When he sees the names, he does flinch. He does not stop to look. He keeps scrolling, impassive, his eyes blank, his fingers on the keyboard feeling suddenly like static, like objects very far away and entirely unreachable.
Akiko Lawliet, April 11th, 14:43. Deceased. Heart attack.
Harrison Lawliet, April 11th, 14:44. Deceased. Heart attack.
With the task force all around him, and Light-who-is-possibly-Kira paging through a sheaf of stapled documents on the other side of the hotel room, it is imperative that he does not react. It would not be difficult to look up the Lawliets and find the records of their only son. A daughter, on paper, but the leap wouldn't be difficult to make. Watari has done his best to scrub all mentions of the child, but shadows always remain, and this is the proof of that. The Lawliets shouldn't have been part of the public record, but here they are, and here he is, looking at them in a colour-coded spreadsheet, consolidated, documented, reduced and ready to be flattened into a scatterplot graph for the perusal of himself and his team.
He carries on scrolling through to Daichi Sato, April 11th, 16:54 until his own heart has stopped pounding and he's quite sure that he could move or speak if someone tried to catch his attention. Then he takes a sip of his tea. Watari has steeped it a little longer than it's meant to be steeped, and he's added three sugars. He likes both these things. He'd asked for and chosen them. He chooses most things, these days.
He flicks his eyes sideways, to look at Light.
Light is staring down at the papers. He is licking his fingers to turn them. His eyes are down, and his expression is careful, concentrated on his work.
L watches him. Just for a second.
What Kira does is wrong. L knows this. It's detestable and vile. It's evil, a perversion of justice, a childish attempt to capture divinity with something as fundamentally human and base as murder. Still. For the first time he looks at Light, with his finger laid horizontal across his lips, with his hair growing too long into his eyes, and for the first time he feels a surge of warmth for him, not in spite of but because.
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Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed. If you want to find me elsewhere, I'm at quicktimeeventfull on tumblr :)