In your dreams, you are back in that car again. In that spot beside the highway overpass, with nothing but blank in-between spaces to every side. Your heart is beating so loud and so fast it is as though Kira's been at it, and you're staring down the barrel of a gun. Your father's face behind it, blurred out and twisted by wrath into something unfamiliar to you. You are going to die. And you still don't know what your error had been.
You're staring at the barrel of the gun and then there's a noise that has physical weight and everything goes quiet—
You wake up. You are not in the car. The sweat on your skin dries and cools as your racing heart stutters to something closer to its usual pace, and Ryuzaki's clicking absently through his computer.
You are chained to Kira, and he's come this close to killing you.
He is a criminal. A murderer. The type of scum that really deserves the death penalty, but instead he's playing games with you.
You let yourself wallow in this self-pity to distract from the visceral memory of that dream; the taste of copper on your tongue. If only he were like any other murderer. If only he were that easy to write off. If only you didn't understand why he does everything he does with the uncanny familiarity of looking at yourself in a mirror.
A social freak, an outcast, an evil, manipulative bastard by any definition. You should have remained untouched—you should have remained the perfect Yagami Light who would never even consider drawing close to him. You've been taken apart into so many pieces you don't even recognize yourself anymore, and so it's not fair that you could recognize Kira anywhere, no matter what moves he makes and how he justifies himself; that you are so strangely acquiescent to the sound of the tapping keyboard and the way Ryuzaki is hunched over beside you, not knowing, or choosing not to care, about your morning mental breakdown.
You sit up in the room, look around it a little blankly, take note again of everything in it: bed, round table and chairs, the door into the bathroom, bedside tables, standing wardrobes, your desk and your empty bookshelf. It irritates you the more you stare at it, that empty bookshelf. It irritates you that it is here in the first place and that you've let it remain empty all this time, as though ignoring it would make it go away. You reach to your bedside table and wind your watch, carefully until it hits the stop, and then strap it to your wrist. It covers the thin scab from last night's miscalculation, heavy and clean and outwardly perfect.
You remember, then, that the chronograph dial is still broken.
/
You've developed a persistent tic in one of your eyelids. It's lack of sleep and stress, for sure, but knowing that doesn't make it any easier to bear, especially when you can't see your situation changing anytime soon. You hate it. It's a sluggish resentment rather than a burning, motivating force, however. Your own body has betrayed you. Your mind is no less fragile—you are acutely, uncomfortably aware of the fact, after your stay in confinement. If Ryuzaki wanted to break you, he could have you broken just as easily as he could have you killed. He could leave you to rot in a cell and arrange it so the killings never start up again, he could wall you up and forget about you.
Immurement.
"To be walled from within."
The shoemaker Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, the Marrakesh Arch-Killer, worked together with an old woman to drug and then decapitate more than thirty-six young women who would come to his shop to dictate letters. He did all this just to steal their money, and buried his victims under his shop in a pit, and in his garden. When he was finally found out, the machinery of justice dictated that he first be beaten and then chained into a hole in the market square's wall, and then the opening bricked up. Outside, a crowd who had gathered, who had thrown offal at him as he was chained, waited to hear him fall silent, to die. This was what the people wanted.
Retribution.
He died on June 13, 1906.
It took three days.
Today, Soichiro's taking the test version of the Kira Program to the NPA. It's incredible that the task force has managed to create something that shows the possibilities of the idea in only eight days, and you're sure that if you had to, you could eventually create the system yourself. But eventually is a long time, and that's without counting all the integrations it needs to handle to pull from such a wide variety of sources. Not only issues of security, though that's paramount when it comes to anything regarding governments, but also issues of translation; what your father is asking for is nothing less than an international team of governmental and police liasions, with programmers, translators, and hackers on call, almost a second task force. It's his job to make any of that sound reasonable to his superiors.
As for you, you can only wait and hope for an answer.
So, in the meantime, you do your own searches, though you aren't sure what for. You keep being drawn back to those two weeks when Kira stopped killing—or rather, between when the first Kira stopped, and the third one started.
You're poking through analyses of worldwide mortality rates when you see it. You don't want to believe it, and so you refine your criteria, and then for good measure you actually type the question into google search, and find that many reputable news sources have reported on the same issue.
During the first week Kira stopped killing, there was not much change in the worldwide crime rate from the Kira-baseline. But during the second week, crime rates rose—not, as you might expect, only to pre-Kira-baseline, but to twice that amount. What can you make of this? If Kira is (and he is) so effective at reducing crime, does that make him Justice?
Of course, there would have been no way for Kira to know he'd be effective when he started killing. But now that it's been proven…
Still. More worrying is that upward trend. Has Kira only been holding back people's natural impulses? Is it like water pushed back against a spigot, that comes out in an even greater rush all at once when the blockage is gone? Would crime rates continue to taper off until they reached pre-Kira baseline, or would they stay at this heightened rate—in which case, is Kira changing people's hearts for the worse?
Then again, does that even matter?
Like it or not, he is here and he is acting; and crime rates have fallen. Whether it is only a dictatorship that impinges on people's freedom to act in the truly depraved way they wish for, or whether he's really the beacon of hope he sees himself as… he is effective. More effective than countries and governments. On the level of cold hard facts, hasn't he made the world a better place?
And yet he's a murderer, just like those he kills… worse, even.
