warnings: I don't actually think there's any sex in this chapter? wow, that's a first. no, don't run away! I promise there are lots of invasions of personal space. and, uh, underage drinking.
notes: Congratulations! You've made it this far into this monstrosity. As a reward, some plot events might actually sort of happen this chapter ~ wow!
In all seriousness, a million thanks to everyone who's reading this, or reviewing, favoriting, following, etc. And thank you to the people on tumblr for being brilliant darlings. Thank you all, in general.
chapter eight - man loved the birds.
"The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. 'To say goodbye is to die a little.'"
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
He builds himself a box. He is a marvelous builder, a practiced artist when it comes to small, enclosed spaces and he stands in the middle of his bedroom - his, Light's, theirs, whatever; only matters now as far as symbolism goes - and builds himself a box. He can't move his arms or his legs, cannot think his thoughts. He becomes a thing that does not exist, just for a moment, just for as long as it takes him to blink and breathe in softly, trying to set himself right. He hears the knock. He doesn't move.
Aiber's palm is warm when it falls to his shoulder, more awkward and stilted than it's designed to be.
"Hey," Aiber says.
"Get your hands off of me."
L doesn't shake him off, doesn't pull out of his reach, just lays it down as an order: you can only touch me when I say you can touch me and you cannot touch me now. A pang of annoyance slips into his box when Aiber doesn't move. His grip gets tenser, veins shifting under the skin, and then L's being jerked around to face him. Aiber's face is void of its usual lightness and he looks oddly concentrative, as if he's given the situation a good deal more thought than he is normally wont to do. Wedy in behind him, posed reticently in the doorway.
"Don't pull that shit with me, L," he says, not unkindly, but his voice is hard.
L frowns. He has to nip this in the bud if he doesn't want it to get out of hand, and he has enough to deal with at the moment. "What?" he asks. "Do you think you're important? That you have some kind of favor with me? Light Yagami was under the same impression, and you can see how it's working out for him."
L keeps his voice even and Aiber's brow shifts as he speaks the words, like a dog trying to understand human speech. L feels little more than disgust towards him at the moment. He is disgusted by everything at this moment, most especially the things outside of his box; sick, strange, unsanitary things.
"Don't you ever get tired of - " Aiber starts, then stops. He shakes his head. "Nevermind."
He leaves, forcing his way past Wedy and out of the room like the mountain running away from Muhammad. L misses him when he's gone, misses the disgust and fever of being afraid. Wedy's still there, but she's not half as much of a threat, because she's never tried to know him - not in the way Aiber has, the way Light is.
She's all business. "Is he going to kill us?" she asks. "Aiber and I? Because I'll do a lot, but I draw the line - "
"He won't get your names. Not while I'm alive." He says it not because he knows it, but he thinks it's what will make her go away. It doesn't.
"And what if he kills you? If you were ever safe, you aren't now. Not after that." She's playing with her lighter, nails flicking against the body; nervous, but quietly. "If you were really such a genius, you would leave. Now. Pursue the case from a different location. If he doesn't have your name yet, don't give him time to find it out, just go." Her expression is much more distant than Aiber's and if she truly cares about his life and not just her own, she's determined not to let it show. L finds the scarcity of emotion comforting in that way that unappealing things can be, if they're familiar enough.
"I am not running away from a child with a god complex," he says, the words forced out like a battle cry, a call to arms that has no one to call.
"He's not the only one with a god complex."
L blinks. "Wedy," he says, gently, "get out."
She does. He stands for a while, then sits. The world has lost its angles, gone thick and splotchy with the feeling of pointlessness that settles into him. He has a purpose, a job to do, but no desire to do it and so it all feels like time wasting, just trying to fill the space that is left for him to fill. Light is going to kill him and L knows, logically, that he ought to stop him. He just can't seem to get up the energy to try.
He falls back, feet still touching the ground, hair landing around him like an ugly crown. He imagines a world where he could think straight, a world where he is nobody in particular and Light is just Light - the Light he had been, the one who lives between the mask and truth, the conflicted, young part stuck in the middle that had made L feel less weak through his own weakness - and they could live somewhere, together. A place, a circumstance where chains would be unnecessary, where they could dance around the truth for fun instead of fear, could separate from the rest of the world and into their own. Light could read the paper and L could rest his head in his lap and it would be dull and beautiful in its banality, something to grow bored of instead of be killed by. Maybe they'd break up and go their separate ways and, in this theoretical nowhere-world, maybe that wouldn't be a big deal, wouldn't be worthy of a death sentence.
He puffs the strands of hair out of his eyes and feels far away from himself.
It takes a while to get Rem to agree to it, and even when she does, sorting out the details is a pain. She wants to know all about how Misa will fit into it, what it will mean, what will happen if it goes wrong, and Light has to explain again and again that it won't go wrong, as long as Rem plays her part. By the time she agrees, he's missed three calls from Misa and has to suffer through a lot of squealing and hugging on the steps of the investigation headquarters in order to slip the note into her pocket. She smells like raspberries and her hands are very small in his. She feels more to him like an annoying little sister than a girlfriend, someone he has to appease as a matter of course.
That, of course, makes him think of Sayu, and that makes him think of how different everything is going to be, after. He'll have his autonomy back, can go and see his sister and his mother whenever he likes, can go anywhere. The world is open to him and L is the only thing standing in the way.
"Say hi to Ryuzaki and everyone for me!" Misa calls cheerily as she skips off, expertly covering any surprise at being given a secret note, which is at least some comfort.
Light takes the elevator up to the main room the find L hunched in a chair, which has become unusual in recent days, eating pocky and speaking lowly to Matsuda. Light frowns, has a brief image of Matsuda bending over L - in a bathroom stall, a supply closet, whatever - red-faced and delirious at his good fortune. L would give it up to him for loyalty, maybe, or perhaps for no reason beyond sheer human desperation. It's a very unlikely scenario, but Light imagines it anyway, just to have reason for the distaste that rises in him, watching them speak.
