warnings: all the usual, with bonus actually-penetrative!sex and unusual drinking buddies.
notes: I don't know what happened here? This chapter - and the next, which more or less immediately follows it - pretty much wrote itself. And it didn't write itself particularly well. Stay tuned for the longest, most un-sexy sex scene, with the least amount of actual sex contained therein. If that doesn't make sense now, it will soon.
chapter four - quiet things
"the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it."
- Richard Siken, Crush.
It's morning and Light has tea and miso and L has a coffee cake and a coffee and they're both more or less bodily exhausted at the little make-shift breakfast table, so when L sucks the crumbs off of his finger and casually says, "You really have to stop beating up on me," Light doesn't even bother to glare.
"What are you talking about?" he says, sighing deep and long-sufferingly, as if he can play his way out of this with a roll of his eyes.
"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. Don't be deliberately obtuse." L sets down his mug and pulls the collar of his shirt down to reveal the angry purple bruises lining his lower collar bone, watching Light's eyes twist with a little bit of surprise and something sharply like arousal, before going blank and unassuming. "If you want to play the hapless victim correctly, Light-kun," he continues, "you have to stop injuring me. You almost sprained my wrist the other day. I had to get Watari to bring me ice while you were sleeping."
It's been like this all week, since Aiber in the bathroom, and L has been looking for some way to shift Light's overbearing possessiveness to his advantage, but so far all he's got to show for his attempts are finger shaped bruises and bite marks. Every time L has talked to Aiber since, or even Wedy, Light has jerked him away as quickly as possible, brow crumpled and eyes seething, just waiting until they're alone so that he can pin L to the nearest flat - or not flat, he's become considerably less picky - surface and kiss and touch and hurt him. L doesn't particularly mind the injuries so much as he does the negative effect the behavior has been having on their rapport. Light has barely spoken to him in the past few days, outside of work and asking if L is going to let him fuck him yet.
To the latter, L had said no. Partly out of pure self-preservation, and partly because it isn't the right time yet. Light is too angry to really let L in, to let him see him for what he is.
Light goes statuesque and tightlipped as soon as L says this, composing himself to be as distantly polite as possible.
"Are you sure I did that to you?" he says, and then with a slightly cruel tilt to his voice, "Maybe it was Aiber. Or Wedy, I suppose. I've heard she has quite the grip."
He's baring his teeth at L, fists going tight, and he's really nowhere near the liar that he had been. He's obviously angry, and if L doesn't play this conversation right he's probably going to end up spread out on the breakfast table with Light pinning him down.
It's not as if L couldn't fight him off, and rather easily at that - he's professionally trained in eight forms of martial arts and non-professionally trained in several more - but that would be counterproductive. He'd thought maybe he could ride Light's annoyance out, let him work out his issues on his body and then go back to the comfortable closeness of before, but Light seems to work himself into fits of rage as easy as he breathes or does calculus. He's so brilliant and so childish and so angry, and it might be tragically enamoring if it didn't hurt as much as it does.
L takes a bite of his coffee cake and rolls his eyes. "I haven't touched Aiber or Wedy and you know it," he says. "You're with me 24/7."
"No, but they've touched you," Light counters, quietly vicious.
He can see Light gritting his teeth and half of him wants to cup that jaw, to hold him steady and drag his fingers through his hair and tell him to be calm. Kira is really quite a terrible mess of a person under that perfect mask of his, and there's a part of L that, when faced with this confused, virtually innocent version of him, wants to believe that he could somehow save Light. Make him see the error of his ways, make him understand. But L is not so idealistic, and Light would never stand for it, anyway.
"I'm almost a little disappointed," L says, slumping forward to drop a few more sugar cubes into his coffee, purposefully neglecting to look at Light directly as he speaks. "I'm nurturing a bit of hope that this is all part of some overarching, murderous scheme, because, otherwise, this blatant jealousy is rather beneath you." His spoon clinks against the cup as he stirs the sugar in.
"Really?" Light snaps, not seeming to think before he speaks. "I could have sworn you were what was beneath me."
His brow furrows after he says it, and he looks almost disappointed in himself, too, like that hadn't been what he'd meant to say.
He's been like that a lot lately, always glaring and snapping and saying things not half as pretty and neat as the things he usually says. L's trying to decide how to respond to him, to either say something quelling and kind or else bait him further, but before he settles on a course of action, Light is standing abruptly and marching out of the room.
The problem with them - one of the many - is that it's very difficult for either of them to storm off from a fight without dragging the other along after himself. L stumbles up from the chair, trying to keep his balance as he thinks of what to say. This had been his intention, he admits - to get Light to react, to poke and prod him until he did something, but he hadn't quite resolved on what to do after.
At the sound of L's footsteps, Light stops, back tense and jaw grit. L has a brief image of going over and unbuttoning his shirt, of slipping it off of his shoulders and unzipping his trousers, too. Of pressing his face into the back of Light's neck in the way that Light sometimes presses against L. Of taking some sort of initiative that isn't sideways and roundabout and experimental. It's a very quick flash, though, and after it's over he just goes to stand next to Light, a few paces back.
"You're angry," he says.
Light breathes out, sounding suddenly too tired to be truly angry.
"Yeah," he says.
"At me?" L asks, moving closer. He could move his hand now, he could stroke down Light's back and say something comforting. Instead he just stands there, close but not touching, as Light pointedly avoids looking at him.
Light takes a few steps away, facing the small refrigerator and minimal counter space. There's a fully functional gourmet kitchen in Watari's rooms, but L hadn't felt it would be beneficial to provide the taskforce with that kind of distraction. He's sure Light's figured as much out, given the home-made sweets that come out for L virtually once a day, but he hasn't remarked of it and L hasn't asked him. There are a lot of things - most things, really - that they don't need to talk about, they both just know, and further know that the other knows, too.
This is not one of those things.
"I don't know," Light says softly, sounding almost guilty. "I feel weird." He looks over his shoulder at L, eyes not as sharp as usual, expression approaching confused. "You make me feel weird. I'm sorry. I don't know why - "
He cuts off his apology abruptly looking away again, and he looks so young just then and L doesn't know what to do. After a moment, he walks past Light, the chain dragging on the floor between them, and hops up to sit on the counter, legs tucked underneath his chin. He opens the tin next to him and pops a couple of sugar cubes in his mouth, more as an attempt to appear as normal as possible than any actual desire for them.
Light's looking at him with his eyes hazy, the way they sometimes get.
"A man almost killed me during sex, once," L mumbles, crunching.
Light freezes, expression suddenly going focused again, eyes narrowing at L in order to try and spot the lie, or else the truth of it. "One of your suspects?" he says, very slowly.
L drops another sugar cube into his mouth. "Yes, I suppose."
He doesn't remember the sex specifically - it had just been one encounter out of many and it blurs together with the rest of them, pale skin and thin fingers and a wide grin - but he remembers the hand around his throat, remembers the spark in the back of his mind burning him out, remembers the blackness and the feel of the wood floor on his cheek when he had woken. Remembers B's eyes locked on him when he'd dragged a hand through L's hair and said, "I was trying to kill you."
L would have been fine with writing it off as accident, but B hadn't let him. "I was trying to kill you," he'd said, and L had believed him completely.
Light looks at him with something between disgust and fascination and L of course knows that he wants to ask about the who and what and when and why of it. His mouth is set in a line and when he moves closer half of L wants to flinch.
"Why do you let them - " Light starts. "Why do you let me - "
And L's not sure how relevant it is that Light doesn't refer to himself in the same terms as he does them - criminals, suspects, ne'er-do-wells - but he does qualify them in the same position of wrongdoing in relation to L. Which is interesting in so far as it's different than what he knows of Light, who is usually unable to identify any wrongdoing in his own actions, no matter how cruel and unusual. Before - the first Light, the real Light, maybe - would never even have so much as questioned his own moral standing, L's sure of it. The way he's wavering now, unsure and ashamed of himself, can only mean progress.
