warnings: violence and blood. aizawa point-of-view?
notes: i'm going to forgo the WILD APOLOGIES for quality/content/not enough editing (there's no such thing as enough editing when it comes to my writing but i'll get on) and just say a gigantic THANK YOU to everyone who reviewed last time and was so sweet and supportive of me and of this fic. i'd really like nothing more than to finish this and make it as good as i possibly can. lots of stumbling around in this chapter on everyone's part and a surprising amount of task force. i promise more mello and B next time and a bit more advancement of plot.
that aside, if i didn't respond to your review yet, i intend to do it after i post this, i just want to get this out there before i get distracted by thanking you all ECSTATICALLY. what even is this fic anymore, i do not know, but you all keep it going and keep me excited about writing it and i couldn't be more grateful for every single one of you.
chapter fifteen - love is.
"We are ally just trying to be holy."
- Snow and Dirty Rain, Richard Siken
The highway flashes by in the haze of late afternoon half-reality and Light lets up on the gas uncomfortably. He has his license - had insisted to his parents on getting it shortly before he'd entered university - but he's barely done any driving that wasn't simply practice and test-taking. This car still smells new; the seats feel as if they've been sat in very few times before. Misa had said it was a gift from a very rich and influential fan from a few years back - one that Kira had killed off a few months ago. She might have even written his name herself. Charming.
He turns on the CD drive and then, after no more than a minute of bubbly pop music, turns it off again. He flips through radio stations without listening, eventually settling back on the silence, nothing playing but the hum of the engine and L's steady breaths in the seat beside him.
Light is pretending, quietly and to himself, that he knows what he's doing, but he's not truly sure that he does. He'd sent Misa off for the back-up plan, with an address and a bouquet of flowers that she'd deemed suitably romantic. He'd cleaned up the apartment, scrubbed it of any fingerprints and washed it, floor-to-ceiling, of any indication that L had ever been there. They're not going to be found out, probably - maybe. Aizawa had followed him to the house, and even though Misa had been waiting in the car around the back and that's the way he'd gotten L out, they still could have been followed. But If Misa does her part, the apartment will be covered and the team will be convinced. It's a sacrifice, but one he has to make.
One that seems to have been made for him already by Aiber.
"About L," Matsuda had said, "we were wondering, well, how close you were to him? If maybe you were more than friends? It's okay if you were! It's okay, right Mogi? But, if you were, well, then that makes everything different, doesn't it?"
Ide had winked at him, inside the headquarters, where they'd gone to discuss it. Aizawa had watched him with narrowed eyes. Watari's terminal had stayed quiet. But the implication had been there from all sides, and that had been bad enough in and of itself, but then -
"Your mother and sister went by your apartment when you were sick, but neither you or Misa were there. They called the family doctor, but you hadn't been in. They even asked around with the neighbors, and found that you're hardly ever home, even at times when we know for sure you're not at headquarters. So, Light, what I'm asking, is where were you? And - well, does this have anything to do with L?"
"We're not accusing you of anything, of course."
"You know you can trust us."
Platitudes. They're suspicious of him. Maybe not all of them, but there's enough doubt there for it to grow, especially with Aiber and Watari there to push it along. What was he supposed to say? There was no denying the truth of his absence yesterday. Even he couldn't manage to get around that. No, he'd said, there'd been nothing going on with L, but - but he could explain everything if they'd just give him time to work it all out. It's nothing to do with the Kira case, he'd told them, and he thinks most of them had believed him, but not Aizawa, clearly, because he'd followed him. That's fine, though. Good, in fact. That will make everything line up. He'd asked for a day, said that he'd been having relationship problems with Misa and that he needed to fix things with her before he did anything else. And then he could explain.
Then he had gone and talked to Misa. Told her the plan. It's a risk, but it will hopefully shake off any lingering suspicions to do with the Kira case and make all of Aiber's work at shaking the team's trust in him for naught. He just needs Misa to do her part, for the flowers and the long pauses and the little room to all pull together and come to something.
He just needs a bit of time with L - alone.
They're not too far outside the city and they won't need to go for much longer, just need to find a motel, something low quality enough not to have security cameras or ask any questions of its patrons - like why they're taking a chained up, unconscious man into their room with them. He just needs L out of the way while things get settled. Just a bit of free-time. He'd given Misa the Death Note from under the floorboard, but he'd kept enough pages to maybe be able to do some judgements personally today. It's been too long. His fingers itch and he mentally traces the characters in Hiroshi Ono, but he doesn't move his hands from the wheel. He tries the radio again, and L blinks awake next to him, bleary in the fading light.
"Hey," Light tells him, without looking over.
L sits up slightly, still looking a bit drugged up. "Where are we?"
"In a car," Light says.
"Yes." L blinks. "Why?"
Light doesn't respond. He doesn't know how to put it without seeming… weak, maybe. Is he afraid of L seeing him as weak? Doesn't L already?
"Light," he says, and Light presses down on the gas, braces himself for the questions, the demands, the - "You tried to kill me." L's voice is very quiet.
Light finally looks at him and it's - it's not what he'd expected. He looks at the clock - it's been three hours since he'd injected L, which is an hour short of a proper sleep cycle and the amount L ought to have been out for, given the dose. Not that it matters, really, but - is he still drugged? His eyes are hazy and he's slumping slightly to the side and he looks… resigned. Is that how one is supposed to feel in these situations? Resigned to the kidnapping, to the attempts on their life. Resigned to love.
Maybe Light's expecting too much. Maybe L's not offering enough. His body has been so covered in masks lately, seeing him bare is like staring down a well. There is so much more there than surface. "You tried to kill me." It sounds like weakness. Light's not sure what to do, or if he should even touch it.
"Yes," he says, eyes ahead, "we've been over this."
L blinks at him and he does it slowly, like it's an action he has to put effort into. He must still be drugged up. "But I mean, you actually tried to kill me." He says it with this air of disbelief that Light wants to trace the seams of, checking for wires. It sounds like the kind of thing that L would pretend to say, while actually saying something else.
No, no actually is sounds like the kind of thing that Light would pretend to say. Is L making fun of him? Should that even be a question, or should he just take it as a given? All things aside, he of course isn't being genuine.
"Did I hurt your feelings?" Light almost snorts, laughing it off. The silence spreads out, following them down the road, and he's almost tempted to turn Misa's awful music back on.
L looks out the window. "Don't be cruel."
That's… new. That's new, right? "What is this? Are you still out of it or something?"
"No, I'm not, actually. Which is strange, isn't it?" L rolls his head, looking over at him, eyebrows raised, but his pupils are clear and cognizant. "I'm trying to be honest. A novel concept, I know, but I'm tired of being drugged and dragged around by you like an animal, and waking up in rooms and cars that I don't recognize. And I could stop it, we both know I could stop it, but I haven't, have I? It's because I can't be honest."
Light blinks, lets up on the gas, eases his grip on the steering wheel. "Honest about what?"
"About what this is. About what you are." He smiles thinly and there's a tiring emptiness to L like this. His eyes are crinkled like he's been laughing or crying, but Light's been with him the whole time and knows he's done neither.
He feels agitated but he doesn't know why. It's not annoyance at what L's saying - although he's being childish and ridiculous, as usual - but just a strange teething under his skin, like he's forgotten something important or left behind a valuable. Like maybe the world is ending somewhere else and he's skipped out on it for a day at the park.
"Why shouldn't I be cruel?" he asks, speaking directly to the windshield. He wishes it would rain. This is a rainy day. "You always are. You treat me like - like I'm less than you. Like I'm stupid."
