warnings: bad writing? probable factual inaccuracies and mangled attempts at British accents/slang.
notes: Sorry this chapter took a bit longer to get out than the usual. RL combined with scattered motivations/excessive writing angst. I didn't get much of a response to the last chapter (which honestly isn't a big deal - let's face it, I'd probably this writing this fucking thing even if I was the last person in the fandom) but I got kind of nervous, all - did I fuck up? is it terrible? I've no idea what I'm doing in the first place and would have no qualms about being told that I'm doing it wrong. con-crit is appreciated and encouraged. don't have something nice to say? say something anyway! I'd really appreciate any response, just so I can gage how I'm doing.
Okay, review-PSA over. You can also feel free to ignore all my notes, skim this mess for the porny bits and never say a word to me. No hard feelings.
chapter ten - far.
"I wanted to hurt you
but the victory is that I could not stomach it."
- Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain
"I can't talk to you right now," is the first thing Light says that morning, dropping off a takeaway bag of mini-waffles and unhooking L's chain from the bedpost to let him have his toilet break.
"Are we in a fight?" L asks, finger to his lips. "Should I be passive aggressive at you?"
Light's sigh is familiar and long-suffering and, for a moment, L can almost pretend that they're back at the investigation headquarters and nobody has kidnapped anybody.
"I don't care what you do, honestly," he says, hooking the chain onto the towel rack and going to lean against the doorjamb. "The judgements have started again, I have a ton of work to do with the taskforce today, Misa's having some sort interior decorating related mental breakdown, I have university classes to make up, and, on top of that, I'm supposed to be having dinner with my family tonight. I really don't have to time to deal with you today."
L finishes quickly, washing his hands to an apparently unsatisfactory degree - from the scathing look Light gives them - and rattles his arm as a signal that he's done and would like to go out an eat his waffles now. It's only been a week and already they've stepped into a sort of pattern, made easier by the fact that it's more or less what they were doing before, only with their positions reversed.
L misses being the one with the key.
He's also misses the first few days of his imprisonment, before the bout of godly mania that had sent Light into a tailspin of holier-than-thou monologues about the nature of justice. Ever since Kaito Hidaka he's been completely insufferable, and very psychically distant, as if he's afraid that if he gets to close, L is going to fall onto his cock and insist upon the whole sex slave thing.
L has only fucked Kira once - still has the faded marks around his neck from the encounter - and it hadn't gone especially well for for him, so he's not looking for a repeat performance quite yet, no matter the edge it would likely give him. Light had been different, had been soft and needy and young, easily appeased with hands and lips and warm sighs. Light is gone, though, and the man here now is just someone who's gotten his signals crossed, who's thought up some pretty ideas and convinced himself that being in love with L would put a nice spin on this whole story.
"Why don't you kill me?" L asks, pulling out one of the waffles with the ends of two fingers. The syrup drips across his hand, slides down his wrist. He licks it and feels better, like he can think slightly straight. "Mmmh."
Light wrinkles his nose and tosses him a napkin. "That's disgusting. Use a fork." He ignores L's question.
"I mean it, Light," L says, not bothering to finish chewing. "We don't talk, we don't have sex. We don't even smack each other around anymore. I'm sure you could get my name fairly easily, and even if you couldn't, a high enough dose of that drug you so love to put me down with and I'd be gone. Out of your hair. What's the point of keeping me alive?" He sucks on one of his fingers. "You could just as easily get a plant. They're less maintenance and serve more or less the same function."
Light folds his hands in front of him, watching L eat with an expression of vague interest, but not responding to - or even seeming to hear - a single word that he says. He glances at his watch. "You need a shower. Finish that and I'll give you ten minutes in the bathroom before I go."
L watches him, considers hanging himself with the chain just for something do, then takes another bite of his waffle.
He showers quickly, methodically, and Light stands in the bathroom doorway and watches him. There's no particular lust in his eyes, looks as if he could be thinking over his lunch plans or what shirt he's going to wear tomorrow. When L's finished, he walks straight out of the shower, not bothering with a towel - he never does when left to his own devices, not since he's been old enough to bathe himself; Watari never complains about the excess water. Light has always been far less lenient, but instead of the towel to the face and the fond admonishment that L's used to, Light just sets one down on the bed next to him as he chains him back to the headboard.
L doesn't reach for it, lets his hair drip patterns on the bedsheets. The air in the room is stale and he nearly chokes on it when he speaks, hurriedly, all in a rush, because Light's hand is on the doorknob and L is quietly desperate for him to stay.
"Is it beautiful yet," he calls, "your brave new world?"
It could be a dig, but he doesn't say it like one, just asks a question.
For the first time all day, Light smiles at him, glance shooting over his shoulder. It makes him appealing in a way that L nearly always forgets when not directly presented with it. "All in good time," he says, and lets the door thud behind him on the way out.
Aiber's thrusts are long and slow and the kid underneath him looks uncomfortable, but he doesn't protest and Aiber wouldn't hear him, anyway. He's got black hair and wide eyes, is a little too Japanese for it to be exact, but Aiber's not even going to pretend to not be doing what he's doing. L is dead or some such, but the world goes on, and boys with pale skin and thin wrists aren't hard to find in Tokyo.
His phone rings and he lets it go to voicemail, because pumping his hips is more important at this point. The boy mewls, says something too fast and breathy for Aiber to understand or care to.
"Hush," he grits, stilling a moment later, a shudder running down his back.
The hotel room is dirty and too full of furniture, a startling contrast to being in L's building. The phone rings again and Aiber comes and shoves off of the boy a moment later, planting the cash in his shaking hands and grabbing his cell out of his discarded jacket pocket.
"What?" he asks, too tired for charm and too sure of who it is to feel a need to employ any. The only other person who uses this number is one that Aiber can't quiet get his hopes up enough to wish for.
"Say 'thank you,'" Wedy smarms. He can imagine her quirked lips, red and obnoxiously clever, shaping the words around a smirk and white, white teeth. He hates her with whatever's left over from his loathing of Light Yagami and his shiny hair and starched shirts and darling smiles.
