April 7, 2004. You resent him. It isn't his obvious weirdness, his calculated, brutal honesty, or the fact that he suspects you're Kira. Or maybe it's all of these things. Nothing explains the sheer well of rage that pulses within your skin every time you so much as look at him. Maybe it is because he is as smart and achieved as you. You have spent years building a reputation of perfection, of likeability, of approachableness with painstaking precision, creating Yagami Light, hardworking honors student, Soichiro's son, as though putting on the outfits from your closet, everything coordinated to make a calculated statement of unselfconscious flawlessness. And he shows up in sneakers with the laces trailing, half the time he doesn't even wear them, baggy jeans washed a soft stone-blue and a plain white t-shirt. Does he even brush his hair? "I suspect that you are Kira" and a moment later, "let's go someplace we can have some privacy." You have successfully peformed friendship, though it is a farce on both sides. He thinks of you only as a suspect, and you think of him as—you don't know. L, maybe. If he is L he is the very person you've needed and wanted to meet ever since you saw that gothic letter on the TV, when he stood up to Kira and outplayed him. If he's another decoy he's not even worth your time. If he isn't Kira himself. (He could be.) And every conversation around him is just another gamut of tests through which you hurtle through knowing you can't do anything, your pride won't let you do anything but pass, even if the percentage of Kira fitting your psychological profile climbs up at the same rate. The only thing worse than being a suspect would be to be passed over by the greatest detective in the world, as though you weren't good enough, smart enough, as though you weren't on his level.
You are. As he is on yours. And this is the first time this has happened in your life, the feeling of being on an equal playing field, the feeling of having your coordinated persona seen through to the real person underneath and you are enraged and addicted; life is interesting. Others whisper about how the two of you are an ill-matched pair, so far from each other it isn't even funny. "I guess it must be because they're both the smartest people in the school." Something like that.
L is ugly. He is brazenly ugly. His back never quite un-stoops. His eyes have a permanent bag beneath him, and his thumb is always playing with his lips as though he's some kind of child. His face is very wide, with eyes that seem too far apart, too innocent for someone who speaks so cuttingly and is always making plans. He's skinny to the extreme, his wrists so bony they look like you could break them with one hand if you had to, his pallor is as healthy as a vampire's and his eyes are as flat and lifeless as a camera's lens. They seemed to you like a black hole, the first few times you saw him, and maybe it was because of the way they hooked themselves into your skin and pulled, but it's not until you're sitting across from him in the back of the café that you realize they are wide and reflective and as dark as glass, and you know there's no proof yet that he's L but something about him makes you sure. This is the creature that had stood behind Lind L Tailor. You should be his opposite, you should be flawlessly perfect, and of course you are, but it takes work, perfection takes constant control and everything he says and does is distracting enough to make you wonder what if I were the one he's trying to pin. It would make you powerful. Perhaps as powerful as god.
Your skin is itching with dried sweat and you're filthy and so is he because neither of you had bothered to shower after playing a set of tennis. Because this was more important than appearances; this silly game where Ryuga keeps changing all the rules. "L did you know… gods of death… love apples?" Why wouldn't you read it that way? With no indication of a fourth, even taking the time stamps into account (Kira wouldn't create a gibberish sentence) there would be no reason to think Ryuga had held a photo back. But is that only self-assurance after the fact? You did know there were four notes. You've known ever since you peeked into the information on your father's computer. It was an innocent curiosity, nothing more: you've been aching to understand the Kira case since you first heard his name, too driven to be the one who defeats him. It doesn't make you a murderer, but to admit you've been following the case unofficially now that you're a suspect would as good as damn you. "L did you know? Gods of death who love apples have red hands." The game was rigged from the start but there's nothing you're better at than test-taking and even more than smarts and knowledge, test-taking requires knowing on an instinctual level if it's a trick question and what the other person wants to hear. (You know what he wants to hear. You can feel it. There is already only one answer that will satisfy Ryuga and that's if you are Kira. You can't play into it, you remind yourself. This isn't a game, even if it feels like one—not for you it isn't. But every word is volleying another serve, and you'd quit tennis because you were bored of easy wins.)