Honesty, then, if he wants it. Light doesn't know why L is acting like this and he doesn't care, he knows he doesn't care, but it just grates on his peace of mind, makes him fidgety and unable to concentrate. What is he getting at? What is he playing at? Should Light really have said that, or did it come off as too needy? Oh god, L's going to think that Light is desperate for his approval and get all obnoxious and use it to his advantage to -
"You're not stupid." It's blatant. He's almost really smiling. It cuts into Light and his mind latches onto it without permission from the rest of him. Since when is not stupid praise, anyhow? Especially when L follows it up with, "You're young."
Light's brow crumples and everything in him shifts. "So what? You were eight when you solved your first case."
"Six," L corrects, nibbling at his thumb.
"Six," Light repeats, merely as a formality.
"And," L continues, "if I met my six-year-old self now, I'd be a lot crueler to him than I am to you."
Light would cross his arms about now if that wouldn't end in a car wreck.
"Why?" he asks.
Probably because L is utterly self-loathing on some level. There's another level where he thinks he's the most brilliant thing to ever step foot on planet earth - or maybe it's just another facet of the same level. He knows all of L's parts, in one way or another, he just isn't completely sure how they fit together to make the whole. He knows the whole, too, inside-out. Especially inside. Because they fuck. Because Light fucks him. Whenever Light gets annoyed with him like this, he just reminds himself that he fucks him and it makes him feel better. Well, no, not really, but at the very least, it conjures pleasant visuals.
L doesn't respond, just looks back out the window and Light sighs. He feels like he's having a relationship counseling session by himself. "You know, L, I like the game. I like playing with you. But we were closer before, when I wasn't even myself."
Okay, okay - honesty. It's alright. It's not like L can walk out on him in the middle of the road. He's not going to leave. He can't leave. Though they shouldn't be far now. He's passed a couple of hotels since L's woken up - there are a lot in this area - but they all looked too nice, the kind of place where their presence would be questioned.
L is chewing at his fingers. He might be hungry. He might just be putting the tick on. Hell, he's probably putting the whole conversation on.
"Maybe that was you, and it's now that you're not yourself," he suggests petulantly. It sounds petulant to Light, anyway, who's foot trips on the gas, pressing down harder.
"Is that what you're holding out for?" he snaps, because, for some reason that he's not sure how to examine, the idea of that boils through him, slowly, heavily, painfully. "That person? The wide-eyed innocence?" He doesn't care, of course, he doesn't care - except, no. No, he does care. He can see why L might feel that way, but he - he doesn't want him to. "I'm not innocent. I've killed a lot of people. I'll never be innocent." He turns his eyes on L. "Are you okay with that?"
"Of course I'm not okay with it," L tells him, watching the cars that pass them in blurred lines of dark blues and reds and greys. "I'll never be okay with any of this." The sun is setting behind him, the fading light catching in his hair, and it looks like the end of the world out here. But it's not. It's just a conversation.
"Light," L says, turning sharply on him suddenly, like he's re-thought his answer without changing it, "it's all word games and rhetoric and tripping around one another, rocking from love to hate, and do you know why?" He asks it like a question but he doesn't leave time for an answer. "It has to be a game, because if I look at you and what you are and what… being with you - god help me, we're getting into humiliating territory here - makes me, I can't stomach it. It's all wrong. We can dress it up however we like and we have, but the bare facts of it are that we are fucked." He looks back out the window. "I hate what you do. I don't want you to do it. I don't want to be star-crossed lovers that act out the roles insisted upon by the tragedy in your head. Your kingdom is stupid and I don't want you wasting your time on it."
He's slowing down now, or speeding up in odd places, slipping on his words off into different directions that he might not have even intended. What's the game? Light thinks, and stiffens to wonder that there maybe isn't one. Honesty. Is it the drugs? It's got to be the drugs. Why else would L say these things to him?
"What I truly want," he continues, looking back to Light like he can't quite help himself, "is for you to understand the flaws in your plan, give it up, and come work for me. Or with me."
He stutters it all out, like a botched love confession, a failed prom invitation. Honesty. What a stupid word. What a stupid concept. Why is L doing this to him?
"That's never going to happen," Light says, fingers gripping down into the soft leather of the steering wheel. One jerk and they would go tearing through the shoulder, down into the grass and the leaves and the trees. A single twist, and boom.
He blinks and erases his fantasy of release from the compulsion of destiny. It's gone. It never happened. He had never thought it.
L's not quieting, though, and he's not letting up. His voice is only getting louder, in fact.
"Why not? It's idealistic, sure, a silly thing to think, but it's out there now, isn't it, so why not? You were angry with the world and you felt like you couldn't make a difference, and then you were handed a tool to do exactly that. No wonder you did what you did." He shifts, looks across the car. "But I'm handing you a different tool. I'm handing you me - euphemisms aside. Why don't we forgo the struggle? Why don't you just take it?"
And Light, he understands. Not why L has chosen now of all times to say this, to make this offer - maybe because of the attempt on his life, maybe because of Aiber and Wedy, maybe he's just tired the way Light is tired - but he knows what he's saying. It could be easy. I could have you and you could have me and it could be painless.
That's how is looks to L. But that's only because it would be painless for him.
Light speeds up, passing a particularly slow car ahead and shifting into another lane.
"That's a complicated question to answer," he says, after a moment, "so let me ask you something instead. Why don't you be Misa?" L blinks at him a few times and Light catches his look of concentrated detachment in a quick sideways glance, eyes going immediately back to the road. "Why don't I kill her and you take her place as my second, as my protector, as my love-struck princess?" He pauses, pulling to the left to turn into what looks like promisingly decrepit stretch of road. "Why don't you sacrifice everything that you believe in and have built your life on, and hand it all over to me?"
An eye for an eye and all that. That would be painless for Light. He feels no attachment to Misa - would have to get around Rem, but he's sure he could manage it. It would be the best possible solution for him. But he, unlike L, isn't naive or blatantly uncaring enough to actually think that seriously suggesting such a thing would lead anywhere good. Joining him would gut L.
Just like giving up the Death Note would gut Light. There is no possibility of partnership. One of them will always have to be the prisoner of the other. And L knows that, so why is he -
"Light - " he starts, softly, suffocatingly. He's being condescending again. It's the sort of gentleness that Light, without his memories, would have taken at face value.
"No, okay," Light says. "You're not right." Deep breaths, deep breaths, honesty. That's the game today. Honesty. "You're not completely wrong, but what you do as L and what you stand for isn't right either, and I'm not joining up with the same corrupt regime that I've been trying to tear down from the start." And that's the crux of it, really. It'd be one thing if L was actually the figure of justice that he pretended be, but that's just a pose, a headline for the papers to keep the public believing in him, the world's law enforcement depending on his expertise.
L's justice is only a cover sheet for what is, at root, his own personal brand of violence. Self-sacrifice, self-immolation, self-denial and self-victimization. It's all about the self, the man and not the letter. Solving cases is just the way he keeps his emotional disorders filed in neat lines, how he keeps his head on straight - or as straight as he can get it. That's the difference between them. Light actually wants to make the world a better place, actually wants to save people, clean things up, strive for good. L just wants a distraction.
And… Light is L's distraction for the moment. That hurts. He can't tell if it's true, but it hurts anyway.
L tips his head the side, fading in and out from bleary to pin-sharp. "And I won't join up with you, either, so where does that leave us?" he asks, voice gone back to the usual dull tones. He's not really asking anything. He's just making noise.