"And then Watari said you'd only been joking, which was honestly kind of a relief. The Shinigami follows the notebook around and, I mean, I guess it's not dangerous or anything, but it's pretty weird to have it floating next to you when you're trying to - oh, hey, Light! How's Misa-Misa?"
Light gives some mundane, placating response and goes on to answer Matsuda's overly excited questions about his lip and L's bruise and whether or not they'd gotten into a fight and what it had been about and are they okay now and do either of them want an icepack, because Matsuda can go get some. Light declines, but L says yes, presumably to get rid of him, and then it's just the two of them surrounded by the warm whirring of the computer systems and the quiet chatter of the rest of the team.
Light looks at the blooming purple bruise at the corner of L's mouth, spread low on his jaw, fading out in an ugly yellow toward his cheek. It looks like sickness and desiccation and it is only beautiful because of how ugly it is. Looking at it makes Light tongue his healing lip. He's got bruises worse than L's all over him and he thinks he should still be angry about that, but he's not. L had, over the course of their time together, mentioned many a job-inflicted injury, earned in the service of justice. L hadn't made them sound particularly romantic, but Light remembers thinking that suffering for the good of the world must be very fulfilling. His aches and pains now, though not exactly the same, instill him with a strange sense of pride.
He sits down and abruptly says, "How many bones have you broken in your life, do you think?" at the same time as L mumbles, "It's my birthday the day after tomorrow."
They shock each other into silence, and Light feels very silly for asking such a needless question, so much so that it takes him a moment to process what L had just said, and when he does, he can't help marveling at the brilliance of the situation. Like poetry, he thinks. As if he'd written it just like this.
"25?" he asks.
L raises his eyebrows. "Oh, not so many as that. Over ten, though."
Light takes a moment to understand what he's talking about - bones instead of years. It's impressive. Over ten is a lot.
"I meant your age," he says.
"Oh. Yes."
They sit for a while in a silence that would be much more awkward if they weren't both so aware of it being so, and it is therefore made almost hilarious, in an upsetting sort of way. Light's a bit giddy inside and L is far-removed. It's all a big mess, really, couldn't get worse if they put effort into trying to make it so. That's what Light is betting on, anyway. The fate of the world is hanging on his snap decision, his strange shift of plans. It's so terrifying in its immensity that, from this distance, it becomes a joke.
Matsuda comes back with the ice-pack eventually. L thanks him stiffly and doesn't use it, so Light picks it up for him, rolling his eyes as he presses it to L's bruised skin. He feels like the harried mother of a developmentally stunted child. L's eyes drop closed against the sharp pressure of the cold, teeth gritting. Light wants to kiss his eyelids, run his hands against his skull.
Instead, he says, "If you had the option, would you take me away with you?" L blinks his eyes open at that, but Light doesn't meet them as he continues. "To England, or wherever you plan to go when this is all over. I know it's not going to happen, but would you, if you could?"
He can feel L staring at the curve of his neck. He is solemn and he seems at once much older and much younger than 25, everything but 25. "You'd hate the weather in England," he says finally. He leaves it at that.
The inanity of big, dramatic events is that everything in between them feels arbitrary. A film can cut from action scene to action scene and a book can tell you only the important bits, but real life isn't so narratively concise. As much as one might want the atmosphere to continue on into the next day, things snap quickly back to their usual mundanity. So Light chokes him and fucks him and he has Light beaten and chained to a chair, but by the next day it's already become tiring to hold grudges, to prolong the crisis.
Things continue on as they must.
"I found Wedy's stash," L says, as soon as he sees Light. He catches him on the stairs, holding up a bottle of something with a very high proof.
"And?" Light says.
"And," L says, "I think we should drink it and have sex."
A pause. "I don't drink," Light says. He looks surprised in a jittery, uncertain sort of way.
L shrugs. "Then we could just have sex."
In actuality, they do drink and they don't have sex. They go to Light's room because it's clear of shared sense memory, ending up on the floor instead of the bed - clean, crisp sheets tucked in at the edges; too perfect to muss - and taking small sips at first, then larger, then lying spread out beside one another on the scratchy carpet, watching the hazy ceiling lights twinkle above them. There is something less debilitating about lolling about on the floor drinking and doing nothing productive when you have someone to do it with, someone who gets drunk much more thoroughly and easily, and smiles at you with his handsome eyes and paws at you with his fine hands.
L climbs on top of Light at one point, because they can't seem to manage it the other way, and they kiss softly and move against each other discordantly, but nothing much comes of it - pun recognized, but not particularly intended. It's more like grappling with an animal than anything else, each of them trying to wrangle the other into the specified position, each blurred and miserable in their own way - at least he thinks, hopes, Light is miserable. There is a good chance that this is all a show, just another game of pretend, but then there always is that chance and L can't be bothered to mind, either way.
Tomorrow, he tells himself. Tomorrow he will catch Kira, tomorrow he will save the world. Maybe the day after. He's already spoken privately to Watari about setting up a test for the 13 day rule, but intends to take measures beyond that in order to ensure his success.
He intends to.
For now, he strokes along Light's thigh and presses his face against the crook of his shoulder, collarbone kneading into his cheek. They have conversations, hazy and half-there and about nothing of particular interest. Light will say something and L will make some reply and they will tumble forward, the blind leading the blind into something like a strange sort of intimacy, one they seem to enter at unusual intervals and with little regard for the situation at hand.
"I dislike animals," Light says, at one point. "Sayu always wanted a cat, but she wouldn't have taken care of it and I would have had to take care of it and everyone knew that so she never got a cat."
