Mello screeched L's full name when Near's phone rang as they sat in the upper lofts of Wammy's personal quarters back at Wammy's Sleepaway Camp. Near didn't mind the interruption. Matt and Mello had spent the last seventeen hours yoked together in the full bloom of best friendship, as Near watched them pig out, shove data in his direction, play video games, shove data in his direction, tell horrendously filthy jokes, shove data in his direction, and ignore all his pleas for help. The most they would say was, and it was usually Matt, "But you're first and L'll be so proud of you when he gets back."
This was Near's comeback now as Mello dived for the phone in his pocket.
"I'm first," he cooed. "I get to answer."
Mello shoved his hand in Near's pocket anyway and smirked and fished for the thing much longer than necessary, replying with, "And you deserve a break, baby. HI L. IS YAGAMI IN JAPAN YET?"
It was painful standing this close to Mello's vocal chords so Near moved back and pouted. Matt clung to the doorway and wiped his DS screen on his pants over and over as he listened, tapping the call in the other room (it wasn't needed but it was something to do).
"WHAT. L. OH. OH. OH. OKAY. AH. UM. NO. OKAY. OKAY. I LO—OKAY. BYE."
"So?" Matt returned to rescuing Peach.
"L's going to London with Light for a case. Then he's sending him home. Assassination of the PM and everything." He was too sullen to even try to return the cell to Near's pocket. "He said we have to move Wammy's back to the US. And make sure Light's family gets back to Japan safe."
"Light's family?" Matt's head snapped up. "His sister too?"
Mello's eye twitched. "You and your cliched East Asian fetish."
"No," Matt snapped, stamping his foot, "you haven't seen her. She's—gah—and she's just as smart as Light."
"Unnng," sneered Mello. He fluttered his hand. "You can take care of that."
Proving that close relations induced shared idiosyncrasies, Matt's eyelid twitched. "Yes. Please. What time tomorrow? Oh, here, actually, I'm just gonna be right back." The door snapped shut behind him and the sound was followed by a series of clicks that denoted all the locks closing.
"He's giddy," Mello explained. "He gets to breath near Sayu's face, instead of the Sayu-on-the-monitor-that-he-stalks and aren't you happy too? We get to move the camp...oh..." Mello ran to the door and began pounding. "MATT. MATT. MAIL JEEVAS IF YOU DON'T WHOOP—" and he fell into the room with Near staring after him.
"What?" Matt drawled as the front of his shirt was seized.
"You have to stay with us," Mello gasped, kicking the door shut. "I don't know if I'll be able to control myself if it's just the two of us together the whole time. I have visions, Matt. Maid cos—"
"Kinky," Matt interrupted, shoved his hand into Mello's face and fighting for his shirt. "Don't tell me who's wearing it."
With a whimper Mello slumped to the floor.
Matt rolled his eyes. "The longer you stay in here the more there's a chance Near's going to be clutching his virgin butt in fear when you get back out there."
"He doesn't...oh. He's Near. He always knows."
Matt nodded, but Mello didn't see it. He was watching an ant try to go around a speck of something unidentifiable on the carpet and considering the distance between eyeball and ant this was fascinating.
"And you're going...back to him...getting away from me..." An affectionate kick to Mello's back and Mello beamed.
"Matt, you're my favorite."
A grunt.
"Always and forever."
"Yeah, sure," Matt smiled.
Panicking in a bout of frenzied leg kicks and abrupt frustrated sounds, Light tried to rip himself away from the headboard to which he was chained.
"L," he called, keeping some element of bored oh-I-didn't-really-want-to-do-this in his voice, "L, where—"
"Here." L padded in in his bathrobe. "I took a shower. I doubt you wanted to be a part of that."
"No," Light croaked, staring at all available skin. "L, my hand is falling asleep."
The key was tossed over in a flash of silver and L admired the line of Light's throat as he arched to look behind him and undo the lock, but Light was still too mentally crippled by his lack of sleep to do more than struggle with the thing instead of using common sense and, perhaps, trying to sit up to see what he was doing. The chain was three feet of even length and L had looped it tight enough around the headboard to prevent self-strangulation or any detriment to sleep, but there was still enough slack chain to prevent all of Light's current actions.
"L, I messed it up. Oops." Light held up his wrists, which were now bound together inside of one steel loop. The key was somewhere in the bedsheets. "This really hurts," Light gasped out of surprise as he tried to shimmy his hands out.
