The sense of everything being fine doesn't last long enough for you to fall asleep.

Instead, under the covers with synthetic rain falling, your plans line themselves up like game pieces; you feel more unbalanced than you expected. It's one thing to play Ryuzaki, it's another thing to have put yourself so viscerally into a vulnerable space. You'd thought you could keep a distance between you. You'd been basing all of your predictions on your experience of sex. This is different. This is like opening your chest, letting him put a knife against your beating heart.

Can I actually do this? you wonder.

It's a different question from 'do I want to do this.' 'Do I want to do this' is completely irrelevant. This is necessary and therefore practical. But you've never before questioned your actual capability to do something you set your mind to.

You've always believed you were capable of stringing L along, keeping his interest, playing games with him. It's what you've been doing ever since the two of you met, and when he offered a challenge you knew you would do everything in order to meet it. The same damn pattern. You'd tried so hard to slip away from that, to not let him have so much power over your thoughts and feelings, and now your own plans have landed you right back where you started. You've tried and tried to become a different person. It was the thought that preoccupied you during your days in confinement; the idea that the version of you that had landed yourself there had the deep flaw of wanting, too deeply, to be everything in opposition to L. If you could only get rid of your pride, you'd thought, you would also excise what was your downfall. But you've never been further from your pride than you had been, crying on your knees before him and licking pathetically at his feet, and you still want to be everything in opposition to him. Whether he is L or Kira-L or Ryuzaki; whether that means you are Kira or his prisoner or his friend. You hate him.

Somehow, in confinement, you'd forgotten the intensity with which you hated him, and you hate him more for bringing it back in startling relief, for reminding you why you'd taken his bait in the first place, played his games. Life had been grey and spongy and stagnant, rotten and endless, a repetition of days in which nothing breached the monotony of existing without a purpose in a pointless universe, and then Kira and L (Kira, who is L) had made every moment as harsh and glittering as crystal.

"Light-kun, I can hear you thinking," Ryuzaki says.

You turn around to face him. He's a shadow in the dark, faceless, only heat and voice. "I wasn't thinking," you deny. "I just couldn't fall asleep."

Ryuzaki sighs. "Well, perhaps Light-kun isn't thinking, then. Perhaps I'm only hearing my own thoughts."

"What are you thinking?" you ask, curious.

"I should have explained myself more. This kind of game… it's one thing to enjoy humiliation, but to not let you know what you were getting into… I feel like I've taken advantage."

"You didn't take advantage of me," you scoff. "I'm the one who brought it up and you told me how to make you stop and everything… honestly Ryuzaki, it's kind of hypocritical to get all tied up in knots over this when you tortured me for fifty-three days."

"Perhaps you're right," Ryuzaki allows.

"You don't deny it," you press.

"Hm?"

"That it was torture."

"I never have. It was you who was denying it, Light-kun."

"It's not like I wanted to!" you insist, feeling defensive and angry, brittle. "But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I had to be your perfect little pet, didn't I, or you were going to throw me right back there. You made that clear enough."

"I never said you had to be perfect. In fact, it annoys me."

"Yeah, well, you annoy me. Everything about you annoys me."

"And yet you tried to seduce me. Did you think it would make me less annoying?"

"No," you stress. "I didn't."

"Then why did you try to seduce me?"

"I wasn't trying to seduce you."

"Then I was taking advantage."

You shove him, and he makes a small huff of surprise. "Fine," you say. "You took advantage of me. You have my permission to feel appropriately bad about it."

"And never do it again?"

You don't answer.

"See, this is why I had the mistaken impression you were thinking," Ryuzaki says. "It's happening again. Hear it?"

"I don't hear anything but you being an asshole."

"Mhm. Go to bed, Light-kun."

"I can't sleep, Ryuzaki."

"Neither can I."

"You're a hypocrite. How am I supposed to fall asleep if you won't?"

"I didn't think reciprocation was required."

"I hate you," you say.

You can hear the edge of a smile in Ryuzaki's voice when he answers. "Yes, Light-kun hates me. He is annoyed by everything about me, right?"

"Right," you say. You scooch closer to him, close enough to cling to him under the covers, and he moves, restlessly, this way and that before ending up in his usual sideways crouch, with you as the big spoon. You can feel the echo of his breath through his back, his bony, uncomfortable shoulderblades, every unfitting and unapproachable and disgusting piece. He is warm, alive, and still as tangled a mystery as he ever was.

