CHAPTER 2: Choices
Misa had never really thought about animals very much until after her parents died. Before, animals were just another kind of servant, physically resembling humans except for the animals' furry ears and tails, the fangs on the predatory ones, and the different abilities they had.
And there were their different minds, too, to set them apart. It was clear that they didn't think quite like humans, and so Misa rarely talked with them. Cats were rather obsessed with mice, horses with their own strength, dogs with the houses or flocks they guarded, and the wild animals were rarely glimpsed and always obsessed with stealing.
After her parents' deaths, though, she'd gained a new respect and closeness for one animal in particular, a rather intelligent cat her parents had cared for in order to keep away mice and rats, and to say clever things to impress visitors. Light was the perfect feline, very clever, astonishingly so, and yet he was haughty and arrogant and preferred to keep his own company, and so Misa really didn't have much to do with him until that one fateful day.
That day was emblazoned in her mind. When she had returned home that day, he'd gained her unending devotion for his act of bravery. She'd found the slaughtered bodies of her parents, and then a third body of a stranger with Light crouched on it, his teeth in its throat, growling and growling with his tail stuck straight up in the air and all the fur on it expanded like a bottle-brush.
When he'd settled down, he'd explained that he'd arrived to find her parents already dead and the robber going through their belongings, and he couldn't help but attack, and kill, doing a job that was expected of many dogs but was unheard-of for a cat.
After that, Light had comforted Misa in her grief in his own strange animalistic way, and she'd managed to convince him to guard her in her bed at night, to make her feel safe, and to hold her in his arms as she cried. From then on, he'd comforted her in bed every night, and, with much shame, Misa realized that she'd fallen in love with a cat.
It was good, though. Having Light was an immense comfort. She especially found it pleasureful to get him out of his clothing and run her hands across his smooth chest, to gently kiss his warm lips and try to get him to return the kiss, to marvel at the nearly-human look of the vast majority of his body and to wonder why more humans didn't fall for animals.
During cuddling, Light was fussy and standoffish and she could hardly ever get him to purr, and sometimes, sometimes, she thought that he was merely going through the motions of cuddling because of the advantages of having an owner who was devoted to his every whim. But then, when she asked him, he always said he liked it, that he wanted it, and he'd silence her doubts and leave her knees weak with a passionate kiss.
Once in a while, she could even coax him into a sexual mood and then he would mount her and thrust a few times, painfully, until he abruptly climaxed. His penis had small spikes on it, as Misa learned was true of all male cats and greatly liked by female cats, and so it was a kind of doomed love.
Misa told herself that it was enough, and that their love was particularly romantic for having that obstacle. It was frustrating, though. She wanted more and more of Light, more than he was able to give, and she found herself becoming something like his slave, hanging on him all the time, hoping always for a few more scraps of attention from him in return for her unending devotion.
It was difficult to attend to all of Light's wishes, no matter how much Misa wanted to. Income was restricted. Even after getting a job as a dancing-girl at a tavern and becoming popular, Misa was still selling away treasured heirlooms and furniture that had been in her family for generations.
One day Light took Misa aside to have a serious talk with her.
Stretched out full length on a sofa, Light said, "Our financial situation must improve. I have a plan, but I will not tell every part of this plan to you. Will you obey me, Misa?"
She fell to her knees, took his hand in hers, and said, "Yes. I will, Light."
He licked his little fangs and his eyes almost glowed with excitement as his tail started twitching. She reached up with one hand and dared to caress his soft, furry ears, which flicked under her movements as if annoyed, until she withdrew her hand.
Light reached into his pocket and took out a piece of paper, unfolding it to reveal a map that he had obviously drawn himself.
He said, "I know you have not visited your grandmother Rem in a few years, because of increased bandit activity along all the wilderness roads. I believe you can avoid any bandit ambushes by traveling on this particular route I have marked, using animal trails. Rem will be pleased to see you and she'll be likely to help with your finances."
Light gestured towards an ornate and pretty picnic basket on the floor.