« There is a story by Jorges Luis Borges (Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo) called "The Garden of Forking Paths." Ryuga brought it up during your Theoretical Physics class, which he has in common with you. You've discovered that Ryuga has every class in common with you, because the only reason he is attending Todai at all is to spy on his favorite suspect. The story is about a spy who is trying to send a coded message via killing a man who's name itself is a clue. Heavy-handed on the Kira-Suspect-Yagami train, but L is the last thing from subtle; neither of you are. The trouble is you both like to show off as much as you hate to lose. But, anyway, you'd read the copy he'd printed out, because it's another game, and you'd liked the narrator immediately, which was perhaps no surprise considering he said 'whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.' The future has taken shape before you and it is called the New World. You don't say that. You say, "this is just a cheap metaphor about the infinite multiverse theory." Which is about quantum physics and time. Neither of which is being covered in your Theoretical Physics class. But Ryuga insists it fits the subject, since theoretical physics is theoretical physics, and you spend an afternoon arguing about it. You've come to expect the same café, the invitations to lunch; it happens multiple times a week leaving less time for making college friends, unless of course the infinite multiverse theory is correct (which would be absurd), although considering that your hobbies consist of purifying the world through murder there's really no one else but the detective trying to catch you who can understand why things such as college friends don't hold any particular allure.
At one time, Ts'ui Pen must have said; 'I am going into seclusion to write a book,' and at another, 'I am retiring to construct a maze.' Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.
You think you don't know how right you are, knowing how the notebook you own is in fact the entire labyrinth of Kira's powers that L is treading past, searching in vain.
'In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them.' »
—April 15th, 2004. "Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy."
"What do you think of that, Yagami-kun?" Ryuga says, after reading the sentence out in his usual flat, intense tone.
"I think you love to come up with far-fetched ways to accuse me of being Kira when you should be studying," you answer, with a laugh. You know he thinks you are Kira and if you were Kira you'd probably be offended right now, but you aren't offended. It's amusing, in the way the foibles of people you tolerate become amusing.
"I am studying," Ryuga says. "I am studying Yagami-kun's reactions to the story."
"Like I said. It's just playing out the infinite multiverse theory. 'Having everything without having to settle on something'—it's just plain cheating, Ryuga."
"Yagami-kun must be aware of the studies that show that when manipulators speak, they use the name of the person they want to draw out."
"You used my name three times in your last three sentences."
"Of course," Ryuga agrees. "That is because I am trying to manipulate you. What are you trying to do, Yagami-kun?"
"Show you how much of a hypocrite you are," you say, rhetorically, because L knows already, and also will never admit it.
"But consider the thought experiment in which the infinite multiverse theory is correct," Ryuga says, ignoring any reference to his blatant hypocrisy, and taking a sip of coffee that's at this point more sugar than anything else; the small sugar packets have gravitated their way toward him, along with the plastic containers of cream, although that he doesn't throw into his coffee but rips the foil top off and downs one every now and then as though it were another beverage. "If you were Kira, what would you think of that?"
« If you were Kira, because the game requires speaking in hypotheticals, although you both know you are Kira. And so, when you say "If I was Kira I'd probably point out that Albert thinks he's speaking hypothetically about him and the narrator being enemies, when they actually are. And I'd probably add that if instead of rambling about labyrinths Albert had gotten a gun of his own, he wouldn't have died," you mean something that amounts to a taunt, a childish one perhaps; as though L would ever actually just shoot you in the street when by doing so he would prove nothing.
"They both died," L points out. "Even Kira, who gloated about his victory…" he pauses. Makes an exaggerated face of surprise as though he's expecting to be on stage in a theater group. "Did I say Kira? Of course I meant Viktor Runeberg." »
—"The future exists now," I replied. "But I am your friend." … I fired with the utmost care: Albert fell without a murmur, at once.
No one is surprised when Ryuga's short paper, which is ¾ an analysis on a story about a garden, comes back to him with a C, and only that because he has in fact managed to make a brilliant argument about theoretical physics somewhere in it all. You get an A, of course. In another timeline, where you were more concerned about studying and less concerned with the Kira investigation, it would have been an A+.
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