The boy is putting his clothes on, bending over to pick them up, shameless and quiet. Aiber watches the arch of his back, decides it's not unhealthily gaunt enough. A thick disgust settles in stomach at having gotten off to such a pathetic copy and he doesn't bother to mask the look on his face when the boy nods at him. He's got smudged mascara and exhaustion on his face, can't be more than 20, is probably doing this just to be able to eat, and Aiber should be kind to him. He isn't.
"What for, pretty lady?" he asks Wedy, holding open the door for his guest with a flourish that prickles with mockery.
"Just say it," Wedy tells him. She's not smoking, he can tell. He imagines it's warm where she is. Wedy hates to smoke in hot weather, says in makes her feel like a sauna. She says a lot of things.
The boy finishes dressing and goes, watching him down the hall. "I really don't like you right now, Wedy," he says.
Even though she probably did the smart thing, the only reasonable thing to be done at this point. She left and Aiber stayed and that should somehow make him nobel and good, but it hasn't led to anything but early morning fucks and a pit that likes to gnaw rabid at the back of his throat. L is gone and a prostitute is leaving Aiber's hotel room, passing someone in the hall who, for a moment, looks suspiciously familiar.
"You'll like me more when you don't die from a heart attack," Wedy says, patient annoyance in her voice.
A moment later and that someone looks even more familiar, stopping in front of Aiber's open doorway and bowing slightly. The coat has been dry-cleaned, all the folds ironed straight and stiff, and for a second or two, the general atmosphere becomes that of a hardboiled detective novel.
"Thank you," Aiber says hurriedly, and snaps the phone shut, stands up a little straighter and covertly checks his bathrobe for stains, bowing back. He should be in a suit, he should be in a suit with a drink in his hand and a smirk on his face and not fucking every odd person who looks slightly like L.
Watari takes off his hat off. "You said you wanted to help?" he asks, voice a stern bend of something low and familiar.
Aiber swallows and nods him inside.
Sayu eats too fast. Sayu does everything too fast, including talk, and the combination of that with tonight's dinner makes most of her input into the conversation barely intelligible. Their mother has to remind her to chew her food for the third time before her next sentence is fully comprehensible.
"I don't understand why Light's allowed to move out but I'm not," she says, tapping her chopsticks excitedly against the edge of her plate.
"Because," Light says, rolling his eyes good-naturedly, "you're 15."
"So?" she asks, taking another bite and mumbling around it, "I'm very mature for my age."
That makes their mother laugh because habits that make everyone else embarrassed by association are always endearing when the person whom they belong is your darling baby girl. "Chew, Sayu," she corrects agin. Never in Light's entire life has his mother corrected him for anything and it might be a point of pride if it weren't an absolute given. He can't imagine what it might be like to be a person in need of correction.
Sayu, on the other hand, is never without some fault or another. She is young and pretty and charming and so everyone brushes them off, but one day she will grow up and most likely find herself incapable of meeting anyone's expectations. As it is now, no one has any expectations for Sayu; Light has used them all up. He'd feel bad about it if excessive proficiency wasn't something that came as natural as breathing or faking his smiles, but it does, and she gets on well enough besides.
"I was more mature than you are now at 8," he tells her, after fully chewing and swallowing and wiping his mouth lightly with a napkin. His tone is teasing and perfectly inoffensive and she just meets his smile with one of her own.
"You were more mature than Grandpa at 8," she tells him.
"Don't poke fun at your brother, Sayu," their mother says, offering Light more food, which he declines politely.
It's not that this is uncomfortable in and of itself - the situation actually instills him with a calming sense of normalcy - it's just that he doesn't have time for it. There are serial bombings going on in Norway and a sex trafficking scandal in Taiwan and a succession of brutal murders coloring the English countryside that are eerily reminiscent of Jack the Ripper and have the press all in a buzz. Family dinners ought to wait until all the dirt has been cleared away, until the world is shining and new and doesn't corrode more fully with every passing second. Family dinners are for unremarkable people with nothing better to do.
God doesn't need a family to have dinners with.
Though God shouldn't need a girlfriend either, and his phone still buzzes with the fifth call from Misa that day. He presses ignore without a second thought and turns back to his sister.
"I'm just kidding, jeez," she says, swallowing down her rice. "Light knows he's perfect. Anyway, isn't Dad going to come home soon? I know Kira's started up again and everything, but there are more important things, aren't there?"
She says it so offhandedly and Light stills in his seat. He can feel the world decaying around him.
"More important than justice?" he asks slowly, looking at his plate.
"Yeah," Sayu says, swallowing quickly and smiling brightly and being a thousand things that are all acceptable but in no way enviable, "like family." She sets down her glass and glances at her mother. "And love." She drags the word out, turning it into a joke, a pretty fantasy, stripping it of any meaningful substance.
"Nothing's more important than justice, Sayu," Light tells her. His tone sounds even to his ears and it strikes him as a perfectly natural thing to say, but her eyebrows go up.
"Oookay," Sayu says, lips quirking. "I know somebody who's gonna ace all of his NPA exams and fail all of his relationships."
Light thinks of L and then tries not to, because there's nothing particular about him to be thought of. He talks too much lately and doesn't listen enough, asks unreasonable questions and pokes and prods at Light with his crooked fingers, looking for weak parts. Light is annoyed by his existence and would fantasize graphically about killing - for real this time - if doing so didn't make him feel like his chest had been hollowed out and filled with many-legged insects that crawl around and lay eggs and breed and -
Light remembers not to think of it. He puts it away, shoots a teasing look at Sayu.
"Hmm, that's funny," he says, "because I know someone who's going to fail all of her math exams if her brother stops helping her."
"No way," she more or less squeals. "I'm really good now. Honestly. Mom, tell him!
Their mother smiles placatingly, puts a hand to her daughter's shoulder. She's got tired eyes and Light knows that she wants her husband home. "You're fine, Sayu."
Sayu cocks her head at him. "See, I'm fine."
Light nods, thinks he must be smiling. "I know you are."