L might feel guilty if he hadn't lost the ability years ago.
"You told me you knew," he says from his perch on the counter, letting his voice go gentler than it had been, no longer sounding as if he's conducting a science experiment.
He more or less is, though physiological experiment is probably more accurate. As he is in all things, Light is the best possible test subject, reacting and rerouting his hypotheses almost constantly, producing results he never would have foreseen. L sort of wishes that he hadn't killed all of those people, but is also sort of glad that he had, because if Light weren't Kira, Light wouldn't be anything and L would be in England now, or the Czech Republic or South Africa or some other place that he isn't, instead of standing in the tacky kitchen of a building that he had built specifically to trap an eighteen-year-old boy, regaling him with tales of his sex life in the same tone you would use to tell a horror story.
"That was before," Light scoffs, "when I thought it was just me. You think I'm Kira." It's maybe the first time he's ever said those words with something closer to pride than anger. "You think I'm your equal, and I am. It makes sense. But anyone else, it's wrong, they shouldn't - "
He sounds honest, which probably means he's lying while simultaneously planning out L's murder step-by-step in his head, but still. He sounds honest.
L gets down off of the counter. He thinks it's probably safer if he stays up there, as far away as possible, but he gets down and goes over and stands before Light, and it feels very mechanical, but also very unpracticed, like these are new movements that his body has just learned.
"We do plenty of wrong things for justice, Light," he says, and his voice is quieter than he means it to be, but he decides when he hears it that it's just the right volume. "I think you know that. Or you did, at one point."
Light meets his eyes then, caught off-guard even though he shouldn't be, should be used to it by now. There's too long of a silence before he speaks, and he doesn't quite manage to sell the cynical laugh as he turns away and says, "Can we please let up with this 'memory loss' stuff, L? Just this once. I'm not any different than I've always been."
He says L instead of Ryuzaki, and L thinks to correct him, but he doesn't.
"Yes, Light-kun," he says, quiet still. "We can let up."
They don't speak much today either, both concerned with their separate bits of research and avenues of investigation, and although the silence is not particularly congenial, it's not angry either. Even when Aiber comes by to ask a question about Coil and leans so far over L that he might topple over, Light doesn't glare or sneer or bite out his tight, sharp smile. If anything, he might actually roll his eyes, giving them the once over before going back to his work.
L isn't sure how he feels about that. L isn't sure about a lot of things lately.
Light shifts his strategy.
That's what you do when something isn't working - which is rare for Light, but it happens - you do something else. That something else is easy to slip into, after years of practice, of smiling softly and opening doors and saying quiet, clever things to make the girls giggle and blush behind their hands, overjoyed that he's even speaking of them. It doesn't take much mental strain for him to come to the conclusion that Aiber isn't exactly going to go for that, not with the terms they're on now, so his best bet in this situation is Wedy.
Light doesn't really know much about her beyond what L has told him - thief, L's former case, currently in L's employ. The whole sex thing, which Light's not going to think about anymore than he has to, because for some reason doing so makes him grit his teeth so hard his jaw starts to ache. L has fucked Wedy. L fucks everyone, it seems, and Light files the information away in some well-guarded little folder in the back of his mind full of information on L, examining it calmly and coldly, just another piece of the enigma.
L fucks everyone and Light is fine with that, he really is, but right now he wishes he had a way to get L to fuck off.
"That's fascinating," Light says, eyes crinkling with his smile. Wedy is showing him how she had placed the cameras in the Yotsuba members' homes and vehicles to leave as few blind spots as possible, although sounding rather bored as she does it, red painted fingernail flicking from screen to screen.
When he'd asked her to talk to him about some of her infiltration and surveillance techniques she'd looked surprised for a moment, cocking a suspicious eyebrow. "L?" she'd said, and Light had known she would - teaching the prime suspect how to break in is as good as teaching him to break out, after all - but L had just nodded, silently watching them. As Light had known he would.
After initiating a conversation with them, it's usually only a matter of time before most people end up adoring Light - if they hadn't at first glance - or at least respecting him, but Wedy is professional and, unlike with L, suddenly not one for extraneous conversation, and he ends up having to do a lot of legwork just to get her to speak.
"Excuse me if this is intrusive," he says, lowering his head slightly to look up at her through his eyelashes, "but I was just wondering how L ever managed to catch you? World's greatest detective or not, you're extremely adept at your profession." He says it as respectfully as he can, because thievery is still a crime and she is still a criminal, but seeing as that information isn't of much use to him currently, he sets it aside.
She looks at him evenly, eyes only glancing briefly over his shoulder to shoot a look at L, who's been watching the conversation as unsubtly as possible since the beginning.
"It is intrusive," she says, breathing out a long plume of smoke that catches him right in the face - L has long given up trying to get her to take her cigarette breaks outside, because every day is one long cigarette break for her. "And I bet you can answer that question for yourself if you think hard enough about it. You're a smart boy, right? "
Her lips twitch but she doesn't smirk, and Light gets the distinct impression that L has said something to her, because otherwise she'd be putty in his hands right now. Either that or she's just intoxicated; she's been drinking gin by the barrel all day, Light wonders that she doesn't just load up an IV and roll it around after her.
"I've been told as much," Light replies, trying to angle the conversation in a genial direction while simultaneously fighting hard not to roll his eyes. Everything Wedy says sounds like it's straight out of a 40's noir thriller, and he vaguely wonders if the only spy training she's had had been from the movies.
"Wedy," L speaks up suddenly, cheek squished childishly against his palm when Light turns to look at him. He's nodding at something across the room. "You have good reflexes. Matsuda's about to drop something. Go help him."
Matsuda does, in fact, look like he could take out several full-grown men with the foot-high stack of documents that he's clutching to his chest like a precious family heirloom. Wedy cocks a look at L that expresses a sentiment along the lines of, 'This is so far beneath me,' but gets up to do as asked. Light watches her go with a mixture of amusement and frustration.
"It's not going to work," L says, when Wedy is barely out of earshot. Light looks over at him, face as innocent as possible, even though they both know exactly what he's trying to do.
"What are you talking about, Ryuzaki?" Light asks, going back to his computer screen.
"Wedy's a professional, and that aside, she's known plenty of men like you."
He's not eating anything, but his fingers are tugging at his lower lip and Light really wishes he wouldn't do that, because not only is it an infantile, unsanitary habit, it's also terribly distracting.
"Like me how?" Light asks, leaning back in his chair again, laptop forgotten.
"Oh," L says, eyes rolling up as if he's just now giving it some thought, "charming," he says, "and ruthlessly manipulative."
Light has to physically prevent himself from laughing out loud, because he knows that L is hypocritical, that he hides behind a mask of justice while being secretly so far from just that the starkness of the lie is almost poetic. L doesn't seem poetic, reeks of computers and technology and mechanized logic, but he is. That's the secret to everything, maybe. In the same way that Wedy is the femme fatale of her own private drama, L has constructed himself a place as the Sherlock Holmes of his personal little mystery, where he is the good guy and Light is the Moriarty, the villain pulling the strings.
L is poetic in the same ways that he is unreasonable: quietly. To look at him, you'd think he was the antithesis of subtlety, but Light's spent enough time with him to know that he's not, that there are layers and layers to everything he says. And so when he calls Light, 'ruthlessly manipulative,' it's, of course, not even close to all that he's doing.
Light's lips quirk clever at him. "So take away the charming part and we're talking about you, yes?" he says, because under the layer of arrogance that is under the layer of social awkwardness, there is a strange self-deprecation to L, like even from behind his play-acting, behind his facade as the face of justice, he knows his flaws, knows that he is not the person he ought to be.
