Chapter 2: Fascination

Lawliet drove back home in silence, not bothering to switch his radio on; upbeat chat shows and jaunty music both gave him a headache. The mindless drone of traffic was a familiar and tedious background noise which he easily drowned out with his thoughts. Pulling up in the basement parking lot, he slouched his way up to his apartment as usual, but ignored the fridge in favour of pulling up his laptop. His fingers hovered over the keys for a fraction of a second before he bit the bullet and proceeded to hack into the NPA's confidential files. It was not something he did often, although he was well able to do so without being traced. Usually, he held back out of some respect for the force he was a part of. And, of course, because of the extreme apathy which caused him to care very little about the secrets of the NPA. Today, though, it was different. Today he had a purpose in mind, and the NPA were going to help him out. Firewalls circumnavigated with absurd ease, Lawliet's fingers caressed the keyboard again.

Yagami Light,he wrote. And hit enter.

Seventeen results. He clicked on the first.

Immediately a picture flashed up on his crummy screen, scratched and scored with years of rough treatment and stained with unknowable substances, permanent flecks of tea and cake, a testament to his addictions. The picture was indisputably the young man he had spoken to in the gaol. Here he was younger, face fuller, eyes wider. Innocent eyes, Lawliet found himself thinking. These were eyes which had not seen violence or death, eyes which had not shielded shadowy thoughts and plans. Nevertheless, they held the same sparkle of intelligence, and the same cool shrewdness. The young man was wearing a school uniform. Lawliet glanced at the date; 11th October 2004; five years ago. His eyes flickered downwards to the man's date of birth – February 28th 1986. So Yagami was eighteen in the photograph; if he was Kira, as he claimed, then he had already committed dozens of murders by this time. Lawliet studied the eyes again. Wide, clear and honest. He couldn't see anything out of place for an eighteen year old in them, unless you counted that shimmer of intelligence, and L knew his own eyes had been wise beyond his years long before the age of eighteen. Either he was not who he said, or he was a chillingly good actor.

Let's see... if Yagami had been born in 1986, that made him 23 now, barely 2 years younger than Lawliet himself. Perhaps it was the fragility born of his slightly underweight figure which made him look so much younger than his years, or simply his smooth, stubble-free face. Lawliet discarded the irrelevant thoughts and skimmed down the page to find out more about the man. Date of arrest: 12th July 2006. He had been twenty years old when he had been imprisoned. Just twenty. And the sentence had been for life. No, that was wrong, L realised as he read further. Six months into his sentence, it had been altered; Yagami Light had been transferred to death row.

Lawliet was too absorbed to notice the fact that he was absorbed, something monumentally abnormal for the typically listless detective. But Yagami Light was fascinating, a dark enigma enshrouded in a shadowed riddle. Simply his background alone contrasted with his status, rotting in a high security cell and waiting to die. He had top marks, dating right back to when he started school. He had been on the honour roll at college without fail, and had graduated early with grades which matched L's own, in itself almost an impossible feat, since L's every score had been perfect. He had been tennis champion at high school – also a feat L had accomplished. He had had ambitions to join the police, too, which Lawliet found highly ironic... but his father had been a chief of police – retired, now, after his son had been captured. A family profession? Or a personal desire, for whatever reason?

L sought further information, information on the case against Yagami Light. Why had he been arrested? How? He returned to the search engine results and clicked on the case file. What he read reeled him in hook, line and sinker. How had he missed this case? But of course, he had not cared enough to follow the case. The climax had taken place during one of those times,one of the weeks where L would spiral into such a black pit of depression that nothing on earth could drag him from his bed for days at a time. At the time of the arrest, he had probably been lying on his back in week-old clothes, hair and body unwashed, bathed in the scents of sweat and decay, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and waiting for death. Such episodes had been common to him a few years back. Now, he was almost sure that his entire life consisted of nothing but one long episode of depression and futility, but at the very least it also included cake and arbitrary social interaction.

But back to Yagami Light. Lawliet read the case against him with great interest, making his way steadily through every fact, every fragment he could find. It was interesting, in the most part, because it made no sense at all. There were massive gaps, gaping holes in the evidence, things that just didn't fit, and things left totally unexplained. The only thing that had earned Yagami Light a one way ticket to hell, it seemed, was his confession, out of the blue, and his presentation of a slim black notebook containing the names of every person he had apparently killed, along with their manner of death. With such evidence, and no other leads, the police had jumped on the confession. No wonder his defence lawyer, Teru Mikami, had had a hard time spinning the case out for longer than it took for twelve men and women to jot the word guilty on their little slips of paper.

But it made no sense. Even with the confession, it was obvious that Yagami Light had not committed the crimes for which he was convicted. Within seconds of imbibing the information at his disposal, L had spotted several insurmountable lacunae:

The deaths recorded in the notebook began in 1996, at which point Yagami Light had been ten years old.

The Kira killings had continued until the spring of 2007, at which point Yagami Light was already in prison.

It had not been the police who had found Yagami Light, but Yagami Light who had handed himself coolly over to the police and declared his own guilt, seemingly with no prompting.