"Why would you have taken care of it?"
"Because she wouldn't have."
"But if you dislike animals."
"I dislike a lot of things."
Light is next to him, twisting his fingers through L's hair, and his voice is low and tired and tiring. L wants to kiss him but his arm has fallen asleep and these two things seem connected to one another, somehow.
"We had a dog when I was younger," he says instead. "A great, dumb, sheepish beast who would bite only when she was sure of there being no repercussions. Horrible animal. I don't remember her name. I miss her."
"Did it die?" Light asks.
"Of course she died. Everything dies."
"Not you."
"I haven't yet, no."
"You won't. I don't think - I think you won't."
"That's very kind of you to say."
"I'm not being kind."
"No, you never are."
They do kiss then, but Light's the one who shifts to initiate it. He tastes thickly of alcohol, like sickness and weight and unreasonable things that have no names. In that moment, L feels very inclined to run away and elope with him, except without the actual marriage or the traveling, and he'd have to bring Watari of course, so maybe what he wants more is a metaphorical elopement. He wants to and he entertains it contentedly and that's worth about as much as the act itself. Love is such an uncalled for word in any situation, but it fits nicely into this one and L lets it float in the back of his mind like a private joke with himself.
"That boy," Light says at one point, "the one who knew names."
"I made him up," L mumbles.
"Oh."
It's as easy as that.
"I lied to you when I said you were my first friend," L says at another point.
Light scoffs, taking a long sip. "Do you think I don't know that?"
"No. I think you know it, but in the wrong way. We're friends now, I suppose, but I've had friends before and better friends at that."
"Aiber and Wedy?"
"And people like them, yes."
"Those aren't friends."
"Then I suppose I never have had any friends, up to and including you."
"I suppose I never have either."
L imagines he can hear sirens from the streets below, but knows he can't. They're too high up and the building is too well-made. Light's lips are warm against his temple. They're not really concerned with touching each other anymore, individually collapsed and only half on top of one another by chance. Light's bangs tickle his forehead.
"We're not the brilliant minds we like to pretend to be, are we?" L says, for some reason he will not remember in the morning. "Great, big fakes, the both of us."
Light sits up, looking at him curiously. Then, before he can say whatever he's going to say, he leans away from L, thrusting out a hand to steady himself before promptly throwing up on the carpet beside him. His body spasms with the force of it, racked and shivering. By the time L thinks to help him to the toilet, he's done, sitting up and wiping his lips and frowning like he can't quite believe he's just done that.
Then he groans, shoving a hand to his forehead.
"I quite agree," L says, slipping one of Light's arms over his shoulder.
He manages to haul him up and over to the bed, dropping him on the mattress with little ceremony and attempting to arrange him into a position somewhat suitable for sleep. Light is not overly compliant. He whines in the back of his throat, knocking L's hands away. L thinks of getting a warm, wet towel and wiping the excess vomit off of Light's face, but it feels altogether too kind and too foreign, so he just brings him a bucket and turns the lights off.
"My socks," Light mumbles, blinking blearily at L from beneath the ends of his hair.
"What about them?"
"My feet are hot," he says. It's strange in a sad way to see him like this. L thinks he should feel empowered or something, being at such a constitutional advantage, but it just makes him feel weirdly intrusive. Like seeing a hollywood actor without their make-up on, crying on a dirty street corner, and he's the paparazzo snapping the headline photo.
He walks to the end of the bed and slips Light's socks off, setting them on the sheet next to him. "Is that better?" he asks, drawing his thumb along the arch of Light's foot. Like everything about him, it's beautiful.
"Mmmh," Light says, already mostly asleep.
L puts in a call to Watari for the clean up, then goes out into the hallway, closing the door quietly behind him. His head is blurry and flared, but he feels strangely soft in the low light of the early morning, like things aren't half as bleak as he usually pretends they are. Melodrama has been his quiet companion through-out this whole case - a necessary spin to an otherwise too complex story. He'd fashioned good and evil, one for himself and one for Light, but he's been in this business long enough to understand that it's not and never will be that simple. Light is a fragile boy, a boy who doesn't drink, and evil is too simple a descriptor.
Likewise, good does not approach the reality of what L is.
He slumps down the hallway, resolving to find Aiber if he's awake and to wake him up if he's not. Not to apologize, of course - apologizing is not something that L is in the habit of doing - but to make sure he understands that while he is not in any way special or irreplaceable, he is a valuable team member, and one that L would rather not do without. He isn't sure of the truth of either the former or the latter statements, but truth is not what matters in this situation. At this point, the priority is survival.
He's turning a corner, head sorting through a list of meaningless platitudes to attempt to find one with an applicable sentiment, something simple and to the point and not as fruity or romantic as 'I need you,' but slightly more affectionate than, 'I'd prefer not to have to fire you,' when he feels it. Just a prick on his neck, nothing much - and then the pain is sharp, jabbing into the vein with a sick shakiness. He swerves, hand going to his neck, but it's not fast enough, it's already in him, already licking through his blood stream and making him dizzy and imprecise. He can't see anyone, but he can feel it, there's someone there, someone watching him as his legs give out and his vision goes very dark and then very bright and then -
He's floating, he thinks. He's just floating. He watches the ground below him get smaller, fading out into nothing. He fades with it.
It's all very well to feel sick to your stomach in a metaphorical sense and Light, given the amount of time he spends around L, is well-practiced at it. It's a completely different matter to be legitimately sick to your legitimate stomach and legitimately need to throw up.
He's halfway to the bathroom before he's fully awake and has a very near miss with the doorframe, navigating it just in time to lean over the toilet and vomit spectacularly. He hears the knocking then, realizes it's what must have woken him in the first place, but can't be bothered to conjure up a polite response as he barely manages to hold himself up, breathing heavily. His head feels like a fish tank and his mouth tastes like a beach towel and he wants nothing more than to go back to sleep.