Light knows he's hit the nail on the head from the way L's expression stops its frozen stare and fades out into a distant, unreadable sort of pleasure, almost like he enjoys the fact that Light can read him so well. Maybe he does.
"I like to think I'm very charming," L says, biting his thumb, and of course he's not even attempting to make the lie sound believable.
Light huffs a quiet laugh, deciding to get back to working on Wedy some other day. He has more important things to do. "You like to think a lot of things," he says, and for possibly the first time ever the fact of this doesn't really bother him.
Watari calls in to tell L that there's a call for him on the secondary line, but L insists that they have more important concerns and closes the line before Watari can offer anything approaching an argument.
Light had made some comment about not having been outside for weeks, mostly just poking fun, not really meaning anything by it, but L had taken him up to the roof anyway. L - obviously, given the chain, given that they're never more than six feet from one another - hasn't been outside for weeks either. He just hadn't noticed. Watari sometimes has him take pills for vitamin D deficiency because it's not uncharacteristic for L not to notice. He forgets, sometimes, that there's a world out there, and it always rather shocks him to see it.
They stand on the roof for a bit, but it's cold and the view doesn't really mean a thing to either of them and Light looks more than a little relieved to get back to their heated, cushy bedroom. The bedsheets are warm in comparison to their skin, and although they might intend to kiss or touch or fuck - because now is one of those times that L feels like it would be easy, like he wouldn't really have to force himself at all - they end up staring at the ceiling and talking about Yotsuba and then about the case in Argentina two years ago, because although the methods are very different, the motives for the two cases appear quite similar. That takes them to the subject of world travel, and all the places L has been and that Light pretends he has no interest in visiting while being quite obviously jealous. They talk about the sort of far away, mundane things that don't need to be skated around and carefully measured and secreted away.
They talk about the sort of things that friends might talk about.
"I hate snow," Light says emphatically, at one point.
It's unremarkable as a comment in and of itself, especially from a sheltered teenager who get extremely annoyed if there's dirt on his shoes, but from Light it's almost endearing in its innocence, its straightforwardness of sentiment. His brow is crumpled softly and his hair is in his eyes and, "I hate snow," he says, and L thinks - for surely the first time with regard to Light, and maybe the first time with regard to anybody - that this is someone that he does not want to leave.
He thinks nothing of prosecuting him, or finding out beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's Kira - that seems an inevitability. He just doesn't want to leave. There will be other cases after the Kira case, and that makes L sad in ways he's not sure he knows how to be.
"My first memory is of a snowstorm," he says, which draws Light's eyes from the ceiling and over to him. L would like to think that he hadn't meant to say it, but he suspects he rather had. Not now, but the thought has been hanging in the back of his mind lately, with the bells. He doesn't ever think of the snowstorm, except for those time that he does, those times that it claws its way out from the corner that he'd put it in and then it's in him and it's cold and white and terrifying in a way that nothing else has ever been.
Light is still looking at him and his eyes are so warm that L doesn't really know what to do with the expression in them. Or, well - of course he knows what to do with them, with Light and the way Light is looking at him and what he's obviously feeling for him. He just can't seem to make himself do it. Making Light fall in love with him seems simple at this point, like some errand that he's been putting off and will get around to any day now.
He flicks his gaze along Light's collarbone, cheek pressed into the pillow, and meets his warm eyes. "I don't think I knew that it was a snowstorm at the time," he says. "I don't think I knew what a snowstorm was. I was very, very small and cold and I was being carried by someone, either toward or away from a church. I remember the church-bells."
Light's fingers are coasting through his hair then, brushing it up out of his eyes, and it's so easy. It's easy to make him believe it, to make him think of L as some tragic, misfortunate hero, to make him feel things the way L can make anyone feel things, if he puts his mind to it. There is nothing his mind cannot do, no criminal he cannot catch. If there's something like guilt licking deep and hollow and the pit of his stomach, then that's nothing to do with any of this. With justice.
Light's fingers smooth across his forehead, and they're warm like they always are, a familiar pressure.
"That sounds like the beginning of a Victorian-era tragedy," Light says softly, but he's smiling slightly, looking at L with a fondness usually reserved solely for his own reflection and a few particularly well-tailored suits.
And it does, doesn't it? L's never been very good at navigating the cliches. He is sure he is a cliche himself sometimes, and other times a wild anomaly. He is not quite certain of how to categorize Light within those parameters, either. Light, who is looking at him with the sort of eyes that schoolgirls daydream about, or maybe schoolboys, because Light could shift even the most discerning of tastes. He looks, in fact, so overcome with sheer adoration that, within the space of a few seconds, a thousands little neurons firing through his brain, L manages to convince himself that Light is just acting, that Light hasn't fallen for it and never will. Anything else is almost disappointing.
So, he turns his head slightly, slipping out from under Light's fingers, and says, "That's because I just made it up."
L is always making things up. L is just as much of a liar as Light, truth be told.
Light's eyes widen slightly, brows going up, and then he does something horrible and incongruent that makes L's stomach shift uncomfortably. He laughs. "I should expect as much," he says, shaking his head with that familiar air of long-suffering annoyance, but he doesn't seem truly put off by it, and that's where the trouble lies. "Can't you ever tell me something about yourself that's true?"
L looks at him for a long moment, then shifts slightly, reaching over to get his laptop. "There are no true things about me, Light-kun," he says quietly. And then, without fully intending to, "Now go to sleep, we've got a long day tomorrow."
Light looks genuinely surprised then, mouth opening and then closing quickly, trying to catch up with L's shift. He watches L for a second and then nods, but doesn't actually do as he says and go to sleep either. Sniffing slightly, he digs up his own set of documents and matches L page for page, hour for hour, not sleeping until L takes pity and shuts his laptop, pretending to settle in for the night so that Light will, too.
It's a kindness, maybe, but cruel in that it only delays the inevitable.
When Light wakes, L isn't there.
Everything stutters into dim focus in the low light of the early morning and so much has happened in this room that Light would have assumed that nothing could surprise him at this point, but L isn't there and it's like that moment, like breaking a vase or a mirror, and that moment just before it hits the ground where you're sure that what you've dropped isn't really falling, that it won't really break, but then it does and you sit there looking at the pieces and wondering how it had happened and why you can't just put it back. It's such a small moment, not even really a proper space in time, that it shouldn't count.
Light feels like that. He sits up in bed and L is gone and he feels like that for a long time.
He's been with L for just a little under three months, but he's woken every day next to him, and today he isn't there and Light just sits there not knowing what to do with himself.
The cuff still digs into his wrist, but the other end of the chain is wrapped around the bed post and Light watches it with the hazy unease of morning. He shifts and it clinks with the movement.
They've made more progress on the case in the last few weeks than they have in the last few months. They're closing in on Yotsuba. Kira is becoming more and more obviously not Light. But in that moment, as he sits there in the bed by himself, Kira seems very small and L seems very, very large. Like one of them is real and one of them is a dream Light had once.
The sheets smell like come and detergent and then three things happen very quickly, so quickly that they might as well occur all at once.
The first is that L walks into the room, shutting the door softly behind him like he's afraid of making any noise. He looks even thinner than usual in the gaunt shadows of dawn and something that would be a smile if L was a person who made facial expressions flits through his eyes when he sees Light there, awake.
The second is that Light smiles back, opens his mouth to say something very clever and very charming, and ends up coughing loudly. His throat is still lodged with the thickness of sleep and he might have been coming down with something yesterday besides, so he just greets L by hacking into the crease of his elbow with little dignity. L stands at the door and watches him. He's got his cell phone clutched in one hand and his wrist looks bare without the handcuff around it.
The third thing that happens is very quiet. Light realizes - or maybe resolves - in that moment that he is never going to fall in love, but if he were going to fall in love it would be with L and it would be right then.