Light frowns and realizes too late that the honesty from a moment ago had been actual honesty. It'd been hard to tell in real time, but now that it's gone - replaced by the emptiness - it's easy to see. He looks at L, but his expression is solid, unmovable.
He'd blinked and missed it. How does he get it back? How does he make L lay out all of the true, silly, idealistic things that he wants? How can he have that? Light wants that. He wants it.
"Here," he nods, turning into a small, slightly dilapidated motel parking lot. "We'll stay here for the night."
"I know what Aiber-san said, but do you really think Light is Kira?" Matsuda stares up at Shuichi with wide, genuine eyes. "After all the proof we have that he isn't?"
Shuichi pinches the bridge of his nose - he doesn't know, he really doesn't know - but L's gone and Light's gone off on an emergency relationship retreat with Misa - which is suspicious, that's suspicious, isn't it? - and they haven't yet let the chief on about the newly discovered secret apartment - it could be nothing, it's probably nothing - and absent of any other figure of authority, Matsuda's looking at him of all people as some kind of leader. Which, if Shuichi's being honest, isn't going to lead anywhere good for anyone.
He sighs. "Maybe, maybe not. We can't eliminate anything." He holds open the door to the meeting room and lets Matsuda in ahead of him, nodding to Ide, who's already inside. "But what I really want to know is what Light was doing at that apartment complex. That's not the sort of place Light would normally go. Even if it's got nothing to do with Kira, it still strikes me as shady."
He sets down at briefcase and glances around. Good, good, the chief's still out to lunch with his wife. They'd convinced him to take a few hours off, said the stress wasn't good for his health - which is true, technically, but it still feels like a betrayal to do this behind his back.
"What have you got, Ide?" he asks, before Matsuda can make another weak protest.
Ide tosses a stack of files down on the table, crossing his arms and uncrossing them in rapid succession. "It's just a regular low-rent apartment. The landlord - Jun Nakamura, no criminal record - wouldn't say anything except that all the rooms are rented and if I wanted to look around anymore, I'd have to get a warrant." He's jittering with a nervous sort of excitement, but he tries to cover it up with professionalism. Shuichi's been working with him long enough to see it, anyway.
"But Light going into an unusual building isn't enough for any kind of official investigation," Matsuda says, and he's not wrong.
That's the thing about Touta, he's rarely straight-out wrong - just painfully naive.
Mogi comes in while Matsuda is speaking, holding several files and moving in his stiff way. "That's why I sent Aiber over," he says, somewhat sheepishly, even though his voice is loud enough to make everyone look over. Mogi always speaks as if he's reading off lines, like a robot that's been programmed with shyness and firm duty and not much more. "He and Watari-san, um, questioned the landlord." He say questioned like the word upsets him and only blinks at Ide when he protests that he'd already done that. "Thoroughly."
"And?" Shuichi asks, snapping his fingers to avoid the chit-chat.
"Apparently almost all the tenants are long-time renters," Mogi says, "it's only the apartment on the basement level that's recently been leased out. He doesn't know the name of the tenant, only that a man matching Light's description comes by the place every few days, and occasionally someone else - someone he claims he's never gotten a good look at - stops by." Mogi looks down at one of the files, fidgets his large hands awkwardly. "Other than that, he says that he's pretty sure the apartment's unoccupied most of the time, since he's never seen anyone else come or go."
"That's a bit weird," Ide says, hand tapping on one of the desks, not that it needs to be said.
"What's he doing in there?" Shuichi murmurs. "And who's the other person?"
"It's probably none of our business," Matsuda says, puffing it out under his breath, but he's frowning now, just as curious as the rest of them.
"Maybe not," Shuichi tells him, "but he's definitely hiding something. On the slight chance that it could have anything to do with Kira, we have to investigate." He looks around. "Just, no one tell the chief, alright? Not yet. We don't want to worry him. Maybe it's nothing. We'll wait for Light to come back from his trip with Misa and then confront him on the subject. Until then, we'll just continue our usual work."
The rest of the investigators nod and it's just about settled, and then the door is pushed lazily open and Aiber strides in, looking like a disheveled beach-wear advertisement in the middle of November. The first thing Shuichi thinks is that he must be cold. The second is that he's about to stir up something, and it's not going to be anything good.
"Hello, gentlemen!" Aiber announces, buoyant and possibly drunk. "Who wants to go on a tour of Yagami junior's secret apartment with me?"
They all look around at each other, not sure how to respond. Most of them like Aiber just fine, but he does upset the harmony of the team a little bit. It's not that he isn't friendly or competent, he's just… excessively western.
Finally, Matsuda says, "Uh, I thought we needed a warrant."
Aiber smiles cheaply at him, fiddling with the lining of his rolled up shirt-sleeves with one large, errant finger. "Nakamura-san changed his mind. Watari can be very convincing. The elderly have a certain charm about them, don't they?"
"He also has a sniper rifle," Mogi says, quietly - which is strange, maybe. Mogi doesn't usually say anything, if he can help it.
Aiber's smile only grows. "That, too."
"Aiber-san, that strikes me as being unethical," Shuichi says, but more as a formality than anything else. He's curious, itching to find out what's going on with Light, and - honestly - he needs something to do. They all do. Ever since L disappeared, the case has gone cold. Aiber and his… somewhat inappropriate insinuations about L and Light, unnecessary as they might have been, were the only bits of information of any notability to come by them in weeks.
"L would have done it," Aiber counters, standing up straighter. He doesn't look like he's shaved recently, but there's still a stateliness to him, even in disorder, that commands attention among the rest of them. It's something Light has, something L had, too. Something that Shuichi himself is lacking. "But L's not here, because Kira's done something with him. Maybe killed him. And if Light Yagami is Kira, are you really going to let him get away with that?"
The rest of them glance about at each other, and Shuichi can feel it, that pull, the urge to get excited, to get angry - the drive necessary to solve a case. But, then there's the part holding them all back. Nobody wants Light to be Kira, or to have anything to do with him at all. Except Aiber, obviously. Aiber who's probably just - is jealous the word? Because of L? Thinking that makes Shuichi uncomfortable, so he stops thinking it.
"Whoa, we're getting ahead of ourselves here, aren't we, guys?" Matsuda says, sheepishly rubbing at the back of his head, the way he always does when he's nervous. "It's probably all just a big misunderstanding. Maybe, heh, Light's just bought an extra apartment for his hair-care products."
He's trying levity, trying to be the comic relief the way he always is. It doesn't work.
"Matsuda, this is a serious situation," Ide tells him. "Be serious." Mogi looks at his shoes. Shuichi doesn't say anything.
Matsuda puts his arm down, looks at his feet. "Sorry."
"Don't be sorry," Aiber tells him, slumping there. He usually reminds Shuichi of an overgrown teenager, one of those unbearable trust fund kids he'd known back in school who hang about the world as if it's their private lounge, but now he looks oddly serious. "We need to see this situation from every possible point of view. Who knows what could happen? We ought to try and prepare for everything. That's what L would do."
He's stern, but kind. Like the chief. The way any leader ought to be. Shuichi should maybe be annoyed by having his position of authority snuffed out from underneath him, but mostly he's just relieved. If Light isn't Kira, he doesn't want to be the one who gives the order to investigate him. And if he is - and that's a whole minefield of ground-shaking possibilities there, that is - Shuichi thinks he still doesn't want to be the first to know.
Teru's secretary brings the flowers in with an abhorrent little smirk on her face. "Tsuki, huh?" she says. "Is she cute?"