People like Sayu will never be anything more than fine. And that's fine. But Light is more than that, so much more, and it's his responsibility to take to reins, to fight for justice, to do the things that no one else can. Maybe L could, if he'd try, but L doesn't care. L doesn't care about 12-year-old boys with missing livers and he doesn't care about justice.
L doesn't care about anything.
L is doing tai chi when the door opens.
Watari had special ordered a martial arts instructor straight out of a rural Chinese prison for him a when he'd been 13. It had been a birthday present. L had become proficient in most of the common forms in under a year. He possesses no particular physical talent beyond the ability to memorize and replicate muscle movement, which is only different from absorbing and retaining any sort information as far its application it concerned, and L has a long and storied history of getting his body to do what he wants it to.
His back is to Light and he slowly moves his arms, shifting his stance, body arching in a way that he's sure must but reasonably appealing. It's a bit difficult to manage with one arm chained to the bed frame, but there's enough give for him to move comfortably, even if his bones crack and his muscles ache with every movement from being in relatively the same position for the last week or so. One hand stretches out, the other following it, and then he hears an unsettlingly high-pitched giggle and freezes.
"Wow, Ryuzaki. You're actually pretty tall."
Misa's hair isn't in pig-tails and L thinks it's maybe the first time he's seen her without them, photographs aside. She's got what is probably meant to be an inconspicuous hat on and is slipping a pair of comically large sunglasses off of her face, looking for all the world how one does when trying to be discreet and not having any guidance beyond what they've seen in movies. She's holding a department store bag in one hand and grinning at him like they're old school friends or something.
"Misa-san," L says, lowering his arms and immediately resuming his slump. He feels strangely caught off guard by the remark, as if the revelation of his true height is the equivalent of being seen naked. Which in truth, would probably have bothered him less.
"I brought you some clothes," Misa says. "And cake." Light isn't with her and if there's an explanation for that, she doesn't offer it. "You really haven't done much with the place, have you?"
The room contains a bed, a small, rickety desk, and one discolored chair. It's cheap furniture, but still too much for Light's lack of income, so L assumes that Misa's paying for his accommodations from her wages as a model. L has had as much to do with the acquisition and decoration of the place as a beetle has to do with the purchase of the boot that stomps on it, and it's not as if Light is in the habit of bringing him Martha Stewart Living in with the morning paper. Unless she expects him to have fashioned curtains out of the clothes off his back, he's not sure what sort of home improvement Misa imagines he could have done.
He doesn't bother pointing any of this out, though, just holds up his arm and says, "Light chained me up."
"You chained him up first," she counters, tossing one of the bags at him.
He doesn't catch it, just watches as it collides rather comically with his abdomen and then drops to the floor. A pair of jeans spills halfway out, along with a few shirts. Did she buy him underwear? Is she the sort of person to buy underwear for her boyfriend's… captive? Is there any sort of person like that in existence?
"Yes," he says, awkwardly. He's not the infamous murderer in the room, but he feels strangely guilty, like he should apologize to her for something. This isn't a new situation for him, not as if none of his suspects have ever had significant others - Aiber is technically married, after all - his work is just too important for him to be kept up at night by something so trivial as infidelity. Maybe it's that he knows Misa, has spent a certain amount of time around her.
Maybe it's just because he can sympathize with her position - so to speak.
"Do you have plates here or - " she sets down the other, smaller bag, looking around the room, eyes stopping on him only briefly before quickly flicking away. "I - you should change. You kind of smell." It would be an insult if she didn't sound so distant, far away from the scene, like she's reading off well-practiced lines.
L looks at her, looks at the bag on the floor, then reaches down and picks it up. He does smell.
Misa coughs quietly. "Are those Light's clothes?" she says without looking at him. They are - Light had said that getting L's own clothes from headquarters would be too risky, had given him some sweatpants and a few t-shirts to borrow. They hang unsettlingly on L, are cut for a different sort of man, one who plays volleyball on beaches in magazine ads. He supposes it must be obvious to Misa how unused to them he is.
"Yeah, he lets me wear his t-shirts sometimes, too," she says, smiling a small, forced smile, full or something that lacks the energy to be loathing, but comes close enough. "I definitely look better in them, but it's okay." She moves closer, almost examining him. "You're alright, I guess. But, I mean, nobody would put you on the cover of a magazine, would they?"
There's a quivering, suppressed sort of agony in her voice and it makes L feel how a person must feel when they feel guilty.
"No," he agrees, "they wouldn't."
She cocks her head, hmms, and then straightens up, pasting her Stepford wife smile back on. "I'll go find plates." She opens the bedroom door and L's half-sure she's going to leave him to sort out getting changed with one of his wrists cuffed, before she calls out down the long hall, "Rem, will you come unchain Ryuzaki and make sure he doesn't run away?"
"I don't think the Shinigami - " L says, given that every time he's tried to get her attention, he's been promptly ignored.
"She'll come," Misa says.
And she does. Which is curious, as is the almost gentle way that she accepts the handcuff key from Misa - who keeps it in her pocket, L notes, storing that away in the place where he keeps all of the information that could possibly help him escape. Misa goes and the Shinigami undoes the lock, wrapping one sludge-like hand around his forearm as a warning, then floats there, blank eyes set on him. He has no space and no privacy but he's had plenty of time to get used to such a situation in the last few months, and changes quickly and fastidiously. He doesn't bother trying to make a run for it, knows he won't get far and rather wants cake besides. He hasn't eaten since yesterday morning and would claim mistreatment if he thought Misa would care all that much.
He can hear her knocking things around and cursing through the thin walls, breathy, overexcited squeals filling the quiet apartment. It must be a full apartment, if Misa's gone to look for plates. L hasn't been out of this room and the hall and had known better than to ask Light.
If he's honest, he almost resigned to his situation - if only for the moment. Being held hostage is not ideal, of course, but there's a dusty, disused, truthful corner of his mind that admits that he's almost grateful that his autonomy has been temporality taken away, because the paralyzing monstrosity of the things left behind, the things he has to deal with, are no longer bearing down on him. He is free from the necessity of apprehending Kira, free from the law's petty demands and the public's scrutinous eye.
