Author's Note: I'm still waiting for 3 Doors Down to record a song called "Chrysanthemum Tea."
VI. Professionals
It was slightly strange how much pleasanter drudgery was when you went about it on a full, contented stomach.
Surprise, of the contented variety, registered on Matsuda's expression as Light smacked a stack of paperwork down on the man's desk blotter—a stack of considerable size even for Light, whose efficiency was not to be understated.
"Thank you," Matsuda said, meaning it.
Light happily waved it off. "It's the tea," he explained. "It makes me want to be a better person."
Matsuda grinned. "The transformative power of chrysanthemum?" he hazarded. "Maybe you should go out into the world and see what wrongs you can right armed with your newfound altruism and antioxidants."
"Faster than a speeding courtesy," Light took up, "leaping tall injustices in a single moral bound."
"Go forth and change the world," Matsuda instructed.
And maybe that was how you did it—one kindness at a time.
Light had an odd premonition-ish feeling that this would be more difficult than he anticipated.
Chrysanthemum Tea Man, however, was undaunted by the misgivings of his mild-mannered alter ego.
—
Just after five, as he started towards the stairs, shouldering on his coat—for he always took the stairs down; to do otherwise, he felt, was to squander the powers of the elevator—Light noticed Lawliet gathering helmet, windbreaker, and shoulder bag.
For a horrifically critical moment, the chrysanthemum tea took over.
Shit was like kryptonite.
"Do you want a ride home?" he heard his voice dare to ask.
He saw out of the corner of his eye that Aizawa looked like a kid in a candy store.
Aizawa looked like Lawliet in a candy store.
Oh, hell.
Lawliet himself, currently in a police office, looked startled. The tiniest bit hesitantly, he smiled.
"That would be very much appreciated, Yagami-kun," he replied.
"If you know what I mean," Aizawa added under his breath, just a few decibels too loudly.
Lawliet flushed and sent his partner a wounded look.
"Somebody needs to untie Light 'Straight-Laces' Yagami," Aizawa defended.
"Wh—what?" Light managed to sputter.
"Oh," Aizawa remarked, half-airy, half-awkward. "I thought you knew about that."
Light stared at him.
"Perhaps, Yagami-kun," Lawliet put in, "we should go."
The road could always do with a reprimand. Hitting it sounded good right about now.
Light was categorically not running away from this situation. Certainly not.
"Yeah," he acceded, "let's go." He gave Aizawa a Look.
Aizawa winked.
On his way to the stairs, Light made sure to mutter something audible about crazy people and their inexplicable projections, which they should keep far away from his completely unrelated personal life, which was doing just fine on its own, if the crazy people were curious, thank you very, very much.
To be fair, he probably wasn't helping his case.
—
Lawliet unlocked his bike from the rack where he'd secured it just outside the building.
"Don't let it get to you," he recommended.
"It's not getting to me," Light said. "What's getting to me?"
Lawliet glanced at him, but he continued before Light could comment on his evident—and extremely unjust—amusement.
"Shuichi," Lawliet explained, "has been attempting to set me up with someone—anyone, but don't take that personally—since the first day we began work together. I suspect he as adopted me as…" He zipped the bike lock into his bag and, taking the handlebars, started pushing the bicycle towards the parking lot. "…something of a geeky younger brother, it seems—the one who will never get a prom date unless you bribe your friend's sister to ask him."
"We didn't have anything quite like a prom," Light commented. "Though I heard about them."
"I was homeschooled," Lawliet responded. "More specifically, I suppose, I did my coursework mostly online. Quillish and I did a great deal of traveling until I decided to settle regularly at a four-year university." He considered. "Though even then I did overseas study twice."
Fishing in his pocket for his keys, Light looked at Lawliet sidelong. "What's home, then?" he asked. "If you've lived everywhere, what do you identify with?"
Lawliet shrugged and smiled. "Quillish's doorstep is home," he answered. "I'm home where I hold the house key." Deftly, he manipulated a series of silver nuts and bolts, removing both wheels from his bike and sliding the pair of them and then the frame into the backseat of Light's Accord. "There are places that feel like home, like a place of belonging—southern France, and Prague, and Victoria in British Columbia—and I was raised in Winchester, in England. I'm fond of Washington, D.C. Largely, though… where you make home is where home is. Where the people you love let you in." This was spoken over the roof of the car, and then Lawliet smiled as they both ducked inside to occupy the front seats. "And preferably," he noted, "where they then proceed to feed you." He drew his seatbelt into place. "Is San Francisco home for you, Yagami-kun?"
