Deals never work. Not if they're even. Nothing functions for long when no power differences exist.
Power plays exist to keep the game running.
The game always has to be running.
0o0o0o
The word. It must have been dangerous; what else could explain the way it lingered on the closing syllable of every sentence and especially their names, hovering forefront in their minds at any moment, yet never became substance?
'Love', that deadly, binding promise. Some people thought it was a promise to care, forever, for someone. And maybe, for some people, it was soft and warm and comfortably deep like that. Maybe there was different kinds of love. Not platonic differentiating from romantic, but all the varying ways of experiencing the stuttering of your heartbeat when your thoughts forced you to look back and say, that one, I want that one to be my absolution after I do things I shouldn't to get to them.
This form of love was dark and had hidden folds to fall into and more than two sharp edges. And it burned and branded them. Just another way to make sure every conversation, every look, every second together wouldn't be forgotten.
You couldn't step back from that kind of love. Call it obsession. It sank it's teeth in and held tight; try to pull away and you'd leave part of your heart behind. You'd always leave something, because you couldn't stay in that kind of love forever. Leaving was painful, but it wasn't a death sentence, unlike obsession.
Fire burns if you stand too close, no matter how much you protest that you're invulnerable.
0o0o0o
Die, if you want, but don't you dare forget me.
Artists carve human faces into stone because their sculptures will outlast them. The fragile human image chiseled into the everlasting bones of the Earth is a cruel joke, the most ironic plea to think of the future full of things that might be and say, 'Remember me, remember all the ways that disappeared when humans are dust in the universe once again.'
0o0o0o
You are mine, Light said. Every mark and left on your body is one I placed with a cruel touch. I know it hurt, and didn't I let you scream out the pain? Darling, it had to be, so that the impressions would never fade.
I'd say I'm sorry, but the sight of you, unbreakable, undefeatable L-or so they say-burned by your own decisions is too inviting. I'm really not. Just like you aren't for the identical in pain but worlds different in nature spiderweb lines you left for me.
You'll never forget me, unless you cut out every last scar I left. And you won't, will you? To others, you'll say that losing that much of yourself isn't worth it. Isn't worth me. To yourself, you'll say the same. But when I drag the truth out of you, you'll tell me it's because you want to remember. That you loved the ache from years of looking in the mirror and seeing the signatures I carved.
Right now, we're going to walk outside these doors and this room with the cot that barely held last night. We're going to go back to pretending.
Pretending, but not like last night. We're returning to society's illusion, and ours, but the kind that dulls the red-hot edges where we clash, not with ice water, but by smothering under layers and layers of clothes and pointless rules and words.
Like we're little kids again, little kids pressing buttons and flipping switches. Some connect to nothing. Some connect to nuclear bombs. And there's that one, high up on the wall, that kills us both. None of them do any good. And we know it. So why do we still play?
Because the sounds the buttons and switches make when activated form some sort of pattern. Notes in a song. What's the song?
Maybe there isn't one. Maybe we're all just trying to explain why we're here, trying to see patterns when there is none, because humans hate it when we can't see patterns.
The noises just sound good.
0o0o0o
'We should take these off,' Light said to the words on his skin. Again. He'd been repeating himself, trying to work up the courage to actually act. Good thing he'd said the word 'should' and not 'will'.
'We should,' L agreed. 'Only the ones that we can't hide…?'
'Yeah.' Light absentmindedly rubbed off an errant trail of ink from the soft joint between his thumb and fingers. It came off easily. When he'd woken up, some of the words had already erased themselves. Maybe they should have used a permanent marker, the kind with the narrow, biting tip, and told everyone the lines were veins bloated by poison.
How many people would believe them?
A cool cloth traced over the back of his neck. Light reached a hand back to stop it, but not because it was cold or L's touch was the exact opposite.
'Tell me the words you're erasing?' he asked. L nodded. He didn't look down before reciting.
'No playing games where we can be winner and loser, or both, or neither.'
'I remember what you did when I wrote this one,' Light mumbled, face mostly hidden in L's hair. His fingers danced over the detective's narrow hip bones, dipping into every channel and valley. 'If we had more time, I'd keep teasing until you made those sweet sounds again.' A ghost of a smile. 'Shall I recite it? 'When we fight, we shoot to kill. That makes it realistic.''
'I remember that one. I remember all of these. I remember writing them and imagining that the blood underneath my paper would bring the rules to life, as something more than just ours.' L pressed a kiss to Light's collarbones, exactly where he'd just erased the slashed tail of a Y. That rule, 'We can talk normally,' one of their first. 'Something other people would acknowledge.'
L felt like every stroke he erased brought their universe down, just a little bit, loosening one of the strings that had held them above everything and everybody else. If he kept going, they'd fall. It felt wrong. But it was necessary.