Light, of course, still brings him the newspaper. He even circles articles that criticize L's investigation for easy reading.
"Shinigami Rem," L says, after he finishes dressing - blue jeans, grey shirt; the closest thing to white that he'd found in the bag - "would you be opposed to answering some questions I have about the Death Note?"
Rem slumps aggressively at him. "He won't like that," she says.
L is a genius but extreme intelligence is unnecessary to understand who he is.
"No," L says, giving her a quiet smile, "I don't imagine he will."
She looks at him for a long time, as if he's a television program and there is no expectation for her to respond to his words. Before she gives any indication of her answer, whether negative or positive, Misa's back, with napkins instead of plates, because apparently Light hasn't been expecting any dinner parties. Misa mumbles something quietly to Rem, standing uncomfortably close, and L wonders whether Shinigami possess enough emotion to be able to care for humans. The look on Rem's face before she nods softly and floats out through the wall says yes.
The cake is good, though not excellent, and Misa pulls the invalid of a chair up to L's bed, resting her high-heeled boots across the sheets, like a child who cares very little either way about impropriety. Misa has some cake, too, and L doesn't remark at the change, just listens to her rattle off several disconnected, uninteresting facts about her day and where she bought his clothes and how he looks way better in jeans that fit, but still not very good, and does he like it here and have he and Light been getting along and, oh, have they been having a lot of sex?
"Misa-san," L says, not a protest or a defense, but a warning. He really isn't interested in performing a soap-opera scene with her over Light, especially since, as far as he's concerned, she is welcome to him at this point.
Her smile is jagged and bubblegum bright and there's a smart determination in her eyes. "What, I'm just asking," she says. "A girl wonders, you know?"
L sets his fork down and sits up straighter, shrugging off the role with just a shift in stance. "What are you hoping to gain through this exactly?" he asks. "If you're unsatisfied by your relationship with Light, you ought to bring it up with him. If you're simply looking to feed some masochistic urge through extensive consideration of your boyfriend's infidelity, perhaps you - "
"I'm not masochistic," Misa snaps, standing quickly and turning away. She crosses her arms and moves as if she wants to pace, but the room is too small for her to really have anywhere to go.
"Oh, yes," L almost snorts, "neither am I. And Light Yagami is an innocent. And Kira is justice." He shovels in a bit more cake, imagines he can feel the glucose molecules igniting something neglected in his mind. "I can see your common interest, at least. You both live on lies."
"And you don't?"
Her frankness is overshadowed by the breathy indignation she adds to the words, squealing them out like a piece of performance art. She is a performer in all things.
"Of course I do," L says, not looking at her in order to make her look at him. "I'm just the same as him." The startling reality is that it's not true - they are different in more ways than they are similar - but it is a formidable lie and one that all parties involved have signed on to believe, and so he treats it as fact, the same way you would in a game or play.
Misa seems to believe it. She crosses her arms again. Behind her, L can see the Shinigami's head poking partway through the wall, a grisly sight, only made less so by the somewhat uninterested look on the thing's face. It must have heard them. Maybe it has super-hearing. Maybe they're just being loud.
"Maybe," L says, mostly because he wants to test the reactions, "you should fall wretchedly in love with me, in that case."
Misa barely reacts, like there are some things that her mind filters as jokes by definition. "Ew," she says, but it's halfhearted and far away, and the bulk of her attention seems to be fixed on the bathroom counter, visible from certain angles, where a bottle of aftershave sits. Even if Misa doesn't recognize it, It doesn't require particularly advanced deduction to come to the conclusion that it doesn't belong to L.
"You know, I could kill you anytime I wanted," she says, after a moment.
L blinks. The Shinigami has slunk back out of the room, leaving the wall blank and dull and white.
"I figured as much," he says. She is the Second Kira and the Second Kira can get your name just by looking at your face, and here she is and here's his face. The moment she'd walked in the door, he'd resigned himself to it. His current circumstances are of the sort that necessitate a certain degree of resignation. Fear gone, all that's left is simple curiosity. "How do you learn it?" he asks. "Do you see it, or does it just come to you?"
"I see it," she says, standing beside her chair like she can't decide whether she wants to sit back down or not. "Floating there. L Lawliet." She lifts up a hand, and doesn't quite point and doesn't quite touch, but gives the impression that she might be liable to do either at any moment.
She drops her hand, but the threat is there.
"I'm not going to, though," she says after a moment. "I could, but I'm not going to. I'm not stupid." She says it with such quiet force, like she's making a point, though not one intended specifically for L. "I understand more than he thinks I understand. I understand what I am."
She looks down at her hands and, though faded and hard to see at first glance, L can now tell that her fingers are covered in ink splotches.
He nods, isn't sure what he's nodding to. After a time, Misa sits down and picks at her cake some more.
Light goes to a guest lecture. He doesn't have the time, doesn't have any particular interest in the subject being discussed, but it's expected of him, so he goes. Light is the sort of person who goes to guest lectures, and other people go to guest lectures to impress people like him. That's just how the world, and academia - a fairly accurate microcosm of the full scope of modern society - works. His seat is uncomfortable and the people behind him won't stop whispering and the lecture hall smells like undried paint and he's, in general, looking forward to a very dull hour - and then the lecturer walks in and everything suddenly gets terribly interesting.
He looks like L, is Light's first thought, because Light has become a horrible shell of a person who typically only has two basic subjects of constant consideration, and one of them is L. The other is the nature of justice in a world riddled with seething, overhanging rot and the death of common morality. But mostly L.
Lately Light has spent more and more time preoccupied by the many and various ways in which he is patently pathetic and ethically abhorrent, and how there is nothing attractive about him at all, even when he's tied to a bed. In fact, it seems obvious that the entirety of Light's fascination with him had undoubtably sprung from a desire to conquer him, and now that L has been defeated and stripped of all agency, there is nothing at all appealing about his body, or his mind, or the way his fingers tap slow, thick rhythms in the heavy dark or -
There is nothing worth anything in L, no currency and no greatness that is more than greatness. He exists to be great, but in such an ugly way that it almost cancels itself out. Nothing great is great without being beautiful. Light is beautiful and L is ugly and these are where the lines fall. Light is only keeping him around out of some mix of charity and necessity. The necessary things are all ugly, never great.
