Your desk is gone.
It hasn't been here since you came back upstairs last night; sometime during the day Ryuzaki must have emailed Watari about it; or maybe he didn't need to because of the bugs-that-totally-aren't-here. Well, at least he took me at my word, you'd thought. It hadn't bothered you much then; you'd been expecting it, after all.
You're still expecting it this morning. Still, it's a small surprise, to wake up and see that further empty space where there used to be something else.
It makes the room look oddly bigger.
Of course that's what I notice, you think with an internal groan. You've never been one to be overly attached to things, and losing a familiar item doesn't cause you a whole lot of stress. But that space in the room…
The entire wall stretches out.
It's not a big deal, you remind yourself, staring at the empty spot. So the room looks a little bigger. It's already three times the size of your old room for crying out loud, one little desk-sized spot more or less means nothing.
You're pressing the cuff against your left wrist without thinking about it. You don't even realize you're doing so until the thought passes through your mind that you should make sure you don't, and realize you already are. You let up on the pressure and blink your eyes shut, taking a deep breath and trying to center yourself. One moment, and another. Beside you, Ryuzaki's typing away at his computer, a soft rhythmic click of keys; the low constant jingle of the chain as his hand moves.
You sit up and scooch over to him.
"Good morning, Light-kun."
"Good morning, Ryuzaki," you say, resting your chin on his shoulder to look at what he's up to. Door Door, apparently. He's been playing the puzzle game for quite a while and is currently steering Chun into trapping his pursuing aliens behind doors. Ryuzaki collects a suddenly-appearing lollipop with a grin, traps another alien and moves onto the fiftieth level.
"I don't think you can win this one," you say after a moment, observing the aliens' movements. They follow patterns, predictable after a certain amount of thought.
"It seems that way," Ryuzaki murmurs, taking in the scope of things. He makes as many moves as he can and then, with no way to defeat the last alien, merely stands still and lets it take him out.
"What's that about?" you ask, startled.
"You'll see," Ryuzaki says, restarting the level. Every alien he's already defeated remains defeated, and with his next life, he finally lures the last alien behind a door, and moves on.
Eventually you manage to tug him away from his computer and out of bed, and Ryuzaki follows you to the wardrobe as you pick out your clothes for the day, and then to the bathroom, a thoughtful look on his face.
When you're in the shower, Ryuzaki holds out a hand for the soap and you give it to him, not entirely surprised when he decides to use it on you instead of himself. He slides the bar down your arms, skimming down to your wrists and then pauses there, with your handcuffed hand held between his own. There's a new scab on your wrist just from this morning.
He traces his fingers across it, delicately, and your eyes follow his movement. With the spray from the showerhead plastering his hair down over his forehead and his face downcast, you can't read his expression. If he says anything—you think with sudden rage.
He does, but not what you expected.
"You're left-handed, aren't you."
"What?"
"I said you're left-handed—"
"I heard what you said," you say a little shortly. "And no, I'm not."
Ryuzaki makes a short breath of a laugh; that wry-sounding thing with a hint of bitterness to it that seems so much more his own than the full laughter you'd seen from him during last week's date. "Is there anything I can ask you that you won't lie about?"
"Ryuzaki—"
"Don't answer that," Ryuzaki adds, ironically.
You roll your eyes.
"Anyway," you say, "you've seen me write plenty of times, and play tennis—"
"And that's where I noticed it."
"When we played tennis?"
"What, did you think you were hiding?"
You stare at him stonily.
"Okay," Ryuzaki admits, "in practice you're almost entirely ambidextrous. In fact I first considered that you were naturally ambidextrous."
"I guess I favored my left hand somewhat when I was a kid," you admit grudgingly. "But I outgrew that."
"You outgrew your dominant hand?"
"I outgrew relying on that. Whereas you, for instance, don't even try to compensate."
"'Compensate,'" Ryuzaki says. "Light-kun, is everything a battle with you?" his left hand—his free hand—holding the soap.
"Don't act like I'm in any way unique to think that way, Ryuzaki. It's the pot calling the kettle black."
Ryuzaki shrugs.
"Didn't your teachers ever get on you about it?" you fish, suddenly curious. "Or did you not go to a public school…?"
Ryuzaki gives you a flat look. Instead of taking the obvious bait to reveal more about his past, he says, "I guess where I grew up it's not looked down on quite so much as it is here."
Now it's your turn to laugh shortly. "You make it sound like people are making a big deal about being left-handed. It's just not polite to use that hand for things."