Teru doesn't know what she's talking about, doesn't know why she's standing in his office with a bouquet of roses when he's told her twice that he needs the files on the Shikamaru case as soon as possible - incompetent woman - and it doesn't even register that the flowers are for him until she's already clicked her impractical heels out of the room, leaving them in a vase on his desk. He has no idea what this could possibly mean - is it a threat? Is someone playing a practical joke?
And then he remembers. Tsuki. Moon. That's how Light Yagami spells his name. Moon Night God. Teru hasn't yet been able to decide if he thinks it's beautiful or over the top. He hasn't yet decided the same about Yagami himself.
He looks back at the roses. There's a card.
L keeps his chained hands under a jacket as Light pays for the room, and if the clerk gives them a scathing look for purchasing one room with a single bed, it's quelled by the tip Light slips him, along with a few mumbled words about discretion. Not that it will do any good. As someone who tends to interview hotel clerks after the fact to make his living, he finds that no matter how much any criminal can pay someone to keep their secrets, he can always pay more, and discretion is never kept up for long.
Light takes him into the room, chains him to the bed, moves as if he's going to brush L's hair out of his eyes but doesn't, and then leaves. He comes back a few minutes later with a bottle of sake and sets it down on the bed between them.
"I couldn't find cups."
"Don't want to fuck sober?" L says, cocking a barely visible eyebrow.
He's doing it again. He pretends to himself that he doesn't know what he's doing, but of course he does. Beyond used to point it out all the time when they were kids, and then later when they were older. Most especially after they started fumbling in dark rooms and beating up on each other with their cocks out.
"You bare your soul through self-deprecating little taunts. You want to tell me how you feel, but you don't want me to know that you want to tell me. I do know, of course. I can always tell when you're hiding your skeleton truths, and exactly where your hiding them."
L had ignored him, but L had understood that he'd been right. He hadn't even realized it until B said it. He hated whenever Beyond knew something he didn't. He'd beaten him with a shovel once. Had caused internal hemorrhaging. It hadn't been that day, but L thinks of it now anyway, about B lying on the floor, looking up at him, laughing, saying, "Marry me, Lawliet. I'll buy you a white dress." He'd just kept laughing as L had just kept hitting him, giving him this look that -
It's a look that Light has never given him. Not Aiber, either, or dear Salina in Argentina. It's not a look he likes to remember.
"Who says I brought you here for sex?" Light asks, and he tries to smirk but abandons it halfway through. He's starting all these gestures and then stopping them. He's unsure. It's from the conversation in the car, L is sure. Honesty.
L can't even tell if he'd been honest back there. He hadn't expected Light to say yes to his proposal, hadn't expected it to lead anywhere, he'd just wanted to feel better. He's sick of them tumbling over each other, like a race, like a battle where they're only sometimes fighting on opposite sides. He's tired of being drugged. He's just a bit tired.
"You bring me everywhere for sex," L counters, and Light rubs his hands together. L sighs, supposes that if Light is going to go all nervous and teenage, he'll have to be the adult. He holds out his unchained hand. "Alright, then. If we're not going to fuck, let's at least drown out all functional thought processes by consuming copious amounts of alcohol."
Light does smile then, but quietly, and takes a small drink before passing the bottle to L, who takes a larger gulp. He's not worried, though. As evidenced by the last time they'd done this, he can hold his liquor much better than Light can. He can do most things much better than Light can - and yet he still wants to run his hands along his tiny, golden arm hairs and lick his jawline and talk metaphysics with him in bed at 2 in the morning. He wants these things and he knows how to not want these things, but he's not sure it isn't better if he does. Human desire is a strange thing. He takes another sip.
Light takes the bottle back and drinks longer, deeper. "We'll have sex afterwards if you're so desperate for it."
"And if you can manage not to pass out."
They smile minutely at each other and it's something like nice.
"And that," Light says, nodding gently. "But first I want to do that honesty thing again. I want you to tell me everything you know."
And now the alcohol makes sense. Loosening the tongue and all that. L would personally rather just loosen their clothes. "General knowledge? Well, there's a dinosaur called the Micropachycephalosaurus, which has always stuck me as bit ridiculous. Oscar Wilde's last words were, suitably, to do with the wallpaper, and about an hour before the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, a fifteen year old girl was drowned in Queens. She got absolutely no press coverage. Not a single letter of print." He takes another long sip. "Hmm, what else?"
He half expects Light to get annoyed and half expects him to shut him up with tongue, but he does neither, just takes the bottle back with a slight smile. "Not general. Specific. I want to know what you know about the Death Note."
L slumps, playing his hands along the rough material of the bedspread.
"I'd wager you'd know a lot more than I, if only in that area."
"You'd be partly right." The smile again, but more pained this time, and then he's reaching out and taking L by the wrist, cupping his hand like a lover. L half expects him to drop off the bed and onto one knee. To pull out a ring. It's a shame L hasn't got a shovel for the occasion. Light's fingers are warm and they're gentle on his skin, which is different from all the grabbing and pulling he's used to. He kisses L on the knuckles, one by one, and L half wants to hit him, to beat him senseless, but the other half wants to close its eyes and accept the situation for what it is.
"You're in love, sugar. That's the problem here." B's voice is either completely alien to the moment, or else fits in very well. L can't decide.
"What did you talk to Rem about? What was the plan?" Light says softly. He thumbs L's wrist bone. It's probably a trick. It's nice anyway.
L sighs his eyes closed and then blinks them back open. "Fine. On the condition you tell me exactly what's going on, and what you plan to do about it." Light begins to nod, but L holds up a finger, back still arched low. "And - in what way I can help."
Light looks at him solidly for a few seconds, still not having let go of his hand. "Help who? Them, or me?"
L flexes his wrist, twisting it out of Light's grip, and reaches for the bottle. "I don't know," he says, taking a sip. "I haven't yet decided."
He likes the look that Light gives him then - wide open and dangerous and passionately, stupidly adoring.
An hour and a half and a lot of sake later, they're spread out diagonal across the bed, and Light - for what L considers a very offensive reason - can't stop laughing.
He sounds like a little boy, like L could be tickling him torturously. He's in absolute raptures, drunk and flushed and handsy in a way he hasn't been since he'd gotten his memories back. "You," he starts, but it tumbles away in another wave of giggles, and it takes him a bit to catch up with it again. "You're going to make Misa fall in love with you? Oh my god." He puts a hand to his forehead. L thinks he might actually be crying.
"I don't see what's so funny," he mumbles, smushing his face against Light's forearm and reaching around for the bottle without any particular success. "People fall in love with me all the time. They make a habit of it." He's afraid he might be pouting slightly, but it makes Light laugh harder so he keeps doing it, anyway.
"I know, I know, it's just Misa - can you imagine? Her following you around instead of me - I - actually, that would be kind of a relief." He wipes his eyes and blinks at L, humor still obvious in the curves of his face. "You should do it."
L scratches at his hair, then realizes that he's not touching his own head, but Light's. Their limbs are so all over each other, it's hard to tell them from the other. Light might just be the only thing that actually exists in the world. Welcome to paradise. Christ, that's possibly terrifying. And possibly a relief. It's all possibly's these days. There is no 100% left, if it was ever there to begin with.
"I don't know that I can," he says, looking at the ceiling, "or that I should. I just needed to get Rem on my side."
"She'll never be on your side. She's completely Misa's. She's in love with her, do you believe that?" Light laughs, but in a way that's less pure amusement and more there to fill the space. "A Shinigami in love with a human. And a human like Misa, of all things. It'd be like if Ryuk - " He stops, looks at L and then smiles to himself, looking quickly away.