But the man at the front of the hall is very good-looking. He's tall, he's got creases in his suit. Light likes him on sight. Light sees him and it's like how L would be if L were better, more worthy of Light.
The man clears his throat and speaks with tremulous conviction about law. His hair falls in his eyes, he wears glasses, looks like L in glasses and a suit which makes Light imagine L in glasses and a suit which is, altogether, a very different picture. Slumped and susceptible and uncaring and chained to things, always chained to things. Even in a suit L would be ugly, because L's existence is one that is dependent on both a stillness and a penchant for destruction.
The man in the suit who looks like L but not really like L could not destroy anything. He is not great, Light thinks. He is good.
Teru Mikami speaks and Light watches with a curious, loathsome wonder.
He skulks Borough Market in the mornings. Skulks because everyone looks at him like he's skulking and he sort of settles into it through lack of any other recourse. Afternoons he runs errands. There's a private investigator downtown - an overlarge, smushed woman with a hairlip who calls him love and pats his ass sometimes - who can't be bothered to hire an assistant for proper pay, so she sends out anyone in need of a little extra cash on freelance jobs sometimes. Mello's in need of a lot of cash, but he needs a roof over his head and food to eat first and foremost, and working for Missy takes care of that.
It's on his fourth job for her that he gets caught. Business relations, Missy had called it, which - from the ridiculous clothes and heavy voices - Mello assumes means gang stuff.
He thinks he can do it, even though she tells him it's dangerous. He's still convinced he can do it, even when he's backed into a wall with a gun to his head. They tell him to beg for his life, but he doesn't. He begs for a job instead.
The meeting place the one man gives him - not the one with the gun, the other one, the one that smiles too much even though he has chipped teeth and picks at the undersides of his fingernails - is a fairly deserted street at a fairly deserted time of day, and then into the back room of coffee shop for a little bit of extra desertion. There are two men there, one of them from before - the smiling man - and another that Mello doesn't recognize who speaks with a thick northern accent.
He's sitting in a chair, legs sprawled aggressively apart. Mello hates the look on his face.
"No way," he says, shaking his head at Mello and spitting slightly when he speaks. He's chewing something that could be tobacco and could be bubblegum. "He's barely out of his nappies. We're not having a 12-year-old running for us."
"I'm 15," Mello says stoically, standing up straighter and trying to resist the urge to stomp his feet and demand that they give him what he wants. He needs the money. He needs it.
"Pipe down," the smiling man says, though not cruelly, and turns to his compatriot. "He's 15, see? And a pretty thing. Looks like a rich kid, or would without all that dirt on his face. No one would suspect. No one would think he could do the job."
The other man snorts. "That's cause he can't."
Mello thinks he probably shouldn't interrupt, but then he rarely should in any situation, and hardly ever listens to his better instincts. "I can," he insists, choking back his frustration. "I'll prove it. I'll do anything."
"Will you suck my cock?" the man in the chair asks, leering face split with a grin much crueler than the other man's quiet smile.
"No," Mello practically spits, unable to cover up his instinctive revulsion, even though it's weakness, weakness, weakness. Matt would probably laugh at him. Not for being weak, but for caring that he is, and for being in this situation in the first place. Matt would never be in this situation; Mat doesn't care about anything.
"Well then, he's not very committed to the job, is he?" the man says, grin splitting wider. The other one doesn't return his smile and doesn't particularly seem to like this whole business that sounds suspiciously like prostitution. Mello will do a lot, but he won't - he won't - he probably won't.
But desperate times.
"What has your cock got to do with the job, exactly?" he asks, shifting his stance, moving a hand to his hip. Trying to make it seem like cock is a word that he says all the time.
"How well you'd like to know, little pretty," the man says, leaning forward so far in his chair that Mello's prepared to make a run for it if it comes to it. Hopes to God it doesn't come to it. He must flinch or something, because the man tosses his head back, laughing like he's just said something show-stoppingly funny. Mello tries not to grimace.
"You ever shot someone before?" the other man asks, still floating in his general good humor. Like this is all some casual sort of business.
"Yeah," Mello says, not saying the word with half as much conviction as he should.
Conviction is key, L had told him once. He had been nine and it had been snowing out, Wammys's lake frozen over with thick, grey ice.
"Lying little shit," the man in the chair barks, appearing to enjoy this far more than if Mello had told the truth.
"I could," he says, crossing his arms, "just give me a gun."
There's a rickety ceiling fan in the room and, although it's too cold to be necessary, is shifts a little bit with ever creak of the building. It sounds like someone's doing a tap show on the floor above them. Mello crosses his arms tighter.
"Yeah, right," the man says, lips quirking nastily around what Mello is pretty sure is tobacco, "we give a gun to every toddler that asks for one. Real cunning strategy, that." He sighs, stands. Mello's pretty sure this man wouldn't know a cunning strategy if it walked up to him and shook him by his thick, meaty hand. "If you're not fucking off, then we'll bring you to the boss, I suppose. See how he likes the look of you." He opens the door and his eye twinkles with something that crawls across Mello's skin. "You can suck his cock, too."
The other man snorts, almost delicately. "Leave off with all of this about cocks, will you? Christ." He motions for Mello to follow and heads out the door, too, back into the slowly filling street.
Mello follows.
Mikami sorts his lecture notes slowly, precisely, as if he knows each and every sheet of paper by touch and cannot abide the thought of a single word being out of order. All the corners line up, all of his pens are parallel, and the creases in his suit look as if they were stylistically designed that way. He looks more like a portrait of a man than a man and Light wants him to stand very still so that he can touch his skin, trace the curves of his bones and see how he can measure up to L.
Light's struck by the sudden idea - delirious and freeing for a moment - that it's not L that he's infatuated with, but infatuation itself. The clawing need for another person that can almost match his clawing need for the Death Note, for his new world. Maybe L is easily replaceable - unnecessary - and all of this trouble can be avoided.