Light turned the keys in the ignition, and the engine rumbled obediently into life.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I do love it, but everything falls short of Japan one way or another." He twisted to squint over his shoulder, carefully backing the car out of the mostly empty lot, guiding it around its stationary fellows. "Then again, it's been three years since I visited. I've probably made it into a myth already."
Lawliet gazed absently out the window as they started down the street, thumbing at his bottom lip. "I liked Japan," he noted. "Good weather. Good people. Fascinating cultu—Light."
There was something in the tone of Lawliet's voice that made Light's blood's temperature dip thirty degrees in an instant.
"Pull over," Lawliet ordered, and Light didn't even think—just jerked the wheel rightward, skidded up to the curb, jammed the stick into Park, and yanked on the parking brake.
Out the back window on Lawliet's side, an alley stretched off into the fading world of twilight. Within the sparest reach of the sunset's watercolor light, a dark-clothed figure in a ski mask knelt over a second, unmoving form.
Steel gleamed.
Light's feet were on the pavement, his left hand slamming the car door as he reached for his gun with the right.
Lawliet on the sidewalk side had a few seconds on him, but their target had taken off like a jackrabbit—following the black windbreaker disappearing deeper in the alley, Light skirted the brutalized corpse (for so it was; eyes glazed, still fingers half-curled as if to cradle something they'd lost, a halo of blood blending into the pavement as the world around it slowly dimmed) and avoided Lawliet's abandoned sandals, sprinting after, flicking off his pistol's safety as he ran.
Cursing viciously in his head so that he wouldn't have to spare the breath, Light careened around the corner Lawliet's pale feet had flashed beyond, scrabbling for his own footing, keeping the gun carefully raised above his right shoulder, barrel to the sky. This alley let out onto the street—onto a sidewalk dotted with passersby, with children lugging sports equipment home, with homemakers on errands, with career people emerging from coffee shops with the day's last fix.
There was a dark figure in the distance, shoving by human obstacles on either side, backlit by the low sun glowing orange and underpinned by the gasps and screams as the light glinted, blinding, on the long knife in one gloved hand.
Between Light and his adversary was Lawliet—Lawliet, defter, smoother than Light ever would have imagined, darting, sidestepping, flowing like a shadow through the bottlenecks, sidestepping clusters of innocents.
God damn, he was fast.
Which, of course, only underscored the fact that there was absolutely no time to spend marveling at it.
Light took the sidewalk going full-tilt, ignoring the environment, listening only to his every economical breath and the pounding of his soles on the sidewalk, to the shrill voice in his head howling at him to move faster, or they'd lose him—
The gun was garnering new screams of its own, but there wasn't time—an S.U.V. screeched to a halt six inches short of his shoulder as he raced heedlessly over a crosswalk without consulting the stoplight, and the horn blared, the deafening intrusion only accentuating the thudding of Light's heartbeat in his ears.
He was focusing on Lawliet, who—damn!—swerved around another corner, presumably into another alley, and there was a gaggle of teenaged girls with Coach purses giving Light an unsettling onceover as he flew past—
He skidded around the turn and found himself hemmed in by red brick, scattered black trash bags vomiting their contents onto dank cement—and at the end of this alleyway rose a chain-link fence, which Lawliet was scaling in bare feet, scrambling up it like a cat, slinging himself over, and vanishing behind the boards that shored it up from the other side.
Light did not want to climb a chain-link fence in these shoes.
Light did not want to climb a chain-link fence carrying a gun.
Really, Light did not want to climb a chain-link fence under any circumstances, and these were just about the worst ones he could think of.
The urge to quit the police force on the spot was extraordinarily strong.
Light shoved his pistol into the holster, reached up, gripped the wire, and jammed one foot into a diamond-shaped hole, then the other, dragging himself upwards, gritting his teeth and bearing the way the rusty steel dug into his hands.
It looked like a long way down to the pavement from the top.
As Light soon discovered, it was a long way down to the pavement from the top.
His knees were never going to recover.
Lawliet was nowhere in sight. Jogging now, the voice in his head having pointedly changed its tune to "I hate this job," he looked this way, that way, into every doorway, down every possible path—
On the sidewalk where the alley met the street, staring off at nothing, Lawliet stood, stark in the waning sunlight, shoulders shifting as he panted.