"Who's Ryuk?" L asks, even though he can extrapolate fairly well, given the context.
Light kisses him on the temple, fingers playing through his hair. "I'll introduce you two sometime."
L closes his eyes for a moment, listens to the hum of the heating unit. It's cold out today, he'd even heard something about possible flurries of snow from the television in the lobby. Light hates snow. Light is being unsettlingly gentle with him. Or maybe he's the one who's being gentle with Light. It might not matter. He opens his eyes and says, "You still want to destroy me, right?"
Light frowns, shifts a little so he's sitting up. "That's a weird question."
"Don't play dumb with me, Light." He sits up, too.
Light rolls his eyes. "I take you out of your cage for one day and all you want is to go back in, isn't it?"
"I just want to know what the game is, if I'm expected to play it."
"There is no game," Light tells him, and then watches the tips of his own fingers with narrowed eyes, as if he's trying to suss out the truth of that statement. "Honesty, isn't it?"
L huffs, but he's not angry. It's not a logical train of thought that's led him to that, just a feeling. He doesn't feel angry or scared or rife with loathing, and he doesn't know that he wants to force it, and himself into action with it. Inaction is the game today. Inaction is honesty, for now.
He shifts, staring at the ceiling and thinking back over what Light had let drop about what's going on at headquarters - which hadn't been an excessive amount, but then L hadn't expected it to be. They suspect him of something, certainly, although not necessarily being Kira, which isn't necessarily helpful to L at all.
Still, he blinks over at Light, after what might have been a long silence, but not an uneasy one - it's a drunk silence, something that fades in and out with the stars that they can't see through the ceiling - and says, "So they're onto you, huh?"
Light slumps to the side, the side that's closer to L, that warms him in the dim room. His extremities feel cold, like all the heat in him has migrated to the center of his body, ruffling his breathing, warming up the places where Light touches. Like young love, except older and worn out. They should kiss but they talk instead.
"Not really," Light smiles at him, a whispery little tilt of the lips. He laughs to himself at something he hasn't said yet, and then says it. "Mostly they just think I'm gay."
L blinks long because it makes his thoughts easier to process. "You are gay," he says, opening his eyes back up. He can't tell if he's smiling at Light or Light is just smiling at him. There's amusement covering them, here in this room, and it's directed at themselves, at all of their failings.
Everything's funnier when you're drunk. L, of course, is not drunk, and never would be, just on principle.
"Not really," Light says again, airily, like the whole situation is moment away from collapsing into giggles once more.
L snorts, taking the bottle from Light's fingers, which are far warmer than his to the touch. "No?" he asks, before taking a short swig. "My mistake."
The low light falls in uneven lines across the bedspread and when Light looks at him, it's with a self-effacing sort of kindness that aches through L. He tips him up by the chin in a cinema romance kind of way, credits rolling, music rising, and it's slightly hilarious, but in a way that they both recognize and possibly appreciate. Light's hand drops away, knocking L's jaw in the process. "I'd still love you were if you were a girl," he says, unimportantly, like he's trying to make the words as little noticed as possible.
L nods after a moment, because he can buy that, but - "Would you still want to fuck me, though?"
"I don't know," Light says, leaning against him, sunk into the scratchy blankets, breathing soft and hazed. "I'd still want to hurt you, and that's more or less the same thing, isn't it?"
L doesn't know why he kisses him then, or if he even makes a conscious decision to do it, he just does, climbs half on him and presses his lips and presses them hard. It's not like a new case, fragile and unaccustomed, touching something never before touched. Light is familiar to him, part of a pattern, a repetition. And he knows - in the same ignorant way he'd known everything B had told him, everything he'd ignored or beaten with a shovel - that he is afraid of patterns.
Things that become familiar slowly become integral and L's existence is one that needs to be maintained through solid singularity. He can touch everything, but he can't keep anything. Which is possibly why he doesn't so terribly mind being kept by Light.
Which is possibly very frightening. Light kisses back and it's familiar in all the right and wrong ways, and L - he likes it.
Honesty, isn't it?
Shuichi nods as politely as he can to the slightly-battered looking landlord who leads them twitchily down the steps and unlocks the door to Light's apparent spare apartment. The man doesn't return the gesture, just scurries away as soon as Aiber reaches for the knob, ducking around Ide and past Matsuda's nervous smile as quickly as he can.
It's just the four of them. Mogi had volunteered to wait back at headquarters, in case the chief returned early, and Watari barely comes out of the back rooms anymore, relying on his internet connection for communication. Caution, Aiber had called it. Shuichi suspects he's afraid. The fact that the source of that fear is Light is what gets to him. Light is not a thing to be feared, certainly. He's smart and he's quick, but the idea of him ever doing something to purposefully hurt anyone - it just doesn't compute. The chief's son would never have ended up someone like that. Like Kira.
Aiber walks confidently into the room, as if he expects to find immediate evidence waiting for him at the door. There's none. There's nothing. No furniture, not a single item. Blank walls and open floors, all loosely paneled and obviously cheaply made. The four of them walk in, look around, and then move onto the next door, on the opposite wall. That leads to a long hall, also completely bare, but for the door at the other end. It's half ajar. Aiber looks ready to run at it. Shuichi holds up a hand, motions him back, and moves forward himself, placing a ready hand on the gun holstered to his side. He's fairly certain he won't need it, but -
He almost thinks it's L for half a second, but the angles are all wrong, the posture is ramrod straight and the hair falls in unfamiliar angles. And he's wearing a suit, which more or less clinches it.
He sits at a small desk, nothing on it but a vase of large white roses. There's a made-up bed and a cheap bedside table, but the rest of the room is absent of adornments - no rugs, no knick-knacks, no pictures on the wall. Shuichi fingers his gun as Ide and Matsuda move in after him.
Aiber stands there, frowning, but doesn't speak the way Shuichi had expected him to.
Ide does it for him. "Who the hell are you?" he asks the man at the desk, feet planted in a wide-set, heavy stance. He's ready to fight if need be, and from the way the man's eyes go wide and his quiet stolidity goes frazzled and nervous in a moment's notice, there may be a need.
The man doesn't fight, though, doesn't run. His hands go up like they've just ordered it. "I - " He looks at them, looks at Shuichi who's reaching into his jacket to pull out his badge. "You're the police?"
"Yes," Shuichi tells him, flipping the badge open and flashing it around, so that it's caught by the dim light in the room. "Yes." He puts his badge away, hand going back to the gun. Not that's he's particularly convinced that he'll need to use it. Still, caution is necessary. For all the things he might have expected to find in this room - the thing that Aiber had likely been expecting - an uncomfortable looking man in a suit had not been high on the list. "Now tell us who you are."
"My name is Teru Mikami," the man says, hands still up. "I'm a prosecutor. My record is clean, I've never - "
"Do you live here?" Matsuda asks, quite ridiculously, Shuichi thinks, but then Matsuda's particular brand of ridiculousness is sometimes necessary.
"What? No," Teru Mikami says. "I - I didn't break in, though." He moves one hand down slowly, cautiously, to the pocket of his slacks. "I have a key." He does, in fact, and pulls out a small, silver, run-of-the mill door key, in the same style of the one that the landlord had used to let them in.
Shuichi, more sure of himself now, if not the situation, walks forward to take the key from him, turning it over in his hands. He feels Ide following him, providing the usual back-up. Mikami takes the opportunity to reach into his wallet and pull out his ID, handing it off to Shuichi with nervous fingers.