Takada passes him as she leaves the room and says something soft and self-satisfied that Light nods to and ignores in the same breath, shifting seamlessly through the crowd and to the front of the room. He waits there as the last students straggle out, watching the room fill up with empty space and the strings of Mikami's hair drop in front of his eyes, making him frown and toss them back. Up close he's even more solemn, with a passive sort of gravity that is very easy to ignore. Light wants to touch him under his clothes and he wonders if that's normal.
He clears his throat softly, bowing, and Mikami freezes, two or three sheets of paper sliding out of order with the way he jerks slightly, steady movements shattering into a disorganized muddle for a single second, before he bows back.
"Yes?" His voice is cold and self-conscious and, it strikes Light then, really nothing like L's, who is admittedly the apex around which this whole experiment revolves. A sort of compare and contrast. After all, he doesn't want to be like one of those twenty-somethings who marry their high school sweethearts, never knowing if they've even touched the real thing or are just playing at it.
"Excuse me, Mikami-san," he says, smiling in a way that he knows from experience to be exceedingly charming, "I don't mean to bother you. I can come back some other time, if this is inconvenient."
"No, no," Mikami says, seemingly unable to decide between gathering up the lost documents or shaking his head and settling for a staunchly awkward mixture of the two. "Please - " He gestures to the desk, realizes there isn't a chair on the side that Light is standing and lets his hand drop. He is obviously uncomfortable, but so stolid and immovable that the fact of it doesn't seem belittling so much as it does overwhelming.
This is a man who is committed to being uncomfortable and maintains his state as such with a determined tenacity. Light can't decide if he finds him admirable or pathetic.
He inclines his head, makes himself look boyish and unassuming, the way he would glance at L across the desk in the main room, back before. Eyelashes brushing his cheeks and voice softer than it needs to be, he says, "I really liked what you said about morality today." Light isn't actually sure what Mikami had talked about specifically - ethics and that, mostly, though not in a particularly engaging way. "It's something most people don't give enough thought to."
Mikami is idly lining up his pens again. "It's my job," he says.
"Of course," Light says, nodding, but he lets an extra layer of something settle in his voice, wonders if Mikami will pick up on it, knows L would.
L would have already pinned him to the desk.
"Is there - " Mikami starts, and it sounds like an end to the conversation, so Light doesn't let it get that far, isn't done yet.
"That's a nice suit," he says, taking a step closer, arching his body so that Mikami has lean back a bit if he wants to keep his breathing room. He starts to say something but the words puff out softly as hot air and Light thinks no, this is nothing like what L is like, not really, and even if there's a low thrill, it is somewhat empty. L is made of sense-memory, of cool glances and warm fingers and late nights, and there is something to be said for familiarity. L occupies a spot in him because he has dug it out for himself, through proximity and obsession and abuse of power.
Teru Mikami is a nobody in a suit.
Teru Mikami is someone that Light silently and fervently wishes that he could get to like.
He freezes, then his stance shifts, going colder still, and he pushes his glasses up his nose and asks, in as uninvested a voice as possible, "Is this a joke?"
Light's pleasant expression withers a little on his face. "Excuse me?"
"Is this a joke?" Mikami repeats, slowly, as if speaking to a child with some kind of learning disorder. "Are you making fun of me?"
He says it matter-of-factly, as if this is a thing to be expected, which doesn't match up at all with his appearance. L is the sort of person, strange and socially incapable that he is, that Light would expect to be defensive, always expecting the attack, instead of brazen and confidently uncaring the way he is in reality. Mikami, on the other hand, is attractive in a way that is obvious at first glance, that doesn't take weeks and words and close contact to understand.
Maybe he used to have terrible acne, Light thinks, but doesn't really understand. Mikami is strange, though - and whether it's a taste acquired through L or not, Light likes him the more for it.
"No," he says, not really knowing how to continue from there, but making it understood with one word that he is not that type, not the sort to bully or make fun or waste his time on the humiliation of every odd, inconsequential person. "I - no."
Mikami pauses, looks at him with a strange, calculating look that Light can't decide whether he likes or not, and then nods. "I see."
He starts lining up his papers again, all in a row, everything neat and perfect and Light doesn't like that he looks like he's going to walk away. People do not walk away from Light, they follow him. So, he smiles and uses the line that always works when he needs it to, with a cool, appreciative tilt to his voice.
"You should come to lunch with me," he says. "Tomorrow." It's not a question, not even really a suggestion. Teru Mikami is coming to lunch with him tomorrow and that is a fact.
Mikami seems caught off guard by this news and looks down at his hands, at his neat, neat papers, and then back up at Light. He looks cornered and confused and a little too tall for his own body, but he nods. He nods and says, "Alright."
Of course he does.
Mello mostly runs errands for his new employers, too. And when they say errands, what they means is drugs. Mello doesn't care and doesn't ask questions and they pay him enough not to need to. He doesn't have to do this for long, just needs enough for a flight to Japan and a little extra to keep himself fed and watered, and then he can start.
He'll find L, he knows. He can feel it, the way he sometimes feels things - and not things like Matt's boner digging into his side when they fall asleep next to each other in the old observatory, cool winter air slipping in around the plastered up hole in the ceiling - but in a gnawing gut sort of way. L doesn't come around much but Mello doesn't need him to, will go to him instead. It's much better this way. Wammy's is too crowded and L doesn't like crowds, at least that's the excuse that Roger gives when L stops by but doesn't come out of his room for the duration.
He doesn't like crowds. He's busy. International security rests on his shoulders. No, you can't eat his chocolate cake.
L's appearance at Wammy's had always been accompanied by a lot of rules, the most important of which is known to every student, from the tiniest toddlers upwards: don't disturb him.
Mello had always disturbed him. He'd wanted to know him, still does. He's going to. He's going to find L and he's going to help him and L is going to see, going to understand that Mello is the one, was always the one who deserves it the most. He doesn't care what he has to do.
He doesn't care that there are shadows haunting his path, that if he turns around quickly on the London streets he can almost spot someone dodging out of sight, someone long and strangely familiar, someone Mello pretends he doesn't see, because he knows that it's just psychological. Of course he's going to see L out of the corner of his eye if L is all he thinks about constantly. It's basic psychology.