You hope, secretly, that he has given his powers to a Third Kira who will be very hard to catch.

/

It's one thing to say you hate Ryuzaki in the middle of a humiliation game, when Ryuzaki actually asks for it. It's another to let him know it's true. To be honest—you're not sure you should even have given him this much, but the problem is that in order to lure him in you have to give L something he wants; and it can't be a confession that you're Kira. But L wants an enemy. Someone to stand against, to despise and to defeat. It's a balancing act to try to give him an enemy without giving him Kira; if you take one step to the side you'll fall.

So in the morning you center yourself on your innocence; become Yagami Light, Ryuzaki's friend again.

Ryuzaki is typing away when you wake up, and he doesn't make any move that he's noticed you come to awareness; so you can be the first to speak.

You sit up, stretch, and then, notwithstanding the fact that you haven't had any coffee yet and feel more like you want to strangle Ryuzaki with his own handcuff than be cheerful, you say, "good morning, Ryuzaki," with an enthusiastic smile in his direction.

Ryuzaki stops typing.

His eyes slide over toward you, without turning his head. He studies you for a small moment as though trying to find a crack in this veneer.

He won't.

In fifty-three days of confinement, he couldn't get you to confess.

When you could barely sleep for days on end, and could barely think, when you were in so much pain and despair you wished to be dead, you didn't confess.

A little game like this won't break you.

"Good morning, Light-kun," Ryuzaki says at last, slowly. "You're in a good mood."

"Why shouldn't I be?" you say. "It's a nice day, isn't it?"

"I suppose it is," Ryuzaki says. He glances around as though he'll find the evidence of 'a nice day' if he looks for it enough.

Last night he had accused you of being a liar and instead of denying it you'd told him your deepest resentments. Today you need to turn the tables on his success. You need to be more perfect and more amenable than ever. It's the one thing you've noticed gets under his skin and throws him off. He hates it when you are too nice, too innocent, too perfect. He wants you to be Kira, and the more you behave like Yagami Light, the more frustrated he becomes.

I'll be your plaything, L, if that's what gets you off, you think. But outside of that, I will be your friend. Whether you want it or not.

Because, if you want Ryuzaki to ever consider you indispensable, you need to be a challenge for him. To keep him guessing and frustrated, so that whenever he thinks he's gained the upper hand you pull the rug from under him.

You know this, because he's like you.

And there's a reason you haven't tired of Ryuzaki yet.

You go through the handcuff routine, shower, and get dressed like it's any other morning. You put rice into a pot, fill it with water, and wait for it to cook. Ryuzaki makes coffee and places a cup in front of your seat.

Today, you make tamago gohan for breakfast, cracking an egg over your bowl of rice and throwing soy sauce on top.

"Want any, Ryuzaki?" you ask, as he stirs his thick sugar-sludge of coffee around contemplatively. You push the bowl toward him slightly.

Ryuzaki looks up from his deep observation of sugary syrup sliding in drips off his spoon, and focuses on you.

"Breakfast," you say. "I don't mind sharing."

Without a word, he reaches forward. His spoon, sticky with coffee, carves a perfect half-circle in the side of the rice, leaving a dark mark behind, and he brings it back to his mouth.

"Thank you, Light-kun," he says.

"You're welcome, Ryuzaki."

/

You take out your anger on the treadmill.

Because you are angry. And more unbalanced than you'd like to admit. This morning, even after you brushed your teeth you couldn't forget about the fact that your mouth had been on his dirty feet; you couldn't forget about being on your knees, bowing with your head almost to the floor. With every impact of your foot against the conveyor, you imagine throwing him to the ground—grabbing his hair in your hand and shoving his face down until you can't see those hook-like eyes anymore—covering his mouth until he can't speak or breathe. If you can imagine him losing consciousness, if you can imagine pressing the metal into his skin until the bruises from the handcuff on his right wrist turns to blood, perhaps it would have been Ryuzaki, all this time, that suffered instead of you.

If you watched until the life drained out of him…

If you did so, you would be justice, for you'd rid the world of a killer.