It's a horrible realization, almost, because L is wrong in so many ways and this isn't the life that Light is supposed to have. But L's jawline is sharp and his presence is comforting in the same way that being alone used to be. Light's eyes water embarrassingly at the sting in his throat when he clears it.
There's an alternate universe somewhere, maybe, in which they've never met and L is just a letter in the Latin-derived alphabet to him. By that logic, there must also be universes where at this point Light rolls his eyes and says something snide - like, "I'm flattered that you trust me to sleep all on my own," - or scoffs and rolls over, or just pulls L onto the bed with rough hands and demands that they fuck. Those would be the smart things to do, the right ways to play the game.
In the current universe, though, Light doesn't do any of those things.
He swallows, wetting his throat, and looks at L's exhausted frame, at the phone clutched in his hand.
"What is it?" he asks, quietly.
Because L wouldn't have left him on his own unless it was something important, wouldn't look so heavy and small, standing there with his back to the door. He stares at Light for a long moment, then steps forward, walking to about halfway across the room and then stopping again like he doesn't know how to go any further.
Light should just shrug it off, but he waits patiently for L's steps to pick back up again, for him to make it to the edge of the bed. The sheets are cool and Light's skin is warm against them. When L leans over and kisses him, it's a gentle press of something so sharp and bright and terrifying that he forgets for a moment how to kiss back. In an alternate universe he is suave and perfect, but in this one his mouth opens at the wrong time and his hands are unsteady and - and this is it, this is the vase crashing to the floor.
This is the tiny space in time where he would fall in love, if he were the type of person who did things like fall in love.
L pulls back. They're always on level ground - or otherwise a sliding scale and wins and losses that balance out - but Light suddenly feels much, much younger than L. It settles in him, a new sensation. He doesn't think he'd even felt this young when he'd been a child, can't remember a time when he wasn't far and above everyone around him. It strikes him, vaguely, in the back of his mind, that he might be a very different person if he had grown up surrounded by people like himself.
Before L, he hadn't know that there was anyone out there like himself.
L steps back to pull off his shirt before reaching quickly past the gaunt outlines of his ribs to pluck at the button of his jeans. He drops his phone on the mattress with a soft sound, and Light leans back on his hands, just watching. L takes off his underwear, too, and Light watches harder.
He is beautiful in the way that very dirty, ugly things are beautiful. The fact that he is beautiful at all jags sharply through Light's mind as an inaccuracy, but he must be, because he looks it then. He is long and tall and black and white. He looks like something out of a story about death.
The first time, the night L had up and planted himself in his lap not a month and a half ago, Light had been surprised by how heavy he'd been, a solid body instead of the wisp of bone and hair he appears to be. By now the weight of him is familiar and when he slides across the bed and into Light's lap, it's with a cool, quiet familiarity that aches through Light when they touch. He tries to remind himself that L doesn't even really like him, that this is all just an elaborate strategy, that they tend to hate each more often than not.
He tries to remind himself, but the way L's thighs stretch across his lap is unbearable, a quick, harsh choke of sensation that isn't physically felt so much as psychologically experienced. Light remembers that fantasy of strangling him and it's even more perfect now than it had been, with L in his lap, with L looking like the gutted insides of a fairytale prince and acting stranger than all of the usual put together.
He pulls Light's pants down his hips and Light nearly coughs again because of how his breath flinches through his throat to catch and wheeze and gut through him, making him feel sick and powerful and powerless and like maybe in an alternate universe he would know what to do. Maybe he would grab L by the hair and make him suck his cock, make him weak the way Light feels weak, make him beg for all of the things that Light wants so much to beg for.
And maybe in another alternate universe Light would love him and love him so well that it would be the end of the story. Maybe when L wraps his fingers around Light's cock, Light's hips wouldn't stutter helplessly and his eyes wouldn't get blurry and the ends of his fingers wouldn't feel hollow and cold with a searing sort of want, but in this universe all of that happens and it is either horrible or wonderful or a curious mix of the two.
L's hand slides over his cock, barely pausing before he moves onto his thighs and hips and waist, petting the skin like a tease until Light is almost gasping underneath him, face flushed and palms clenched against the mattress. He wants to grab at L, pull him close, make him touch and stroke and do all the things that he ought to, but he can't seem to move from his desperate slump, heady with the barest traces of L's touch.
L gives him a good long squeeze eventually, but it's slow and ungenerous, pulling at his insides, at his coiled muscles like some wonderfully debilitating disease.
In a weird way, Light considers what it would be like to die here and now, and it scares him, because for the moment it somehow feels like a very real possibility, one that it is terrifying because it means that all of this will stop and go away and be gone, and the idea that this could be anything but here and real and vibrant and all over him, crawling under the skin and peeling back his eyes and lodging thick across his tongue, hurts him in a way that cannot be measured, or spoken, or even properly felt. Light doesn't know how to properly feel this. It would be terribly romantic if it were romantic at all, but it is just offset and strange and wrong, wrong, wrong in the most right of ways, like a story you want to blot out and re-write, except you know it will come out the same every time, that there is no other way for the story to go, so you just freeze solid and shivering warm. Light feels like that.
Light feels things that he doesn't know the words for.
He feels sick and strange, like a part of his mind has broken off and gone away, and he decides this is what love must feel like. The sensation now must be the echoes of it, from a phantom limb that was chopped off years ago or maybe never there to begin with.
L touches him again and Light is getting his hand sticky wet with pre-come and it's probably pathetic, but he doesn't care. He wants to ask what has happened, what's the matter, because the cell phone is still on the bed next to them and L is acting strange in a way that he doesn't usually and something must have happened. Something must be the matter, but Light can't tell what it was and he can't manage to care as much as he probably should.
L's hand is squeezing him so roughly that it feels like he's being gripped by death itself and he's never felt anything better in his entire life. It's not even good. Good is not the right word for it, but nothing is better, nothing compares.
"L," Light chokes out through the dry strain of his throat, because a part of him is sure it can't breathe and another part is gasping like a man fresh from the sea,
L leans his forehead against Light's own and he looks very serious and very sad and very tired, all without making any expression at all. He presses his lips to Light's temple and says, in the softest, lowest, most important voice that anyone has ever said anything in, "Sometimes I want to pretend that the only thing that's ever happened to me is you."
The words rock through Light like a fever and he finally remembers that he has hands and that his hands have fingers and he brings them up to ghost along L's arms and across his back, clutching him close. L's back is so, so thin that it feels like the back of somebody else, somebody with much less height and influence, and Light's nails tickle the ends of L's hair and L's hair tickles his nails and it's gorgeous in the most unexplainable way.
Light wants to say something very powerful and meaningful back to L, but what he does is lean up and kiss him very, very hard with lips that had somehow become chapped between now and the last time he'd paid attention to anything at all besides L.
L kisses him back and it's a terrible thing, except for the fact that it's the best thing that has ever happened. Light feels unlike himself, like Light Yagami is someone he made up once and played around with the idea of, but wasn't overly attached to in the end. Someone he would gladly sacrifice in exchange for becoming a thing that kisses L and cards its fingers through L's hair and thrusts its cock into L's hands and gasps sharp and uncontrollable into the long tunnel of L's throat.
It's foreign, because the most important thing to Light at all times has always been Light himself and the moment that that fades into the background and L moves in - crowding him, taking up the foreground, taking all of everything - he's struck by just how stifling it is to be himself and just how wonderful it would be to be anybody else.
Like Kira, something whispers in the back of his mind, and it thrills within him as he jams his hip up into L's, hands grasping at the thin skin over his shoulder blades to drag L even further onto his lap, until he's practically sitting on Light's cock, long body wrapped around him in a hunch.