He was alone.
He turned as Light approached, and a bitter resignation had quelled the mischievous fire that usually sparked in the wide gray eyes.
"He's gone," their owner reported unnecessarily.
"We'd better get back to the body," Light said.
"Justifiably distracted," Lawliet muttered.
Light nodded, putting his hands in his pockets, and gave the disappointed silence one more moment to fester before he searched for the nearest street sign to guide them back to where they'd begun.
—
Light closed his eyes, put his hand over his mouth, and took four deep, even breaths, picking a point in the center of his chest and anchoring it in the space. He was not going to throw up. He was a professional. This would be fine.
He opened his eyes and crouched next to Lawliet, who was surveying the carnage, apparently unperturbed, as they waited for the cavalry Light had summoned by telephone. The damage, as always, was almost paralyzing in its inhuman cruelty and the pointedly human cost. Light knew he would never be able to erase the image from his mind, and the unmistakable metallic tang of blood had permeated the immediate air so entirely that he couldn't smell anything else.
Lawliet said nothing, so Light stood and left him to it until the sirens came.
—
Lawliet was silent yet as they forged through the city towards Pacific Heights. He tossed his flip-flops onto the floor, drew both knees up to him, wrapped his arms around them, and settled his chin to peer out over them as if across a barricade.
Light was vaguely fascinated to find that there were things in life that took precedence over the cleanliness of his car's upholstery.
Beethoven drifted, softly, from the speakers.
"It's not them," Light said quietly.
"Not yet," Lawliet whispered.
"They're safe with you," Light countered. "No one will recognize them now."
"Whoever is doing this knows where to find children who evade police officers and health care workers every day," Lawliet retorted. "I guarantee you that any emaciated child out here, for a bit of food, would tell them anything else they wanted to know. Matt, Mello, and Near are incredibly intelligent—and they have a sense of whom to trust because of it—but not all of the others will think to be so cautious."
Light was not going to notice the strange feeling that relaxed his shoulders at this short but potent example of Lawliet's excellent grammar.
Lawliet, as it were, hugged his knees. "They haven't done anything wrong," he said. "None of them have done anything wrong. They're children. They're alone."
Light put his blinker on, checked his mirrors, and turned onto Lawliet's street.
"You know what the danger is," he pointed out. "You know they need to be safe, so you know to protect them. That's probably more than whoever's behind this is expecting."
Lawliet watched Quillish's Victorian materialize from the darkness, windows aglow.
"If we'd caught him—"
"Don't," Light interrupted. "It happened; it's done. We tried, and that's something in and of itself. We'll find him. First of all, we know it's a him now, which is more than we had before—and we were close, which means it's possible to catch him at it. He makes mistakes."
"We were lucky," Lawliet responded petulantly, glaring out the window. "And now he'll be more careful. He's holding all the cards, Yagami-kun. All we've got is what he chooses to put down on the table."
Oh, God, they were getting metaphorical. They were sitting in Lawliet's driveway, and they were getting metaphorical.
Lawliet seemed to realize it, too, for he unfolded his legs and unbuckled his seatbelt.
"Thank you for the ride," he murmured. "Would you like to come in?"
"Oh, no, thank you," Light managed. "I'd hate to impose, and I have some housekeeping to do."
If you took "housekeeping" to mean "curling up in a ball on his bed, trying to purge the cynicism so that he could force himself to get out of the aforementioned bed the next morning," it wasn't even a lie.
Lawliet might have been nodding, though his hair, and therefore the considerable portion of his face it obscured, was virtually indistinguishable from the night. "Another time," he conceded. "Quillish likes you."
"Does he really?" Light sighed, smiling gently. "And he seemed so reasonable…"
Lawliet met his eyes and offered a smile of his own—tenuous, but warm.
"Appearances can be deceiving," he noted.
"Have a good night," Light bid him.
"You as well," Lawliet returned, shutting the car door and moving towards the front step.
The door opened before he'd quite reached it, and three smaller shapes spilled out to fight over who was to carry which portion of the bike. A taller figure behind them raised a generous hand in greeting, and Light reciprocated before pulling out of the driveway to get reacquainted with the road.
Home was where the people you loved let you in.
And preferably fed you.