Chapter 3
Reflection
Light stared at the tiles of the ceiling, counting them again. Fifty two. There were fifty two tiles in this room. It wasn't the first time he'd counted them. Not by a long shot. During the first few weeks of being tethered to L, the insomniac detective's nighttime habits had kept Light from sleeping for more than an hour or two every night. He had counted the ceiling tiles every night for a while.
He had hoped it would be like counting sheep. Mindless enough to force his brain to shut down. Instead it had led to him mentally calculating complex quadratic equations centered around the number fifty two.
This time it was different however. Fifty two. The same number of criminals he had killed on the first day of the Kira plan. It had to be some kind of cosmic joke. Fifty two plain white ceiling tiles. He could picture, superimposed on top of the blank surface, the names and faces of each of those men and women. The first to die.
The first sacrifices to the God of the new world.
He forced his eyes shut, hoping to block out the images his mind was creating. He shouldn't be thinking about them. What he should be doing is trying to muster up a plan to save L's life or sleeping. Not wallowing in his guilt and certainly not doing something as inane as counting the tiles. He had to save Ryuzaki.
Ryuzaki. L. It was his fault Light couldn't sleep anyway. At first, when they had been forced to live together, L's nighttime activities had made it next to impossible to sleep. The most obvious reason being that the detective just didn't sleep. L worked. He claimed that some of his greatest deductions had come to him while working alone in the middle of the night in a sugar induced haze.
When they'd been tethered together, it had frustrated Light to no end. The first night, L had made him get up three times to go get more sweets from the kitchen. After the resulting fight, Ryuzaki had agreed to bring everything he needed for the entirety of the night with him.
He'd thought that simply not being dragged out of bed multiple times would have helped his sleep schedule, but it hadn't. L worked while he tried to sleep. L typed and clicked. The noise of the soft tapping had driven him close to insane. It was, however, better than when L was working with paper. The scratching and shuffling of pages made him grind his teeth. But it was something L had refused to compromise on. He wasn't going to sacrifice eight hours out of his work schedule for the sake of Light's comfort.
Light had been told quite promptly to "Get used to it.". It made him bitter to think now that he had gotten used to it. In fact, it was the absence of Ryuzaki's previously annoying behavior that was robbing him of his sleep. He needed the soft tapping of L's fingers against the keys of his laptop like he needed a lullaby. It was a comforting sound. A steady, constant tap tap tap that soothed him as much as the soft ticking of his watch did.
His watch.
He swallowed nervously as he thought about it. His watch, such an innocuous, innocent object. No one would suspect that he'd hidden a murder weapon inside it. A murder weapon as innocuous and innocent as the casing it was hidden within. He hadn't disposed of that piece of Death Note paper yet.
He should do it right now, while he was thinking of it. Actually, he should have done it as soon as he'd gotten off of Ryuzaki's chain. But he couldn't bring himself to part with it. Not for any sentimental reasons, but because it weighed on him. He could feel it. He was always aware of it. The death he had hidden in his watch.
If anyone found it, it would be all the evidence they would need to convict him of murder. It was dangerous to keep, let alone keep on his person. But he still couldn't let it go. He wanted to remember Higuchi's death. He wanted to remember what he'd done to that man. Perhaps the weight of the guilt on his consciousness would prevent him from taking any more lives in the pursuit of saving L.
That was what really scared him.
As emotionally damning as it had been, killing Higuchi had been easy. He'd been able to justify the man's death to himself far too easily. It was for the sake of L. He would kill for the sake of L. Where had this blind devotion come from? When had he surrendered that much of his autonomy to the detective?
It wasn't that he would kill for L. No, certainly he wouldn't. In a hypothetical situation - because it would never happen in reality - if L asked him to kill someone, he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't kill for L, but he would certainly kill to protect him. He already had.
Nausea was becoming the norm whenever he thought about everything he'd done. It was a byproduct of his massive guilt. Guilt, nausea and a mildly throbbing headache caused by exhaustion.
He wondered if he would have nightmares about what he'd done? In that case, was sleep really something he should be striving for? He couldn't guard himself in his sleep. He couldn't dictate what he let slip and what he didn't. If Watari was reviewing the security footage – like he knew the man would be – he would be able to hear anything he might say in his sleep and play witness to his nightmares.
So maybe he shouldn't sleep. But that meant he had to turn his mind back to more useful pursuits than counting the ceiling tiles and ruminating on the nature of L. He needed to think.
He'd already reviewed his possibilities. He couldn't simply ask Ryuzaki nicely not to experiment with the notebook. That would only create suspicion. If he simply let things be, the best case scenario was that L would have a criminal test the notebook for him. Someone who was already slated to die to prove whether or not the thirteen day rule applied. Even allowing that it was a filthy criminal on death row that would be the one writing in the book, it didn't sit well with Light's newly-spawned conscience that the man would lose his entry into hell. He didn't like it that the criminal would lose his soul. The worst case scenario was that L would test the book himself. That was simply unacceptable.
If he told L not to test it, he'd get suspicious. If he let L test it, even ignoring the whole afterlife debacle, it would throw suspicion back onto not only himself, but Misa as well. It was a lose-lose situation. He couldn't win like that.