If he closed his eyes, the fireworks showed the impressions of where blue ink used to be; where blue ink could be again, if the angel agreed.
Light looked different without his inked-on shackles. Like he'd grown used to holding the weight, and his hands shook and fidgeted without the stone to shoulder.
L's bruises still hadn't healed completely. Delicate skin, like the petals of a flower that blooms once a century, and, once it's breathed it's first and last of the night air full of promise, it dies.
Light could imagine L with poison-yellow daffodils woven through his hair, smiling as the toxins worked through his blood and forced their way out through red-stained teeth.
I pray you haven't completely unraveled the bindings that trapped you yet. If I was the one to make you claw your way out...then I'm sorry; I'll try to make your few days without plastic wrappings around your heart unforgettable.
0o0o0o
We're going back to the case again, his conscience said, back to Kira. Light distractedly ran his fingers over the keyboard, wondering how the letters hadn't worn with Ryuzaki's typing style and his own tap scratch tap tap habit.
With a start, he looked up from the screen he wasn't paying attention to and back to the Task Force he was-with one notable exception-paying even less attention to. Someone was talking about Higuchi and Matsuda and-there was that goddamned rattling noise, it was the well-worn key in the lock to drive him insane. Light strained to pay attention to the words and make out more than droning chatter.
It didn't work. With a weary sigh, he let go of the fraying tether that connected him to the here-and-now and let himself drift among all his jumbled thoughts. At random intervals, he swam out of the chaos and offered an opinion on whatever fragment of mundanity he'd caught onto before sinking back down to the Herculean chore of sorting a hundred, a thousand, a million different variations of one thought.
It would take forever. It would take longer than forever; his task would outlive his body and mind and memory.
The meeting did not last forever, though, and Light very quickly ran out of reasons to be staring aimlessly at his computer when he was alone with L.
'What's wrong?' L slid his chair closer. Light absentmindedly tapped at the closed lid of his computer and felt the raven's hand on his back.
'I'm okay,' Light said. He hoped the not-quite-lie was out loud; right now, he wasn't sure. L's arms found their way around him, and the detective's quiet breathing ruffled his hair. But all very cautiously.
'Am I allowed to do this?' L asked, not meeting his eyes. 'Now that we're...we don't have the 'just one time' rule?'
'You're allowed,' Light said, and heard his voice reassuring him. Neither of them mentioned what L had meant to say. The end of the sentence was too terrifying.
What are we? Just firewood, matches, deals to use each other. What is a suspect to a detective more than a neck in a noose, what is a detective to a suspect as more than the one who will pull the lever?
0o0o0o
They'd disappeared into one of the side hallways in the middle of a meeting, spurred by Light's quiet whispers of 'let's just leave, right now, screw the consequences,' every few words underscored by hands brushing underneath the table.
What did it matter if they couldn't put words to what kind of love they had? It was definite, it was real-look, it's sharp enough to cut-and it was burning and hot and swirled around every breath as they kissed.
'You're beautiful,' L panted, licking a slow trail up from Light's neck. The brunette keened, pressing a hand back on the wall. 'Shh. Quiet, remember?' L said. It was so hard to keep himself from decorating that flawless, swan-like neck with bites, and Light was making good on his promise to tease, those lovely hands brushing over every inch of his hips, like he was writing again.
'I'm so glad we're allowed to do this,' Light said. The wall seemed unnaturally frigid, or maybe his hand was burning up, regardless, the immovable wall was bitingly cold on his palm and L's body was all quick, desperate movements with a steady command underneath. The excuse they had given wouldn't last forever. Their time was most likely almost up.
'Me too.' L subtly pulled away and looked Light in the eyes. 'So, are we…in a…'
'It's safer if we aren't,' Light said. Safer because a relationship is commitment, is true love, is promises, and they couldn't even say 'I love you'.
'It's safer if we aren't, but I want to be with you regardless.' This was dangerous, this was everything opposite of single nights in the dark together and red-hot clashing edges and I-love-you-I-hate-you and lying games. This was breaking the deal-shattering it, and the broken glass pieces would cut them if they walked together. This was everything they weren't and didn't deserve in a world full of rules and the Kira Case.
Light pressed a kiss to L's lips and whispered, soft as raven feathers, so quiet it was almost like he didn't want L to hear, 'I love you.' Silence, silence, and then the return of a kiss and hands moving up to tangle in brown hair and the response, just as quiet and forceful, 'I love you too.'
0o0o0o
A soft place to fall, a safety net with strings that don't untangle and fall apart. Only a few people can fulfill those roles for each other, and maybe it takes a killer and a detective branded with hate and love to do that.
You can trust your enemy to kill you, you can't trust your allies to not turn around and stab you in the back.
Or can you?
:: Old texts with someone you loved, when you talked in full sentences before something happened and you either broke apart or fused together
-LyingMonsters