His feet are cold and he doesn't know where his socks are.
The knock comes again.
"Hold on!" Light calls, his voice wavering, then cracking on the words. He flushes the toilet and brushes his teeth, then brushes his teeth again for good measure. He can't get it up to floss at the moment. By the time he's blundering over to the door, his mouth still tastes like sick, just with a minty twist.
Watari is neatly groomed, his suit well-pressed, eyeing Light with a distantly curious expression, and it makes him overly aware of how terrible he must look. Where the fuck is L? If L were here, Light might still look put-together in comparison.
"What is it?" he says, trying to be as polite as possible while feeling as if he would be best suited to curling up on the floor and dying.
Watari's mustache twitches. "I apologize for disturbing you, Yagami," he says, not sounding particularly apologetic, "only I think you had better come and join us downstairs."
And Light thinks a number of things then, scenarios flashing through his frazzled mind and twisting things up, making his chest seize just a little; things like: they know, they know I'm Kira or they know about L and me or someone's dead or Misa fucked up, yes, Misa probably fucked up - but the thought that he settles on, the one that drowns out all the others, is comparatively simple: where is L?
Yagami looks like shit. It's a rather unusual occurrence and Aiber cherishes it dearly, leaned as he is against the wall, back a twist of angry tension. Wedy is next to him, half a shield and half a voice of reason.
"Don't do anything stupid," she tells him, tone low and surprisingly sober for someone so consistently inebriated.
L would have asked her to define stupid, would have said the word means nothing unless the speaker's definition of intelligent action is first explained and the caveats provided by the situation at hand are taken into account. That "Don't do anything stupid," is, in itself, a stupid and vastly imprecise thing to say. Wedy would have told him to get bent. Aiber would have probably wholeheartedly concurred.
But L is not here, L is not here, and that is why Aiber's back is knotted and why his brow feels stuck stiff on his face, why he can't seem to quite laugh any of it off.
"What do you mean 'gone'?" Light asks, face a perfect mask of pretty-boy cluelessness that's not even offset by the sharp exhaustion in his eyes or the rumpled, slept-in look of his clothes.
The chief's sigh is heavy and his face is lined and he has the eyes of someone well past retirement age. "Watari-san says that he's scanned the entire building, and we sent out Aizawa and Ide to do a sweep in person, but no one's seen him in hours."
"What about his bedroom," Light says immediately, "there are no cameras in there."
"Checked," Watari says. "Floor-to-ceiling. He's gone."
"He can't just be gone, he has to be somewhere. What about the helicopters, the limousine? Maybe he went out."
"All accounted for."
"Well, then maybe he went for a walk," Matsuda puts in, wearing his happy-face grin and twisting his fingers sheepishly as he speaks. "I mean - I know it's the middle of the Kira investigation, but maybe he just needed some fresh air. That happens sometimes, right?"
"Not to L," Aiber puts in from the sidelines, staying slumped where he is as all of their eyes jerk his way. Yagami's expression is one of fixed displeasure, but curious all the same. He really does look slightly panicked, as if this whole thing isn't easily traceable back to him. "I can tell you what did happen, though," Aiber continues, partly just to keep his audience enraptured, enunciating the word with a delicious air of performance. "Kira."
"That's not - that can't," Matsuda starts, stopping soon after.
The room is still, the dull hum of computers becoming loud in the ensuing silence as the investigators look around at one another with a vague sort dying hope, as if L is at any moment going to jump out from behind a corner, yell, "Just kidding!" and everything will be okay again. It doesn't happen.
Aiber hates them all terribly - not just Yagami, all of them. They wear their dull grey suits and they stand there dumbly, uselessly, without even the tiniest edge of understanding as to what this all truly means.
Not just that there is no one left to stop Kira - who cares about Kira? - but that L is gone. L and his boney knees and jagged frame and the way he would smile without his mouth at the things Aiber says, the way he'd arch and twist and get solemn and quiet, reflective and far away, as if there was a little room inside of his head where he would go, locking the rest of the world out. His skin had always been warm to the touch, pallid and removed, but warm like a living thing, pretty in unpracticed ways. Aiber's fucked hollywood girls and trust-fund boys, bodies to fill the spaces that L had carved out in him, trying to recreate that one moment.
It had been before Argentina, before he'd been caught, before he'd known that L was investigating him at all. It had been in someone else's house, on someone else's spare mattress. It had been a sunny afternoon, and L's hair had tickled patterns against Aiber's spine. He'd quoted some very famous French writer who Aiber has never read or cared to. He'd fallen asleep - had been faking it, of course, and as much had become obvious after the fact - but in Aiber's memory, in that moment, L had fallen asleep with Aiber's hand around his wrist.
"I can't accept that," Light is saying, loudly, in a stoically earnest voice that sounds like he's trying out for his secondary school play. "We don't - we don't know anything yet."
The officers are nodding. Watari looks grim and unconvinced, but he says nothing. Aiber reaches over, plucking Wedy's cigarette from right between her fingers and taking a long drag. The smoke twists horribly through his throat. A terrible habit. He hands if back to her, blowing out as he moves across the room, slowly at first, casual as ever. It's not until he's practically in front of Light that he throws his hand out, grabbing him by the collar of yesterday's shirt and jerking him forward in one swift, uncompromising movement.
"Where is he?" he demands, shaking Light into an artless stumble.
"What are you - " Light gasps, trying to keep his balance. "Aiber-san, calm down for a moment." His eyes are wide and wild and ingenue, flicking around the room, mapping out exits or coming up with a plan, giving shape to the lies.
