Welcome, to Low Light in all it's erratic words and ideas, thrown across the great web from me to you. I hope nothing got corrupted on the journey, but some parts do, even before they make it out of my thoughts and onto the page.

0o0o0o

End: the furthest or most extreme point of something. Come or bring to a final point, finish.

The furthest point; the cumulative crescendo of this convoluted life.

An end to hiding and waiting and only playing the games he could stack the deck for. He'd been good at all the little diversions humans took so seriously. He might have taken them seriously, too, if he hadn't learned that the best way to avoid hurting was to never look like you cared. And the best way to appear uncaring was to put on the mask of an unfeeling monster.

He'd did it, and done it so well he couldn't even tell where the lines of the mask ended anymore.

Without his mask, he fell into things and let them under his skin, into his thoughts. He let them grow into him, let them play parasite and host where neither knew who was slowly killing the other. And then, too late, he realized he was always the one dying and tore himself away, only to find that he took some of them with him and left some of him behind. Now he was less L, the-albeit damaged-functioning human and and more L, the collection of puzzle pieces he'd ripped from others where he knew none of the edges fit together, but it didn't stop him from trying to fix himself.

Let me introduce you to this game, where we kill each other with words and broken deals, slowly poisoning each other's minds until one of us falls apart and the other cries to mask their victory. I expect you know the rules, Light, you've been playing it so well already.

0o0o0o

A suspended hourglass, spinning in front of a morning window with the curtains barely cracked.

Sometimes the sun would glance off the surface, but sometimes it would become magnified by the glass and lance directly into your face; even if you closed your eyes, it was a dancing bright spot on the inside of your eyelids. But then the warp of the glass would turn to darkness and you'd blink away the phosphenes. And the sand was always running out.

It would be easier to just get up and close the curtains, but you couldn't, because you were chained by the wrist to the greatest suspect of a deadly murder case who was, at this moment, sleeping in the same bed as you.

Don't wake up, don't wake him up. Let him sleep, he needs it; let him sleep, because that voice back from when humans were prey instead of hunters is screaming at you, step carefully, barely breathe, because if you wake this beautiful, dangerous apex predator, your last sight will be the gleam of it's brown eyes turning to red.

Brown to red, normality perverted by violence and depravity. In definition, the Kira Case.

Who had thought a few criminals having heart attacks could escalate into...whatever this was; thinking a few half-legal moves would win the game for him when his opponent had the ace up his sleeve.

The Kira Case had narrowed from Kira and heart attacks to Light and all the emotional baggage that came along with merely mentioning his name.

Light Yagami, with the tap scratch tap tap habit he'd picked up and the way he'd only cry if he thought L was asleep and the shell he put around himself that was always cracking and eroding away.

I can still love the little parts about him, the way his eyes look when he's barely awake and the way he pronounces certain words so I can tell what movies he likes even though I know he would refuse to tell me if I asked, and the way he thinks about things, the way only Beyond ever did before.

Those things, tiny, insignificant things like someone's movie choice and the way they start sentences and whether or not they mouth the words to the music they're listening to; they've all been romanticized as the things that make you fall in love so much that it's almost like you can't notice them unless you are.

This isn't love, L thought desperately, this was a bad decision and more of Light's lies; this isn't love because last time I let love get in the way of my purpose, I messed everything up.

Because if it's the little things that endear someone to you, then how did L explain that the feeling he got when he saw Light was not from noticing his stance or speech or any of those little quirks, it was the rush of heat and pleasure that curled over itself in his stomach, the kind when you see something you instinctively know you shouldn't, but you can't stop staring.

Conversing with Light was like dealing with the devil, selling your soul not for material gain, but because they'd talked you into believing you weren't good enough for heaven.

0o0o0o

Breathe!

His body demanded it while his mind convinced him he couldn't; no, that he didn't deserve to; no, that it would just be easier to submerge himself in the few inches of sludgy water still left and inhale until he couldn't.

Light's hands were fisted white-knuckled in the already rumpled pillow. He should have been alone. This kind of terror, naked, primal fear and gibbering, irrational it's-here feeling was one meant only for the one who was experiencing it.