Like Kira, he thinks agains, as he grinds himself into the crease between L's legs, not caring particularly that L is struggling slightly, trying to slow him down.
It's only once those long fingers have locked into his hair, jerking him into a bent-back gasp that's stuck somewhere between shock and mortified arousal, that L manages to climb off of his lap and over to the small nightstand to dig in the drawer for something that is shortly tossed over at Light, hitting him squarely in the chest. He looks down at where the condom has landed in his lap and wants to say one of those clever things that he would say if this were a normal situation, but it isn't, so he doesn't. It's special, and not in any of the ways that first-times are supposed to be. It's special in the way that very strange and sudden things are, special because it shouldn't be happening like this and wouldn't have happened like this if it were any other day and L were playing the game right.
But L doesn't seem to be playing the game at all right now.
He's got a little tube in his hands that he's flipping open and squirting onto his fingers, and Light's thoughts as he watches him are nothing more than a heady mix of lube and fuck and nghhh. Then L is kneeling across his lap again, fingers slipping down behind his back to press into his own ass, and Light's breath rushes out so quickly he almost gets spots behind his eyes. He wants to watch, to see L's long fingers sliding in and out of himself, to shove his own fingers in beside his and make L take whatever he wants to give him. To give it to him the way L clearly so clearly needs to be given it.
As it is, Light can barely move, so paralyzed with scintillating arousal as he is. Head swimming, he groans thickly and vaguely considers passing out, but ultimately decides against it.
L's hands are cold and large as they slide over his cock, getting Light wet, making it easy for him to slide inside. The thought burns into him, the image of shoving inside L and staying there as long as he likes, crawling into him and dying like some helpless creature with nowhere else to go. His mind keeps fuzzing over and he can barely breathe, barely think straight, and this isn't really how it was supposed to go at all, but nothing else could ever possibly feel better.
Light means to fuck L, but it ends up more like L fucking himself on Light's dick, straddling him and sinking down until he's completely filled, then picking himself up again. Over and over and over. Light just watching on in awe.
It feels different than he'd thought it would - and he's imagined it enough times for it to qualify as patently pathetic - and much, much better than it logically should, because it's just bodies, just animal movements in and against each other, hormonal reactions caused by a mixture of chemicals. It's his cock is in L's ass and it shouldn't feel like a fucking religious experience, but it does. He wants to scrub his eyes and shove L away, but he can't move except to thrust his hips up to meet L's, dig his blunt nails into L's back and try to speak against his collarbone, only to manage half-formed, near-worshipful whispers.
He's sure now that this isn't love, because it feels like dying, like a choreographed demise and he can't even think of the morning after because he's convinced himself that he isn't going to wake up, that after this nothing really exists, and everything before was rather a dream or a story or something, and he can't breathe, he -
He legitimately can't breathe, he's going to die here he's going to die and L is going to kill him and he's the one who's supposed to kill L and is that just the part of him that whispers Kira talking or is that really him him and why have his eyes rolled back and why is his vision blank and who's voice is that coming out of his mouth and -
Is he dead yet?
He either has a panic attack or he comes, thick and overwhelming and groaning noiselessly into L's shoulder. He feels L's fingers in his hair and L's cock still hard against his stomach and the gentle rocking of L's hip against his, still on him, still riding him - and oh god, that almost hurts. He's too oversensitive, but he can't move his mouth to tell L to stop, so he just lies slumped against him, arms wrapped loose and heavy as L gets himself off on gentle press from Light's limp cock and his thin hand grappling desperately with his own.
Sometimes I want to pretend that the only thing that's ever happened to me is you, Light thinks.
He's still not sure that he hasn't died.
The word empty gets bandied about by a lot of people nowadays, so much so that it's become a bit like nice, in that it doesn't really have a meaning of its own any longer, at least in the metaphorical sense. Empty is a word for teen angst and drugstore novels and when one reaches the bottom of the sugar bowl. Empty is cheap and kitschy. Nothing makes L roll his eyes more when skimming through paperback mysteries than the phrase, "He felt empty." Oh, did he? Did his organs slip out? Was he just so very sad? L only reads paperback mysteries to sneer at them in the first place, but "He felt empty," just makes it too easy.
But standing out in the hall outside of his and Light's shared bedroom, L stares down at the dull grey carpeting and he feels empty.
He's got a lot of words in his head, a virtual dictionary that he can sort through quicker than the blink of an eye, but he cannot come up with a better word than empty. He hasn't felt like this in years. He thinks he'd forgotten that it was possible for him to feel this horrible.
Other people, sure. There are always suicides and he is always being called onto them - "Prove that my sister was murdered, Mr. L!" and, "He never would have hung himself, trust me, I knew him," and all kinds of well-meant but horribly annoying drivel of the like - and it always is suicide. People are sad and people kill themselves and it is a fact and a fact that L knows well. But those are other people.
L is L and L is justice and L is not supposed to feel the way he feels now.
But the phone had kept ringing - out of earshot, of course, the secondary line is always left with Watari - and L had known, L had known, but he'd finally picked up anyway, finally taken the call.
The California Institute of Mental Health, Los Angeles Branch. Please hold for prisoner no. 9012398. Thank you.
When the call had finally connected, B's voice had sounded older and a bit harsher - maybe he'd taken up smoking, as one supposedly does in prison - but not unfamiliar. It hadn't even been a bad conversation, as far as conversations go with them - circular, of course, repetitive in nature and certainly quite inappropriate for the workplace, but L has had years to get used to that. It had just brought everything up with it, like being sick.
And the sickness had come out all over Light and now L is empty and it's ridiculous, it's so ridiculous, because he is too good for this melodrama, he is above feeling these things that he is feeling, but Light is Kira and Light is going to kill him or he is going to kill Light and he is empty. He can barely make his feet move.
He's still just standing there when Wedy walks by, raising an eyebrow over her cigarette. "Nice shirt," she says.
L looks down. He's wearing Light's button-down pajama top. He must have put it on by mistake when he'd dressed, pulling clothes on mechanically as Light had drifted off to sleep. He hadn't noticed. If he thinks about it, it's probably really quite funny - and the look on Wedy's face confirms as much - but he doesn't think about it.
"I wish that you wouldn't do that indoors," L says, watching Wedy blow half-formed smoke rings around the hallway. He's not sure what she's doing skulking around at this time of night, but then skulking at night is about 75% of her profession so maybe he should just label it practice and let it go.
She looks at him from under her eyelids, glance skating across his bare wrist. "Where's your better half?" she asks in her silky voice, the one that sounds like it was made purely for times like these. Quiet chats in the middle of the night.
L looks down at his wrist. It's strange, the way it moves now, too fast and forceful, like his muscles have been trained to expect being weighed down, tugged this way and that. There are a few red marks, skin chafed from the metal, but other than that it looks like it's always looked, pale and thin across his bones.
L doesn't answer the question, instead says, "Watari's asleep."
Wedy gives him a blank look. "So?"
"So," L says, eyes drifting down to the shifting patterns within the carpet, growing and changing with every flick of the low light, "given your status as a practicing alcoholic, you must have a stash of gin of your very own, for times just such as these?"
If possible, Wedy's eyebrow arches even higher.
When Light wakes for the second time, L is gone again. It's hard to tell that he'd ever been there at all, the only difference being his white shirt puddled on the floor like a deflated ghost, and… the handcuffs. The handcuffs are lying across the bed, on the side where L usually curls up, pretending to sleep.
Light's wrist is completely free.
Watari is taking his four hours and so they end up in his surveillance room, watching the quiet building stay quiet. L is curled up on his chair and Wedy is sprawled in hers, two very expensive highball glasses between them.
"No," L says, "more." He motions for her to continue pouring. "Due to my rather extensive training, I have a very high alcohol tolerance."