Shuichi looks it over, decides it's as legitimate as a form of identification can get, and hands it back. "What are you doing here, Teru Mikami?" he says, trying to sound less accusing and more conversational. He knows Mikami's type, has interviewed men and women like him before - jittery and easily spooked and needing constant reassurance of their safety in order to provide any information of value.
"I'm meeting someone," Mikami says, pushing his glasses up his nose. He keeps looking at the flowers - soft, beautiful things; they're all wrong in this dilapidated room. They cut the shadows at strange angles. "I'm supposed to be meeting someone." He lifts up his hands again slightly, like an instinctual protective action. "I promise I would never do anything illegal. He said to meet him here at seven, but it's been almost 40 minutes, and…"
Mikami gestures weakly at the flowers. Shuichi notices the card, sticking out between the lush green of the leaves. He picks it up, reaching over Mikami, who seems locked to his chair. The words on the card should maybe be expected, but they still rock though Shuichi with a strange reality.
I want to meet you again tonight, my prince. 7 o'clock.
It's cheesy. Sickeningly romantic. It's Light's handwriting. He'd even signed his name. The whole Kira thing might have been easier to rationalize.
"Light Yagami," Shuichi says softly, even though he doesn't really think the situation needs anymore explaining. "You're meeting Light Yagami?"
Mikami looks at the desk, hair falling in his eyes, and blinks with a resigned sort of embarrassment. "Yes."
"Did he send you these?" Shuichi asks, nodding at the flowers. Mikami inclines his head in the affirmative.
"I don't get it, why would - " Matsuda stops mid-sentence, looks from Mikami to the vase to the bed, and then at Shuichi with something like a blush lighting on his cheeks. "Oh."
It's one of those surreal, distanced moments that come around every so often. Shuichi can see this whole scene playing out before it even happens - the bumbling shock, the averted eyes, Mikami's embarrassment - and it's not so much a kindness to Mikami as it is to himself that makes him want to skip ahead, past the stock reactions, through the whole scene, quietly boiling scandal and all. He knows this is mostly his fault - he'd wanted to come here, to get to the truth, and even though he doesn't regret his resolve, he's sure everything would have been more comfortable for everyone if they'd left it alone. Let Light have his little secret.
But then, there's really no room for secrets on a case like this. If Light's gay, that's fine - no business of their's, anyhow - but he should have known that setting up secret rendezvous would soon attract suspicion. Isn't he meant to be smarter than that?
Mikami is looking at the table.
Shuichi sighs. It'd be best to get through this as cleanly and quietly as possible. "Light's not coming here tonight," he tells him. Mikami doesn't look up. "He's taking a day off. To work on his relationship issues. With his girlfriend."
Mikami blinks, pauses a moment, like he's on the other side of a telephone and waiting for the signal to reach him. Then -
"His - of course. Of course." He stands from the chair, looks at each of them with a firm but self-deprecating twitch of his features, as if daring someone to point out the obvious. He looks at the vase like he's not sure what to do about, looks at the card like he thinks maybe he should pick it up, but only wipes nervously at his hands before nodding and heading for the door.
Maybe Shuichi ought to stop him for questioning, but he doesn't. His wife is making pork buns tonight. His daughter will need help on her homework. Light Yagami's love life is not a business he wants to involve himself in without necessity.
Aiber hasn't got a family to go home to, though, and has a whole lot of involvement in Light's love life as a matter of course, so he steps forward with the demanding sort of energy he'd used to get them all here in the first place, spreading on his inoffensive smile like butter. "Do you meet with Light Yagami often, Mikami-san?" he asks, pleasantly, but in a way that doesn't serve to obscure his vested interest.
"Not - I wouldn't say often," Mikami tells him, stopping, stuttering over the words a bit. "A few times." He looks at the door and then at Aiber, the big, blond obstacle in front of it.
"Have you ever seen anyone else with him?" Aiber asks, doggedly, not looking to give up. "A man, about your height, maybe a little shorter." He waves his hand in the air at roughly L's height. His desperation makes Shuichi want to look away. "Funny looking guy. Black hair. Dresses like a homeless person."
"I'm sorry," Mikami says, with utterly forced civility. "I don't know what you're talking about. May I please go?"
Aiber looks like he's going to go on longer, drag this out, check every corner on the slight chance that L could be hidden away there, but Shuichi shakes his head. They shouldn't even be here in the first place, and Mikami is slipping out the door in the few moments of Aiber's hesitation.
"Poor guy," Matsuda says, watching him go, which is possibly very kind of him. No one else has anything to say at this point.
They check through the rest of the apartment while Ide puts in a call to Mogi to ask about Teru Mikami, prosecutor, but they come up empty of anything valuable on both ends. There's some toothpaste and soap in the bathroom and condoms in the bedside drawer, but the rest is virtually empty, and it's obvious no one spends any extended amount of time here. Teru Mikami checks out and is, in fact, highly respected in his position, even though he'd just begun practicing a few months ago. His record's cleaner than the cleanest of whistles. He's a regular catch. The worst thing that Light is guilty of, from the look of the place, is infidelity.
"I guess we know what Light was using this apartment for now," Ide says when they're done, standing out in the parking lot. Shuichi had considered apologizing to the landlord, but Aiber had told him that an apology implied wrongdoing on their part, of which there had been none - the last part mumbled with a peculiar little twinkle of the eye that suggested he thought nothing of the sort, and didn't want Shuichi to, either. "No wonder the landlord couldn't say who the other person was. It's probably several people." He says it with a straight face, but the amusement is there, lying just under the surface, barley skimming the edges of politeness.
"Several men," Aiber says, making a point of it.
Matsuda seems to be the only one particularly uncomfortable with the developments, and he paces the length of the sidewalk, hand scrubbing his hair weakly. "If he - I mean, it's fine if he's - you know - and I understand why he'd keep it a secret… " and there's a lot of mumbling and trailing off and obvious embarrassment at the idea - maybe because of the homosexuality, maybe just because of the sex in general - "But just, why is he dating Misa-Misa?"
They really should not be talking about this. Shuichi is not going to participate in this conversation.
"She's got money." Aiber shrugs.
"She's in love with him," Shuichi snaps, abandoning any attempts to stay uninvolved. Aiber's got a few necessary qualities - namely, his in with Watari - but Shuichi won't have him bad-mouthing anyone on the team, Light included. "He probably just doesn't want to break her heart."
"It'll break her heart even more if she finds out about this," Ide says, eyebrows going up, seemingly unaware of Shuichi's attempts to shut this line of conversation down. "And what about the chief? What should we tell him?"
"I don't know," Shuichi says as they reach the car. "I don't really want to have to be the one to - "
"I'll do it," Aiber volunteers, teeth sparkling. He's got his ladykiller smile on. Or maybe man-killer. Either way, it's not a happy expression. He'd been expecting to find something here - L, or any clue about where L could be, dead or alive - but they hadn't.
Shuichi wouldn't admit it out loud, but he's glad. At this point, the only thing harder to deal with than L's disappearance would be L's reappearance, and whatever implications that would bring along. He tries not to think this, knows it's an insult to L's memory, but as they all limp into the vehicle, closing each of their doors with uneven, untamed slams, the thought bobs on the edges of his consciousness, not quite stamped out.
There's something about the cold that makes Light feel less drunk, which is maybe why he doesn't like it. But L insists on going out into the parking lot on bare feet and Light is too airy and contented to do anything but stumble after him, attaching one handcuff to his own wrist in order to keep the hold and barely remembering to grab the room key.