"Cut the cute stuff, Kira," Aiber grits, tugging him around by the scruff of his neck. "How did you get his name? Did he give it to you?" The thought's been swirling in him for some time, formless and without cause, but there's just this niggling fancy that he could have - not because he'd fallen, not because Light had truly charmed him, but as a part of the plan; it isn't an inconceivable possibility. "Did you ask him for it nicely?"
"Hey, cut it out. Light's not Kira!" Matsuda says, pulling weakly at Aiber's arm. He shakes him off easily.
Aiber has to do this because no one else will, because they're buried safe under the self-imposed delusion that Light Yagami is harmless, is incapable of the cruel and unusual. If L were here it would be different, but L's not here - not dead, though, not dead, can't be - so Aiber steps up to the plate, intends to hit the ball out of the park.
Watari's hand is firm on his shoulder, aged and gnarled and familiar. "Aiber-san," he says, a thin air of understanding in his voice, "please. That isn't helping."
Aiber looks at Yagami, ignoring the faces around him. His lip is scabbed, still healing from the blow, and he's probably marked up pretty badly underneath his clothes. Shin, gut, face: three of the most effective points, genitalia aside - and although L hadn't specifically cautioned him against debilitating the goods, he'd done him the courtesy of avoidance, anyhow. Still, even bruised and bloodshot and rumpled, Light is still fundamentally one of the best looking people Aiber's seen in his life, probably the best L has ever touched. He understands the fascination, to a certain degree - but not beyond, not far enough to believe that L would willingly submit not only his body, but his life to a pretty kid with some big ideas.
L is in hiding, maybe. Or kidnapped. Maybe he's been kidnapped.
The world is made of maybe's, though, and if L were here he would tell Aiber that he's being self-deluding and illogical, betting on them like that.
Matsuda is red-faced and harried, stepping back out of Aiber's immediate reach with an expression of great suspicion on his face. The chief's mustache is quirked disapprovingly. Mogi, as usual, is silent.
From her perch, Wedy breathes out a thin plume of smoke, sending it up towards the high vents in the ceiling. "Where'd you get the booze?" she asks, eyes rolling lazily to Light, and Aiber thanks God, Jesus, and the whole shebang for her low words and clever tone, if only because she's undoubtedly on his side, subtly or not. "You're hungover, aren't you?"
Light swallows, straightening his shirt slightly - the perfect guilty teen - and nods. "It's was yours," he says, "the alcohol. L said he thought you wouldn't mind."
"Light?" his father says, suitably shocked and appalled, like being accused of murder pales in comparison to the enormity of underage drinking.
"He said that it was his birthday tomorrow," Light says quietly. "Or today, I guess." This would probably be the point at which he'd stare dolefully out the window, but seeing as the room is windowless, his eyes just catch on the wall, and he stares long and far away as if he can see straight through it. Maybe he can.
The thought would be slightly more ridiculous if, in the last few days, Aiber hadn't been walked - or rather, floated - in on multiple times by a giant, terrifying monster of a thing with a very put-upon expression. If Light is Kira, and Kira deals in Shinigami powers, who knows what else he can do, what other powers he has. Being limited to a notebook, after all, is rather pathetic.
"That's correct," Watari says, confirming L's birthday. Hmm. Aiber hadn't known, isn't quite sure it matters.
"He'd wanted to celebrate," Light says, voice taut with restrained emotion - a typical technique, one Aiber had learned in his earliest acting classes, back when he'd wanted to be in the movies instead of the criminal underworld. "We got drunk, we just talked. It wasn't a big deal," he lies. Always, always lying. "He went back to his room sometime last night and that was the last time I saw him. I can't believe - he's got to be somewhere. We've got to find him."
Light looks like he could go for several more minutes of soliloquizing, but Aiber doesn't let him get that far, just crosses his arms and says, "Yeah, okay, but has anyone seen the Shinigami?"
He'd hidden in a luggage compartment once, just curled up and stowed away with the baggage, arm bent awkwardly against someone's ski gear for several long hours. When the plane had been in the process of being hijacked, he'd knocked until he'd been let out by one of the frazzled hostages and put two bullets in the chest of the guard that had been left to watch the passengers. The body had fallen sideways, landing across a row containing a single mother and her two young sons. L had left them to sort it out for themselves, stepping into the cockpit to take out the other two hijackers. They'd given up easily and L hadn't even needed to sleep with anyone to solve that case.
Despite the impression he likes to give, that's not all the investigating her does - sex is the 40 in the 60/40 odds, and he only recalls those cases more clearly because they're the ones that stick in his mind, that would keep him awake at night if he didn't keep himself awake. There are also hackers and hitmen and corporate espionage, where the perpetrator is not truly connected to their crime, doesn't need to be investigated iin carne/i.
He thinks about his cases, thinks about the bodies and the hands, hips and torsos and ears - the forgettable, imprecise parts of people that he memorizes and catalogues and forms extensive theories based upon. He thinks about Light's hips and torso and ears, thinks about Beyond's. Tries to remember why - in this half-haze, where all he can see is a gritty, blank space with a few cracks, a thin layer of dust - why he had thought of that time on the plane, that wrenching pain in his shoulder.
Then he shifts slightly and realizes he's feeling something eerily similar now.
He blinks his eyes open quickly, suddenly, gaze flitting around rapidly, trying to take it all in at a time, like one massive gulp of water that he can't quite swallow. Nothing fits together and then, strangely - typical of the human senses - it all does, and L's arm is tied up above his head and he is lying in a small, dim room with cheap lamplight and a massive Shinigami staring at him.
"Hello," he says. His voice feels thick and it cracks through his throat, setting his head to pounding.
She says nothing.