"Hurry up, kiddie," Bert calls, spitting over his shoulder as Mello slips in through the back door, to the little room where the ceiling fan creaks above them in the cool air and they always wait for the drop-off.
Bert is a complete sleaze and Mello would have him arrested on principal if he could afford it. Watson, the other one, he's alright. He smiles too much and never sits down and wears a jacket two sizes too big for him, but he's alright. For a criminal, at least. He never paws at Mello or talks about his cock, always nods and conducts business efficiently, always makes good-humored jokes to lighten the mood if he can.
Bert catcalls Mello as he leaves and it almost sounds like the row of rubbish bins to his left is laughing in agreement.
The shadows shift. Mello rolls his eyes, tugs his coat on tighter and heads out for another round through the city.
Teru Mikami looks extremely uncomfortable.
Light watches him from across the street and in through the cafe window. He keeps tugging at his collar and playing with the ends of his sleeves. He thinks that Light isn't going to come. Light loves proving people wrong.
He hasn't been back to see L in days, though he's sent Misa twice. Maybe he should kill the both of them. Maybe he should make Teru Mikami fall in love with him - easy - and then go from there. L is just a decoration from a past life, something he'd brought along with him out of apprehension for the future - he can admit as much now. Light had been terrified of the idea that no one could ever matter as much as him, be as integral to his day-to-day existence, but Light has barely seen him lately, and he doesn't miss him.
The world is so large and there are so many things to own. L, as something he already has complete ownership of, is no longer interesting.
And Misa never has been. She'd practically blackmailed him into dating her. It's reasonable justice that he should punish her for that crime. She'd tried to leash a God, just like L. They're both scum.
Teru Mikami is clean and crisp. Light had looked him up on every database - L's computer has access to them all, and though Watari eyes him suspiciously, he never stops Light using them - and he's never done so much as miss a day of school. His record is perfect and his suit is neat and his self-conscious sobriety as he sits waiting for Light at the table, absently playing with his phone, is a welcome change from L's self-assured impudence.
Light moves to cross the street. One of Tokyo's billboard televisions shifts into another news story, and he watches it flash out of the corner of his eye and stops.
Breaking News.
He stops, stares at the screen and the boy smiling up at him from it. Feels a bit sick.
Takashi Sato. Age 11. Found dead at 9 o'clock this morning. Corpse mutilated, liver cut out. Sexual assault suspected.
Light feels very sick.
He's stopped somewhat in the street and moves off to the sidewalk, right up to the window of the cafe. He barely notices. Teru Mikami sees him and his brow furrows and he almost raises a hand before thinking better of it, and Light barely notices.
Possible connection to another recent case. Police had been closing in on a suspect who died in custody. Heart-attack. Kira strongly suspected.
Light feels very sick. He looks through the window, sees Mikami there - a one-time lecturer at a college; nothing, no one; doesn't even have that nice of a suit - and doesn't understand what he's doing. He doesn't understand. He briefly meets Mikami's eyes and then walks away, checking his phone for the current train schedule.
It's not Misa again, L can tell from the footfalls, from the uneven way the key is twisted in the lock and the door is shoved open. Light stands in the doorway and Light looks like he's aged quite a bit in the last several weeks, like the jump between innocence and murder has altered more than just his mind - like Jekyll and Hyde, changing outside as well as within. L wonders whether Kira is the ugly part, or the shining, golden thing that he pretends to be. L hopes for the latter. L hopes that he is pretty and good in some ways that make it make sense for L to feel the way he does to look at him, to see him standing there in a sweat of quiet rage.
He is a meaningless person, really, one to be piled in with all of the others, but L has still stopped trying to escape, and L still freezes and shakes through the back of his throat when Light walks forward - doesn't even close the door, just comes and kneels by the side of the bed and grabs one of L's legs - now clad in a pair of somewhat restricting jeans, courtesy of Misa's enthusiastic shopping excursion - and presses his face, somewhat awkwardly and certainly unexpectedly intimately, to the inside of L's thigh.
It's not very sexual, though L wishes it was, because there is not much else to do when chained to a bed and he also rather wants an excuse to take these wretched jeans off, but it's almost like Light isn't fully aware of what he's doing, of the fact that he's wrapping himself around L's leg, like a child clinging to its mother's skirts. He breathes in and his breath puffs lightly against L's hip and makes him rather want a blowjob and also to grab Light by the hand - like a child, still - and take him out of the Japan and take him away, very far away.
Like some kind of shitty romance film.
Light's face is pressed almost to his crotch and L feels like a shitty romance film, and he feels tired and at once very awake.
"Sometimes," Light murmurs, and L thinks he's going to quote his winning line back at him again, the way he so loves to do - but he doesn't. "Sometimes I can't tell if I'm God or you are."
He breathes it out the way you'd breathe some daunting love confession, like he knows it's a perfectly unreasonable thing to say, but he's committed to having it said, anyway.
L sighs fondly at him and remembers, the way he has a habit of doing, that swelling, overtaking, wipe-out feeling of this is someone he does not want to leave. "The fact that you need someone in the relationship to be a deity says a lot more than it doesn't, Light."
Light doesn't smile but his expression shifts and L can feel it against his leg. Then he's sitting up, adjusting his position to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out his phone - and he doesn't usually bring is phone into the room, L knows, because he usually searches Light's pockets when he falls asleep here - and types something in. He turns the screen to L and it only takes a moment for it all to settle into a subdued understanding.
The story can't be out in newspaper yet, not so soon, but it's there on the front page of the Tokyo's top news website. Takashi Sato. L would be shocked and appalled if he were someone else or trying to make Light think that he's someone else, but he's neither of those things and has surrounded himself with this sort of ugliness since childhood. Murder, rape, dismemberment - it's no shock, no new idea. Not like spontaneous combustion - now that's a real fun case, the kind that B would have taken if B had ever made it far enough to have cases.