This was without even going into the details of each specific murder, comparing what the supposed perpetrator had been doing at the time; the boy had alibis for over half of them, for christ's sake!

So L was fascinated, but utterly confused. And it was unlike him ever to be confused, since life rarely held any intellectual challenges which could stump him.

But even through the dimness, illumination – light, hah – hit. Yagami Light was fully aware that the case was one which would intrigue Lawliet. He knew that it made no sense, and perhaps the strange young man held the answers himself. Perhaps, through closer acquaintance, Lawliet might be able to coax them from him, or better yet, unravel them himself. Yagami Light was a challenge worthy of his intellect. At long last, could it be possible that Lawliet's chance had finally come to employ his considerable faculties on something worthwhile?

And the price... Lawliet weighed the price in his mind, rolling it from side to side. Yagami had never said he was innocent. In fact, he had implied that he was as guilty as sin, and his eyes told Lawliet that there sat not a blameless youth. No man on death row could smile like that unless they had a secret brilliance branded into their heart. No innocent man could sail to his fate with such equanimity. Not that he had accepted his fate, it seemed. The young man was still thinking, still planning his ticket out of there. Although he could not have anticipated Lawliet's visit, surely. Perhaps just a very skilful opportunist, then. A good reader of character. And the price was something L could live with. He lived with it every day. Betrayal... it was a word he was familiar with, and which had long ago lost its sting.

If he helped Yagami Light to escape, he would be aiding a criminal. Breaking the law. Betraying the NPA. But it was nothing he had not done before, in minor, untraceable, beneficial ways. Beneficial to him, beneficial to his beliefs of right and wrong. The continued mystery of a few hundred thousand pounds stolen from corporate bigwigs, for example, was not something he would lose sleep over if it meant a little boy could die in comfort and his bereft mother could afford to grieve in peace and start a fresh life. The occasional piece of incriminating evidence which mysteriously went missing when Lawliet knew but could not prove that a suspect was innocent, or at the very least just in their crime, or the mysterious appearance of concrete proof when Lawliet felt somebody deserved to go down, was again all in the line of duty. It was corruption, of course, or would have been if it were anybody but him doing it. But he happened to have a highly developed sense of justice which occasionally required the bending of rules set for people who could not think for themselves. Lawliet was well aware that this boiled down to 'It's ok to do it because it's me', but nevertheless he felt no remorse. Because it was him. And of course he was right.

If he helped Yagami Light to escape, though, he might well be freeing a mass murderer simply to sate his own curiosity.

But then again, it was a game which Lawliet was capable of playing. At no point would he be out of control. He could dictate exactly what Yagami would and would not be allowed to do, and he was not exactly going to allow him to go on a casual killing spree in the streets of Tokyo. No, it was under his control. A partnership, building a new world together... Yagami had not elaborated on his suggestions, but for a man convicted of killing criminals, and the son of a police chief, conspicuously intelligent, Lawliet understood him to mean... justice. L was confident that Yagami's sense of justice might in fact be fairly close to his own. Instinct, perhaps, told him that he could be, if not trusted, then at least untrustworthy in a way that L could cope with, in a way he could manipulate. And L would receive, he hoped, more in return for his side of the bargain than simply a stimulating and mutually beneficial partnership. L would get front-seat privileges in unravelling the mystery of the Kira case. Unravelling the mystery that was Yagami Light. That was what he truly desired. And L would by no means let his guard down, or see Yagami as anything but what he was... that was, as soon as he discovered what exactly that was. He smirked idly to himself as the phrase 'taking no prisoners' drifted through his mind. Uncompromising, it meant. Unbending. Ruthless. Even by entertaining the notion of helping Yagami out of his sticky situation, he was giving in to compromise, taking things on faith.

But it did no good to tell himself these things.

What was it the man had said? Lawliet remembered the exact words. He remembered the soft pink lips from which they had sprung forth, curled ever so slightly with a cunning smile, moist with tantalising victory hanging almost within his reach.

"All I need is for the power to fail for a half hour span. I'll be ready any time. At any moment. Just that, nothing else. All I need is darkness."

It was said for effect, more than anything, Lawliet thought to himself. What he was asking for was far more than simple darkness. He was asking for total power failure for a thirty minute slot in one of the most highly manned, restricted access buildings in the entire of Japan. He was asking for the surveillance system to collapse, the locks to disengage, communication to die, the automatic defences to fail and for utter darkness to shroud the facility for thirty minutes. It would take more than a technical genius to provide such a thing. It would take a cunning and forwards-thinking planner to anticipate the reactions of the guards once the power went down, somebody with a detailed knowledge of the security methods in place, and somebody who could not only accomplish the steep task, but maintain the situation for a stretch of time, undetected.

And L also knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he could, and would do it. In two days time he could gather all the information he needed, and execute the plan perfectly. The rest was up to Yagami. But in his tired, rotten, longexistence, Lawliet had never wanted anything quite so much as he wanted Yagami Light. He was willing to gamble the last fragment of his soul on the exchange, because if he did, instead of just living, he might actually get to be alive.