He is on a bed. He is chained to a bed, and it's sort of a familiar feeling and sort of an amusing one, because it feels very maudlin and fake, like something that would happen to a detective in a movie instead of to an actual detective. The room is sparse and forgettable: off-white walls and cheap veneer furniture and very little else. There are no sheets on the bed, the mattress is generic. The only thing in the place that is at all notable is Rem, gangly and tendinous and the sickly purple-grey of a dead body. She still says nothing, cat-eye on him with mild bewilderment, as if his existence is slightly troubling to her.
He cycles through his last thoughts, remembers taking Light's socks off and putting him to bed, remembers the hall and the quiet feeling of morning, remembers floating.
"You brought me here?" he asks. He's seen the Shinigami go through walls before; it's not a stretch that she could bring him through walls with her, could have transported him easily, could have put him to sleep easier.
She doesn't reply, so he tries again. "You used some sort of Shinigami power to knock me out?"
"I stabbed you with a needle full of drugs," she says, her low, dull voice a shock.
"Oh." L's eyes flick back up to the crack on the ceiling, trail along the edges of the room, looking for weak points. "That will do it, too, I suppose."
There are no windows and only one door, which doesn't look particularly solid, but even if he were able to maneuver his way out of the handcuffs and break it down, he doubts that Rem would let him get far. He drops back, hair falling around him as his head hits the mattress - no sheets, no pillows - and tries to position himself so that his chained arm has a bit less pressure on it as he waits for Light to arrive.
The night air is cold on Light's face, and the thick press of bodies on the Tokyo streets is familiar but uncomfortable, a world away from what he'd grown used to. There are bright lights, heavy smells, planet Earth alive and uncompromising in front of him, dirty and fractured and loud, a parade of human weakness.
He follows the map on his phone to the apartment that he'd had Misa buy - paid in cash, fake name, black wig; untraceable - hasn't ever been here and is afraid he won't be able to find it, that he won't get there in time, that he'd miscalculated and that everything is ruined. He digs into his pocket for the key that Rem has dropped on his nightstand yesterday, through the wall behind his bed, invisible on the recordings. The key to the lock that holds back the sky, the light and the dark and all of the things that are worth anything. He twists it in, pulls the knob, has to give the rusted hinges a shove to get the door to open.
There's a small living room, a smaller kitchen, the bare necessities of furniture and not much else. A door, a long staircase, another small room, a hallway, and another door. He undoes the lock, hands shaking slightly and this is it, it all comes down to this. If this room is empty, then everything is ruined, then nothing will work out the way it ought - then L -
No, no, don't think it, don't think things that hurt.
He opens the door, quicker than he means to, stands in the doorway and breathes out long and heavy, wallows in the relief.
L is on the bed. L, in his worn jeans and overlarge shirt, hair a mess, skin fading into the mattress. He sits up slowly, meets Light's eyes with his familiarly blank stare, accusatory in its absence of feeling.
Light loves him.
Light loves him the way you love a man who burns down your house and murders your family, who rapes you and pillages the wreckage. Light loves him so much and so often and with such tremendous force that it has become a part of him, like his eyes or his ears or his hands. Light is in the doorway and Light loves him.
L is on the bed and L's voice is hollow when he says, "So," tilting his head to the side slightly, hair falling across his eyes in a deflated slant. Light says nothing.
He turns to Rem, gives her a look that's meant to grind down deep, make it clear how not happy he is. He holds out his hand. The Midazolam is in a dark, mostly full bottle and the needle goes in quickly, withdrawing just enough. He flicks the body, the way they do on television, spritzes a bit out, and takes slow steps over to the bed.
"So," he returns, holding up the needle, making it obvious what he intends to do with it.
L's watches the trajectory of his arm, but doesn't make a move to stop him, and bends easily when Light takes him by the wrist, stretching out the skin and pressing the needle to the crook of his elbow. He looks at him with eyes that think they know so much and says, with half a smile twitching onto his face, "You've really fucked yourself, Kira."
His crooked amusement wilts as Light injects him, drug flooding his veins, slipping into his system. He slows, stops and starts, the deep breaths of sleep taking over, and then he's just a body, unconscious and incapable.
Light only half understands him, the rest is just white noise, static in the background of his quiet victory. L is here and L is not dead, just sleeping. There's a clawing, hateful feeling in his throat, and he resents L so much for being a thing that cannot be dead, a thing that he loves.
It's a ridiculous word. It feels ridiculous when he thinks it, when he rolls it on his tongue. Love. Misa says she loves him but that's different, has to be different, because Misa isn't capable of feeling what Light feels for L, no one is, no one could be. Just him, just L. He leans down, wants to press his lips to L's temple, wants to strip him and curl against his body, because it all feels so weighted and important and necessary.
His hands are maybe shaking, or maybe he's just imagining it.
He breathes out. Sets down the needle.
Rem is waiting out in the hallway when he goes out and finally, as he closes the door behind him, Light feels like there's enough air in the room for him to speak, to think straight. He shakes his head, trying to knock off the smile that's painting itself across his face, but then he's laughing, he's just absolutely laughing. He's vaguely hit by the image he must make, laughing to himself - and a god of death - alone in the shit hallway of the shit apartment he'd had his fake girlfriend buy so that he could keep his real boyfriend there. Boyfriend? That's a terrible word for L. This is a terrible situation.
Light can't stop laughing.
Rem is looking at him like he's the large, sludgy beast in the room, and so he wipes his eyes, shakes his head once more, and leans back against the door, feeling light and brilliant and unstoppable.
"November 5th," he says slowly, letting the jovial expression drop slowly from his face. "I told you to take him on November 5th."
Light knows that Shinigami can roll their eyes, because he's seen Ryuk do it plenty of times. Rem doesn't quite, but she looks as if she wants to. "And I told you that I do not know what a November 5th is," she says, slow and dully forceful, the way she always sounds. "The human calendar is strange and imprecise. He was alone, there was an opening, I took it. This is what you wanted, isn't it?"