"That," he said, "contains a number of treats and gifts for her. Some of the items I've been asking from you were actually for Rem."
He cocked his head, ears perked forward alertly, and Misa recognized the pose. She knew the correct response.
She said, "You're so perfect, Light! Thank you! You're a good kitty!"
At the praise, the tiniest hint of a smirk came onto his face, the closest that Light ever got to a smile.
Misa opened up the basket and Light lurched forward, looking almost alarmed. Misa glanced back and forth from Light to the basket's contents, puzzled. She saw presents in bright wrapping paper and a few bottles, dark blue and dark green.
"I was afraid... you might open the presents... and ruin hours of work," Light said between licks, as he started furiously washing the back of one of his hands.
Misa read the label on one of the bottles and said, "Medicine? I thought you'd send grandma some liquor in these bottles, but-"
"Rem is sick," Light said, "according to the information I could gather. I've been bribing wild animals to learn this, and everything is third-hand at best, but if she is sick we must help her. She'll be very grateful, Misa. We need that gratitude."
Misa blinked uncertainly at him. Light had sounded almost sinister for a moment, and he'd gotten a strange expression on his face, but now he was simply her pretty kitty again, looking quite innocent.
I must be imagining it. This really is the best plan, and I know Light cares for me. Those behaviors that I don't understand, that's just because he's a cat.
Laughing, Misa kissed him, dazed at his taste and the way he responded just slightly, and then she skipped about the room getting ready. There wasn't much clothing that was suitable for hiking. She'd sold nearly all her practical clothing, and her wardrobe was stocked with short skirts, suitable for her dancing job. There was one nice long red hooded cloak she could wear over a dancing outfit to make it warmer. Fortunately, it was spring, so that ensemble along with boots should do it.
There wasn't any underwear, as she always sold all of those to clients as fast as she could buy new ones, but she knew it wouldn't matter much for warmth, and if bandits found her despite Light's precautions... she shivered... panties wouldn't stop anything.
But that won't happen. Light always has foolproof plans, and bandits would never expect a human so far from any roads.
Misa finished dressing, packed a little food and water for her own use, picked up the picnic basket, and started out the door. Right before she closed it, Light said, "Be careful. You are going far off the beaten trail. There are wolves in those woods, and wolves eat people."
Misa shivered again, but then she put all bad thoughts out of her mind and stepped out the door, immediately going to the woods and starting out on the first animal trail Light had marked on the map. In the beginning, the route was close to town and non-threatening. She marched through tiny patches of forest, right on the edges of closely-grazed pastures and plowed fields with the first green shoots of young wheat just starting to show. Gradually, though, as she moved from one animal trail to another, she was into denser and denser woods, with no signs of civilization in sight.
It was after many hours of travel and several stops for small meals that she started seeing and hearing something, always just on the edge of her senses. It was too far away when she saw it for her to be sure that any slight movement wasn't just an oddly-shaped bush blowing in the wind. With so many tree trunks in the way, it was always hard to tell if it was something alive or not.
Perhaps the visual aspect was many different things, but there were also, at times, some slight sounds. When she heard it, she could never be certain whether it was loud breathing some distance to one side or another, or just more tricks of the wind.
As the late afternoon drew on, the sights and sounds decreased and she thought that perhaps it had been her imagination after all. She stopped under a tree in a place where the trees were further apart, letting in abundant sunlight, resulting in a thick carpet of grass everywhere between the trees.
Just as she was about to open her food, he stepped around from a tree trunk very near to her.
A wolf.
His grayish-brown ears and tail marked him as one, and as he placed a finger in his mouth and stared, Misa could see a glimpse of his fangs, much larger ones than Light's tiny cat-fangs.
As to his human-looking portions, he had black, fluffy head-hair, and wide, liquid black eyes, utterly piercing in their expression. His skin was unusually pale for a wild animal. Misa supposed he must normally do his hunting at night, or perhaps during the day in the deepest parts of the woods where the sunlight hardly reached the ground.