"Where's the key?"
Light shrugged, going doe-eyed. He flopped onto his side, cheek bunching as his face hit pillow. "In the bed somewhere."
"Perhaps you should look."
"Perhaps," Light cheerily repeated.
A feeling, more excessive than smugness, than satisfaction, made L turn so Yagami wouldn't see the smirk he was giving the closet door. That Light was incautious enough in his happiness to let L see it, and knowing from whence the happiness stemmed, gave L feelings so priceless he bobbed up and down for a bit on the pads of his feet before grounding himself.
"Yagami, I have an assignment today and you won't be chained but you have to come with me. We're going to a manor house in a rural region of France. I would prefer you return to Japan immediately, but with the time crunch I am currently experiencing and my total mistrust of you it is clear that you have to come with me."
"What's my role?"
"You don't have one. And you're not coming at all if you can't find the key."
"It's on the floor. Then what am I supposed to do?" His voice had grown cold, and the familiarity of it was humbling. L began tossing dress shirts on the floor.
"You're going to wait in the car. It shouldn't take more than an hour. You could read a book. Or call Mello. Or write a letter to your charming parents, who I met yesterday. Tell them that they're being escorted back to Japan by our staff because we needed their rooms for whatever excuse you want to make up."
"I want to go with. Give me a valid reason—"
"I don't want you there."
"My hands are turning purple."
"Light," L sighed. Stomping over from the soft slopes of white at his feet L rescued the key from the carpet, picking it up with his toes and then flicking it up with a kick to his hand. He bent over Light and thrust the key into the lock.
"Another one?" Light muttered.
L glanced down and knew where Light's eyes rested: a line of small bruises smudging his pale shoulder.
"What?" L tightened his bathrobe and began massaging Light's tender wrists and Light was too embarrassed that he'd spoken out loud to do more than blush and stare at the ceiling and (to L's surprise) puff out his cheeks.
"What? I didn't—what did I say?"
"Nothing," L snickered.
The blushing deepened. "Can you not—" he ripped his hands away. "Thanks." He rose at once and stalked away to the shower.
L stopped by a pâtisserie on the way and loaded down Light's lap with fragrant paper bags full of delicate little concoctions that were making warm spots all over Light's thighs. L carefully emptied each bag as they drove, going through countless cups of coffee that lay in a tray at Light's feet.
"Can I at least know where we're going?"
L spoke with a mouthful of croissant. "Dear Heart; it's a château."
Due to inflection and the mouthful of croissant Light mistook château name for a term of endearment and boggled. "What did you say?"
"The château's name is Dear Heart."
Light looked out the window as if L hadn't spoken.
And then, a few scant minutes later, "Why sex workers?"
"Moral obligations making your conscience want to prick mine?"
More morally obligated idealistically than he consciously thought, Light grunted. "No. I just think it's unusual."
"To want sex?"
Blushing furiously, Light began to arrange paper bags on his lap by emptiness levels. "No. Just. Instead of just picking someone up. I um. It just seems...cold. I mean...wouldn't it mean more if it was a real relationship?
Yes, Light's one leap at fairy-tale fantasy has been revealed, dear readers.
"I just want sex," was the answer.
Light bobbed his head, not sure whether he was agreeing or confirming.
"It's you that confuses me," L began to drone, digging blindly with one hand for another pastry. Light occupied slender fingers with a cupcake.
"Thanks," L continued. "I mean, you're seventeen. You've never been in a valid relationship, which doesn't matter, of course, but you don't look at porn, you never masturbate, you did nothing with that boy who cost me 5k...are you asexual? Celibate? Paranoid about catching something?"
"W-why does it matter?" Light spluttered.
"I'm just curious."
"I'm curious why you have such a sexual history―"
"Who is there?" L snapped. "Who matches me?"
Light's face smoothed into a plane of perfect blankness and he began folding waxy bags into little shapes.
"And that's what you want? You want endorphins instead of basic drive."
Light mumbled something sinister, and L yanked the car over to the side of the road violently enough that Light's head cracked against the window so hard the pain went to his teeth.
"Sorry," L said, unapologetic. "We're here."
Dear Heart nestled into a sort of hollow in the earth so it seemed the entire building was receding back, as if finished with its existence. It was surrounded by lavender fields.
L snagged one last croissant before he opened the car door. "I'll be back in one hour or so."