You can't help glancing over at Ryuzaki as though he might realize what you're thinking, but he's not paying you any attention. He's sitting backwards in his chair, apathetically staring out into the vast main room of the task force headquarters.
The Kira you thought you were profiling, the child, may have had an attractive purity and ideals. But the Kira that is L does not care about those. He would care about effectiveness most of all, wouldn't he?
You remember when you'd once asked him, do you think of yourself as a good person?
Ryuzaki had quickly responded, no. I think of myself as a necessary person.
And if he's right—what, then?
In 1246 Jeanne de la Tour, a nun of Lespenasse accused of heresy, was confined to a cell in her convent. Food was pushed in, but no one could see or hear her. Said Henry Charles Lea in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, Volume One: "the cruelty of the monastic system of imprisonment known as in pace, or vade in pacem [go into peace], was such that those subjected to it speedily died in all the agonies of despair."
'The agonies of despair.' You know a little of that, enough to fear it in a way you hadn't when you so cavalierly incarcerated yourself. Of course you thought it was necessary, and in a way it probably was, for you have no doubt that if you hadn't made such a move, L would already have framed and killed you. But at the time you hadn't even considered that. The thought that L could be Kira was nothing more than a passing one, a hypothetical you hadn't remotely believed with any seriousness. You were acting in fear, yes, but more than that you were acting on a high of moral certitude—knowing that you must do the right thing, that Yagami Light, Soichiro's son could not live with himself otherwise.
Given the same choice now—you aren't sure if you could ever willingly subject yourself to confinement again.
The possibility of it hangs over you, a more effective deterrent than L even knows.
Because—effective or not—shouldn't Kira be brought to justice? Be given the death penalty for all he's done? Of course he should! He is a different class of murderer, but he is still a murderer, on a scale that is as horrendous as it is admirable.
And yet you have not spoken of this to anybody.
(Not that you could.)
Instead, to save yourself from a worse fate, you're preparing to overlook everything—to work with him for who knows how long; with the distinct possibility that despite gathering evidence against him you'll have a usable case never.
It makes you as much a hypocrite as L is.
You say hello to your father as he enters the main task force workroom. You smile, and sit up straight, and when the computer has dimmed because you've stopped typing on the keyboard for too long your reflection on the dark screen is flawless—innocent. Perhaps there's something in your wide eyes that seems unaccountably lost, but no one can pin anything on you just for that.
You hate L for hurting you, but that you can forgive.
You hate him more for making you an accomplice.
/
Your thoughts are wandering.
They've done that lately. Are doing that. Since the confinement.
Because you've realized that waiting until things are back to normal isn't even possible, because you are more and more afraid that your previous 'normal' will remain unreachable forever, instead you painstakingly work around. The Kira program is a tentative yes, and in the meantime, you work without it. You deal with the moments, as you search through the database by hand, when you lose track of the drift of your thoughts and stare blankly at a half-started phrase or half-conceptualized new sorting criteria, and try to piece together where you had been as though fitting together a puzzle created by someone else.
You start and then re-start a hundred trails and hope it will lead slowly anywhere.
/
A day passes. And then another. You find yourself vaguely surprised at the fact.
In the hotel you'd found it possible, though awkward, to masturbate in the shower with the curtain between you and Ryuzaki.
That won't help here.
You've resorted to doing so in bed instead, while you both pretend that nothing is going on.
You're not sure why you're both pretending.
Obviously Ryuzaki knows.
But after that first time he doesn't even look. It's purposeful. He is so fascinated with watching your every move that it must be.
You get out of bed, move into the bathroom, go through the getting-out-of-handcuffs as usual, and because of said shower's chainproof glass door, you both get in the shower. Ryuzaki has conceded to the fact that this works better if he's also undressed.
You are reaching for the bar of soap when you notice he's drawn close enough that, when you turn, his chin is almost resting on your shoulder. The soap, slippery in your hands, falls, and you curse and bend to get it, and you realize that you're at a rather unfortunate height.
Considering what part of his anatomy is right in front of you.
He isn't aroused.
He never once has been by you, and yet he keeps watching.
The soap in your hand, you try to stand up without brushing against him, and instead of stepping back to accommodate this, Ryuzaki just stands there.
You're standing up, bumping shoulders, and it would take nothing—less than nothing, really, the merest breath of space—to be touching skin to skin as though against a mirror. He is warm under the water, warm and familiar like bodies are and yet strange, like a leaf floating on a pond.
A curled up leaf, floating.
Ryuzaki gestures for the soap, and you hand the bar over to him, though you'd been planning to use it yourself.
But he seems to realize, because instead of using it on himself he's stepping behind you, striping it across your neck and back, something so slow you ought to have been able to think up the ways to refuse, and yet it seems inevitable.
"Ryuzaki, what are you doing?" you say.
Because someone has to.
"Helping you," Ryuzaki says mildly. "You looked like you were having trouble."
His touch is unhurried, languid. The soap leaves a slippery film that the water cascades against, and you remember that you'd started this game yourself.
He is still Kira, but you can't think of that, because if you did, you might break apart. You might, and probably would, spin around and punch him. You might scream.
You stare at the blank tile. It is white and cream, but there are blue accents around the top of the shower, and the chain is a loop between you, where the water skims its way off, jumping, like rain.
.
.
.