The drinking had come before pain tolerance but after verbal interrogations. Alcohol is an age-old method of loosening the tongue among the seedier criminal elements and so it follows by direct course that L has been able to drink most grown men under the table since he was fifteen. As a general rule, he doesn't really like alcohol - unless it's particularly sweet, and even then he's better off with a nice virgin pina colada - but tonight it goes down easy, like fuel to a tank.
Wedy watches him with heavy eyes. "Shame," she says, after a moment of long quiet, "I was planning on getting you wasted and taking advantage."
That's all of what Wedy is: clever lines and quiet moments.
L watches the last drops slide down his glass, landing harsh and bitter on his tongue, and he winces with it. It tastes horrible. He feels horrible. He's just fucked Kira. Light Yagami. Kira. Does it really matter which? He'd wager he dislikes them both equally.
"You know I don't need to be drunk for you to do that," he says, pouring himself some more.
Wedy sips her own, glance skating away from him and over to the lines of monitors, thick with static and stillness. She shrugs. "According to Aiber, you've gone… soft." Her glance down at his crotch is as far from subtle as possible and L assumes that invoking the name of Aiber must somehow have the immediate effect of lending a quaint sleaziness to all situations.
He almost rolls his eyes. "I have more pressing concerns of late," he says dismissively.
She eyes the way Light's shirt hangs across him. "Clearly."
This conversation skates across L's skin and he'd really like to talk to someone he can actually talk to right now, instead of having to put on a show, but Wedy is the only one around and when he'd been alone he hadn't felt like he could breathe. The combination of the alcohol and the conversation is dulling him down, away from the sharp, manic point he'd been at out in the hallway. He tries to think of someone he would actually like to talk to and comes up empty.
Watari is there, Watari is always there and Watari will take care of him if he needs it, but it isn't - they don't talk. L doesn't talk to anyone. L doesn't need anyone. L ought to go back into the bedroom before Light wakes up, but L is vaguely terrified.
A strange, small, ugly part of him sort of wishes that B would call again.
Wedy breathes out a thick plume of smoke and then takes a sip from her glass. In her leather pants, she looks like the poster girl for the criminal underworld.
"L," she says, after a long silence, "is he really Kira?"
The question jags through him and he feels vaguely like jumping out of a window. Or drinking this entire bottle of gin. Yes, he really doesn't drink, really doesn't enjoy it at all and would never do such a thing during an important investigation such as this, but he is going to drink this entire bottle of gin and it is a great idea.
"Yes," he says, after several long seconds. "Or no. I think he's lost his memories of being Kira." He watches the liquid dripping slowly into the glass and calculates the amount of alcohol per serving and serving per bottle and then scratches it all out and throws it away, because he doesn't really want to know.
"Convenient," Wedy says.
"Yes, very."
Wedy waits for him to continue and when he doesn't, huffs an impatient breath and taps her long nails against the console. "And you think he did it on purpose?" she asks. He wonders how much she actually cares. Wedy is usually an ask-no-questions type of girl. "How exactly does someone induce memory loss in themselves? Bad bender?"
L shrugs, sips from his highball. "The same basic way someone causes mass heart attacks from a remote location, I'd assume."
"What? Do you honestly think there's some kind of magical ESP power involved?"
Wedy is a skeptic. Being skeptical is one of her favorite hobbies, second only to being cynical, and she practices them both with the air of someone who has done all of the other things there are to do already and has fallen back on these just as a matter of course. He knows that's untrue, of course, knows her whole history top to bottom, and though it's no jaunt in the park, he's known histories a fair bit worse.
Still, he likes her skepticism. It fills the space where his own should be.
"There's a rational explanation for everything," he tells her, making a face at his drink. He wonders if it wouldn't be completely ridiculous for him to sprinkle some sugar into it. "Just, depending on what the Kira case reveals, I may have to reassess my definition of what qualifies as rational." He pauses for a moment, then adds, because he can't make himself not, "Besides, it wouldn't be ESP, anyway, which refers to a theoretical trans-temporal method of receiving or transmitting information, not remotely causing myocardial infraction. In fact, anything falling under the umbrella term of parapsychology wouldn't qualify for Kira, although there were a series of interesting experiments in the 1960's using - "
"Okay, okay," Wedy says, cutting him off with a sharp series of clicks from her nails against the table. She smiles at him with indulgent annoyance. "You know I don't understand when you use big words."
L scoffs into his glass, feeling as he suspects she must often do, considering the amount of time she spends scoffing into glasses at people. "Yes, you do," he tells her. "I hate when people pretend not to be as smart as they are." The words roll straight off his tongue and he still feels empty, but in a lighter way than he had before. Like he could drift up and out of the room without even really noticing.
"I'm suddenly reminded of why we never fell in blinding, passionate love," she says, and smirks around the words to make them come off as harder than they are. "You never really liked me much, did you, L?"
There'd been a time that he'd hated her, a time when he was 18 and B had only been gone for a year and he hadn't known how to solve her case, how to catch her up, so he'd done the only thing he hadn't tried yet - he'd come onto her. Sex is about power and L had needed power, and instead she'd smiled pretty and dug her nails into his back and - to be slightly crass - kicked his ass in the bedroom. He'd hated her.
"I like you now," he says, and drinks his drink.
She's going to say something back, maybe, and he rather hopes she will because if they're going to have this conversation - this conversation they've never had but always should have - he'd like to do it while intoxicated. But then she stops, eyes catching on something to the left of him, and L glances over at the closest security screen to see what's going on. The first thing that L notices about Light is not that he's out of their room, wandering through the halls unsupervised in the dead of night, but rather the somewhat disappointing fact that he's gotten himself out another sleep shirt instead of putting on L's. Maybe that's a clue that he's had a bit too much to drink.
"Kira's on the loose," Wedy says, stubbing out her cigarette and seemingly thankful for the distraction.
L leans toward another screen, squinting to make out the figure reclined in an arm chair in the room adjoined from the one that Light's walking through. "Not just Kira," he murmurs, and if he were the sort to make vulgar exclamations when unfortunate events occur, he would be swearing like a sailor now.
It says something about the pathetic state of his priorities that, having found of himself free from the chain, the only thing Light can think to do is to go look for L. He almost wishes he had some sort of devious scheme waiting in the wings, if only because he could use the diversion at this point.
Unfortunately, another diversion presents itself not a few yards away, in the form of tall, blond and the very last person Light wants to see at the moment, save maybe Misa - and only because he hasn't quite sorted out his unreasonable feelings of guilt in regards to her. Aiber is sitting down and there are creases in his slacks and if Light were the type of person to ever feel at all inferior, he might be uncomfortable standing there in his pajamas, but as it is he just crosses his arms and sets his face is a tight, disapproving line, like Aiber is intruding on his existence just by being there instead of L. Which he clearly is.
"Uh oh," Aiber says, setting his book aside - and Light briefly marvels at the idea that he can even read. "How'd you get off the leash?"
He looks like a statue in one angle of the light - broad and fair, like one of those armless, cockless Roman masterpieces, except in a terrible suit instead of a toga. Then he shifts and the dull fluorescents hit him differently and he just looks exhausted, light stubble and tired eyes and only a dim flicker of that jovial vitality that he usually wears as a second skin. Light hasn't really thought about his age before, but he must be a least ten years older than L, maybe more, considering how long they seem to have known each other. That thought might strike Light with something like disgust, if he had room in his head for anything besides the trilling displacement that fills him up in L's absence, in the wake of what had just happened.
"L undid the chain," he says, after what might be too long a pause. His voice sounds strangely distant to his own ears.
Aiber gives him a long look, then stands slowly. "Considering that Kira can control the actions of his victims before they die, I'm not exactly reassured," he says, but it's devil's advocate, he's not afraid at all and Light can tell he's just saying it in order to be contrary, though he still slips a hand into his pocket and pulls out his phone, fingers jabbing deftly into the keyboard, presumably alerting L to the situation. Light doesn't mind; Aiber has only shortened his search.