Did he have to accept that, in order to prevent L's death, his suspicion of being Kira would have to be confirmed? Did he have to lose? If so, that opened up a whole plethora of new paths that he could travel, the most appealing of which included stealing back the Death Note and destroying it. The notebook was a horrible atrocity that should never have been allowed into the human world, let alone to be controlled by a human. The rest of the task force would naturally suspect that he was trying to destroy incriminating evidence. He would damn himself by such an action.
Could he hide from them? Could he outrun, L?
No.
The answer was so simple, the question barely deserved being thought of. No. Of course he couldn't. L had next to limitless resources. L knew his name and what he looked like. More importantly, L knew how he thought. He could mobilize every police force in the world to hunt for him. And who knew how many more underworld contacts the detective had. How many more people did he have like Wedy and Aiber who were willing to operate on the wrong side of the law for him? He'd have no chance. Optimistically, he estimated he'd last a week before he was apprehended and executed.
Executed.
So that was it. Suicide by cop then.
The nausea twisted into anxious dread. He was going to die. Not that he didn't deserve death for everything that he'd done, but that was beside the point. This wasn't death sneaking up on him. This wasn't an unexpected demise at the hands of nature or some malevolent god. This was Light Yagami choosing his death. This was Kira choosing to die for L.
Could he do that? He was, by no means, a martyr. Even with all that talk about sacrificing his soul for the greater good, he'd never really been a martyr. He'd just wanted to leave his mark on the world. But this was different. Could he really sacrifice himself to save L? There had to be other options. He just couldn't see them.
He thought through every possible course of action he could take, ranging from the bizarre to the plausible, but came up short of anything that would save both of their lives. And there was no point in both of them dying. So that meant . . .
I have to choose. Him or me? No, I can't be so selfish as to sacrifice Ryuzaki to ensure my own survival. It has to be me.
Stealing the notebooks was the best out of the many options and alternatives he'd considered. This way, at least, the notebook would be destroyed. With any luck, he'd be able to get the second notebook from where he'd stashed it and destroy that one too before he was caught. No, not just 'with any luck'. He'd have to get to the second book. Without knowing that both of them were destroyed, there would always be the chance that someone would find it, or that Ryuk would retrieve it and give it to someone else who would create more havoc and cause more deaths.
He would have to destroy them both. Which would mean that he couldn't get caught before obtaining the second notebook. He would have to avoid detection . . .
Or destroy my pursuers.
He shuddered as the thought came to him. Why did those thoughts come to him so easily? But it was already too late. An idea of how it could be done had already introduced itself into his mind and evolved three times before he could rein in his wild imaginings and remind himself that he was talking about killing people again. About taking human lives.
He could make the eye deal so he knew their names if they followed him. What was half his lifespan when he was facing execution anyway? Or was that how it worked? By deciding to steal the notebooks, had he already shortened his lifespan? Would halving it ensure his death before he was able to destroy the notes?
Knock. Knock.
The sound of someone knocking on his door drew him out of his thoughts. It was a very soft, subdued sound. If he hadn't already been awake, he never would have heard it. Frowning, he rose from the bed and padded over to the door.
Ryuzaki stood hunched next to the door, his laptop tucked under his right arm, hands in his pockets. He was gazing down at the floor in front of him, hiding his face behind his hair. He looked almost nervous and Light's eyes zeroed in on his behavior immediately. It was contrived.
"Hey."
He met Ryuzaki's greeting with a blank stare and had the pleasure of watching the detective shift uncomfortably after a moment. "Did you need something?" He asked eventually.
"I was hoping I could work in here. It seems that I've grown used to your presence in the room at night."
Light kept his face completely neutral but internally frowned. A lie. Light was an expert liar and manipulator – much to his shame. The experience had made him reasonably good at spotting a lie. That coupled with living tethered to the detective for the last few months made it easy to tell that L was lying to him.
It seemed he'd come under suspicion already. Not that he really blamed the detective for it. He hadn't, after all, been doing a very good job at hiding just how disturbed he was by his returned memories. In fact, he would have been disappointed in L if he hadn't fallen under suspicion again.
He was tempted to refuse the request simply out of arrogant pride. It had been a long time since he'd been able to deny Ryuzaki something and it would feel good to assert his new found freedom a little. But on the other hand, L was offering him an out. He would be damned if he would go find the detective to ask him to come work in the room so that he could get to sleep. But L had come to him, sacrificing his pride instead.
Light pulled the door open wider, admitting him into the room, but he held out his hand to stop the detective a second later. "No sweets in the bed, L."
Ryuzaki engaged Light in a glaring contest for a moment before he frowned. "Fine." He mumbled and pulled a handful of tinfoil-wrapped chocolates out of his pocket, leaving them on the dresser before he settled in his usual posture on his side of the bed.
Light followed him back to the bed, crawling under the covers and fighting back his content smile as L opened his laptop and began tapping on the keys. He fell asleep remarkably soon after the return of his roommate.
AN: This story it up over 200 hits! I'm awed and thankful to each and every one of you who read this. Especially to those who left me a review. You've been very encouraging. I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Thank you for continuing to read Abdication. You've made my day.
Allora