The wind hits sharp and does a bit of run around with his flutteringly warm body temperature, eventually beating it down so that he's shivering out on the concrete, staring at the mostly broken streetlights of the less than urban parts of Kanto.
"This is stupid. Let's go inside," Light means to say, but instead the wires cross each other, twisting it all up and suddenly it seems like a good idea to turn to L and tell him, "When I'm through with this world, we can go anywhere. It'll be ours." Which works well for a moment, the empty outdoors pausing with his smile and L tilting his head to the side, curious, considering.
But then he's kicking Light in the stomach with the ball of his foot.
The sky is the first thing that he notices, black and middling grey and virtually starless with all that light pollution. There's a moon up there but he can't see it and he doesn't look for it, because the next thing is the gravel, the little rocks and the scrape on his back, pressing through his shirt and rubbing him raw. He tries to breathe but hacks instead, thinks about standing but not enough to commit to it. A few seconds of coughing and then L is on him, thighs straddling his hips and maybe he's just drunk but maybe he's just angry. Probably both.
"You tried to kill me," L says, voice as rough as Light's, like he'd felt the blow just the same.
Light coughs again and pushes himself up on his elbows. L's balanced on his lap like either a very bad or very good porno, depending on what the intention is. "We've already been through this," he says, even though it hadn't been quite the same unfocused, hazy rush of cold and warmth and L's hair in his eyes and breath on his face.
"I know," L says, "I want to do it again. I want to tell you how I feel, but I want you to beat it out of me."
He speaks softly and casually and without the weight that he usually lends things, the effect he likes to add, the dramatic flair. It's meant to make Light hit him, perhaps, but he mostly wants to fuck him, here on the concrete, half over a painted-on parking space divider line. Or to be fucked by him. It's strange, because Light usually minds that, just on principle, but he doesn't think he'd mind now.
"Honesty, huh?" he laughs instead.
His body doesn't work the way he wants it to tonight and his words are all the wrong words and L's fingers are in his hair, pulling him forward, kissing him softly, and it's a taste of how the world would look without structure or reason or law, and Light wonders why he should bother trying to help people when he could just burn the fields and grow things new. It's all wrong and L could fix it with his eyelids and his sake breath.
That's a lie, of course, but L's hips don't make it feel like one. Love is a developmental disorder. Love is gravel against Light's back and a squinty, achey disgust that feels like euphoria. Tomorrow he will have to fix it and put it back on track and plan and calculate and be very, very brilliant. Most days he has to put love on a shelf, but he brings it out for nights like this, because they're a joke, a game he and L play with each other. They're not even really in love, probably, but then sometimes they are simply out of necessity. Whatever L is to him is something separate, though. Love is heaven and the angels and their blaring trumpets and their bright, white light. L is too quiet for that.
"Or a very good lie," L says, humming slightly, tickling Light's jaw. "I'm a very good liar."
L is telling him a lie about the truth, or something, but Light can't follow it and doesn't want to, so he pulls back and hits L in the face, because that's what he'd asked for. His knuckles collide with the sharp jut of his cheekbone and it hurts, but there's a squirming animal rage that delights in the pain, and it's something that Light keeps locked down at all other times, aside from the fights and the sex and the scrawls through the notebook.
L moves with the blow, but he looks pleased, eyes closing like he's reveling in it. Maybe it's masochism and maybe it's just some weird penance and maybe it's nothing that makes any logical sense, but Light likes it because L likes it. It's not hurting each other, not really - although they do do a lot of that. There's a sort of appalled shock and humiliation when you're hit all of a sudden, by someone inconsequential, someone you hadn't expected to hit you. But a punch from someone important is something important. Is that a ridiculous thought? It's probably the sake. It's like a kiss only it feels different, but the general sentiment is the same.
Here, this is for you. I am giving it to you. You want me to hurt you and I want to hurt you and I want you to hurt me and you want to hurt me. It's an exchange, a declaration.
He hits L again and L takes it, almost smiling, definitely getting something out of this, and Light wants some of it, too.
"Okay, hit me back," he says, grabbing L around the ribcage and pulling him back up. L isn't in his lap so much as knelt upon him, hand to his cheek, eyes wide and pained and breathing through it. He glances up at Light. Light smiles, imagines the pain in his cheek and wants to recreate it in his own. That's fucked up, probably. Most likely. The gravel is still digging into his skin. "I killed you," he murmurs, voice already harsh in anticipation, "so hit me."
"I didn't die," L says, body tensed, muscles lining up with Light's.
"I know, but I killed you."
Light had never considered a scenario where he'd be requesting his own physical assault, but from L it seems natural. Yes, let's beat each other in the parking lot of a sleazy motel. Yes, let's beat each other. One of them is clearly an abusive boyfriend - possibly both of them. Or L is - L is bad and Light is just punishing the wicked. Maybe the other way around? He doesn't know. It gets complicated. L hauls off and slams him back into the ground and punches him in the face and he can feel the scramble of endorphins and taste the blood in his mouth, top lip ripping on his teeth, skin throbbing. It hurts with a kind of necessity. L hits him again, so it should figure that he's the bad guy, but maybe not. Maybe right now, in this particular scenario, they're on the same side.
L keeps hitting him. Once, twice -
"Stop, okay, stop!"
The blood from Light's nose drips hot over his lips, getting in his mouth. And maybe this is necessary, but it hurts in a way that feels excessive and when he says stop L doesn't stop, and that is why they can never really do anything but chain each other to beds and beat each other in parking lots. Light probably wouldn't have stopped in his position, either.
It's just a few extra, and then L's fists drop - there's blood on them, Light's blood; it's so dark out here it looks like oil - but his face throbs and he groans when L touches his cheeks and why did he ask for that? He regrets it, wouldn't do the same again, but he's still proud of having done so. Something reckless and freeing and violent. He'd withstood it. He can withstand anything that L throws at him.
He falls back on the gravel and L falls forward with him, cupping his face, wiping away his sweat. There's a dirty bathroom in their room and he knows that in a few minutes they'll be inside, L drawing a bath to wash him clean.
But for right now the cold air cools the blood on his face, on L's hands, and both of their breaths even out. Light could almost fall asleep here, if he didn't have a world to save tomorrow.
"I knew a boy like you once," L says to him, after a moment.
Light's instinctive reaction, of course, is, "Liar." He breathes the word out through his mouth, because his nose stings. "No, you didn't."
"No, you're right." L's hand slips into his and they're sort of collapsed next to each other and anyone taking a late nigh drive could run over them and wouldn't that be a lovely end? "He wasn't like you, but he was like what you are to me."
Light's harsh breaths have calmed down some. "And what's that?"
L grasps his hand harder, pulling him into sitting position. He doesn't smile, but his expression looks kind - and Light remembers this feeling, from before, back without his memories. L as the leader and himself as the led. He'd done everything he could to wash it away and start new, better, once he's become himself again, but now - just for a while, it doesn't seem so bad.
"Come on," L says, not answering his question. "Let's go inside."
Mello's arms ache in a way where they don't feel real. He could just be a head floating somewhere and he wouldn't notice. When B unchains him, the blood flowing back in is the first thing that he feels and it hurts like an attack, like there must be some outside force pressing in on him, something beyond his body simply existing.