"And you, being exceedingly concerned with the polite way to do things, soon learned how to compensate," Ryuzaki finishes. "Doesn't it ever bother you…? Knowing that the way you naturally are needs to be changed to fit into society?"
"What, is this a 'my culture is better than yours' argument?" you scoff. "Newsflash, Ryuzaki, everyone has to change to some extent in order to fit in with others. That's the definition of society. And even who you 'naturally are' is so dependent upon circumstances that except in a theoretical argument you're never going to find a person who is 'truly himself' and not shaped by external influences. Even if you did find that person—he'd probably be something like a feral child, without language or a knowledge base or any of the things that make us distinguishable as human beings."
"I see your point," Ryuzaki says. "I suppose in the grand scheme of things it's not that important whether you're left-handed or ambidextrous. I guess I just wonder where that stops… is there some part of you that you wouldn't erode, just to fit in?"
"You're missing my entire point, Ryuzaki," you say, annoyed.
"I know your point. I want you to answer my point."
"Well, I don't want to answer your point," you say.
"Why? Does it bother you?"
"No, it's just stupid."
"I think that means it bothers you."
"You bother me."
"It's a talent."
"Ryuzaki," you complain, pulling your hands away and shoving at him lightly.
"I'll be serious if you'll be serious," he says. He reaches for your hand again and this time swirls the soap over the healing cut. It barely stings.
"I am serious. Humanity as a whole is more important than any individual; that's just logic. You've got to know that; you support governments and institutions that frankly fail quite a lot to protect individuals. But we keep those systems around because they still manage to do enough."
"True," Ryuzaki says. "But I don't do my job to protect humanity as a whole."
"Yeah, that would require that you do your job in the first place," you needle him.
"I'm merely saying that—while the idea of humanity matters to you, I really couldn't care less about it," Ryuzaki says.
"Do you care about anything?"
"I don't do my job because I care."
"You do it because it's fun," you say. Ryuzaki nods.
"Does it ever occur to you that you seem to really distrust the idea that anyone might have ideals… or care about anyone?"
"I'd call it realism. After seeing as much of the world as I have," Ryuzaki explains, "it all blends into the same thing again and again… people care too much about each other and they kill each other over it. Or they care too much about their ideals and kill whoever doesn't fit into it. Yet everyone will still insist that 'caring' is the magical fix-it for all of life."
"Well, it's obviously not that," you say. "I get the feeling it's more that it makes life bearable for some people."
"But not people like us, you're saying, Light-kun?"
You shrug. You could press the point, but you'd have a better chance trying the whole 'I'm not Kira' shtick on him again. And to be honest you're not very invested in that charade anymore—not with him. Anything that leads Ryuzaki to say 'people like us' is one more thing tying the two of you together in his mind. And if that's a general inability to become close to people… well, that only pits the two of you more firmly in your own little box against the world.
And it's true.
Not a truth you've ever liked to look at too closely; not because you thought it was any fault of your own but more because it was just one more thing you had to compensate for. But your ability to compensate for a little thing like that and still become the best is without question.
You have heard a lot about caring. You know how to do it; the right things to say, to do for your family; the right way to present yourself in school. Caring is a series of social actions, and when you'd heard people describe feeling the pain of another person, seeing them up close and feeling struck by it as though it were your own, you had understood it because you had felt it on occasion, for your family, when you'd realized they were in distress and had to figure out why.
It didn't strike you until much later that most people didn't have to put themselves in the correct mindset for caring—that it happened spontaneously.
When in elementary school one of your friends twisted his ankle and cried, it was you who took him to the nurse's office, and she smiled at you and said you were such a sweet, helpful boy. That was how you knew you were on the right track.
The tears were a blatant attempt at eliciting sympathy, you'd thought at the time, and it had rankled you.
"Perhaps he was in a lot of pain," your mother had pointed out, when you came home and complained about it. "Sometimes people just cry. Not everyone thinks ahead the way you do, Light." Not everyone would've seen caring for what it was—merely an inescapable part of the social contract—and not everyone would've shown distress only to gain the appropriate amount of sympathy. In fact, much of the world is enslaved to an entire push-and-pull of feeling and acting out about it; seeing others' feelings and feeling, in turn, compelled to respond.
It must be exhausting.
Ryuzaki passes the soap back over your arms. Skirts it around your collarbone.
"Is that what Kira did for you?" you ask.
"What?" Ryuzaki asks quietly.
"Make your job fun."
He pauses. Tracks the slow pour of water across your cheekbones with his eyes; never quite landing on your own.
.
.
.