki, what's wrong? Why are you staring at me? Not that I'm not used to you staring at me, but..."
Kira. Kira Kira Kira. Kira. Ki-
"Ryuuzaki?"
L sprang.
"I broke apart my insides.
(Help me...)
I've got no soul to tell.
(Help me...)
The only thing that works for me...
Help me get away from myself.
I wanna fuck you like an animal.
I wanna feel you from the inside.
I wanna fuck you like an animal.
My whole existence is flawed.
You get me closer to God.
You can have my isolation.
You can have the hate that it brings.
You can have my absence of faith,
You can have my everything."
-Closer, Nine Inch Nails