Of course, these are nothing but idle fancies. You can't really do any of those things; and if you did, you would sink down to his level. It is one thing to be humiliated by a monster; any victim can be humiliated. It doesn't mean anything, because Ryuzaki, L, Kira is the one with perverse thoughts.

Today, Ryuzaki is doing some kind of mixed martial arts. Balancing on one leg and transitioning into stance after stance with something a little better than his usual posture, slow and quiet as you run in place.

You do your cooldown exercises in silence, and even as you stretch, feeling the physical tension drift away from your body, your mental turmoil creeps back in as you come down from the high.

When you go downstairs, you add names into your list of suspicious deaths, and then spend the rest of the day imagining how the security system in the building is set up, and how you would've done it if you were the engineer. You don't have any paper next to you so you can't exactly sketch out your ideas, but you think up one piece after another, circuit after circuit, room after room.

You study the positions of the cameras on every floor you're aware of.

In the workrooms, the cameras aren't hidden, just unobtrusive. 'Unobtrusive' so it's easy to forget about; 'not hidden' so everyone feels like they know what is going on.

The cameras in Misa's room are extensive, and you're pretty sure there are more bugs than even that, not hooked into the same system. You know that Ryuzaki's the type to go overboard, and it doesn't surprise you that there are almost three hundred covering the entire apartment.

You've never seen any cameras on your and Ryuzaki's floor. Perhaps there are some hidden behind the mirror. But, perhaps there really aren't any cameras after all; he might be relying entirely on bugs, which he could've hidden inside the wall without even having to leave space for a lens.

It's ten o'clock in the evening when Matsuda and Misa return early from work.

"Hey Light-kun!" Matsuda calls. "Did you know I got a letter from Sayu-chan today?"

Ryuzaki, who has been swiveling round and round in his chair, takes one last spin and stops, facing the police detective. He presses his thumb to his mouth.

"A letter from Sayu?" you ask, incredulous.

"What is this all about?" Soichiro asks, looking up from the latest Kira analysis.

"I don't know, she just said, uh, here, I'll read it," Matsuda reaches into his pocket and pulls out a slightly battered piece of paper, unfolding it. 'Hello Matsuda-san, I heard that you visit my big brother sometimes for work. If you do, maybe you can tell him I think of him a lot and I hope he and Misa-san are doing well.'"

"How did she learn about your address?" Aizawa says.

"The phone book I guess?" Matsuda says. "I'm getting all my mail redirected here and it usually ends up a week late, so this must've been from last week. Anyway, uh, so yeah…" he shrugs.

"But how did she find out you're in contact with Light-kun?" Aizawa says. "Did you say something?"

"No!" Matsuda says. "Of course not!"

"It must be because you've been to visit once, so she knows who you are, and that we work together," Soichiro says after a moment. "I've made it clear that we won't talk about Light at home anymore, but recently Sayu asked if he was really taking a year off school—she'd checked the registers and seen that he was no longer listed as a student. She said she was worried something had happened to him. 'I can believe you two got into a fight and that you aren't speaking anymore,' she said, 'but leaving school isn't like Onichan at all!' I didn't want her mind to run away with her thinking something had happened; so I said it wasn't that unusual, considering that he had just entered a new relationship and needed to support himself. She must have guessed from that that Matsuda might be in contact with him, since Light has always intended to go into police work and would probably be interested in the Kira investigation."

"Wow, that's pretty smart!" Matsuda says.

"Don't let her know she's right," Ryuzaki says abruptly. "No writing back to her, okay? It's one thing if she has her suspicions, but it would be dangerous for an actual link to be established."

"Oh, yeah, uh, I understand," Matsuda says, looking a little crestfallen. "Well, anyway. The letter's for you, Light-kun, so here," he steps forward to hand it to you and Ryuzaki scoots his chair close and leans forward to grab the letter before you can, holding it between two fingers.

"Thank you, Matsuda-san," Ryuzaki says.

You let your hand drop.

Everyone on the team looks a little taken aback. Aizawa has a deep frown on his face, while Soichiro's eyes are wide behind his glasses and his jaw is tense; even Mogi doesn't seem to know what to make of this.

The acid burn of humiliation coats the inside of your stomach and travels up to your throat.

Misa's the one who breaks the mood of the room. "Ugh, Ryuzaki, you're such a control freak," she complains.

