"When I was young I used to tell my friends that my grandparents were dead."
You are making breakfast.
There's plenty of eggs, rice, and seafood of every kind around, quantities of fresh fruit and even a smattering of vegetables and legumes, but no meat. You've come to realize Ryuzaki doesn't eat it, and so by extension neither does anyone else who relies on the task force headquarters' catering. It had showed up once or twice while the investigation was working out of hotels, as though Ryuzaki were trying to be accommodating.
He's not trying to be accommodating anymore.
You'd even asked about it once, saying, "are you allergic to that too?" in a half-joking tone—you weren't sure that was even possible but if anyone could manage it Ryuzaki could.
He'd only answered, "No, I just don't like the texture. It's kind of, mm… ick?"
Okay, it's a stretch to say you're making breakfast. You're heating up what's already been cooked by someone else and stuck into prepared containers in the fridge, which is useful since your own cooking skills include rice, noodles, eggs, toast, and that's about it. The most useful kind of seasoning you've ever discovered is the simple expedient of pouring every available sauce on top afterward.
"I assume that was a lie," Ryuzaki says. He's got his head folded on his arms, leaning halfway across the countertop so he can properly stare at the coffeemaker, willing it to go faster.
"It was," you say. "But I'd never met them, so in a way it felt to me like they were dead. My school friends would call their grandparents every day or go visiting on the weekends, and our family never did that. My parents barely even talked about their parents. It was… weird."
"And you disliked the thought of being associated with something weird," Ryuzaki says.
"Yes," you admit. "Especially since I couldn't understand it." You lift the cover, watch the cloud of steam that escapes as you stir, and adjust the heat a little lower.
Ryuzaki doesn't further the conversation. He's still listening—probably—but it's the coffeemaker that has the bulk of his attention.
It's so easy to fit into his profile of me as Kira that he'll know I can't honestly believe I'm Kira anymore, you think. Only someone innocent and trusting would share a story like this.
As you and he finally sit down, you with breakfast, he with coffee (and another cup, black, that he hands to you), Ryuzaki says, "Did you know that when someone discloses an intimate detail to another person, usually that other person feels compelled to respond with the same?"
You're struck with the distinct impression that this is your cue to laugh kindly to assure Ryuzaki he's being a paranoid bastard. Unfortunately, the impulse gets stuck in your throat with the realization that you haven't laughed—not in earnest and not socially—since your confinement.
The startling breadth of this—the fact that you hadn't even noticed till now—(how much else about you has been moved with such significance and without your knowledge?) swallows up everything else for a long moment. The encompassing silence—the void of the room—and you remember lying on the floor in confinement and being perversely grateful for it, for that lack of injunction to be.
You suddenly regret having opened your mouth at all, having started any kind of conversation when you could have remained talking only in disconnected sentences. Ryuzaki, you know, would have been happy enough to oblige.
"I—no," you say. He has already filled his cup with sugar; you've waited longer than you thought to speak; time drifting away from you. You take a bite of your food just to distract from the excruciating nearness, exposed as clumsy and unskilled at a game you should be good at. Your eyes burn.
Two bites later, you say, "I guess that's common sense."
"To some people, I'm sure it is," Ryuzaki says. "There've been plenty of studies too." He takes a tentative sip of his coffee and reaches for another sugar cube. "I can go if you like."
"What?"
Ryuzaki's eyes grow unfocused and he rests the tip of his spoon against his lip, worrying it back and forth. Then he announces, "I learned Japanese at the age of twelve from an acquaintance who reminds me of you."
"Because he's Japanese?" you say, with flat half-humor.
"Whether he was or wasn't," Ryuzaki says, "no. He hated boredom as much as I did. I'd never known anyone who understood till then."
"Dare I ask why the past tense?"
"He's dead," Ryuzaki says. His eyes focus on you, then, and it's like the black holes of them catch you in their gravity well. You take a sip of coffee, expressionless.
"Did you kill him?" you ask, putting your cup on the table.
"In a sense. Yes."
'In a sense' doesn't distract from the fact that Ryuzaki has just confessed to murder. If anyone other than you would believe it, you'd grab the tapes from whatever hidden cameras are playing here and parade them in front of the rest of the task force. Even if you'd had a hidden recorder in your clothes, what would it prove to them? It's startlingly direct, yet too vague. He'll have some story concocted.
And yet this—this bare recitation of fact, void of all detail—
It ignites a burning curiosity, and a palpable resentment. The very fact that L has a past that doesn't involve you shouldn't be a surprise. And yet to so blatantly say that someone else had done what you had—someone else had been a better—suspect? Maybe. Maybe you aren't the first person he's framed of a crime they didn't commit. Kira had to start somewhere. Serial killers often do.
It's not a surprise and yet you are overcome by the utter need to claw an answer out of him, to dig out a confession that this previous acquaintance was nothing in comparison—that you're better at being his—this—
You want to win against a dead man.
Because he's dead, you'll never win.
You scowl.
Ryuzaki is gazing at you like he's picking apart every detail, like you're a curiosity.
Surely he hasn't looked at anyone else like that. Surely no one else has been a greater puzzle or satisfaction. Surely—you don't care, anyway.
Of course you don't care.
You've told yourself you won't let him hook you again. Won't let him present a beautiful picture of yourself as Kira like the bonus level of a game no one else has managed to beat. You thought you'd rejected that successfully, and yet you have to tell yourself again, and your hand is shaking when you pick up your fork. The chain shakes softly, a clear clink against the cuff.
/
You are running on the treadmill.
The private gym on your floor is not overly large, but like most rooms in the task force headquarters, the impression of grand scale is added to by floor to ceiling windows along one wall. You know for a sad fact that this is one of the reasons you like the kitchen better. The kitchen is in the center of your apartment, and so completely windowless. It has a tile backsplash behind the stove, and is painted cream. It would be a nice place to never leave, and so, instead, you do.
You run on the treadmill and try to ignore the sky at your back. It exists, though. The space of it pulls outward, a brilliant, sunny blue, and the readouts on the treadmill are almost indecipherable because of the radiance. It is so vast that if you don't move you could topple backward, fall through the clear glass and dive, as though in slow motion, through the city's horizon.
The chain jangles as Ryuzaki shifts around from where he's standing beside you. He holds up his camera and points it toward the sun.
He said he'd get bored if all he could do while you were exercising was sit around.
Click.
You've gotten used to the antics, though you have to admit you don't see what's worth taking a picture of in this room. When he shoots out the window, each picture ends up like the last; nothing but a featureless expanse of blue.
Click.
It's a Nikon D70, just announced in February this year, with an 18-70mm lens, and it's quiet. No creaks, groans, and noises of complaint. You've only ever owned one camera, and it was much cheaper; so the difference shouldn't surprise you. But still—
A flash blinds you momentarily; Ryuzaki has turned the camera around and the sun, jumping off the wide round lens, cuts across your vision.
You can feel your heart pounding, you can feel the burn in your thighs as you run, sweat dripping down your shoulders, chest, covering your neck and the breath like a physical thing, this air; taking up space.
You will never move forward. All you can do is keep from sliding back; all you can do is stand in a room teetering on the edge of the sky, and turn the mechanics of fear into power, into the beat of your footsteps on the conveyor.
You take a breath.
Your chest expands.
.
.
.