As soon as L was far enough off Light cracked the window, reclined his chair, and fell asleep.
When one wakes, expecting day, and instead finds night, it becomes rational that blindness has suddenly and inexplicably overcome one and and until Light's eyes adjusted the adrenaline rush was such Light thought he was going to die.
But here was the car. He was stiff and chilled and starving and it was exactly 3:23:56 AM according to his watch and there was no L but the reality of night and time, which seemed to bear down on him with every passing second.
L had said one hour. This was either a game or something very seriously wrong had occurred.
Thankfully, there was a flashlight in the dash and Light set off after picking the lock of his handcuff, the beam drunkenly bouncing off lavender in front of him as he approached the château. He got frightened a third of the way to the house and turned back as he remembered he had Watari's number in his cell.
"Do not approach the house," came a tone more sedated than anything he'd heard out of the daft man's mouth. "We'll secure it tomorrow."
"What do you think happened?"
"He must be dead," said the man on the other line. "Dead or missing, but until we can get a task force there to scour it I'll have no one enter."
Light stopped walking. "Are you serious?"
"L is, after all, mortal."
Light was walking back now; Watari's voice was a false sense of security as crickets leaped out of the way of his feet.
"But...he can't just die. This is one of his games, like, well, all of this has been, he can't really be dead."
"Where are you?"
"Dear Heart."
"That's the Morel case. He could very well be dead."
Light let himself into the house and, before he realized what he was seeing, almost fell backwards to get away from the body at his feet.
"I found him," Light whispered.
He dropped the phone.
Nothing but stiffness, coldness, unchanging certainty when he felt for a pulse. This was a shell. What had been L Lawliet no longer occupied the space.
Shaking, he grabbed for the phone again.
"He's dead."
"Get in the car. Come back here. We'll have you questioned before your flight back to Japan."
"W-what?"
"Listen to me carefully. This no longer concerns you. You must be sent home."
All of this sounded perfectly logical. Light stood and stumbled back to the car, collapsing over the steering wheel.
I think he's really dead. What if I could have saved him? I won't be the successor. It'll be one of them. I'm not needed. I'm not wanted. That was him, and he's dead. He's dead. He said one hour. I saw him walking. He said only one hour. I should have stayed awake but he said only one hour.
Creating a well of bottomless guilt he was prepared to drink from for all eternity the cold, pessimistic side of Light briefly wondered if the Wammy Foundation would sue.
"Still won't get him back," he muttered to himself. The image of L's back, walking through that field, replayed so many times it was almost a memory he'd created himself.
He fell out of the car once it was parked and stumbled inside the chalet, only to find Wammy and a slew of people he'd never seen before waiting for him.
"You're going to be questioned first thing tomorrow," Watari said gently. "And then you'll go home. It's all over for you, Light Yagami, unless the next L sees a desire to continue our relationship with you. However," and here Wammy's rage was palpable, "your cruel, relentless, and self-serving behavior has marked you as such a danger I had to ask beg to not have you flown back tonight."
Light nodded and brushed past him.
He collapsed in his bed and didn't sleep.
Haggard, the next morning he was allowed to be driven to the site and was handed coffee as a detective named Naomi led him from scene to scene and pieced together L's final moments. The body had been removed hours before Light appeared again and Light felt gravitated towards the spot with a pull that made him ache as he stood upstairs and watched fingers sketch out bullet trajectories and half-focused on the calm, steady voice as the facts were laid out.
L was dead. He sipped his coffee and thought of the countless cups L had drunk.
The plane trip home was not worth mentioning, other than it made Light exhausted and irritable at the lack of contact from the world he'd left behind impaired by the endless vision of L's back as he walked away for the final time, and he held imagined conversations that had never come in an odd sort of way to comfort himself. When he dozed the voices would continue and he'd dream of glances and whispers and touches that, when he woke, provided a blanket of bittersweetness that took two bus trips to discard.
His mother was grateful to see her precious, perfect boy home, and he was immediately unburdened of laundry baggage as she announced that dinner was just now ready and it was so nice that Light had a friend there to welcome him home.
Hope burst so bright he ran in and almost tripped over L, who was lounging at awkward angles on the floor sucking on a stick of pocky.
Light let out a string of sentences his mother would not have approved of.