"No, it makes sense for Ryuzaki to keep track of the letter," you say, taking the opening to speak and smiling reassuringly. "It's technically part of the investigation, after all, since it got delivered here."

It isn't; not by any stretch of the imagination. You haven't even gotten to take a look at the writing, and you feel unexpectedly resentful at the fact. It's just a stupid piece of paper, and Ryuzaki keeping it is a blatant power-play, and extraordinarily petty. Of course this is just what you expect from him, but for Sayu to be involved…

Damn it, Sayu, you think. Why do you have to be so inquisitive!

You want to keep her out of this. It's the one thing you don't need; to have to worry about your little sister on top of everything else.

Soon enough the incident is past, and everyone else moves on to work, while Misa and Matsuda disappear into the elevator together. You toggle the cameras on to watch them after a minute of tense itchiness deep under your skin that makes it impossible to concentrate, but all they're doing in her apartment is sitting at the counter and talking about her day and her schedule for tomorrow.

Still, you don't get any more work done tonight.

You manage to act unconcerned until you've both gone back to your floor and entered the apartment with the door shut behind you. Then, as you take your shoes off in the hall, you say pointedly, "was it really necessary to take the letter like that in front of everyone? You could've confiscated it when we got back here."

"Is Light-kun still thinking about that?" Ryuzaki says in a tone of exaggerated surprise, and then his voice becomes flat and pointed. "I didn't think it would bother you. After all, Light-kun doesn't mind sharing. Right?"

"There's a difference between public and private, Ryuzaki," you say irritably. "Even if you never seemed to get the memo on it. You made me lose face."

Ryuzaki's eyes widen. "I did? I'm sorry, Light-kun. It didn't occur to me that you would see it that way."

"Oh, cut it out with that absent-minded act of yours!" you exclaim. "You know exactly what it would look like because that's exactly why you did it."

"Actually, I was concerned about the investigation," Ryuzaki says.

"Yeah? Because me getting to hold a letter from my sister would screw up your great big plan to catch Kira? Oh right, you don't have one."

"And whose fault is that?" Ryuzaki asks quietly.

"Yours! It's all your fucking fault—" you stop short, breathing heavily. Your hands are clenched, you've stepped up close to him, grabbed him by the front of his shirt—but Ryuzaki remains as unconcerned as ever. Instead of looking threatened, his deep eyes study you intensely. You feel a sudden sinking feeling that takes the place of your boiling rage so quickly it's as if you've taken an extra step off a staircase where you didn't expect one, losing your balance and finding only thin air.

Shit.

This was his play all along. He wanted to make you lose control, make you angry. And you've fallen for it. You should have known ever since that over-the-top intonation on 'is Light-kun still thinking about that?' When Ryuzaki's being fake it's so damn obvious, but instead of seeing it as the clue it was you'd only let it wind you up further.

To be honest, the incident with the letter was probably something you could've overlooked on any other day. It's really not that big of a deal considering everything else Ryuzaki has put you through. But after last night…

Damn it!

He wants to see you shaken up. Why do you keep letting him?

"I think you're being very childish, Light-kun," Ryuzaki says. "If you want the letter, you can just ask for it."

"I don't care about the letter!"

"Really? But it's from your sister. Doesn't Light-kun care about his family?"

"Just shut the fuck up, Ryuzaki," you say in a low tone. "Or—"

"Or? What will you do? Kill me?"

"I'm not Kira!" You are! You are, damn it!

Ryuzaki sighs. "So we're back to this," he mutters, a little disappointed. He pulls out of your hold and walks into the main living area.

It's a place you barely spend time in. In the morning, you usually hang out in the bedroom until you get ready for the day and the kitchen after that, and sometimes during the afternoon you'll come back up to use the private gym if you haven't already done so in the morning. Even the library gets more use, and you've hardly poked in there at all. The main living area remains, in your mind, a place that you walk through to get somewhere else, but now Ryuzaki sits himself down on a couch. He wraps his knees around his chest, sighs again, and then flops onto his back and stares at the ceiling. You kick his legs away a bit so you can sit next to him, and he puts them back across your lap.

Neither of you say a word.

You press your left hand against your side until the handcuff cuts into the skin. A thin line of blood stains the otherwise clean edge.

.

.

.