Wherever he went, people looked at him askance. L, quite frankly didn't care. He was comfortable, and that was all that mattered; their gazes ran off his skin like so much water.
This hadn't always been the case though. When he was young, he had looked more like the seething masses around him, had actually cared about what his classmates and teachers thought of him. That caring had diminished proportionately with his realization of just how far beyond his classmates he was.
When he was just around adolescence, he had become increasingly arrogant and distant, and there was something – he could quite remember what, because the years between ten and thirteen were a bit of a blur – but in the end, he had realized that that was pointless, too. He had finished up with high school shortly thereafter. Looking back, L had to admit that there was an advantage to going to school in America, where they actually let you do something like that, as opposed to Japan, or Germany, where the system was much more rigid (but worked much better overall).
It was that same year that L had solved his first impossible case – the murder of his own parents (who might not have been good parents, but they were still his) – without anyone learning his identity. And that had been something of a rush, catching his parents' killers, and exposing their deep conspiracy for all to see. It caused a scandal that blazed across the newspapers for months.
One thing had lead to another, and L continued to solve impossible cases for Interpol, and various other organizations. In the process, he acquired reams of information that would ensure the cooperation of the police and security agencies in his cases (he still hadn't managed to get his fingers into any county's military, but that was really a matter of time; they all came to L eventually, and when you came to L, that allowed L to get a piece of you), and he had few qualms about employing it in the name of the greater good.
Really, L had few qualms about taking whatever measures he had to in order to insure that justice was served; this thought had once led him to compare himself to the American comic book hero, Batman. There wasn't really any comparison though; Batman was a vigilante armed with a slew of gadgets, and L was a scrawny kid hunched over a computer. But that was okay; L liked who he was, which was why he didn't care what anyone else thought about him, not even Yagami Light, who sat on the chair across from him, the long chain of the handcuffs stretched between them, and stared at him.
Light was one of the few people L couldn't quite wrap his brain around, and that was really the first thing that made him think the boy was Kira. Because even though L understood Kira perfectly, he still couldn't get into the criminal the way he always had before. And he knew that the case was the same for Kira – and Light. Neither could wrap their brains around L (not that anyone had veer been able to do that, except maybe Watari, and even he didn't completely get it), and that added a whole .5 to his calculations, even now.
L could see that Light's inability to understand him bothered the boy though. It was interesting, and he tilted his head slightly to study Light from another angle as he chewed on his strawberry mousse cake.
"Is there something interesting about my face?" Light asked, breaking the long silence that had been holding for the past hour and seventeen minutes. L swallowed his bite.
"You really should relax, Light-kun," L said. "And try some of this cake. It's excellent."