Light grits his teeth and stands up straighter. "What about the cameras?" he says.
"There are blind spots."
Rem has her uses, but her stoic impudence is unbearable and Light feels his good mood fading fast, mind shooting through all the things he needs to do. Get his notebook back, convince Misa to trade for the Eyes again, keep the taskforce occupied. The judgements. So many people, so many useless, unworthy people who don't deserve to have been born, and L is drugged up and chained down behind this door and how is that fair?
The world is not fair. The world is all wrong and Light has to fix it, has to set everything right. He squeezes the bridge of his nose, feels exhausted already.
"Fine," he says, "fine. Just guard the door."
He doesn't look at Rem, ignores everything - the quiet click of the lock and soft sound of the carpeting beneath his feet and the low light of the room - just sinks down next to L on the other side of the bed, the side he always sleeps on, and closes his eyes.
The room doesn't smell like L yet. It will.
L wakes abruptly, as he always does. His body goes stock-still and tensed for attack, then loosens slowly as he becomes aware of his surroundings. Blank walls, no sheets, shoulder cramp. Light's left arm tossed over his chest and his nose presses against L's neck, breathing softly in and out. His body is warm and his hair is tossed appealingly in his eyes and he is really such an attractive boy.
He's also just kidnapped L.
It's kind of hilarious, actually. Kira has kidnapped him. Kira kills with little discretion, takes down anyone who gets in his way without a second thought or a doubt in his mind, and he's kidnapped L. It's so terribly naive. As if it's this easy, as if you can just scavenge away the things you like, keep them in a cage and feed them scraps and call them yours and expect no one to come looking. As if this isn't the single stupidest thing that Kira could possibly have done.
"You idiot," he says gently, voice cracking slightly -likely from the unnecessary sedative use. "You beautiful, shining idiot."
This is not a Kira thing to do. It's not exacting or precise or brilliant in any way. It's a plan thrown together by someone unsure and afraid, someone with no other choice. But Kira has had plenty of choices, could have - should have - killed him, or at least made plans to kill him. Kidnapping draws too much attention, throws suspicion on everyone with personal access to him, makes the crime far easier to trace. Kira wouldn't do this, would never -
Light Yagami, though, he might.
Just a boy, just a silly little boy with big ideas about things he doesn't understand. A boy who thinks that L is important.
He sleeps peacefully and when L slips out from his hold, he only shifts slightly, breath puffing out on a tiny groan. There's a fuzz, a head-rush, and L steadies himself with his free hand against the wall. It's the drugs, two shots of something he can't identify - some form of Benzodiazepine, maybe? - injected over a relatively short amount of time, on an empty stomach and with more than a few traces of alcohol in the bloodstream.
He glances at Light, who's completely out, and realizes that he's probably still sleeping off the hangover.
Good, good, that should give L time. The handcuff chain is short, not much longer than a normal pair of police handcuffs, but sturdy enough that it's not going to break without excessive force. That's fine, it's fine. He can do this. He's done this before and he can do this now. Gritting his teeth, he folds his hand, makes it as small as possible and slowly starts to maneuver it out of the cuff. It chafes, metal splitting the skin, and if he can just bend his fingers - just a little more - he can -
"Don't bother," Light says silkily, blinking lazily up at him from the bed.
L freezes for just a moment, like a child caught doing something naughty, before quickly resuming the effort. The skin is splitting, cuts warming his wrist, but it does't matter. Watari can bandage him when he gets back. Light watches him, eyes narrowing, the folds of his shirt shifting smooth against his chest as he moves. He watches L curiously, as if he doesn't fully understand, as if wanting to run away from someone who's drugged and incapacitated you doesn't really compute in his mind.
"Come on," he says, sitting up. "You'll get blood everywhere and I'll have to clean up after you, like I always do. Rem's outside, anyway." He yawns, toned arms stretching above his head. "She'd catch you before you could make it two feet. And then there are several more doors and several more deadbolts, and Shinigami are hard to outrun. So, don't bother, okay? Just come back to bed."
L is standing in the middle of a foreign room, nearly dislocating several of his fingers in an effort to get loose. L has been kidnapped and Light is his kidnapper and Light is looking at him like he expects L to roll over, to just crawl into his lap or something. There's a strange disconnect from reality, as if this is all some big game, a role-play or something. Like with the choking - terrifying, in its way, but Light had been so far removed he hadn't even noticed or cared.
This is not good. This is a brilliant boy using the world like a plaything. The prodigal son with a stick of dynamite.
L stops. He isn't actually getting anywhere with the cuff, and the biting pain is rather uncomfortable, besides. He just stops and says, "You're actually mad, aren't you?" He flicks his eyes sharply at Light, tilts his head. Light just smiles, and he doesn't get it, he really doesn't get it all. "Like, stark raving," L continues, starting to pace. He can barely move on such a short chain but he's antsy, can't be still, this is all wrong. "You kidnapped me, Light. It's a stupid move. It's a stupid thing to do, you understand that, right?"
His voice is a quiet seethe, but it gets louder as he speaks - like talking to a deaf person, like thinking that raising your voice is suddenly going to make them understand. It doesn't work.
Light waves a hand, leans against the headboard. "Don't be so overdramatic, it doesn't suit you."
He looks oddly self-satisfied, like L's panic is what he's been waiting for, but it's not the right kind of panic.
"They're going to catch you," he says, walking up to Light, going to the very edge of the bed, then stopping, like he can't move any further. "What's the idea here? Go to work every day with the investigation team, and then what? Come home to me, waiting for you with a pot roast and a martini?"