L wonders what B is doing now, wonders if he'd find this case - child murderer, likely serial killer; nothing confirmed, two is a line not a pattern - boring, or just be jealous that he hadn't gotten to commit the crime first.
Then L remembers why he hates thinking about B.
"Another one's dead," Light says, still down on his knees, but appearing not to notice. "Same way. Same killer, surely."
L runs his fingers down the slope of Light's arm, not quite touching, just tracing. Some things break if you touch them, and some things poison you on contact. Most things are just things and they don't do anything in particular, but Light is never just anything.
"It could always be a copy-cat," L says, facetiously, because it's the first thing an idiot police officer would say and just because both L and Light are brilliant doesn't mean that they'd be more effective alone, just the two of them. People like Touta Matsuda are necessary for a reason.
Crimes are born out of humanity and genius has nothing to do with humanity; idiocy has everything.
Light scoffs. "Don't patronize me," he says. He flicks his hair out of his eyes. He looks very nice in a blazer and some flattering variety of collared shirt that L knows nothing about. He's dressed up, it's easy to see. He's harried, too, like a nervous prom date sure that the girl he bought the corsage for is going to stand him up. "I hate you," he says, leaning closer. He's still got his phone clutched in his hand and L could make a grab for it, knock Light out with a few well-placed blows and call Watari. It's not just an idle fantasy. He could do it easily.
Light's so close and L uses his free hand to grab him by the jaw, so roughly that Light bucks in his grasp, throwing him off only for a moment before they kiss. It's not very pleasurable at first, feels rather like a battering ram to the face and a poorly maneuvered one at that, but there's something about his hand on Light's face, curling up into his hair, and Light fingers digging into his thighs, pushing up to crawl from between his legs to halfway in his lap, pushing close with an unintelligible force of feeling, of hands and fingers and eyes and lips.
"You're ugly," Light says when he pulls back, but it's a flaccid insult, sounds more like a compliment the way he breathes it against L's lips with a desperate sort of look in his eye. "You're nothing."
L kisses him again. Light kisses back and it feels like a violent hello, a hi, how have you been lately? Only with teeth and tongue and uncomfortable throat noises.
When they pull apart, the phone is on the ground and L watches it for a long moment, not so much deliberating as confronting himself with the fact that he has chosen not to make his escape, despite the opportunity. He wallows in the failure, agonizes over it until it becomes part of him, and the lets it seep in. It's easy to let things be the way they are, for a while - hanging in the balance. Light was supposed to die, or else L was, but at this point nobody has died. It's not prevented, just pushed off, but it gives him time and time is what they need.
Just a bit more time.
"Misa told you, of course," L says, because he wants to get it out of the way. He doesn't want to sit through half an hour of Light's Machiavellian spiel sometime later, so he's bringing it up first. From the way he asks the question, he's sure it's obvious what he means.
"Your name?" Light says, something that's not a smile, but could be, twisting on his face. "Of course." He strokes down the side of L's neck, a gesture that's more grasping than it is possessive, as if Light means to be, but can't quite get a handle on it. "L Lawliet."
L's not sure what he'd been expecting - time stopping, darkness encroaching, climactic music - but none of that happens. Light says his name - pronounces it pretty poorly, too - and that is it. L's name has been said to him, out loud and in full, for the first time in coming on seven years. It should feel important, but it doesn't. It's just some words. They have the power to kill him, Light has the power to kill him, sure - but they don't really mean anything. Light has had the power to kill him for weeks now, and hasn't. L doesn't expect him to start trying now.
Light seems to have noticed the generally underwhelming feel of the moment, because he laughs slightly and says, "Your first name is one letter. That's unbelievably stupid."
L tips back, half against the headboard, and pulls one of his feet up next to him on the bed. "I'm not going to get into an argument about ridiculous names with you of all people." The tips of his fingers play with Light's hair. "Now can you go get me something to eat? I've been wasting away all day."
Light pauses, then nods.
They come at night. Misa's seen enough films to know that this is how it goes: they always come at night.
She hears the echoes, the thumps on the doors, the quiet whispers, and she doesn't even think, just gets down on the floor and crawls under the bed - just like last time. She remembers the scratchy carpeting on her cheek and how it had chafed when she'd cried, making her face red and blotchy and ugly, nobody's pretty princess anymore. It feels sort of surreal to be back here again, but also rather inevitable. Cornered in an alley or shaking and hidden in her bedroom, it's all more or less the same, every time.
They always come at night.
The voices are quiet and footsteps shake through the floor and she's frozen, she can't move, and where are her pages? The pages she kept, they're somewhere in her purse, and if she could just get them, or her phone, call someone, call Light -
Light will fix it. Light will make everything okay again.
She reaches out, small fingers grasping towards the nightstand - it's too dark to see properly, why do they have to come at night? - but then the footsteps are louder and the door cracks open.
There are too many of them and she wishes Rem were with her still and their faces are covered - they know - and she'd even take Ryuk at this point but she'd sent him off and why are they here? What do they want? She hasn't done anything, she never does anything wrong, but they alway come and take things.
"A black notebook," one of them says to the others, who's pawing through Misa's underwear drawer, "that's all we're looking for." His voice is muffled by the mask. Another one speaks, says something Misa can't hear in a woman's voice, and they're touching everything, knocking things over - that's her Miss Teen Idol 2003 award, that's her favorite corset.
She stays quiet, so quiet, doesn't move or breathe or think, just waits -
And then they're gone, but she still stays under the bed. Just lies there, hand over her mouth, trying to keep still until morning, and consoles herself with the knowledge that Light will make everything okay.
tbc.
end notes: I've actually been to Borough Market and it's highly perfect. Sorry about the slowness. Sorry about the scarcity of LxLight this chapter. Sorry for the completely extraneous Mikami. Sorry the quality of writing was honestly very suspect. I don't' know what was wrong with me when I wrote this. Thanks for reading/reviewing/etc. and thanks for all being very wonderful in general.
Oh, and a line from this fic made it onto wtffanfiction (the tumblr blog.) I was very proud. And my really unfoundedly kind and talented friends made a mix for this fic, the link to which can be found on my profile. Thank you again.