"I thought there was drive in you, Yagami. I thought there was curiosity. I would have even accepted it if it was only pride that would have made you want to solve the mystery of my death―" L was now crawling awkwardly upright "―but no, you're told to shut up about it and go home and you obey."
Shamed to his core that L had won yet again, Light insisted on skipping dinner and escorting L back to his hotel personally, refusing to say a word as L explained how the ruse had been set up and that his parents fully knew of the hoax, and that there was a room for Light held at the hotel and they'd be heading back in two days. He ignored the cheery Japanese-spoken Goodnight! from L and stalked down the hall, his key card from L in his hand and grateful for another reason to hate him, though a much larger and sultry reason was knocking on L's door.
"Well hello there," said the escort, eyeing Light as if more money than expected was to be made. To Light's surprise, this one was female, a delightful mess of copper curls and freckles.
Light stuck up his chin.
"Just being friendly, pet," soothed the woman. "But look at you. Why does he need me when you're down the hall? You two just don't click?"
Gold eyes glimmered. "I'll give you a bonus if you do something for me."
Skin soaked in oil. Hair tousled, as if Light had just stumbled out of the grasp of someone else. Tiny little shorts that Light didn't even think would fit, and yes, he'd had to zip into them lying down to get them on, but on they were, and now, body glowing in the dim light and a pout already on his lips, Light knocked on L's door.
"Come in."
Light pouted a bit more, hooded his eyes as he'd seen in old films, and walked in almost shyly.
Suddenly, this was all so wrong.
L was staring up at him where he sat on the foot of his bed, looking as if he'd just recoiled from being struck. His eyes went up and down Light's body and he winced, then blushed, and then stared at his knees.
All of the purring and cajoling and nasty, wicked things Light was going to say dissolved like sugar on his tongue.
L looked up. "What are you doing? Because I really, really..." his voice gave out and his mouth set, then he tried again "...really don't understand," he whispered. He licked his lips and buried his face in his knees. "What did you do with Aisling?"
"It was a joke we planned," Light mumbled, hoping to incriminate the other to soften his own punishment.
"Please explain how this is a joke," L gritted out, brain still autonomously run by Light's body.
"I um. You want sex, right? So...if I come in, it's a joke, cause you don't want sex with me? But you thought you were getting sex?" Shutting up. He was shutting up and taking a taxi home because he was never going to be able to live this catastrophe down.
"Ah," was all L said. He wiggled his toes and hid his face again.
"I'm really sorry."
"How far were you planning to go?"
"I wasn't. I thought you would throw me out―"
"At least have the decency not to lie. Until you got turned on and it was no longer a joke, right?"
Light tugged on his shorts and huffed. "You couldn't turn me on." He felt brave. And obvious. But L just stared at the carpet, the blush staining even deeper and spreading down his thin neck and disappearing past his shirt.
"Are you quite finished?"
Why did this never work. Here was Light, sweating sex, and L was supposed to be all needy right now and shove him against the door, and L would never stop using his tongue and mouth was accidentally thought and the thoughts that followed were slurred together and totally denied as soon as the shape of them formed in Light's mind.
The denial process was difficult, which is why he was left staring at L with his lips slightly parted, breathing shallow as he unconsciously tipped back into the door and closed his eyes.
"Light, are you alright?" he heard L say, and when he opened his eyes L was no less than inches away with a look of tangled confusion and amusement, as if he was slightly sorry that it was Light's little shorts that were cutting off circulation but hey, that was funny.
This went over Light's head. Everything was going over Light's head except for L's body heat washing over him and L's tongue as it nervously touched a lip and L's eyes, which were pulling him forward until...
Dear readers, it was not a kiss sublime enough to be described in full. It wasn't even a full kiss, what with L shoving Light backward and Light moaning in pain; in fact it could be summed up with the word failure.
"What was that?" L snapped. "What are you doing? I don't like you—for the last time, I don't like you."
It was as if something inside Light fell. As if something, unconsciously, had been standing on a precipice, and in its falling jarred Light to the reality of its existence, only for him to mourn the death.
He stood there for a moment feeling lightheaded with self-revelation. "It was a joke," Light whispered. "I'll go now." He awkwardly turned and groped at the door handle before L swatted his hand away (and the touch made Light electric and the revelation bloom ever more clear) before he was shoved through, and L's fingerprints were burnt into the small of his back and Light went to his own room and tried to sleep.
L, watching him on his monitor, knew it didn't come.