He's not actually sure that Light has ever eaten a pot roast in his life, or had any desire to, but L can't quite think of the Japanese equivalent at this point and it's semantics anyway. The point is, this is a snow globe. Light has built them a snow globe to live in. Their old world - the headquarters, the bedroom, the chain - was coming to an end, looming past its due date, and instead of accepting that and doing what needs to be done - killing L, taking the Death Note, whatever the plan is - he's trying to extend the honeymoon period on into real life. But it doesn't work like that.
The snow globe always breaks at some point. L always gets his man - or woman, child, whatever. Then it ends and he moves onto the next one.
Light is not allowed to be his suspect forever.
Light doesn't seem to understand this, though. It doesn't even seem to vaguely strike him. He just snorts slightly at the pot roast comment and says, "Well, you don't have to cook, if that's what you're getting worked up about."
L shakes his head, wishes for once that he was wearing shoes so that he could stomp his feet, make his point loudly and with little room to be misinterpreted.
"You stupid boy," he says. "Murder is one thing. Writing names in a notebook is easy, all you need to know is how to spell. Keeping a living, breathing person as your prisoner? That's a lot different. People eat, Light. They eat and they shit and they drink water, they need exercise and mental stimulus and - "
"Don't act like I haven't thought this through," Light says, frowning. That's something, at least. "I know - "
"No, you don't," L says, finally crossing that invisible barrier and leaning over onto the bed, one knee up, almost looming onto Light. "You don't know anything about human beings, just like you don't know anything about emotions, or how to navigate them. Most people?" he says, stabbing two long fingers into Light's chest. "They feel the things you're feeling? They take the person out for coffee, maybe to a movie. They don't chain them to a bed in a basement somewhere."
It's a call out, an actual spoken accusation, and the crime is affection.
Light looks at him with wide, boyish eyes, but the wonderment is draining out of them and reality is setting in. This is what he's bought and paid for, this is what he's stolen away - not a pet, not another Misa, someone who will sit and stay and roll over when he tells them to, but a real person. L is a real person, a human being with a past, with dark parts, with responsibilities and people who depend on him. Light doesn't understand that and he doesn't want it. He wants a doll, something clever and pliable, something to play with and own, but not to know. Not to understand.
That's fine. L doesn't need to be understood. He just needs his bodily autonomy, at the very least.
It isn't quite clicking for Light, though, because as brilliant has he is, his intelligence lies in the clinical, the bare facts of things. Emotions don't seem to factor in for him, and certainly not L's.
He huffs, kneels up in bed so that he and L are of level height. "As if you're some great pioneer of social decorum?" he snaps. "You physically chained me to your wrist. For three months."
"That was for a criminal investigation," L says, tone getting wild, out of hand, "not because I realized I would need someone to fuck after taking over the world." There's too much in his voice, too much feeling. He's showing skin, he's chafing himself raw and he knows it, but he can't seem to stop. "There's Light Yagami and there's Kira." He holds out his palms, two sides of a scale." There's Ryuzaki and there's L. You don't get both. Either choose coffee dates and movies or Shinigami and mass murder. It's one or the other. Either kill me and play god or - or go back to being what you were. Be him. Be Light Yagami."
The words come out in a rush and they hurt, they hurt, because -
This is someone he doesn't want to leave.
"I am Light Yagami," Light say, grabbing one of L's hands. It's the free one, the one without the chain. His fingers are warm and familiar, feel just like they always have, but it's not the same.
L pulls out of his reach, moving so quickly he almost knocks himself over, held up only by the tense strain of the chain. "You're not. He - You're not."
"I'm him, he's me," Light says, palm coming up to cup L's face, "there's no difference. There's no difference. Look at me."
L looks. His lip is still scabbed and his eyes are more tired than usual, worn around the edges, but there's that tiny, clever spark - a wild, radiant thing that lives inside him, is him. A thing that can play god and play him well. A thing that L hadn't wanted to leave.
"You love me," Light says.
He just says it, just outright lays it down, like an undeniable fact. But it's such an immature act, to tell someone that they love you, to insist upon it. It should be pathetic, but the way Light says it, the assurance in his voice, is strong and pulling, tearing at all the seams. It's a mandate, an order from a king to a subject.
L keeps his expression flat.
"I liked you," he says. "Past tense. Love is such a strong word, and you might be clever, but you're not clever enough to know what it means. And I hate when people use words that they don't understand."
The hand on his cheek gets rough, fingers clutching, and then Light yanks him forward, face first.
"You don't understand," he says, voice a determined grit. "But you will. Look, I know you're frightened. I know this is all different, but it's not really, it's just the same. A different room, a different bed, a different chain, but I'm still me, you're still you." He moves close, so close his lips are almost on L's cheek and L is disgusting because he wants them to be. "You love me. And we don't have to play games anymore, we don't have to tip-toe around the truth."
Maybe L should be shocked, maybe he should be bowled over by the enormity of the moment, but he's taken it as a given for so long that the confession is almost anticlimactic. It's just another fact about Light, likes how he takes his tea or what kind of music he listens to. Mass murderer is just one of many qualities.
"Kira," he says, not overly slowly or quietly or importantly. He just says it,
He half-expects Light to toss his head back, to do one of those manically villainous laughs. He doesn't, doesn't even smirk. He smiles, though, looks almost chipper. "Yes."
L supposes he's been waiting ages to openly brag about it.
tbc.
end notes: I really doubt this is an unforeseeable plot twist, seeing as it's right up there in the summary. This is actually what I originally intended to write when I started this thing (your typical 'light kidnaps L and rapes him and takes over the world~' fic, except with less rape and more belligerent domesticity.) In my original outline, Light was meant to do the kidnapping in, like, chapter three, but then I got sidetracked by actually giving them a solid relationship foundation before the whole imprisonment thing. (pshhh, I know, who cares about that, right?)
Anyway, I hope you're looking forward to some domestic bliss! Or, you know, more fist fighting and weird sex. Either way, thank you for reading.