Light hates that he's not afraid, although he doesn't know why. There is nothing to be afraid of. Light is not frightening, but at the moment, he rather wants to be.
"You don't really believe that I'm Kira," he says, pushing stray hair out of his eyes in a gesture so practiced it's become second nature. "Do you?" Any other time he would say the words with quiet, unassuming charm, displaying a vaguely hurt innocence that would melt everyone in a fifty foot radius. But he says them quite flatly tonight, not putting on a show at all. He uses this voice with L sometimes, late in the night when he forgets to arrange himself, forgets to perform. He wishes L were here now.
He wishes L were here.
It's a very weak thought and Light will resent himself for it later, but he just stands there in his pajamas waiting for Aiber's reply and feeling strange and unlike himself. Like he's lost something. Like L had fucked it out of him.
"No," Aiber says, "I don't."
The look he follows the words with makes it clear that he doesn't mean to do Light any favors with this opinion. He's just underestimating him, is all. Light isn't Kira, but he could be, if he wanted. He can do anything. He'd just had sex with the world's top three greatest detectives and L is probably in love with him - because how could he not be? - and he could be Kira in a heartbeat. The thought burns through him the way it sometimes does, and although he usually shoves it down, usually aches with it, this time his mind thrills.
"Given how these things usually turn out, though," Aiber continues, watching him with unusual vigilance, "odds say that L's right and I'm wrong." He leans on the wall beside him, hip cocked and trying to look casual, but there's a heaviness to his words that Light has never heard from him before. "Still," he says, "I hope you're not."
"What," Light says, taking the word and wrapping it up in a clever tilt of his lips, "do you think I'd kill you?"
It sounds innocuous - just a taunt - but it fills him up with a sickening jolt of something torrential and ruining, something inside of him that claws at the walls and he thinks maybe he goes lightheaded for a second before everything snaps back into steadying focus and Light realizes what he'd just said. He feels sick. He wants L to hurry up and come chain him up again, but doesn't acknowledge the thought.
Aiber laughs. It sounds hollow.
"As if you could get my name. Not with L alive, you couldn't. Hypothetically, of course." He checks his phone and smiles slightly, typing something back, and if it's L he's talking to then Light hates the both of them tremendously in that moment. Aiber looks up again. "No," he continues, "I just know that our illustrious leader has, well, a bit of a thing for the criminal element. The badder the better," - and he does a little suggestive eyebrow twitch there that makes Light want to hit him - "and as far as bad goes, Kira's the cream of the crop. I reckon if it turns out you're not him, he'll lose interest in a snap."
He even snaps his fingers for effect. Light grits his jaw and counts backwards from ten.
It's not true. It's not true, and they both know it. Aiber is just slinging impotent barbs around because he's jealous. Light is L's favorite. L keeps him close, sleeps in the same bed as him, never lets him out of his sight. Where's L now? something whispers to him, but he drowns the voice out because the voice doesn't know what the fuck it's talking about. L had come to him, L had come to him and crawled into his lap, had given himself up to Light because Light deserves him, has earned him. It had started as a game, but it's not anymore, or maybe Light has just won and L is his prize, because this is different.
L fucks everyone but Light is different and it's okay. L will come and get him and put the chain back around his wrist - why does he want that, he shouldn't want that - and it will all be okay.
"You're wrong," he tells Aiber. "You don't know anything about L."
Aiber actually has the gall to snort at that. "I know a fair bit more than you do, kid," he says, sighing and shaking his head.
And what right does he have to laugh at Light when Aiber is just a minuscule little bit player in the story that is Light and L, the game that isn't a game. He's nothing. He's nobody. Light is the hero and L is his nemesis, or maybe his right hand man. Or maybe he's L's. It doesn't matter - it's them and no one else, because everyone else is useless and L is the only that's worth anything in this rotten world and -
"I'm not trying to be cruel here," Aiber says, and he sounds honest, but lying is his job and Light doesn't believe a word out of his mouth. "Look, I know, okay? The eyes, the jaw, the quiet tragedy. I know. He's got a certain charm about him and he turns it on when you least expect it. But L is not a good man." His phone beeps again, and he looks down at it with a quiet smile. "A great man, maybe, but not a good one."
Light knows that. Light wrote the book on that. L is bad and Light is good - but L is his now, so it's different.
"I'm not stupid," Light says, voice ringing with that pleasant tilt of the tone, and he wants to smile but he feels like he might snarl instead. "I'm Japan's top-ranking student. I know what he is."
"Do you?" Aiber says. "Hmm." And then he looks Light up and down and something bright flicks into his eyes and he says, if not the very last thing Light had expected him to say, then definitely close to it. "'Sometimes I want to pretend that the only thing that's ever happened to me is you.'"
His coyote grin deforms the words and there is a very short moment that feels very long and everything sort of tilts off its axis and falls to the ground.
"What?" Light says, more quietly than he means to, because for a moment he doesn't understand.
Then, for the second time that night, the vase, the mirror, all of it - it shatters.
Wedy lights another cigarette and watches the scene unfold onscreen like a television program. "Is it really safe to have him off the chain in the first place?" she asks idly.
A plume of smoke catches L in the face and he doesn't wince. "Don't worry," he mumbles into his glass, "he's not going to kill Aiber. As much as we all might wish for it. He's not any danger as he is now."
Still, he should go. Light is his responsibility and although at any other time L might have been interested to test his reactions to Aiber's particular brand of confrontation without L being there to referee, now is unlike any other time for a number of reasons. One of which being that L is rather tipsy.
Another of which is that for the last week or two, L's been getting almost daily calls from The California Institute of Mental Health, Los Angeles Branch, and ignoring them under the guise of keeping his full attention on the case at hand, but in reality only because nothing shakes him up quite like conversing with Beyond Birthday. B makes him rash and young and then he trips up, he always trips up, and this time he'd tripped right into Light's lap, nose-dived into the thing he's been putting off for almost a month and a half. They'd fucked, and if L's track record is any indication, it's not long now before the case will be over.
The case will be over and Light Yagami will be dead, maybe. Maybe L will. He doesn't know why that makes him feel like his insides have been gutted out with a fish hook, but he's half sure that the only thing still sloshing around inside of him is gin and possibly that milkshake he'd had earlier.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. Lose something? says a text from Aiber.
Misplaced, L types back with one quick finger. I'll be right there.
He doesn't get up. He half considers just sending Wedy in his stead, but even he's not that cruel of an employer. His phone buzzes again. No need to hurry. I can play guard dog. He takes that as a sure sign to hurry. On screen, Light's jaw is grit and he looks like he might just go Texas chainsaw on Aiber in the next minute or so. L has purposely left the sound off.
He suspects he's being very unprofessional as he drains his glass, and as much is confirmed when he tries to step smoothly out of his chair and ends up swaying on his feet a bit. He should drink water. He's not in any way headed toward the kitchen, though.
"If he murders me, wake Watari," he says to Wedy without turning around, and then slumps off down the hall. His thighs burn and his head is blurred and he really wants pie after this.
"Heh. I can't believe he still uses that line," Aiber says, fiddling lazily with his phone.
The world sort of stutters for a second and then everything flips into a sharp point of horrible clarity. L is not a good man. He feels sick. He doesn't think he's ever been ashamed of something before in his life, not truly, not that he can recall, but it burns through him now with Aiber's words. He is disgusted with himself and it fills him up with sick understanding, because Light is smart - smarter than anyone - and it doesn't take a genius of his caliber to catch on.
There's a very small, pathetic part of him that can't quite believe that this is happening, and that must be the part of him that speaks first. "He - what did you just say?"