It was most definitely not for the dispassionate black-eyed detective who was probably beyond fear and hate and love, all the things that flickered, sometimes like fireflies, sometimes like forest fires, into an existence just beneath the physical realm. He didn't have all those burn scars that marked someone as human.

Light imagined L lifting his head and-would he deliver the line with a smile? Yes, he would. Smiling, the ironic little twist of his lips that marked things language has no words for.

Look at me, I'm fireproof.

Light was different. He felt fire lick along his skin just as intensely-perhaps more-than someone who wasn't caught in in convoluted games that he'd put far too much effort into. And no matter how pleasurable watching himself go up in flames like a risen phoenix was, he couldn't forget that after the euphoria had faded, he was not Light the phoenix, caught safely in the knowledge that death wasn't the last door, but Light the burned and damaged angel with no more than bruises on his back to remind him that once he hadn't paid any heed to the raven-feathered fallen of his kind.

He couldn't blame the raven, it was boring and gray in the world where all the fallen ended up without games to play.

0o0o0o

Light had been gripping the bed's frame so tightly that when he released it, his fingers throbbed. Detachedly, Light examined them, feeling like he held his own heart in his hand. How easy would it be to crush it?

Crush it, and either extract the courage he needed to keep denying himself or to break the last, trembling shadow of a doubt-more of a blind hope, really-that he was hopelessly fucking addicted to L.

'Light, you wanted to talk?' Light nodded without looking up. He'd dragged L out into the hallways after tossing and turning all night. The only thing he'd achieved was to convince himself that holding out against going back to L was pointless. With the nature of the Kira Case, they'd both be dead soon, and all this worrying about whatever L had become to him wasn't going to matter anymore.

'Do you remember our deal?' Light asked. Rhetorically, of course. He knew that night had been ingrained in both their memories permanently, stuck on repeat as noise that would never fade into the background.

L said nothing, but the tensing of his shoulders, the darkening of his eyes were all as obvious a tell as L was probably possible of. Inwardly, Light laughed. If L didn't like Light simply mentioning the deal, he was going to hate what happened next.

'You asked me if I could do something with no strings attached,' Light continued. 'And I can't.'

'Stop.' L's voice wasn't shaky, it was cold and hard and flat as a shard of ice. Light looked up from his twisting hands. L was frozen still into one spot, and his eyes were blank, staring past Light, somewhere beyond the cell wall.

'I know you've been thinking about it too,' Light challenged. L snapped back to the here and now, sitting in the middle of a solitary confinement cell with barely room for a bed, knees pushing against Light's when he leaned forward, moving more by instinct and the sound of breathing then the milky illumination that lit barely more than the planes and alignments of faces.

'Stop, Light. We-we can't do this. Not again.' Drawing his knees under him, L barely resisted the urge to press closer again. Light sighed, and they were so close the exhalation tickled the strands of hair that always fell in the raven's face.

'L, you know you want to.' L shuddered at the sudden change in tone, from shaky mock confidence to a sultry, low ribbon that wound through his head, fogging up his thoughts, and down around his heart and lower, pulling tighter with every raspy breath until it was practically a choke chain. He'd do anything Light asked, and Light knew it.

'L…' Light's hands found his waist and pulled him closer. 'Please.'

A growl seeped up from his throat. Keeping his hands from stripping off all those extra clothes Light was wearing and just having his way with him was hard. Not rocking forward and getting some friction to the ache down south was harder. And stepping back, doing what any respectable person would do was so hard it was impossible. Zero percent chance.

This was the card, the trap Light was playing. He could see the tripwires but made no attempt to avoid them, because the prize he'd get to hold for a few, precious moments before the crumbling floor collapsed would make the fall all worth it.

So L pulled Light to the bed in the corner that was hardly a cot big enough for both of them, teeth and hands eager to remark the bruises that had faded. He would reassure the world that Light Yagami was indeed his.

0o0o0o

Deals usually benefit one person by feeding off another. This one? Neither L nor Light will walk away thinking they're the victor.

However, they won't think the other has bested them, either.

:: Losing your train of thought in the spaces between those arguments that are waiting games

-LyingMonsters, the lost one who wanders to find deeper secrets instead of ways to escape