Instead of the simple loincloth or the torn, ragged cast-off clothing that many wild animals wore, he was respectably, if somewhat sloppily, dressed in an oversized white t-shirt and baggy blue jeans. The jeans hung low enough for his tail to pop out over the hemline, unlike Light's meticulous insistence on sewing a nice tail-hole into every pair of trousers he owned.
The wolf circled warily, his eyes flicking from the basket to Misa and then the basket again, and then he suddenly looked as if he might rush in at once.
Misa said, "Hi, I'm Misa! What is your name?"
I've got to keep him talking. Most wolves can be tricked or diverted; at least that's what the stories say.
His eyes were shifty. He opened his mouth and looked as if he might say one thing, but then he hesitated and instead said, "My name is Ryuzaki."
"Ryuzaki," she repeated, trying to keep her voice normal and calm, "why don't you sit with me, and I'll share my food with you?"
I'll bribe him with food, and maybe he'll only eat that and steal one or two things and leave.
He looked startled, and in a voice that was somehow both intense and nearly a monotone at once, he said, "This is my trail, you know. I own it from the lightning-marked tree stump to the abandoned well, and I own everything on the trail. Everyone knows this. What is in that basket is mine. You are also mine."
She patted the grass beside where she was sitting and said, "Sit! I promise you'll be full just from the food I'll give you."
And then you won't eat me.
Ryuzaki doubtfully said, "Okay," and settled into a feral crouch on the soft grass where she indicated, wriggling around and gazing at her, itching himself with his long toes.
He looked strangely familiar, though Misa was sure she'd never had an up-close view of any wolf before.
She told herself, Perhaps I've seen him gazing from the edge of the forest without realizing any animal was there. Wolves blend in so well.
A/N (Author's Note):
This is based on a request from the Death Note Kink Meme 2 on Livejournal, at dn_kink2. I was thinking about putting it in my "Smutty Shorts" collection, but decided not to, because that collection is for fics that I'm worried won't stand well on their own, and it's also for fics that are complete within one chapter. I felt that "Big Bad L" would stand by itself better than most of the "Smutty Shorts" fics, and I was also certain it would be at least two chapters, due to the extreme change of scene between the first part of the fic and the second.
Why did I have that odd set-up in the first chapter? Basically, it's because I have a hard time wrapping my head around any fanfic AU that is radically different than the canon and has no explanation of how or why these fanfic characters can be considered to be who they're supposed to be.
By writing a connecting bit between canon and this fanfic that provides some kind of explanation for why Little Red Riding Hood is Misa and why the Big Bad Wolf is L, no matter how cheesy that explanation might be, it eases my mind a bit and allows the rest of the story to be written more easily.
The meme request says:
"Red Riding Hood!Misa/Big Bad Wolf!L.
Misa Amane is sending a basket full of goodies to her sick old grandmother. Along the way she meets a wolf (L) who not only wants her basket full of goodies but her as well (mating season? idk)
Remember to include dub-con on Misa Part.
Request based on a L/Misa Red Riding Hood paint chat I found a few days ago [and then the request included a link to a webpage with a series of eleven MS Paint sketches, most of them repeats of the same pictures with just the dialogue changed.]"
The pictures' dialogue is in Japanese and most of it isn't understandable to me because those words can't be run through Google translate. It's very messy handwriting. It's definitely Red Riding Hood themed with wolf!LxMisa oral and then doggy style in the woods, and there's something at the very beginning about a feline-looking Light, and the webpage parts that can be run through Google translate don't make much sense to me, but I think it says L is a virgin and Light has some kind of sinister plan to hurt Misa. Other than those bare facts, this fanfic and that MS Paint picture series shouldn't have anything in common.
Because of all this, I believe my fic is going to be different enough from whatever this other person is working on (a possible doujin in the works?) to be more like a case of parallel ideas, and to not need this other person's permission. However, I won't be uploading this fic to the archive at adult fan fiction dot net because their anti-plagiarism rules are so strict that I've had fics removed for "plagiarism" for simply having author's notes acknowledging fanon, or for mentioning other authors' ideas in any way.