Aiber has a small indentation between his brows that creases when he grins, and maybe it's very handsome, and maybe L has touched it with his long, pale fingers before, a long time ago. Maybe recently. Light feels sick.
"He used it on me, too, the first time," he says. "And Wedy. She told me about it once while we were on a case in Bangladesh. We got completely hammered and swapped all our favorite L stories. I assume he uses it on everyone. All his suspects, I mean." He says this all very quickly, like a performance, and then continues with barely a breath. "It's a good line. I tried it once, but the girl just called me a creep and threw a martini in my face, so I guess it needs to be delivered in some specifically wide-eyed, anemic way. Anyway, you see what I'm getting at, right? You're just another piece on the board with the rest of us and he's the chess-master."
And he looks at Light then like he is a child, and no one does that to Light - except L - and there's something in his eyes that's almost sympathetic - Light doesn't want his sympathy - Light hates him, hates both of them, hates L more, probably. It's a game. It's all a game. He feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room because it's just a game and L uses that line on everyone and thinks he's a Kira - he's not Kira, he's not, he's not - but L thinks it and how could Light think that L could - would ever - how could he be so stupid?
Light feels sick.
The crease in Aiber's brow shrinks a bit, like the fun has suddenly been taken out of what he's doing. "Don't feel bad or anything," he tries weakly. "The sex is still good, right?"
And - no. No, no, no. Light can and has taken a lot - a month of incarceration, a staged execution, L - but if there's one indignity he won't stand for, it's pity. Not from anyone, and least of all from a half-wit conman who smells like a department store and wears sunglasses indoors. Light is so above him, Light is so above all of them, L included.
L especially.
The world resets in his mind in that moment, the glass un-breaks. L never came into the room and fucked him in the middle of the night - and if he did, then it had only been a game, and Light had played along. It hadn't meant anything. Light had only played along. That is what had happened. The world resets, and Light convinces himself of this reality and rejects all others.
He takes several slow steps forward until he can smell Aiber's cologne and smiles very calmly, and very unkindly. "I am not a piece," he says. The words cut through the room and it sounds like proclamation of king, a mandate set down by royalty. Light Yagami is brilliant. He is the top student in Japan. He, if anyone, is the chess-master.
Aiber's expression goes tighter suddenly, nervous, and Light feels quite self-satisfied until he realizes Aiber's gaze is shot at something over his shoulder. He knows it's L, and that's using basic reasoning skills, even though it feels like some sort of odd sixth sense. Like the world only shifts back into focus when L is there, six feet and no more between them. Light turns to look at him and means to say something but doesn't.
It's just a game, he thinks. Play the game. But his throat is lodged shut.
"Light," L says, so flatly that it doesn't sound like a word at first. He takes his steps forward slowly, like he might sink through the floor at any moment, and speaks very quickly so that the words rush together. "Fancy meeting you here. I hope you don't mind, but I need to physically restrain you to my person. And if you do mind, even then." He puts a hand out to take Light awkwardly by the arm when a few moments have passed and Light doesn't move. They're so used to just pulling one another along with the chain - a game of a tug-of-war in a secret language - that direct contact seems oddly impersonal, in a way. "Come along."
Only when Light finally begins to let himself be carted off by his captor does L appear to take notice of the third person in the room. "Aiber, get some sleep," he says, and it sounds very much like an order. "We can't have Coil looking haggard for Yotsuba tomorrow."
Aiber's smile slips several times, but he tries to put it back on. He really does look tired.
He taps the space under one of his eyes, then nods to L, who is nothing but dark circles. "Just trying to get in character," he says. In another situation, said in a very different voice, it might be teasing. It might be flirting.
Light follows L back into their room, seeing neither the hallways nor the elevator, the journey blinking past him in a flash. L's grip stays locked on his arm the whole time, a shackle binding them together as well as any chain, and Light has images dancing like pinpricks in the back of his mind of those hands wrapped around his shoulders, digging into his back, his hair, his face. L's grip has always been surprisingly strong, and Light can almost imagine it burns him now, branding a mark onto his skin through the material of his sleeve.
L is wearing one of his shirts and yesterday that would have been arousing and intimate and maybe a little thrilling, in some way that Light has to bury now in order to think straight. He's too thin, and it hangs on him like a sheet, but still looks better than his usual clothes. Light briefly fantasizes about dressing him, about putting him in nice, fitted suits and getting him a hair-cut, coifing him up the way that people ought to be if they want to be with Light. Making him a pretty little fake, like Misa, instead of the ugly liar that he is.
Ugly, Light tells himself. L had been very ugly once and he tries to see it again - focuses on the too-wide eyes and sickly pale skin and the gaunt crookedness of his frame - but he can't. He remembers the jagged dips of L's back, shifting and arching under the skin as he'd ridden Light, forehead pressed to his temple and warm breath sifting out like steam, and he can't see it. Thinking of the sex at all, though, makes him angry, so that's at least something. It makes him feel gutless and hollow for a moment, but he quickly shifts it into a bubbling sheet of rage that pools under his skin and on his tongue as L leads him back into their room.
Time seems to slow as L slips the handcuffs back on, first on his own wrist, then turning to Light's. Light imagines jerking the chain out of his hands, grabbing it and grabbing him and just wrapping it around his neck - like a collar, like a noose - pulling him close and breathless, making him gag and choke and beg - with silent, breathless words - for mercy. He thinks these things sometimes: disgusting, vile, bad things that titillate him the way nothing else can. Fantasies, dark and wrong and buried deep; not all of them involve L, but most do.
He doesn't act on them, doesn't ever, wouldn't dare. Instead, he waits until the handcuffs are fastened securely on both of them to grab L by the collar of his own shirt and throw him down on the bed, pinning him with the weight of his hips. It's a game, just a game, but Light doesn't want to play, is so fucking tired of playing - the way Aiber is, the way L makes people. L is a horrible person who ruins things, who crawls his way in, down under your skin, so deep until you can't get him out. Light thought he could make him better, could help, but L is beyond saving.
Light feels sick.
"'Sometimes'," he says, in whisper-soft voice that he spits into L's ear, "'I want to pretend that the only thing that's ever happened to me is you.'"
It's a taunt and L knows it, is a genius after all and can catch up even if he hadn't heard Light's conversation with Aiber, which is always a possibility. He doesn't look afraid, but he does look wary, but also sorry in a way that makes Light ache. It's just a game, just a game, don't -
"You knew what I was doing," L says, very quietly, staring up at him with those wide, ugly, horrible eyes. The circles look darker than usual.
Light feels sick.
tbc.
end notes: *throws hands up*
As you can see, I have given up on resisting the unexplainable desire to turn this first arc into a melodramatic workplace romance. Fear not, in a few chapters we'll get to the obsessively psychotic angst and murder. For now it's just a lot of hurt feelings, because who doesn't like to see Light drown in a pool of his own tears? (rhetorical question. let's face it, we all love the crazy fuck.) One of the great things about L/Light is that (if you follow the tried and true cliches the way I like to) you basically get to do two versions - the yotsuba lovefest of bed sharing and make-outs and general cuteness, and then the aftermath when Light inevitably regains his memories (and his status as a certified lunatic) and everything goes predictably to hell. We're in the former now. (I know, you probably couldn't tell, given all the psychosis already flying around - my good!Light isn't overly good, is he?) We'll get to the latter.
Things in this chapter that are unclear or otherwise don't make sense will hopefully be somewhat explained in the next chapter (i.e., the B stuff.) As is probably obvious at this point, the Beyond Birthday in this AU is very much alive. I have no good excuse for this except that I very much wanted to write him, so let's just assume that L didn't let his name and face end up on public record and leave it at that.
Thank you for reading and, especially, for reviewing. Thank you all, in general.