The water flowing into his mouth - dripping down his chin, getting on his shirt - is the second thing he feels. There's a lot of that, and some grunting, which might be him or might be B, and he tries to remind himself to be afraid, to fight, but the water is so relieving and then there's a cushion under his head and a hand in his hair and he knows it's all wrong, not anything he'd come looking for, but he'd so tired and so drained and so absent of any other option, that falling asleep strikes him as his only possible recourse.
He wakes hazily in what could have been several hours or several minutes, squinting at the light streaming in through the window and knocking over the glass of water that had been set next to him. "Shit," he mumbles, but it barely comes out at more than a twisty ache in his throat, and he picks the glass up, chugging down all the water he can salvage, then looking around for more.
The place is clean. Not just wiped of any blood or internal organs, but clean. It looks like a maid-service has been through. The books have all been stacked into neat, uniform piles, the dust wiped from every surface, the used mugs cleared from the tables.
Mello blinks, tries to stand, then tries again. The sun has warmed the cheap linoleum and he feels it gently through his socks. And that's - he'd been wearing shoes, hadn't he? He glances behind him and sees his boots lined neatly next to each other at the foot of where he'd been sleeping. He'd been given a pillow and blanket, too. He looks down at his wrists. There are marks chafed into the skin there and he remembers the cold press of the cuffs well enough to know he hadn't imagined it. His joints still ache and his head's a bit foggy and, really, there are a lot of questions to be asked, but the most pertinent one at this point is this: where is Beyond?
Then he smells the burning.
His feet trip over themselves, socks slipping on the newly smooth floor, and he's not sure if he's even going in the direction of the door, but then -
Two plates. The table is set. Orange juice and coffee and bacon sizzling on the stove. The toaster dings and it rings through Mello's bones like a shock and B pulls two pieces of bread out with long fingers, wincing and biting his lip as he burns himself slightly. "Morning, sleepyhead," he says. It's quaint and otherworldly, like Mello's just stepped out of reality, but then B smiles and it stretches his face in ugly, knowing shapes, and it becomes clear that he understands - and has purposefully manufactured - the strangeness of the situation. "Hungry?"
"You. You're making breakfast." Mello stands there, hair mussed from sleep and falling in his eyes. He means to sound shocked but his voice is hoarse and flat, not registering any particular feeling.
"Yes." B scoops some eggs onto each plate, holding one out to Mello.
Mello twitches toward it - starving, he realizes quite suddenly; when was the last time he ate? - but stops. "You killed two people," he says, as if he can't quite decide whether that had really happened. What time is it? What day is it?
"Three, actually," B says, shrugging and setting both of the plates on the table. "You can shower first if you want - I cleaned the bathroom, so no need to worry about papa bear's cooties - but your food will get cold, and you'll need your strength." He blows on his eggs, kicking his feet like a little boy, even though his legs are so long he has to bend them strangely to fit them under the table. He looks like an L who's been cut off the page and pasted back on, fitting into the world with jagged, unsuitable edges. Even in the airy morning light, the shadows move strangely around him.
Mello's still standing. He really is fucking hungry - but. There are still marks on his wrists. A dark brown stain on his chest where the heart had been for hours. He doesn't know where the bodies are and he's not sure he wants to. The whole room is so bright and clean. It's surreal, but in a very sharp, vivid way. He wonders if there's something he could kill B with in here. He wonders if he should have breakfast first.
He waits for Beyond to do something that gives him permission to make the decision to attack, but he just sits there, cutting his bacon into neat pieces. Who does that? He's a cannibal. Isn't he a cannibal? He's probably a cannibal. He's the type.
Mello takes a few steps toward the table, one foot in front of the other, slow, slow, so that he can run for it any time. He picks up the glass of orange juice after a few moments. "Does this have pulp in it?"
"Of course not," B says, wrinkling his nose and shoveling another forkful of eggs into his mouth.
"I like pulp," Mello says.
"And I like pulling people's eyeballs from their sockets and keeping them in jars. Sit down, Mihael."
Mello sits down. B pours him some coffee. Everything smells so good. The eggs are cooked to perfection, soft but not runny, and Mello feels instantly better just putting food in his mouth. He eats so quickly that he may vomit after, drinking his pulp-free orange juice between mouthfuls without complaint, and even taking his coffee without milk.
"I've never actually done that," B says, watching him eat. He's got a weird air about him, like a predator who doesn't see Mello as prey. Maybe he does, but Mello's too hungry to care. "The jar thing. I usually just throw people's body parts away when I'm done with them. Can't you tell you're special?"
"Where are the bodies?" Mello says, around his bacon. It's a weird sentence and he feels separate from it, like he'd only said it because it's what needs to be said, not something he actually thought up himself.
"Bedroom." B licks his fingers. He's vaguely terrifying, but in a subdued, teasing sort of way. Mello's skin crawls, but like an afterthought. The fear is only a minor setback in the conversation. "They're tucked in all cozy. Cleaned of prints. Don't worry your pretty little head about a thing."
Mello wipes at his mouth. Bert is dead. Watson is dead. Watson had tried to rape him and Watson is dead now. Beyond had saved him. Sort of. That had happened. He'd known them, had met with them almost everyday, and now they're dead and their hearts are not in their bodies and - the man across the table from him did that. The man with the bony wrists and too-sharp teeth and partly drawn-on eyebrows. The more he looks at it, the more he realizes that B's face is made up of weird ticks, plastered together in loose, gleaming expressions. It's hard to remember that this is the man from the stories. A Wammy's legend. A childhood horror tale is pouring him more coffee.
"Do you love your daddy, Mihael?" Beyond asks him.
"I - " What? Is that a trick question? Is that even a real question? "… I don't really remember him."
"No, not him. The other one." B smiles and it rips across his face like a gash. "Daddy Warbucks. The man who's image you were made in. And no, not god either."
"You mean L," Mello says, swallowing. He doesn't know how he feels about that. Roger had always said to think of L as a surrogate older brother, and Watari had called him 'a role model,' but L himself had seemed to prefer not to be called anything, except maybe for dinner.
B smiles wider. "Yes, I mean L."
Mello's starting to realizes that Beyond usually means L. "Do I need to?" he asks.
B's face twists around the words, as if repeating them back to himself, and then nods. "Finish your coffee, babydoll. We've got a long trip ahead of us."
When Wedy gets the first message, she ignores it. When she gets the second, she reads it with her eyes rolling. The third is not even encrypted or password protected, it's just Aiber whining in her voicemail. By the time the business proposals turn into drunk texts, she decides she has nothing much else to do. Costa Rica is too warm, anyway, and Watari offers to pay for her flight to England.
And, well, Winchester's weather is just her type, really.
tbc.
end notes: so there you have, chapter 15, the last thing i wrote before my brief hiatus. the writing in the next chapter may differ quite a bit, since i wrote a 20k story for a different fandom in between finishing chapter 15 and starting chapter 16. then again, it may be utterly identical. who knows? i certainly don't. i just hope it will be halfway decent and that all of you reading will enjoy it and that's all i can really ask for. thanks for being patient with me and sticking with this story, despite my issues, and thank you - and i grow about ten levels more cheesy and lame in saying - for believing in me. it's a cliche but it's applicable and, as i've been saying from the beginning, this story is made of cliches.
that aside, i was thinking that - in order to move the plot along properly - i may end up having a chapter that is all or mostly made up of mello + B scenes. would that be unduly annoying for anyone? i may not even have to but balancing the timeline is a bitch and so who knows how things will end up. it's an lxlight fic at heart but it's spawned off in different directions as well and i really hope that isn't a deal-breaker for anyone.
lots of love and thank you again for reviewing, favoriting, following, reading, and even passingly glancing at this fic.